The Collected Stories

by Earl

  GORDY had to take the arm of von Grenfeld and lead him away almost like a frightened child. Von Grenfeld was suffering the tortures of complete shattered pride. The bottom of his universe had fallen out. His uniform still fitted him nattily. But on his short figure it gave him the sensation of being a strutting, pompous little bantam, with no more impressiveness than a half-grown boy in a play uniform. Even his men, he noticed, had to hide uncertain grins. Rage howled in his brain.

  He lunged at one man, whose lips had twitched in an amused smile. Von Grenfeld hammered up toward the man’s chin. Before, the blow would have landed solidly and laid the man out full length. Now the short arm missed its mark. Von Grenfeld half spun around. The man clutched him by the shoulders to restore his balance, then held him easily as von Grenfeld flailed at his face, but never reached it.

  “Stop, you fool!” commanded Dr. Gordy.

  Von Grenfeld subsided with a half sob, and the man let him go. All the police were smiling now, forgetting their amazement at the phenomenon in favor of grinning joy. Von Grenfeld had always been a domineering, blustering, bullying commander. Now, in one brief moment, he had become a puny little wretch who couldn’t reach a chin. Von Grenfeld felt it all and his soul writhed.

  Gordy looked around at the door.

  “What happened to Miss Asquith?”

  At that moment they heard her car drive Swiftly away. She had slipped out without a word. The police cars also left. Von Grenfeld had gone into a trance of silent suffering. Dr. Gordy kept nervously glancing at parts of his body—and wondering.

  Richard Hale, in his secret hideaway, had watched the tableau in another spy ray screen. Von Grenfeld’s reactions had fed again the hunger of revenge. The pride-shorn man added the fourth part of atonement for Hale’s three years of prison.

  It had been simple enough, behind its amazing effect. Matter, as science had long known, was largely empty space. By reducing that space in his compression machine, Hale had brought the atoms and molecules of von Grenfeld’s body closer together. It was condensation of matter.

  As Dr. Allison had expounded it, in Strato-prison, the potential of strain between atoms could be altered.

  Heavy stars did it by stupendous pressure. But the same thing could be duplicated in the laboratory, using a super-gravity field, the opposite of the zero-gravity field. In the super-gravity field atoms would quietly move closer together and take up a new system of motions, without changing relative position.

  Von Grenfeld’s body, in the compression machine, had simply been reduced in proportion, uniform and all. His original weight was still there, but packed in a lesser space. The process of course, would be fatal beyond certain limits. Hale had reduced guinea-pigs to the size of small mice, but found them dead. Von Grenfeld, reduced only one-sixth, would very likely live as long a life as otherwise.

  Step four was done. It had been singularly appropriate in the case of von Grenfeld, Hale thought, to make him insignificant among men and thus undermine his self-pride. But there remained Dr Gordy—step five.

  He went back to his spy ray.

  SOME time later, as evening threw its shadows over the white spires of New Washington, the Four held a grave meeting.

  “We must destroy him!” von Grenfeld said again.

  He had been muttering the same phrase over and over, like an automaton, as though it were his single purpose left in life.

  “Yes, but first we must find him,” reminded Gordy. “Your men have been searching the countryside without result. His secret laboratory is cleverly hidden. Before we find it and destroy it, we can’t feel safe.” Gordy’s voice faltered slightly on the last words. Paxton glanced at him bitterly.

  “It’s odd that Dr. Strato did nothing to you. Why has he left you out?” The scientist waved a nervous hand. “It’s as bad or worse this way, waiting in suspense. I’m beginning to believe he planned it just that way—letting my own fear play on my nerves. His whole purpose, in this, has been to make nervous wrecks of us all. But we’ve got to fight and keep calm.”

  Peter Asquith gave a strange mirthless laugh. He held up one of his blood-dyed hands.

  “My niece, Laura, told me an odd story. We all have blood on our hands, but particularly the blood of Richard Hale!”

  A dead silence filled the room.

  That name, more than any other, stood out in the list of crimes that had been necessary to their rise toward power.

