The Collected Stories

by Earl

  Bradley and Forijay huddled together. talking swiftly.

  Korth, face astounded, raced to the side port and tried to pierce the sable curtain beyond. But ail he could see was the huge green-winged monstrosity, steadily nearing. “Damn you, Berringer!” he shrieked whirling. “What have you done?”

  Perfectly calm, the aged savant spoke triumphantly, “Just what I said I would. I wrenched the vacuum apart, and we are now falling—or rising, no matter—In the shaft that leads beyond earthly illusion to— more illusion! We have engines, but they are useless—I see the irony of It now. For there are no such things as motion or distance! Human conceptions — illusions! Do you know what we shall find? Professor Korth, do you?”

  Berringer went on as the tall physicist shrank hack, eyes wide. “We shall find that the sun is the center of everything, and that It is the only star! We shall see other stars spaced evenly around, but bunched at one end of this ultra-dimensional shaft, and they will be illusions. The planets will be missing!

  “But those are silly, meaningless things—unveiled hallucinations. The important things we shall see and discover will be the Blue Beings in their natural environment of what we call vacuum. Then the facet-rocks of the Outer World, whose reflections we call stars. The Universal Mind which the Blue Beings fear. And finally, the Great All—the reality that will turn Illusion before our very eyes!”

  Korth and Berringer stared at one another, both aware of a tremendous significance behind these paradoxical words.

  They did not notice that Bradley and Forijay were quietly sneaking toward the airlock. In their eyes was a glassy stare—a hypnotic determination to escape from this mad ship that was plunging to an alien universe. In their fear-palsied brains rang but one thought—“Get out!”

  Bradley twisted the control lever for the airlock, jerked open the first door, and duplicated this maneuver at the outer hatch. Strangely, there was no blast of escaping air as be catapulted himself madly away from the ship. Forijay followed an instant later.

  They had escaped! Let death come, the way they understood death; better that then the lunatic journey to a world of insanity and illusion!

  [2]It was very dark. There were no stars visible. Forijay shivered to the cold wind that blew out of the black silence. His hands clutched at the naked, ice-cold rocks. Even as he lay with face pressed against the ledge, his head still ached and spun with an appalling unendurable vertigo.

  There are no stars!

  The words hung in his mind, a haunting, hideous enigma. He tried to remember; then the thought came that the memory must toe so terrible that it would shatter his insanity.

  With vast relief, he sensed another inert body near him. His eyes, becoming adjusted to the strange darkness, could now see the outlines of the desolate rocky terrain, as if by a faint luminescence. He turned toward the groan.

  “Bradley!” he muttered. “What happened? Where are we?” He whispered again the sinister and meaningless answer to his questions. “There are no stars!”

  Bradley sat up in the darkness, still groaning.

  “It would be hard to say where we are—and when,” he gasped. “But we are where Berringer will never find us. I have broken our pledge, Fo— to save our lives!” He shuddered. “When I saw that winged monstrosity of the void, it was impossible to go on! I never suspected myself a coward, Fo. But that horror—”

  Forijay was rubbing his bruised forehead, dizzily.

  “Still, he muttered, “I can’t remember—it’s all like a nightmare. Tell me, Brad.”

  “Of course you remember,” said Bradley. “But no wonder you think it a nightmare—it is one! But old Berringer’s experiment— remember? He was going to prove that all knowledge is illusion. And Korth, his old rival, standing there with a skeptical smile on his hard mouth, waiting for his chance to make a fool of Berringer—”

  “Wait!” Forijay’s voice broke in, faint with dread. I remember . . . The terrible dark, when Berringer started his apparatus . . . The silence . . . The shaft beneath the vanishing planets . . . The fall down the shaft, out of space, Berringer said—”

  Horror choked him for a time. His dry lips moved soundlessly, whispering again:

  “The stars below . . . The facets of rock like a valley of Jewels . . . The central sun beneath a world that no longer existed! . . . The Blue Beings, waiting for us to come to our doom . . .”

  He jerked up his head, tried to recover himself.

