The Collected Stories

by Earl

  Humidity values varied from air drained dry of moisture to air so saturated with it that droplets leaped out as from an overfilled vessel. The mercury columns of thermometers shot past the figures of the scale with unbelievable rapidity, sometimes up, sometimes down.

  Violent electrical storms occurred over most of earth. The prongs of lightning split the sky in almost continuous succession. Yet it was a peculiar lightning that occurred only in the upper air, blazing from cloud to cloud. Very little of it struck earth. The weird St. Elmo’s Fire took part in a pyrotechnic display that would go down in history as the most amazing ever seen.

  Speculation ran its usual gamut among earth’s millions, but even the foremost meteorologists were completely mystified. It was apparent that some unusual phenomenon had disturbed earth’s normal weather for the three hours it lasted, but the cause—that was unknown.

  AT a snow-covered Montreal airport, Martin Fenstrom taxied his large low-winged transport ship down the runway on its wide skis. It lifted ponderously and smoothly into the air.

  All his life Martin Fenstrom, still a young man, had knocked around the world, seeking escape from humdrumness. There was hardly a spot on earth that had not seen his freckled face, keen blue eyes offset by curly black hair, and rugged frame, at one time or another. Yet, in all his adventuring, Fenstrom had never been so intrigued as in the present one. He could hardly believe, at times, that up to the north—

  Fenstrom had been with his present employer for just two years now, longer than he had ever before stuck with one thing. Once a month or oftener he had piloted his great Boeing to the south, to Montreal, for supplies for the northern encampment. Fenstrom was being paid well, and liked the work. But lately, he had been wondering about certain things. Especially what that brief, but violent, storm of the day before had signified.

  Straight north the plane droned, over a land in the grip of winter. Then over a corner of Hudson Bay and into the barren reaches of northern Canada. Below lay a mottled blanket of white, broken only by ice-covered lakes and patches of fir forest. A desolate country, growing more desolate with each mile. Always due north—as straight north as he could by the compass. His destination was the North Magnetic Pole of earth, on the Boothia Peninsula of Canada’s north coast, bordering the Arctic Sea.

  Fenstrom had to laugh a little at the ease of finding his haven. All he had to do was parallel the axis of the compass needle. And its dip—it was suspended from a quartz fiber—indicated his approach graphically. When it began to point almost straight down, Fenstrom knew he was near. He had flown fifteen hours.

  Fenstrom lowered the ship in a darkness that was due to last for another three weeks in this latitude of 71 degrees. At last he saw the lights of the encampment that existed in an eternal winter not 1300 miles from the geographic North Pole. His compass needle stood rigidly vertical.

  Revealed by the gibbous moon overhead, he saw the familiar group of igloos—ice houses—surrounding a long low structure of sheet metal. Back of this was a queer tesselated tower supporting a hoop from which hung dozens of wire-strands. It was not odd to Fenstrom to see these manmade things in this cold wilderness, but it was a secret that the world did not know.

  Under his skilled guidance, the huge ship lowered like a feather and skudded lightly over the packed level of snow. Already figures came running from the igloos a few hundred yards away. Fenstrom answered their rousing greetings with a wave of the hand, as he stepped from the cabin, and instructed one of the men to keep the engine idling for an hour to let it cool down slowly.

  “Did you bring me my Clover-cut tobacco?” yelled one of the men as he started unloading the fuselage.

  “Sure,” grinned the pilot.

  Then he trudged toward the encampment. An icy wind whipped against his exposed face. He approached the only permanent structure of the camp, the long low housing of thin but strong sheet metal. From its several windows gleamed light—electric light. He opened the felt-lined door and stepped in, taking off his gloves and opening the zippers of his parka at the breath of warm air that met him. He heard the low drone of the apparatus at the back which supplied current for heating, lighting and other purposes, even to the igloos.

  Fenstrom pulled out a cigarette and lit it. Half-way down the laboratory a short thin man of about fifty looked up from the apparatus covering the wooden bench before him. He came forward with a slight smile wrinkling the parchment skin of his rather sad face.

