“In three hours and fifty minutes—that will be at precisely seven o’clock—there is a commercial radio program on Station RPRS. You will cause the announcer, after his station identification, to say ‘Agreed.’ It will pass unnoticed by all but my employer. There is no use in having me followed; my work is done. I shall never see nor contact my employer again. That is all. Good afternoon, gentlemen!”
Wright closed his suitcase with a businesslike snap, bowed, and left the room. Four men sat staring at the little red cube.
“Do you think he can do all he says?” asked the President.
The three nodded mutely. The President reached for his phone.
There was an eavesdropper to all of the foregoing. Conant, squatting behind his great desk in the vault, where he had his sanctum sanctorum, knew nothing of it. But beside him was the compact bulk of Kidder’s radiophone. His presence switched it on, and Kidder, on his island, blessed the day he had thought of that device. He had been meaning to call Conant all morning, but was very hesitant. His meeting with the young engineer Johansen had impressed him strongly. The man was such a thorough scientist, possessed of such complete delight in the work he did, that for the first time in his life Kidder found himself actually wanting to see someone again. But he feared for Johansen’s life if he brought him to the laboratory, for Johansen’s work was done on the island, and Conant would most certainly have the engineer killed if heard of his visit, fearing that Kidder would influence him to sabotage the great transmitter. And if Kidder went to the power plant he would probably be shot on sight.
All one day Kidder wrangled with himself, and finally determined to call Conant. Fortunately he gave no signal, but turned up the volume on the receiver when the little red light told him that Conant’s transmitter was functioning. Curious, he heard everything that occurred in the President’s chamber three thousand miles away. Horrified, he realized what Conant’s engineers had done. Built into tiny containers were tens of thousands of power receivers. They had no power of their own, but, by remote control, could draw on any or all of the billions of horsepower the huge plant on the island was broadcasting.
Kidder stood in front of his receiver, speechless. There was nothing he could do. If he devised some means of destroying the power plant, the government would certainly step in and take over the island, and then—what would happen to him and his precious Neoterics?
Another sound grated out of the receiver—a commercial radio program. A few bars of music, a man’s voice advertising stratoline fares on the installment plan, a short silence, then:
“Station RPRS, voice of the nation’s Capital, District of South Colorado.”
The three-second pause was interminable.
“The time is exactly … er … agreed. The time is exactly seven PM Mountain Standard Time.”
Then came a half-insane chuckle. Kidder had difficulty believing it was Conant. A phone clicked. The banker’s voice:
“Bill? All set. Get out there with your squadron and bomb up the island. Keep away from the plant, but cut the rest of it to ribbons. Do it quick and get out of there.”
Almost hysterical with fear, Kidder rushed about the room and then shot out the door and across the compound. There were five hundred innocent workmen in barracks a quarter mile from the plant. Conant didn’t need them now, and he didn’t need Kidder. The only safety for anyone was in the plant itself, and Kidder wouldn’t leave his Neoterics to be bombed. He flung himself up the stairs and to the nearest teletype. He banged out, “Get me a defense. I want an impenetrable shield. Urgent!”
The words ripped out from under his fingers in the functional script of the Neoterics. Kidder didn’t think of what he wrote, didn’t really visualize the thing he ordered. But he had done what he could. He’d have to leave them now, get to the barracks, warn those men. He ran up the path toward the plant, flung himself over the white line and marked death to those who crossed it.
A squadron of nine clip-winged, mosquito-nosed planes rose out of a cove on the mainland. There was no sound from the engines, for there were no engines. Each plane was powered with a tiny receiver and drew its unmarked, light-absorbent wings through the air with power from the island. In a matter of minutes they raised the island. The squadron leader spoke briskly into a microphone.
“Take the barracks first. Clean ’em up. Then work south.”
