John Russell Fearn Omnibus

by John Russell Fearn

  But certainly there was nobody in sight in all that great expanse—no waiting crowds—not even the usual army of mechanics waiting to receive the flyer.

  Blake’s frown deepened. He snapped on the radio sharply.

  “Blake Venner calling Enterprise!” he intoned. “Prepare to receive ship. All O.K. down there?”

  There was no response—in fact no sound whatever save the throb of the powerful underjets braking the ship’s fall.

  Nick stared at the radio fixedly, disbelief on his features.

  “Hello there!” Blake barked. “What’s wrong down there? Answer my signal, can’t you?”

  The radio remained mute. Blake glanced up in genuine concern.

  “Something decidedly wrong here, Nick,” he breathed. “I don’t like it! Where the devil is everybody?”

  Nick remained silent, frowning in slow bewilderment. By slow degrees, the ship settled gently. Blake switched off the engines and regarded Nick for a moment in the heavy silence that ensued.

  “Well, might as well see what it’s all about,” Nick remarked at length, and going over to the airlock, he unfastened the clamps.

  Thoughtfully, he stepped out onto the tarmac and stood gazing around. The cool autumnal wind blew around him, gloriously fresh after the stifling artificiality of the space ship.

  His dark, perplexed eyes gradually moved the length of the semi-circular Enterprise Building, along its myriad windows and doorways. Suddenly he came to a decision, began to walk across the space towards the massive main entrance. Blake caught him up in a moment.

  “I don’t like this silence,” he muttered, and he found himself involuntarily walking on tiptoe. “You’ve noticed it? No birds singing, no rumble of traffic—no anything, in fact. It’s just like a cemetery!”

  “Uh-huh,” Nick acknowledged, pondering—and they went up the broad granite steps together. Their footsteps echoed oddly in the immense space with its lofty domed roof of glass. Normally this entrance hall should have been seething with activity—officials, booking clerks, scientists and technicians.

  But now—nobody!

  Everything was still, in a state of curious disorder as though everybody had left in a hurry. The clerks’ desks were in their places as usual, ledgers still open upon them. The main staff elevator was level with the floor, with its gates flung wide open.

  “Look!” Blake whispered, and pointed behind him. His and Nick’s feet had left distinct marks in a gathered film of dust.

  For many days not a soul had passed in or out of this normal hive of industry.

  Nick pursed his lips, traced his finger across the nearest desk. Behind his finger streaked a long bright line of polished mahogany. He looked at Blake in bafflement, then with one accord they moved to the elevator and pressed the button. Nothing happened; the power was off. Still in silence, they mounted the stairs, walked along the endless corridors and stared into the rooms wherein lay the space pilots’ quarters. Nobody was in sight. In the pilots’ mess, a gigantic room for general assemblage, there was the usual appearance of disorder and not a soul around.

  And the silence! It began to get on Blake’s nerves when they had finished the touring and came back again to the front steps. They gazed over the deserted tarmac towards their spaceship, across at the locked hangars where the rest of the space machines were housed.

  Nick moved away suddenly, went across to the hangar doors and slid aside the watchman’s inspection plate. After a moment or two, he re-joined Blake.

  “Hangars are full,” he commented briefly. “Thought perhaps a sudden space-expedition might account for this.”

  Again they went quiet—gazing at the empty sky, oppressed by the pall of silence.

  “Queer!” Nick commented at last.

  Blake swung to him. “Queer!” he echoed. “Good God, man, is that the best you can say about it? It’s downright uncanny, never mind queer! Where in hell is everybody? It’s—it’s inconceivable that every person can have disappeared,” he went on, mystified. “We’ve got to look around, Nick. There’s Sheila, too! Good Lord, if she’s gone as well—”

  “We’ll look around,” Nick interrupted briefly, and strode off towards the spaceship.

  In five minutes they were in the air again, flying slowly at about five hundred feet over New York, passing between the towers of Manhattan, staring down on the streets below. What they saw only served to stagger their minds still further.

