John Russell Fearn Omnibus

by John Russell Fearn

  “Is it dangerous?” asked the master-navigator.

  “I think not. That world is an equation — it has nothing more it needs. Basically we are all figures, but we are outside that Thing now because it has stabilized itself.”

  There was a long silence in the ship, then the master-navigator gravely asked another question.

  “Do we continue to the third world?”

  Dath Rasor shook his head.

  “No! I am thinking that we may have been mistaken, that on that world there may be scientists far cleverer than we. Perhaps they created this mathematical figment to warn us to keep away. No, set the course at right angles.”

  Dath Rasor fell silent, looking into the scanner on that blue, distant thing. Then he closed the switch that blanked the screen. That unknown quantity was too enigmatic for material eyes even to look upon!

  The Unbroken Chain

  Ugh-Wah, of the Fourth Glacial Age, did not know that the people of the future would call him a Neanderthal man. In fact he knew very little about anything except hunting, eating, sleeping, and keeping warm — until one day he suddenly began to devise more elaborate weapons for the snaring and slaying of the bigger beast which forever threatened safety. This feat gained for Ugh-Wah the reputation of being a wizard, and because of it distrust was bred among the others of his breed — a childish superstition of his powers.

  Particularly when he talked in his boastful, snarling jargon of visions. He said he had seen landscapes that had upright men on them, men who went up and down in strange contrivances, who actually made use of the flaming ball that buried itself every night and was reborn every morning. To Ugh-Wah, though he barely understood what he was talking about, it was all very real — until he began to realize that he had perhaps said too much.

  Distrust was all about him. Even his own mate, Gu Lak, was suspicious of him, alarmed at the strange light in his fierce, almost hidden little eyes.

  Then came a day when Ugh-Wah, foraging, found himself in deadly danger. During his hunt for food he turned and shambled off, to stop abruptly and wheel round at the sound of mighty feet pounding behind him. For one short second he stood in paralyzed horror before an advancing mammoth whose tiny ruby-red eyes were sparkling with fury. Ugh-Wah wheeled and began to run across the ice-caked ground, shouting warnings at the top of his croaking voice. Behind him the mammoth screamed and trumpeted. The others of the tribe swung around at Ugh-Wah’s yells and were instantly on the defensive. Then they became motionless with awe at an amazing sight.

  Ugh-Wah, not ten yards in front of the mammoth, suddenly began to become transparent, even as he ran! The watchers could see the mammoth through his fading body.

  In two seconds Ugh-Wah had disappeared, and at that identical moment a vast, overwhelming explosion cannonaded from the spot where he had been. The tribe fell back in screaming, disorganized terror before a blinding flash of flame and terrific concussion!

  The tribe soon forgot all about Ugh-Wah, all save his mate — and she silently remembered that he had saved the lives of all in the tribe by the explosion. But how? That was where her undeveloped brain stumbled …

  *

  Clifford Delthorpe was the toughest problem the Board of Directors of Delthorpe’s Bank had to contend with. Because he had inherited virtual ownership of the Bank from his father he was in effect the President of it — but what he knew about banking could have been written on his gold cuff-links. He left it all to the Directors and spent his time in and out of New York’s social spots, using up the money his tight-fisted father had withheld from him. Which was why Delthorpe’s Bank preferred his room to his company.

  His wife Fay was just as bad — a former actress, shallow and vain, conspicuously devoid of culture. But she had the redeeming virtue of honestly admitting that she loved Cliff only for his money, a confession which did not worry him in the least. In fact nothing ever worried him — he had too much money for that. Which was the reason Fay got the shock of her dizzy life at breakfast one morning when Cliff refused to agree to her idea of a protracted, round-the-world tour.

  “But why not?” she demanded, her egg-spoon in mid-air. “I thought we fixed it all up yesterday?”

  Cliff looked at her thoughtfully. There was puzzled indignation on her pretty face, the prettier indeed for its morning absence of cosmetics.

