“Jordan will kill me, of course. I am the last obstacle in his path. But I don’t care. Anything, anything is better than this torture.”
What were those lines of Shelley?
Yet now despair itself is mild,
Even as the winds and waters are;
I could lie down like a tired child,
And weep away the life of care
Which I have borne and yet must bear,
Till death like sleep might steal on me—
His wan eyes traveled slowly. They lighted on the rigid blank face of Dr. Knopf.
“Poor fellow,” he thought. “I got him into this.”
They traveled on. They brushed over Margaret, came to a halt. She was seated on a crude kitchen chair, her hands folded in her lap. Her face was drawn and pinched; she was suffering. Something fluttered within her eyes; some little ghost that tried to escape the vast compulsion.
A flood of warm pity surged through Wentworth. Poor girl, what would happen to her? She would—she would—of course—she would be killed, even as he, Craig Wentworth. Jordan was ruthless.
Something snapped within him. He knew now what he felt, what had lain latent throughout the surge of events, the feverish rush of the past several days. He loved Margaret Simmons! Fool, fool that he had been! She would die now, so would he. It was too late!
He stared out of the window at the inevitable approach. The thud of feet against earth came up even in the face of the damnable “Obey!” In half a minute it would be over.
A wave of rebellion swept over him. Frantically he thrust his will against the palsying sound. He shouted, he screamed, he clamored with all the force of his fagged-out brain against the engulfing influence. It was useless. The troops were outside already, a white-haired colonel barked a command.
“Obey!” shouted the air waves with insane glee.
Heavy-shod feet stamped into the room. Some one seized his arm. He stared with onrushing insanity, thrust all the fervor of his will into one last smashing attack, and collapsed.
Jordan put down his glasses with a grin. “They’ve got him now,” he said. “But you keep it up. Don’t relax a minute until we have him here. He’s slippery, that fellow.”
“Obey! Obey!” they all said together, monotonously.
It was exhausting. Marshall was near collapse; Alison was shrill from much shouting. Doolittle repeated the words mechanically. He had been threatened with death if he did not persist.
“What is Maria doing now?” he wondered with his subconscious mind. The phantom of her grim, red visage rose before him. Even the mole with its three wagging black hairs on her chin. She spelled the old tight little circle of routine, of habits in accustomed grooves. There was safety, peace. What was he, Charles Doolittle, doing in these strange surroundings, harried, bullied, threatened?
A wave of meek rebellion swept over him. He looked around hurriedly. No one was watching him; each was concentrating, forcing his voice. He stopped the stupid chant and surrendered himself to a wallowing yearning for home and Maria.
At that very moment Craig Wentworth had shrieked his last attempt at defiance. The sono-amplifiers ceased suddenly. The fourfold will of the far-off man had beaten down the united efforts of the three.
Pressure lifted from Wentworth like a gasping diver hauled hastily to the surface from deep waters. The soldier who had gripped his arm, released him, stepped back uncertainly. The colonel brushed his forehead in bewilderment; there was confusion among the crowding men.
There was more confusion in the steel-built cupola.
Jordan staggered back, as if from a physical blow. He swerved, saw Doolittle—silent, rapt in ecstasy. In one stride he was at the little man’s side, towering.
“Shout, damn you, shout!”
His dark face was distorted with rage, his brain was reeling, his arm uplifted to strike.
Doolittle cowered, brought rudely back from his dreams. Something gushed. The meek, downtrodden little man was like a cornered rabbit with a terrier cutting off escape. Futilely, blindly, he fought back.
“I won’t, I won’t!” he screamed. “You can’t make me. I’ve had enough. Go on, kill me, I don’t care.”
Wentworth’s fuddled senses then cleared magically. It was now in effect five—his fourfold will plus the opposition of Doolittle—against three. He concentrated, forced his commands into roaring channels.
Margaret got up from her chair, a look of wide surprise on her face. Iron constricting bands around her brain lifted. She saw what was happening, spoke to the soldiers.
