The Collected Stories

by Earl

  “But his son lives on!” interposed Hale.

  NOW Hale could see the background of the present Emanuel Gordy, son of an upscrupulous father. Undoubtedly, if he gained the dictatorship of Earth, his first move would be a purge in Europe, a frightful, large-scale revenge for his father’s execution.

  “Go on with your story, Dr. Allison. I’ll tell you mine when you’re through.”

  The old scientist resumed.

  “I was sent to solitary. I heard only vaguely of the final peace of nineteen-seventy-nine and the formation of the World Government. My release did not come. I was still a murderer, according to the records. The world had forgotten me as a scientist. So I knew then that I was doomed to a lifetime of imprisonment here. I nearly went mad the first year . . .”

  He paused, shuddering with the recollection. Hale shuddered with him. For Hale had been here almost a year, and he also had nearly gone raving mad.

  “Then I gripped myself. I accepted a philosophy of resignation. I would make the best of it. I had seen the blueprints of the globe before construction. I knew escape would be impossible. I didn’t hope for it, and somehow that made it easier to bear.

  “Other things helped to make it bearable. I still had a rich, faithful friend on Earth. Failing in all efforts to obtain my release, he thought of my comfort. Through enormous bribes, guards and jailers were induced to smuggle in to me a micro-reader, to pass the time. A ten-inch strip of micro-film, as you know, records a complete book in micro-lettering, which the micro-reader’s lenses magnify for reading. Over a period of ten-years I accumulated a boxful of film, equivalent to a huge library. What a blessing it was to have this mental occupation, through those long, lonely, bitter hours!”

  Hale could see that very well. Just one micro-book, to read over and over, would have been a godsend, A whole library was an unthinkable treasure.

  The elderly scientist’s voice broke. In the dark of the cell, Hale could see his eyes glow.

  “Fifteen years later—and fifteen years ago—hope of escape suddenly sprang up again. The human heart never really resigns itself, else all life would cease. I saw that it might be possible to use the parts of the microreader to make some sort of AP-projector. I began a task that was to take ten years. I had no tools. Bribery would not get them in. I used my teeth, for days on end, to twist little screws loose.”

  He raised his upper lip. Hale shivered. The upper teeth were worn down almost to the gums.

  “I wore away rivet heads by rubbing them along the metal walls of my cell, long hours each day, for months at a time. I made separate metal parts by scraping through with the sharp steel edge of my bunk. Finally I had the instrument apart. I had bits of metal, glass and wire. These had to be assembled, somehow, according to the plans I had in mind.

  “The human intellect is more ingenious, in desperation, than most people know. I made paste with spittle, bread-starch and ground-up film.

  It, hardened almost like glass, readily held some parts together. I welded corners together by the heat of hammering—pounding with a metal rod till I fell asleep. I bored holes through metal with slivers of harder metal, for what seemed ages of time. I will skip further detail. At last it was done. It took ten years!”

  CHAPTER VIII

  Treasures of Science

  TEN years! Hale ached, hearing the account, as though it was he who had spent ten grinding years on that stupendous task. It must have taken colossal persistence. On Earth, some men had made history in ten years.

  In proportion, Dr. Allison had done an equally mighty thing.

  “But how did you get the radium you needed for an activator?” Hale queried. He knew all AP-processes were based on the trigger of radioactivity.

  The old scientist grinned a little. “I consider that my master accomplishment. My lower teeth are false. I took the plate out, broke it in several pieces, and wheedled the jailer into having a new set set made for me, on Earth. My Earth friend paid the necessary bribe. A note in code to him—he understood cryptograms—did the trick. The set of false teeth came back. One of them, a molar, was lined with lead, and in its center was a tiny capsule of radium. With that, my projector was complete.”

  Dr. Allison paused.

