Astounding Science Fiction Stories: An Anthology of 350 Scifi Stories Volume 2 (Halcyon Classics)

by Various

  "There wasn't any more in the newspapers about it," he said. "I have a friend in California who got me the photographs."

  He looked at me intently. "You won't believe any of this." He pressed the coin into the palm of his hand. "You won't be able to."

  "The photographs," he continued, as if lecturing, "were of characters projected by the sphere when placed before a focused light. The sphere was transparent, you see, imbedded with dark microscopic specks. By moving the sphere a certain distance each time, there was a total projection of three hundred and sixty different characters in eighteen different orderings. Or nineteen different orderings if you count one which was a list of all the characters."

  I made a mental note of the numbers. I felt they were significant.

  "As I said," he continued, "I obtained the photographs of the characters. Very strange shapes, totally unlike the characters of Oriental languages, but yet that is the closest way to describe them." He jerked forward in his chair, "Except, of course, ostensively."

  "Later," I said. I wanted to get through the preliminaries first. There would be time later to see the photographs.

  * * * * *

  "The characters projected by the sphere," he said, "weren't like the characters of any known language." He paused dramatically. "There was reason to believe they had origin in an unknown culture. A culture more scientifically advanced than our own."

  "And the reasons for this supposition?" I asked.

  "The material ... the material of the sphere. It could only be roughly classified as ferro-plastic. Totally unknown, amazing imperviousness. A synthetic material, hardly the product of a former culture."

  "From Mars?" I said, smiling.

  "There were all kinds of conjectures, but, of course, the important thing was to see if the projection of characters was a message. The message, if any, would mean more than any conjecture."

  "You translated it?"

  He polished the coin on his jacket. "You won't dare believe it," he said sharply.

  He cleared his throat and stiffened into a more rigid posture. "It wasn't exactly translation. You see, to us none of the characters had designation. They were just characters."

  "So it was a problem of decoding?" I asked.

  "As it turned out, no. Decoding is dependent on knowledge of language characteristics--characteristics of known languages. Decoding was tried, but without success. No, what we had to find was a key to the language."

  "You mean like the Rune Stone?"

  "More or less. In principle, we needed a picture of a cow, and a sign of meaning indicating one of the characters.

  "For me, there was no possibility of finding similarities between the characters and characters of other languages--that would require tremendous linguistic knowledge and library facilities. Nor could I use a decoding approach--that would require special knowledge of techniques and access to electronic computers and other mechanical aids. No, I had to work on the assumption that the key to the sphere was implicit in the sphere."

  "You hoped to find the key to the language in the language itself?"

  "Exactly. You know, of course, some languages do have an implicit key? For example hieroglyphics or picture language. The word for cow is a picture of a cow."

  He looked at the toes of his shoes. "You won't be able to believe it. It's impossible to believe. I use the word impossible in its logical sense.

  "In most languages," he continued, looking up from his shoes, "the sound of some words themselves indicates the meaning of the word. Onomatopoetic words like bowwow, buzz."

  "And the key to the unknown language?" I asked. "How did you find it?"

  * * * * *

  I watched him push the coin against the back of his arm, then lift it to read the backward letters pressed into his skin. He looked up at me and smiled.

  "I built models of the characters. Big material ones, exactly proportionate to the ones projected. Then--quite by accident--I viewed one of them through a glass globe the size of the original sphere. What do you think I saw?"

  "What?" I noticed he had the boyish look again.

  "A distortion of the model. But that's not what's important. The distortions, on study, gave specific visual entities. Like when looking at one of those trick pictures and suddenly seeing the lion in the grass. The lines outlining the lion are there all the time, only the observer has to view them as the outline of a lion. It was the same with the models of the characters, except the shapes that appeared were not of lions or other recognizable things. But they did suggest."

  He pressed the coin against his forehead, closed his eyes and appeared to be thinking deeply. "Yes, impossible to believe. No one can believe it."

