Four Astounding Novellas

by Nat Schachner

  “Dakin! Dakin!” he shouted. “What’s happening to you? Where are—” A soundless explosion scattered his amazed senses into oblivion. He knew no more—

  Outside, Forbes Dakin stared aghast at the emptiness where the tourmaline sphere had stood only a second before. It had vanished; so had its occupant. Young Jerry Sloan had catapulted into a new order of things, had commenced his tremendous journey beyond space and time itself in search of his vanished sweetheart. Or else he was dead—he and Kay Ballard—utterly, irretrievably dead, as no human beings had ever been before.

  With a sharp cry Dakin rushed out of the laboratory, ran hatless and coat-less through the long shadows of that June afternoon as if pursued by scourging furies. A white-haired, gentle man, panic in his eyes, oblivious to the curious stares of passers-by. A policeman caught at him as he fled.

  “Here, what’s the trouble?”

  But the elderly physicist babbled unmeaning words, thrust off the grip of the law with a sudden twist, and was gone on his aimless race. The policeman looked after him doubtfully, shook his head, muttered to himself about old men drinking more than they could stand, and resumed his slow, majestic circuit—

  It had been Jerry’s strict orders that the laboratory be left untouched, exactly as it was on the momentous occasion when he first started his search for Kay. Otherwise, should they ever be able to return, disaster might ensue if they materialized within the solid confines of other objects.

  These instructions were meticulously obeyed. Dakin, recovered from his senseless flight and mightily ashamed of himself, sealed the house just as it was. All doors were carefully locked but one. To that he held the key. No one else was permitted to enter.

  Every day, promptly at five in the afternoon, the elderly physicist unlocked that single door, entered the laboratory, and sat in a chair well removed from the degression in the floor, until six o’clock. Then, with a sigh, he arose, took a last, lingering look at that vacant, unmoving space, at the silent magnets and the dull reflectors, set his hat on his head, let himself out of the house, carefully locked the door with a double lock, and departed to his own bachelor quarters.

  Every day for a month Forbes Dakin repeated this undeviating ritual. He was a methodical man, and he had no family to expostulate with him. Strange feelings tugged at his withered heart. He had learned to love Jerry as a son during that frantic week of preparation. And now Jerry was gone, as was that slim and lovely girl who had been his assistant, and never again would he see either of them. Heaven knows what manner of thoughts went through the old man’s head as he sat there, an hour each day, day in and day out, staring into that emptiness where spheres and warm flesh-and-blood humans alike, had vanished into—what?

  At the end of the month Dakin felt his hopes slipping. Not that he had really expected anything else. Other matters intervened. Work that must be done. So he cut down his visits to twice a week, then to once a week.

  A year passed. The dust silted through tightly closed windows and doors, and made a thin carpet over apparatus and undisturbed floors and furniture. On the first of every month the old man let himself in, hopelessly stared with aged eyes at the tragic area, and let himself out again softly, quietly, as if he were afraid to awaken the sleeping echoes.

  The years rolled on. The tumult, the noise of the astounding disappearances had died in the world. Edna Wiggins, more mountainous than ever and mumbling toothlessly, had other worries. Egbert had been expelled from college, had forged her name to certain checks. It required all her influence to keep him out of jail.

  The very names of Kay Ballard and Jerry Sloan were forgotten. Only in Forbes Dakin’s heart were they still enshrined, and until the year of his death, he made his monthly pilgrimage to the tomblike house with religious fidelity.

  Then he died. In his will were instructions. Never was the house to be torn down, or disturbed in any way. Once a year tins of food were carefully to be replaced within the laboratory; once a year trustees were to air the place and seek for evidences of the departed. Telephone connections were to be left intact, in case—

  The instructions were carried out faithfully, albeit with many shrugs. Dakin had left ample funds for that purpose, and the trustees were well paid for their simple duties.

