by Earl
The professor and Darce glanced at one another helplessly. They had hoped against hope that Tearle would give up his mad dream, and come back as a penitent.
“I am now the president of a certain munitions corporation,” continued Tearle tersely. “It was easy. I visited the former president and forced him to sign his powers over to me. Forced him by means of the third-level psychic powers. He committed suicide the next day. You probably read it in the papers.”
His two listeners shuddered at his cold-blooded tone. Yet Oberton noticed that for an instant Tearle looked remorseful. It had probably caused him some twinges of conscience before he had fully inured himself to the tragedy he had caused.
“I called a meeting of bond-holders,” Tearle resumed. “They were antagonistic at first and wanted to oust me. I talked to them—swayed them a little through psychic channels—and now they’re eating out of my hands. The corporation is part of an international ring of munitions manufacturers, with plants all over the world. As soon as I find out who the ring-leader is, I’ll get his position. Nothing can stop me!” His cold eyes snapped.
“Through munitions sales, I’ll mint fortunes, as ordinary business men mint dollars. The world of finance will soon place the name of Tearle above those of Rockefeller and Ford, and above such former money-kings as Krueger and Zaharoff. To help my plans along, and speed things up, I’ll precipitate the next world war if necessary!”
He leaned forward dramatically. Professor Oberton, white faced, almost groaned aloud. Darce Henderson wanted to scream hysterically, but even that was denied her, by a look from Warren Tearle. Both of them knew that it was no idle talk. Tearle had the power to do it!
“But you haven’t the nerve to do all that!” cried the girl finally. “You’re a coward at heart. You’ll never go through with such a fantastic scheme!”
“I will, because nothing can stop me,” retorted Tearle coolly. He looked at her strangely. “And when I have built my great golden empire, I’ll need a queen beside my throne of power. All kings have queens . . .”
The girl’s face almost convulsed with loathing and hate. But before she could speak, Tearle went on.
“Yes, I know, you refuse. Your mind is an open book to me. No matter. I’ll have my pick of women.”
Turning slowly toward the professor, he hissed, “I said I could read minds, Oberton. I know you’re about to grab up an automatic from your desk. Go ahead! Pick it up and aim it at me. Now—try to pull the trigger!”
Professor Oberton had snatched up the gun and aimed it, determined to end Tearle’s mad career on the spot. But when he tried to pull the trigger, some tremendous force held back his finger. The scientist strained, till sweat poured from has face.
Tearle laughed. “No one can ever assassinate me. Now turn the gun on yourself, professor!”
Darce shrieked, but could not move, as the scientist’s hand pointed the gun at his own temple. Oberton knew that at the mere mental command of Tearle, he would blow his own brains out.
Tearle laughed again, breaking the tableau. “No, professor, don’t kill yourself. I have nothing against you. In fact, I owe everything to you! And I don’t have to kill you two, as in murder mysteries, to keep my secret. No one would believe you if you told what I have in mind! Now toss me that gun, Oberton. You might hurt someone with it.”
The scientist obediently tossed the gun and Tearle slipped it into his pocket. A yawn came to his lips. His face became a little haggard.
“I’m very tired,” he admitted. “I’ve hardly slept, planning my course of action.” He looked at his wrist-watch. “I’ve called another stockholders’ meeting for the afternoon. Till then I’ll take a nap. May I be your guest, Professor Oberton?”
Without waiting for an answer, Tearle walked to the small chamber equipped with a couch, in which the psychologist had taken short rests from his strenuous mental labors. Tearle locked the door behind him.
Darce Henderson burst out sobbing in the professor’s arms.
“What are we going to do?” she asked in a terrified whisper. “He’s not human any more. He’s a monster. A mental monster! And we are responsible!”
“He must never come out of that room alive!” the scientist said grimly.
And then, as clearly as a voice over the telephone, Tearle’s psychic voice came to them, from the other room.