  "In addition to the visual response, the distortions gave me definite feelings. Not mixtures of feelings, but one definite emotional experience."

  "How do you mean?"

  "One character when viewed through the globe gave me a visual image and, at the same time, a strong feeling of light hilarity."

  "I take it then that these distortions seemed to connote meanings, rather than denote them. You might say that their meaning was conveyed through a Gestalt experience on the part of the observer."

  "Yes, each character gave a definite Gestalt. But, the Gestalt was the same for each observer. Or at least for thirty-five observers there was an eighty per cent correlation."

  I whistled softly. "And the translation?"

  "Doctor, what would you say if I told you the translation was unbelievable; that it couldn't be seriously entertained by any man? What if I said that it would take the sanity of any man who believed it?"

  "I would say that it might well be incorrect."

  He took some papers from his pocket and laughed excitedly, slumping down in the chair. "This is the complete translation in idiomatic English. I'm going to let you read it, but first I want you to consider a few things."

  He hid the papers behind the back of his chair; his face became even more boyish, almost as if he were deciding on where to put the tipped over outhouse.

  "Consider first, doctor, that there was a total projection of three hundred and sixty different characters. The same number as the number of degrees in a circle. Consider also that there were eighteen different orderings of the characters, or nineteen counting the alphabetical list. The square root of three hundred and sixty would lie between eighteen and nineteen."

  "Yes," I said. I remembered there was something significant about the numbers, but I wasn't at all sure that it was this.

  "Consider also," he continued, "that the communication was through the medium of a sphere. Moreover, keep in mind that physics accepts the path of a beam of light as its definition of a straight line. Yet, the path is a curve; if extended sufficiently it would be a circle, the section of a sphere."

  "All right," I said. By now the patient was pounding the coin against the sole of one shoe.

  "And," he said, "keep in mind that in some sense time can be thought of as another dimension." He suddenly thrust the papers at me and sat back in the chair.

  I picked up the translation and began reading. The patient sat stiffly in the leather chair on the other side of the desk. Nervously he pressed a coin into the palm of one hand.

  "Just start anywhere," I said, "and tell me all about it."

  "As before?" Without waiting for an answer, he continued, the coin clutched tightly in one hand. "I'm Charles J. Fisher, professor of philosophy at Reiser College."

  He looked at me quickly. "Or at least I was until recently." For a second his face was boyish. "Professor of philosophy, that is."

  I smiled and found that I was staring at the coin in his hand. He gave it to me. On one side I read the words: THE STATEMENT ON THE OTHER SIDE OF THIS COIN IS FALSE. The patient watched....

  * * *

  Contents

  THE MAN WHO LIVED

  By Raymond F. O'Kelley

  He stepped from his Pimlico lodging house—into a London as dead as Babylon.


  Hunger and the sight of plenty drove Edward Penderby from the streets at 9 o'clock the night of that September 10. London's heat, pulsing at wall and roof all afternoon and evening had made the Lupus Street attic oven hot. He opened the window, and the effort left him panting.

  Penderby was tired in body and mind, tired as only the workless on his futile quest can be. His underwear clung. The soles of his feet seered burning. The hunger-pain had given way to an ache that throbbed between his eyes and the top of his head.

  Picture this Penderby. Picture him as he lay, while the room darkened, on the soiled coverlet of the truckle-bed. Lanky, ill-shaven, black hair in need of cutting, eyes quick even in defeat, suit now so ragged that any employer would have been repelled; and in dubious control a clever, savage brain scheming ever to no purpose.

  And ask why he was chosen.

  Whatever the quality of Penderby's faculties, worry and fatigue had numbed his mind beyond the power of directed thought that night, and he stared as unthinkingly as a human being can at the lamp-thrown window-pattern taking shape on the slanted ceiling.

  When that pattern was sharpest, he had fallen asleep, one leg still hanging over the side of the bed, and it was three hours after the automatic extinguishing of the street-lights wiped the design away that he awoke.

