A Large Anthology of Science Fiction

by Jerry

  Away through the snow Jandron dragged him. Marr made no resistance; just let himself be led, whining a little, palsied, rickety, shattered. The girl, her face whitely cold as the snow that fell on it, came after.

  Thus they reached the landing at the river.

  “Come, now, let’s get away!” Jandron made shift to articulate. Marr said nothing. But when Jandron tried to bundle him into a canoe, something in the journalist revived with swift, mad hatefulness. That something lashed him into a spasm of wiry, incredibly venomous resistance. Slavers of blood and foam streaked Marr’s lips. He made horrid noises, like an animal. He howled dismally, and bit, clawed, writhed and grovelled! He tried to sink his teeth into Jandron’s leg. He fought appallingly, as men must have fought in the inconceivably remote days even before the Stone Age. And Vivian helped him. Her fury was a tiger-cat’s.

  Between the pair of them, they almost did him in. They almost dragged Jandron down—and themselves, too—into the black river that ran swiftly sucking under the ice. Not till Jandron had quite flung off all vague notions and restraints of gallantry; not until he struck from the shoulder—to kill, if need were—did he best them.

  He beat the pair of them unconscious, trussed them hand and foot with the painters of the canoes, rolled them into the larger canoe, and shoved off.

  After that, the blankness of a measureless oblivion descended.

  Only from what he was told, weeks after, in the Royal Victoria Hospital at Montreal, did Jandron ever learn how and when a field-squad of Dominion Foresters had found them drifting in Lake Moosawamkeag. And that knowledge filtered slowly into his brain during a period inchoate as Iceland fogs.

  That Marr was dead and the girl alive—that much, at all events, was solid. He could hold to that; he could climb back, with that, to the real world again.

  Jandron climbed back, came back. Time healed him, as it healed the girl. After a long, long while, they had speech together. Cautiously he sounded her wells of memory. He saw that she recalled nothing. So he told her white lies about capsized canoes and the sad death—in realistically-described rapids—of all the party except herself and him.

  Vivian believed. Fate, Jandron knew, was being very kind to both of them.

  But Vivian could never understand in the least why her husband, not very long after marriage, asked her not to wear a wedding-ring or any ring whatever.

  “Men are so queer!” covers a multitude of psychic agonies.

  Life, for Jandron—life, softened by Vivian—knit itself up into some reasonable semblance of a normal pattern. But when, at lengthening intervals, memories even now awake—memories crawling amid the slime of cosmic mysteries that it is madness to approach—or when at certain times Jandron sees a ring of any sort, his heart chills with a cold that reeks of the horrors of Infinity.

  And from shadows past the boundaries of our universe seem to beckon Things that, God grant, can never till the end of time be known on earth.

  (THE END.)

  THE MAN WHO OWNED THE WORLD

  Frank Owen

  The Hero of This Story Had a Beautiful Dream and a Rude Awakening

  I MET John Rust by chance one evening in a by-street near Greenwich Village.

  It was a miserable night, the air was extremely cold, and a choppy wind kept blowing against my face as though resentful of my presence. And now it commenced to rain, not sufficiently heavy to drive one from the street, yet disagreeable enough to make everything clammy and dismal.

  But despite the dreariness of the night, I loitered for a moment before a jewelry store window, probably because I simply cannot pass a window containing gems or pottery or old vases without pausing a moment. There was nothing in the window worthy of recounting, just a heterogeneous assortment of cheap rings, bracelets and gaudy beads almost valueless. Nevertheless, I tarried and then it was that someone grabbed me by the arm, and as I turned around, the jewelry window, the storm, the cold, all were forgotten, for I was gazing into the face of John Rust.

  He was so thin that the skin of his face seemed drawn over the raw bones without any intervening layer of flesh. His face was absolutely colorless, even his lips were blue-white. He had a straggly beard, yellow and vile-looking. Even without the enormous shapeless mouth and toothless gums, the beard was sufficient to make the face repulsive.

