Rule of the Brains

by John Russell Fearn

  Even in that consciousness your name was Richard. I shouted your name with all my power. I reviled you, knowing you for what you are in my normal life—my dearest young friend.

  I fell into that gulf of fire; perhaps I died and was reborn into another state of consciousness. I do not know. I remember only that I fell through the floor of the gulf of fire into a world that had no opacity, where I could see through the ground and where no solid seemed to block my body or vision. I got to my feet and walked forward steadily, until presently I came to a solid world again—found myself wandering in drear, unknown streets, a place which I now realise was London. Some strange force compelled me through a closed door, and I came to a figure lying asleep in bed.

  In an instant I recognized you, not as I really know you, but as Richard the man who had condemned me to the flames. I became seized with a mad fury; I tried to strangle you, but my hands went through you. As I could not do you any physical injury, I stood glaring down my hate upon you. I saw you writhe in your sleep. I cursed you for condemning me to the flames. Then suddenly you awoke.

  At that instant something seemed to snap within me, and I found myself slowly recovering here before my desk—not refreshed, but more weary and hopeless than ever. I have written down these words; I feel somehow that you will come and find me. Don’t think too hard of me, Richard. I have tried—and failed.

  You have my record—and you will also find a letter, which I wrote some days ago, in anticipation of this event.

  Now I shall go into the laboratory and lie on that infernal table for the last time, for perhaps I shall now be able to sleep.

  Sleep!

  MYSTERY OF THE MARTIAN PENDULUM

  with Raymond A. Palmer

  CHAPTER 1: METAL BARRIER

  “How far down in this damned planet do you think the stuff might be, Cliff?” Val Morrison asked the question.

  He sat folded up, his big, six feet four frame as thin as a knife-blade, with a face like a pickaxe; he was possibly the toughest man in the whole outfit. He sat regarding Cliff Anderson now through his tiny, merry, little dark eyes.

  “Lord knows!” The chief engineer rubbed his big, stubby chin. “Doesn’t matter much, anyway; these Martian guys who went before us did a whole lot of chiseling. We’re down two thousand miles already—but no sign of anilum so far. Soon we’ll hit Mars’ core. Mebbe we’ll find something before then.”

  “Yeah—we hope...,” Val said dubiously.

  The sudden blare of signal sirens came from the depths. The whining din echoed through the reaches of the tunnels and shafts. The voices of the men at the head of the main shaft came forth in a murmur of sound.

  Immediately Cliff and Val were on their feet, glancing at each other.

  “Guess they must have hit something vital,” Val said briefly.

  He started to move forward as he spoke, Cliff beside him. At the pit top Cliff elbowed his way through the men.

  “What’s wrong below? What’s happened?”

  The radio operator in contact with below glanced up.

  “Number 4 unit operating in underground cavern has encountered a steel wall, sir. Want your advice....”

  “Steel wall? Down there!” Cliff looked his amazement. “But how the devil did—?”

  “Oh, be damned to conjectures; let’s go,” Val snapped, and strode forward into the waiting shaft cage. He waited until Cliff had joined him, then threw in the switches.

  For several minutes they dropped steadily down through the miles of shafting thrust deep into the planet’s bowels. At last they touched bottom, flung back the grille, then hurried over to the group of engineers gathered round their enormous boring machine. It had stopped before a massive rotunda of gray metal stretching up into the cavern ceiling and on either side as far as the eye could see.

  Richardson, the engineer in charge, nodded to the barrier as Cliff came up.

  “Thought it was anilum at first, Cliff, but our tests show it is steel of sorts. All in one piece; been flowed together by some skilled process. No sign of a join. Thought you’d better see it before we tried blasting it through. Might be something dangerous on the other side.”

  Cliff surveyed it keenly. “Such as?”

  “You never know. Maybe molten lava: even conserved water supplies. Might be anything. The Martians sure didn’t mean it escaping, whatever it is....”

