John Russell Fearn Omnibus

by John Russell Fearn

  There was a long, perplexed silence in the Martian quietness. Then Grant drew a deep breath.

  “I believe I understand,” he said slowly. “Look, Iana, didn’t Cal say that they had perhaps signed their own death warrants?”

  “Why yes! He did say something like that.”

  “And he was right!” Grant looked around keenly at the interested faces. “These men sealed themselves up completely in a globe of force—maybe they did the same for their whole underground setup with its people—to save themselves from further attack or disaster from possible repetition of sea and air snatching.”

  Grant drew a deep breath.

  “Completely sealed themselves up, mind you!” he repeated. “Now, to refer back to one of our own oldest scientific laws on Earth, we remember this, and I’m quoting now from a statement once made by Sir James Jeans in his Mysterious Universe: ‘To achieve thermodynamic equilibrium, in which no increase in disorganization can occur, in which entropy is constant and complete, we must isolate some region where no energy can either enter or leave! Under these isolated conditions the energy will be bandied back from matter to barrier and back again, and the shuffling—the only possible limit of energy interchanges—is soon complete…’ That’s the quotation, as well as I remember it.”

  The girl pondered.

  “You mean they just shut themselves up in a living tomb?”

  “I do, yes. Good scientists though they were, they were too anxious for their safety to consider the deeper issues. They sealed themselves inside a globe of energy and in a very short time the energy reached its maximum number of changes. Entropy was complete. They all became fixed as they were, incapable of movement, neither dead nor alive. They achieved a condition, unwittingly, which parts of the Universe have already achieved—complete thermodynamic equilibrium.”

  “That, of course, is more than possible,” Balmore admitted, “though I am not at all sure how you arrived at the solution so easily. “If we wish to awaken them, doesn’t it suggest another scientific law?”

  Grant Mayson repressed a shudder and slowly shook his head.

  “We can never awaken them,” he answered quietly. “All we can try to do is find a way through this energy barrier. Once we do that, and thereby produce new atomic energies in a state of perfect equilibrium, we start entropy going again also. Everything down here will pass away into dust and a new state will begin—the state we will have started. It will mean that we have introduced a random element…”

  He paused and turned. “After all, Iana, it’s up to you. This is your world, not ours.”

  She was silent, gazing down pensively into the depths.

  “You’ve guessed right, Grant; I know you have,” she said at last.

  “To enter through this dome would do no good. Down here there must be a race transfixed by the law of absolute entropy, the race which followed Vaxil millions of years ago and which has been held in scientific thrall ever since.

  “Let it stay that way—a kind of monument to scientific greed—and error! It would benefit none of us to look below. Everything would just disappear, and this world is dead anyway. Hollow caverns are of no use to anybody. I would not find my own people, the race left on Vinra, so of what use is it?”

  She turned away despondently and Grant fancied he caught the glint of tears in her grey eyes. In three strides he caught up with her as they moved back towards the space cruiser.

  “Your people went somewhere,” he said seriously. “They would surely have left some kind of record. If we went back to Venus we might yet find some trace.”

  She gave him a long, steady look. “You really believe that?”

  “I definitely do! In fact, I think that if we returned to the same spot on Venus I might be able to find the answer myself. I am sure I nearly did it last time, though I don’t know why. This time might cinch it.”

  Her eyes took on that curious, wondering light he had seen once before in the space machine when he had told her of his strange mental recollections. She gave a quick nod.

  “All right, we can but try it.”

  She hurried her pace toward the vessel in sudden eagerness.

  CHAPTER IX

  UNITED AT LAST

  Sure enough, once the return journey to Venus had been accomplished, and that solitary clearing with the broken colonnades had been found again, Grant felt once more the same curious sensation as before steal over him.

