Avon Science Fiction Reader 2

by Unknown Author

  Only no more brands came flying through the air as those tentacles in the clearing sought out the avenger. To each he was forced to give his baptism of fire before they were willing to leave him to his own devices.

  But they served to reduce his ammunition, and to replenish it the man had to leave the fire, dash here and there to gather such sticks as lay close at hand. Twice a tentacle all but tripped him, but he danced safely away each time, and with the new supply of torches renewed the succor of his friend.

  Reluctantly the constricting coils released the captive, who managed to climb to his walking-roots and stagger several steps before another blood-crazed tree-fern plucked him up.

  Shaking a balled-up claw at the trees, the fire-breeder went farther afield to collect more fuel, taking a lighted torch for his own protection.

  Now, all this while old Gorn had thoughtfully been considering the scene. It had come to him that without a replenishment of his campfire the fire-breeder was powerless. Thereupon he transferred his surmise to his people, pointing out that if they but prevented the creature from gathering mote faggots there could be no more fire-blossoms. Acting instantly upon the suggestion, a threatening circle was formed just out of reach of the fire itself.

  But Gorn had not taken to account that inexplicable force driving the man to the aid of his companion. Finding his way barred on all sides he refused to acknowledge defeat. Turning upon himself he tore away part of what to the trees appeared to be his outer bark and threw it into the fire. Appalled, they saw him pluck it out flame-covered, and toss it into the air.

  Taking the form of the fusim, the only flying thing of Venus, the coat slithered toward the captive man. Straightway Huj and Herul, his captors, dropped him just in time as the burn-thing enfolded him, falling flame-side out. That large chunk of burning life was too much for the horrified tree-ferns.

  Had the great Ancadus tree-ferns but guessed the deadliness of those licking flame-tendrils they would have suffered the agonies of hell to stamp them out; but all they did was to gaze jealously, waiting for the fire-blossoms to fade away that they might again seize their prey. Those that had not been beset by the fire as yet were dubious, only half believing that the golden-red flowers were as hurtful as the screams of those who had felt their scorching breath made them out to be. Still, because they half believed, they stood back—waiting.

  Meanwhile their erstwhile victim was having his own troubles. Fire is at best a treacherous friend, and though he had tossed the burning cloak from him, curls of fire had already eased themselves into his hair, his clothing. Slapping them did not avail and he dropped to the ground to roll and twist in an effort to put them out, only to aggravate them in a bed of dry brush that lay in his path. True, as long as the fire wreathed him he was safe from the trees, but at the same time his condition was precarious, too weak as he was to fight the fire properly. Piteously he called to the other to save him.

  But the fire-breeder was in bad straits himself. Threatened on every side by the enemy, unable to gather more fuel, he had already removed his boots, was coaxing them to burn, when suddenly he spied something he had not seen before, an old log lying in the shadow of the space-ship. Using one charred shoe, in which a flame teased, as a shield he forced

  several tentacles to give way until he could grasp the log end. Dragging

  it to the fire, he thrust one end into the fire. But the log refused to burn! Gorn had forgotten that he had begged his people to let the visitors go unmolested. Now, in high glee he cried out: “He is defeated; And I, in my right, demand his blood. He is mine!” And as he spoke his tentacle shot across the clearing—only to dart away again in dismay. Even as he had spoken, the old log began to smoke; a feather of flame ran halfway up its length, died, only to be followed by a second tendril that bit deep into the butt.

  Shouting his joy, the fire-breeder waited long enough for the fire to burn merrily; then like a flaming sword he used it to force the enemy to writhe away. One by one the menacing tentacles slithered to one side, opening up the path that led to the side of the other man-creature who now lay as if dead, soot-blackened.

  Beating out the flames that still wreathed him, the fire-breeder picked his comrade up and flung him over one shoulder. Then, pausing long enough to take a better grip upon the torch, he advanced, jabbing savagely at those tentacles not quick enough to give way.