  Val narrowed his eyes. “Might even be Martian life behind it,” he murmured. “I’m not fooling,” he went on, seeing Cliff’s doubting look. “After all, I figure the Martians must have gone somewhere, and we’ve seen no trace of life in the upper or surface regions since we first landed on this hell-fired planet.”

  Cliff tugged out his ray gun and fired it experimentally at the barrier. The metal sizzled and liquefied under the heat. He nodded curtly.

  “Okay, start blasting it through. But take it easy and use a small radius. If there’s anything dangerous released, we’ll have time to get clear anyway.”

  The big engineer gave the order. With Val beside him, Cliff mounted to the bore’s flat deck and stood among the crew. In the belly of the ship’s control room the men set about their tasks. The powerful tractors moved. A needle-pointed spear of incandescent heat stabbed the barrier and began to drive through it like a white-hot needle through a slab of butter. The air began to reek of heated metals and electric discharges.

  At the end of a half-hour the reaction instruments showed the boring was finished. Immediately cooling radiations were forced through the barrier and searchlights were swung onto the foot-wide hole.

  Staring into it the engineers could see nothing but darkness.

  “There’s air anyway,” Val said, frowning. “Distinct draft blowing through.”

  “That might be the air blowing right through the planet from the other side,” Cliff mused. “Doesn’t seem attenuated enough though...and it’s breathable too.” He shrugged and turned to the borers.

  “All right, finish the job,” he said. “Use full range this time and plow right through.”

  This time the beam incorporated an area wide enough to permit of the entire borer machine following it through. As before, it took it thirty minutes to nose its juggernaut way through the wall, which was all of twenty-five to thirty feet in thickness. Once beyond the barrier, engineers stood sniffing the stale, musty air, and gazing round in the glare of the searchlights.

  They were within a colossal artificially bored cavern, filled with an extraordinary number of gray metal balls dotted about in various directions.

  Some were large and some small, but all were bolted and riveted immovably to tripod stands of metal. Right and left they went, round the natural curve of the cavern out of sight. In the cavern’s center was yet another ball of metal, gray like the smaller balls, and apparently a kind of master ball. The distance to the major ball was perhaps two miles. How far the cavern itself really extended was lost in darkness.

  The air seemed to be coming from a source in the cavern hidden by the major ball.

  Cliff climbed down from the borer and went to the nearest ball, stood looking at it perplexedly. At last he turned to the others and held up his hand for silence.

  In a moment it was clear that the little ball was whirring mysteriously like a spring uncoiling.

  “Machinery!” Richardson exclaimed.

  Silence fell on the party again as there came a new sound through the heavy silence—a solemn, deliberate ticking like that of a giant grandfather clock.

  It went on steadily and Cliff consulted his watch.

  “Something is ticking at exactly three-second intervals,” he proclaimed finally. “And it has only just started.... Looks like we have stumbled onto something, boys.”

  Val said slowly, “The ticking comes from that giant ball there. Let’s take a look at it.”

  They mounted the borer again and drove forward the intervening distance. The progression of the journey made the ticking all the more audible, until by the time they h
ad reached the giant ball itself it was a solemn reverberation that boomed along the floor.

  Tick.... Tock. Tick.... Tock.

  “Time bomb?” Val suggested laconically.

  “Quit clowning,” Cliff snapped impatiently. “It’s pretty plain we started the works going by coming in here. Nothing happened until we went over to look at that smaller ball. Somehow I don’t like it. There’s a deliberation about that ticking that’s kind of ominous.”

  “Yeah...,” Val meditated. He said, “Suppose before we start forming opinions we look around a bit? This air mystery, for instance....”

  CHAPTER 2: INVISIBLE ENEMY

  At the rear of the giant ball they discovered the reason for the air supply and its un-Martian density and purity. A large vent sunken into the floor, and presumably communicating by a shafting system to the some air-generating plant—was covered with a massive lid of machinery, the unit itself being housed inside a transparent case. The components were working visibly in the midst of a mass of thin gluey substance.