  But it was the unnatural, fanatical light in his eyes which impressed itself most clearly on the screen of my memory. It was not human, but a glow such as might appear in the eyes of a maniac or a wild animal. His costume seemed made up of stray bits from the clothes of all the tramps of earth. And yet he carried a cane and kept swinging it about jauntily as though it were a thing of vast importance.

  “You call those jewels!” he cried harshly in a voice made of falsetto notes. “Why, those are not even fit to be thrown to the swine which grovel in a thousand pens more than a mile from my castle. Come with me and I will show you gems more wondrous than the Crown Jewels of Old Russia, more gorgeous than the collection of Cleopatra and more luxurious than the famed necklace of Helen of Troy. After you see my jewels, you will laugh at what is obviously but a collection of baubles.”

  On the impulse of the moment, I said, “I will go with you, but before we go, I suggest that we have a bite to eat. You look hungry.”

  He shrugged his shoulders. “This day,” he cried, “have I drunk three pearls melted in golden goblets of rarest wine. But if you wish to eat, I will go with you. All the restaurants near here are mine.”

  So we went to Messimo’s Chop House and ate, but what we ate I cannot recall. As we passed out, John Rust grew quite angry because I paid the check.

  “That was foolish,” he stormed, “for did I not tell you I owned the restaurant? Tonight I want you to be my guest.”

  He led the way through a labyrinth of alleys and narrow streets.

  “I live apart from the howling mobs,” he told me, “so that my sleep will not be disturbed. Each morn I am awakened by a lad as lovely as Narcissus who plays an anthem of the Sun on a harp wrought of gold and platinum and set with a hundred and thirty-three pink diamonds. At the top of the harp is a single square blue diamond of forty carats, the finest in the world. It represents the Morning Star. The strings of the harp are the rays of the sun. The pink diamonds represent the individual kingdoms over which I reign.”

  As he spoke, we came to a hole in the ground, a filthy, ancient cellar. I must confess that I had a twinge of terror as I followed John Rust down a flight of slippery stone steps, more treacherous and steep than the facade of Gibraltar.

  Something, I know not what, scampered across my feet and went screeching off into the blackness which engulfed us like the shadows in a tomb of recent death. I could hear John Rust fumbling about, and after an eternity of waiting, he struck a match and lighted a candle. As he did so, he cried:

  “Behold, my treasure-chamber!”

  By the dim light of the candle which made the silhouette of John Rust dance on the wall like the capering of a fiend, I glanced about me. The cellar was absolutely unfurnished, unless the cobwebs of a century can be classed as drapery. Down the stone steps the night rain dripped monotonously.

  “Look!” fairly shrieked John Rust, “look at these diamonds, sapphires, carved jades, rare corals, tourmalines, emeralds and gorgeous lapis lazuli! Has ever mortal man gazed on a finer collection than this? Here is more wealth than even Midas dreamed of. The Gaekwar of Baroda by comparison to me is without jewels; the Dalai Llama of Tibet is a pauper when the light of my wealth shines upon him.

  All the treasures of Rome are insignificant when held parallel to mine. The Incas of Peru owned less than I divide in a single year among the poor!”

  He clutched at the bits of ashes, coal and pebbles which were falling through his fingers, the wealth which the Gods had lavished on him so prodigiously.

  “Tell me,” he cried hoarsely, “are your eyes not blinded by the brilliance of my stones?”

  “My surprise at what you tell m
e is acute,” I declared truthfully. “I can scarcely find words to express my thoughts.”

  “Don’t try,” said John Rust grandly. “The greatest rhetoricians the world has ever known have never invented words even to suggest their true magnificence . . . Nor is this treasure all I possess. I own the world! Every castle of Rome or Venice is mine; every pasture of England, every moor of Scotland, every city in America, I own. Come,” he ended abruptly, “come with me, and I will show you my private bath, a pool such as Mark Antony or the mighty Caesar never dreamed of.”

  It must be confessed that I sighed with relief as he led the way up the worn stone steps again. It was good to be out in the open air once more, even though it was raining as heavily as when Noah set sail.

  John Rust led the way back to Washington Square, to the fountain in the center of the park.