  Powerless to halt him, the Ancadus groaned in unison as he reached the cylinder and disappeared within with his burden, sealing the opening. But even as they lamented their loss and nursed their wounds, the cylinder gaped again, and the figure of the fire-breeder stood poised before him.

  Exulting, the tree-ferns stared, then in one accord dozens of long arms shot out. This time they would have him! But no, the man was wary enough. Before the opening was resealed for the last time something came arching through the air to land at the roots of old Gorn. It was the flaming torch!

  Again the Ancadus turned to their leader for advice. Should they try their strength upon the cylinder, crush it and pluck the creatures like bav from their hole? For the first time in their existence the old patriarch had no advice to give. He was more concerned with the hungry flames at his feet, one of which had already tested the texture of an old gnarled root that had broken through the forest loam.

  The next instant the cylinder was taking to the air, filling the forest with an ugly roar. Then it was level with the fern-crowns. For a moment it seemed to hang suspended between land and sky. And to the horror of the Ancadus its rear end seemed to ignite—in a great blast of withering fire.

  The fire-breeder had his revenge as the long tongue of flame bit deeply into the heart of the Ancadus grove. With his departure a new sound came into the forest, a deep throaty roar interspersed with strange unnameable creakings and cracklings wherein were intermingled the cries of the dying race, the loudest of which was the shriek of old Gorn.

  Once inoculated with the virus of the fire, the whole world seemed ready to burn as immense flowers reared their angry, licking flames into the tallest perches of the forest, devouring everything in their path.

  Elsel, the young free-moving tree-fern who had taken his hurt to the river, a good quarter of a mile from the clearing, there to lave his tentacle in the flood, saw the flame-flowers advance, apparently pushing the small band of perambulatory ferns that hurried ahead of them, toward the river.

  All the world burns, the young ferns told Elsel; all are gone—Gorn, Naxum, Tunnux, Nushu, Geeb, Masur—all the great ones, all the middle-aged, all the newly rooted—all, all consumed by the ravenous flame-flowers that the intruders had loosed into their paradise. All were gone. All.

  Standing on the river bank they waited, fearful, uncertain. They knew they could launch themselves upon the broad river, float upon its bosom into new lands; or they could cross the river to the salt barrens into which no self-respecting perambulatory tree-fern ever treads.

  But their own hesitancy closed the first path as the florescent flames were seen to gather at the river’s edge, a few hundred feet below, hissing as their fiery tongues tasted that liquid flood, painting the overhead clouds in their lurid light.

  Out in space the fire-breeder saw that same pyrotechnical glow, saw in his mind’s eye that calorific hell that he, a modern Prometheus, had engendered upon the bosom of Venus.

  The Book of Worlds

  by Miles J. Breuer

  This story was written twenty-two years ago, in 1929. That was but a few months before the Crash that ushered in the long unsettled period of depression, social turmoil, misery, and wars … a period which has not ended. The Book of Worlds tells of possible futures, and the future which has actually unrolled since its writing seems to fulfill all too hideously a pattern it predicted. By the time you have finished reading it, glance through your papers and wonder whether the man who was placed in a sanitarium was the crazy one or whether it was not rather those outside the asylum walls that deserved—and deserve—that diagnosis.
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br />   TO psychiatrists, Professor Cosgrave’s case is a striking study in the compensatory psychosis. He perches on the edge of his bed in a private sanitarium for mental diseases, and coos and twitters and waves a wreath of twigs in his lips. Whether he will ever recover his sanity or not is problematical. Whether anyone else will ever be able to understand and use his hyper-stereoscope is also problematical. And whether, if it were figured out, anyone would ever have the courage to use it, in the face of what happened to Professor Cosgrave, is still further remote in the realms of doubt and conjecture.