  Automobiles were piled up in wild and smashed array, buses stood up like islands in the shambles. Traffic in its entirety had gone mad, run into itself and jammed the main streets in the most unholy chaos. Yet nowhere was there a person, nowhere a sign of life. No human walked, no animal slunk along, no bird flew in the heavens.

  Westwards to the harbour regions, it was the same. Ships lay either at anchor, rising gently with the tide, else they were piled up in slowly sinking ruin against the jetties. Some were even smashed and interlocked with each other, half settled in shallow waters and black mud.

  Blake could not help shivering a little as he stared across the gentle sea towards the horizon. It was utterly empty—no friendly curl of smoke … He looked back over New York. There was not a single wisp of smoke there, either. No factories were in action. The calm was harrowing in its peacefulness. Only the green things lived, as of yore. The trees, the soft grass of the parks, stirring in the cool wind.

  “Nick, I can’t stand this!” Blake gasped out at last. “It’s driving me nuts! I’m only just beginning to realize the horrible fact that there’s nobody around anymore! We’re alone, man—alone! Do you begin to realize it?”

  “Yeah—sure.” Nick spoke laconically, but he was manifestly deeply moved. “Just the same there’s no reason for going off half-cocked. All things have an explanation—even this!”

  “Everybody’s dead…” Blake muttered.

  “Anything but! If that were so, there’d be corpses around. Corpses don’t vanish in two weeks, though they smell plenty. No; I don’t believe anybody died, though they certainly vanished.”

  “Surely not everybody in the world…?”

  “I dunno…” Nick relapsed into thought for a moment and then shrugged. “I guess it’s not worth circumnavigating the globe to try and find out. The radio will do just as well. Keep on flying around while I see what I can pick up.”

  He settled himself before the apparatus, switched it on. With deliberate persistency, he tried all the leading radio stations of the United States, without a single response. Then, his face becoming graver, he tried London, Paris, Berlin, Moscow, even Sydney and remote other-hemisphere stations … Silence!

  Quietly he switched off, stroked his chin moodily.

  “Well?” Blake demanded impatiently. “What the devil are you going broody about? What do we do?”

  “I’ve no idea—yet. The situation is a most amazing one, Blake. We’ve got to get used to the incredible fact that we’re probably the only two people in the whole world! There may be others, but I’m beginning to doubt it.”

  “Before I do anything, I’m going to try and find Sheila,” Blake said resolutely. “She’s got to be around somewhere,” he went on desperately. “If she’s gone too, I—I don’t know what I’ll do!”

  Nick shrugged. “We can go and see anyway,” he commented, in a voice that was anything but optimistic.

  Blake’s jaw squared purposefully. He drove the ship down towards the main street wherein the girl’s apartment block was situated. Gently, he settled near the smashed remains of two interlocked automobiles. With scarce a moment’s delay, he had the airlock open and was racing up the steps of the building. The place was quite deserted.

  After a brief glance around, he pelted up the stairs to the third floor, savagely rapped on the panels of No. 16—but there was no response. He tried the door: it was securely locked. Nick appeared on the corridor, frowning pensively.

  “No answer, I suppose?” he inquired quietly.

  Blake nodded bitterly, appli
ed his massive shoulder to the door.

  “Give me a hand here, will you?”

  Under their joint efforts, the lock screws began to give way. They plunged into the apartment at last, cannoned into the table in the centre of the room, and went sprawling.

  Blake scrambled to his feet and gazed anxiously around him. The room, save for the overturned table, was just as it had always been, dainty and feminine—but it was dusty everywhere, and the flowers in the window had fallen limply into decaying petals.

  With hungry eyes, he strode into the other rooms, calling the girl’s name as he went. No response. Nothing appeared to be disturbed. The bed had not been slept in. Scowling, he returned to the lounge and found Nick thoughtfully reading a black leather-bound book.

  “This is a swell time to read!” Blake snapped. “Why can’t you give me a hand to locate Sheila?”

