Four Astounding Novellas

by Nat Schachner

  The boy, frightened at the blaze and the noise, howled and scurried for dear life to the farthest end of the laboratory.

  Kay swung around, cried out in fear. The frosted crystal was opening, dissolving before her very eyes. Inside, mouse, canary, chair, bread, ham, water, became vague, indistinct, shifting from hard solidity to a nebulous tenuosity, behind which the machines and walls of the laboratory wavered and grew momentarily clearer.

  The girl’s desperate eyes swerved to the bolometer. The needle was tight against absolute zero. Then, suddenly, as thermo-couple misted into nothingness within the globe, the needle sprang back to twenty-five degrees Centigrade. Room temperature!

  The next instant it happened!

  Kay felt the sudden tug, heard the howling noise that enveloped her. With a great cry she threw herself backward. But it was too late—

  III

  The noise, the increased flare, the wail of Egbert, Kay’s scream hard on its heels, caught the milling group, pushed them around in gasping astonishment. Jerry, halfway through the group, pivoted, saw the incredible event just as it happened. With a snarling oath he lunged forward, bowling the physicists out of his way, fear like a great hand clutching his heart.

  The huge swoosh of air caught him as it did the others. It roared like an express train pounding along steel rails; it swirled with cyclone force; it scattered heavy instruments like chaff in its path; it knocked men right and left like ninepins; it picked Jerry off his feet, smashed him into a heavy chair, sent him stunned and bleeding to the floor.

  In that second of screaming madness he saw everything to the last startling, crazy detail. The great tourmaline sphere had opened into nothingness. The interior was a phantom, tenuous outline, a vague blur of ghostly matter. The walls of the laboratory were solid behind. Kay’s body, slender, resilient, was curved like a bow, convex toward the sphere, as if she were being pushed by irresistible forces. Terror and strain were on her face; her lips were parted in a dreadful cry.

  Then, even as Jerry smashed headlong into the chair, he saw the girl catapult toward the misty globe, pass without a stagger, without a jar, through what had been inches-thick tourmaline walls, clear into the center of the nebulosity.

  While Jerry sprawled and slithered in frantic attempt to heave himself erect against the rush of air, his horror-struck eyes held on those of the girl. There was surprise, something else within their depths. Her mouth moved as if she were shouting, but no sounds came. Then her eyes widened, and her body, exposed to the still-rushing waves of force, seemingly suspended on nothingness, began to blur. The sphere was gone, vanished; so were the objects Jerry had placed within.

  Then Kay Ballard, too, was gone, vanished, like a clap of thunder, like lightning that had blinded with dazzling flare and become utter night again. The cyclone died down as suddenly as it had come; the confused cries of the men, the toneless shrieks of Mrs. Wiggins no longer faked hysteria, the halffrightened, half-gloating wailing of young Egbert, muted into hushed silence.

  Jerry was already pounding across the room, hurling the lever back to zero position. A million volts seared and died; the tubes went dark and the reflectors quenched their light. Then he whirled, dived for the place where the tourmaline sphere had been, where Kay had stood, incredibly within its closed interior.

  The wild frenzy of his rush carried him over the smooth expanse of floor; his sudden, frantic leap cleared not an instant too soon the pit in which the globe had rested. His hands extended in vain to brace himself against solidity, against a mass that must be there.

  He crashed through thin air, went staggering with the momentum of his body toward the huddled group of men. Edna Wiggins had fainted in earnest, but no one paid her any attention. Young Egbert thought it time for him to be going. He quietly eased himself out of the room, raced for the waiting limousine, and stampeded the highly uniformed chauffeur into instant flight for the Park Avenue penthouse that was more Renaissance palace than home.

  “My Lord!” said Dakin over and over again. It was incredible, impossible! Not a minute before there had been a solid, substantial globe, a girl of extraordinary charm and beauty; and now—there was only the stark emptiness of the floor, the huge magnets thrusting at nothingness, the gigantic reflectors enringing a sphere from which all substance had fled.

  Clamor rose again; shoutings, confused questions bordering close on panic.

