A Large Anthology of Science Fiction

by Jerry

“Yes, yes!” Dr. Frick seemed annoyed. “But we are getting nowhere. This may be evidence of intelligence and yet we’re completely in the dark.”

  “That series of notes could be a sort of communication, Frick. Good grief, man, it’s like listening to a child’s voice crying out that it’s lost—like a voice in the dark. But they aren’t words. They don’t even sound as if they were a code. It makes you forget that it’s nothing but electricity—nothing but imprisoned electricity being expelled bit by bit and transformed by our sound box from electro-static force into audible sound waves.”

  “Technically you are correct, Beckwith. But here’s the point. What is it controlling the flow of electrical energy from the meteorite? Oh, there are hundreds of questions. Why wasn’t all of the energy dissipated when the meteorite struck the ground? Or might not the energy itself have been generated within our own atmosphere and stored within the outer shell during the fall? Then again, why should the energy seem to accumulate in that one spot of the sphere as if by willful intelligence? Tom, this is unbearable. I must find out.”

  “Wait!” Beckwith leaped to his feet. “I have it. We can transfer the energy to a series of cells and then take it with us to the laboratory. We can’t move several tons of meteoric iron, but we don’t need to worry about that. The thing—whatever it is that is controlling that stored-up electricity—is trying to tell us that. Can’t you understand it, Frick?”

  “Good, Tom! However—well, don’t you understand that we can’t attempt this at the planetarium? You know what would happen. The moment it was generally known that we were working on an experiment to prove the existence of intelligent life upon another planet, we should be laughed out of countenance. I think we should try to transport the controlled energy to the workshop I’ve rigged up at my own house. What do you think about it?”

  “That would be best; I quite agree with you. The world will think us mad. Well, maybe we are mad, Frick. But notice that—that ball of energy! It’s like an eye in the dark, an eye that’s looking at us and waiting and wondering.”

  Dr. Allison Frick threw an arm about his youthful assistant. “Tom,” he said, “I was under the impression that this was some private fantasy of my own.

  But with yon believing in it, too.

  There are several bell-jars in the back of the car. I chucked them in on the off chance that we’d want to protect some bit of something or other from the atmosphere. There are three sizes. Superimposed, and with metallic shells in between, we can connect them in much the same manner we attached the sound box.”

  “There’s enough stuff here!” Beckwith exclaimed with boyish enthusiasm. “If only we can get the—the thing in the meteorite to understand.”

  DR. ALLSION FRICK had succeeded in closing his office at Erie after two and a half days of rather intensive work. There was much yet to be done with regard to the amazingly clear photographs which had been obtained in the gondola’s skyward trip. Too, he sorely missed young Tom Beckwith’s very capable assistance. Nevertheless, he had arrived at a point where a rest of a few days at least would not seem unreasonable to his associates. Their acclaim for his daring adventure was still at full glow. It was natural, many of them said, that he should refrain from confining himself too closely to the planetarium after such a nerve-straining experience.

  Hurrying to the large attic room which he called his workshop, Dr. Frick approached the tense figure who was bending over a bewildering bank of static electricity controls. At sound of his footsteps, Tom Beckwith straightened up.

  “Still no results?” Dr. Frick questioned eagerly.

  “There’s something here,” Beckwith said in a slow, thoughtful tone. “But I don’t know yet bow I got it.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Look!”

  Very carefully Beckwith removed the lid from a glass jar and withdrew a small black cricket.

  “It’s dead,” Dr. Frick remarked. There was a deepening frown of perplexity across his face.

  “I know. The shock killed it. You see, I’ve been easing in little amounts of positive electricity to try to make up for what we lost in the transfer. At one time I thought the power which controlled the energy in the meteorite was attempting to reestablish those sounds again, but nothing remarkable happened other than a few hesitant sputters. Then, quite by chance, a cricket came from somewhere. I saw it running toward the equipment there and tried to catch it. The thing jumped, landing squarely across the two wires leading to the sound box.”

  “What happened, Tom?”

  “Just this. Watch.”