Johansen was alone on a small hill near the center of the island. He carried a camera, and though he knew pretty well that his chances of ever getting ashore again were practically nonexistent, he liked angle shots of his tower, and took innumerable pictures. The first he knew of the planes was when he heard their whining dive over the barracks. He stood transfixed, saw a shower of bombs hurtle down and turn the barracks into a smashed ruin of broken wood, metal and bodies. The picture of Kidder’s earnest face flashed into his mind. Poor little guy—if they ever bombed his end of the island he would—But his tower! Were they going to bomb the plant?
He watched, utterly appalled, as the planes flew out to sea, cut back and dove again. They seemed to be working south. At the third dive he was sure of it. Not knowing what he could do, he nevertheless turned and ran toward Kidder’s place. He rounded a turn in the trail and collided violently with the little biochemist. Kidder’s face was scarlet with exertion, and he was the most terrified-looking object Johansen had ever seen.
Kidder waved a hand northward. “Conant!” he screamed over the uproar. “It’s Conant! He’s going to kill us all!”
“The plant?” said Johansen, turning pale.
“It’s safe. He won’t touch that! But … my place … what about all those men?”
“Too late!” shouted Johansen.
“Maybe I can—Come on!” called Kidder, and was off down the trail, heading south.
Johansen pounded after him. Kidder’s little short legs became a blur as the squadron swooped overhead, laying its eggs in the spot where they had met.
As they burst out of the woods, Johansen put on a spurt, caught up with the scientist and knocked him sprawling not six feet from the white line.
“Wh … wh—”
“Don’t go any farther, you fool! Your own damned force field—it’ll kill you!”
“Force field? But—I came through it on the way up—Here. Wait. If I can—” Kidder began hunting furiously about in the grass. In a few seconds he ran up to the line, clutching a large grasshopper in his hand. He tossed it over. It lay still.
“See?” said Johansen. “It—”
“Look! It jumped! Come on! I don’t know what went wrong, unless the Neoterics shut it off. They generated that field—I didn’t.”
“Neo—huh?”
“Never mind,” snapped the biochemist, and ran.
They pounded gasping up the steps and into the Neoterics’ control room. Kidder clapped his eyes to a telescope and shrieked in glee. “They’ve done it! We’ve done it!”
“Who’s—”
“My little people! The Neoterics! They’ve made the impenetrable shield! Don’t you see—it cut through the lines of force that start up that field out there! Their generator is still throwing it up, but the vibrations can’t get out! They’re safe! They’re safe!” And the overwrought hermit began to cry. Johansen looked at him pityingly and shook his head.
“Sure—your little men are all right. But we aren’t,” he added, as the floor shook to the detonation of a bomb.
Johansen closed his eyes, got a grip on himself and let his curiosity overcome his fear. He stepped to the binocular telescope, gazed down it. There was nothing there but a curved sheet of gray material. He had never seen a gray quite like that. It was absolutely neutral. It didn’t seem soft and it didn’t seem hard, and to look at it made his brain reel. He looked up.
Kidder was pounding the keys of a teletype, watching the blank yellow tape anxiously.
“I’m not getting through to them,” he whimpered. “I don’t know what’s the mat—Oh, of course!”
&n
bsp; “What?”
“The shield is absolutely impenetrable! The teletype impulses can’t get through or I could get them to extend the screen over the building—over the whole island! There’s nothing those people can’t do!”
“He’s crazy,” Johansen muttered. “Poor little—”
The teletype began clicking sharply. Kidder dove at it, practically embraced it. He read off the tape as it came out. Johansen saw the characters, but they meant nothing to him.
“Almighty,” Kidder read falteringly, “pray have mercy on us and be forbearing until we have said our say. Without orders we have lowered the screen you ordered us to rise. We are lost, O great one. Our screen is truly impenetrable, and so cut off your words on the word machine. We have never, in the memory of any Neoteric, been without your word before. Forgive us our action. We will eagerly await your answer.”
Kidder’s fingers danced over the keys. “You can look now,” he gasped. “Go on—the telescope!”
Johansen, trying to ignore the whine of sure death from above, looked.