  “For Heaven’s sake, man,” screamed Marlin, “what have you done?”

  But Jerry was beyond hearing. Grimfaced, desperately, he was swinging from machine to machine, reversing levers, shifting processes, slamming waves of heat into the silent space, trying with every resource known to science to undo that which had been unwittingly done. The sweat poured in little streams from his body; the temperature of the room grew to furnace-heat, but nothing happened. Both tourmaline sphere and Kay Ballard were irretrievably gone!

  It was Dakin, kindly and spare of build, who forced him to quit his frantic efforts. He led Jerry gently to a chair, saying: “Don’t take on so, Sloan. It wasn’t your fault. You had refused to be stampeded into an experiment which you hadn’t checked in advance. It was that young imp of Mrs. Wiggins’ who was responsible for the tragedy. Pull yourself together, man. We’ll have to think this thing out clearly.”

  Jerry stared with haggard, hopeless eyes at the mocking sphere of vacancy. “I should have known,” he cried fiercely. “I should have been prepared. Kay! Kay!”

  There was danger of madness in the terrible agony of this young man, thought Dakin. Evidently he had been deeply in love with his very personable young assistant. Poor girl! What a dreadful fate! To disintegrate and vanish like a puff of smoke before their very eyes. Dakin shuddered, pulled himself together. And, being wise in the ways of human nature, he adroitly turned the subject.

  “But, my dear Sloan,” he protested, “what did actually happen?”

  Jerry swung on them all, taut, bitter. “Don’t you see?” he cried. “I should have known; all of you should have sensed what was coming. I succeeded, only too well. I stopped the swiftly moving molecules in their tracks. I stopped the swifter atoms themselves, the very electrons, in their orbits. Motion died, and absolute zero of temperature was a reality, perhaps for the first time in the history of the material universe.”

  “But why,” submitted Marlin in hushed bewilderment, “did everything— uh—vanish?” He had lost his arrogance completely.

  “A very elementary proposition,” Jerry said with fierce contempt. “When motion ceases, matter—visible matter —must die with it. What are the solid-seeming substances we see? An extension of extremely rapid movement. Nothing else. The diameter of the average molecule is two one-hundred-millionths of an inch. Tremendously below our range of vision. We see them in the mass only by the extension of their speeds. And the electrons themselves within the atoms have also stopped. Their diameters are 4x10-13 centimeters. Inconceivably tiny. Stop their motion and matter, as we know it, vanishes. The interior volume of an atom is a vast globe of emptiness. Jeans has represented it as several wasps buzzing around in the tremendous void of a Waterloo Railroad Station in London. You see the wasps while they fly. Search for them when they hang motionless on walls or ceiling, and the task is futile.”

  His eyes clung desperately, hopelessly, to that void within the circumscription of the reflectors. “She is in there,” he said, pointing, “even now. Yet for all we can do, she might just as well be outside the universe, in another space, another time.”

  Bellew, a small, dapper man, whose specialty was thermodynamics, spoke up. “You applied heat to the area. The energizing waves should have been absorbed by the moveless electrons, kicked them back into vibration. In other words, we should have seen the—ah— vanished substances, even though”—a faint tremor passed over him—“they might not be—ah—exactly in the same form in which they vanished.”

  Jerry shook his head tragically. “Millions of volts went into stopping them, i
nto locking up their energy of motion. Each electron, each proton, is a closed cycle of potential energy. I tried reversing the process. I increased the voltage. The impulses should have done what you say. But they haven’t. Either the closed cycle is a stable state which no power we possess can change, just like a spring-lock door which requires only a slight shove to close, but once closed cannot be opened again without huge exertions of force—or else—”

  He sprang violently from his chair; it went crashing. His eyes flamed. “By Heavens, I think I’ve got it. What I had said before at random. Our space time is an attribute of matter. Without matter our universe fades and becomes insubstantial. But matter is also an attribute of energy, which is motion. The electrons, protons, what not, lost their kinetic energy. They no longer exist. OV rather, the space time in which they were wrapped, the space time with which we are familiar, has ceased to exist with relation to the tourmaline sphere, and—and—” He bogged at the mention of Kay’s name. It stuck in his throat. The others carefully averted their eyes at his grief. With an effort he stumbled on:

  “Perhaps they—she—are in an entirely different order of space time, a new universe, occupying that space, yet infinitely remote. Perhaps, even, they exist in that strange dimension, live, move and have their being, just as—” His lean jaw tightened into hard knots; his face grew grim with an intense resolve. He was speaking to himself now, softly, as if the hushed men in the room did not exist.