  "If it weren't so infernally hot" he said, "I'd stay in bed"

  Then he saw that he had slept in his clothes, and cursed. They would stick to his sweating skin more than ever. As he swung onto the edge of the bed, he felt the clamminess of them already.

  But he washed, tiptoed down through the fetid lodging-house air, and stepped into the freshness of the street. He turned toward London's heart, and walked slowly.

  What impelled him, what had caused him to leave his room so early and make a miserable day longer than it normally would have been, he did not know.

  The first body was outside a store at the corner. It was an old newspaper-seller's, in a greasy blue suit that shone. Copies of the Evening Standard and the Star had fallen from his arms to the sidewalk, Penderby, determined not to be an inquest witness, hurried past.

  But beyond the corner was another body, a girl who had been standing in a doorway. Her body had folded into the attitude of a sleeper on the step, and her cigarette had burned away in the palm of one hand. There was no blood, so far as Penderby could see. But she might have been murdered; so might the old man, only a few feet away; and Penderby turned and ran.

  He stopped short to avoid a bundle of rags and what had been a slum harridan.

  He was frightened, now. He retreated to the middle of the street, and looked swiftly up and down. Two more bodies were about fifty yards away. And one was that of a policeman.

  "What in thunder is this?" Penderby asked aloud. "Am I awake, anyway?"

  He undeniably was, and the bodies still were there.

  "They can't be asleep, all together," he said. "Nor drunk—look at that cop."

  But he went back to the sidewalk, and touched the two bodies on it gingerly. He said, "Hey, wake up!"—and felt a little sacrilegious, as he tried to shake what had been the girl. They were corpses, without a doubt. So, he found, were the bodies of the policeman and the well-dressed youth nearby.

  Five bodies! And not noticed, apparently till now.

  "I don't give a damn," Penderby muttered. "Let someone else be a witness. I'd get no thanks for it, I'll bet."

  On he went. A pair of cats had died on the steps of a house. What he assumed to be the body of a man lay on the other side of the street. "Let him lie there!"

  He found himself counting the dead on Warwick Way. They seemed natural after a time; most, at a distance, were dark bundles that matched the drab street. His astonishment gradually receded; it did not grow: it became a curtain in his awareness, new background that gave a new proportion. But he stopped now and then to ponder the astounding fact once more, and his thinking did not lessen the fact that these streets in the center of London were filled with dead.

  To one he did give heed. A girl, seventeen or eighteen, had been leaning out of a first-story window, face cupped in hand. Her elbows had spread on the sill, and her fingers had slid into her yellow hair. Chin and part of one cheek rested on the stone slab.

  He ran to the door of the house. He pressed the bell, wielded the knocker till the street echoed. No one was aroused.

  "It's a plague!" Penderby shouted. His voice was shrill. A sickly, light sweat stood on his forehead. "It's a plague! It's got all the town and it'll get me!"

  But he began to reason, with the surprising coolness that marked most of what he did that day. He walked from one to another of six or seven bodies on the street. The expressions of the faces were those of persons who had tried to prevent themselves from slipping, from tripping, from being struck. There was no sign of panic. And there was no sign that anyone had run to aid anyone else.

  "No," he concluded. "If it was a plague, it killed everyone at once. But a plague couldn't do that; and anyway how comes it that I'm here, after sleeping beside an open window all night?" Then, "But am I awake?"

  He pinched the soft skin on the backs of his hands, in turn, several times, stamped, shook himself as if to fling a burden away.

  He was awake. These others had died, Edward Penderby was alive.

  He went on, his bearing less hesitant than before.

  Sixteen or seventeen busses, passengers in all of them, drivers and conductors in a few, stood in the Victoria railroad-depot yard. Penderby did not enter any of them. He noted a blue-uniformed group in a corner, and remembered that drivers, conductors, and inspectors had gathered at the spot.