“Don’t make any plans, Oberton! Remember that I can read your thoughts, asleep as well as awake. I’ve trained myself in that. If you try to call the police, or burn down the building, or some such childish endeavor, I’ll know it before you make the first move. That gives you an idea, professor, of how impossible it is for you, or anyone else on earth, to catch me unawares!”
PROFESSOR OBERTON sat for hours, thinking, while the inhuman ego that had once been timid and unimpressive lay sleeping. It was history repeating itself. As a psychologist, Professor Oberton knew that the history of the world could be rewritten in terms of human psychology. In the past, other human egos had inflated dangerously, usually because of an earlier bitterness toward life. Once given power, those frustrated souls burst the bonds of reason and sanity. They wallowed in false glory, unconcerned over human feelings and sufferings. Dictators, Napoleons, warlords—human history was replete with them.
Warren Tearle was now such a being. He would override the world like a monster, plunging it into war and chaos. He had more real power in his hands than any previous man.
And he, Professor Oberton, had helped develop those powers! The bitterness that filled the scientist’s soul at that moment was almost suffocating. Was there any way of stopping this menace to the world’s welfare? But how could he even think of a way to do it, with his every thought open to Tearle, sleeping or waking?
Oberton sensed that Tearle’s tired mind had gone to sleep almost immediately. With his own psychic perception he could feel the relaxation of Tearle’s conscious will. But his subconscious mind was still alert, sensitive. At the least sense of danger, it would wake Tearle.
What could be done, if anything? Oberton groaned mentally.
Darce went out for sandwiches after a while, though she knew neither of them would eat. She wanted some fresh air.
Left alone the full force of his responsibility struck Oberton in a wave of realization of what it would surely mean if Tearle went on his unmolested way toward a financial empire—or something else. He sat tense for long moments, fingers gripping so hard he became conscious of pain as the nails bit into the palms.
And it was now, at once, that something must be done!
“Asleep!” whispered Oberton hoarsely. “He’s asleep now . . . his full will forces robbed of much of their resistance! If only I can impose my own upon his . . .!”
He groaned. “No,” he mumbled in despair. “The suggestion is untenable . . . suggestion!” He jerked erect. “Suggestion—perhaps . . .”
Forgotten now was the physical pain of his muscular reactions, forgotten altogether his body, the very fact that he lived. Instead he became in effect a disembodied mentality, a tense, straining intelligence, concentrating . . . concentrating . . . and at the root of his concentration lay one basic significant fact. Warren Tearle, in spite of the telepathic giant he had become, still possessed a conscience, still was able to feel remorse over a wrong deed, even though he thrust it from him. That munitions manufacturer who had committed suicide, at Tearle’s suggestion!
Even as his mind strained, his voice whispered hoarsely the verbal expression of the concentration in his brain. He did not notice that Darce had returned, was standing transfixed in the doorway, her eyes riveted on him in nameless fascination.
“Warren Tearle,” he muttered, “you are a despicable creature. You have murdered a man! You have killed, as surely as with your own hands, a fellowbeing. You are an outcast of society, and you have contracted a debt of horror which must be exacted from you in full payment of your crime. And you must pay! There is no escape.
“Think, Warren Tearle,
of what you have done, and fill your soul with the remorse that must dog your footsteps until you make amends. And you cannot make a just reparation. He is dead—gone, and his blood is on your hands.
“A life for a life! That is your only reparation. Those who kill by the gun, must die by the gun . . . there is a gun beside you, Tearle, in the drawer of the table beside your bed . . . a gun—loaded—”
Darce stifled a strangled exclamation of horror as the import of the words the professor muttered broke over her like a wave.
“A great crime—a gun—only justice——”
Oberton’s face grew pale and his body shook with the force of his thought intensity, and his eyes blazed with some strange fire, smouldering, the only spot of living color in the chalk-like hypnotic concentration of his visage.