  “Back already, Fenstrom?” he said in a preoccupied voice. His eyes sparkled suddenly. “Did you observe the phenomenon of two days ago, down there in Montreal?”

  The pilot nodded. “Yes. As you predicted, the compass needle went crazy. It did everything but stand on its head and how it lied about where north was! But say, Professor Manning, what was all that other stuff? Electrical disturbances, sudden storms, and a pretty bad mix-up of weather conditions. I didn’t like it, and I don’t think anybody else on earth did.”

  PROFESSOR HOWARD MANNING’S melancholy face quickly became lined with remorse. “We temporarily lost control and could not switch the earth’s magnetic field to normal in less than three hours,” he muttered. His lips twitched a little. “For the first time I’m beginning to realize what a—a powerful thing this is. Perhaps—” He did not finish the thought, but stood there frowning.

  “And that peculiar feeling of—of being turned inside out,” went on Fenstrom. “That was damnable. Others felt it, whom I heard talking, so evidently it was universal.”

  “Yes, everyone felt it,” nodded the diminutive scientist. I heard all the reports over the radio. It put quite a scare into people, who, of course, imagined all sorts of dire things. As a matter of fact, it is a harmless, though disconcerting effect. Every cell of your body is a tiny electromagnetic unit, producing neutral impulses of an electrical nature.

  “In his noted book The Phenomena of Life, the world-famous Dr. George Crile reveals evidence of the tiny radiogens—miniature electrical generators in the body-cell. Thus, all your body processes are electromagnetic in character. You live and move in earth’s magnetic field. When the field is suddenly changed in any way, you are correspondingly affected. Not physically, but in your nervous system.

  “It is all an effect of the crossing of magnetic lines of force. Have you heard that a person sleeps better with head north and feet south—again Dr. Crile is the authority—with the body parallel to earth’s magnetic lines of force? It’s true, because there is no crossing of lines which produce currents that have a disturbing effect in the neural paths of the human body.”

  “You’re over my head,” murmured Fenstrom. “But I would like to know what this research is all about. For two years I’ve been hauling supplies and equipment. I thought it was what they call ‘pure research’, but since that twisting of the compass the other day, I realize it may have practical significance as well.”

  Professor Manning raised a finger dramatically and seemed to swell up and grow larger. “Fenstrom, this marks a red-letter day in science! For we—my brother and myself—have harnessed the earth’s titanic magnetic force-field. We now have an illimitable power, with which we can benefit mankind—if we can control it. Uncontrolled”—his pinched face became drawn with inner worry—“it could be a terrible menace. Sometimes the responsibility—”

  He chopped off his words suddenly, looked up. “You must be tired, Fenstrom. Go and get some rest. I’ll tell you more about all this tomorrow.”

  The pilot realized he was tired. He zippered up his parka and stepped out. He stopped for a moment, looking up. Almost directly overhead the Aurora Borealis had spangled the starry firmament with multi-colored glory. Gauzy curtains of gold and rose and sea-green shimmered as though caught in an ether-breeze. Long, delicate streamers of milky white, like searchlight beams, probed the black vault above. Bubbles of swiftly changing hue expanded outward like the visible concussion waves of some gentle, silent explosion.

  Almost every day for two years Fen
strom had seen these magnificent Auroral displays, yet he knew he would never tire of them. He sighed without knowing it and tore his eyes away. Snow-needles whipped up by a gusty wind tingled on his face as he strode along to one of the igloos. Larger than the others, it was the general mess-hall. Savory odors met Fenstrom as he went in.

  He had a meal of bear-meat and rice, talked with the men there a bit, and then left for the sleeping quarters he shared with two others. Fenstrom fell asleep quickly in a deerskin bunk.

  PROFESSOR HOWARD MANNING was a scientific genius. The radio and television set he had here, a product of his own mind, was a superinstrument that could reach around the earth. It hummed busily as his long, sensitive fingers twisted the vernier dials. Spangles of light ghosted into the vision screen and solidified to the image of a face.