  I have repeated the story for medical men so many times, that I am beginning to see a sort of logical sequence in things that at first utterly bewildered me. As Professor Cosgrave’s chief assistant, I was undoubtedly closer to him and knew more about his work and about the mechanism of his tragic fate, than anyone else. The physicists who merely went over his apparatus and equations and did not know the man, did not grasp the significance of what happened, as did I, who lived and worked with him every day and many a night.

  Yes, the thing begins to look logical to me now, after it has been on my mind constantly for several months. As no one else has been able to understand exactly what happened, I ought to do my best to render a consecutive account of events.

  Professor Hemingford Cosgrave was the most highly civilized man I have ever known. If mankind is in truth becoming more civilized as time goes on, then it is following in the footsteps of such advanced and refined examples of human progress as was my late superior in the School of Physics. He was a small, delicate-looking man, with classical Greek features; with very little physical strength but with infinite physical endurance. To spend day and night in his laboratory for a week on end seemed to produce no deleterious effects upon him.

  When I extol the rare combination of mathematical genius and expert-mental ability of this man, so well known, I am wasting my breath. But the world does not know so much about his other exquisitely subtle mental sensibilities. He was a poet and an artist; he saw all the beauty in Cosmos with a wondering eye. And he was as gently sympathetic as a woman. The reports of famine victims suffering in China disturbed him at his experiments. His student-assistants would conspire to guard him against the visits of the old Salvation Army Captain, who more than once lured him away from his desk, with the tale of some woman or child in distress. He was the last man in the world to be permitted to witness the horrors, . that he said he saw.

  A little over two years ago, he and I were planning together a demonstration. for his class in Quadrics. We had considered making models of some of the solids, with whose equations the class was working; but the time and labor involved in this was almost out of question under the circumstances. I suggested that the Mathematics Department of the University of Chicago had all of these models already made. We solved the problem by my going to Chicago and photographing these models with a stereoscopic camera. The prints of the strangely shaped solids, viewed in a stereoscope, were quite as satisfactory for class purposes as would have been the models.

  I had brought the pile of cards to Professor Cosgrave for approval. He had run through three or four of them, and seemed quite pleased. Suddenly he laid them down and stared at me.

  “Do you know what just struck me?” he asked in a queer tone.

  I shook my head.

  “You know what I’m working on?’1 he asked.

  “You mean your Expansion Equations—?”

  “Popularly called the Fourth Dimension.” He smiled at the thought. “And you know what I’ve begun to suspect about it, especially since the experiment with the gyroscope?”

  “Yes, I do—though it’s hard for me to grasp that there really might be another dimension. I’ve always considered the fourth dimension a mathematical abstraction.”

  “No abstraction.”

  He said it as one might say, two and two make four.

  “Really something here. Do you see the connection now?” He shook the stereoscope at me.

  I shook my head, I felt helpless, His mind was always far ahead of mine. He explained:

  “This instrument takes a two-dimensional figure on a fiat plane and builds it up so that the brain sees it as a three-dimensional solid in space!”

  He waited for me to grasp his idea, which I still failed to do. He smiled indulgently. -

  “If the fourth dimension is really a dimension and not a mathematical abstraction—” he smiled confidentially as he emphasized the if; “can we not build a hyper-stereoscopic instrument which will build up a threedimensional model of a fourth-dimensional object into an image perceptible to the brain in its true four-dimensional form?”

  I continued to stare blankly from him to the stereoscope and back again.

  “As a matter of fact,” he continued; “our three-dimensional world is merely a cross-section cut by what we know as space out of the Cosmos that exists in four or more dimensions. Our three-dimensional world bears the same relation to the true status of affairs as do these flat photographs to the models that you photographed. Surely you can grasp that from our equations?”

  “Yes,” I assented eagerly, glad to find familiar ground to rest my feet on; “just as the present time is a cross-section of infinity cut by a moving space-sector whose motion is irreversible; it moves in one direction only.”

  He beamed at me for that. Then in silence he finished looking over the geometrical stereograms and handed them to me.