  Edna Wiggins was coming to, making huge moans, but no one even flicked an eyelid in her direction. All eyes were fixed with unbearable intensity on the young physicist whose loved one had vanished into thin air.

  “Of course,” Jerry whispered to himself, “they are a vacuum in our universe. That was why the air rushed in with such force. She is still there, and I—I am going after her.”

  Dakin put his hand timidly on the young man’s shoulder. “You don’t know what you’re saying. Perhaps a little sleep—”

  Jerry laughed harshly. “I am not crazy, if that’s what you mean.”

  “But how—”

  “The same way Kay went,” he answered promptly. “I’ll build another sphere, repeat exactly what has happened by accident to-day. I—I think I can bring both of us back to this spacetime existence. If not—” He shrugged, and fell silent.

  They stared at him in awe, these scientists, practical, efficient men, not given to sentiment or display of emotion. “Greater love hath no man than this that—”

  Bellew broke the insupportable silence with a matter-of-fact objection. “Granting even your theory, Sloan, granting even you can find the sphere in that other universe, Miss Ballard is dead, irretrievably so. No human body, no life as we know it, could survive the intense cold to which she has been subjected. A man frozen to death remains dead, no matter what is done to restore the energy of his component molecules.”

  “That is only because the process of freezing was long continued,” Jerry responded. “The organic molecules had time to change chemically into other forms, shift their mutual positions. That is not the case here. The whole damnable affair took only a second. Every molecule, every atom, every electron, was stopped in its tracks. There could not have been any relative change of position, of form.”

  They argued it out until voices were hoarse, and tempers exacerbated, but nothing could be done with Jerry. It was suicide; it was worse, they said, until finally they had to give in to his dogged, stubborn determination.

  Mrs. Wiggins, wide awake now, and thoroughly cowed at the disaster her darling child had brought upon them all, hysterically agreed to furnish the sums necessary to repeat the experiment. Provided, of course, there would be no prosecution of her precious brat, no damage suits, to which Jerry agreed. As if, he raged, all the money in the world could compensate for Kay Ballard.

  IV

  A week passed. A week of driving furious energy. Jerry Sloan was already a man wrapped away from the world, of things as they are. He neither slept nor ate nor seemingly tired. Workmen scurried with frightened celerity at the harsh whiplash of his voice; the laboratory seethed like a spouting volcano. Jerry was a monomaniac, a man possessed of a single, driving idea. Faster, faster, forging on with insane energy. His cheeks hollowed ; his eyes fixed on far-off things.

  The image of Kay Ballard never left his haunted vision—that last terrible scene as, with outthrust, imploring arms and look of startled surprise, she faded from the universe of familiar things.

  Jerry held on to that desperately. She must be alive—if life it could be called—in a new dimension, a new existence, waiting for him to follow and resale. He permitted himself no other thought, else he would have gone mad.

  Edna Wiggins stayed discreetly out of sight. Young Egbert was shipped to an expensive private school in California—as far away as possible. Nightly, Mrs. Wiggins dreamed that the police were coming for her darling brat to drag him into durance vile, and she woke in sweaty fear. Thus it was that she signed checks for Jerry’s work with feverish haste, not stopping to argue or quibble over vouchers.

  Forbes Dakin stuck loyally by Jerry. He assisted, advised, expostulated that the hollow-eyed young man get sleep, take nourishment; subtly he tried to dissuade him from his crazy venture. To Dakin, as well as to the others, it was deliberate suicide. But Jerry was deaf to all entreaties. Kay was out there, in the infinite, calling to him, waiting with the growing fear that he would never come. It drove him on to even more tremendous labors.