“March back to the parade ground. Seize Jordan. It is I who command you.” Her voice could not carry to the reviewing stand, but the troops were within sound.
With rigid mechanical movements the men moved out, formed ranks and went back.
Jordan’s arm fell to his side. His will was like water; he sat down with folded hands, waiting for Wentworth’s further orders. Alison, her face blown with red splotches, moaned and slipped to the ground. Marshall fainted. His heart was pumping too hard. His breathing came stertorously.
Only Doolittle stood erect, triumphant. His will flowed soothingly along on the tide of Wentworth’s radiated influence. Fear had left him.
XI.
It was quite dark when Craig Wentworth stepped to the microphones and sent his broadcast message of deliverance to the nation.
“You are all free now,” he said, and men, women, and children everywhere took deep breaths, looked at each other dazedly, and for the first time realized what strange compulsion they had been under. “Jordan is a prisoner, and so are all who were responsible for your hypnotic condition. Neither you nor the world at large will ever fully appreciate the terrible disaster that hung over you, the incalculable consequences that might have ensued from Jordan’s insane will. It is better so. Even now I am sending cables to the other nations of the Earth, apprising them of the overthrow of the menace to their security. No longer need they arm against a foe who would have destroyed them.
“As for you, so-called Bluebands, poor hypnotized instruments of a fanatic will, I release you. Disperse quietly to your homes, attend to your old normal duties. Special trains are waiting for your accommodation.
“To the nation of listeners, sleep with assurance to-night. By twelve midnight neither Jordan nor the others shall be of any further concern to you.”
It was near midnight. The blue-white light beat fiercely from the overhead reflector like a spotlight on the immaculate porcelain of the table. A figure lay on it, swathed in white robes, a gag of soft-white gauze in its mouth. Its head was shaven. Black eyes stared upward, indomitable with driving hate, unwinking, trying desperately to force its will across.
Around the operating table were a group of figures. Dr. Knopf, dressed in surgeon’s white, his face masked, his hairy arms bare to the elbow. With him was another figure, similarly attired, Dr. Hugh Lofting. Assistants hovered solicitously, arranging terribly gleaming instruments.
From outside, through the ventilator, came the buzz of the city of Washington, awake from its nightmare, humming with excitement. Wentworth and Margaret watched with half-sorrowful eyes, turning to each other for comfort. Something passed between them, warm, understanding. His hand tightened on her arm. She sighed contentedly.
“Poor fellow, in a way I’m sorry for him. All his dreams smashed.”
“Better his, than that the world should go smash. Afraid, darling?”
She smiled at him bravely. “No. I’ll welcome the operation. I have what I wanted anyway.”
He squeezed her arm. “We’ll be the last to go on. Then we shall be sure it’s all over.”
They turned Jordan over, so the back of his head was exposed. A delicate galvanometer registered the driving radiations from the other-universe globules. The needle was pressing hard against the limiting knob.
“Too bad,” Knopf said regretfully to Lofting, “that Wentworth won’t let us remove the globule
s intact and analyze them. Think what it would mean.”
“I know.” Lofting nodded. “I’d give my right arm to find out how they work.”
“Orders are orders.” Knopf sighed and swabbed the base of the skull with iodine.
These men were pure scientists.
He lifted his scalpel for the first swift incision. A distant church chimed out the hour of twelve. The point of the scalpel pricked the taut skin.
“Dr. Knopf! Dr. Knopf!”
The voice of a white-jacketed assistant pierced the tense silence like a sword. Fortunately, the surgeon’s nerves were steel. He lifted the scalpel.
“Look at the galvanometer!”
All eyes turned. Outside, the last echo of the bells died on the air.
The needle, which a moment before was quivering against maximum charge, now rested quietly against the zero knob. It registered nothing.
Wentworth was at the machine in swift steps. “A wire must have loosened.”
But all his searchings disclosed nothing. All the connections were tight.
“What does it mean?” For the first time Knopf was agitated.