  As the thin air streamed up the giant shaft it passed into one giant valve in the machinery, went through an amplifying process by which heavier air pressure was added, and was then expelled by a piston system at the other side of the machine, a massive pipe being driven through the tough outer casing. The thing was virtually the mechanical heart of Mars, pumping out good air from newly created gases.

  “The Martians were damn good engineers, anyway,” Val commented.

  “But just why did they need to give air to this cavern in particular when there is only a lot of balls in it that don’t need air to work in...?”

  “Unless,” Cliff mused, “they wanted intelligent life to come into this cavern and have a look round in order to start the machinery going. The air would invite anybody inside—as it did us. I’ll bet, when we broke through the wall, we completed a circuit that started the air pump working.”

  Val grunted. “Say, maybe you’ve got something. Anyway, we can check up on that by examining the wall later. What we’ve got to do right now is find out what makes these balls tick.”

  He tugged out his gun and fired it experimentally at a corner of the heart’s transparent casing. The beam simply glanced off. Val stared blankly.

  “By all the saints, it’s anilum!” he gasped. “Molded anilum, at that. Ray guns will never penetrate this! It takes a temperature of something like 15,000° C. to melt it.”

  “Everything in this cave’s made of anilum,” said Cliff.

  The engineers glanced at each other, then with one accord they looked at the monster ball. Within it something was still ticking solemnly at regular three-second intervals.

  “Say, something’s just occurred to me,” Val said presently. “Is it possible that we’re right at the core of Mars and that this giant metal ball is natural? Or at least it was natural until it changed into unthinkably hard anilum.”

  “So what?” Cliff’s brows were knitted.

  “If the Martian engineers found a way to hollow out its center, which is quite conceivable, they might have put something inside it. From the stuff out of the center, they manufactured all these other little balls. We’d probably find by mathematics that the material used in these little balls equals the extracted mass from inside the larger one. In plain words, pressure changed nickel iron into anilum, but Martian science was clever enough to enable the Martians to find out how to bore through it and hollow it out. The seam of anilum which the first Martian explorers from Earth found seems to show that that seam was ejected volcanically, proving conclusively that it was from the bowels of Mars.”

  “Which might explain why we can’t find anilum on Earth,” Cliff mused. “So far our Earth has not ejected any of its deep baser material; only the upper molten metals. Deep down there will be anilum, but we shall never find it until Earth is as riddled with passages to its core as Mars now is. Yes, Val, I think you’ve got something.... But I’ll be damned if I understand the Martian purpose.”

  “Every planet has a ball of metal in its center under terrible pressure—nickel iron center,” Val mused. “In a normal planet like Earth it is a liquid solid—a paradoxical way of showing what pressure can do with a solid. But in a world like Mars, or the Moon, where the rest of the planet is practically dead and shrunken, the pressure round the center has relaxed, it might leave a solid ball of metal, which because of that pressure might become anilum.”

  The puzzled silence that fell on the group was broken suddenly by a hoarse scream from Richardson. He had wandered from the others to inspect the next steel ball. Simultaneously with his scream everybody present saw a light wink momentarily with blinding brilliance high up in the lofty ceiling of the chasm. Richardson, dead in line with it, collapsed his length on the cavern floor.

  “My God!” Cliff exclaimed, startled—then he rushed forward with the others beside him.

  That they were too late was obvious the moment they turned the engineer over. His face was charred to ashes, the upper part of his neck and chest were burned away horribly.

  Cliff raised a grim face and stared round on the now inscrutable roof and its galleries of rock and pumice stone.

  “Something mechanical that killed him,” he whispered, standing up again. “Boys, we’re facing something deadly around here. It’s got to be located....”

  He stood watching bitterly as the unfortunate Richardson was carried to the borer. The solemn ticking of the giant ball followed the stunned party.

  Once back at the upper levels in the domed base camp, Cliff summoned his engineering chiefs from their different tasks and put the position to them.