  Nick shrugged. “I picked this up as I straightened the table; must have fallen off when we knocked it over. It’s Sheila’s diary.”

  “And what right have you to read it?” Blake glowered at him.

  “Oh, have some sense!” Nick retorted impatiently. “I’m not reading the darned thing for the love of it. I thought I might find some sort of a clue, and I’m not so sure that I haven’t…” He stopped and grinned faintly. “There are one or two juicy references to you, all the same. You’re mentioned as the only guy that matters; rugged, blond manhood and—”

  Blake snatched the book in annoyance, gazed at the entries. In silence, he studied the final entry for September 26, the day of the collision. The writing ceased in mid-sentence with a long, whirling stroke of the pen.

  “Interesting, eh?” Nick murmured.

  Blake grunted, read the entry again thoughtfully. “I can hardly believe that Blake is so many millions of miles away in space. What a wonderful thing he and Nick are going to see—something I too could have seen if only dad had given me permission. Still, maybe after all I will be able—”

  Then the streak of ink and significant emptiness to the bottom of the page. Blake closed the book slowly, puzzling. At last he glanced at Nick.

  “Any ideas?”

  “Not very clear ones. It’s pretty obvious that Sheila was suddenly and unexpectedly interrupted. She left her sentence unfinished—had a shock of some kind too, which accounts for the nervous jolt of the pen. The pen itself isn’t around anywhere, which seems rather odd … We don’t know when she wrote this. September 26, yes, but at what time? The star collision was not until 8:13 in the evening. Was this written before or after that happening? What happened? Where did everybody go?”

  “Fourth dimension!” Blake said abruptly; but Nick shook his head.

  “I guess not. A fourth dimension can’t be added to, or angled into, the normal three dimensions without some very good reason. Besides, if it were four dimensional, it would incorporate everything—buildings, trees, humans, and probably whole continents. We find everything just as it has always been, with the one exception that all humans, animals, fish and so forth have vanished like mist.”

  “It’s Sheila I’m worrying about,” Blake muttered. “She may be in some horrible place, possibly even dead. Good Heavens, suppose there was an invasion from another planet while we were away?” he finished in alarm. “Suppose everybody was carried away?”

  Nick sighed. “You’re the only one that’s getting carried away. Talk sense! What possible invasion could there be that takes every living thing, animals and the rest of ’em included, and yet does not even scar a single brick on any building? Besides, all the planets are lifeless, and those in the remoter deeps of space are too far away to bother about … No, it wasn’t an invasion. It was some complex slip-up of Nature that we’ve got to solve. We have all the world’s resources at our disposal, the rest of our lives to do it on. Best thing we can do is get back to headquarters and start in to do a little puzzling. Let’s go!”

  Blake nodded slowly, picked up Sheila’s diary reverently, then followed his friend out of the room.

  While Nick went into a huddle with himself in the pilots’ mess at headquarters, Blake wandered about the deserted metropolis and loaded himself up with tinned foodstuffs from the empty stores. Ordinary food was turning bad; a fact which brought to his mind the possibility of disease.

  “We can haul all the fresh food we can find into the open and pour kerosene over it,” was Nick’s observation, as he sat eating corned beef and drinking coffee in the mess room. “I don’t think there’s a great deal of danger, anyway. That comes from dead bodies, not putrefied meat. Nevertheless, we’ll take precautions.”

  He turned back to the notes he had made and pondered for a while, chewing rhythmically. Presently he spoke again.

  “I think the only way to get to the bottom of this mystery is to make a scientific reconstruction, just as one would a crime. We have one good basis to work from—namely, two stars have never collided in astronomical history within our knowledge, and therefore the effects of such a collision have never been recorded. When it happened before—a near-collision—Earth and the planets were born and later came life.

