Dr. Harry Brett struck a third match. Its light showed color once more. The gray figure was a girl, Laura Hunt, with whom he had been shaking hands the instant before waking in this weird world.
“G-good heavens!” said the girl, staring in terror. “Where am I? What has happened?”
“I’m—not quite sure,” said Brett unsteadily. “I’m trying not to believe my eyes. Haven’t you any idea?”
He was not truthful. He did know where he was. When he was, at any rate. But it would be most merciful to keep her from knowing as long as possible.
“N-no.” The girl’s voice quavered. “There can’t be any place like this!” She hesitated. “Are we—dead?”
“Not yet,” said Brett in an attempt at humor.
He crawled, internally, because of what he knew. He had put a live mouse, once, into the field of his mass-nullifier. He’d turned the machine on and off again, instantly.
Where the mouse had been in its cage there was only a little heap of dust, with friable bits of unidentifiable bone and streaks of red rust. That had told him everything—why his first machines destroyed themselves, by rusting until he plated them with chromium, what the removal of mass from an object meant, and the real significance of Einstein’s formula for the mass and the time-rate of an object moving at the speed of light. Nobody had thought of the reverse of that formula, but he’d hit on it by accident when looking for something else. Now—!
“We’re not dead,” he said, steadying his voice deliberately. “I feel quite natural. I think we’d better try to find out what has really happened. We were just being introduced when this thing started,” he added. He spoke urgently because he saw a terror, close to hysteria, in the girl’s eyes. “Your name is Hunt, isn’t it?”
“Yes. Laura Hunt. And you are Harry Brett, some sort of scientist. Can you do anything?”
“I’m going to try,” said Brett. But he was utterly without hope. “First I’ll take a look around. Do you want to wait here?”
“I—” The girl looked around at the dead-gray, misty surroundings. “No! I’ll come with you!”
The match burned out between his fingers again. She cried out.
“I look like a ghost,” said Brett. “I know! So do you. Look at your hands.” She gasped at the gray, stony color of her skin. He struck yet another match. Her hands looked natural again.
“It’s the light,” said Brett. “There’s no color in this world.”
“There’s a colored light there,” the girl said faintly.
From inside a gray doorway, across a gray room, down a gray hallway, came a subdued yellow glow. Brett’s heart pounded. Hope would die hard, he knew. But there was only one man in the world who knew anything at all about Harry Brett’s mass-nullifier. That was Professor Aldous Cable, who had been embittered by the necessity of accepting employment as Brett’s assistant, and who hated him because Brett had achieved where he had not. There was no one else who could have brought this about, or wanted to do so.
“I don’t suppose the light will come to us,” said Brett. “I think we’d better go to it.”
He tucked the girl’s hand under his arm and moved toward the opening through which the light showed.
“I—really think I’ve gone crazy!” she said shakily. “This simply can’t be!”
Harry did not answer. They stepped through a doorway. They were no longer in the open air. But it was exactly as light, inside, as underneath the sky. The walls and ceiling and floor and furniture showed no shadows. The girl’s hand had tightened with alarm. Everything was luminous—even the two of them! She caught her breath.
“Steady!” he said. “I’m just as scared as you are.”
He was in a worse mental state so far as apprehension went. He knew what had happened. Einstein has postulated that there is an inherent relationship of mass and time-rate, so that if a material object—such as a spaceship—went at only slightly less than the speed of light, its mass would be almost infinite and it would move out of normal time. What seemed a second to the space-navigators might seem a century or a millennium to the rest of the universe. But there was no question now of an increase of mass to near-infinity. The question was of its decrease to near-zero!
A flashlight lay on the floor beside the hallway. It was turned on, and its beam unwinkingly illuminated a room. Where the light struck, the room seemed completely normal. Rugs and furniture. There was a woman at a dressing-table, coloring her lips.
“I beg your pardon,” gasped Laura Hunt. “Will you answer a question?”
