The Collected Stories

by Earl

  But as the slow minutes passed in ominous silence, with the flush of near-sunrise growing in strength, even the tough-souled captain became nervous. The men fidgeted, shuffled their feet.

  The lieutenant stood with mouth half open, as if prepared at any moment to see the devil himself arrive and whisk his protege away. For el Diablo Espia had been almost a myth for two years, one whose activities had been devilishly cunning.

  In the gloom, the spy’s eyes seemed to gleam like small fires. His lips were curled in mockery. Suddenly his eyes flicked to the east-gate, and widened slightly. For there he saw a girl, white arms straining to tear down the solid bars of steel. At the same time the tip of the sun peeped over the horizon, and a shaft of brightness speared into the shadowy courtyard.

  El capitan, awaiting this signal, raised an arm. The riflemen brought up their guns, took aim. A scream intercepted the word: “fucil—”

  The Bolivian captain glanced toward the gate, saw the girl, and motioned for the men to lower their rifles. El capitan, was of the old school, with chivalry deeply imbedded in his nature. He strode toward the girl at the east-gate.

  “Senorita, I beg of you to depart for the time. It is no pretty sight, this. Particularly for so charming a girl!”

  DARK eyes aflame, the girl spoke tremulously:

  “Mi Capitan, please do not kill this man. Make him a prisoner instead, till the war is over!”

  “Caramba! Are you mad? He is our nation’s worst enemy!”

  “Then let me go to him—die with him!” pleaded the girl wildly, “I love him—I sheltered him for many days, before he was captured, so I am a traitor to Bolivia! Do you hear? You must kill me with him because I am a traitor!”

  “Diablo! That is impossible, senorita. I will not believe it. More, it is foolishness. You cannot die with him.”

  “Then let me be with him for a tiny moment! I will do anything, anything, if you will grant me that!”

  The stern look on the Bolivian’s face dissolved to reflection. “You love this man, si? You will do anything to be with him for a moment, si? You will, perhaps, let me do all in my power to comfort you—afterward? Comprendo, lovely one?”

  Soft, black eyes tragic, the girl nodded. “Let me in to him and you will not regret it.”

  Grinning in satisfaction, the captain called for one of his men to open the steel gate. “But one minute I will give you,” he admonished the girl. Like a bird seeking its nest, the girl ran to Jose, enfolded him in trembling arms.

  The doomed man lifted up her face, kissed her tenderly. “In some afterlife we will be reunited, Nina. Our love cannot die.”

  They clung to one another fiercely for a moment, then Jose pushed her away firmly. “But go now. Death awaits me.”

  “O mi dios! Then with you I die!” The girl flung herself about, faced the firing squad with her body in front of his.

  At the other side of the courtyard, the men watching this scene exchanged glances. The Devil Spy’s doom was being delayed, as if death itself were reluctant to take him.

  A flood of rays from the east gate now lit up the tableau with supernal brightness. The girl’s white clothes seemed to expand into a blazing cloak that hid the man behind. El capitan cursed and started forward.

  When he had gone half way, a dark streak plunged toward the east gate. It was el Diablo Espia making a run for the steel portal that had been carelessly left unlocked after the entrance of the girl!

  “Shoot him—kill him!” screamed the Bolivian captain, frantically jerking out his own pistol.

  The distance was a hundred feet. Of the ten men that brought up their rifles, one must surely have aimed true. But only one bullet was fired, that of el capitan, and it failed to stop the flying man, even though it made a trail of spattered blood over the grey cobblestones.

  The rest of the men stood staring toward the east-gate, watched el Diablo Espia escape from it. It was not him they watched, however.

  It was the incredible thing beyond.

  THEIR Widening, dazed eyes beheld the enormous bulk of an enchanted sun now hanging just over the horizon. It was the color of the droplets of blood that marked the escaped spy’s trail. Misshapen by refraction, it floated there like the Gargantuan heart of some celestial Cyclops. Cloud wisps scurrying by made it seem to pulsate with nameless life.