  “Makes me feel rather like a water diviner.” He was grinning, as the girl and the scientists watched him prowl about slowly. “I’ve got that ‘I’ve been here before’ feeling mighty strong, such as many of us experience sometimes. There ought to be something here which—”

  He broke off, made a sudden dive forward across the terrace as his eye caught sight of a curious bronzed panel forming the front facing of one of the terrace tiers. He dropped on his knees, fingered it urgently, pressing on the ornamentations.

  Abruptly, with a faint click, it shot to one side and left a dark, draughty aperture.

  “But—but how did you know?” Balmore whispered, dumbfounded.

  “I just did,” Grant replied. “Come on.”

  He flashed his torch beam through the opening, pointed to ancient bronze steps leading downwards and in another moment he had scrambled into the opening and on to them.

  He helped Iana through after him, and the scientists followed eagerly.

  When they had all gained the steps they stood looking round a monstrous metal-lined inner cavern, all traces of decay and mildew kept at bay by the constitution of the metal.

  Dimly, at the limit of the torch beam, a floor could be discerned.

  “Some kind of vault,” Iana said, her voice echoing. “And you found it, Grant! I just can’t believe it.”

  He began to descend the steps slowly. When he reached the bottom he stopped abruptly and slowly rubbed his forehead.

  “That weird feeling of having been here before,” he whispered. “I never felt it so strongly. There’s got to be a reason for it! Just a moment. Let me try something out to see if it explains it.”

  The other travellers waited in tense interest as he went forward, his torch beam flashing about the emptiness until it alighted on a massive metal table. On it were two bronze-like boxes with highly complicated combination locks.

  He stood looking at them, his face drawn and pale with vast mental effort. Silently the others stole forward and watched him. There was not a sound save their tense breathing.

  Then, as though he were alone, Grant reached forward rather nervously to the first box and began to move the combination dial with his fingers.

  Left—right—left again. Until at length clicked under his fingers and the lid sprang open.

  Within was metal foiling. He stood looking at it, apparently too dazed to seize hold of it. Iana and Balmore could see a mass of hieroglyphics—but to Iana they evidently meant something for she dashed forward and, whipping the foiling up, trained her torch on it.

  “Grant!” She was suddenly breathless. “Can you—read this?”

  He shook his head bemusedly.

  “But I can!” she cried. “It’s in my own language.” She bent closer.

  “It’s a record of what happened!” she went on urgently, her eyes going down the closely written lines. “And Cal wrote it!” she finished, studying the signature.

  “What does it say?” Balmore demanded, his eyes shining.

  “There’s a lot of it…He describes several important inventions… Yes, yes, here he pays a tribute to my memory! He is very unhappy without me, he says. But—here we are! He writes: ‘To continue to live on this world of Vinra is impossible. Below, the material is too spongy to permit of building a complete city, and above we have produced a too fruitful landscape! The water and air stolen from our home world brought with it spores and seeds which have settled and grown. Here, with violent sunshine and heat for seven hundred twenty hours, changed conditions, and extreme humidity which prevents
any cold during the night, amazing growth has taken place.

  “ ‘For all our efforts we are powerless to prevent the slow strangulation of our cities by plant life. Departure is the only answer. I am writing this record prior to our evacuation and shall place it in a sealed vault which I know will be proof against devouring vegetation. A second box beside this one for the record, will contain all the prints for the inventions I have named. Someday somebody may come here and make use of these ideas. We have decided to go to the third world. Young and deadly perhaps, but tractable and not consumed with avid life. I think we may master it’—”

  The girl stopped, her eyes wide.

  “Earth!” Stephen Balmore exclaimed. “The third world! They went to Earth at the finish!”

  “The very world to which chance brought me!” Iana looked about her with shining eyes. “Oh, now there is so much that I understand! So very much! You are of my race! I belong to you! Do you not realize that it explains away the mystery of how life began on your planet? Explains too why the other worlds are empty? Grant, do you begin to understand, too?”

  “Yes,” he said slowly, “I think I do. We have come to the end of the odyssey. The complication of space and time has unfolded to us in the strangest possible way. And yet—why not? Universes go in circles; microcosm and macrocosm are in circles; orbits are in circles; life itself, even history. Above all things I realize one amazing fact— I am Cal Anrax!”