Wentworth’s face twisted with strange emotion. “Only one thing,” he said quietly. “The gift has been taken away from us.”
“Nonsense!”
“I’ll prove it.” He stared steadily at Dr. Knopf. “I want you to put that scalpel down on the operating table. Obey me, it is my will.”
The neurologist looked at the scalpel in his hand, removed his mask, and looked at Wentworth.
“Was that a test?” he demanded.
“Yes.”
“Then you are right. The power has disappeared, evaporated. I feel under no compulsion to do what you desired.”
The long operating room was a babel of sound. Every one spoke at once and no one heard the other. Wentworth slipped out, brought the three bound captives into the room. Their frightened eyes searched his. One by one he released them, tested their wills on the galvanometer. It did not react. The terrible gift—the curse as it had turned out—had gone completely. Once more they were all normal everyday human beings.
The clamor grew. What did it mean? What had happened?
Wentworth saw him then. A slight shimmering at first, a mere brighter concentration of light. Then, as it flowed into the area of the operating lamp’s blue-white glow, rich in ultra-violet radiations, the figure took form and shape.
“There he is!” Wentworth cried, with extended arm. “The being who appeared to me that first night.”
He from Procyon smiled a superhuman smile. The comedy was over; the month of Earth time had expired. The globules next to the pineal gland were already absorbed in the surrounding tissues. His great transparent body dazzled the onlookers. An interne—more devout than the rest—fell to his knees. He from Procyon looked like a traditional archangel.
It had been a fairly interesting experiment. The scurryings of these insignificant creatures had provided a momentary amusement. Low grade, irrational, far down in the evolutionary scale. It was time he went back to Procyon, to the society of his fellows. He moved out of the beating illumination. His shining form faded, flowed into the nothingness from which it had seemed to come. He was gone!
Earth-born creatures stared with wide, incredulous eyes where the apparition had been. The sense of other-universe, of tremendous powers beyond their knowledge, weighed on Earthen brains. Margaret shuddered, and pressed close for comfort to Craig Wentworth.
The End
***************************
Entropy,
by Nat Schachner
Astounding, March 1936
Novelette - 15365 words
I
It was a small but select audience that gathered in Jerry Sloan’s laboratory that late June afternoon. They filed in with murmured words of greeting and swift, appraising looks at the young man who had maintained with unseemly positiveness that all their lives of laborious research had been along radically erroneous lines.
He stood up well under their cold scrutiny, however. His keen, alert face showed no signs of his inward perturbation; his gray eyes twinkled gravely at the veiled hostility with which these world-famous physicists shook his hand.
“Whew!” Jerry whispered to the girl who stood a little to one side and just a trifle to the rear, as became a laboratory assistant in the presence of her chief and betters. “Did you see the glare with which old Marlin favored me?”
“You can’t blame him, can you?” she retorted. “He’s just solidified liquid helium, and proved by intricate mathematical formulas that he has approached within several thousandths of a degree of absolute zero. He has also announced that it is impossible to achieve lower temperatures. Then you come along and tell him he’s all wrong. That it not only is possible, but that you can do it. Furthermore, you add insult to injury by questioning the whole expansion-contraction, ammonia-liquid oxygen cycle as the proper method for getting extremely low temperatures. After all, Marlin and the others are only human.”
Kay Ballard was an extremely pretty girl, thereby disproving once and for all the ridiculous old maxim that brains and beauty do not mix. Behind her impish smile and warm, dancing eyes was a cool, steady mind which by native brilliance and adequate training had proved of invaluable assistance to Jerry Sloan. Not that he didn’t appreciate also the impish smile aforesaid, the dancing eyes and the peach blow of smooth-textured skin. Quite the contrary. As a matter of fact—but that is neither here nor there for the moment.
“I suppose not,” Jerry admitted. Little creases of worry had suddenly appeared on his forehead, and a harassed look on his face. The last of the invited guests had entered the laboratory, and they were alone in the anteroom. “That’s what will make it all the worse if the experiment fizzles. I should have waited another month, made all my preliminary tests first.”