He saw what looked like land—fantastic fields under cultivation, a settlement of some sort, factories, and—beings. Everything moved with incredible rapidity. He couldn’t see one of the inhabitants except as darting pinky-white streaks. Fascinated, he stared for a long minute. A sound behind him made him whirl. It was Kidder, rubbing his hands together briskly. There was a broad smile on his face.
“They did it,” he said happily. “You see?”
Johansen didn’t see until he began to realize that there was a dead silence outside. He ran to a window. It was night outside—the blackest night—when it should have been dusk. “What happened?”
“The Neoterics,” said Kidder, and laughed like a child. “My friends downstairs there. They threw up the impenetrable shield over the whole island. We can’t be touched now!”
And at Johansen’s amazed questions, he launched into a description of the race of beings below them.
Outside the shell, things happened. Nine airplanes suddenly went dead-stick. Nine pilots glided downward, powerless, and some fell into the sea, and some struck the miraculous gray shell that loomed in place of an island, slid off, and sank.
And ashore, a man named Wright sat in a car, half dead with fear, while government men surrounded him, approached cautiously, daring instant death from a now-dead source.
In a room deep in the White House, a high-ranking army officer shrieked, “I can’t stand it any more! I can’t!” and leaped up, snatched a red cube off the President’s desk, ground it to ineffectual litter under his shining boots.
And in a few days they took a broken old man away from the bank and put him in an asylum, where he died within a week.
The shield, you see, was truly impenetrable. The power plant was untouched and sent out its beams; but the beams could not get out, and anything powered from the plant went dead. The story never became public, although for some years there was heightened naval activity off the New England coast. The navy, so the story went, had a new target range out there—a great hemi-ovoid of gray material. They bombed it and shelled it and rayed it and blasted all around it, but never even dented its smooth surface.
Kidder and Johansen let it stay there. They were happy enough with their researches and their Neoterics. They did not hear or feel the shelling, for the shield was truly impenetrable. They synthesized their food and their light and air from the materials at hand, and they simply didn’t care. They were the only survivors of the bombing, with the exception of three poor maimed devils who died soon afterwards.
All this happened many years ago, and Kidder and Johansen may be alive today, and they may be dead. But that doesn’t matter too much. The important thing is that the great gray shell will bear watching. Men die, but races live. Some day the Neoterics, after innumerable generations of inconceivable advancement, will take down their shield and come forth. When I think of that I feel frightened.
The Haunt
JUST A GAG, that’s all—a gag. I’m sure it was. It had to be. Heck, we were wise, Tommy and me. Tommy was a radio technician and a good one, and I knew the gadgets to the last hidden loudspeaker and the last Fahnestock clip almost as well as he did. Tommy was a funny egg, anyway. Foggy, you know—the kind of guy that shows up at work with one brown shoe and one black, or dunks his cafeteria check in his coffee and hands a doughnut to the waiter to punch. But—he knew his stuff, he had the apparatus, and the idea tickled him. I can see his point there. Scaring the living daylights out of a cool cookie like Miriam Jensen was a challenge to any man.
Her rock-hard nerves were by no means her only striking characteristic. She was smooth—smooth to look at, smooth to talk to, smooth in the way she thought and acted and moved. Tall, you know—dark brunette, long slim neck, small head and features; quite tall—that kind. A knockout. Brains, too, and she used them. I don’t believe anything but hard exercise could raise her pulse more than one-two beats a minute. I know that the funny idea I had that it would be nice to be married to her didn’t have her at all fluttery. She laughed me off. When I asked for her lily-white hand, did she say she’d be a sister to me? Did she tell me tenderly that we weren’t suited? Did she say so much as “No”? Uh-uh. She said: “You’re cute, Bill. Didn’t anyone ever tell you how cute you were?” And she giggled. I stood there with my teeth in my mouth and my bare face hanging out, watching her walk away; and then and there I said to myself, “I’m going to shake her off her high horse, by all that’s unholy, if I have to kill her to do it.”