Darce stood at the door, hardly breathing. She could feel the psychic forces at play, between the scientist and the sleeping man in the other room.
Then suddenly there was a shot, and she screamed, dropping the forgotten sandwiches from her hands. Professor Oberton hardly moved, but his whole body seemed to shrink and relax.
He looked up at the girl with a ghastly smile.
“I knew one thing more than Tearle,” he spoke, in a low, weary tone. “That the subconscious mind contains all of man’s so-called conscience. I didn’t project any antagonistic thoughts against Tearle himself, for that would have awakened ham. I simply kept thinking of the munitions president, who had committed suicide because of Tearle. That remorseful thought I projected filled his subconscious mind. It played that strange chord that affects the mysterious strings of conscience.”
Darce put her hand to her mouth, to stifle a moan of horror, waiting for the professor to go on.
“And so, Tearle just shot himself through the head,” finished the scientist with a pitying note in his voice, “—in utter remorse over that crime.”
THE END
[*] It was only four years ago, in 1934, that Duke University announced its epochal experiments in parapsychology, thereby raising that study of psychic phenomena from a pseudo-science to an exact science. Since then there have been many verifications from other laboratories of those classic researches. The strange telepathic and clairvoyant powers of the human mind have been amply demonstrated.—Ed.
THE METAL OCEAN
A Floating Continent Harbors the Secrets of the Greatest Civilization on Earth! Science Wrests the Elements from the Sea and Welds a Soilless Land
CHAPTER I
Chaos in Metaland
THE golden-hued plumes of Corporal Lan Tar’s jaunty metal helmet wavered gently in the north breeze as he paced up and down on guard duty. To one side, gleaming in the moonlight, the giant conical Extraction-plant spouted fiery sparks from its summit like an artificial volcano.
To the other side rose the towering, scintillating heights of the huge central city, hub and heart of the greatest nation on Earth. Between lay a five-mile strip of wooded land, lushly carpeted with thick grasses, lavish with flowers. It encircled the city.
Lan Tar drew in a deep grateful breath of the sweet aroma that wafted from its blossoms. It was deserted now, at night, but in the daytime thousands from the city wandered through its Elysian beauty. Even now in wartime, for the enemy aircraft could not penetrate past the eternally vigilant defenses at the boundaries of their empire.
And that was what bothered Corporal Lan Tar. Here he was doing meaningless guard duty in a place where the infra-rays of the enemy were never seen. Guarding a city that never had, and never would be attacked! He was young, spirited. He wanted to be at the front-line of defenses where daily the screeching rays and bombs of the enemy buffeted vainly against his country’s neutro-screens. He wanted to be in the thick of it, fighting shoulder to shoulder with his fellow soldiers, laughing in the faces of the invaders.
He sighed. Well, at least he was on night patrol. When he had had day patrol here, the women passing him had smiled at his futile pacing up and down. They had left their children play around him, as though he represented the safest spot in the land. When he had strained his eyes into the sky, almost praying to sight a hawkshaped enemy craft that never appeared, the women had laughed. What was he looking for, they asked—rain?
Even now, Lan Tar fumed. Nothing ever happened here. Of course, there had been the time daring pirates had broken through from Below. They had pillaged a gold-vault and almost escaped. But that had been on the other side of the city, of course, and all Lan Tar knew of it was the recital of events the next day.
CORPORAL LAN TAR varied the course of his beat, tiring of the steady pacing over hard metal. He circled to the edge of the woodland strip. His sandals crunched on dirt. What a different feeling it was! He wondered how it would be to live in the land of the enemy, where all was dirt and ground underneath. Where the woodland areas around and in cities were part of the natural scene and not artificially constructed replicas!
How strange! For Lan Tar had lived all his life on a “land” of metal. And simply Metaland was its name. Hard, smooth, even metal that stretched for almost two thousand miles in every direction from this central point. All their cities were built on this metallic floor. All their millions of people were born, lived, and died on it. And Below was the water, the ocean, a hundred feet under!