  “But that’s impossible!” Balmore exclaimed.

  “I tell you I must be, doctor!” There was sudden ringing authority in Grant’s voice. “I dared to think of the possibility for the first time when I felt myself drawn irresistibly towards Iana, when I was so jealous of the long forgotten Cal Anrax because of his scientific knowledge. Then I remembered things. Of all people, I alone understood Iana and her efforts with a formula! No person without some inherited connection could have grasped it so readily—”

  “And there were other things,” Iana hurried on, catching Grant’s arm. “The way you kept saying over and over to me that you felt as if space were familiar to you, that you were not making the journey for the first time. That was when I too first dared to hope that you might be an unthinkably distant successor to my beloved Cal. But I had to be sure first.”

  “There can be no doubt of it now,” Grant said quietly. “I finished the theory of thermodynamic equilibrium which Cal had in mind for Vaxil and his minions. Only a continuation of ideas through one individual mind could have prompted that. And, too, I knew, with everything in me, that somewhere—in a remote past—I had concealed records of scientific discoveries. Standing in that terrace outside memory came floating to me—the memory of a secret vault, a special slide—seen as though in a dream.”

  “And none but the mind of Cal could have understood the combination of the lock,” the girl finished. “See this lock for yourself. It is in our own symbols, not Earthian. Yet you understand them, Grant! Oh, Grant, this is more wonderful than I ever dared hope! I lost my race, only to find it around me on that wonderful world of Earth! I lost Cal, too, only to discover that he lives on, that his scientific spirit lives again through you. Never since my rebirth have I been so happy. You are Cal, yes, in a different fleshly form. And—and yet, not so very different, either. You remember I once told you how much you reminded me of him?”

  “My science is not quite so good as his was.” Grant was smiling now. “Maybe the skill became blunted by the interval of time. Maybe it was even lost altogether in the struggle to master the vagaries of Earth in the early days. Maybe—lots of things.”

  “Do you imply from all this that you are Cal—reincarnated?” Balmore asked slowly.

  “Certainly I do. So excellent a scientist as you must admit that reincarnation is not only possible, but logical. It happened in Iana’s case that an identical reincarnation took place because the self-same atomic configuration came into being twice over, by sheer chance.

  “In my case a majority of atoms and electrons forming the original Cal re-gathered in the normal course of evolution over millions of years. I don’t doubt that I have lived hundreds of lives in between, all in some form or other reminiscent of Cal.

  “In some of those lives I was doubtless a scientist and in other perhaps not. But the entity of Cal persisted through all the phases because he, so far as we are concerned, was the original pattern. Now I am here again as Grant Mayson in Nineteen Sixty-Four, entirely unaware of my past existence on another world until I visited that world and the telepathic memories started by Iana awakened me to the truth.”

  “Correct,” Iana said gently, clinging to his arm. “So utterly, beautifully correct! I know it, as a woman, as one who loved Cal more than anything in life—and I don’t need cold science to prove it.”

  “Fate or coincidence has been unusually lavish,” Stephen Balmore said reflectively.

  Although Mayson answered Balmore, it was Iana on whom he kept his gaze.

  “Perhaps,” Grant said. “Or maybe there is a destiny that shapes things after all, that the deepest wishes of our heart do mature in the end, no matter how many cycles pass between. Time, after all, is only an arbitrary measurement which is made by mathematicians so as to enable them to decide what happens in space.”

  He broke off, smiling, and caught the girl to him.

  “Iana,” he said gently, “I shall not be the ruler of the world when we get back to Earth—not even of half of it. We shall try and colonize this world and Mars, of course, and we will have a hand in it. But otherwise I’ll just be Grant Mayson, scientist, maybe a bit better than most because of things I have learned and the secrets you have bestowed. But don’t expect greatness. You’ll be purely and simply Mrs. Mayson, wife of a young physicist.”

