Four Astounding Novellas

by Nat Schachner

  “Impossible!” Jerry echoed. “You, a man of who knows of trillionth centuries, still have that concept in your mental categories!”

  The sarcasm was wasted on Horgo. These godlike beings were not given to petty, human emotions.

  “Perhaps,” he meditated, “it could be done, by the use of all our supplies and the materials you have within this sphere, I could build up a new force beam in a thousand light journeys. But—”

  Jerry actually grinned. “You forget,” he reminded, “that all our material is of the same order of energy. The iron bar equally with the tourmaline sphere, my body with that loaf of bread which to my primitive stomach is food.”

  Horgo’s face cleared. “Naturally,” he admitted readily. “I had forgotten that. You could break the sphere, so could the girl you call Kay. But then you have destroyed the strongholds which hold us intact from the heat-death that rules without. We shall be naked, unguarded. It would require tremendous dissipations of energy to force our way through a universe that no longer exists, to join the inmates of the other sphere. Our air supply must scatter at a faster rate when not confined. Gases, even in this potential state, have necessarily more freedom of motion than solids. And for what purpose? So that you may be in the presence of this girl.”

  He wagged his head. His logic was impeccable, his reasoning unanswerable. But Jerry was not content. He was ready to risk the loss of immortality if only he and Kay were together for what had once been a normal life period. But something else was dimly struggling in the recesses of his mind. He exploded in a sudden shout that was a deafening clamor to the eternally silent Horgo.

  “I’m sorry,” Jerry thought shamefacedly. “But I had forgotten Something I had.” His fingers trembled as they produced the tiny mechanism from his pocket. “This,” he explained in jumbled, confused pictures, “is an instrument I had evolved when I first went in search of Kay.”

  Horgo looked at it with interest. It meant nothing to him, naturally.

  “It is,” Jerry proceeded, “a tiny reproduction of the parabolic reflectors on my initial machine. Inside this metal attachment is a storage battery to provide the activating currents. I had set it in advance. Its action will exactly reverse what had been done before. The push-pull of the impulses will kick the moveless atoms into long-forgotten motion. Remember, they are both of the same order now, are normal with respect to each other. It will take time, of course, much more than the original process, for I haven’t an immense voltage at my disposal, but gradually the electrons will swing farther and farther from the protons, until, under repeated impulses, they will tend toward their accustomed orbit states.”

  Jerry was sending out his patterned concepts with increasing confidence. “The slightest additional impulse should then precipitate them into their ancient grooves. Atoms once more will obey their original laws of motion. They will whirl within the limits of the molecules; the frozen molecules will lunge with renewed vigor, and matter will have been reborn—normal, energy-yielding matter.”

  Horgo was still puzzled. “I still don’t see what you are aiming at. Granted that you can do this, and the analysis you have offered seems logically coherent, yet you have gained nothing. More, you have lost immensely. The universe is obliterated. Space time has died in motionless, equi-potential waves. Your load of energy-producing matter will quickly dissipate into the void of nothingness, and ourselves along with it. It is a new and decidedly effective way of anticipating death.”

  “But don’t you see what will happen?” cried Jerry, unwittingly breaking into speech again. “We shall have reproduced exactly the conditions that existed at the original birth of the universe. A central body of matter in the midst of nonspace, nontime. Matter that for some reason or other possessed enormous potential energy, locked-in, self-contained, as yet untranslated into kinetic energy. Something took place. Call it my activating reflector, call it what you will, but the tremendous potential was broken down. The vast store of energy at once released in a tremendous explosion.

  “It acted on the void as it expanded, wrapped it around itself in a new space and a new time. The waveless heat-deaths of a million million former universes stirred under the expansion, rippled, puckered into the little nodules we call electrons, protons, matter. These in turn reacted and interacted. The explosion spread, like ripples in water from a hurled stone, creating new matter, new energy. A universe had sprung into being.”