  It was a wizard’s trick and the Bolivian riflemen, as they reeled back in fright, had no doubt that it was the doing of the devil himself, to insure the escape of his ward, the Devil Spy!

  . . . Professor Hargreave slammed down the receiver in disgust. “Can’t get Washington for love or money!” he said explosively. “I suppose every crank and fool in the country is on the wire. Talk about a voice crying in the wilderness—”

  He jumped to his feet. “But something has to be done! You, Bradley, take my car and get to Milwaukee as fast as you can. Get a general message over the radio if you have to buy out a station! We can’t let anything stop us. Kincaid, you take a plane for Washington and get to somebody high up if you have to murder to do it. In the meantime, I’ll try to get a call on the phone through, so one of the three of us ought to get our message across. Get going, men!” The two men dashed out, faces set in determination. Hargreave turned immediately to the telephone, barking into it viciously. When long distance had completed his connection, he rapped:

  “Dr. Morris Birge, Director of Biology—hurry!”

  Over his shoulder he said half mumblingly to Terry:

  “He’s a government man. Agricultural Bureau. Connections in—what!” For a moment he listened, then hung up slowly. His eyes were pained as he turned to Terry.

  “Suicide!” he muttered dazedly. “An hour ago—swallowed a dose of curare. My friend. One night he confided in me that his wild, passionate youth weighed heavily on his mind. But for him to—”

  The astronomer’s eyes changed suddenly. He grabbed up the phone again, hopefully. A few minutes later he jumped to his feet with a curse.

  “Velter dead too!” he groaned. “Shot this morning during a jailbreak, at Joliet prison. He was a G-man, hot on the trail of somebody down there. Now he’s gone too. I don’t know who to try next for a contact at the White House. But I must have it!”

  “Maybe I can help!” cried Terry. He continued at Hargreave’s gruff “Well?”

  “Wisconsin’s Senator Jordan has a summer home here in Geneva. Just down the street. If he’s home—”

  “Come on!” shouted Hargreave, pushing his two-hundred-pound bulk toward the door at an actual run. They went out into the hot afternoon. Since dawn the overgrown sun had increased its girth by another diameter. It was now nine times as large in face area as normally! The heat Seemed insufferable.

  “That’s the house there,” pointed Terry, and a moment later they were panting up the steps of a broad, shaded verandah.

  “Pray God he’s here!” exclaimed Hargreave fervently.

  CHAPTER V

  Cosmic Laughter

  THE God of Irony looked down on Earth that day and laughed. He saw a world of creatures disturbed from their normal pursuit of life, and it was funny to watch their painful antics.

  In New York, a drunk who had made his usual nightly rounds, saw the dawn of an impossible sun and laughed himself to sleep on somebody’s doorstep in the thought that pink elephants and snakes were passe.

  Near Chicago, two gangsters returning from a “ride” with blood fresh on their hands, stared amazedly, superstitiously, at the blood-red Titan sun, and ran head-on into a milk truck, dying instantly.

  The God of Irony laughed louder. A young man, up all night in his shabby rent-due room, bitterly convinced that life was not worth living if one could not work and eat, withdrew the fatal blade from near his throat at the sound of outside shouting that came with the dawn, and when learning of the sun-doom, cursed the fate that was inevitably going to end his life while he was so young.

  After three days and nights of unselfish, sleepless labor, their rescue tunnel
reached the cave-in and they brought up the buried miner in the dawn of that fateful day, and his tears of joy and relief changed into a raging curse when he learned that he had escaped one doom only to be in time for another.

  An early bird evangelist, haranguing a gullible audience, gleefully launched into his pet theme of hellfire and brimstone, from which there was no escape except through becoming the soul of purity and repentance that he was, but one could never describe the strange green color of his apoplectic face when the sun-doom became manifest.

  A patient, earnest astronomer gave a shout of joy to the amazement of his colleague, who had just announced the news of Earth falling into the sun, and exulted: “Now I’ll get superlative photographs of the sunspots, perhaps solve their mystery!”