The woman did not move. She was unnaturally still. She was motionless as a stone is motionless. Brett moved forward. He touched her shoulder. It was as immovable as a mountain. Sweat started out on his forehead.
“What is it?” asked the girl, shivering.
“It’s what I was afraid of,” said Brett grimly. “But this light shouldn’t work, and it does. Let’s see!”
He touched the flashlight. It yielded He picked it up. It was a perfectly ordinary flashlight with dry batteries inside.
“Maybe this is intended to make me hope,” he said with a flash of bitterness. “The spirit may be of mockery but I am to accept facts. Come along!”
He swung the flashing beam about. Wherever it touched, the ghostly, glowing walls and floors looked, normal. The rugs? Brett touched one with his foot. Each separate thread was iron-hard and iron-firm. He could not bend the most minute fibre. He grimaced.
“We’re intended to hope—for a while,” he said grimly. “Let’s see what the rest of it is.”
The girl clung to him as he moved down the hallway.
“You know what’s happened?” she asked him.
“Now, yes,” said Brett. “I was messing around with a theory that mass mightn’t be inherent in matter. Einstein says that an object could have infinite mass. The quantity of substance wouldn’t change, but its mass could—and its time-rate. I wondered what would happen if you reduced an object’s mass to near-zero. And I’ve found out.”
They came to the open door of the apartment. The flashlight showed them elevator-doors. Harry Brett pushed his thumb against a call-button. It was immovable. He turned off the flashlight.
A flickering yellow glow showed in the stair-well. On the next landing down, a highly commonplace candle burned smokily,” stuck in the neck of a bottle.
“I see!” said Brett bitterly. “Cable’s arranged this. It couldn’t be anyone else. He was my assistant and helped in my experiments. I made a machine which would take the mass out of anything within its field. It was only part electrical, but it worked. I didn’t like what I found out, though. Einstein says an object can have infinite mass and a time-rate which is nil.”
Cautiously they went down the steps. He leaned over the stair-rail and saw other yellow glows below them. Markers, evidently, to lead them to some intended destination.
“I found a way to make a mass almost nil,” he told the girl. “Not quite nil, but almost. I found it implied a time-rate which was almost infinite! The obverse of Einstein’s formula. If one made a spaceship—or a man—have almost zero mass, instead of one second to him or them meaning centuries or aeons of normal time—why—an aeon of his time would pass in a second of normal experience. That’s what’s happened to us. We’re living perhaps a hundred million times as fast as normal. We could live here all our lives, and die of old age—and a clock in normal time wouldn’t have clicked off a single second.”
The girl stumbled. They passed another candle in a bottle. Harry held the flashlight before them and the separate steps were distinct.
“But how could it happen?”
“My assistant!” said Brett, bitterly. “Cable! He was jealous of the fact that I was getting results and he’s never been able to do any really original research. When I found out what my machine would do, I stopped. It had possibilities that were too horrible to think of. I didn’t think he knew them. But it’s evident that he duplicated my machine on his own, and t
hat we’re here because he used his machine on us. That’s the only possibility I can think of, anyhow. Still, there are some oddities—”
He stopped. The girl shivered. They had reached the bottom of the stair-well. There was a respectable blaze of yellow light ahead. It came out of an open door and shone into an elaborate foyer and upon an absolutely rigid, absolutely motionless elevator-operator with a braided uniform. Brett clamped his jaw tightly and, led the way toward the lighted door. It was most likely that he had been lured here to read a mocking message bidding him remember the heap of dust which had been the mouse of his experiment and promising to watch for the imponderable remnant which, in normal time, would, soon be Dr. Harry Brett.
He entered the door, prepared for any mockery. But he faced a desk, lighted by hundreds of candles in receptacles. He saw Professor Aldous Cable sitting at that des), lean and dark and shaking with hatred, with heaps of hopeless calculations and diagrams before him.