  “...and so we face a mystery,” he concluded. “Down there in the core of Mars is a mechanical system of destruction controlled by God knows what. It’s taken Richardson. We know neither the extent nor the nature of the thing we’re fighting—but we do know that we are going to stop it. We’ve found anilum too, though not exactly in the way we had hoped. That makes searching in other parts of this planet unnecessary. What you have got to do is get every available flame gun machine and transport it down to the lower cavern. We’re going to try and liquefy those anilum balls, and the big one, which ticks. We have one or two portable furnaces, and since the balls are on tripods we can shove the furnaces under them.

  “You, Townshend, are our chief scientist.” Cliff looked at the squat, broad-shouldered man standing before him. “You’ll go to work to try and figure out why those balls tick, and what they are supposed to be. It won’t be easy, and you may never solve the mystery—but there’s no harm in trying.”

  “I’ve got the instruments; maybe I’ll find something.” Townshend nodded his gray head.

  “We others will go to work to find out exactly what it was that struck Richardson down,” Cliff concluded grimly. “Sparks, you stay here in case we have to radio to Earth for help.”

  He turned to the door of the base with the others beside him. Then they paused and glanced at each other quickly at a sudden alien sound. It was a noise such as they had never heard before on Mars, a noise other than that of their own work.

  From remote distances came clanging concussions, the rattle of metal flanges slamming against each other and followed by the sharper note of locks snapping into position. Four times it was repeated. Twice from high over their heads and twice from below their feet. Then all was quiet again.

  “You know something,” Val said in the ensuing calm, “I dare to think that that was the locks to the outer surface closing! There are four of them, you know....”

  Puzzled, loath to believe the startling possibility of Val’s assertion, Cliff led the way to the shaft cage. Once the men were gathered—fifty in all—the descent began. Ten minutes later the entire party was back in the cavern.

  The searchlights on the borer were switched on and Cliff gave brief instructions. Then while three men remained to watch the searchlights and guide them according to orders, the others went to work to examine the rocky walls of the place
inch by inch. Ladders were set up against the approximate spot where the light had burned out Richardson’s life.

  Val and Cliff chose this particular task as their own especial duty. It took them some fifteen minutes of searching to discover a ball of anilum, only a small one, imbedded in the rock. In the center of the ball was a curiously faceted lens.

  “Looks like a glorified limelight,” Val said, scratching his head. “Not a chance of moving it. Only thing to do is to avoid it.”

  “Yeah, I guess you’re right—”

  Cliff broke off with a start and turned round with dangerous speed on the ladder at a sudden wild scream from the opposite side of the cavern. He and Val were just in time to see part of the floor crack suddenly up the center in so neat a chasm that it was obviously mechanical. The floor simply fell apart in one complete seam—but into it dropped nearly thirty of the workers gathered in a bunch to inspect the giant ball. Their screams, mingled with the grinding roar of the floor’s parting, filled the giant cavern with hideous commotion.

  Cliff started to say something, then changed his mind. He scrambled down the ladder at top speed with Val tumbling after him. With the other workmen and scattered engineers they raced across in long leaps to the opening—but before they reached it, it began to close with invincible power like the jaws of a mammoth press. The agonized cries from below lapsed abruptly into silence. With a mighty dang the metal floor linked up again, leaving a line so thin it was almost undetectable.

  Cliff wiped his sweating face and looked around in bewilderment on his comrades’ horrified faces.

  “I don’t begin to understand it,” he almost whispered. “This is unthinkable! Ghastly! Thirty of them trapped down there and then crushed to death.... We’ve got to stop this if it’s the last thing we ever do! You realize that, all of you?” he nearly shouted.

  “Yeah, sure. Take it easy. It wasn’t your fault.” Val’s voice was gruff with sympathy.

  “Not my fault, perhaps, but I’m head of the Expedition and responsible for everybody here. Try to think how I feel....” Cliff knelt down and stared at the closed jaws of the floor. He got up with a hopeless look in his eyes.