“It can’t fail,” Kay assured him encouragingly. “We’ve gone over the mathematics of it time and again. It’s air-tight.” Then, with fine feminine in-consecutiveness, she burst out indignantly, “It’s all the fault of that old buzzard, Edna Wiggins. She had no right to force you on with a public announcement just because the endowment year was up.”
“She’s paying the expenses,” Jerry reminded her softly, “and she can call the tune. Besides, Marlin has made her jittery about me. Maybe I’m only a four-flusher.”
Kay shook her brown bob defiantly. “A lot she knows about science,” she declared. “It’s the publicity she’s after. Mrs. Wiggins, widow of the late beer baron, the eminent bootlegger, patroness and endower of the arts and sciences. She’s afraid now she’s backed the wrong horse. The old buzzard!”
“Sssh!” Jerry warned. “Here she comes now.” He raised his voice. “Good afternoon, Mrs. Wiggins. We were waiting for you.”
A HIGHLY uniformed chauffeur had preceded her, stood with heels clicked and hands stiffly at attention. She waddled in, fat, indeterminate of age, dressed lavishly and expensively, yet in extremely bad taste. Kay’s unflattering characterization was apt, Jerry thought, as he forced cordiality into his voice. In spite of the gross breadth of her body, her face was startlingly hollow and leathery, with saclike pouches hanging from her scrawny neck and a fierce, predatory nose overshadowing all her features.
“Good!” Her thinnish head was like a pendulum bobbing on her enormous bulk; her voice was hoarse and mannish. “That means I won’t be wasting my time. I’ve an appointment with my beautician at six sharp.”
Her beady, glittering eye passed disapprovingly over the trim youthfulness of Kay—she had argued vehemently with Jerry on the question of young lady lab assistants, but on that point Jerry had been adamant—and pierced her unhappy protégé with hostile regard.
“I’ve spent a hell of a lot of money on this idea of yours, young man,” she went on inelegantly, “and I expect results to-day. Show those fellows you invited that you’ve got the goods, and I’ll stake you to a cool million. The Edna Wiggins Fou
ndation, hey? But if you can’t—”
“I wanna go to the movies. I don’t wanna stay in this stupid old place.” The little boy, about eight, whom she had towed in, half hidden behind her billowing form, darted from behind, beat at her with small, angry fists. His sullen face was distorted with anger.
“There, there, mama’s precious,” his mother cooed. “Mr. Sloan’s going to show you something just as nice as the movies.”
But mama’s precious kept on howling. “I don’t like him and his silly experiments. I wanna see a movie. That’s fun.”
Jerry and Kay exchanged glances. The young physicist shrugged. Under his breath he swore. If ever there was a spoiled brat whose neck he’d like to wring, it was young Egbert Wiggins’. His doting mother dragged him everywhere, and several times there had been near catastrophes in the laboratory because of his darling little ways.
For the moment Jerry was tempted to throw the whole thing up, tell the great Edna Wiggins a few plain, unvarnished truths, but that would mean the end of his work, the end of all his scientific dreams. So he ground his teeth, put on his best smile, and ushered his benefactress and her still-squalling brat into the main laboratory where the assembled physicists were inspecting the complicated apparatus with intense, albeit somewhat skeptical interest.
Kay brought up the rear, shaking her shapely fist with a certain vicious intensity at the unsuspecting backs of mother and son.
The apparatus was well worth close attention. In the very center of the great room, poised in a cuplike depression within the floor, was a hollow crystal ball of some fifteen feet in diameter. Its transparent substance held a bluish tinge. Within, slightly magnified and irradiated by the distorting medium of the crystal, were various articles: An iron bar; a chair of carved wood; a small glass tank filled with water; a loaf of bread; a smoked ham, suspended by cord from a hook embedded in the crystal wall; a cage with a tiny white mouse; another with a frightened, fluttering canary.
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