  “Yesterday has gone, Fay. It’s what I say this morning that counts. The cruise is off. We’re going to do something useful instead — build machinery!”

  “What!” the girl bleated. “But — but I’ve ordered my outfit for the trip. Done everything! You just can’t —”

  “I control the money,” Cliff snapped. “What I say goes! Get it through your empty head, Fay, that I’m resolved to do something with my life even if you are not. I’ve got work to do in the matter of straightening out humanity’s problems.”

  Fay could not speak so she just stared blankly.

  “Machinery,” Cliff whispered softly, at length. “Machinery incorporating electronic power.”

  It was too much for Fay. She got to her feet in sudden anger.

  “Look here, Cliff, I’ve had enough of this clowning! If you think I’m going to have a darned good holiday canceled while you drool about electrons and — and things, you’re crazy! I won’t —”

  She broke off, her eyes widening as Cliff looked at her steadily. It was not the Cliff Delthorpe she was accustomed to knowing. That look in his gray eyes was one of mental force, shattering and omniscient, breaking down all her individual desires.

  For nearly five seconds she stood in paralyzed amazement before his gaze. Then she flung herself from the room and slammed the door. Cliff relaxed a little and rubbed his dark hair in a worried manner. Going over to the sideboard he poured himself a stiff drink and meditated over his plan.

  “Maybe lunacy,” he mused, staring into the glass. “Grandfather Delthorpe went nuts — but figures did it for him. Maybe I’ve got the same complaint. Only figures that have interested me so far have been girls’.”

  He went to the mirror and studied himself, saw nothing unusual. At the back of his mind swirled odd little notions and visions — cities of supreme design reared against a dying sun — machinery of incredible efficiency.

  Machinery! That did something to him. He went over to the writing desk and tugged pencil and paper towards him, began to draw …

  In the ensuing days it was increasingly evident to Fay that something was radically wrong with Cliff. He became less and less like his normal self and went off into his curious, dictatorial — yet oddly brilliant — moods without warning.

  He talked with an unquestionable accuracy about electrons, wave-packets, continuous union of mentality, time and space lines, and various other scientific matters which were utterly over Fay’s head. He bought a plot of land out of town and had a concrete laboratory erected on it, to which machinery was delivered and gradually assembled.

  Fay watched all this with a certain futility, tried once to get a brain specialist to see Cliff, until his deadly rage at the suggestion frightened the life out of her. From that point onwards she sought some relief from the nervous tension governing her.

  She revived her ideas for a world tour and spent the time with Dick Morrison, an old flame, leaving Cliff to his own devices. Her own pleasure was far more important than this strange behavior anyhow — though she did secretly wonder what he was driving at.

  *

  Within two months Cliff had become completely absorbed by his ideas and had undergone a strange metamorphosis of character. He deserted the city apartment and normal ways of living, appointed a proxy to handle his connections with the Bank. Working alone — Bronson occasionally bringing him a fresh supply of provisions and laundry — he devised machines of various shapes and sizes, machines which bristled with tubes and coils as remarkable as they were revolutionary.

  Nobody was admitted to this laboratory except Bronson, and — when she ran short of money — Fay. It was her
first, and she hoped her last, visit. To her inward surprise she found Cliff in a more tractable mood than usual, a curious half and half state, but more understandable, more the man she had married. And yet there was still something mystifying about him.

  Fay spoke peevishly, by way of opening. “At least I ought to have an explanation!” She gazed round on the banked machinery. “For instance, what is all this stuff for?”

  “World betterment, I hope,” Cliff answered. “Eventually, that is. What puzzles me is I’m not quite so sure about the whole thing as I was when I started.”

  “Still the same old gag,” she sighed. “Why can’t you be yourself and throw this junk away?”

  “That’s all it means to you?” he asked seriously.

  “What else do you expect? World reformers are either nuts, or else a cinch for a kick in the pants.”

  He considered, ignoring her bitterness.

  “There’s a reason for all this,” he muttered. “But I don’t know yet what it is. I’ve been forced to take stock of myself recently, and I’ve arrived at a pretty definite conclusion. An intellectual force, somewhere, is trying to establish a contact with my mind. It may be something in the future. I’ve had curious visions that might apply to a time to come. Yet I’m definitely linked up with something else, and this something — far as I can tell — believes that the mental line of each individual is continuous from beginning to end of time.”

  Fay gazed at him, mystified.

  “Don’t tell me you include reincarnation among your tricks!” she burst out scornfully.

  “Call it that if you like, but yours is a primitive term,” Cliff answered curtly. “It would be more correct to say that a man or woman — never really dies — No, listen to me a moment! The mind, which had its first matter-manifestation in the amoeba, grows in knowledge during the course of its evolution, and during that evolution, it manifests myriads of different matter states from amoeba to future man until, at the finish that mind has so perfected itself that it doesn’t need matter any longer for the purposes of expression, and so becomes pure intelligence.”

  “And of course, when we die, we’re just playing hooky?” Fay asked cynically.

  “The body dies, Fay, not the mind.” Cliff’s voice sounded as though he were talking to a child. “The mind lives on and expresses itself again through another matter form. That’s what I mean by an unbroken chain of mentality from beginning to end. After all, many of the present day scientists are pretty convinced of the fact. Eddington, for instance, in his ‘Nature of the Physical World,’ refers to consciousness by saying, ‘consciousness is not sharply defined, but fades in subconsciousness, and beyond that must be postulated something indefinite but yet continuous with our mental nature’.”

  Fay’s eyes had become frankly contemptuous.

  “If you aren’t the world’s prize sap! A multimillionaire, and you go haywire over a scientific theory! Anyhow,” she went on impatiently, “it doesn’t mean a thing to me, Cliff. I’m more interested in practical things, like enjoyment of money and — and a trip around the world.”

  She stopped and screwed up her painted brows in unaccustomed thought for a moment.

  “Did you say something in the future is affecting you?” she asked slowly.

  “I think so, yes.”

  “But how on earth can it?

  “The future isn’t here yet.” Cliff smiled tolerantly. “It isn’t here, but it exists. Past, present, and future always exist. We move along a definite course in Time — and that course is evolution. The unknown force that has every atom and every star in its appointed place has just as surely mapped out the road of Time.

  “We pass along it to some ultimate stage, experiencing on the way what scientists call ‘instants.’ Eddington calls them ‘special frames.’ Just as on an ordinary train journey you’d experience different stations at different scheduled times. If you went from New York to Los Angeles, for instance, you wouldn’t deny that Los Angeles would be at the end of the line, would you? That represents man’s conquest over space and distance. How simple it must be to a greater power, then, to arrange the future at which we must arrive in due course.”

  “Heaven save us!” Fay groaned. “This gets worse! Anyway it still does not explain how the future can affect the present — can affect you.”

  “But it does!” Cliff insisted. “A person at the end of time has one very singular advantage — in fact two advantages. He has a profound scientific mentality for one thing, and for another he is able to recapture the vibrations of a past time. Even today we admit the possibility of being able to trap light from a past time, but we haven’t the necessary mental development to work it out.

  “Everything that is seen, or experienced is caused by the activity of electrons and dissipation of energy, all of which is distributed somewhere in the Universe and can, by machinery complicated and intricate enough, be recalled and refitted into place.

  “If I had that power I might be able to see my past selves stretching away right down through history. Unfortunately I have only a limited brain. But wherever this force that is guiding me may be it’s taught me plenty. Especially in the knowledge of how to build machinery to improve the world. I still have a lot to do.”

  Fay tightened her lips. Then with a helpless glance, she went out of the laboratory and into the small living room off the laboratory. She spent half an hour trying to decide what she ought to do. But the decision was taken out of her hands.

  Just as she had made up her mind to leave, that living room, the laboratory, and everything attached thereto, went up in the mightiest explosion New York had known in many years …

  *

  The curiously contoured, big-pated figure moved very slightly in his chair, stretched out a lean knuckled claw of a hand and pulled a switch. A periscope screen came into life and pictured a view of the world existing outside this buried, Arctic laboratory. It was not a cheerful view, but none the less it was one to which this being, Drath Gofal, was accustomed.

  Stretching away to the everlasting, brilliantly cold stars yawned ice fields, bordered to the west by a mountain range. Gofal might have imagined himself alone on the planet were it not for the fact that he knew, beyond the mountains, the last men of his race were eking out a waning existence in the slight but still noticeable warmth of a red, dying sun. Everlasting sun, even as just here there was everlasting dark.

  The ceaseless struggle of tidal drag was over. Earth swung round her master with one face always towards him, wobbling only slightly on a faint libration which occasionally brought the barrier reefs of Twilight Mountains into the sunshine and melted the accumulated snow and ice to provide water for the last men.

  Strange, inhospitable world! The husk of a once beautiful planet of soft winds, expansive seas, and life-giving sunshine. Only the stars seemed unchanged, and even they were misted by the presence of embryonic rings. The moon had returned to Earth, broken up.

  Synthetic air, water just sufficient to maintain life by melting processes — Man might live on the sunward side for many thousands of years with such perfect science and synthetic powers at his command — save perhaps for one thing. The Ice Life.

  Drath Gofal, out here in this specially constructed laboratory, erected in the first instance for quite a different purpose, was so far the only man — excepting his assistant Flan — who had seen the strange invader. Microscopic, destructive, insatiable life, spawning in the ice itself, life that in truth belonged to other barren worlds, that had been spewed on Earth in spore form when drawn by the moon’s attraction in its Earthward movement. Life which existed and thrived at 500 degrees below zero Centigrade — tiny organisms which digested the water content of the ice, life that would one day adapt itself to sunward-side conditions and devour everything before it unless something happened to bring sudden and extensive heat to this Arctic waste and destroy the queer, malignant bacteria in its early stages.

  Drath Gofal sighed as he wrestled with the pr
oblem of defeating the invader.

  “Heat or else explosive. Heat we cannot afford because we need every scrap we can manufacture both here and in the city. And explosive would certainly wreck this laboratory completely and ruin my experiments. A pity indeed that it happens to be directly overhead …”

  He looked at the periscope screen again and studied the view of a star-lighted brownish area about a mile and a half in width lying immediately above this buried retreat.

  “At the moment, Flan, we can do nothing,” he observed. “We shall have to decide sooner or later which will have to go — this laboratory or the Ice Life.” He turned and looked at Flan’s face beneath its bulging head. “You followed out my orders and advised them in the city of the presence of this life?”

  “Yes, Gofal — and also warned them to make no attack on it for fear of destroying us.”

  Like his superior, Flan was a short, big-headed being with a muscular pipe for a neck and thin arms and legs. His slightly smaller head was the sole indication of his inferior position to Drath Gofal himself.

  Drath Gofal switched the screen off at last, rose from his chair with a slight clink of metallic clothing, and walked across to the machinery jamming the main portion of the laboratory. For a time he stood musing before a sprawling mass of tubes, globes, and electrical equipment.

  Presently he turned.

  “I shall have to finish my work without delay,” he said thoughtfully. “And you know, Flan, the more I dwell upon the ultimate possibilities of probing back along a mental lineal descent, the more I think we were wise in burying ourselves here, away from all interference, and likewise from all possible disturbances we may create in the final stages of the experiment. There may be danger.” He paused gravely. “You realize that?”

  “Science only gives her greatest secrets to those who are not afraid,” Flan answered, unperturbed. He belonged, like Gofal, to a race schooled through ages to be absolute masters of emotion. His small but brilliant eyes surveyed the machinery.