  The years became decades, the decades centuries. The city grew to a marvelous thing of soaring colors and brilliant facades. The telephone gave way to television. Rockets pierced the stratosphere, made their initial flights to the moon. Interplanetary communication became an established fact; mankind grew in knowledge and power. New and impossible inventions became commonplace. With one exception— the secret that Jerry Sloan had possessed, the secret that had been his doom and the doom of that ancient girl he loved.

  The house remained. A dingy, timeworn structure of indestructible stone. Generations of trustees remembered but one clause of that age-old will. The building must never be destroyed, must never be disturbed.

  That grew into a tradition more immutable than the laws of the Medes and the Persians. All else was forgotten. The house became a monument, a shrine to departed generations. It was sealed beyond all possibility of entry. Fantastic legends grew around it. Within its foul and musty interior, huge machines slowly rusted and rotted away, ready to shatter at the slightest touch. The moveless dust lay thick on everything.

  Then, three thousand years later, war flared. War between the planets. A Venusian fleet slashed out of space, dropped explosive spores upon the ancient city of Earth. There was a tremendous puff, and city and lofty towers of strange, new metals and millions of swarming mankind disintegrated into mile-high columns of flaming dust. The laboratory of Jerry Sloan was no more!

  V

  Jerry felt curiously free and light. Just when it was that he awakened from his trancelike state he did not know. His eyes were open, and his brain functioned with a strange new headiness. When he moved, it was without effort, without that feeling of straining muscles, of resistance within the body that is so normal and taken for granted in an Earthly existence. He might have been awake for seconds only, or it might have been for unimaginable centuries; he had no manner of deciding. The time sense was curiously lacking.

  He stared around him. He was within a great, hollow sphere, whose bluish tinge made transparency a matter of definite angles of vision. Two cages hung from near-by supports. A bright-eyed mouse examined him with intense curiosity, while a canary preened itself, cocked its pert little head and trilled with carefree forgetfulness of all but the immediate present—the here-now of time and space.

  Jerry’s eyes traveled farther around the curving walls of his globe. He knew these things, recognized them for what they were, yet his brain, smoothly functioning though it was, had not yet adjusted present with past and future. There was a tank of water near by, its liquid surface smooth and rippleless. A loaf of golden, crusty bread looked hungrily inviting on a chair, and a great ham lay on the crystal floor, with a broken cord trailing from its brown rotundity.

  Jerry blinked at it, and uttered a startled cry. That homely reminder of Earth coordinated hitherto disjointed processes within him. He remembered now. The tourmaline sphere opening up before him like a mirage; the great swish of air that hurled him into the vacuum; the last, bitter sight of Dakin frantically reversing the lever; the swift blurring of the outside world, and the final blast of oblivion.

  “Kay!” The name flung itself against the confining walls, boomed hollowly in his ears. She should be here, next him, with her dancing eyes and impish smile, welcoming him to this new existence, maintaining with precious dignity that she had not been afraid, that she had known he would follow to rescue her.

  But Kay was not within the sphere. A frantic fear ‘drove him senselessly around the small confines, made him stumble into the chair and send it crashing, and the loaf of bread skittering almost into the tank of water. That brought him to a full awareness of his situation. Bread and water and ham! Who knew how infinitely preciou
s they might prove before this insane adventure was over?

  He rescued the loaf of bread, and sat down to consider the situation carefully. Something had gone singularly astray with his calculations. Up to a certain point they had been perfect. The globe and all its contents, including himself, had materialized in this strange new universe, even as he had suspected. Matter carried its own space time along. When motion died, the universe changed; the old wrappers disappeared and the new ones took their place. Life evidently continued, different no doubt, though as yet he had no means of detecting any particular changes.

  But something else had happened. By placing the second sphere exactly in the situs of the vanished one, by reproducing with painful fidelity every detail of the initial catastrophe, he had hoped and expected that they would materialize in the new space time simultaneously and co-existently. In which case the two spheres would have coalesced and he, Jerry Sloan, would have found Kay at his side.

