The Collected Stories

by Earl

  “Madness!” I pleaded. “You’re going too far, Lanny!”

  HIS terrible eyes focused on mine, and I saw in their depths again that inner amusement, as though my thoughts were childishly naive.

  “Fiddlesticks!” he said, contempt in his voice. “Now listen, Charlie, I’m going to project my mind out into space this very minute. I wanted you here to—well, I will have a body to which I must return, and your mind will be the anchor to pull me back. I can’t explain, but—I may not come back!”

  It is simple to tell of that incredible experiment. Alanson put me into a deep hypnotic sleep and when I came out of it, he was standing in front of me. I saw from my wrist-watch that a half hour had gone by.

  It was a subdued, haggard Alanson that faced me. Even the fire in his eyes had burned away somewhat.

  “Yes, I was out there,” he said as I opened my mouth to ask. “Out in the frigid cosmos—out where there are only stars, drifting molecules, dark space stuff. I wandered for eternity over the desert of trackless sky. I saw the leering face of timelessness, the hideous form of immutable past-future. There was the inexorable loom which predestines all effort in any direction to endless repetition. The sheathed claws of the inevitable many-deaths reached for me, drew back mockingly. I reeled from the stark vision of futility, from the revelation of complete nothingness!”

  He broke off, spoke next in a cracked voice—“But you wouldn’t understand—you couldn’t—”

  The lurking terror had gone out of his eyes, but in its place was something infinitely more horrible. I can only describe it as a total lack of soul.

  Vision of the hydra. . . .

  The next evening Jondra met me at the door and quietly led me to Alanson’s room, a queer look of peace in her eyes. But they were red-rimmed, I saw, from much weeping.

  I looked in and saw Alanson seated at his horseshoe desk, with the phonograph voices droning away, himself writing rapidly at the pads of paper at either side. It was not until I leaned over him that I understood why Jondra turned away so pityingly. The pads of paper were scribbled with a senseless jumble of words. And a vapid face turned up to me grinningly. . . .

  THE MYSTERIOUS STRANGER

  Unique fantasy

  JOHN SELBY looked at the speaker in surprise. “What is that you say?”

  “I say, good sir,” repeated the stranger with a nasal twang, “I am sore puzzled—bewitched, I fear—and know not where I am or what strange thing

  has befallen me. If I may trouble you to tell me where I am——”

  “No trouble at all,” assured Selby heartily at the apologetic tone of the stranger. “This is Dakin Street, 58 hundred west, Chicago. City limits are two blocks west.”

  “Dakin Street? Chicago?” mumbled the other blankly.

  Seeing him hesitate as though still bewildered, Selby went on with friendlier tones: “If you are looking for some particular family around here, perhaps I know them. Have you their address?”

  “Nay, I know no family hereabouts; unless it be the Fairfaxes.”

  “Never heard of them,” returned Selby, shaking his head. “And you don’t know the address?”

  “Address?” repeated the stranger. “Why, there would be no need of an address if this be Wilkshire. The Fairfaxes are known to all.”

  Selby edged away from the man. There was something decidedly queer about him—his voice, his manner, his very words. It was dark, and he could not see the man’s face clearly. A chill autumn wind whipped about them suddenly; the stranger shivered and pulled a sort of flappy coat about his thin shoulders. “I’m sorry I can’t help you.” said Selby, turning to go.

  “Please, I beg of you!” the stranger’s voice ploaded.

  “Well?” asked Selby gruffly. He was becoming impatient. “What do you want?” The man must be a panhandler with a new line. The stranger’s next words confirmed his belief.