  “No one will ever know”—his voice became solemn—“what that moment meant to me. It took me hours to press the trigger. What if it didn’t work? What if my new principle of AP-generation failed? What if my ten long years of work were wasted? I would have gone stark mad that moment, if it hadn’t worked. But it did!

  “The little AP-gun ate into matter as readily as the big projectors, though at a much slower rate. I think I screamed in triumph. That was five years ago. Then I began my digging. I carefully etched out a bevel-edged plate, so that I could cover the tunnel I extended. Every six months, when they came to take me out for the routine sanity tests, I was there. Everything looked quite the same. They did not know that an unsuspected manhole lid covered a tunnel that I was digging—toward freedom!

  “I knew the basic plan of Strato-prison. Underneath these solitary cells are passageways connecting to the upper corridors. These run parallel to the curving hull. In two years, inch by inch, I dug through six feet of metal. This globe is very solidly constructed. It was originally planned as an impregnable war-base. Weight meant nothing, in the zero-gravity field.

  “I broke through into one of the passages, rarely used except for repairs on the conveyor-system. But it had no direct connection to the main passage that would lead me to the upper air-lock, to await my chance to escape. I had to reach that main corridor. Boring through the ten-foot thick hull would have been useless, for I would emerge in a near-vacuum fifty miles above Earth. After long thought I reasoned where the main passage should be. I began boring again.”

  He stopped for a moment, shaking his head.

  “I made two mistakes. One, I lost track of time. That was two years ago. The jailer came to take me out for a sanity test, and I wasn’t in my cell. I was below, digging. And that’s the story of Z-ninety-nine-twenty-two, who miraculously ‘escaped’, or vanished. I covered up my trail by adjusting my AP-beam to a simple heat-beam and fusing the plate to the floor, sealing myself out of my own cell.

  “If I had reappeared in my cell, they would have investigated carefully and found my tunnel. As it was, they reasoned my cell door’s electric lock had somehow failed for a moment and that I had sneaked out and up to the airlock, stowed away on a supply-ship before they even knew my cell was empty. But I was below, still trapped.”

  “What did you do then?” Hale asked wonderingly. “You were faced with starvation, cut off from your own cell!”

  THE old man shook his head. “I had access to the robot food conveyor. It ran through the passage I had reached, from the kitchens to the cells. I simply took a little food from each prisoner’s meals, so it wouldn’t be noticed. And water, of course. The passage was ventilated, and a refuse closet was near. Whenever guards happened to pass through, or repair-men came to look over the conveyor, I had barely time to scramble into my tunnel and hope they wouldn’t notice it in the dimness. They never did.

  “My second mistake was missing the main passage, and coming up here. And now, with my AP-gun useless, I am no farther than when I started, fifteen years ago—”

  His voice faded away.

  Hale realized now the inconceivable disappointment that must have overwhelmed the man. After fifteen years of slavelike toil and scheming and hope, to come up in another prisoner’s cell!

  “God!” The old scientist’s voice suddenly burst out sharply, as though the full realization had first burst on him. Then his voice lowered to a dry whisper that chilled Hale’s blood.

  “Has fate ever played a more hellish trick on a man? I wanted so much to escape. To see Earth just once more. To know again, if only for a moment, what sunshine was, and rain and a crowded city street and laughter. Instead, I’ll die here like a trapped rat!”

  It was horrible to hear the dry, ru
stling whisper of a man without hope. Hale shuddered. It was worse than if he had shrieked and stormed. Was his mind teetering on the verge of madness? Was Hale to have a madman for a companion?

  Hale grasped the old man’s shoulders and shook him.

  “Don’t, Dr. Allison!”

  The scientist looked up wanly.

  “Don’t worry. I won’t jump up and batter my head against the wall. But I have nothing to live for. Nothing! Just leave me alone for awhile . . .” His whisper faded into the still of the cell.

  Hale saw the tears in the old eyes—two large tears that furrowed down his cheeks and lost themselves in his uncut beard.

  It was not till hours later that the old scientist stirred, with a heavy sigh.