  “This,” he explained, “is my bath, shaded by myrtle trees and palms and in the heart of a grove where ten thousand song birds sing. Among the seven wonders of the world is nothing to equal this. I am better than Monte Cristo, for whereas he only boasted when he exclaimed, ‘The world is mine!’ I can prove my claim to it.”

  DURING the days that followed, I met John Rust several times, and although I cannot say that he remembered me, he nevertheless talked to me, which was really all he desired. He believed that all the people in the great city were his slaves and this misconception was the direct cause of his undoing.

  While his eccentricities flowed in a harmless channel, he was unmolested, but one day he struck one of his subjects with his scepter. The scepter was a strong oak cudgel and the subject in question was a huge, stalwart ice-man who strenuously objected to being disciplined. He raised such a din that two policemen were necessary to quell his personal riot.

  After chaos had ended, the ice-man continued on his rounds, but John Rust was detained until the police-patrol arrived. He believed it was a chariot of gold, that the crowd gathered around had come to envy Caesar, and so he climbed in as majestically as though he were about to proceed to the Coliseum as the supreme guest of the populace on a fete day.

  In the course of weeks, a great brain specialist, because he was interested in the case, examined John Rust and asserted that he could be successfully normalized by a simple operation. He went on to explain about the pressure of a bone on some vital spot in the brain, the removal of which would insure the return of rationality.

  The operation was successfully performed and eventually John Rust was turned out of the hospital a withered, broken old man, entirely cured.

  He went back to his cellar. The first thing he intended doing was to sell his jewels and deposit the money in a reliable bank, for he still retained the memory of his jewels, although the hallucination that he owned the world was entirely blotted out of his memory.

  So he returned to his cellar only to find heaps of worthless stones and ashes. He shrieked in his anguish. He had been robbed of all his jewels! For a moment it seemed doubtful that his new-found sanity could stand the surging flood of his ravings. All his enormous wealth had vanished like the essence of a dream. Now life contained nothing for him. He had neither relatives nor friends. He had lived in his dungeon for more than ten years. No one knew from whence he had come. For hours he sat, perhaps even days, moaning and wailing as awfully as any woman for a lost child.

  Months later, they found him dead one morning in his cellar, lying face downward in his ashes. He had died of grief, in abject poverty, this man who once had owned the world and had ten million slaves.

  AN ADVENTURE IN THE FOURTH DIMENSION

  Farnsworth Wright

  THE thought of meteors terrifies me. They have a disagreeable habit of coming down and killing people at the most inopportune times. That is why I was so startled when I saw a large object hurtling toward me out of the sky, as I was walking along the lake front recently in my city of Chicago.

  I shivered. Was this the end? I began to say my prayers. To my astonishment, the onrushing missile struck the grass beside me without the slightest jar.

  I gasped.

  Thousands of singular objects began to detach themselves. They bounded from the mass, and suddenly increased in size from one inch to three feet in diameter. They were entirely round, and covered with teeth. On each tooth were ten ears, constantly in motion. Each ear carried a quizzical eye.

  The dwarfish creatures rolled rapidly on the ground, the ears serving as legs, hands, tentacles and what not, propelling them with incredible speed. Sometimes they stood on only four of five of their ears, then suddenly pressed hard against the ground with half a thousand ears at once, thus bounding high into the air. They lit without jar, for the ears acted as shock absorbers and broke their fall.

  “Surely these are explorers from Mars or Venus,” I thought, as the funny bounding creatures filled the air.

  “You are wrong. They are Jupiterians,” said a voice beside me.

  I recognized the voice. It was Professor Nutt. You probably know him.

  “Ahem,” he said. “Ahem, ahem!” And once more he repeated, “Ahem!”

  “Interesting, if true,” I remarked. “And what might Jupiterians be?”

  “They might be men, but they’re not,” he snapped. “They are people from the planet Jupiter. Out of your ignorance you thought they might be Martians or Venusians, but you are wrong, for Mars and Venus have people of three dimensions, like ourselves. Jupiterians are entirely different. There are six hundred thousand of them in this Jupiterian airship.”

