The two moved across to another apparatus, far too much like an electric chair for Conroy’s peace of mind. On its summit reposed another leather helmet, only differing in that it was provided with adjustable clips in order to ensure absolute contact with the person concerned.
“The person sitting here will receive the exact impressions registering in my brain by literal thought transference,” Calthorpe went on steadily. “You will be that man, Conroy. There is nothing whatever to fear. You have a break switch on the arm of the chair here if anything goes wrong you can instantly cut contact. Since nothing will go wrong you will learn what I have to tell, and then record the entire story in the usual way, handing the finished manuscript to the Institute of Psychology, as I mentioned before.”
That, it appeared, comprised the main bulk of apparatus. From that time onward Conroy’s whole attention was taken up in absorbing all the knowledge Calthorpe steadily drilled into him—and during those days of learning he watched, with some sorrow, his mentor’s swift decline toward death.
Specialists were in constant attendance upon him, urged all kinds of methods by which he might prolong his life, but to all their suggestions he turned a deaf ear. He fought rigidly and obstinately against pain for days and nights on end, but there came a period at last, some five weeks after Conroy’s arrival, when he was finally confined to his bed.
It seems needless to dwell upon his passing. It is recorded that he died at 10 p.m. that same night. That was the signal for instant action, the specialists themselves knowing exactly what was intended to be done with Calthorpe’s corpse.
*
IV
*
Aided by his assistants, who possessed the names of Bennett and Mason, Conroy carried the dead body down to the laboratory and, true to instructions, placed it at full length, unclothed, within the death tube. The cosmic lamps were switched on and bathed the still, emaciated figure in violet radiance, so dazzling to the eye that the three found it necessary after a while to don tinted goggles.
Unwearied, carried away with enthusiasm for the experiment, the men got to work on the heating and air apparatus—then, switching the helmets into commission, Conroy took up his position rather gingerly in the transference chair, and slowly eased the helmet into position on his head.
According to his diary he had never felt very reassured by the sinister, all-embracing grip of that helmet; he likened it to the application of artificial dentures for the first time. Every part of his head was suddenly in a firm but immovable grip—but as for sensation there was none at all, to commence with.
Conroy sat quite still, hands resting on the chair arms, his gaze alternating between his anxious-faced assistants and the silent, nude body of the dead doctor. Still nothing happened. Then, just as he was about to declare the whole thing a failure, there came upon his mentality a rushing wave of telepathic power—so powerful, so inhuman, that he nearly fell out of the chair. His limbs twitched; his head reeled. In an instant of time, it seemed, he ceased utterly to become aware of his own personality.
It was equivalent to an exceptionally powerful anesthetic. The brightly-lighted laboratory blurred and vanished from comprehension before he could even speak or break the contact. He lost all sense of everything. He became abruptly none other than Calthorpe himself, so utterly swayed was he by the amplified power of the dead man’s mind. Self reeled away into an unknown gulf.
That being so, Conroy beheld things entirely through the mind of Calthorpe. He lived the same events; his brain reflected every impression of the transmitting one.
At first there was a vision that he took to be space itself. A vast and all-surrounding blackness dotted with the glowing of innumerable coldly winking stars. He saw Earth and Sun rushing away into immeasurable distance. Stars and nebula passed by him with utter soundlessness. At times it appeared that he even passed through the glowing core of the hottest suns and stars, and yet felt nothing —
Then, from amidst this onrush through space there grew upon his auditory senses a clicking and tapping, which he began to recognize as the movements of individuals gently lowering instruments into basins of sterilizing fluid.
Abruptly, startlingly so, everything was vividly clear. The vision of infinity passed away and he gazed, for a space uncertainly, upon a square, highly intelligent face, lent added distinction by reason of the massive bald dome surmounting it. The shoulders of the man, too, appeared more than usually large, covered in a spotless white surgeon’s smock.
“You may rise,” he announced in a deep, grave voice. Somehow his mouth did not seem to form English words, but just the same the dual minds of Calthorpe and Conroy understood him.
Slowly Calthorpe got up from the long operating table upon which he had been lying, trying to shake the obfuscation from his mind.
“Why are you so thoughtful, my young friend?” the surgeon asked presently, his eyes upon him.
“I—I died,” Calthorpe said uncertainly, passing a hand over his forehead. “At—at least, I think I did!”
“Nonsense!” The surgeon’s teeth gleamed in a smile. “Just fancy. Many of us sometimes get that impression whilst undergoing the cell operation. It is purely a vague hangover of the operation itself. You didn’t die—far from it. You are still the young man Vanrod, who has attained his majority and therefore must give his customary contribution to the science of our world.”
Little by little it began to seep into Conroy’s intellect that he was Vanrod, a young man who, akin to his fellows, was possessed of a tremendous and far-reaching intelligence, able to understand the profoundest riddles of space and time, gifted with almost eternal life. He had a vague remembrance now of having come to this super-surgery earlier in the day to undergo the operation common to all men and women attaining their majority—the operation of sacrificing one cell of his brain in the cause of his planet’s science.
He raised an arm to his head again, and then once more sought the eyes of the master surgeon.