  “But that can’t he!” His jaw tensed. “Illusion of illusion. There are no stars!” He rubbed his forehead, blankly and looked into the darkness toward Bradley. “But I still don’t understand why we are here.”

  “You have forgotten the nearer horror,” said Bradley. “The monstrous entity that guards the secret of the void. It pursued us through space on wings of glowing green. Its flight was as fast as light; it may have been a thing of light.” His voice was dry with horror. “Its eye was a triple well of purple evil.”

  He shook his head, as if to shake off fear. Forijay grasped at his arm.

  “Berringer will find us,” he said apprehensively. “We gave our word to go with him to the end—even to certain doom at the end. He won’t let us break it.”

  “No, we’re safe enough from Berringer,” said Bradley confidently. “It Is a thing I got from the Blue Beings. Time and space and matter are illusions. There is a mastery of illusion. We are ten thousand miles from Berringer, and ten million years—”

  His voice was cut off by a gasp of panic. Far away in the starless darkness, he had heard the clatter of a stone. Presently, out of the black unknown, he saw a dark bulk approaching. Its looming outlines became human, although it remained a monstrous thing.

  “A man, Brad!” gasped Forijay. “Though his head’s too hig—”

  “Once a man,” the low, terrible voice came out of the dark. “But now my purpose makes me greater than a god.”

  “Berringer!” cried Forijay in terror.

  The grotesque huge head became a helmet, as the man approached them.”

  “It is I. I have come to remind you of your pledge. You had the choice—you could have remained behind to reap fame and wealth from my disclosures. But you have chosen —to know and die.

  “There can be no turning back. We are surely doomed. But if we go forward, we may know before we die what all men have toiled to learn, since the first savage wondered at the alternation of day and night.”

  “But how—” gasped Bradley. “How did you follow?”

  Berringer’s emaciated hand touched his strange helmet.

  “This mechanism gives me contact with the Universal Mind, of which you are a part, and I am. I knew every thought of your desertion—But we must go on. Our quest will lead, far beyond the range of the Universal Mind. Korth has followed us with the ship.”

  The little space-ship grated on the rocks beside them. They filed aboard. Tall Korth was staring from the controls with frantic terror on his face.

  “Berringer!” he gasped. “It has followed us, even here!”

  His trembling hand pointed at a vision screen. There Forijay saw again the monstrous entity of the void, its glowing green wings rigidly extended against the dark of space.

  “Drive back into space,” ordered Berringer. “The monster is the smallest of the perils before us.”

  The ship flashed upward through spinning, vertiginous darkness. Abruptly the stars returned. Korth, at the controls, greeted them with a mocking laugh.

  “Illusion. There are no stars.” He looked fearfully back at the screen.

  “It is gaining.”

  “Full acceleration,” commanded Berringer grimly. “Away from the Earth.”

  The velocimeter needle crept swiftly upward. But suddenly alarm gongs jangled. White-faced, Korth snatched for the brake dial.

  “Obstruction ahead. Invisible! But we are about the collide—”

  “Go on,” said Berringer.

  Still the needle crept upward. The pursuing monster
grew larger in the screen. Korth’s staring eyes searched for the invisible border revealed by the detectors.

  Young Forijay looked mutely at his chief.

  “Ahead,” said Berringer, “is the etheric shell that surrounds the earth. “The mirror that reflects the illusion of the stars. Itself an illusion—”

  Crash!

  Forijay reeled from a stunning shock. All his body ached from a searing instant of in tolerable pain. He blinked, bewildered, at the vision screen.

  “The barrier is gone,” reported Korth, incredulously. “And the pursuing monster also—”

  “The atoms of our body have rebounded from impact with the etheric shell,” said Berringer. “If you will observe yourself, you will discover that what was once your left hand is now your right. You will now require a mirror to read your charts—”

  “But—” Korth stammered bewilderedly, “the monster—”

  “We were reflected back against it,” said the old man, the withered mask-like face beneath his helmet grim with invincible purpose. “Our combined speeds were far in the excess of the velocity of light. Impossible, you may say. Illusion of illusions.