  Gordy did a strange thing. Motioning the others aside, he went to the visi-phone and signaled Strato-prison. Warden Lewis’ brutal face appeared. He answered Gordy’s question with surprise.

  “Richard Hale, number Y-fourteen-eighteen, absolutely died attempting to escape two years ago. Two guards were witnesses and a dozen prisoners. His body was charred to ashes on the atomic grid. But what—”

  Gordy clicked off without explanation, and turned to his companions.

  “Just a precautionary checkup,” he said imperturbably. “Now, who is this Dr. Strato?”

  “An avenger for Richard Hale!” Asquith returned nervously. “He told my niece that himself.”

  “Nonsense!” barked Gordy. “But it shows clearly the subtle, clever game this Dr. Strato is playing. He is preying on our nerves and minds that way. Somehow he knows all about us, and is opposed to us, possibly to take over world rule himself. He boasted that he would counter-move our every move.

  “He took Transport from our control, but we still control propaganda and the secret Syndicate troops. Let him stop those if he can! Now look, here’s our move. We’ll turn the tables on him. Asquith’s propaganda will immediately term the stock market a conspiracy.

  “Transport’s beneficent public service was torn apart by wolves, and the World Government failed to prevent this shoddy affair. Thus we still give the Government its black eye, mass public opinion on our side, and lay the groundwork for a military coup!”

  Dr. Gordy’s voice rang imperiously.

  He stood there with face lifted, as though expecting their awed admiration. He had always been the brain behind the Five, solving all difficulties, leading on toward their goal. Soon he would be the actual dictator supreme, the invisible brain behind whatever insignificant figurehead they chose to put in apparent power.

  Gordy started from a trance, noticing the others were staring at him.

  “Your skin!” said Paxton. “It’s becoming—transparent!”

  Gordy lifted his hand before his eyes, startled. The skin seemed to be slowly but steadily vanishing. Veins began to show as tiny tubes. Muscle tissue and tendons grew visible. Second by second, as though an intangible acid were at work, his skin became more and more transparent.

  They all watched in stricken fascination.

  DR. GORDY suddenly ran to the huge wall mirror, peering at the reflection of his face. He saw a ghastly image. Cheek-bones lay bare and white. The tight muscle cords around his mouth twitched in full view. His eyes appeared to be two balls hanging unsupported. The heavy cords of his neck were mirrored in their knotty entirety.

  And he knew that if he stripped off his clothes, he would stand before his fellowmen like a repulsive anatomical model in a medical classroom, all muscles, veins and organs exposed to prying eyes.

  But one thing brought a sharper gasp of horror from his transparent lips. Underneath the beetling bone of the brow he could see straight through to the back of the skull. His entire brain was invisible!

  Gordy’s swift mind instantly leaped ahead. He pictured himself standing before a mass of humanity, in a public square, addressing them as advisor to their dictator. And they would shout and jeer and laugh and turn pale at the sight of him, with the mixed emotions of a crowd. His death’s-head face would be flashed via television all over the world, and people would turn away in loathing or disgust.

  No one would see the noble case of his brow, the autocratic look in his eye. They would only see an empty-skulled thing, unrecognizable as human. They would shout against him, depose him, revolt against
rule by a thing fit only for the morgue.

  Gordy groaned. How could he face the future in his horrible condition?

  Back in his laboratory, Hale grinned humorlessly at the image in his spy ray screen.

  “You are now the ‘invisible brain’ you always wanted to be, Dr. Gordy!” he said savagely. “It was your brain that threw an invisible net around me and cast me into Strato-prison.”

  Hale laughed aloud at the repulsive figure. All its skin and fatty tissues had become very nearly transparent, as with jelly-fish. Dr. Allison’s mind, turning often to biology, had speculated that some gland product present in all lower forms of life accounted for their transparent skins. One isolated, the hormone would do the same for opaque skins, devised by evolution to hide vital organs from eyes that wished to kill.