“Hello,” said Brett ironically; “Why did you bring us here?”
Cable ground his teeth. His features expressed at once the bitterest possible hatred and a haunting horror. But rage overlaid all of it.
“You know where you are!” he said thickly.
“I can make a pretty good guess,” admitted Brett coolly.
“Then, find a way to get back,” said Cable savagely. “I can’t!”
CHAPTER II
Fool for a Master
Brett found there was almost a community of people in the duplex apartment which had an entrance behind the desk. Cable had been working desperately on his problem when Brett and Laura Hunt arrived. Now he led them to an inner door, shaking with a rage which choked him. He flung open the door.
“Here he is,” he cried savagely. “Tell him what to do.”
He pushed Laura through. Brett followed quickly. The door closed. Professor Aldous Cable remained outside, his hands clenched.
The room was huge, and there were almost a dozen people in it. Four or five were men, mostly younger than Cable, and the balance were women of various types but tending toward the lean and intellectual. There was one girl of a lush, red-headed beauty, though. All of the people had one thing in common. Each had eyes which were filled with horror close to madness.
A record on a phonograph came to an end and stopped.
“Turn it on again, for heaven’s sake!” someone said desperately.
A man put the needle back in its groove. It began to grind out a senseless melody which had only one virtue, that of noise. At once Brett understood. By the looks of things these people had been here for a long while, corresponding to weeks. And this world was silent, and still, and changeless. Time had stopped. Motion had stopped. Human figures in the streets glowed faintly in the gray twilight. And these people were nearly mad with horror.
A young man with a twitching face came over to Brett. “You’re B-Brett?” he stuttered. “Professor C-Cable said you’d get us out of this! Are you Dr. Brett?”
Brett nodded. The young man gulped.
“Then help us!” he cried shrilly. “We’re all going crazy! Professor Cable is crazy already! We’ll all go m-mad.”
Tension broke. A girl cried out. The cry went around the room. There was a rush, and Brett found them crowding about him, pawing at him, babbling at him. They were nerve-racked and trembling. They were starey-eyed and shivering. All of them appeared to be hysterical. Brett pushed Laura Hunt behind him.
“Stop it,” he said sternly. “Hold everything—hold onto yourselves!”
But it had no effect. The babble grew to a clamor, a wild uproar. They pulled at Brett. They shrieked at him. They gibbered at him. He was the center of what seemed to be a mass nervous breakdown. It was deafening, inarticulate, terrible. Brett was shocked to see otherwise unharmed human beings so completely shattered by long-continued horror.
The door behind Brett opened again. The tall, lean, raging figure of Cable stalked in. For the moment he was not seen, but he quickly compelled attention.
“Quiet!” he roared.
Instantly the shrieking ceased. Save for the wheezy, senseless noise of the mechanical phonograph at the other end of the room, there was dead silence. These persons who had seemed so frenzied, cringed before Cable. They were like people stricken dumb. Fearfully they moved back. But they looked even more fearfully from Brett to Cable and back again.
“Answer his questions,” stormed Cable. “Tell him what he wants to know. Do whatever he tells you. But be quiet!”
He did not look at Brett. He went out of the door again and closed it behind him. There was a terrified hush. Brett felt a trembling hand upon his arm. It was Laura, wide-eyed and white. He covered her hand with his own.
“Steady!” he said in a low tone. “I didn’t look for anything like this, but it’s a darned sight better than I did look for.”
He understood, now, why he had been allowed to waken on that terrace out-of-doors, in a still unidentified apartment. Cable was frantic with rage because he had been forced to call upon Brett. He had wakened Brett high overhead, and led him down the long stair-well by lighted candles to mark the way, because it was intolerable to him to face Brett. By having Brett waken and find out for himself that he was in a world where time had stopped, he could avoid having to explain the facts that Brett was forced to discover.