“I repeat, sir; I died!” he declared in a low voice.
At that the older man’s expression changed slightly. Sudden concern came into his eyes.
“Once before when that happened our experiment was ruined,” he muttered. “There have, too, been isolated instances of what we might call recession. Tell me, what did you see, Vanrod?”
“I was living on a planet called Earth. I lived there for forty-eight years and became an eminent psychologist. Then I was stricken with a deadly disease and decided I would see—see what lay beyond Earthly death.”
“What!” The stare in the surgeon’s eyes was terrifying. “You what?” he thundered, shaking the young man by the shoulders.
“I invented apparatus by which I could probe beyond Earthly death. I kept my body free from mortification. Oh, I don’t begin to understand all this.” Vanrod sank down weakly on the chair at the foot of the operating table, still gazing up into the surgeon’s now grim, set face.
“Vanrod,” he said slowly, “do you realize what you have done?”
“How can I? I don’t even know the nature of your experiments. What is this cell operation for?”
The surgeon smiled bitterly. “It hardly matters now; you have ruined it. Just as it was ruined once before. Still, perhaps I had better enlighten you. For many years it has been our custom to isolate one brain cell from every healthy man and woman. This is done by a process of advanced electric surgery, so small are the cells concerned. They are far beyond all visual range. However, it is our belief that we are made up of living, thinking creatures, infinitely below us in the scale of intellect, and for that reason we have tried to spawn a race of beings from the cells of ourselves. You understand? A living cell isolated will pursue its own way, inheriting a few of our own original thoughts and characteristics.”
“Go on —”
“That world of Earth, as you call it, was but the veriest electronic fragment existing somewhere within the electrically-charged globe where we have placed our
cell specimens. Presumably you saw a universe from this Earth world—all you could have really seen was the boundaries of our surgical globe.”
“The Earthly universe is circular,” Vanrod nodded. “It is filled with galaxies and stars —”
“You may take it for granted that the galaxies and stars were purely the electric currents suffusing the globe,” the surgeon grunted. “You say you were a human being, a doctor of psychology. How much did you know?”
“I realize now that I knew very little. But then, all Earthlings are alike. They have no idea of the real basis of life, the real nature of their minds. They are so unlike us.”
“Naturally. That body you had was one cell from your brain, just as the other humans you encountered were the cells from the brains of our millions of fellowmen and women. Don’t you perceive, Vanrod, that Earth beings, as you call them, are but the basic cells of infinitely more complex organisms—ourselves? Just as human beings are probably composed of infinitely smaller organisms existing only to themselves?”
“That is correct, they are,” Vanrod breathed. “But—but what have I done that is so wrong?”
“I will tell you. Normally, when a cell has done its work it dies, passes on to fresh formation. That is the ordinary course of death. But you rendered that cell unkillable, unchangeable, and yet withdrew from it its guiding mind. In short, you upset the finely balanced atomic aggregation we set up.”
“I still don’t understand what you mean.”
“The basis of that Earthly life—or rather the life which we spawned from here—is naturally figured out exactly in terms of energy, balance, and so forth. We have reckoned exactly what will happen when one cell dies and a change of form takes place. But you have defeated that perfect balance by leaving a live cell—live in so far that it is not changing!
“Mortification, you perceive, is the correct chemical change for altering the dead body, or cell, into another form. You have changed the entire life stream of the cells called humans, and that very fact will mean a new order of energies, utterly unpredictable, which will wipe out every trace of cellular life and transform it into something else—not necessarily life, but probably a new, inert atomic state.”
“But —” Vanrod began in protest.
“It happened once before,” the surgeon went on broodingly. “A type of cell we bred happened on a similar experiment to yours, but more crude, and it resulted in complete annihilation of all the cells. Fortunately we were successful in striking again the correct atomic coincidence, an almost unheard of scientific feat. It is extremely doubtful if we can do it again in this instance. It means, too, not only the end of life on that world of Earth, but throughout the bowl—the universe.”
“Those occurrences you speak of would match up with the vanished races of the past,” Vanrod murmured, “Egyptians—Atlanteans, maybe. Vanishing crews at sea, missing people—perhaps they all link up to it. But tell me, how was it that I saw all this? How comes it that I lived for apparently forty-eight years and have returned with the full memory of it?”
“The time state can naturally be relegated to mathematical contraction; as for the memory, it is because you linked yourself to the cell even when it was dead, and carried the memory with you, otherwise you would have awakened here in the ordinary way and remembered nothing. Your cell, or body, would have lived normally as the millions of others have done, pursuing what they fondly imagine is a form of progress, but what is really an offshoot of knowledge from our own immensely superior brains, just as bacteria exist within human beings.
“Only at times, through their subconscious regions, do these human cells glimpse the underlying truths of their birth—but never has one behaved so drastically as you. I know not what to do, Vanrod. I know not what to do!”
Vanrod seemed unperturbed; the nature of the experiment had gripped his scientific imagination. “In ordinary death, then,” he went on, “the minds of humans do not return here?”