  “But the entity has experienced the illusion of death.”

  [3]They were shaken, these four men in the cramped interior of the speeding little space-ship. Badly shaken by what they had just seen in space, by the weird incredible phenomenon that had overturned the life-time beliefs of at least three of them.

  Berringer, thin, shrivelled little man, whose aged body was husk of a colossal brain, was the least overwhelmed of them all. Korth, the tall, solemn scientist who bad hack on earth been Berringer’s greatest rival and critic, bore on his rugged face a disturbed bewilderment.

  The two younger men, Bradley and Forijay, were looking helplessly toward Berringer. In their eyes was still horror of what they had just seen, and mute appeal for knowledge. for explanation.

  “Now do you believe Korth?” Berringer was asking softly. “Now are you so sure that this quest is so utterly wild and useless one?”

  Korth tried to keep his voice steady. “I still see no reason for overturning all the accepted laws of human science,” he stated. “What we just experienced was incredible, unprecedented. It is true. But it does not mean that everything you have told us is true, that you can actually solve the supreme secret of the universe, storm the last citadel of the unknown.”

  “I can, and I will!” Berringer’s voice rang with a super-human resolve. “For too great a time the scientists of earth have repeated parrotlike, ‘The final secrets are unknowable.’ I tell you that we are flying straight toward the core of the mystery of the cosmos. We are going to know all before we die!”

  “Impossible,” muttered Korth, his gaunt face pale. “I would give my life to achieve it, to penetrate the last supreme mysteries of time and space and matter. I have in fact hazarded my life in coming with you, simply to prove that theory of your’s wrong. For it is—It must be.”

  Berringer motioned young Bradley to the controls of the ship. Then the aged little scientist stepped over to his tall colleague and looked up at him with burning eyes.

  He said softly, “Korth. you don’t believe, even after what we just went through, because you do not want to believe. You do not want to solve the mystery of the cosmos.”

  His thin hand flew up when Korth made as if to protest. “Don’t deny it, Korth. I know your secret thoughts, and they are those of every other scientist earth has had. Science is a hunt, a perpetual hunting down of the truth, and the lure of it for the scientist is the wild lure of the chase.

  “All your life, Korth, you have been engaged is that chase, trailing truth amid forests of incomprehensible facts, seeking and seeking to ferret it out and always finding that it lies still further ahead. You hare said, and have believed yourself, that you really wanted to track down and finally expose the ultimate secrets. But you have only said that because you thought such a thing impossible—in reality, you would hate such success because it would end your work, your thrilling hunt, forever! That Is why you shrink from believing me, even now. You fear that your great chase of truth is coming to an end.”

  “It is not so,” Korth denied steadily, though his eyes could not meet Berringer’s. “The thrill of hunting truth is great, but I am not afraid to find the quarry. It Is simply that our experience just now has not entirely convinced me of the truth of what you say.”

  “Then convince yourself!” flamed old Berringer. He motioned to the air-lock of the space-ship. “Out on the walls of the ship still sticks the slime from the creature we met Just now. Get some of that slime and analyze it—see If it does not have dimensional strangeness I say—”

  Korth hesitated, looked almost appealingly toward Bradley and Forijay. The two younger men were silent, staling, held by the spell of Berringer’s personality.

  “I will do it now,” Korth said suddenly. “I am convinced that it will not prove what you say.”

  Rapidly he donned a space-suit, and entered the air lock. Opening the outer door, and hanging inside the lock, he reached forth a gloved hand to scrape from the wall of the ship some of the strangely glowing green slime which had coated it. ever since their encounter with the monstrous entity of the void.

  Korth re-entered the ship, and carefully deposited the slime in a leaden vessel at the little laboratory cubby. Slowly he took off his space-suit, and then, without looking at the others, began a minute analysis of the stuff.

  They saw his face growing paler and paler as be worked. His bands moved stiffly, his lips worked like those of a man in a dream. Of a sudden, the leaden vessel clattered to the floor. Korth had risen staggeringly, was gazing wildly at them.