  “Do not desert me,” pleaded the man. “Truly I am sadly bewitched, and I am cold and hungry. I—I——”

  John Selby had a warm heart, and something in the fellow’s tone touched a soft spot. “Come along, then, to my place. You can have a hot meal and a warm chair for a few hours. I could ‘stake’ you and let you go, but I know you’d spend it for booze. Rather than have my money go for such waste, I’ll take the trouble——”

  He turned with a jerk of his head. The stranger followed meekly, and for a few moments they walked silently along the street. As the glare of a street light drew near, Selby surreptitiously surveyed the panhandler. If he had been surprised at the queer dialect the fellow used and his equally queer real or feigned ignorance of his whereabouts. Selby was actually astounded at the clothes the man wore. Collectively they might be called a costume, consisting of skin-tight trousers, heavy riding boots, a waist coat with frills of lace and ribbon, a fluttery cape that hung from the shoulder blades, and a three-cornered hat. Selby whistled to himself; the fellow must have raided a costume shop!

  The house Selby lived in, a brick bungalow, was dark. His sister, her husband, and their two children had gone to spend the evening at the movies. Selby unlocked the front door and motioned for the panhandler to follow him in. Then he pressed the electric switch to flood the parlor with glaring light. Hearing a gasp from the stranger, he turned to find him shrinking against the wall, pale and trembling, his wide eyes staring at the chandelier.

  “What a queer duck!” thought Selby to himself as he led the way to the kitchen after the stranger had pulled himself together. Having fried some eggs and heated a pan of peas-in-sauce for the stranger, Selby watched him wolf the simple meal down as though famished. Judging by the way his staring eyes took in the details of the room, Selby surmised he must be either fearful of something or completely bewildered. Could the man be an escaped criminal? Or a lunatic at large? Or possibly just a pitiful victim of amnesia?

  “God bless you. good sir!” said the stranger, arising from the table.

  “Don’t mention it.” shrugged Selby. “Now if you’d care to come into the parlor and take it easy for a few minutes. . . .”

  Selby had suddenly made a resolve to find out more about the man. As they sat across from one another in pailor chairs in the soft light of a shaded lamp, Selby switched on the radio, speaking at the same time:

  “If you won’t consider me too inquisitive, just who are you and how is it you’re in a neighborhood you don’t recognize?”

  The stranger suddenly tensed and again turned ashy as the wailing voice of a crooner, muted in volume by Selby’s hand, came from the radio cabinet. Stating at the cabinet, he listened a moment and then sprang to his feet.

  “God have mercy on my poor soul!” he shouted. “What land of magic is this? Here am I, Ebenezer Wayland, honest merchant of Boston, now lost in an eldritch Kind where the sun answers at the push of a finger, and where ghostly voices sigh from wooden boxes! A God-fearing and King-loving man am I, that goes to Mass regularly. What penance is this for a pious man?”

  Calming himself with an effort, he went on to explain: “I was on my travels, desiring to see other cities of the Colonies. I remember—I was walking down a lonely road at night near Philadelphia. Friends awaited me to take me to their home. Suddenly, there was a roaring of wind, a howling of demons. Indians were attacking me! I saw an uplifted tomahawk; I fell, groaning! When I regained my senses. I saw you approaching me in the gloom. But the forest, the Indians, the surroundings I knew, had disappeared! And now—good God!—where am I?”

  Of course Selby called the Dunning Insane Asylum and delivered to them a shrinking, muttering creature, who answered nothing to the queries put to him. but merely stared blankly and babbled incoherently.

  Interested in the case, Selby asked the Dunning officials to keep him informed about their new patient. A week later they called and told him the man had escaped; had escaped from a padded cell, locked and barred!

  And when Selby looked for the three cornered hat that had fallen from the man when they took him away
from his house—it too was gone.

  WHEN THE SUN WENT OUT

  —and after that—moonshine——

  WHATEVER gods decreed the sinking of Atlantis, the great Biblical deluge, and the ice ages, decreed also the burning out of the sun. A planet that had witnessed these other things, and a host of lesser catastrophes, darkened now as the central luminary died a mysterious death. Mysterious, because the science of the little, two-legged, upright creatures living on earth’s surface could find no reason for the phenomenon. Their glib theories had demanded that the sun continue to puff away its vast bulk in radiant energy, at the rate of thousands of tons per second, for billions of years. Earth, they cried, must continue to receive its portion of this invisible power for those many ages. That was down on paper. That had to be.

