by Anthology
“Professor Toone arose again to put a question. I cannot remember what it was for at that point the discussion started to leave me behind. Voices went on wriggling into an abstruseness beyond my mental grasp. It was a kind of knock out contest—the survival of the mentally fittest. When Sir Henry Deen rose to his feet a long time later there can only have been two or three of the company who retained any pretensions to following the slender thread of explanation. He broke the spell.
“ ‘Can we be shown something of your works, something concrete upon which we can report? So far we have done nothing which will profit either you or those who sent us. The public we represent will scarcely be impressed by hearing merely of a philosophical discussion which most of us have failed to follow. Any intimation we could give them of the forms of armament upon which you rely to carry out this plan would be vastly more impressive than an unlimited amount of discussion.’
“ ‘You shall look around our building, though there is little to see. In the matter of armament, we must disappoint you.’ “Sir Henry grunted.
“ ‘Intending to keep that secret, eh? Very sensible too, from your point of view, but if you could give a demonstration of your weapons’ power . . .’
“ ‘You mistake us,’ the voice reproved. ‘We cannot show armament because we have none.’
“ ‘Ha. Then the whole thing is a piece of humbug—a bluff. I had suspected so from the beginning. You think that by tricks . . .
“ ‘Again you do not understand. Why should we have any need of those guns and shells which are, after all, merely the extension of the stone-age man’s sling and throwing flint? Intellect has no use for such uncertain toys—shells which may kill one man or one hundred men. We wish to kill no one.’
“Sir Henry snorted again to show his contempt for such an attitude (or perhaps to be on the safe side in the event of this proving itself an extension of the bluff.
“There was a pause during which several more dwarfs entered and approached our instructor in a manner which revealed them as inferiors. It was explained that we should be shown round the building in parties.
“ ‘It’s a queer thing,’ said my neighbour as we rose, ‘but did you notice that the old boy never opened his mouth all the while he talked to us—nor has this one.’ He nodded towards the back of our guide.
“ ‘Also, we know they can’t hear, yet they understand everything we say. Rum, I call it, just you watch this fellow now.’
“The dwarf strode straight at the metal wall and a space appeared before him.
“ ‘Nothing queer about that,’ I said. ‘I know plenty of doors at home which open when you tread on the mat.’
“ ‘No, it’s not that. You watch next time. That bit of wall neither swung back nor slid—it just disappeared. Same thing happened when we first came in.’
Chapter IV
A Battle of Wills
“The guide was frankly contemptuous.
His was the manner of a major-domo taking the lap-dog for a walk. He threw out occasional curt references to the objects we passed. These machines were water producers, those, food makers. One and all were equally mysterious to most of us. We trailed blankly along gaping as vacantly as any savage at his first radio. Perhaps the dwarf was justified in his contempt, for these machines, unlike the ‘travellers’, did not use Lestrange batteries and the source of power was to us as obscure as the methods of operation were unintelligible.
“At length we reached a large hall which at first glance seemed to be a jumble of birdcages.
“ ‘Travelling machines,’ came abruptly from the guide.
“We approached them and he became so informative over what we guessed to be a recent invention that contempt was momentarily forgotten. One of the two rows of dials, he explained, determined the amount of time to be traveled. It contained seven indicators ranging from an hour to ten thousand years. The lower row regulated the position.
“A certain amount of interaction between the two rows was necessary. For one thing, it prevented the machine from maintaining its position in space without reference to the motion of the earth. Within the limits set by this interaction, position could be calculated almost to a foot.
“ ‘What’s that for?’ asked one of the party reaching towards a lever. As he lifted his hand, the dwarf saw him and he reeled back, crashing to the floor. Afterwards, he told us that it had felt like a tremendous blow between the eyes.
“ ‘What did I tell you?’ said my neighbour excitedly. ‘Force of mind, that’s what these people use; that’s why their hands are vestigial. Pure will power.’
“The dwarf seemed to hear him for he looked towards us.
“ ‘I am surprised,’ he sneered, ‘that you even know of such a thing as will power. I judged by your reflexes that you had only instincts.’
“ ‘You are insulting,’ said a voice behind me.
“ ‘There are thirty of you,’ he continued to sneer. ‘Let us see if your combined wills assist you against mine.’
“We stared around us in amazement. The walls had gone, the machines, too, everything. There was nothing to be seen in any direction save unbroken desert.
“ ‘Playin’ Aladdin’s lamp tricks,’ growled my neighbour, bending down to grasp a handful of sand.
“The dwarf almost smiled at our confusion.
“ ‘You know perfectly well where you are,’ he said. ‘But all you can see or feel is the open desert. That’s how much all your wills are worth against mine. Try now to see whether you can bring the walls round you again.’
“I suspect that it was the mind of that remarkable man, Professor Toone, which tipped the scales in our favour.
“For a moment we felt the heat still beating up from the sand, then the shadowy outlines of the hall began to reform. Slowly from mistiness they grew more substantial, for a few seconds they began to fade again, then, in a flash, we were back indoors. The dwarf lay on the floor before us, panting.