“I have already said that the minds of the dead cells pass into the new form of cellular life that occurs through chemical change, dividing itself into the requisite number of parts, and multiplying from then on. A dead body changes into millions of minute organisms. Each one of those possesses, in exact degree, a fragment of the mind, of the body from which they came, just as humans are fragments of the minds of us.
“I can only repeat that, outside those other isolated instances, you are the only one to return and tell us what you have seen, and reveal, too, the grim nature of your dabblings. Destroy one iota of the perfect energy balance of a living unit, Vanrod, and the whole thing will undergo a vast and a tremendous change. That is inevitable.”
“Then —” Vanrod commenced helplessly.
“There is nothing you can do,” the surgeon interrupted coldly, glancing toward the immense globe which held, in invisibility, the entire Earthly universe. “Our experiment, for the second time in history, has failed. We shall never know to what extent spawned cells of our brains might have developed. Our hopes of building the homunculus of a new race are shattered. You have tried to explore beyond the mysteries of Earthly death, and I shudder to think of the repercussions upon your luckless fellows left behind.”
*
V
*
Something was stinging the throat of Peter Conroy; strange, vigorous movements were taking place about his wrists. He opened his eyes tardily, expecting to again behold the face of the master surgeon; but instead he met the familiar details of Calthorpe’s own laboratory, whilst bending over him were his two assistants.
“Better, sir?” inquired Mason anxiously, helping him to his feet. “You fell out of the chair, Mr. Conroy. I think the slipping of poor Dr. Calthorpe’s helmet broke the contact, or something. Incidentally, something’s happening to him,” he added in concern. “He’s—he’s glowing!”
Conroy looked blankly across at the recumbent form in the glass tube, then started violently. The dead body of Calthorpe had changed incredibly. It was no longer a dead-white, emaciated corpse, but a thing of glowing, astounding wonder, hurling forth waves of coppery green light to the four corners of the laboratory. In an instant there returned to his mind the amazing memory of the thing he had experienced, the actual adventure of Calthorpe himself beyond death.
“What happened, sir?” Bennett asked curiously. “Anything unusual?”
“I’ll say so,” Conroy retorted. “Hand me that diary. I’ve got to record it all whilst it’s fresh in my mind. You can read as I write. And turn off those cosmic lamps; we may yet save that body. I doubt it, though,” he added dubiously, and tugging his pen from his pocket began to scribble hastily.
Mason and Bennett, the task of the ray lamps’ extinguishing duly done, watched over Conroy’s shoulder, trying vainly to figure the matter out. Conroy inwardly admitted he only half understood the thing himself; but he did realize, amidst the blur of less defined things, that humans were but the basic organisms from which a vaster, more complex organism was formed, and also that humans were but spawned cells in the experiments of the unknown scientists beyond the known universe.
Yes, that was understandable; it tallied with scientific facts so far as he knew them; it explained away the profound riddle of life’s commencement. But the realization that Calthorpe’s dabblings were to change the whole energy balance of life was a worry of considerable dimensions. For some reason an old rhyme quoted by Eddington began to run steadily through Conroy’s mind as he desperately scribbled—an absurd bit of doggerel, and yet it conveyed a sense of meaning to him:
There was once a brainy baboon
Who always breathed down a bassoon,
For he said, “It appears
That in billions of years
I shall certainly hit on a tune.”
Dimly, Conroy remembered that that doggerel was meant to imply that a law of coincidence governs life. A certain number of atoms had originally congregated to form life as humans know it. Time and time again—multi
millions to one—the chance has missed; but finally, in the fashion of the baboon, it had come off and life had just happened. That was the scientific account of origin, yes; but now that coincidence had been disturbed by Calthorpe’s activities, life would undergo a violent, radical change, with once again a multimillion to one chance of ever reforming the same way. The scientists of the unknown planet had twice hit the right coincidence—hitting it a third time was surely tempting Nature too far.
Conroy ceased to write. His assistants ceased to watch. The three turned to dazedly watch the green radiance that still bathed the slowly shrinking frame of the dead Calthorpe, despite the extinguishing of the cosmic lamps.
An abrupt, alarming realization of deadly danger surged over Conroy. He opened his mouth to shout out orders, but the words were stricken from his lips. His two assistants were enveloped in a sudden writhing radiance of the green light. Between them and the glowing corpse in the tube there extended now a visible arm of emerald light. The place was a mass of glowing, inexplicable energy.
Conroy screamed hoarsely, took a stumbling step toward their evaporating bodies, then the thing caught him, too. He was conscious only of a tearing pain, a vast, tremendous reshuffling of atomic formations—
*
VI
*
Brady, editor of the Mirror, stared at his ace reporter with easily the most amazed stare of his long, energetic career.
“An entire crowd of fifty thousand people disappeared at a football game?” he repeated blankly. “What in hell are you talking about, Bates? This is a newspaper, not a children’s fairy-story corner.”
Bates was passionately insistent. “I tell you it’s true, chief I was over on that Henderson assignment, flying there, and I saw the whole thing from the air. A sort of green cloud it seemed to be—swallowed up the people and left empty seats! It got the players, too, before they could even move.”
John Russell Fearn Omnibus Page 7