For five thousand years it had been so—a “continent” as stable and natural to them as were the true continents to the east, west and south to their inhabitants. In fact, what was the difference? The natural continents between oceans; the metal continent upon an ocean. It was merely a matter of outlook.
To Lan Tar, and most of his fellow citizens, his environment seemed much more natural than that of the enemy. He thought of them abstractly as animal-like barbarians roaming through primeval jungles.
Lan Tar understood little of what amazing scientific applications made possible his smooth-running civilization on metal. It had all been taken as a matter of course. The huge metal plate whose area was greater than that of North America had been built out by squares on a system of pontoons. The engineers of five thousand years before had planned carefully and well.
When a square was finished, permanent hollow drums of tremendous size and buoyancy were fitted underneath. Each square was joined to its adjacent ones with an intricate metallic mesh that allowed for the curvature of earth and some slight stretching and shrinking from changes in temperature. It had been a simple matter of adding squares until the artificial continent had crowded to the very shores of other lands. Then it lay nestled between North and South America, Europe and Africa, a new land!
The amounts of metal necessary to build this five-foot thick metal land had come from an inexhaustible source—the underlying ocean itself. The giant Extraction-plants threw down sediments from daily billions of gallons of sea-water. Every known metal was there, in limitless amounts. An alloy had been devised so resistant to the corrosive hand of air, water and time that it might conceivably last for an age.
The staggering powers needed for these stupendous labors came from the atom. In fact, atomic-power alone had made the project possible. It did not take much more than the annihilation of scraps of matter to run the giant power plants that dotted Metaland.
Thus manipulating nature’s storehouses of energy and matter, man had bridged the natural barrier of ocean and welded a new world that stretched from Asia’s outermost tip to that same point in one unbroken expanse of solid underfooting.
BUT man was not so successful in welding his own social differences. Two thousand years after the completion of the land-bridge, events made a mockery of this solidarity. The colonists of the metal land gradually grew apart from the other lands. They evolved a culture of their own. A different set of values, in their different environment.
There was the time, when synthetic food manufactured from elements of the air replaced naturally grown foods, that rebellion came against dictation from absentee overlords. There was secession, war, finally independence. The new nation w
as named Metaland.
Thereafter, a full-fledged nation among other nations, Metaland had its quota of wars. . . .
Corporal Lan Tar turned fretfully in his pacing, dreaming hopefully of the day when he might be transferred to the scenes of action in the war, so that he would not have to stride up and down like an animated stick, guarding shadows.
A breath of heat fanned his forehead. For a hopeful moment he glanced in the sky, to see if there might be an audacious enemy squadron that had broken through the lines. Nothing was visible in the clear, silvery moonlight.
He decided it was his imagination, stalked on mechanically.
Again came a blast of heated air. This time it was unmistakable. Where was it coming from? Lan Tar stopped and eyed the sky narrowly. At his signal a thousand searchlights would stab into being, illuminate the night-sky with the brilliance of day. Ten thousand gun-crews would jump to their posts, ready to hurtle death into the skies.
“By heaven!” he swore fervently. “If only—”
Something caught the corner of his eye, pulled his face down. A dull red glow came from somewhere ahead. Lan Tar leaped forward, wonderingly. The red glow sharpened, outlining a circular portion of the metal-ground roughly ten feet in diameter. Even as he approached, the glow became yellowish and a blast of heat fumed past him.
An infra-ray from above! They had come! They were attacking! With a yelp of joy, Lan Tar stopped and jerked at his belt. Fumblingly, cursing himself for his own butter-fingered excitement, he pressed the alarm-button on a little black box he held. He pressed until his knuckles cracked. He heard the slight rustle that announced his signal-beam’s operation.
It would contact him with Headquarters, in the city.
At last he heard a sharp click. A voice, half growling, issued from the little box.