  Horgo moved swiftly. His eyes burned into Jerry’s. “Man of the past,” he poured his thoughts, “I salute you! You have put the race that sprung from yours to shame. Always we had thought that original nexus of the expanding universe to be a mighty globe of matter. You have proved it is not necessary. The unlocking of kinetic energy in this one sphere is sufficient to re-create a new universe, a new space time. Proceed at once with the experiment.”

  Jerry flicked the tiny catch. Faint sparkles played over the metallic surface. “It will take some time,” he said doubtfully.

  “Time is a minor consideration,” Horgo assured him. “We are immortal. I shall render you so while we wait, so shall Lika to the girl called Kay. It is a simple operation on the interstitial glands that control the processes of growth and decay. And I shall also teach you to send your thoughts over the void, so that you may in the meantime communicate with the girl you say you love.”

  The word amused him, for a smile illumined his face. Then he set to work—

  Jerry awoke to find himself seemingly unchanged. The prospect of immortality somewhat appalled him, yet somehow, instinctively, he felt that the operation could not succeed. His body and Kay’s were not sufficiently evolved for that. What was far more important, however, was the surge of Kay’s eager thoughts across the void. They were heartening, though curiously unsatisfying. He grinned wryly to himself. They were primitive barbarians, after all, accustomed to the crudities of sight and sound and touch. Kay confessed she felt the same way.

  It took an interminably long time. Horgo and Lika did not seem to mind. They were superior to such human frailties. Twice the stored power of the battery ran out without perceptible results. But Horgo did magical things with the iron bar, things that Jerry, in spite of attempted explanations, could not follow. As a result the battery was recharged, and the surging impulses continued to make pin points of flame over the reflector.

  Jerry felt less and less secure as the hours dragged out and nothing happened. His initial confidence, his rash feeling of almost superiority to his companion, gave way to discouragement and final despair. “It won’t work,” he said dully. “I’ve been a fool.”

  “It will work,” Horgo stated with confident calmness, and returned to his serene meditations. Time and again Jerry had tried to penetrate the terrific abstractions among which Horgo soared with effortless ease, only to fall back dazed, bewildered, aghast at the incomprehensibilities of that ultimate wisdom. Once more Jerry felt curiously humble.

  Then, one day, counting by ancient Earth time, Horgo raised his calm eyes and said simply: “Prepare yourself. Our universe is about to expand.”

  Jerry had been wandering around the sphere like a caged lion. Even thought exchanges with Kay had not been able to stop the fret of such lengthy inaction. Now he jerked to a halt, startled. Was it possible? There was a queer feeling about himself, now that he thought of it. A certain trembling, a shimmering, that communicated itself to the walls of tourmaline, to Horgo, too. Everything was hazing, changing. He could not see—

  He seemed to blast open. A blinding flare of insupportable light enveloped him, tore him to pieces—

  A universe was being born—

  Jerry was dreaming; he was sure of that. For otherwise how could his head be pillowed on the soft warmness of Kay’s breast, and her voice, unheard so long, be beating with thrilling accents at his ears.

  He refused to open his eyes. “If this be a dream,” he muttered, “I don’t want ever to wake up.”

  “You silly goose!” K
ay laughed and cried all in one. “It’s not a dream, and unless you open your eyes and look at me at once, I’ll let you drop.”

  The threat had its prompt results. After the first precious minutes of reunion, Jerry looked around. Horgo and a stranger, more subtly rounded and feminine, who must be Lika, were a little apart, smiling at them, albeit a trifle puzzled at these young primitives’ transports of happiness.

  “The explosion passed us in a flash of light,” Kay declared, “but it did not even jar our sphere. We had to smash out way out with the iron bar when Horgo came.”

  They were within Jerry’s sphere now. Horgo had made a passage with the bar, had taken the reflector to Kay’s still invisible globe, guided by the impacting thoughts of Lika. As they emerged, they had metamorphized into normal matter, while Jerry still lay unconscious, and the released energy of their beings had gone flashing outward to assist in the swift expansion.