  This thing could not happen, which was happening. Yet the sun dimmed, cooled and shrank, and the denials of the scientific members of the race, inhabiting the third planet failed in the slightest to stop the process. A celestial phenomenon that may have happened countless times before, in the greater cosmos, pursued its relentless course, draining a planetary family of its light and heat, depriving a world of its life-giving radiation.

  The warm rays that had once bathed earth and given it life no longer performed this beneficent duty. As a result, earth’s surface underwent a great change. The average temperature went down, degree by degree, in company with the paling of the sun. Soon all fresh-water bodies had frozen permanently solid. Not long after, the mighty oceans congealed, never to thaw again. The tides piled ice heaps near the coast lines and left the centers as tremendous hollows. Like giant convex mirrors, these reflected the dying sunlight to a focus, as though trying to collect the miserable remains of radiation. As all the waters froze, the expanding ice creaked and crawled inland for miles, piled in titanic and fantastic heaps, sprinkled with precipitated salts.

  Down and down went the mercury threads of the-little instruments the two-legged creatures had. Bulging eyes read the figures; chattering teeth whispered them out; blue-cold fingers set up thermometers graded in the absolute scale down to a final zero, and traced the dial needles as they swung toward a madness.

  Once the waters of earth had given up their liquid state, the atmosphere disgorged its diffused moisture in a final deluge of snow and frost. For one entire revolution of the moon, a sifting of crystalline water feathered from the heavens over a freezing world. Denuded of clouds, dust and all except its pure gaseous components, the desiccated atmosphere blew its pure, cold breath over a planet shrouded in white, as though in wake over the sheeted corpse of earth.

  But it was not long after that that the atmosphere itself grew heavy and thick, as a deep, increasing twilight came over all. When the stars had begun to shine in the sky with the weakened sun, droplets of liquid air gathered and obeyed the immutable law of gravity. Falling to the ground, they formed in silent blue pools and grew with amoeboid rapidity. Finally, these lakes of gelid fluids solidified and the remaining gases drifted to the surface as a fine snow. In repetition of a manmade experiment on a macrocosmic scale, hydrogen precipitated as a shiny frost moistened with liquid helium. Then the helium locked its molecules in the embrace of crystalline rigidity.

  OVERHEAD a gloomy sun, shorn of its former coronal glory, trickled futile rays over this planetary corpse. It could not wake the life and bustle that had once been there. Its pitted face changed from a ruddy glow to utter blackness. The midnight shadows of star-speckled space swept triumphantly over this planetary system.

  In a short century, as measured by the bipedal race of earth, the sun had waned from a superhot globe with a surface temperature of six thousand degrees to a blackened, lifeless cinder. Some Milky Way astronomer, close enough to ferret out such a tiny star, may have observed this solar demise and linked it with similar star deaths in the parade of eternities. Mankind had taken account only of bursting novae and flaming suns—he had not known of the many cold, dark star corpses peopling the void.

  Life had wilted rapidly on earth, during that period. Deprived of the normal actinic radiation with which it had built its tissues, planet life withered away like dream stuff. The hardy mosses of the North held out till a drifting of carbon-dioxide frost froze the sap within them. As the hen beside the bushel of wheat, they died with their natural food supply piled beside them.

  Herbivorous animal life closely followed plant life into extinction, except for a brief flurry of desperate carnivorousness. The carnivores preyed one another to annihilation. Perhaps some last lion roamed a chilly, blighted world and wondered why there was no game, not knowing that he was the last.

  Piscatorial and all other sea life stayed on no longer than the complete freezing of the oceans. Insects and other forms of a numerous and hardy nature survived beyond the existence of a normal food supply, in a suspended animation. It was a sleep that had no awakening.

  The fauna and flora of earth were a dream of the past.

  And man?

  He had watched the planets vanish from the sky, unlighted by the great celestial lantern. He had seen the moon, once a magnificent sphere of argent, fade to dull gray and finally lose itself in the blankness of the void.