  Hale had injected his hormone extract, from jelly-fish, into Gordy’s pineal gland. The ductless gland had then gradually trickled the hormone out into his body, along with its usual hormone. No hormone worked alone. The whole secret of it had been to let the new hormone join with the usual ones, and have them combine forces in altering cell structure from milkiness to a watery texture. Nothing else of vital nature was changed.

  Hale watched, more calmly after a moment.

  Step five was done. Paxton with the Golden Touch that made him miserable. Asquith with his bloody hands that would slowly drive him mad. Mausser with the black skin that had sent his shuddering soul into the escape of eternity. Von Grenfeld with his broken pride hanging in shreds about him. And Dr. Gordy with a face he wouldn’t dare show in public.

  So Hale had planned, and so it was done. The five men who had ruthlessly cast him to exile from life were repaid. After five years of blighted existence he could once again face the future—Tomorrow.

  And yet, what about Laura?

  He forced his thoughts away from that. He turned back to the screen. His campaign against the Five had turned a corner, passed into a new phase. The personal was done with, except for final revelation. What remained now was a grim struggle with Earth’s fate hanging in balance.

  CHAPTER XVIII

  Rebirth of Richard Hale

  GORDY recovered most quickly of all the Five. He wheeled around from the mirror.

  “He won’t stop us with these scientific tricks!” he shouted. “I’m a scientist, too. What can be done by science can be undone by science. I’ll take away this Golden Touch, the red-dyed hands, reduced stature, and my own transparent skin. But later. Right now, we’ll push through our program. The time is ripe. Asquith, the presses, television and all centers of public enlightenment are to be informed tonight and tomorrow that the World Government is collapsing. A new government is needed to prevent even worse debacles than the stock exchange upset. Get that started now!” Asquith scurried out as if glad to be away from that hideous skinless face.

  Gordy turned to von Grenfeld.

  “You have the Syndicate troops massed near the European end of the Subatlantic Tube. Keep in constant touch with them. In three days, when the Tube is officially opened they will strike swiftly!”

  Gordy’s gargoyle face drew up in a challenging smile. But it was recorded only as a movement of exposed muscles.

  “Dr. Strato has nothing but little scientific tricks in his bag. I control great world forces. He’ll find it harder to fight those!”

  Paxton, who was left, shrugged fatalistically. The petty agonies of his Golden Touch and the collapse of his gold empire had left him a listless, defeated spirit.

  “He will strike in some unforeseen way,” he muttered. And at dawn of the next day, it was seen how that thrust would come.

  Asquith’s sleepless eyes, after a night of work, looked out of the window of his office, to which a clerk had called him. He looked up. There, written across the sky in giant smoky letters, was a message. The words sprawled across a fifty-mile area, exactly like the running-word advertising signs in shops.

  People of Earth! You are being poisoned with propaganda, not enlightenment. The propaganda of a clique of Four who wish to rule Earth. The present World Government is not responsible for the stock market affair. Nor has it wantonly thrown Transport Corporation to snarling wolves of finance. Transport was a monopoly held by the Four, to serve their ends.

  The Four are as follows. Peter Asquith, the Minister of Public Enlightenment. Sir Charles Paxton, Secretary of Finance. Ivan von Grenfeld, Commander of World Police. And Dr. Emanuel Gordy, Director of Science.

  These Four must be deposed from their high stations before they accomplish their ends. Above all do not believe the insidious propaganda that is now pouring from every newscaster and visi-screen. Leaders of the World Government, ask these Four why Jonathan Mausser died by his own hand!

  A SQUITH watched the incredible message spelled out across the blue sky. Even clouds did not hinder it, for the smoky letters only fuzzed slightly at the edges. When the full text was over and began to repeat, the whole gigantic area moved westward.

  Millions of eyes, from Maine to Florida must be reading the colossal sign, gaping at it open-mouthed. Millions more would read it, across the entire continent, as the sign moved steadily westward. Public opinion so close to home would not accept Asquith’s propaganda without serious discussion.

