Dynasty of the Small

by John Russell Fearn

  “The districts around New York are free, sir,” he announced eagerly, his eyes glowing. “There’s bare ground and some wilted remains of plants—that’s all. Everywhere my searchlight touched I beheld the same thing.”

  Blair smiled triumphantly into the dazed eyes of those gathered about him.

  “Gentlemen,” he said quietly, “the bacteria menace has gone; the dynasty of the small has collapsed before its mission, whatever it was, could be achieved. Crops will grow again; there are bound to be some seeds left in the earth; trees will return to life. Those few cattle we saved can be released to carry on the work of reproduction. The seas will glow again at night; the earth will return slowly to normalcy. We have met and mastered the greatest scourge that ever threatened us, and, unwittingly, it was Caleb Roome’s demand for war that saved us! The war itself delivered us, after all.”

  “Blair, what are you getting at?” demanded marshal Cranbourne, his face strained and anxious. “Why have the plants died? It’s all so inexplicable.”

  “On the contrary,” Blair smiled. “You see, it never occurred to me until I heard the reports of the plants’ multiplicity how the whole business was going to end. Overpopulation killed them!”

  “But—how?” demanded Professor Libby.

  “Just the essential equilibrium of nature. Any region of nature left to itself rapidly attains a state of equilibrium, a balance being reached and maintained between the various forms of life that inhabit it. Sometimes there are outbreaks of overpopulation, but through disease or maybe war, the balance is restored again. Take the monsters that inhabited the world millions of years ago. They banked on size and strength—so much so that finally they became too unwieldy to hunt their food, and as a consequence became extinct—or, more correctly, took on smaller forms through the process of evolution.”

  “Well?” the Chairman asked quickly.

  “Well, these bacteria plants, thanks to the terrible hammering we gave them, multiplied so fast that they had no room to take nourishment—probably, even, they could not get enough air. They exhausted their supplies utterly and died thereby. Jam humans closely together—as for instance the Black Hole of Calcutta—and death is inevitable. That is just what happened here. The plants died from lack of space, and the result is that that particular species of giant bacteria has gone forever. The normal type will resume—must be doing so even now; but since Protozoa are also present, they will be kept in check as of yore. Yes, my dear friends, mankind is free.”

  “You’re right,” muttered Libby, glancing at the first rays of the morning sun through the window. “Man is born anew.”

  “Exactly,” Blair nodded. “The people must be told. As for myself, I’m leaving now to perform a very important mission.”

  “It is?” Northern inquired.

  “I’m through with trying to stop disease. Better to have disease than wholesale annihilation! I’m going back to our laboratory at once to destroy that formula for my animacule!”

  ICE MAIDEN

  “Now, sweetheart, you stay here and play with your toys. It won’t be long before I’m back....”

  Vera Morton’s nurse took a last, fond look at the merry-eyed child in the nursery, and then she went out and locked the door. Possibly Ella would have been more loyal to her charge had not spring been in the air; as it was, the only thing which mattered to her was a date in town with a certain dashing young Lothario.

  Vera Morton was just six years old, plump and black-haired. Also in town, her mother and father were attending an important social event.... And below the Morton flat, directly under the nursery in fact, David Gregory toiled steadily with complicated apparatus. He surveyed the accumulation of equipment with satisfaction—the coils, condensors, insulator-banks, and loops of flex socketed to power points.

  The click of the door latch made him glance up, and his young son William came strolling in, hands in pockets, interest written all over his youthful face.

  “How’s it coming on, dad?”

  “Oh, not so bad....” David Gregory gave a smile and ruffled the boy’s shock of hair. “Will, you’re eight years old now, and unless I miss my guess you’ll be the son of a millionaire before you’re another eight years older....”

  “Better be before that, Dave....” Gregory’s wife came in and closed the door. “This luxury apartment which you’ve transformed into something resembling a garage needs paying for, remember. Either that invention of yours works, or we go on the rocks.... Landlords are funny that way.”

  “It’ll work, dear,” Dave Gregory assured her earnestly. “In fact, I don’t think there could be a more perfect system for military defense. All a matter of getting the War Office to see eye to eye with me. Close the switch, and out goes a field of energy which stops any invader getting within miles of us. That means directed missiles, too. Nothing whatever can get through a field like this: even A- and H-bombs would be dissipated.”

  “Yes, Dave,” his wife said patiently, quite at sea.

  “I’ll show you what I mean,” he volunteered. “Watch!”

  He made a final check-over and then threw the master-switch. Instantly a tremendous pressure-wave surged through the room. It was followed by a terrific explosion that hurled David Gregory, already dead, clean through the window. His wife collapsed, blood streaming from her battered head. Young Will was swept off his feet and slammed senseless against the wall—

  The entire building rocked.

  But this was not all that happened. When young William, still living, had been rushed to hospital and the building was searched, the nursery of Vera Morton overhead was found to be intact. Door locked, windows shut—but of Vera herself there was no sign. The child had utterly vanished, nor did she return despite the frantic efforts of her parents to trace her. There just did not seem to be the vaguest clue as to how she had disappeared, or of her present whereabouts.

