The John Russell Fearn Science Fiction Megapack

by John Russell Fearn

  “Good evening.”

  Martin Wilson straightened in surprise. He had not heard the shop door open or shut.

  Indeed he had never anticipated a customer at such a late hour. The man was standing at the other side of the bench, a black raincoat turned up about his ears and a dark soft hat pulled well down, so that it was difficult to see his face. Raindrops gleamed like sprinkled diamonds as he moved into the diagonal radiance of the low-hanging lamp.

  “Good evening sir,” the old clockmaker wiped his oily hands on a rag and came forward.

  “Something I can do for you?”

  The stranger seemed to reflect and Martin Wilson fancied he saw a ghostly smile.

  “It may sound rather silly,” the stranger said, “but I’d like to know the time. I have no watch, nor have I seen a clock in quite a little while. I’m wondering how late it is.”

  “It’s just on ten o’clock.”

  The old clockmaker stopped; staring at the pendulum clock on the far wall. The pendulum had ceased swinging, for the first time since the clock had been constructed.

  “It is later than you think,” the stranger murmured. He had a low, pleasing voice with a curious alien rhythm in it.

  “I don’t understand it,” Martin Wilson stared hard at the silent master-clock with its motionless, vertical pendulum.

  “That clock has never stopped before…”

  “Perhaps,” the stranger suggested, “you might have some other clock by which I may learn the time?”

  “Surely!” The old man smiled at the absurdity of the idea. “Outside of my master-clock, though, there is only one other time piece I trust—my watch.”

  He pulled it out of his waistcoat pocket and gazed at it. His frown deepened. The glass had been crushed to powder, block­ing the second and minute hands. The watch too had stopped at exactly ten o’clock.

  “You are unfortunate,” the stranger murmured, leaning forward so that the light made the raindrops scintillate.

  “I remember doing this,” Martin Wilson replied, musing. “I leaned on the bench here. I must have crushed my watch. It was just before you came in… I must repair it when I have the chance.” He returned the watch to his pocket and surveyed the busily ticking clocks on the workbench. “It’s seven minutes past ten,” he said finally.

  “Thank, you,” the stranger said, but he made no effort to go. The old man looked at the master-clock again and sighed.

  “You shouldn’t have done that, William,” he said seriously.

  “William?” the stranger repeated, and Martin Wilson smiled. “My master-clock, sir. I have names for all my clocks. They are my child­ren. You see, I never married. I have never known the love of a woman or of children of my own. Always it has been clocks.”

  The stranger said nothing. The deep silence of the drizzling night was outside and the quiet of the shop was only broken by the pedantic rhythm of a grandfather’s pendulum and the busy little ticking of an alarm. In varying degrees of enthusiasm the other clocks were keeping in step. The stranger seemed to listen to them for a while and then stirred slightly.

  For a moment the light caught his face and was gone. Martin Wilson did not quite know what to think. He was trying to fathom what it was like to expect to see a face and yet not see one. There did not seem to be a face at all, only some kind of indetermin­ate shadow which, as he unconsciously moved towards it to look more closely, became all the darker.

  “You are curious as to my identity, my friend?” the stranger asked, in his mellow, cultured voice. Martin Wilson shrugged.

  “I admit I’ve never seen you before,” he mused.

  “I have come a long way, and I am somewhat tired. Would you consider it a liberty if I were to sit down and rest for a while?”

  “Please do.”

  The stranger turned and pulled forth a chair from his own side of the bench. He settled on it, his back to the light so that his face was thrown into an even deeper shadow than before. A chiming clock struck the quarter hour. It aroused Martin Wilson from a spell of thought. His eyes moved from the glistening drops on the stranger’s hat and shoulders to the still silent master-clock.

  “Since you wish to rest, sir, and I am in no hurry, would you mind if I worked?” he asked.

  “My dear friend, please do,” the stranger urged. “Not for a moment do I wish to delay your industry. Men with your touch are so rare.”