  Dexterously grasping the lifeless insect between thumb and forefinger, Beckwith lowered it so that the chitinous shell contacted two points. Instantly the insect seemed to pulsate as if with life.

  There came a faint chirping sound. The body was vibrant.

  “I’ve added more energy,” Beckwith was saying. “But so far this is the only reaction I’ve been able to attain. I can’t short-circuit it with my own hand—or even a strip of metal. The energy is there in the storage cells. You can see that for yourself through the actions of the cricket, yet nothing else will give any result. It’s the life-force controlling the energy that accounts for it. There’s no other way of explaining it. But why?”

  His gaze riveted upon the grotesque semblance of life in the tiny insect, Dr. Frick quickly removed his coat. “Tom,” he whispered, “we’ve got it. We’ve really got it. But what is it, and from whence does it come?”

  THE CHIRPPING cricket-sounds had begun to change. A prolonged pitch, not unlike a human sigh, seemed to emanate from the pulsating body. Both men turned to look at the other.

  Dr. Frick said: “The voice, Tom. The voice of the meteorite.”

  “It’s the same. That’s no cricket sound. Besides, you saw for yourself that the insect was dead. If only we knew more than we do of electrostatics. Frick, seeing something like this brings it home to you that we’ve virtually deserted the study since the nineteenth century. Since then our knowledge has expanded almost exclusively in electrodynamics. That’s what makes this so baffling. We don’t understand even the mechanistic fundamentals.”

  “Not that alone, Tom. Even electrostatics won’t give us the answer to the motivating force behind this.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Just what I’ve been trying not to think about ever since we first heard that terrible, appealing voice from the unknown. Pure logic says that we might eventually explain that cry by understanding the mechanics of gravitation. But something else suggested that there was reason and intelligence in it—just as there was reason and intelligence in the controlled flow of electrical energy in the smashed remains of the meteorite, Tom, will you look—I swear that cricket is alive!”

  The two stared in awe as the insect seemed to struggle to right itself. Suddenly cries of amazement escaped them. The cricket was no longer suspended between the points of the apparatus. It was moving, though slowly and awkwardly, across the table toward them.

  “Frick! What are you doing?”

  Beckwith stared after the curator’s hasty movements wonderingly. Dr. Allison Frick moved with frantic speed. Hurriedly now, he began to assemble odd bits of laboratory equipment about the table.

  “Keep watch over the cricket,” he said once.

  Beckwith nodded but continued to watch Dr. Frick’s unaccountable activity. Soon a light of understanding began to show in his eyes. Dr. Frick had dragged the electrostatic machine across the room and was connecting its terminals with certain of the materials which he had laid out on the table. At last he mumbled: “Ready.”

  “The insect is far from normal,” Beckwith remarked. “It acts as if it only half understood how to control its body.”

  “Exactly.” Dr. Frick’s tone of voice was more low pitched and steady now. “But I think I see just a little light, Tom. When you stop to give it thought—in view of the staggering vastness of the cosmos—it is almost unreasonable to presume that the isolated little
planet, Earth, alone can spawn speculative life. We can dream of spaceships, but we can’t build them. Physiologically and mechanically, interplanetary travel is unobtainable. But there is mere to a living, intelligent being than flesh and brain—an elusive something which actually lifts us above all other animal life-forms despite inferior bodies. Sometimes we try to grope for an explanation by giving it a name such as ‘soul’ or ‘spirit’ or ‘consciousness.’ ”

  “But that,” Beckwith exclaimed, “that is just a cricket.”

  “No, no. It is not a cricket. It is something in a cricket’s body—something which crossed over to us on what was thought to be a chance meteorite. By sheerest luck, Tom, you and I have stumbled into a new corridor of knowledge. For the time, it makes all the rest of what we’ve learned seem topsyturvy. That’s true of every other great accidental discovery. But quick now—build up as great a potential in the machine as you can. I’m gambling on chance—it’s been with us this far—and I know that the will within the body of that insect knows more about electrostatics than is known by the whole race of humankind.”