  “Now here is the question: Is it possible that upon the near or actual collision of two suns, certain types of radiation are emitted that alter the nature of space itself? Life, as we know it, is still a mystery. Maybe it was an accident, or maybe the potential for life was produced by a particular radiation that occurred at the crossing of our sun and the runaway. Life did not immediately appear, of course, but the elements of life were present right from the beginning. When the Earth cooled, the chemical reaction of life took place. For millions of years life has gone on…”

  “So?” Blake questioned, moodily stirring his coffee.

  “Far away in space a similar accident happens again—and life just disappears,” Nick said slowly. “The perfect balance, so long undisturbed, was upset.”

  Blake stared at him. “Are you trying to say that life just—just dissolved, or something?” he demanded.

  “Well, life did vanish, didn’t it?”

  “But where to?” Blake yelled, leaping to his feet. “It’s all very well standing around theorizing, but can’t we get some action on the matter?”

  Nick’s dark eyes were gleaming strangely. “Maybe we will,” he breathed. “I’ve got several ideas, and one or another of ’em ought to be right. Something happened when those stars collided; a radiation of some kind infused space and we of all other fleshly things survived because of the proofed walls of our ship. Judging from the hangars, all the spaceships were grounded when the disturbance hit Earth, which explains why only we survive … Yes, I believe I’ve got something to work on.”

  He turned suddenly. “I’m going over to the lab to make some experiments,” he said briefly. “You do what you like, only don’t bother me. I’ve got to nail this idea whilst it’s hot.”

  Blake nodded slowly. He was haunted by the growing conviction that humanity had gone for all time—that Sheila Berick was only a glorious memory.

  Chapter III

  “The Disks”

  Days passed into weeks and the fall changed to early winter conditions as Nick still struggled day by day to produce some practical line of explanation for the mystery. Several times he read Sheila’s diary, but made no comments, always returning it to Blake’s sheltering hands. That diary was the only real memory of Sheila he had left.

  The rest of the time Nick spent either in the libraries in the city, or else bringing home electrical machinery on an old truck. The machinery he proceeded to mount in the laboratory, though time and again he pulled it down, sat for days in scowling thought surrounded by books, then started to rebuild again. What he was getting at remained a complete mystery to Blake.

  For his part, the inactivity palled on his nerves. He played the role of housekeeper and spent much of his time collecting tinned food from the city stores. The rest of the time he just wandered around, usually took the space machine and toured the empty country, trying vainly
to accustom himself to the vision of a world depopulated, flogging his brain to explain it all.

  Then there was always that eternal silence, maddening and complete. When time allowed, he travelled with bullet-like velocity to other countries, gazed sombrely down on empty England with its rusting cities, the grass springing up in the streets, the moss sprouting over the corroding hulks of buses and cars. Everywhere there was litter and brown leaves whirling in the winter wind.

  The world over it was the same. Rust—decay—death!

  Blake found it singularly ironical to tour the world’s armament dumps—infinite square miles of war material, added to year by year. Shells were now covered in rust, factories falling into disrepair. Aircraft by the thousands were dusty and neglected. All these mighty preparations for defence or offence—no man had ever really known which—were now lying dead and useless, unwanted, turning back slowly to their primal state. Vast, wasted effort!

  Indeed, he found only one thing of interest in his travels. On one tour he visited Mount Wilson observatory, spent the greater part of the evening scanning the heavens through one of the smaller telescopes. The larger ones, motivated by machinery, were out of the question, owing to the world-wide failure of power. He started out with the object of discovering if by any chance space itself could explain the departure of humanity—and ended up with a discovery he had never intended making: Mars had changed!

  Without question, the red planet was different. The vast ochre deserts were smothered with curious black marks, extending from pole to pole. What it implied was beyond guessing, but it certainly suggested some kind of life. But why should there be life on a world that had been so long dead? Blake himself knew that the red planet was empty; he had explored it from end to end.

  Baffled, Blake finally departed, put his discovery to Nick’s analytical brain. Nick was not over-impressed.

  “If life can vanish from Earth as it has, it is quite possible that the wave produced effects on Mars, since it would also be included,” he said thoughtfully. “Maybe Mars is starting on a new life cycle just as ours faded out.”