  Gradually, the mystery of Vera Morton found its way into the files of unsolved problems, and the years passed by....

  * * * *

  Will Gregory grew up with the remembrance of that sinister explosion rooted in his brain, and the death of his father and mother sharpened the remembrance. Once he left the care of the State to make his own way in the world, his one aim was to find out exactly what his ambitious father had been driving at.

  Will was now twenty-one, and even more scientific than his father had been. He was the owner of a small television, radio, and electronic gadgets shop. In the back region of the shop, at night, he endeavored to reconstruct the apparatus his father had made, piecing things together from the faded plans which had been left to him from the flat’s few salvaged possessions.

  “Some kind of energy screen,” Will muttered, brooding over the plans and partially reconstructed apparatus. “It looks from this as though his basic idea was to shift the molecular foundation of matter and thereby cause a warp, or change, in the—”

  He looked up sharply, frowning. It seemed as though somebody had come into the shop for there was a distinct draft blowing. With a grunt of impatience Will turned towards the shop inter-doorway and then checked himself.

  “You crazy?” he asked himself. “You locked the shop up half an hour ago!”

  As he stood pondering his momentary lapse he heard a sound exactly like a window closing. Puzzled, he rubbed his head and waited for he did not know what. Then he turned back to his pile of electronic components— But damnit, there was a draft, and a cold one too for a very mild night in the early autumn

  “You’re getting soft, m’lad,” he murmured, throwing himself in the chair to study things out....

  After a while he had decided upon a definite course of action. He got up, picked up the screwdriver, and then started to work. He hesitated in wonder as he felt the hairs on the backs of his hands tingling oddly. His knuckles, too, felt stiff and cramped and the draft from nowhere had swiftly and mysteriously increased. Giving a little shiver, he pulled his coat from the back of the nearby chair and
got into it quickly. As he did so, he glanced casually at the thermometer and nearly dropped the screwdriver in his amazement. The thermometer’s mercury had nosedived to below freezing point!

  Of course, the thing was impossible. Temperatures just couldn’t drop that quickly. He went across to the electric heater and switched it on; then turned to look through the slowly glazing window. Through the clear patches—for he had not drawn the curtains—he could see people walking about casually enough, and there was certainly no sign of frost.

  Slow wonder settled on Will. It changed to alarm as he felt an unearthly aura growing round him—a tightening, biting cold that gripped every nerve.

  The machine on which he was working? Perhaps it—no; that had nothing to do with it. The machine was not even switched on.

  “Yet if it isn’t the machine,” he said out loud, “what the hell is it?”

  “I am responsible, Mr. Gregory, if it’s the cold you’re talking about.”

  “Huh?” Will swung round and stared blankly at the radio, thinking that for a moment some queer coincidence had supplied the answer to his musing. Then he realized the radio, like the machine upon which he was working, was not switched on. Yet he could have sworn somebody had spoken—

  “You can’t see me, Mr. Gregory, but I can see you quite clearly. Maybe you can feel my presence, though?” And as Will stood goggling at the emptiness cold such as he had never known bit into him like a buzz-saw. He gasped with the stinging pain of it and then relaxed helplessly against the window frame.

  “I gather you do feel it,” the calm voice commented.

  With difficulty Will found speech. “What—what is this? Some damned silly game? Some trick because I’m alone here experimenting? I heard you come through the window a little while ago, and if it’s you, Molly, with one of your practical jokes—”

  “My name isn’t Molly: it’s Vera Morton. Does that name mean anything to you?”

  “Vera...Morton?” There was a long silence as Will wrestled with the incredible. “But— But Vera Morton was the kid who vanished from the fiat above ours years ago!”

  “I was the kid!” came the retort: “I’ve grown up since then. I’m nineteen years of age.”

  “For the love of heaven, what is going on?” Will demanded in bewilderment. “If this is some psychic manifestation I’ll get the proper authorities to deal with it.... But frankly, I don’t think it is,” he continued, his tone changing. “We’d get on a lot better if you’d bring out the concealed transmitter and refrigerator and called it a day. I’ve work to do!”

  “You’ll listen to me, Mr. Gregory! If you have doubts about my really being present take a look at this!”

  Will turned slightly and then stood watching in amazement as inside the adjoining shop he saw small boxes and empty crates suddenly flake with frost, then rise into the air and hurl themselves several feet. Other objects rapidly iced over and capered about like the creations of a séance.

  Something was there, then—invisible, diabolically cold, hurling things around by some kind of physical volition.

  “Now do you believe it?” the feminine voice demanded. “I tell you I am Vera Morton, and I am the same girl who was blown into another plane by some infernal invention just over thirteen years ago— No, stand where you are! If you come too near me I might kill you with the cold. I may even do that anyway in the finish, but first I want to give you a chance to speak.... Sit down!”

  “But—I—” Will gazed blindly into space.

  “Stop bleating, can’t you, and sit down!”

  Will obeyed, and waited. The voice seemed to be speaking from the store, about five yards distant. Frost had gathered round the spot where the girl. now presumably stood.