  Beckwith was not surprised that his hands were trembling as he grasped the crank of the machine. The world would pronounce them both insane. And yet, there was a fearful beam of truth in Dr. Frick’s tense probing into tire unknown. Beckwith was building up a significant charge over Dr. Frick’s insulated body. Now, the curator was leaning forward over the table, extending a forefinger tentatively toward the apparently alert and understanding insect. Abruptly, the cricket stepped forward.

  THE CONTACT could have lasted but the fraction of a second, and yet in that terrible interval it seemed that time had been warped beyond material conception, A crackling, daggerlike charge of energy shot from human hand to the black chitin of the cricket. Instantly a cowl of opalescent haze surrounded the bodies so that they no longer seemed a substantial part of material existence. Beckwith was conscious of crying out—yet his mouth gaped in the sound which for the moment had neither beginning nor end.

  It seemed that they were again in the gondola far out in space and hearing for the first time the vibrant animal cry of the charging meteorite. Only this time Frick’s eyes were gleaming with unnatural brilliance as if he were seeing a sight too fantastic for human assimilation.

  As abruptly as it had begun, the fearful discharge ended. Beckwith, his body quivering, drooped weakly upon the electrostatic machine.

  “Tom!” Dr. Frick was calling out. “Did you see it, Tom?”

  Beckwith moved his head feebly from side to side. “The cricket’s dead,” he muttered. “Burned to a crisp.”

  “No—no, it’s not dead. Not really dead.” Dr. Frick was speaking with intense excitement. “The experiment has been a success. It isn’t human life but it has reason, memory, intelligence, culture—all incased within the efficient body of the insect. I see it now. The life force from that meteorite revealed it, Tom, It came from another planet where animals of our type are unknown. It was not an insect but an intelligent being. It was seeking life here, and could not contact our bodies because of the radical structural differences. That explains why the manifestations of light and sounds had no intelligible meaning for us, although we could sense a reason behind them. Do you understand?” The two stared eye to eye, both visibly shaken by the enormity of what had been revealed.

  Beckwith’s voice quavered with emotion. “But there was nothing on the meteorite except static electricity——”

  “Which is the secret of interplanetary travel,” Dr. Frick spoke sharply. “The creatures of the other planet have discovered the laws of consciousness projection. The secret will be man’s, too, when he masters electrostatics. Where did this life come from? I could not tell for sure. In the brief second of contact we could not achieve full communication. From Mars I think. Such a cricketlike being could exist there. But that’s not the biggest thing. The lesson for us is that mind, consciousness, ego, must be reduced to their electrical denominator. This was a terrestrial cricket and yet, for just a moment, its body was controlled by the electrostatic formula of that other-world being.” Beckwith interrupted: “Yes, I know. The secret is ours, but—it must remain ours.”

  “Right.” Dr. Frick nodded. “Until we learn more of electricity at rest. And then,” his face brightened, “we shall no longer be chained in isolation. A new day is dawning, Tout—you and I have just seen the first streaks of sunlight, because we dared rise higher in the sky than any other man.”

  JANE BROWN’S BODY

  Cornell Woolrich

  I

  Three o’clock in the morning. The highway is empty, under a malignant moon. The oil-drippings make the roadway gleam like a blue-satin ribbon. The night is still but for a humming noise coming up somewhere behind a rise of ground.

  Two other, fiercer, whiter moons, set close together, suddenly top the rise, shoot a fan of blinding platinum far down ahead of them. Headlights. The humming burgeons into a roar. The touring car is going so fast it sways from side to side. The road is straight. The way is long. The night is short.

  The man hunched at the wheel is tense; his eyes are fixed unblinkingly on the hem of the black curtain that the headlights roll up before him. His eyes are like two little lumps of coal. His face is brown; his hair is white. His figure is gaunt, but there is power in the bony wrists that grip the wheel, and power in the locked jaws that show white with their own tension.

  The speedometer needle flickers a little above eighty . . .