  Brushing back his long hair, the starving poet again invaded the offices of the News. This time the weary editor accepted some of his work, thinking:

  “Any junk will do for a filler today.” And, at the same time that the poet inwardly exulted:

  “Perhaps, at long last, they see what I am trying to say. Maybe this is a beginning—for me—”

  The God of Irony was now doubled up with uncontrollable mirth. . . .

  A prima donna threw back her head and sang to the small, music-thirsty audience, sang as never before—sang in the face of certain doom, gloriously, triumphantly—with magnificent defiance, strangely free of the haunting fear that her voice was failing. For the first time in months—years—she was giving a performance of real brilliance—a performance that was to go down into oblivion!

  Destined to produce a masterpiece, an author scribbled away madly all day in his locked room, unaware of the doom that threatened to make his production worthless.

  AL, the janitor, awoke with great joy in his heart, for the day before he had cashed in his $50,000 sweepstake’s ticket, and today he would begin spending it in glorious abandonment, but an hour later little lights of madness came into his eyes as the overbrilliant sunlight shone on a fistful of green papers with numbers on them.

  The God of Irony cast his merry eyes over the rest of the world to see what other insanely amusing things there were among these queer beings who had Mind and Imagination. . . .

  Down in Africa, two warring, bloodthirsty tribes spent the day watching the fantastic puffed sun. with superstitious eyes, but as night came, they fell to their fighting with unabated vigor, in the light of a full moon.

  The Mandarin smoothed his silken robes thoughtfully after hearing that the Celestial Fire was about-to consume Earth for its sins, then ordered his frightened servants out, bidding them go to the writings of Confucius for comfort, and when alone he took a strong pair of shears to clip off the four-inch long finger nails that had secretly irked him all his life.

  “Marsch!” shouted the Nazi Kommandant, and when a white-faced under-officer pointed mutely up at the super-sun, the Kommandant shook his head fiercely, saying:

  “This all day marching drill with full pack, goes on should Hell itself come to Earth! Marsch!”

  Babbitt had had a wonderful two weeks in the South Seas—idle days, soft moonlit nights, dark-eyed women, music, it had been heavenly, and when awakened at noon, the news struck him like a physical blow, so that he wailed:

  “I knew it couldn’t last!”

  The God of Irony had had a marvelous day, but his laughter stopped suddenly. . . .

  Oogli, the Eskimo, up in the far Arctic, went complacently on with his fishing and skinning, for the sun could not rise here to astonish him for two more months of night-time.

  Up in the mountains, the blind hermit continued to fill his simple, contented soul with the poetry of babbling brooks and caroling birds, blissfully unconscious of the huge, glowering sun over his head.

  And a park-bench philosopher, typical of his kind, watched the madness of panic-stricken mankind with a secret pity that they were so fearful of death.

  * * * *

  Senator James Jordan came to the door in a maroon bathrobe over pajamas whose brilliantly striped pant legs showed at the bottom. He yawned.

  “Up late last night—or this morning,” he explained with an apologetic grin. “Wife’s away. Guess I’m alone in the house. Funny Mrs. Riggs—our housekeeper—hasn’t showed up yet. Damned hot this morning. Well, what can I do for you gentlemen?”

  He started as he locked again at their faces. “Say, what’s up? You two look like the end of the world is coming.”

  “Not we two—the world looks like that,” said Hargreave dryly. He pointed through the foliage of the tall trees that shaded the porch. “Look at that sun!”

  SENATOR JORDAN’S sleepy look changed to startled bewilderment with the speed of a lightning Hash. He rubbed his eyes, looked again, then turned dazedly to his visitors.

  “The earth is falling into the sun!”

  “The earth is falling into the sun, of course,” said Hargreave impatiently, perhaps a little sneerinigly at the senator’s helplessness, he who could harangue election crowds for hours over nothing at all. “There’s a story behind this that I can’t go into now. Time’s too short. What I’m here for is a telephone connection with the White House. In fact, with the President himself, or Secretary of War, or somebody in high authority.

  Senator, I’ve got to have it! What can you do?”