  Startlingly, the face seemed to be a mirrored image of his own. Yet it came from 12,000 miles away. It was the face of Dr. John Manning, his brother. No less of a scientific genius, John Manning’s voice came in greeting from earth South Magnetic Pole, in the portion of the continent Antarctica called South Victoria Land.

  These two, born of a wealthy family, had been educated in the best universities of the world. Later, in middle life, working in collaboration in a private laboratory, they had discovered certain secrets of magnetism. With unlimited funds from inheritance, they had finally equipped two expeditions, one for the South Magnetic Pole and one for the northern. Here they had been for two years, transporting into the frozen wastes a wealth of scientific apparatus that would have made any scientist gasp.

  All this had been done in secrecy, though they had the formal permits from the Canadian and Australian governments respectively, to be in their territories.

  On closer observance, the figure mirrored in the television screen resembled Howard Manning only facially. And even there, the resemblance was superficial. John Manning’s face was not sad, like his brother’s—it was hard, almost brutal in cast. His cheeks were full and his eyes gleamed with a certain lack of refinement. He was a big obese man, almost two of his smaller brother.

  His voice roared a bull-like greeting from the loudspeaker. Then he scowled as he waited for the little man to speak up, for he had made the call.

  “John,” began Howard Manning timidly. “I’ve been thinking things over. This experiment is dangerous! We’d better not take the next step till we have better control. We lost our grip with the electro-grapples the other day and earth’s magnetic field rotated for three hours out of control before its own momentum slowed it down. We failed to—”

  “What!” roared the man at the South Magnetic Pole. “Why, that was a signal success! A feather in our cap! A milestone in science! Earth’s magnetic field made to rotate longitudinally for the first time in history, and you speak as though it were a failure!”

  His thick lips writhed suddenly. “Howard, you little chicken-hearted runt, don’t back down on me!”

  “You got me into this!” wailed the little scientist. “I’m afraid to go on. We don’t know—”

  “We don’t know, but we’re going to find out!” the television image shouted so that the loudspeaker rattled. “Going to find out just how much power this represents.” His eyes gleamed fanatically. “And then—”

  “And then—what?” asked the little man, stiffening.

  “Why, what do you think?” said the other in mock sweetness. “We’ll give mankind a legacy of power a million times greater than that of all the coal there ever was!”

  HOWARD MANNING’S face lit up, at this, like that of a visionary. It was his greatest aim, to benefit humanity in this work of theirs. His brother’s rumbling voice shattered his spell: “Now get over those qualms of yours, Howard. Test all your apparatus and tomorrow we’ll try again.

  Goodbye.”

  The little professor turned away from the set with a feeling that he was being hurried along by his ruthless, determined brother to an undesirable goal. His sad little face became sadder.

  After a hearty and hot breakfast of venison steak the next morning, Fenstrom went to the laboratory and helped Manning solder leads to a panel of studs that led to the outside loop of wires.

  “We’re changing the set-up a little,” explained Manning, “so we can get a better grip on earth’s magnetic field.”

  “Which is just about as clear as frozen mud to me,” grinned the pilot.

  “I’ll begin at the beginning,” continued the professor. “Ten years ago my brother and I discovered, in investigating magnetic phenomena, a way to rotate a magnetic field. We immediately saw the importance of this, and after developing our method, we finally established these permanent camps at the earth’s north and south magnetic poles.

  “As any text-book will tell you, earth is a gigantic magnet. Like any other magnet, it has two poles, on one of which we are situated. And naturally, it has lines of force, like those displayed by sprinkling iron filings around a common bar magnet. These lines of force are the isogonal lines of the mariner’s magnetic chart, by which he guides himself over the trackless seas.

  “What does this mean? It means that the entire magnetic field of earth is controllable from its two poles!”

  A strange, dreamy look came into the scientist’s eyes as he went on—that look that must have infused the face of Faraday, Curie, Rutherford and other pioneers of science.