  In his laboratory, Hale tuned in the sky-writing with his spy ray. He nodded in satisfaction. It was perfect though merely an extension of the spy ray principle. An ordinary movideo projector cast three-dimensional letters through a spy ray system. Adjusted for a height of a hundred miles, and expanded to a fifty-mile area, the letters unreeled in keeping with the film-rate of the movideo camera.

  Hale watched the clockwork that slowly twisted the focus of his projection ray from east to west. All the people of central North America must see. Then, since his ultra-penetrating ray could take in any earthly dimension, he would whisk the message across to Eurasia, and sweep it over that teeming continent. Within a day, more people would have read his message than had heard Asquith’s outpourings from his network of communications.

  Hale was again a step ahead—a fifty-mile step.

  DR. GORDY realized it instantly.

  He had Asquith stop the visi-presses immediately. And when the Four gathered, within an hour, the sky-writing stopped also.

  “Fie meant what he said,” Gordy stated. “That he will counter-move at our moves. And he wants personal surrender from us. That is shown by the fact that he stopped when he did.” The Four looked at one another bleakly. Fighting an unknown, unseen power was inhumanly terrifying. Searching police had not found the slightest clue to Dr. Strato’s hideaway.

  Gordy’s exposed face muscles did not show the strain and fury written over his features, after a sleepless night. But the large white eyeballs were bloodshot.

  “We won’t try any more half-measures,” he grated. “Von Grenfeld, are the Syndicate troops ready?”

  The stubby little five-foot man, repressed humiliation in his face, nodded.

  “A million men, fully armed. They are quartered a mile from the Tube’s European terminal.”

  “Good!” Gordy’s face, had it been visible, would have shown utter ruthlessness. “Following the opening ceremony, day after tomorrow, the troops will march under the Atlantic to New Washington and occupy the city. What can even the clever Dr. Strato do against a million armed men?”

  Some unrest arose among the people after the mysterious episode of contradictory messages from higher circles. But it was smoothed over by an announcement that the World Government authorities were investigating. It took the most adroit argument by Asquith to keep himself from being clapped in custody for the brief barrage of propaganda. He insisted it was sabotage, a dark plot by others, a sheer accident. Any lies would do for the time being.

  The Four had only one thing in mind—the opening of the Subatlantic Tube. They staved off suspicion against themselves for the few hours left.

  All the world then sat eagerly before its visi-sets to watch the opening ceremon
ies. For five years the great tunnel had been in the process of being dug under the Atlantic. It caught the popular imagination. It was easily the most stupendous engineering feat in history, comparable only to the canals of Mars.

  World Government officials orated. Bands played. A singing group chorused out a song dedicated to the project. A ribbon-decked rocket ship slowly eased past the half-way mark between Europe and North America. All this occurred miles under the middle of the Atlantic Ocean, in the huge, tile-lined tunnel that stretched for two thousand miles in both directions. Ike-operators were flashing the auspicious scenes to the world’s visi-screens.

  Incognito, the Four stood below the speakers’ platform. One would have had to look closely to see their respective afflictions. Asquith had easily covered his red-dyed hands with cosmetics. Paxton kept his hands in the pockets of a tan suit, against which the golden glow was not noticeable. Von Grenfeld wore shoes with extremely high heels to offset some of his shortness. Dr.

  Gordy had grease-painted his transparent skin, which made him look like a pale-skinned invalid.

  THEY kept sharp watch on the crowd. Known only to them, many of the men crowding out of cars from the European side were Syndicate troopers in street clothes. Soon they would outnumber the official police, who were there to keep order. Rocket trains, installed and put on running schedule a week before, had been busy all morning, bringing passengers to the ceremonial location.

  “The zero hour approaches,” whispered von Grenfeld. “At my signal, the troops will take over control of the Tube.”

  “It’s our last chance,” replied Asquith.

  “But our best chance,” said Gordy confidently. “Military power, in the last analysis is always the ace card.”

  “I hope Dr. Strato doesn’t know of this coup!” whispered Paxton, shivering.

  Then he let out an incredulous gasp. The enigmatic figure of Dr. Strato stood five feet away! Four pairs of startled eyes focused on him.