  Yet Kay was not here. That was a self-evident fact. It was that cursed time intervals of a week on Earth. He had not dreamed it would matter here, but it did. Either that, or there was movement in this universe, a movement that had carried the other globe far out of his reach. He arose excitedly. What a fool he had been! Of course there had been movement. He had forgotten completely that he had not, could never, in the nature of things, have reproduced what had once taken place. That week of Earth time had been fatal. A second would have been as bad.

  For the Earth was not still. It rotated on its axis; it whirled around the Sun; it was carried in the sweep of the solar system across the galactic Milky Way; it partook of the unimaginable speed of the expanding universe. And they were no longer subject to Earth laws, to gravitational pulls. A week apart! He laughed harshly. Millions of miles in the space of the old! What incomprehensible infinities in the space of the new!

  Very slowly he drew from his pocket a tiny mechanism. It glittered mockingly in his hand. On that he had pinned his hopes of releasing the stored potential energy, of vibrating themselves back again into the universe of material things. Now it was a worse than useless thing.

  Kay was goodness knows where, and even if she were at his side, they would never dare return. Rematerialization might find them in the frightening void between the planets; it might catapult them into the blazing maw of the Sun itself; or even, for all he knew, on the ragged edges of some extra-galactic nebula.

  Jerry lifted his hand in impotent fury to dash the mockery of that mechanism to the shattering hardness of the tourmaline. A sudden access of sanity held his arm, and he replaced it carefully in his pocket. He sat down again, watching the unthinking animals. He envied them their timeless complacence. Life just now was pleasant; what mattered the future? For himself, he saw it all too clearly.

  He had food and drink enough, with stringent rationing, for a week, or even two, of Earth time. But the air supply! That was vital! If he breathed as deeply and as rapidly as he had on Earth, a hasty calculation showed that he had not sufficient for twenty-four hours. His eyes clung speculatively to the animals. They were using up his precious supply. Now if—He shook his head determinedly. He would not do it. It was not their fault they were here. Besides, what difference did it make? An hour more or less. Eternity would last just as long.

  Suppose he sat quite still, conserving his energy! That would give added minutes. With a muttered oath Jerry was on his feet. He would not cling to life like that. He stared at the enveloping crystal for the hundredth time. And for the hundredth time a bluish-gray blankness met his eye. Impenetrable, soft, with a curious luminescense of its own that shed a concentrated light within the sphere.

  Without quite knowing why he did it, Jerry flung himself flat along the concave of the globe. There was a kind of gravitational force inside the sphere. But there was no up or down. He could walk indifferently on what might be considered ceiling and what might be floor. Movable articles drifted steadily, inexorably, toward each other, requiring force to separate. As if, Jerry thought with a shiver, the globe represented a closed gravitational system, a solitary blob of matter in a universe of emptiness.

  Sprawled out, face pressed close to the polarizing crystal, he squinted sharply through the shifting transparency. Nothing! With a groan of despair he turned his face as he lifted. His gaze made an acute angle of incidence with the tourmaline. His body stiffened; an exclamation ripped from his lips. He had seen something.

  Unwittingly he had glanced along the particular plane through which the polarized light traveled unobstructed.

  Outside was a strange universe, an incredible one. There were no dimensions, or if there were, Jerry’s Earth-bound senses were unable to dissociate them. It was like a gigantic cinema, where near and far flashed over the selfsame screen.

  Strange, flattened shapes whirled and blurred with unimaginable rapidity. Weird distortions of startling colors blinked into view and blanked out again with abrupt finality. Orbs stretched like rubber bands to gigantic proportions and contracted with infinite speed to mere pin points of flame. A picture show, a phantasmagoria, a kaleidoscope of tumbling, constantly rearranging figures, strangely insubstantial, while all around stretched the gray luminescense of a space without height or depth or thickness, a space that was void and without form.