  “Look outside,” Kay said happily, a little catch in her throat. “Our universe, made just for us, being born before our eyes.”

  Jerry swung his gaze with reluctance from her flushed face, peered through the tourmaline. The gray void had retreated. Already flaming energy had licked into primal atoms, coalesced in huge, still formless suns. Gravitation sent them swirling, made gigantic spirals. Great nebulous masses rushed past each other, tore from their blazing garments ragged shreds of flaring matter that whirled and spun around the greater bodies.

  “Planets!” Jerry declared in awed tones. “Planets that in billions of years will cool and spawn new life, new men, new supermen. The endless cycle of eternity beginning all over again.”

  Kay squeezed his hand. “We shan’t have to wait that long,” she said softly. “I have been communicating with Horgo and Lika. They assure me that with all this boundless energy at their disposal they can produce in short order a planet sufficient for our needs, with air and water and the raw materials of life.”

  Jerry returned the squeeze with interest. Far out, the waves of expanding light illumined each new conquest of exploding forces over the timeless void. The frontiers of the universe-to-be were pushing outward with accelerating speed.

  “Look!” He nudged Kay. “Horgo and Lika! I think there will have to be two planets. Something tells me we’ve set them a horrible example. These icily cold superbeings of the world’s decline have learned the meaning of a new and incomprehensible thought concept.”

  In truth, the pair were sitting apart, holding each other’s hands with unaccustomed awkwardness. But there was no disputing the ardor that burned in their eyes.

  The End

  *******************************

  Crystallized Thought,

  by Nat Schachner

  Astounding Aug. 1937

  Novella - 17722 words

  Chapter 1

  WEBB FOSTER was the greatest scientist in all the solar system. This, at least, had been the consensus of opinion at the last assemblage of the planets. Webb, however, had protested the accolade and offered Ku-mer of Mars in nomination for the coveted honor. But Ku-mer received only two votes—his own and that of Webb Foster. Whereupon, with Martian blandness, he had retired from the conclave and left an undisputed field to his generous rival.

  Webb Foster was sincerely sorry for him. He knew the proud sensitivity of the Martians, beneath their outward armor of indifference, and he tried to find Ku-mer after the members of the quinquennial meeting had scattered to their respective space ships. But Ku-mer was not to be found. He had vanished.

  Whereupon Webb, with a shrug of his shoulders, and slightly flattered withal, returned to his space laboratory. This was famous throughout the system, and the fruit of years of contriving. Webb Foster required absolute isolation and profound peace for his researches into the origin of all things, into the fine structure of space and time and matter. These desiderata could no longer be had on Earth, his native planet.

  Earth was a vast garden city with a population of ten billion humans. From pole to pole swift-moving platforms made an intricate network of intercommunication; underground, express monocars whined through vacuum tunnels; overhead, glistening planes darted along aerial traffic lanes; while from a thousand rocket ports great space liners took off for Mars, Venus, the Moon, and far-off Callisto, capital of the Jovian hegemony. A scientist, brooding on the very fundamentals, the ground plan of the universe, could find no peace on Earth.

  So Webb Foster had built his space laboratory. It took five years and the unremitting labor of a thousand men. But when it was finished, the planets marveled, and his fellow scientists ached with possessive longing.

  It was a great crystal sphere, a thousand feet in diameter. The material was plani-glass, a transparent composition of Webb's invention. Its tensile strength was that of fine-wrought steel, but its lightness greater than that of aluminium. In its normal state it transmitted all the beating waves of space without let or hindrance; when polarized, however, only the wave lengths of light could slide along the latticed crystals. Neither electricity, magnetism, X rays nor cosmic rays could force their lethal energies through the impenetrable barrier. A special repulsor screen, such as the space ships used, diverted plunging meteors from their destructive paths.

  Within the vast concavity Webb Foster set up his laboratory. All the normal apparatus was there: huge dynamos powered by solar radiation, giant electrostatic balls, flaring electron tubes high as a building, mass spectrographs, a powerful photo-electric mosaic telescope, delicate immersion baths.