  There was no sound of trains. One, bearing travelers from the Continent who had landed the evening before, had drawn in. Some doors were open, but the cars still were full.

  Outside were taxi-men dead, newsboys dead, policemen dead. Two bodies in German-cut clothes had fallen into a gutter; they were those of refugees, probably.

  Horror and alarm gained brief mastery, and Penderby fled the place. As he fled, Big Ben and Cathedral bells began to peal the useless hour, and made a clangor in his ears.

  He stopped only when his lungs seemed about to burst and his aching legs could not carry him farther.

  An automobile stood six feet from him. It was the first he had noticed. He stepped onto the running-board. But he had had to respect property, and he paused.

  "Is there anyone alive here?" he shouted. Then he bawled the question.

  There was no reply, and he slipped in.

  But the ignition had been locked and the key removed. He cursed in impatience already different from the vexations of his months of struggle, and jumped out. A bigger automobile was ahead, and the driver had slumped onto the wheel. He opened the nearest door, turned the body off balance and guided it to the ground, seated himself at the wheel, and started the engine. The key had been lying on the floor.

  Bicycles, cars and bodies blocked the way every few yards; so Penderby traveled slowly. He passed the houses of Parliament and Government buildings in Whitehall.

  Trafalgar Square contained more dead than even the space outside the depot. He spared them only a glance. The air was chill, and the hunger that sleep had held off had returned. He drove to a big restaurant three hundred yards away, and, somewhat timidly despite all he had seen, walked in.

  The restaurant had been full. He halted at a table at which a middle-aged man had sat. On it were beef, ham, cakes, bread and butter, a pot of tea. Standing, he snatched food in both hands, and as he ate wolfishly from one, the other was stretched for still more. But he could not eat as much as he had expected; his stomach had been used to little.

  He was thirsty. The long-cold tea cut the saliva from his tongue; still, it was bitter, and he set the pot, from which he had gulped, back with a crash. He remembered that he was in the less-expensive section. He returned to the entrance-hall, stepped over bodies of waiters and others, and went up the broad stairs.

  Bottles and g
lasses stood on a table near the cashier's desk in the second dining-room. He poured a glass of wine. He swallowed it in a second, poured and drank another; and, a little less quickly, another. His body began to tingle; he lost awareness of blistered feet and sticky clothes.

  "This is something like it!" said Penderby.

  Bottle and glass on knees, he sat on a chair he had drawn a little apart, and mused in a mingling of contentment and glee.

  His mind suddenly seized on the fact that the dead he faced had been more than well-to-do. He leaped onto the chair, waved bottle and glass aloft, and cried:

  "Silence!"

  His voice mounted to a singsong screech:

  "Ladies and gentlemen! Ladies and gentlemen! You simply cannot know the pleasure it gives me to be with you this morning! There's a slight difference, to be sure, between your standing and mine just now, but you're big enough to overlook it, aren't you?

  "Well, ladies and gentlemen of the upper crust, I give you—"

  There Penderby paused.

  "What do I give you?"

  He rubbed his forehead with the wet bottle-spout.

  "I've got it! I give you discontent, disappointment, starvation, clothes the dogs bark at—and a happy death!"

  He drank the toast, sent bottle and glass sliding and spinning along the waxed floor, and ran down the stairs. He was exhilarated as never before; he was triumphant.

  The Strand, London's most famous thoroughfare, which leads from Trafalgar Square to Fleet Street, was strewn with dead. They had fallen at bus stops, in late-shutting stores (lights in some of these burned still), on pedestrian crossings, in busses and automobiles that had crashed against one another and in places formed a barrier from wall to wall. Here and there, wheels had squeezed blood into oozy patches.

  A bus had shattered a café window, and spilled cakes and pastries onto the sidewalk. Another had snapped an electric-light post, and wires lay in curls and tangles for sixty yards.

  One wing of a Rolls-Royce, a white-haired woman in the back, had littered a section of pavement with the plate glass of a clothing-store.