by L. P. Davies
He paused after the preliminaries.
“I had assumed for a long time that some of the people who vanish from Earth find their way here. It is an assumption that has been proved correct. The doorway between the two dimensions is, as you are well aware, a field comprised of three magnetic forces. I produced the resultant complex field artificially in my laboratory. Under certain conditions they are produced here naturally.
“It is difficult to explain without using technicalities. The mists are, as you have correctly deduced, force fields. They can be called the equivalent of one of the poles on the laboratory floor. The strong magnetic field of this world constitutes the second. Add the final pole-equivalent, a magnetic storm, and you have the necessary conditions to breach the dividing wall. Am I making myself clear?”
“Abundantly so,” Lee said.
“Good. When these three fields come in contact with each other, any person who happens to be standing on the precise spot in our world is drawn through. It is as simple as that. Unfortunately the human frame is not strong enough to withstand the experience. Those that are drawn through have been subjected to forces infinitely more powerful than those produced in the laboratory. They are always dead upon arrival here. Their bodies, of course, always appear close to the mists. Many are in some way absorbed by the mist. The Korvans recover the rest, and, by the clothing and personal effects, know that they have come from some place other than Korva. Long ago the Korvans came to the conclusion that there must be another world nearby. When Adam and I came through, there was no surprise at our appearance, only amazement that we were alive.
“The traffic between the two dimensions isn’t entirely one-way. Adam made the journey in the opposite direction—a rare occurrence. He was alone, out hunting. There is a small animal here (perhaps another modification of life that existed before the destruction of the Magnetic War) which the Korvans hunt mainly for its skin.”
“We’ve seen them,” Lee inserted.
“There are few enough of them, and so they are much in demand. Pursuing one of them, Adam came nearer to the mist than safety demands. He slipped and, catching his foot between two stones, badly bruised his ankle. Fortunately, he was still able to walk. The ankle-covering these people wear—a protection against the spines of the shrub—saved him from any real hurt. But before he was able to limp away, a storm broke. Unprotected, he became unconscious. When he came round again, the storm was still raging. Not until it had passed over did he realise he was no longer in his own world. He guessed what had happened. Most of his clothing had been ripped away by the magnetic storm. He knew, because of the bodies he had seen of people who had come the other way through the wall, that in appearance he would be like the denizens of this new world. But he wouldn’t be able to speak their language. And he had no way of knowing if they would be friendly. He decided to be very cautious.
“Adam found himself in a field, not far from a farm. He staggered towards the buildings, but collapsed before reaching them. When he’ came round again, he found himself in hospital. He learned afterwards that the farmer who had found him had assumed he had been struck by lightning. And in the hospital, when he didn’t speak and didn’t seem to understand what was being said to him, the people assumed he had lost his memory.
“During the three months he was a patient he picked up a smattering of English, enough to enable him to obtain a job on a farm. Aware of his accent and somewhat foreign appearance, he assumed the name Adam Sokel, a name that could have originated anywhere in Europe. After a year and a half, when he was able to read English as well as speak it fluently, Adam read one of my articles on my development of Einstein’s theory of simultaneous worlds. I suggested the possibility of being able to contact the nearest of these other worlds. Adam came to see me, asking for work. I took him on—first as gardener, then as handyman. And after a while, when he had come to discover that I was seriously considering attempting to contact Dimension A, he told me who he really was. His one desire was to return to his own world. I was the one man who might be able to help.”
“And you did,” Lee said bleakly. “And now that you’re in the same boat, he goes and leaves you flat.”
“So it would appear.” Maver rubbed the heavy creases of his forehead with a huge finger. “But we mustn’t condemn him out of hand. Something may have happened to him. We must wait…
“What little I have managed to learn about this world has been through the good offices of my lady visitor. It isn’t her fault that her knowledge of the past is very sketchy. The Toparians obey something they call the New Law. It is a series of instructions that bars progress, prohibiting among other things the use of metal in any shape or form. Since the Toparians have no means of recording the past—not even writing materials—history has come down by word of mouth only. And so has suffered distortion, which means it is difficult to separate legend from fact.
“Korva is similar to Earth in that it is divided into land masses separated by seas. This country is called Topar. Oddly, this history of the Toparians bears some resemblance to that of the British. They had their Agricultural Revolution when they came to realise that the over-worked land would soon be unable to produce sufficient crops to feed a rapidly expanding population. Their Industrial Revolution was an extension of the Agricultural, based on the need to manufacture machinery for producing artificial fertilizers. Then came a third revolution, comparable with our present Nuclear Age. One could call it the Magnetic Revolution.
“Earth has its magnetic fields. Korva has them too, and, even before the Magnetic War, infinitely stronger than Earth’s. The Korvans learned how to put the fields to use. They used magnetism to drive their machines and power their aircraft and vehicles. And finally, inevitably, they constructed weapons.
“First one country, then another, finally all, built and tested magnetic weapons. And after a while the ordinary people, alarmed, voiced protest, banding themselves into groups for the purpose.”
“Ban the Bomb,” I said. “The Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament. Protest marches.”