“ ‘Lord,’ said someone, ‘played out like he’s run ten miles—anyway, we’ve got some wills between us.’
“When I had been home three days, I began to understand Professor Toone’s decision that the committee should meet and discuss in Paris before scattering to report.
“He made the suggestion during the flight back to Le Bourget. The alacrity of acceptance was such as to make one suspect that the delegates were so uncertain of what their reports should contain that they were eager for a few pointers. Toone by common consent opened the proceedings.
“ ‘Gentlemen,’ he began, ‘each of us will be called upon in a few days to give his comments upon the results of our investigation.
“ ‘The questions we shall be asked will appear ridiculous in the light of our experience, but, they will not seem so ridiculous to us as will our answers to our governments. They will say: ‘What form of power supported and propelled the flyer you traveled in?’ We shall reply that we have no idea. They will be irritated.
“ ‘They will ask: ‘How many of these dwarfs are there?’ We shall have to reply that we saw at most about fifty. They will smile. This will be followed up with: ‘What kind of armament?’—We saw none and have reason to believe that they possess none. ‘How many flyers?’—We saw only one. ‘What is their silvery metal?’—We do not know.
“ ‘So it will go on until with their amusement and their contempt we shall be in danger of becoming a laughing stock. If that is allowed to occur, we have no hope of any warning we may give being regarded as anything but further embroidery to a great joke.
“ ‘Seldom, gentlemen, can any committee of investigation have produced less concrete results. Had we found great guns, strange rays, new gases, they would have listened to us—instead, we have found a menace of pure force beside which such weapons would be childish.
“ ‘We have found this, I say, but because we cannot comprehend it, we cannot describe it. The grand total of our observation is one strange ship, one equally strange building, a few dwarfs,
a number of machines reputed to be time travellers, other unknown machinery and what our critics will call a cinematograph show—that is all we saw: we cannot tell them what we felt.
“ ‘This, then, is the problem confronting us: How can we convey to a skeptical world the sensation we received of potential force?
“ ‘The peoples must know of that seething mental battery, that surging power of will beside which we are scarcely reasoning creatures—they must know, and they must believe. The burden of their conviction lies upon us.’
Fruitless Efforts
“The conference had continued for two days. Two wasted days they seemed to me. Speeches drifted more and more from the main issue and steadily tended to confine themselves to suggestions for combating the menace. Again and again Professor Toone dragged the members back from their talk of tactics by his insistence that the governments must first be convinced of the need for tactics. No solution could be suggested short of the governments themselves experiencing our sensations.
“Back home, I was sitting in a palatial office trying to convince a bored official who felt that his time was being wasted.
“I was growing irritated.
“ ‘Can’t you think,’ I demanded, ‘in any terms but guns and gases?’
“ ‘They might have ignition rays,’ he assented.
“I groaned.
“ ‘Of course they might have, but can’t you see what I’m getting at? They simply haven’t been developing along those physical lines.’
“ ‘They seem to have developed physically a great deal if your description is accurate.’
“ ‘Their present form was probably reached tens of thousands of years ago—to them, that is. It’s their minds which have progressed since then—if only you could meet them, you’d begin to feel that terrifying force. Man alive, it was as much as thirty of us, most of them brilliant men, could do to overthrow the mental suggestion of one of their inferior servants.’
“The official smiled.
“ ‘And their flyer. Do you realize that there was no one save the committee on board—no pilot, no crew? The whole blasted thing was worked by a telepathic control of some kind.’
“ ‘We also have radio control,’ he reminded me gently.
“I began to admit to myself what I had known from the first—that it was hopeless. But still I hammered on.
“ ‘You don’t realize what they are working for. We speculate mildly about the future of mind—they know its future. They are out for discarnate intelligence. They know that, given time, they can achieve it.’
“ ‘Nonsense, there can’t be a mind without a brain.’
“ ‘Why not? The brain is only the organ of the mind, a sort of central control for the other organs. Already they can project their minds, but they still have to use the body for a base for operations.’
“ ‘You seriously expect me to believe that?’
“ ‘There’s proof of it. Did you hear the voice which issued their ultimatum?’
“ ‘Yes.’
“ ‘And it came from the loudspeaker? ’
“ ‘Yes.
“ ‘Then perhaps it will surprise you to know that in London they took a record of one of the messages. When they put it on the machine, not a sound was to be heard—the thing was blank. Those messages never came out of the loudspeaker, but the dwarfs, for some reason of their own, made you think—made us all think that they did.’
“In the evening when I met Mary, I was tired and discouraged. Nothing I had been able to say had even dented that wall of mechanical materialism. My most trenchant arguments had either bounced off or missed fire. The final blow had been, when in the middle of my efforts to convey my impressions of mental strength, he had asked with the air of one who draws the conversation back to realities, whether I thought that they might have tanks hidden in the neighbourhood.
“ ‘It isn’t,’ I said to Mary, ‘for or against acceptance of the dwarfs’ terms,—as for that, I only know that I, personally, am going to no dying world,—my job was to try to make the fools realize that they really were terms. For two and a half hours I tried to tell that smug know-all that an over-whelming danger threatens him, the nation, and the whole world—I made just as much impression as I would throwing snowballs at a pyramid.’