Now by thrusting him among these poor devils for further explanation he could avoid otherwise necessary face-to-face talk with the man he envied, hated, and had robbed. He could have made the explanations ten times more clearly himself, but he hated Brett so vindictively that he must have someone else beg the aid that he needed, himself. So Brett must learn all necessary facts indirectly.
He faced the nerve-racked people sternly.
“Sit down!” he commanded. “I just got here. I know what all this is about, but I’ve got to find out what’s happened in order to fix it. Sit down and answer some questions.”
He could guess something from the types of the people before him. They were the sort of persons who would flatter Professor Cable’s vanity—and he had an enormous and insatiable vanity. Cable had been a brilliant student, and great things were prophesied for him. He’d been the youngest full professor of physics in America, for a time. But his reputation had never increased. He was a poor instructor because of his arrogant, contemptuous manner toward his pupils. Professor Cable had contributed nothing in the way of original research except pretentious papers announcing enormously important discoveries which never quite checked up. In the end he’d been asked to resign his professorship because of an attempt to win recognition for an alleged discovery by blatant trickery. The fact was simply that he was not qualified for original and independent work, and his vanity would not allow him to admit it. But he was a capable man under direction, and as Brett’s assistant he had been useful enough. Now, though, Cable had certainly managed to mess things up!
“I suspect that most of you knew Professor Cable before this,” said Brett. “A sort of coterie, eh?”
It was true. One trembling voice offered a fact, and another offered another. In minutes Brett had their part in the picture.
Cable had surrounded himself of evenings with an admiring group because of his pretensions to enormous authority and prestige as a scientist. He fed upon their admiration—and was galled by his subordinate position to Brett. Brett’s success with the mass-nullifier research had filled him with raging envy because he could not claim it for himself. And when Brett ruefully decided that his results were too dangerous to be published, Cable had no reason to be discreet.
He boasted to his admirers of the mass-nullifier, as if it were his own discovery. He painted a picture of a journey in a time-field, when as the field operated the world seemed to stop dead in all its affairs, the light of the sun slowed so that its yellow glare faded to deep red and went out, and a man would see briefly by slowed-up X-rays, and then later by the ghostly light of cosmic rays themselves. As the time-rate went up and up,
Cable had said, there would come at last a ghostly gray light which would be that of the infinitely short vibrations which are gravitation. And he pictured such a journey as possible in the machine he told them he had devised.
One of his admirers quoted Wells’ “The Time Accelerator,” and spoke of the opportunity such a device would offer to criminals. Cable explained, tolerantly, saying a person in such a monstrously accelerated time-rate could easily see objects which moved too fast for ordinary perception. A bullet in mid-flight would seem stationary, to him. Even a lightning-flash would seem the most deliberate of motions. But his own efforts would be too brief to affect any object still remaining in a normal time-rate. Nothing which moved more slowly than miles per second would seem to him to stir. For him to thrust at a thread with all his strength would be an application of force for such an infinitesimal fraction of a second that he could not stir it enough for him to see its motion. He could not raise it to a speed of miles per second—stated in normal time—with a thrust which—again in normal time—might last only for millionths or billionths of a second. And of course he couldn’t steal anything or kill anyone.
“Unless,” Cable had explained, “he took another machine with him and brought the thing he wanted to steal or the man he wanted to kill into his own fast time-rate.”
Then he started. The phrase was a flash of pure perception. It was probably the most brilliant thought Cable ever had in his life. He’d already made a mass-nullifier of his own. It worked, as he knew, because it converted the energy of mass into the energy of time-speed. He had not tried it, but he was confident that it would work better than any Dr. Harry Brett had made because of an “improvement” he had made in the design. Now, having caught at this new inspiration, he embodied a second mass-nullifier. He got into the field of the first machine, carrying the second. He turned on the first. The light of the sun turned red and died. Ultimately he saw a dull-gray misty twilight which was the earth’s gravitational field changed into light by the incredible time-rate to which he had attained.
The Second Murray Leinster Megapack Page 24