  “My brother and I, thinking that over, decided to try rotating the earth’s field. It has taken us two years to transfer our results from the laboratory to the field. From the simple bar magnet to the gigantic earth. But we have succeeded—in a measure.

  “There is an identical tower, such as ours outside, at the South Magnetic Pole. When the two are synchronized, earth’s magnetic field as a whole is rotated—or, if you prefer—a drag is imposed on it while earth continues rotating beneath it.

  “The implications of this are fairly obvious. It is a longitudinal rotation, from east to west. Thus, any single spot on earth, during the rotation, is crossed by innumerable lines of force from this planet’s great and natural magnetic field.

  “Think, then, Fenstrom, of a simple but large coil of conductive wire being crossed by these rotating lines of force. Electrical power! Endless quantities of it! And anywhere on earth’s surface where the coils are set up!”

  The pilot had forgotten what he was doing and stood with the hot electric soldering iron in his hand. “I see!” he breathed. “And I thought this was all some high-flown research without practical significance! And that magnetic storm—”

  “Was our first try-out at rotating earth’s field,” nodded the professor. “Unfortunately, we lost control and gave the magnetic field such a terrific spin that it was three hours before it lost its momentum under the reversed drag of our tower-grapples.

  “The magnetic field, unleashed, produced the phenomenon of hysteresis—heat of motion, as in any electric motor. This heat was what caused the violent agitation of earth’s weather. Most of it was produced near the ground, all over earth’s surface. The heated air arose, cold air rushed in—storms were started. All recording instruments naturally went crazy—barometers, thermometers, hygrometers, etc.

  “The compass too went mad because the isogonal lines were moving westward and dragging the needle with them. Cloud-lightning was the by-product of an immense release of static electricity. St. Elmo’s Fire was an effect of the suddenly ionized air.” Fenstrom was puzzled. “How then will you ever make use of the power resources of the field’s rotation, if it will always have those disturbing effects?”

  Worry leaped into the little scientist’s face. “Earth’s magnetic field is a great and powerful agent of energy. It is possible to calculate a certain slow and easy speed of rotation of the field that will not seriously affect earth’s meteorological conditions, but will furnish a ransom of power. However, it yet remains to be seen if we can control it. This afternoon we are going to try again, my brother and I, to harness this Titan of energy—”

  AL
L preparations were completed several hours later.

  Fenstrom held his breath. All the world seemed to hold its breath. For the second time in history, earth’s magnetic field was to be shaken loose from its age-old moorings, to do the bidding of audacious man. The pilot gingerly grasped the large, ebony-handled throw-switch in the middle of the panel. It seemed to burn his palm. Yet he knew it was only imagination, thinking of the holocaustic forces about to be released.

  “Current!” thundered the commanding voice of Dr. John Manning from Antarctica.

  Professor Howard Manning’s thin arm jerked up in signal and Fenstrom knifed his switch. For a moment he was blinded by the sudden arc of intense violet that resulted. Then he felt a vague stirring within his body, a momentary nausea reminiscent of the time before, when he had been in Montreal. Yet not so strong. Its full effects could not be felt except where the isogonal lines of force swept over earth’s surface, away from the pole.

  In answer to these manipulations of its masters, the mechanical giant outside the laboratory came rapidly and silently to life. A pulsing current leaped through its whirling copper coil. Rotating in the opposite direction from earth’s motion, the magnetic-eddy it produced dragged the force-lines from the pole aside.

  At the south pole, the same synchronized process was occurring, and thus the entire magnetic field of earth was being slowly but inexorably turned on its axis.

  Out in the world the giant, invisible, whirling field was duplicated, in somewhat lesser degree, the phenomena of that first time. Suddenly warmed air was billowing upward, creating winds. Clouds condensed in descending cold strata and changed to falling water. Thunderbolts of electricity were discharging from cloud to cloud. St. Elmo’s Fire spawned out of a superionized atmosphere.