  Finally, a new tourmaline sphere rested in the floor hollow within the circumscription of magnets and parabolic reflectors. Inside its clear depths hung a ham; a white mouse gibbered and squeaked; a canary ruffled its frightened feathers; a chair stood in the accustomed place; water filled a tank; bread; iron ; everything was exactly and meticulously the duplicate of that first illfated sphere. Jerry had tried to reproduce to the minutest detail the material equipment, the sequence of events.

  “The timing, the power we are to use, even that last quick jerk of the lever, must follow exactly what happened before,” he told Dakin, who had consented, albeit reluctantly, to set the switches and the rheostats. “With similar forces and similar masses, the chances of my finding Kay are so much more likely.”

  Dakin nodded wearily. He was frightened, now that the zero hour had come, but it was too late for him to back out. One look at Jerry’s burning eyes and grim, set face showed that.

  Dakin took his place at the panel board. Jerry stood near the magnet switch, even as Kay had done. The routine was carefully gone through. He sent the juice surging through the magnets, waited for polarization for five exact minutes.

  Then Dakin set the rheostat lever in the first notch. The blue lights glowed again in the concentric tubes; the atmosphere was filled once more with the pungency of ozone. The reflectors dazzled as the initial voltage hurtled upon the doomed sphere. When the bolometer registered two degrees Centigrade, Dakin set the lever up another notch. It had all been carefully rehearsed.

  Frost thickened on the crystalline surface; the little animals within stiffened with cold. The needle swung steadily to the left, retracing exactly what had once before occurred. Over, over, while the two men watched with bated breath. Minus two hundred and seventy-two degrees, slower, then the needle quivered and stuck. The temperature at which helium solidifies!

  For ten minutes they waited, ten long minutes that seemed eternity. It represented the interval during which Jerry had argued with Mrs. Wiggins before young Egbert had taken their destinies into his own grubby fingers.

  Jerry swung around, cowered almost against the frozen surface of the globe, even as he remembered Kay had done. Eight minutes, nine minutes, ten, while his heart pounded with suffocating thunders and his breath was a tight constriction in his throat. Suddenly he nodded. Dakin shivered, implored him with anguished eyes. It was still not too late to back out. But Jerry shook his head frantically. The precious seconds were slipping. With a groan Dakin threw the lever v
iolently over to the last notch.

  A blinding flash, a surging roar; a million volts battered into the sphere. The ice-covered surface opened, melted into hazy nothingness. Jerry threw himself around even as Kay had done. The events of a whole lifetime rushed through his brain, like those of a drowning man, of some one falling through space. For a single, tiny moment fear overwhelmed him, fear of that dreadful unknown into which he was voluntarily casting himself. Almost he sprang backward, out of the range of those fearful, beating impulses. Then, as in a dream, he saw the features of Kay shimmering before him. He gritted his teeth, held firm.

  Then came the blast, as the air rushed into the vacuum of the halted atoms. It caught him, hurled him headlong, straight for the center of the misty globe. A great cry tore involuntarily from his throat as he swept, without a stagger, into the swirling interior.

  He was curiously light. He floated in a current of illimitable forces. Red-hot pincers seemed to tear his flesh and bones apart. Up above, all around him, lights wavered and danced. The room was a roaring haze. Through swirling currents he saw Dakin, mouth open, eyes filled with terrible fear, darting frantically for the lever, thrusting it back to zero.

  Jerry found himself suddenly smiling. The gesture was a duplication of his own former movements, and like it would be too late. But there was no doubt that poor Dakin was scared, would give anything now to undo that to which he had been an accessory.

  Suddenly a cry of surprise tore from Jerry’s lips. The tearing, ripping sensations had ceased. A sense of well-being invaded him. The crystalline sphere, the chair, the caged animals, hitherto vague, insubstantial, ghostly, were swimming back to solidity, to hard, tangible surfaces. But the great laboratory, the magnets, the pounding, flaming reflectors, the walls with their panels and shiny surfaces, Dakin himself, misted and fled from his senses like the tenuous wisps of a waking dream.