I came home—lived in an apartment hotel then—and met Tommy in the hall. I dragged him into my place, stuck a drink in his hand, and figuratively wept on his shoulder about it for the best part of an hour, while he sat there doddering his untidy hair up and down and watching the bubbles collect on the bottom of an ice cube.
“W-what do y-you want to do about it?” he asked.
“I told you—slap her down. If I could think of a way to slap her down so that it would do me some good, I’d do it, too. But you can’t walk up to a woman, take a poke at her, and expect her to marry you for it.”
“You can with s-some women,” Tommy observed with the profundity of a confirmed celibate.
“Not with this one,” I snorted. “No, I’ve got to scare the bustle cover off her, and then rescue her, maybe. Or show her that I’m not scared by the same thing. Or both. Got any ideas?”
“I th-think you’re a ph-phony, Bill.”
“I didn’t mean your ideas about me. Come on—you’re supposed to run to brains. Forget the personalities and let’s have a brain wave or two.”
Tommy stared at the ceiling and gravely ground out his cigarette two inches away from an ash tray. “What’s she sc-sc-frightened of, do you think?”
I walked up and down for a couple of minutes, trying to frown out an answer to that one. “Nothing, as far as I’ve ever heard,” I said. “Miriam will dive off a sixty-foot platform, or break a bronc, or drive a midget racer, and breathe no harder for it than she does after a fast conga. I tell you, that girl’s nerves—if she has any—are made of iridium-plated piano wire.”
“I bet she’s superstitious,” said Tommy.
“What? Ghosts, you mean? Huh. Could be, but what—”
“Easy.” Tommy set his half-empty glass down on the floor from about waist height. “We’ll make her some ghosts—you’ll rescue her from them.”
“Swell. What do we do—draw some magic squares on the hotel carpet around a pot of devil’s brew or something?”
“N-no. We take a couple coils of wire and my little public-speaking s-system, and maybe a few colored lights and stuff. And we haunt a house. Th-then you bring your iridium girl friend in. J-just leave it to me.”
“That sounds like quite something, Tommy,” I said. I was so tickled with the idea that I remembered I hadn’t had a drink and began pouring myself one. “Miriam’s a sucker for a dare. But the Lord help me if she ever found out about this.”
Tommy looked at me vaguely and grinned. “I don’t know nothin’, ch-chief,” he said, and got up to go. “I’ll l-let you know what I dream up on this, B-Bill. Night.” He went through the door.
I thanked him, pulled him out of the bathroom, and saw him to the right door. I never did meet such a foggy fellow.
Inside of a week he had it rigged up and took me out there to look it over. The house was a chalet over a century old. It had hedges in front of it gone hog wild, and the once-green paint was a filthy gray. It had eleven-foot ceilings and Venetian shutters which were in the last stages of decay, full of tartar and cavities, as it were. I don’t know how Tommy had gotten hold of it, but he had, and man, how he’d rigged it up!
“You s-see,” he explained, “the old place has a history, too. There have been four murders here, and th-three suicides. The l-last guy who owned it starved to death in the cellar.” He motioned me after him and started through the weeds toward the back. I looked up at the gloomy old pile and shuddered. “What are we going around the back for?” I asked.
“So the dust in the f-front hallway will look as if no one has been here in the last twenty years,” he said, opening a cellar window. “G-go on—climb in.”
I did, and he tumbled in after me. He threaded his way though large piles of rubbish until he came to a partition. He opened a door in it and we found ourselves inside a neatly arranged control room. Pointing, Tommy said, “See th-that board? There’s a photo cell and relay laid across every door in the house. Any time anyone goes into a room I know which it is by the number underneath the light. There’s my mike over there, and phonograph pick-up. There’s a hot-air system in the house; I put the speaker in the furnace, and when I play my little collection of m-moans and groans and shrieks from those recordings, you c-can hear them all over the house. It sounds swell.”
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