“A parallel with our world indeed,” agreed the Professor. “And a harsh lesson for us to learn. Here, on Korva, the people organised themselves on a vast scale. The various groups combined to form the one Society. The Society created its own code of laws, the same code the people abide by now. A stern, unbending law, first promulgated in self-defence, that now bars the way to progress. Its original intention was to abolish not only the magnetic weapons, but also every piece of machinery, every plane and vehicle that used magnetism as its driving force. But the efforts of the Society proved unsuccessful. Perhaps they had waited too long before organising themselves. War broke out, and the magnetic weapons were used.”
Maver paused.
“Here it becomes difficult to differentiate between legend and history. There seems no clear information as to the actual nature of the weapons. Certainly, they were not bombs as we know them. Legend speaks of the Time of the Great Roaring Whirlpools. This leads me to suspect that the weapons were devices that increased and distorted the natural magnetic fields. They would be dropped from the air with the centres of densest populations as the main targets. The havoc they caused—and there can be no doubt about this—was comparable to the wholesale destruction that would be caused by the dropping of a hydrogen bomb. Within a certain radius there was complete annihilation. The effects spread outwards, killing every living thing on the planet’s surface, vapourising everything, so that not a building was left standing.
“Only a small number of people managed to survive. The survivors formed two distinct classes. There were those people who lived out in the wilds and who were able to find large and deep enough caves in which first to seek refuge and afterwards to live. And there were those city-dwellers who were able to survive in the artificial deep shelters.
“Unlike bombs, the magnetic devices did not have instantaneous effects. The process of annihilation continued over a very long time, probably for many ye
ars. One can visualise the enormous vortices of destruction, the huge tornadoes reaching high into the lair, the roaring whirlpools of legend.”
‘The Professor spread his hands. “Civilisation was wiped out. The few survivors lived as best they could in their shelters. After a long time, when the devices had finally died, the cave-dwellers emerged. The Toparians are their descendants. Of the others, there is little reliable information. Here, legend has completely taken over. They are the people who live inside the mists. No one has ever seen them. And, as I told you earlier, no one has ever gone through the force field and come out alive again.
“I have not had the opportunity of studying one of the Circles at close quarters. There are a great number of them, all apparently identical, each roughly five miles in diameter. Each marks the onetime site of a city. I am assuming that they are dotted over all the land masses of the planet.
“The Toparians are very much afraid of them. They say that if anyone approaches too closely, he loses control of himself and is drawn into the mist, never to be seen again. I have had a chance of viewing one of the Circles from a distance. It was the perfect symmetry of the surrounding mist that led me to suspect it was some form of artificially induced force field. And if that is indeed the case, then the people responsible have developed a technology far in advance of ours on Earth.”
“Technology.” Lee met my eye. “You don’t know the half of it.”
“The Toparians have a word for the Circles,” said his uncle. “They call them ‘Nests.’ And they call the people or beings who live in the Nests ‘Vorteds.’”
“We saw neither hair nor hide of them,” Lee said, and gave a condensed version of our experiences in the artificial woods.
Maver heard him out in silence. He lifted puzzled brows at the description of the apparently very ordinary Earth-type scenery, lifted them still further at the way the branch had moved away from my hand, unfolded his arms and leaned forward when he heard how the tree had dissolved into nothing during the storm.
Then: “Confusing. Little enough to go on.” Clasping his huge hands, he rested them in his ragged lap. “Thought-readers, certainly. With the ability to shape matter. But why? Why go to all the trouble of creating an environment to suit your thoughts?”
“It could be curiosity, sir,” I said, and offered my theory.
“You could be right, Morton. But even so … And they never showed themselves. That is something I find significant.”
He stared down at his hands. “Survival?” he asked them, and now he seemed to be thinking aloud. “And what if there were no survivors? What then? But there is intelligence there … In which case the Vorteds could be some new form of life. The product of—”
He broke off, looking up to include us in his reasoning.
“Complete annihilation. The legends are very clear on that score. Everything destroyed. And perhaps the man-made shelters were not deep enough, not as efficient as the deep natural caves of the Toparians’ forefathers. So everything vapourised, city and inhabitants alike. And above, a whirling tornado that reached high into the sky. The debris of destruction would be sucked up into the vortex and kept in constant revolving motion for years … Animal cells, plant cells, dust. All stirred together in a gigantic test-tube and acted upon by forces beyond our comprehension. Corning together, forming masses, taking on new shapes. And then, as the causative devices lose power, so the tornado loses momentum. The new contents of the vortex gradually sink to the ground. To live there.”
“How long ago did all this happen, sir?” I asked.
“Eh?” He regarded me absently. “Oh—hard to say. According to my informant, who gauges time by generations, about two hundred years ago. Four lives, she said, and these people have only short life-spans, an average of fifty years. Legend has it that the Nests Were only small at the beginning. But oddly, the mists have always surrounded them, even when they were very small. As the years went by, so the size of the Nests increased, perhaps directly proportionate to the population they conceal.”
He turned to Lee.
“And you have twice been inside one of the Nests. The first time you emerged during a storm. The next time, your escape was part of the hallucination which caused you to relive your passage into this dimension.”
“We’ve long ago given up trying to make any sense of it,” Lee said.
“But sense there must be. And something more than idle curiosity, I feel, Morton. We are obviously dealing with intelligent creatures. If creatures they are … I would give a great deal to see the inside of one of the Nests for myself.”
“Count me out,” