“They would be,” Lucille said quickly, her eyes bright. “Every single one of us believes a thing because we are compelled to from the cradle. Believe otherwise and —”
“You’d get whatever you believe,” Stone assented, smiling at her. “The old quotation — ‘There is nothing either good or bad but thinking makes it so’ is a profound truth. Now, to get to our point. Here there are only five of us, utterly removed from the mass opinions of multimillions of our fellow human beings. Their thoughts no longer cloud our minds: we are so far away from them we are unaffected by them. So we receive cosmic rays — or spiritual radiations — or whatever you like to call them, as they really are. We have no preconceived opinions about them: there are no educational beliefs to be overcome. We accept them and they are beneficent.”
Martin Senior smiled oddly. “We talk indeed from the heights of Olympus, Mr. Stone — yet withal I can detect the logic of your argument. I am one who relies on proof, and in this case the proof is that we are not hurt in any way by this all-inclusive radiation that is pouring down on us with every second. That is enough for me. There remains the problem of what happens next. To have perhaps solved the conditions existing here does not by any means tell us how we get home.”
“Do we want to?” Jonathan Stone turned and looked through the pavilion window, the eternal sunlight again casting a halo around his white hair. “Don’t you feel, here on this outermost rim of the Universe, that we are nearer our chosen destiny than we ever could be back on Earth? The freedom of thought, the well-being of the body: those attributes I would never trade for the old life back on Earth.”
“Well-being of the body,” Lucille repeated slowly, and then smiled wryly. “From where I’m sitting, Mr. Stone, that has a decidedly ironic ring. I’m a doomed woman — or didn’t I mention it?”
“Because of incurable illness?” Stone turned to look at hers “That was back on Earth, child. Are you sure your viewpoint is still correct, or have cosmic rays destroyed the trouble which was undermining you?”
Lucille hesitated and then looked down at herself, clearly uncertain. Martin Senior looked at her also, an odd expression in his sharp eves.
“It’s a long time since you coughed,” he said.
“That’s nothing. Sometimes I go for days on end without any trouble. Just the same …” Lucille hesitated, distance in her eyes. “Just the same, I do feel different somehow.”
Edna moved restlessly. “Conversations always bore me,” she confessed. “And since sleep and food both seem written off I think I’ll go for another walk. I’m even inclined to believe that there may be something in what you say, Mr. Stone. I’d like to think it out.”
“By all means.”
Edna turned pensively towards the door, then Jerry’s voice gave her pause.
“Just a moment, Ed! I thought you were afraid to go out alone?”
“I was. Somehow I’m not any more. Still, if you want to come with me by all means do so!”
Jerry did not hesitate. For the second time since they had so mysteriously arrived in this alien region the two who could not understand each other — and yet felt impelled towards each other — wandered out under the brittle stars.
*
Jonathan Stone had hit the nail on the head — and not entirely by accident either. His great age, his years of study of the profundities of life and mind, had in some subtle way groomed him for this moment, wherein he was positioned as a kind of revelator. He knew, with everything that was in him, that his theory of the dual nature of cosmic rays was right. It must be right for cosmic rays are everywhere. There is no place where they are not. Of the power of a Creator the same thing can be stated. Such a parallel could not possibly be coincidence.
And with every moment, every second, these invisible radiations were beating down from their unknown source, bereft of their deadly qualities because there were no influencing minds present to produce a material effect contrary to the normal one. So five people lost in the Universe, through the unintentional meddling of an aged University professor, were swiftly changing — following the course normal to the absorption of cosmic rays, and were evolving. Swiftly! Incredibly!
Not only those in the pavilion were aware of it, but Edna and Jerry also. Indeed, for them, the effect was if anything much swifter because there was no slight deflection of radiations from the pavilion roof.
“I have often wondered,” Jerry said seriously, when he and Edna had come to the last grass knoll separating them from the “soil plain” on the fragment’s other side, “what it must feel like to have godlike power. Now I know.”
Edna had no bitter response to make this time. She accepted his words as absolute fact because she felt exactly as he did. In silence they both stood on the slight rise of grassy ground looking upwards towards the stars.
“Whatever it is that is the source of cosmic rays, be it material or spiritual, it’s definitely up there — or out there,” Jerry said slowly. “Can’t you feel that? Far more so than the last time we came out here?”
Edna was silent for a moment, erect, her head thrown back as she stared aloft.
“I more than feel it, Jerry, I see it. Something — out there — incredibly bright and yet so infinitely gentle —”
Jerry did not answer. He could not sense exactly what Edna meant. Manlike, he could not even hope to realize that at that moment Edna was undergoing a complete transformation. As a woman, hard-surfaced though she had been, she had the innate qualities of conception, which Jerry could never possess. Yet even he glimpsed something for a moment. It seemed like a shaft of pearly radiance, evanescent, unthinkably lovely, projected straight out of the void down towards this hurtling, forgotten little fragment of Earth. For a moment even it looked as though both he and Edna were washed in cold fire … Then it was gone, but it had left behind the breath of genius.
“Somehow — somehow, Ed —” Jerry stumbled over his words. “Somehow I know now why we’ve never agreed. Our physical make-ups have been opposed. We’ve had mathematical strains in each of us that have cancelled each other out, making absolute unison impossible.”
“Yes,” Edna assented simply. “That’s the answer. But now it doesn’t exist because in that moment the mathematical strains straightened. The complexities which separated us, and yet attracted, have been resolved.”
They looked at each other, god and goddess without realizing it. Mentally they had grown to immeasurable stature, had almost reached the stage of absolute evolution as far as their minds were concerned. Their bodies had responded in that they were young, lithe, bronzed, of superlative physique.
“It has been worth coming here if only to resolve those differences,” Jerry smiled. “We’ll never misunderstand one another again. Suppose we get back and tell the others?”
Before long they had returned to the pavilion, to discover about Stone, Martin Senior, and Lucille a certain radiant assurance that spoke for itself.
“We felt we should tell you what happened to us out there!” Jerry exclaimed eagerly. “We saw something, and somehow felt it too — then afterwards our misunderstandings vanished. We know just where we went wrong.”
“I think,” Stone replied quietly, “that we all of us know now where we went wrong. For myself I am completely satisfied in that I have achieved my life’s ambition. For just one precious moment I was able to gaze upon the face of the Ultimate. It satisfied me that all I ever believed was correct.”
“Then you saw what we saw?” Edna asked quickly. “A kind of radiant shaft of light from above —?”
“I saw much more than that.” Jonathan Stone replied gravely.
“We saw something like a ray of light.” Lucille put in. “I mean Martin and I — but it meant a great deal more to Mr. Stone. He’s capable of seeing much further than that.”
“And did anything happen to you because of what you saw?” Edna asked quickly — at which Martin Senior nodded slowly.
“There was a strange shifting
of viewpoint. Somehow everything mental became abruptly crystal clear — like looking into oneself, and the effect hasn’t gone off either. I saw, for the briefest instant, how futile a thing murder is.”
“Murder?” Jerry repeated, astonished.
“That startles you, eh? Well, let me tell you that up to that moment of conversion I had murder in my heart. I brought it with me from Earth. Just before we were whisked away I had planned, quite cunningly I thought, the murder of a young woman who was once a friend of mine. Frustration and a nurtured desire for vengeance had made of me a bitter, hard-lipped man. Now all that has evaporated. Not only do I clearly see the senselessness of murder, but I even turn from it with revulsion. One might put it all down to a purifying effect, I suppose?”
“Or to swift evolution,” Edna mused, “Where formerly I had no scientific knowledge whatever I now have it in excelsis. I can even contemplate the infinite calculus and see the answer without the least effort. That can only be explained by a swift and profound mental advancement — and advancement is evolution.”
“That’s it!” Jerry snapped his fingers. “Each one of us has evolved to a point which humanity, under normal circumstances, would probably only reach in millions of years. Cosmic rays have done it — and are still doing it. As our minds have advanced and improved so have our bodies because the physical always obeys the mental. In one stroke, in a few hours of Earth-time, we have telescoped millions of years of advancement.”
“And may yet go further,” Lucille said quietly. “For me there has not come so much mental change as physical release from the disease which was killing me. I have nobody present who can positively say that I am cured: I just know that I am.”
“If you know it,” Stone said, “it doesn’t matter what anybody else thinks. You are your own mistress, Lucille, as long as you retain an individuality.”
The silence weighed heavy for a while. The assimilation of the fact that each one of them had become a genius, and that this state of rarefied intellectual eminence was still developing, was slow indeed. Earth-born habits and inhibitions were not that easy to cast aside. Each had been born of a human being and they had yet to outgrow the tenacious roots of heredity.
“How far do you suppose we can develop before reaching maximum?” Jerry asked abruptly — and as usual he directed the question to the venerable Jonathan Stone.
“Maximum,” Stone answered, “is purely an arbitrary term set by human beings to denote a period beyond which they cannot predict anything certain. I would say that development is unbounded, infinite, free and —”
It was mid-evening. In the distance a brass band was playing on the barmy air. Children were laughing and gamboling some distance away. Jerry, instead of getting the complete answer to his question, found himself near the pavilion counter. Edna was standing close beside him. They looked at each other in profound bewilderment — and then around them. The rationed foods they had set out had vanished: they were back on their shelves. There was no sign of Jonathan Stone, Lucille, or Martin Senior.
“What’s — happened?” Jerry demanded, his eyes blank. “Or did I dream something?”
“It was no dream,” Edna reassured him, and those few words convinced him that he was not going insane. “Look at our sunburn! Just as it was when we were …”
Baffled, they raced to the pavilion doorway. Everything was perfectly normal. Ahead of them lay a stretch of grassy earth, with two trees — just as they had been in that alien space. Under one of them, on a rustic seat, sat an elderly white-haired man looking at a small Bible. Near him a shapely girl with golden-brown skin lay coiled on the grass. Further away still a young man sat against the second tree and looked about him. Beyond this immediate area children tumbled, giggled, and turned head-over-heels.
“I don’t get it,” Jerry whispered, his hand on Edna’s arm. “Look at the clock over there!”
Edna looked, and started. It was just after 9.15 — only the merest fraction, and even that time could have been occupied in moving to the doorway and contemplating the scenery.
“My watch also says nine-fifteen,” Jerry whispered. “Last time I looked at it, it was heading for three o’clock!”
“Those children were just outside the slice which went elsewhere,” Edna said, almost irrelevantly.
“It didn’t happen!” Jerry insisted stubbornly. “It couldn’t! Nothing’s different and no time has elapsed. We had bad dreams — or good ones. Damned if I know which.”
“Could you feel as you do towards me, and could I feel as I do towards you, merely on the strength of a dream?” Edna asked quietly. “That’s something very real, Jerry, and very lovely. We no longer have the towering genius, but the character change in each of us remains.”
“It seems so …” Jerry’s admission was made with a frown of complete bewilderment, then his grip on Edna’s arm tightened a little as Jonathan Stone, Lucille, and Martin Senior all began to move at the same instant. They glanced towards each other, rose from their various positions, and converged into a trio.
“That proves it did happen!” Jerry insisted. “Before the incident in alien space they didn’t even know each other: now they meet like old friends.”
The three came forward. In the eyes of Martin Senior and Lucille there was utter bafflement, but Jonathan Stone seemed to be smiling. And the vigorous uprightness which had come to him Elsewhere was still there. So, too, with the young man and woman the evidences were proclaimed by the bronze of their skin and the easy grace of their movements.
“Apparently,” Jonathan Stone said, pocketing his Bible, “we are back!”
“But it happened!” Lucille insisted. “I’m absolutely sure that it happened! I know it did because I feel so well, so happy, so sure of myself and the future.”
“And I know it happened because I no longer have murder in my heart,” Martin Senior added. “But when did it happen? See that clock over there? It’s still only a few minutes after nine-fifteen! According to that we never went at all.”
“We went — and we came back,” Jonathan Stone said, shrugging. “Whilst we were there we lost nearly all our human failings and weaknesses, and I had my unforgettable experience of seeing the Ultimate face to face. But, though the physical changes remain the genius of speeding evolution has gone like mist.”
“Why?” Edna insisted.
“Because we are again surrounded by multi-millions of conflicting minds all unconsciously influencing our efforts to think straight. That means the evaporation of that brief genius, but it does not mean a step backwards to the former mental and physical state. Those conditions were destroyed forever and the correct adjustment made, not so much by the cosmic rays themselves as by the touch of the Artisan of the Universe himself.”
“Yes, but —” Edna moved restlessly. “Mr. Stone, it still does not explain why it happened! We did so much, have brought back such incredible changes, and yet no time elapsed!”
“Time,” Stone smiled, “is only a unit of measurement used by human beings to bring order into what would otherwise appear as chaos. In any case that experience was not Earthly, or even mundane, so how could Time as we know it be applied to it? Time is not absolute, you know. There is a flaw in it. Where, for instance, is the moment between present and future? You may say the next second is in the future, but the instant you say it, it is in the present, and before you realize it, it is in the past! What is in the tiny, infinitesimal gap between? No matter to what inconceivably small unit you reduce Time-instants, you can never find the bridge between this instant and the next. Maybe we did bridge it for a moment.”
“There must have been a reason,” Jerry insisted; then suddenly raising his voice he called over to him the children who were rioting nearby. They came immediately — dusty, happy, hot-faced girls and boys, their clothes in a condition that would probably give their mothers a fit when they arrived home.
“You kids been here for the last half-hour?” Jerry asked.
“Bin he
re all evening!”
“Time we went home, too!” One of the girls looked startled. “It’s twenty-past nine!
“Whilst you were playing about did you see anything queer happen?” Jerry insisted.
“Queer, mister? How’d y’mean? Queer?”
“Well, for instance, was there an earthquake or some sort? A loud explosion? Did this pavilion here vanish?”
The blank stares were enough; then a boy with freckles and a sawn-off nose made a rude face.
“You’ve bin out in the sun too long, mister! Come on, gang: time we got ’ome …”
“Satisfied?” Jonathan Stone asked dryly, and Jerry shook his head.
“I’ll never be that. I’ll go through the rest of my life wondering what caused our experience to happen.”
“So will all of us probably.” Martin Senior shrugged. “For myself I’m prepared to accept it for what it was — just one of those things.”
“For which,” Lucille muttered, “we should be unspeakably grateful. As to the reason for it: evidently there isn’t one.”
*
But of course she was wrong in this. The reason was nakedly plain, but such is the inscrutability of things Professor Engleman had not the least idea of having precipitated anything unusual. He stood now beside the switch of his disturber-field machine and contemplated it. Then he shook his head slowly.
“I have the feeling, ladies and gentlemen, that it might not be altogether safe to operate this machine this evening,” he said. “I have just switched on and off — a matter of a split second — and I distinctly noticed a curious stress in the air, a kind of warping of forces. Now that should not be, particularly as I might miss our intended target of St. Michael’s statue. It is possible the instrument has been thrown out of alignment in its removal to this hall.”
John Russell Fearn Omnibus Page 38