  “Are they? I’m—I’m sort of glad to hear you say that. I take myself so much for granted—Excuse me, but I must see what is wrong with William.”

  Martin Wilson shambled out from behind the bench and searched amongst the lumber of the shop until he had unearthed a pair of steps. He straddled them, climbed up to the penultimate step, then shoved and heaved until he had the wall clock free of its massive nail.

  As though the clock were a sleeping child he cradled it in his arm and descended slowly to the floor again, laying the clock face upward on the bench.

  “I never knew I had that much strength,” he remarked, surprised. “This clock is heavy—solid mahogany frame.”

  “Sometimes,” the stranger said broodingly, “we do not realise how strong we really are.”

  There was again that glimpse of something where a face should have been and was not.

  Martin Wilson wondered if he ought to be frightened by his extraordinary visitor. For some reason he was not. He felt he accepted the occurrence as the most natural thing in the world.

  The complexity, the mystery of it, did not trouble him in the least.

  Reaching to the tool-rack over the bench he took down a screwdriver and began to detach the clock from its frame. It looked as though the stranger was watching his activities. At last Martin Wilson had the clock free, and detaching the pendulum, he laid the clock face down and gazed at the polished brass works.

  “Beautifully intricate,” the stranger commented. “Obviously con­structed by an expert.”

  “I made it,” the old clockmaker responded. “Thirty years ago. It was an old Swiss model. I took it to pieces, rebuilt it, and since that time it has never varied more than a few seconds either way. I just don’t understand why it should have stopped like this. There doesn’t appear to be anything wrong with it.”

  He contemplated it, his slender fingers testing the cogs and escapement. Finally he shrugged. With a pair of forceps he unfastened the clamps holding the back in position and lifted it gently. Cogs and pinion-wheels, their supports gone, fell askew. One little spindle rolled forth, a glittering line under the light, and tottered to a standstill.

  “You are going to try and repair it?” the stranger inquired.

  “If it takes me all night!”

  The stranger moved again, ever so slightly, and seemed to be pre­paring to watch. Martin Wilson glanced towards the door, entirely from force of habit. It still seemed to be drizzling.

  Nobody was passing—which was odd. It was as though he and the stranger were the only two people in the universe. So quiet, except for the endless chorus from the clocks.

  Shadowy, too, save just in this one spot where the naked glare smote on the clock that would not go.

  One by one Martin Wilson took the parts and placed them on the bench, until at last he had the bare frame of the clock and a heap of wheels and spindles. He had forgotten what time it was. For some reason he did not even care. The stranger was still watching absorbedly, and pres­ently he made a comment.

  “You know my friend, I have the strangest conviction. I do not think that clock will over go again.”

  “With my workmanship,” Martin Wilson told him, with reasonable pride, “it cannot fail to.”

  “Workmanship, yes, but you are forgetting a deeper issue. What does a clock do? It measures time. It has to work in that advancing time in order to register it. Right?”

  “I—suppose so,” Martin Wilson agreed, putting a spring into a small receptacle filled with paraffin.

  “It is so,” the stranger insisted with quiet f
irmness. “When you have repaired the clock it will not go, for the simple reason that it can never again catch up on the time it has lost. That time has gone—forever.”

  The old man paused in his work and looked troubled. “How so? If I put the fingers to the correct time and start the pendulum swinging, the clock will go. It cannot fail to.”

  “It can fail to, and it will. It stopped at ten. Very well, let us suppose it will be two in the morning before you have assembled it ready for going again. How many hours will have passed during the repairing?”

  “Four,” answered Martin Wilson mechanically, removing the saturated spring and wiping it.

  “Four hours gone that can never be recalled. To simply adjust the fingers four hours ahead does not mean a thing. You are asking the clock to tell a lie. It has not lived through that time, so how can it register it? It is like asking a dead man to come back to life after four hours and carry on as though nothing had happened.”

  There was a long silence then Martin Wilson said: “It will go, I’m convinced of it.”