  For a long time Jerry stared in breathless attention, his plight forgotten, everything but that weird show. Then suddenly the answers came to him. That which colored and formed a back drop for the hyperspace, the supertime into which he had been thrown, was the universe of his former being. Those shifting shadows were the projections of solid, three-dimensional suns and planets and galaxies and nebulae upon his present space and time. A magnificent peep show at which he was the sole and involuntary spectator. Somewhere in that fleeting exhibition was the Sun; somewhere among the most inconspicuous dots that flicked on and off like defective bulbs was the Earth, its nations, its endlessly striving people, its loves and sorrows and hopes and despairs.

  He laughed aloud at that. It seemed so futile, so insignificant. What, for instance, was Forbes Dakin doing at this particular moment; what was Marlin, Edna Wiggins doing? Incongruously, the expression “Old buzzard!” formed on his lips. It brought a pang to him. Memories of Kay Ballard flooded him with unbearable longing.

  A new fear was welling in him, a fear that would not down. The inconceivable speed with which those flattened shapes formed and reformed, and dizzyingly blurred. What did that mean? Suddenly he knew, and with it the terrifying answer to his idle questioning.

  Dakin and Marlin and Mrs. Wiggins were dead; had been dead for unimaginable ages. Perhaps the Earth itself was already a cold and lifeless ball, swinging around a crusted, darkling Sun. He was witnessing the birth and death of suns and planets and galaxies; each blanking was a death, each reappearance a blaze of new nebular matter. That accounted for the ceaseless blur. A thousand centuries of slow and ordered growth telescoped themselves into a second of breathing.

  He remembered now. He was in an alien universe, a universe in which the electrons and protons and neutrons of his being had engulfed themselves upon the stoppage of their swift vibrations. Time here was adjusted to that moveless quiescence, or, what seemed more likely, the infinitely slow residual motion of mutual attractions and repulsions. This time sensation was normal to him now. The time of that other universe from which he had been thrown was now abnormal. An exhalation here meant aeons there.

  Grimly he considered that. Even if he could return, even if he found, by some wild coincidence, the exact spot he had quitted, billions and trillions of years would have elapsed. The old familiar patterns had vanished into the limbo of forgotten time; he would be more an alien even than he was here. He took a deep breath, twisted slightly, and saw something that was utterly incredible.

  So near he might have reached it with his hand had the crystal walls not intervened, so far away that aeons of endless flight might elapse before contact could be made, was a sphere. A tourmali
ne sphere, sharp and clear and transparent, moveless in the queer, flat void.

  Jerry’s heart stopped, then pounded with trip-hammer blows. Within its crystal round, sitting on the chair, chin cupped in slender hand, staring with eyes that no longer danced upon the circumscribing walls, was Kay Ballard! The cage doors were opened. The white mouse, brother to one he held imprisoned, gamboled sportively about her feet; the canary nibbled with greedy beak at the bread.

  VI

  “Kay!” Jerry shouted insanely. It was more than incredible; it was impossible. She had reached this hyperspace a week before him, yet she was still alive. The food had not been touched; the air was still breathable. But of course! A week of Earth time meant so minute a fraction of a second in this sluggish eternity that to all intents and purposes they had reached here simultaneously.

  “Kay!” he shouted again, and beat with hammering fists upon the crystal.

  She did not raise her head. How could she hear? Sound required matter through which to journey. Who knew what strange stuff made up this hyperspace? Who knew what unimaginable distances separated the two spheres?

  Time ceased to have all meaning for Jerry now. He shouted; he beat at the solid tourmaline; he flung himself along the concave surface, seeking somehow to attract the girl’s attention. But still she sat and stared into dull and dreary nothingness, while the mouse and canary played unheeded about the globe.

  The distorted projections of that other universe blurred with increasing speed; they vanished and did not reappear. One by one the misty lights flickered and went out. But Jerry did not see, or seeing, paid no attention. All his mind, all his soul was concentrated on that tourmaline orb, on the seated girl within. Nothing else mattered.