  “Now listen,” she continued deliberately. “I know exactly who you are because I have spent a long time looking for a relative of that crazy inventor, David Gregory. From information from various sources—and no place is barred to me, remember—I have been able to discover all about the explosion, all about the death of my parents, and their frantic and useless searching for me. Now I have found you. I have studied you, and I want justice. As the son of the man who got me into this mess, you have got to get me out! I hope you realize what has happened to me?” The girl’s voice rose in anger.

  Will shrugged. His first alarm had gone now.

  “You seem to forget that you’re invisible to me,” he said. “How can I realize what’s happened to you when I can’t even see you?”

  “That’s just it! The fact that you can’t see me! I’m shut out from my own world because of what your father did to me with his insane meddling!”

  Will sighed. “Seems to me you’re jumping to conclusions. I don’t see what my father did to get you into this condition. As a matter of fact I am trying to reconstruct his apparatus in an endeavor to find out what he intended. As far as I’ve got up to now it looks as though the experiment had something to do with a plane of force—”

  “Plane of force!” The girl’s voice was derisive. “I’ll tell you what he did!” Will shivered with cold as the girl came closer her voice quivering with emotion. “The radiations from his machine must have traveled upwards in a straight line. You, your mother, and your father simply got the explosive effect—but in the room above I got the full radiative onslaught. All I remember was being absorbed into a gray fog whilst my body was racked and twisted as though it were being torn to bits. Then the fog cleared and— Well, I’ll never forget it! I was in a strange land, A child in an unknown plane.”

  “Then?” Will ventured, as there was silence for a moment

  “I was taken care of by the people in this plane, but kind though they have been to me, they still are not human beings. In fact, judged from human standards, they look pretty repulsive. All I can do is look out onto a world they can never see and consider myself labeled as a freak. I’m shut out, consumed by an overpowering longing to mingle with my own kind! And why? All because of your father!”

  “My father didn’t know what he did,” Will answered quietly. “Please believe that. Incidentally, there’s another side to the picture. Don’t you realize how unique you are? Speaking from the scientific angle you are a masterpiece of—”

  “Never mind the scientific angle! As far as I am concerned, I am simply a human being locked in an alien plane of existence. Because of my normal birth I retain enough of my natural physique to enable me to see into this plane—your plane, that is—which is something the beings of this other world can never do, any more than you can see the place where they dwell. I can also hear what is going on in this world of humans, and that is how I learned to talk and read above the mere vaporings of a child of six. There are other things too. I can see heat waves, radio waves, cosmic waves....”

  “It’s incredible!” Will whispered.

  “Not to me. As a matter of fact, it seems pretty clear that your father—unwittingly maybe—proved Heisenberg’s Principle of Indeterminacy. This, stated briefly, means that the electrons of matter do not so much exist as concrete things but as probabilities, as liable to be shifted out of their positions as a mist is dispersed by a breeze. Nothing is, Mr. Gregory: all that exists is the probability that it is. Well, then, the vibration from your father’s machine changed the entire probability make-up of my body. Understand?”

  “Vaguely. Keep on talking.”

  “The probability that I existed as Vera Morton in a world of humans yielded abruptly to the probability that I existed as Vera Morton in a plane of matter contiguous to this one. Molecules vibrate at a given speed, but your father’s machine’s radiation changed all that and transplanted me from one plane to the other. Not by actual physical transportation, but by altering my molecular vibration to the extent that I lost ‘sympathy’ with my normal plane and instead vibrated in ‘sympathy’ with this other one.”

  Will did not say anything. By this time he was lost in thought, grappling with the theory the girl was postulating. It hung together too, espe
cially so when based on the Principle of Indeterminacy.

  “You can never contact this plane,” the girl resumed, “because you pass through the people and substances in it. Likewise they in regard to you. It is a simple matter of differing vibrations, which actually is all there is to any material structure. For years I have been lost in this other plane. It was only as I became older that it dawned on me where I really belonged and I set out to find the reason for my plight. I have, with the scientific resources my friends possess, made my body a little more normal—but I could only get so far. I have become solid enough to walk and see, and hear and talk, in this human plane, or I can see into my own plane as well by a slight optical effort. But I am not visible in this human plane! My molecular rate is so slowed down that I don’t radiate light waves back to you, and also because of that slowness I am surrounded by an aura of intense cold Everything I touch here turns to ice! Somehow I’ve got to get back!”

  “Just why did you come to me?” Will asked. “You could not possibly have known that I had any plans left of my father’s machine.”

  “No, I didn’t know.” The unseen girl was quiet for a moment, then: “As a matter of fact I came to exact reprisal.”

  “Quite candidly, I don’t blame you—but it’s a bit unfair to blame me for something my father did. I was only a child too, then, remember.”

  “Much of what you have said, Mr. Gregory, makes me believe that the whole thing was an accident in the first place, but as your father’s son it’s still your job to try and get me back to normal. Find out precisely what your father did and then reverse the process. And don’t try anything likely to hurt me or those who’ve befriended me or I’ll hit back hard!”