  “Hale,” he called.

  “Yes?”

  “Tell me your story.”

  Hale did, with unleashed bitterness. He left out no detail of the Five’s plot, both against him and the world.

  “And now you are here,” commented Dr. Allison, “with no tomorrow you can look forward to. Your life ended when the Five sentenced you.” His voice was pitying. “You’re so terribly young—”

  “There can be a tomorrow for me,” Hale said savagely. “After I escape, there will be a tomorrow!”

  “Escape?” The scientist dismissed the thought with the word.

  SUDDENLY he began pacing the cell. “You have told a strange story, Hale,” he muttered. “Aside from what the Five have done to you, they are a greater menace to the well being of Earth. Emanuel Gordy as dictator! I can picture the son from what I know of the father. The world will be crushed under his thumb!

  “I could stop him, if I were there!” he pursued. He halted in front of Hale, his voice tense. “Do you know that I’m the greatest living scientist? At my fingertips I have scientific secrets that would rock civilization. In one year, in a well-equipped laboratory I could emerge with powers making me a superman.”

  Hale caught his breath sharply, then cursed himself for not realizing it before. The man had gone mad after all! Like Hitler in exile, and Napoleon before him, Dr. Allison imagined himself a supreme power held helpless.

  The scientist was watching him.

  “You think I’m mad,” he said quietly. “And yet, what about my midget AP-gun? With a speck of radium, and a few bits of wire and metal I unlocked atomic energy. On Earth you need a portable cyclotron weighing at least a quarter-ton. All I needed was a little grid of copper and beryllium to bounce neutrons between the plates till they exploded into energy. I devised that principle here in prison.”

  Hale didn’t know what to think.

  “How?” he queried. “How could you do it without a laboratory?”

  The old man tapped his forehead.

  “This was my laboratory. Remember, I had thirty years. All I occupied my mind with in those thirty years was scientific thought, to keep me from going mad. I had read my small but select library of micro-books over and over. I had gathered only science works. I came near memorizing the whole set. In the last fifteen years, while I laboriously made the little AP-gun and then tediously dug through metal, I still had endless hours in which to think and review my knowledge.

  Facial expressions were lost in the almost lightless cell, but Hale could sense the slight upcurl of the lips, as the scientist went on.

  “There’s irony in it all. If I had lived free on Earth, I might have made only mediocre laboratory discoveries. The powers of the mind, in normal life, would have been tempted into too many channels. Misfortune like this made me delve into my own mind for its treasures. Captivity for thirty years sharpened my intellectual capacity.

  “With perfect quiet and isolation, I could follow one train of thought for days, and hound down any worthwhile idea. I thought out the principle of my little neutron-bouncing grid in a solid year of continuous thought!”

  Hale was still astonished. “You just sat and thought and devised the grid without one bit of experimental data! It’s—it’s incredible!”

  “Experimental data was already there!” Dr. Allison declared. “Think of Newton. Did he have a laboratory, in the modern sense? Hardly. He simply sat down and figured out the stupendous laws of gravitation. He used the data compiled by dozens of men before him—the giants on whose shoulders he stood, in his own words. Einstein, too, formulated relatively from data that went back a half century.”

  Hale saw more clearly. It was a new way of looking at genius.

  “Hundreds and thousands of scientists experiment and collect data, and publish them. Then a Newton or an Einstein comes along and sees what is before their noses. They are too close, the experimenters, to see it themselves.”

  “Exactly,” agreed the scientist. “So it was with me. For thirty years I revolved all the latest scientific data. Some things began to stand out clearly, in the focus of my continuous thoughts. Stupendous things!”

  His voice cracked suddenly.

  “And yet here I am, helpless. My scientific secrets are dead, lost, locked up with me in a globe of metal in the stratosphere. A master scientist, with only a nameless grave before him. That is the bitter irony of it.”

  Hale’s thoughts clicked to a swift conclusion.