  “It—It Is true—” he whispered, his eyes dilated as though he looked into ultimate horror. “The dimensional difference in the atoms of that thing’s body—it proves your theory, Berringer—”

  “Of course it proves it!” shrilled Berringer triumphantly. “You know now that what I said is so, that we are heading straight to the last secrets of the cosmos, and shall solve those secrets.”

  “Solve them?” whispered Korth. “No—no!”

  He had made a sudden leap back toward the table. Bradley yelled, “Stop him!”

  Forijay leaped, but was too late. Korth had grasped the ray-gun in his hand and had turned it against his own breast. He sank, a suicide.

  Berringer looked down, almost unmoved. yet with a certain pity on his face.

  “I knew he would do that,” the old scientist said. “He could not stand the prospect of ending the bunt forever that has occupied him all his life. He died, rather than finally attain the truth he has been seeking.”

  The old man turned to Forijay. Silently they lifted Korth’s body and thrust it into the airlock. A twist of the ship flung it clear into space, a moment or so later.

  The ship fled on, toward the final secrets. Far back in space floated the body of the man who had died rather than witness the attaining of his ideal.

  [4]“Illusion, boys? Yes! But still, just as definitely, no!”

  Bradley and Forijay both looked at old Berringer with impassive though intense interest. They felt that they knew him very well now; and yet they were sure they could never fathom all the dark and devious channels of his penetrating genius.

  There he sat before the controls of the space-ship, weird helmet on his head, his thin face shrunken and sweat-streaked, his emaciated chest heaving with his labored breathing; but his eyes alight with the glow of cosmic truth. They had respected him before, though they had doubted some of his Incredible theories; but now that doubt was waning fast.

  “I’m sure Fo and I will listen patiently after what we’ve just seen, Doctor Berringer,” said Bradley quietly.

  “Good!” the aged savant piped. “The whole universe Is a paradox. Things are real that are not real—in a sense! I can give you a very simple analogy: Euclidean and non-Euclidean geometry. One teaches that parallel lines never meet; the other cl
aims that parallel lines do meet—at Infinity. And both concepts are right!

  “But that is nothing. I have said many strange things before, and I say them again now. In one way the universe Is a concrete thing, composed of stars, planets and endless seas of empty ether. Real energy flows In It, real atoms and molecules compose its substance. In another way all this Is illusion—the vast, ethereal dream of some mighty Mental Essence, of which we human beings are each tiny separate parts!

  “Back on earth I built a shaft that was a miniature model of the component parts of the cosmos. With it I could predict much of what the greater cosmos contains; for, by the very nature of things, the pattern of the two must be the same. In It I saw the blue electrical creatures, who are nearer in nature to the Great All than anything that can be said to exist. In one sense I brought those creatures to Earth in my experiment; in another sense I brought only their images; and in still another sense they did not and do not exist at all!”

  “It seems beyond all sense and reason, Doctor,” Forijay muttered. “And yet—”

  Berringer’s cadaverous face was crossed by a fleeting grin of elfin amusement. “Reason is sometimes a doubtful thing to stand on,” he chuckled. “Look at those velocimeters. There is absolutely nothing wrong with their mechanism; their readings can be depended on to tell the truth! They register a speed of 147,000 miles per second. Yet repeated tests by trigonometry, equally reliable, show that we are not moving in space at all!”

  “Then nothing is reliable! Nothing is predictable!” Bradley exclaimed.

  “Quite the contrary,” Berringer laughed. “I’ve told you that before. This helmet I am wearing gives me contact with the Mental Essence, and so I can read all the diverse branches of past, present, and future. You could not do this, for your minds lack the receptivity of mine. But if you could, you would clearly see how the factors of time, space, and energy combine to form the great cosmic pattern. Many, many dimensions are Involved, and many, many things that are beyond description. From one angle all are the illusive parts of the intellect of the universe.”

  “And you are sure that we are doomed in this adventure?” Forijay demanded.