  He spent six months working out his idea on paper. He did not discuss his plans with me very much; but he did give me sections of the problems to work out For instance, he asked me to work out the equations for the projection of a tesseracoid:

  C1w4+ c2x4 + c3y4 + C4z4 = k4

  from eight different directions, each opposing pair of right angles to the other three pairs. Most of the problems he gave me were projection problems; but beyond that I could not grasp the drift of his work.

  Then he spent a year in experimental work. As I am a mathematician and not a laboratory man, I had less to do with the actual construction of the hyperstereoscope. But even there I helped. I worked at the refractive indices of crystals that he made in an electric furnace; and I worked out the mathematics of a very ingenious instrument for integrating light rays from two directions into one composite beam.

  Apparently the thing was a complex job. Professor Cosgrave spent three weeks in the research laboratory of the Mechanical Engineering Department. He went to Chicago and remained there for a couple of months, leaving as his address the Psychology Department of the Chicago University. One day he announced to me calmly that the hyperstereoscope was finished.

  “May I look?” I asked eagerly, expecting to be able to see out into the fourth dimension.

  The instrument was pointed out of the window at the campus. It had three telescopes arranged in the form of a triangular parallelepiped. One end of the room was full of apparatus, electron tubes and photo-electric cells, a scanning disk, and tangles of wire strung between boxes and cabinets faced with dials and meters. At a small table there were two oculars to look into. I put my eyes to them.

  It made me dizzy. It looked like rolling vapors—dense, heavy vapors, and boiling clouds, rolling and turmoiling swiftly and dizzily. It looked vibrant with heat. Through a rift here and there I got glimpses of a glowing liquid, like the white-hot metal in a foundry coming from the ladle. There were boiling, bubbling lakes of it. I shrank away from the instrument.

  “What is it?” I gasped.

  “I’m not sure,” returned Professor Cosgrave. “Prolonged observation and correlation of observed data will be necessary before we can explain what we see.”

  He was whirling dials rapidly. I looked again. There were vapors, but they were thin spirals and wisps. Mostly there were bare, smoking rocks. There was a bleak, insufferably dreary stretch of them, extending on into the infinite distance. It looked hot. It was infinitely depressing. I didn’t like it.

  I stood for a long time behind Professor Cos
grave, as he sat at one little table with his eyes to the oculars of the instrument and twiddled the dials. I was about to turn around and slip out of the room and leave him to play with it alone, when he sat up suddenly. A new idea had struck him.

  “Beyond a doubt these places that we see are regions of some sort, not in our ‘space’ at all, or else infinitely far away. But, in the direction of the fourth dimension they are quite near us. Just as if you are in a window on the top story of a skyscraper office building and a dozen feet away is a man in the window of an adjacent building. To your three-dimensional vision he is quite near you. But to your body, whose motion is confined to two dimensional surfaces, your friend is a long distance away. To your touch, instead of a dozen feet away he is a quarter of a mile away; that is how far you have to travel before you can reach him. ’

  “Or, if I make a mark at each end of this sheet of paper and then bend the sheet double, from a three-dimensional standpoint the marks are a millimeter apart. But from a two-dimensional standpoint they are thirty centimeters apart.

  “This stereoscope sees across, in the same way, to some other universe.”

  He shook his head.

  “My analogies are poor. It is a difficult idea to express. But look!”

  I went to the eye-pieces. There was water. It was endless. Just water. It swelled and rolled and pulsated. A swing of the telescopes over at the window brought into view some black rocks. Over the rocks was slime. A slime that flowed and rounded itself into worm-like forms. It was hideous. I left the gloating Professor Cosgrave and hurried away.

  After that, as my recollection serves, things moved rapidly. I saw him 3 couple of days later at his stereoscope.

  “I have it!” he said elatedly when he saw me, I hastened to look into the instrument.

  “No!” he exclaimed, pulling me away. “I mean an analogy. Like points on the leaves of a book. You see?”

  I nodded. He continued.