  “Legally, yes,” she smiled. “In my imagination you will always be something infinitely greater than that. Not that I shall worry. I shall go back to Earth knowing that my own folk are around me, that they are of my flesh and blood after all, that the secrets I have handed on—and those contained in this other box here—are only treasures to which they are entitled. I am no longer a girl of Mars, or Venus, Grant—I’m a woman of Earth!”

  LAST SECRET WEAPON

  CHAPTER I

  THE BARBARIC INVENTION

  The shabby old man with the shuffling walk and untidy grey hair moved slowly through the corridor of marble and gilt, carrying a small valise in his hand. His tired, wrinkled eyes seemed bewildered by the infinity of elevators and moving stairways he encountered. There were neon indicators everywhere, pointing the way. He looked his relief when a trim, uniformed girl took his arm and led him into the reception office.

  “Dr. Mane? Of course!” She smiled and went through a black door marked “Private.” In less than a moment she returned. “Go right in, doctor. Mr. Kronheim is expecting you.”

  “Thank you—so much.”

  The old man shambled in and stood blinking round an office of extraordinary size. He started nervously as the door closed behind him. He felt and looked insignificant amidst the leather chairs, desks, and cabinets.

  “Hello there, Dr. Mane—come along in!” The voice that boomed across the expanse was powerful, but its cordiality sounded artificial.

  Mane went onwards to the desk and grasped the fleshy paw held out to him. For a moment or two he stood studying the man whom nearly everybody knew and whom a good many feared. Rolf Kronheim was the square-headed, immaculately dressed master of the Kronheim Investment Trust—and the Trust did not limit itself to this vast Wall Street edifice either.

  “Sit down, doctor. Have a cigar.” Kronheim pushed the silver box across with fingers that sprouted diamonds.

  “No—no, if you don’t mind. I don’t smoke.” Mane sat down wearily to continue his survey. He was not deceived by the effusiveness. Rolf Kronheim was no philanthropist. His glacier blue eyes and merciless mouth were proof enough of that. These, added to an intelligent head from which the grey hair had nearly entirely departed all con
trived to portray a man of strength and pitiless ambition.

  For his part Kronheim decided his visitor was a fool, like the rest of the crackpot scientists who took up his time. But on this occasion there was just a chance… Physically weak: mentally powerful. That was Dr. Mane.

  “You mentioned…bombs,” Kronheim said suddenly.

  “Yes—a new type of bomb,” Mane nodded. “I’ve tried to interest various people, even the Government, but without success.”

  “Unimaginative, I suppose?”

  “On the contrary. They say my invention is too barbaric to use and refer me to the Protocol of Geneva… But I need money, Mr. Kronheim—desperately! My daughter and I are nearly destitute.”

  Kronheim raised his eyebrows. “Too barbaric, eh?” he murmured. “The sentiment of our defence ministers and firms is astounding… Fortunately I am not a man of foolish emotions, doctor. If you have something good I can use it. If not… Suppose you demonstrate?”

  He got to his feet and led the little scientist into the adjoining laboratory. A white clad expert with sharp grey eyes and fluffy brown hair came up expectantly.

  “Dr. Mane, meet my scientific advisor Professor Standish. I rely on his judgment implicitly.”

  Standish shook hands and smiled unemotionally. He said briefly, “I see some hundreds of so called scientific inventions in a month, not one of which is any use. Fortunately for you there is a war on in Europe so a new type of bomb may be marketable.”

  “Possibly,” Mane agreed quietly. “My bombs sink through the ground as a stone sinks through water. They explode where you want and when you want. That, perhaps, is marketable?”

  Standish started to proclaim his disbelief in such a bomb until Kronheim cut him short.

  “Take no notice of him, doctor. I guess he’s soured with so many scientific disappointments…Now, the place is yours. Get busy.”

  He sat down, fat legs crossed, and pulled at his cigar. Standish stood watching with an eyebrow raised in doubt.