  The stranger said nothing further. He watched the old man’s hands at work. The clocks chimed. The hours sped. It surprised Martin Wilson to find that it was striking two when he had the clock reass­embled once again. Cradling it in his arms, the pendulum in his free hand, he mounted the steps up to the nail in the wall. Gently he slid the clock back into position and hung the pendulum carefully. With a delicate finger he touched it. It swung to and fro.

  “There!” he ex­claimed, smiling.

  The stranger had risen from his chair and was in the deep shadow cast by the grandfather. It was hardly possible to see him as he gazed upwards. “It is not going,” he stated quietly.

  “It’s not—?” Martin Wilson looked at it and then started.

  The stranger had spoken the truth. The initial swinging of the pendulum was slowing down. There was no steady ticking from the escape mechanism.

  The old clockmaker opened the front of the clock and peered up into the works. He could see the escapement working perfectly, and yet the clock was not going. Its fingers were still at ten o’clock and the pendulum was slowing—slowing—stopped.

  “This is impossible!” the old man declared. “Am I not a master clock maker? Why should this one defy me?”

  “It does not defy you, my friend. It is as I told you: You are trying to make it operate in a time that does not exist.”

  “But surely, if I advance it to seven minutes past two, which is the time now, it will then go?”

  “No; to get the fingers there you will have to make a record of the intervening hours on the dial, hours which the clock has never truly registered. It cannot do it, anymore than you could reach Tuesday morning by being dead on Saturday, Sunday and Monday.”

  “But clocks are things of metal,” Martin Wilson protested. “They do not think! They cannot reason the passage of hours!”

  “My friend, the intervening time has not existed, either for the clock…or you.”

  The old man blinked and stared down at the shadowy figure. “Or for me?” he asked.

  “I am trying to tell you that Time is not yours to do with as you wish, my friend. Like anybody else you merely borrow it as an intan­gible medium in which to perform certain acts. To you, to everybody, there comes a moment when the supply of time must run out. It has run out for you—and the clock.”

  Martin Wilson descended slowly to the floor. “These other clocks are going,” he remarked.

  “Exactly—because they did not stop. There is no reason why they should not continue to go since they are recording time faithfully. They are living through normal time: you are not.”

  The old man scratched the back of his neck. “Y’know sir, I haven’t the vaguest idea what you are talking about. Do you mean to tell me that my master-clock will never go again?”

  “Not whilst you and I are here.”

  The silence seemed to deepen even more, muting even the ticking of the clocks. Martin Wilson spoke in so low a voice he was hardly aud­ible. “Who are you?” he breathed.

  The stranger moved and came slowly into the light.

  For the first time Martin Wilson looked on the face which was not a face but a— He took a sharp step backwards, appalled.

  “Don’t be alarmed my friend. Now you know the truth. You have not feared me so far. There is no reason why you should do so now.” The stranger paused and then asked quietly, “Well, shall we go?”

  “Yes,” Martin Wilson muttered. “Yes, we’ll go. Now I know what you mean by the clock never going as long as we remain.”

  The stranger moved and the old man fell into step beside him. They went across the shop to the front door and it had never seemed so far away. The nearer they went to it, the more it appeared to recede, un­til it was lost in a vast corridor, almost a tunnel in space, becoming darker and darker in which every sound of the living world was swallowed up.

  FIRST OF THE ROBOTS

  “You’re not going to like this, Ralph. In fact you’re going to dislike it very much! But it’ll show you that you can’t stand in the way of the greatest scientist of the age, nor can you win his intended wife away from him! Damn you!”

  Stanley Lang leaned over the strapped man on the long table, smiled in vindictive triumph.

  Ralph Marson made no move because he could not. He was stretched full length on the table, strapped down with arms at his sides, his whole body bathed in the violet, shadowless radiation from the globes above him. In the glare the face of Stanley Lang seemed blurred and unreal, leaning forward with that sadistic grin twisting his strong mouth.