  I was so overjoyed at finding someone who could tell me about them, that I didn’t think to ask him how he knew all these startling facts.

  “Where is the airship you speak of?” I asked.

  “There it is,” he answered, rather grandiloquently, and pointed to an empty spot on the grass.

  I looked carefully, and made out a vast, transparent globe, apparently of glass, which was rapidly becoming visible because of the Chicago dust that was settling upon it. I approached, and touched it with my hand. It gave forth a metallic ring.

  “Aha!” laughed the professor. “You thought it was glass, but it is made of Jupiterian steel. Look out!”

  I sprang back at his warning, and the last hundred thousand leapt out of the globe, passing right through the transparent metal of which it was composed.

  “Nom de mademoiselle!” I exclaimed, in astonishment. This was a swear word I had learned in France when I was in the army.

  “Nom de mademoiselle!” I repeated, for I liked to show off my knowledge of the language. “How can they pass through the glass without breaking it?”

  “Through Jupiterian steel, you mean,” said Professor Nutt, severely. “I told you before that it is not glass. Jupiterian steel has four dimensions, and they pass through the fourth dimension. That is why you can’t see the metal, for your eyes are only three-dimensional.”

  “Are the Jupiterian people four-dimensional?” I asked, awed.

  “Certainly,” said Nutt, rather irritably.

  “Then how is it that I can see them?” I exclaimed triumphantly.

  “You see only three of their four dimensions,” he replied. “The other one is inside.”

  I turned to look again at the Jupiterians, who now covered the whole waterfront. One of them sprang lightly, fifty feet into the air, extended a hundred ears like tentacles, and seized an English sparrow. He crushed the sparrow with some score or more of his teeth, which, as I have said, covered his whole body. In less than a minute the poor bird was chewed to pieces. I looked closer, and saw that the Jupiterian had no mouth.

  “Nom de mademoiselle!” I exclaimed, for the third time. “How can it get the bird into its stomach?”

  “Through the fourth dimension,” said Professor Nutt.

  It was true. The chewed up pieces of the bird were suddenly tossed into the air, and the Jupiterian sprang lightly after them. In mid-air he turned inside out, caught the pieces of the bird in his stomach, and lit on the grass again right side up
with care.

  “Did you see that?” I exclaimed, in a hushed voice. “Why can’t I turn inside out that way?”

  “Because you are not four-dimensional,” replied the professor, a trace of annoyance in his voice. “It is a beautiful thing to have four dimensions,” he rhapsodized. “Your Jupiterian is your only true intellectual, for he alone can truly reflect. He turns his gaze in upon himself.”

  “And sees what he had for breakfast?” I gasped. “And what his neighbors had, too?”

  “Your questions are childish.” said the professor, wearily. “A Jupiterian, of course, can look into the soul of things, and see what his neighbors had for breakfast, as you so vulgarly express it. But Jupiterians turn their thoughts to higher things.”

  The creatures now surrounded me, their ears turned inward, as if they were supplicating.

  “What do they want?” I asked the professor.

  “They want something to drink,” he replied. “They are pointing their ears toward their stomachs to show that they are thirsty.”

  “Oh,” I said, and pointed toward the lake. “There is the fresh, cool water of the lake, if they are thirsty.”

  “Don’t be fantastic,” said Professor Nutt. “It isn’t water they want.”

  He fixed his stern, pitiless gaze on my hip pocket. I turned pale, for it was my last pint. But I had to submit. If you ever have had Professor Nutt’s cold, accusing eyes on you, you will know just how I felt.

  I drew the flask from my pocket, and handed it to the chief Jupiterian, who waggled his ears in joy.

  Immediately there was pandemonium, if you know what I mean. Ten thousand times ten thousand ears seized the cork, and pulled it out with a resounding pop. One thirsty Jupiterian passed right through the glass into the bottle in his eagerness to get at the contents, and nearly drowned for his pains.

  “You see how useful it is to be four-dimensional,” remarked the professor. “You could get into any cellar in the world by merely passing through the walls. And into any beer-keg in the same way.”