  “Dr. Allison, pass your secrets along to me! I can do something with them!”

  “Here?”

  “No, but when I escape—”

  A harsh laugh resounded.

  “I tried for thirty years and failed. How can you have hope?”

  “I have, somehow, I don’t know how or when, but I’ll escape!”

  The scientists’s hand reached through the darkness to touch Hale.

  “It is good to have hope,” he murmured. “I’ll teach you my scientific secrets. At least, if nothing else, it will lighten for both of us this murderous cell existence.”

  Two more years rolled by, in the endless parade of time.

  Every six months, Richard Hale was conducted from his cell briefly, and found sane. The warden could not hide his surprise. It was strange for a young, sensitive-minded man to take the horrors of solitary in his stride. Hale laughed wildly within himself. They did not know of his mysterious companion.

  There was little worry of detection. The jailers never visited the cells between the six-month periods. Daily Dr. Allison crawled through his tunnel to the conveyor-system passage, for food. At times he shared Hale’s rations, or Hale would go below. They derived a grim pleasure in having defeated the very purpose of solitary isolation, without the prison masters knowing. It was a joke on them.

  Dr. Allison imparted his scientific discoveries, nurtured in his mind through thirty years. Hale gradually began to feel as though he were kneeling before a treasure-chest, sifting gold pieces and shining jewels through his fingers. Most of the scientist’s conceptions were half-formed, nebulous. Many would prove to be useless fantasies. But some, after laboratory tests, would be startling wonders. Dr. Allison’s library had included all sciences—physics, chemistry, astronomy, biology, and many in between. His patient, penetrating mind had delved omnivorously into all.

  IT was not so startling. The techniques of science had, by the late 20th century, become reduced to fundamentals. The 19th century and early 20th had been pioneering days of experimentation. After that had come the period of widespread industrial application. Dr. Allison, at the apex of this period, was a generation ahead.

  In biology, he intuitively sensed new and amazing hormones just ahead. In chemistry, he predicted dyes that would out date any known. In physics, the traditional structure of matter would be altered and molded as if it were wax. In astronomy, Dr. Allison knew of a comet—whose orbit data other scientists had not yet sifted—that would pass within 100,000 miles of Earth, closer than the Moon.

  Heaped scientific treasures, gleamed from the four corners of world lore, and the originator was an exile, cast away from Earth life. Hale saw a vivid parallel with past history. Galileo had been forced by contemporary authority to recant his heretical discoverie
s. Lavoisier’s laboratory had been burned down as a witch’s den. And again genius would not be hailed, in the case of Dr. Allison, till after his death. That is, Hale reflected soberly, if at all.

  “So much good could be done with all those things,” the old scientist would murmur at times.

  “They are treasures of science,” Hale would say solemnly. “I promise you, Dr. Allison, that if I escape they will be given to Earth for its benefit.”

  But the old scientist’s companionship was the rarest treasure of all, to Hale. No longer did time drag so cumbersomely, nor darkness and silence hold such terrors.

  CHAPTER IX

  When Tomorrow Comes

  YET one thing loomed monstrously—the lack of any sort of Tomorrow for them.

  Hale talked of escape. With Dr. Allison he resolved a hundred vague plans. The scientist took him below, through his tunnel. A dim corridor stretched here, but solid steel doors blocked both ends. They might conceivably slip past guards, with the door open. But then the way led past each level of the giant prison, each with a locked door again, and guards swarming everywhere.

  “No chance at all that way,” said the scientist flatly. “All the doors are controlled from Earth, as you know, by remote control. When guards march from level to level, the doors unlock one by one. But only at orders from the warden, in contact with the Earth operators by television.

  “My one slim chance, with the AP-gun, was to get into a hull-corridor, bum a hole through each door quickly, and finally reach the air-lock. Here, since they had practically forgotten me, I could slip onto the regular supply ship and thus reach Earth.”