  The senator managed to shake off his bewilderment, and to quell the icy panic in his heart. He put through a call on the phone, when they had entered the house. After forty minutes of sweating, shouting, blustering effort, while Hargreave and Terry stood by anxiously, Jordan announced that he had the Secretary of State’s office on the wire.

  Hargreave grabbed the phone eagerly, began speaking with the words coming out in a tumble.

  In a period of twenty-four hours, the incredible, overgrown sun had revealed itself to all the peoples of Earth, from Greenwich to far India, from the Arctic to the Antipodes. And as it climbed the skies, it grew ever larger and fiercer, and in like degree, the people’s fears grew larger and fiercer.

  For a while things went calmly. Centuries and ages of civilizing restraint became a bulwark against rising terror and madness. Authorities broadcast soothing, but unconvincing, statements that the earth would undoubtedly take up a new orbit.

  There were little cases of violence and madness here and there that grew with the rapidity of an explosion. A reign of terror started. The less restrained, more panicky element of Earth’s population cast all judgment to the wind and became maddened beasts, Bloodshed and violence spread their gory fingers over the world, A tidal wave of insanity, suicide and lawlessness followed the giant sun around the planet. The puny barriers of law and order, sufficient ordinarily, were as though non-existent before this new wave of world-panic, “Everyone is going to die!”

  That was the terrible sword that began to lay civilization low. If everyone was going to die in a few hours or days, what did anything matter? What did law and order and morality mean? Nothing, in the face of this cataclysmic doom!

  It was a black page in the history of civilization that day. As the super-sun rose to midday heights over any certain longitude, the masses underneath launched into reckless careers, Each did as his buried inclinations dictated, without regard for others. The most secret of inhibitions came to light of day.

  Murder, rapine, insanity stalked the lands. Fires, riots, mob violence swelled the day’s mad doings. Feats of heroism and sacrifice occurred side by side with unnameable atrocities. Sun-cults sprang up and grew to giddy heights in the course of a few hours.

  Unnumbered homes were emptied whose occupants would never again come back. Thousands of children cried piteously for parents who were dead or missing. Saints were born that day, and devils. A legion of Good Samaritans struggled to allay the pain and torture and misfortune that rode the world roughshod.

  There were those who preached, and those who comforted, and those who spread calm like oil on troubled waves.

  But there were those many who sadistically
set about displaying their twisted mental complexes.

  AND over it all rode the monster sun, symbol of doom.

  Its actual effect was more mental than anything, for neither the increased heat or light could account for what went on. It was just its constant, inexorable, insidious presence overhead that pressed on shocked brains. An earthquake strikes the heart with sharp terror, but leaves the mind free to think ahead to eventual escape, barring bad luck. But this immense sun, this sun of doom, growing ever larger, sucking the earth into its maw of superflame, left no room for hope.

  From the pulpit it was called the Judgment Sun, coming down to fulfill the prophecy of the Day of Doom.

  The way things were going, the civilized world would be a shambles by evening of that first day. What it would be the next day, no one dared speculate. The final, unthinkable picture was that of a planet half of whose population was dead, and the other half insane—plunging sunward.

  And where was the word of hope? Where was an Atlas to come to the rescue and hold up the falling Heavens? Or was Earth inevitably doomed?

  At about one o’clock in the middle of the Western Hemisphere, a concerted gasp went up from the land. A spark had been ignited at Yerkes and spread from there like wildfire, A second spark had grown at Washington and its greater flood of waves spanned the Atlantic, and later the Pacific.

  The pulse that began to beat strongly at Washington set up resonant pulses in London, Paris, Berlin, Moscow, and finally Bombay, Hongkong, Tokyo, Sydney, Capetown. From these centers the blessed spark spread from city to city, from community to community, by radio, telegraph, telephone and the printed page.

  A great hush came over Earth. Its furious travail ceased. Dazed eyes dimmed with tears. Torn hearts ceased to bleed. Shrieks turned to soft sobs. Terror gave way to relief. Fear vanished into shame.

  People whispered the news to one another—

  Earth is not doomed! The increased size of the sun is an illusion!. There is nothing to worry about!