  But besides this regular equipment were machines that Webb himself had fashioned: infinitely sensitive wave traps that tapped subspace itself, positron segregators, where those flash-vanishing ephemera of nature could be held indefinitely; strange spiral whirligigs in whose light-approaching speeds time itself seemed to have lost its forward march—and a myriad other complexes of ultra-science.

  Nor did Webb forget the more material bodily comforts. At the very center of his space laboratory he placed his living quarters, wherein he studied and ate and slept and had his controls, like an alert spider at the core of his web. In his storage compartments there was always a sufficient supply of dehydrated food for three years of wandering, a thousand-gallon tank of water, and air-purifying machines whereby the atmosphere could be indefinitely renewed and kept clean and wholesome.

  WHEN the great globe was completed, and stocked with all its multitudinous machines, twenty rocket tugs towed it from its Earth hangar out into space, set it upon a previously calculated orbit a million miles beyond the Moon, gave it the necessary orbital impetus, and set it free. Whereupon the space laboratory became a second satellite to Earth, revolving majestically around the parent globe in uninhibited gravitational flight, rotating slowly on its own axis to generate an artificial gravitational field within.

  There, in the depths of space, flashing like a minor planet, the space laboratory went its way, using no power in its interminable orbit, granting to its master that isolation, that abstraction from mundane noise and crowding which no longer existed on any of the inhabited worlds. Yet, when he willed, a pulsing signal would bring a stubby, grimy cargo liner with the requisite supplies, or a space lock would open and eject a small, fast space cruiser piloted by himself. Nor was the great sphere itself devoid of directive motion. Jet-orifices studded its shining surface like crater pits, and sufficiently respectable speeds could be built up from the rocket-fuel tanks to take the giant laboratory even to the closer stars, if necessary.

  Now Webb Foster returned with a sigh of relief. He jockeyed his tiny space cruiser into the silent lock, heard the convex panel hiss into position behind him, waited the required period until warmed air flooded the erstwhile vacuum inside, and stepped out eagerly. Already the conclave of the scientists was dismissed from his mind. Ku-mer's disappointment became a wavering mist. This was home—and there was much work still to be done, important researches temporarily interrupted by the meeting.

  As the inner slide
opened, a great face thrust itself suddenly into his own—a giant face, black as a starless night, grimacing with delight. A cavernous mouth yawned and a bull voice roared, "Welcome, master!"

  Most Earthmen would have been taken aback and more than a little afraid of the monstrous apparition. But Webb looked up without surprise, and even considerable pleasure, at the giant, and answered cordially, "Hello, Stet! It's good to see your homely face again."

  The giant grinned toothlessly. He towered over Webb a good three feet, and Webb himself was tall for an Earthman. Yet, though his bulk was ponderous, he moved with strange, catlike swiftness, and the muscles rippled over his ebon form.

  He was a Titan, a member of the troglodyte race who inhabited that largest satellite of Saturn under conditions of cold and airlessness that would have proven fatal to any other people in the solar system. It was a savage, desolate world, from which the space voyagers usually veered away with cautious haste; a world liable to erupt these giant Titans from their unseen burrows to obliterate a venturesome expedition.

  Yet Webb Foster had visited Titan in search of radio-active elements beyond the Earth tables, and found evanium, No. 95 in the list—and also Stet! Stet was engaged in a desperate losing battle with a horde of his fellow tribesmen. Webb discovered later he had violated one of the obscure taboos of the planet. A few well-placed bursts of penetron shells had scattered the howling savages to their burrows, and Stet, more dead than alive, was hauled incontinently into the space laboratory. Webb nursed the poor Titan back to health and found himself with a devoted servant, an unshakable, loyal dog on his hands. And he learned civilized methods with surprising rapidity, became exceedingly deft with the machines and a tower of superbly functioning strength to Webb in more ways than one.