  These bipedal, thinking creatures, whose ravings had proclaimed the sun death impossible by their theory, after swallowing the bitter pill of the incredible happening, attempted to forestall fate. With an indomitable spirit they cast about for an escape from the doom that had wiped clean their world of all other life——

  PHIL WACKER looked out over the face of earth, gripped in an eternal superwinter, through the one window of his dwelling. It was a square stone building whose walls had been meticulously cemented to make the interior airproof. Three quarters of the large, single room were taken up with the paraphernalia of a laboratory. The remaining space, partitioned off by a rough, cheap weave hung from the low ceiling, was the bedroom for himself and his wife.

  He looked down at her troubled face now and drew her into his arms. She looked up at him with eyes that pleaded.

  “But, dear,”-he remonstrated gently, “I can’t take you with me. You know those absent-minded fits Greeley has, when his mind seems to wander——”

  He broke off and jerked his head significantly at the stoop-shouldered man whose gray head bobbed over the work bench in the far corner, near the cot on which he slept.

  The young wife shuddered. “Greeley and his fits scare me sometimes,” she whispered. “And every time I glance out of the window at that utter desolation——”

  “Yes, I know,” muttered the young husband gloomily. Then he brightened. “But once I’ve achieved atomic power, all that will be over. Mankind will be able to climb out of the ground and become more of a man, less of a worm.”

  The young wife sighed. So many times had he said that in the past ten years. Always so much hope, and always so many disappointments in his research. He was brilliant, perhaps near his goal, but in the meantime they suffered from cold, from harsh foods, and from vague terror inspired by the scene outside. And there was Greeley with the queer eyes, a willing helper and gentle of spirit, but with a mind that wandered at times. He would mutter strange things, with mad little dancing lights in his eyes. Maida had described them to her husband but he had scoffed. Greeley, he said, was old and perhaps a bit scatter-brained, but quite harmless and amazingly keen on mathematics.

  “Maida, do you know what it will mean to live on the surface?” continued the young scientist. “In cities warmed and lighted by atomic power? Our people won’t have to scratch and slave and bump their heads for very lack of room, as underground.

  “On the surface we will be free and rich and happy. Mankind had its troubles in those days before the sun went out, but nothing like the miseries we have now. There were millions upon millions then, and thousands of surface cities. They roamed over the face of earth freely. There was laughter, sunshine——” He choked for breath.

  The young wife was puzzled. Her lips moved tremulously. �
�Sunshine!

  What can that be like? It’s just a word to us. We were born in this world of dark, though we had a heritage of light. What can sunshine be like?”

  “I don’t know myself,” admitted the man, with a trace of wonder in his voice. “It must be far stronger than our oil lamps.”

  “Sunshine?” said the aged assistant querulously, turning around. He had overheard the last. “My grandfather told me of it. He saw it at its best. It was glorious. So was moonlight, he said. Not glaring, but——”

  “Yes, Greeley,” interposed Wacker, impatient to be off, “I’m leaving now. Remember about the neutron gun. You know the danger of letting it run too long. I’ll be back to-morrow.”

  Greeley nodded and turned back toward his work bench, shaking his old head. “Sunlight and moonshine,” he mumbled vaguely. “Moonshine? My grandfather mentioned that, too——”

  Wacker strode to a wall cupboard from which he extracted a jumper outfit of thick neo-rubber, resilient at the extremes of low temperature. Maida kissed him, then helped him fit the aluminium helmet over his head and join it to the neck piece with liquid neorubber. Waving a farewell, the young scientist swung open the felt-lined lock door, stepped into the dark interior of the seal.

  A moment later Maida heard the soft clang of the outer lock. Shivering from the breath of intense cold that seeped from the lock chamber every time it was used, she hugged herself with her arms, then threw a scoop of coal into the one stove the place had.

  She basked in its warmth for a moment, frowning in thought. A little later she stepped to the window and looked out, trying to picture what sunlight could be like, how it could light up that fearful arctic waste stretching from horizon to horizon. Finally she shuddered from more than cold and drew the curtain across the window with a—decisive jerk. The supernal chill of that outside scene had seemed to congeal her very heart.