  Lying there, helpless, Ralph Marson’s mind flashed back over events. He and Stanley Lang had been friends since childhood—but where Ralph had kept his feet on the ground Stanley Lang, by far the more brilliant and discovering easy riches as the reward for scientific invent­ive power, had sickened of the common­place.

  Together they had loved Enid Massey. Overwhelmed by the dynamic personality of Stanley Lang on the one side, and the quiet, but honest, persistence of Ralph Marson on the other, she had so far failed to indicate her choice. This—and because he had tried to balk his erstwhile friend’s ruthless ambition—was the reason why Ralph lay strapped down now in the private laboratory, having walked right into the trap in response to a telephone call.

  “You’re a fool, Stan,” Ralph said presently, shifting his blond head comfortably in the cradle where his neck rested. “If you do anything to me the law will catch up on you—”

  “The law!” Stanley Lang sneered. “What has a scientist to do with the law? Anyway you’ve got the wrong slant on things. Remember some time ago you signed a charity donation list?”

  “Yes?” Ralph’s voice was puzzled.

  “Well, I transplanted the signature to a document stating that any sudden dis­appearance on your part would be entirely voluntary, for the purpose of scientific experiment. Good, eh?”

  Ralph stared at the thin, coldly clever face and its cliff-like forehead. For the first time he felt real fear. Stanley Lang had never gone to such lengths before: to do so now he must have a very urgent reason.

  “Puzzled, eh?” Stanley Lang gave a thin-lipped grin. “All right, I’ll tell you what’s going to happen—I’m going to re­pay you in full for your blasted interfer­ence in my affairs—both in science and in connection with Enid. At the same time I’m going to make a scientific experiment of the greatest value…”

  Turning, he walked over to a corner and from amidst a jumble of apparatus pulled forth what looked to be a suit of armour. Ralph knew better than that. This was the Lang Robot, the most efficient organism of steel mesh and electric network ever devised. For ten years Stanley Lang had poured all the genius of his powerful brain into its construction.

  The finished product was not a clumsy, cumbersome, jointed mass of metal walk­ing with mannequin-like jerks, but a per­fectly flexible metal man, equipped internally with a multitude of reactive electric centres w
hich corresponded to the nervous system; and possessing a face of carven, powerful immobility.

  But for all its miraculous perfection of detail and similarity to a human being, there was one thing—a vital thing—wrong with the robot. It did not always obey the summonses of its brilliant master. There were times when the mesh of sensitive reception plates and impulse-feeders failed to react. It was not the fault of Stanley Lang or of the robot: it was the irreconcilable obstinacy of elec­tricity to the dictates of man.

  “There is much,” Stanley Lang said pensively, “to still be learned concerning electricity and basic forces before my robot can respond infallibly, and perform every command instantly. To solve these intricacies, with all the other work I have to do, might take me ten years. That is too long for me. I want instant results, for when I get them Lang’s Electric Robots are going to make me a multi­millionaire…”

  Ralph eyed him contemptuously as he lay motionless.

  “For God’s sake, Stan, don’t you ever think of anything else but the money science can make for you? Isn’t there something in science for itself alone?”

  “Something—but not enough.” Stan­ley Lang shrugged. “However, I had better outline my scheme to you. Since the solution of all electric laws, and the basic telepathic impulses which are needed to make my robot operate, are too profound to be solved hurriedly, I believe that a human brain is needed…”

  “You—you what?” Ralph gasped incredulously.

  “Surprised, eh? I thought you might be. But thank Heaven,” Stanley Lang went on, “I had the idea. Listen to me, Ralph—Listen well! This robot has elec­trical filigrees which correspond to the nervous system. After all, human nerves are only the same as wires carry­ing electrical current. Now, at the sum­mit of this robot’s spinal column is the magnetic brain pan, that obstinate electric unit which sometimes obeys and which sometimes, unfortunately, does not.

  “If I were to remove it and put a human brain in its place I would have a supreme, infallible unit. I would have a flawless servant, instantly responsive. The slave of my will…!”