  The rear-view mirror shows a very tired young woman napping on the back seat. Her legs are tucked up under her, and the laprobe has been swathed around her from the waist down. One black-gloved hand is twisted in the looped cord dangling from the side of the car; it hangs there even as she sleeps, of its own weight. She sways with a limpness, a lack of reflex-resistance, that almost suggests an absence of life.

  She has on a tiny pillbox-hat with a fine-meshed veil flaring out all around below it. The wind keeps pushing it back like a film across her face. The contact of her nose makes a funny little knob on it. It should billow out at that point with her breathing, at such close contact. It doesn’t, just caves in as though she were sucking it through parted lips. She sleeps with her mouth slightly open.

  The moon is the only thing that keeps up with this careening car, grinning down derisively on it all the way, mile after mile, as though to say, “I’m on to you!”

  A scattering of pinpoint lights shows up in the blackness ahead. A town or village straddling the highway. The indicator on the speedometer begins to lose ground. The man glances in his mirror at the girl, a little anxiously as if this oncoming town were some kind of test to be met.

  An illuminated road-sign flashes by.

  CAUTION!

  Main Street Ahead—Slow Up

  The man nods grimly, as if agreeing with that first word. But not in the way it is meant.

  The lights grow bigger, spread out on either side. Street lights peer out here and there among the trees. The highway suddenly sprouts a plank sidewalk on each side of it. Dark store-windows glide by.

  With an instinctive gesture, the man dims his lights from blinding platinum to just a pale wash. A lunch-room window drifts by.

  The lights of a big bus going his way wink just ahead. He makes ready to swerve out and get past it. And then there is an unlooked-for complication. A railroad right-of-way bisects the main street here. Perhaps no train has passed all night until now. Perhaps no other will pass until morning. Five minutes sooner, five minutes later, and he could have avoided the delay. But just as car and lighted bus approach, side by side, a bell starts ringing, zebra-striped barriers weighted with red lanterns are slowly lowered, and the road is blocked off. The two cars are forced to halt abreast while a slow procession of freight cars files endlessly by. Almost simultaneously, a large milk-truck has turned in behind him from the side road, sealing him in.

  The lights of the bus shine into the car and fall on the sleeping woman. There is only
one passenger in the bus, but he is on the near side, and he looks idly out the window into the neighboring machine. His eye drops to the sleeping woman and remains there, as any man’s would.

  There is a terrible rigidity about the man at the wheel now. White shows over his knuckles. His eyes are glued on the mirror, in which he can see the bus-passenger gazing casually into the rear of his car. A shiny thread starts down his face, catches in one of its leathery furrows. Sweat. A second one follows. His chest is rising and falling under his coat and he breathes as if he has been running.

  The man at the bus window keeps looking at the woman, looking at her. He doesn’t mean anything by it, probably. There’s nothing else for him to look at. Why shouldn’t he look at a woman, even a sleeping one? She must be beautiful under that veil. Some men are born starers-at-women, anyway.

  But as the endless freight cars click by ahead, as the long scrutiny keeps up, one of the white-knuckled hands on the wheel is moving. It leaves the polished wooden rim, drops to its owner’s lap. The whiteness goes out of it. It starts crawling up under his coat, buries itself between the buttoned halves, comes out again, white over the knuckles again, gripping an automatic.

  His eyes have never once left the rear-view mirror, never once left the reflection of the bus-passenger’s face. He acts as if he is waiting for some expression to come into it. Some certain, telltale expression. He acts as if, then, he will do something with that gun on his lap.

  But the caboose has finally terminated the endless chain of freight cars, the bell stops ringing, the barriers slowly rise. The bus-driver unlimbers his clutch, the line of lighted windows start to edge forward. The gun vanishes, the hand that held it returns to the wheel empty. A moment later bus, and passenger, and face have all spurted ahead. The touring car hangs back a moment, to give it a good start. The milk-truck signals impatiently for clearance, then cuts out around the obstacle, lurches ahead.

  The leathery-faced man at the wheel has his under lip thrust out, expelling hot breath of relief up past his own face. He touches the two liquid threads the drops of sweat left on his face, blots them.