“Mary gazed at me intently.
“ ‘It’s very difficult to grasp,’ she said. ‘Even yet I don’t really understand what this great danger is if they haven’t got any weapons.’
“ ‘That’s the devil of it. They may even have some weapons in the way you mean—though I don’t think so,—but that is nothing to do with their strength. Oh, if I could only convey that sensation which scared us all, something might be possible, but I’m utterly incompetent. If you asked a horse to explain the activities of men, he’d be no more at sea than I am over this business.’
“ ‘But, dear, if there are so few of them, why should they want the whole world? Surely they could make a sort of colony somewhere? ’
“ ‘I don’t know, but I think this is a sort of advance guard—supervisors of emigration and immigration; we don’t even know how many of them there are. Probably the world couldn’t support both populations at once so that the only way is a complete change over. Half the worry about this affair is that we know nothing of the details—we’re just expected to do as we’re told.’ “Mary bent towards me and tried to smooth out the furrows of anxiety.
“ ‘Darling,’ she said firmly, ‘you must stop worrying about it. Put it all away for the present.’
“She took my arm and we strolled out to the terrace. A soft breeze pressed the trees so that they swayed gently. Slips of torn cloud were gliding across the moon. Far, far away we could see the misty outline of the hills.
“ ‘It’s all so beautiful,’ she whispered, her eyes on the dim distance. ‘I think it makes me afraid.’
“My arm went round her.
“ ‘Our lovely world,’ said my voice.
“ ‘But how long ours?’ asked my mind.
Chapter V
A World at Bay
“A month later, hell was loose. Our civilization was broken up. The herd instinct which built it had given way. All the climbing from individuals to groups, from groups to clans, from clans to nations meant nothing to men who roamed the dead cities as their ancestors had prowled the jungles. The veneer was off. All our vaunted progress had taken us no higher than the first rung of the ladder; that rung broke and we were back where we started.
“The dwarfs had stolen our power, they had hit us literally where we lived. All the Lestrange batteries went dead and with them our world stopped. Save in the great tide-stations which still made power for the useless batteries, not a wheel could turn. It was chaos.
“Planes fluttered from the skies, ships wallowed in the seas, airships floated away on the winds, factories were silent, elevators dropped, trains were checked, ovens cooled, radios died, cars were pulled up and every light failed.
“It was nine o’clock at night when the great stoppage came and it was the darkness which caused the panic. Across the world in the sunlight they cannot have had that catastrophic madness in which crowds rushed, milled and swirled without reason, without object.
“How it was done nobody knew. Perhaps it was a ray against which they shielded their travellers. Perhaps—but what is the use of speculating on the possibilities of such minds?
“I was in the city, the roar of the city’s life rose through my open windows. One moment, busy hubbub and bright lights, the next, silence and darkness. I stumbled across the room and looked out into a pitchy gulf which might have led to the bowels of the earth, so quiet—a quiet which seemed to wait—a quiet during which men died. During which cages dropped down mines, divers got no more air, loads fell from cranes, acrobats missed trapezes, surgeons cut too deep.
“From below there came a scream and as if at that signal a murmur rose. The voice of the crowd growing louder and louder, wilder and wilder.
My eyes could see nothing, but my mind saw devilish things happening in that street. Bodies crushing at the walls, ribs cracking under pressure, eyes bursting from their sockets, lungs laboring for air, corpses trampled under foot and corpses unable to fall, while above it all rose now the senseless roar of that wild beast, the mob, destroying itself.
“I moved back and sought the telephone only to find it as dead as the lights. It was not until then that the full meaning of the crisis came to me. It had seemed an unusual failure of current only, now I realized in a flash what it meant and knew it for the dwarfs’ masterstroke.
“They had been roused from their patience at last. Of the several messages sent out on their world-wide system since our useless investigation, I had heard only one. It was almost pleading in tone.
“ ‘Our destinies must be worked out, nothing shall stop that. We wish you no harm—we are not butchers—but you are leaving us no alternative.’
“The voice went on to appoint ‘stations’ for transportation. In the northern plains of Italy; North and South France! near Johannesburg, South Africa; Salisbury Plain in England; in Florida, California and Illinois for the United States and so on to the number of sixty or more.
“ ‘I wonder,’ said one of my companions, ‘why they always make these announcements in English?’
“Another listener, a blond young man looked us.
“You will excuse?’ he said. ‘But I haf chust heard them perfect German use, nod English.’
“I attempted to explain that the messages were conveyed directly to their minds without the use of sound. That they merely thought they heard. After this, each obviously considered me more of a fool than he thought the other.
“On the set days crowds flocked to the starting places. Except for a few cranks such as daily expect the end of the world, nobody save the cameramen went from any motive than idle curiosity. A holiday spirit was abroad. There was the prospect of a free show of some sort and the likelihood of a good laugh at the dwarfs’ expense. The cameramen were the only survivors.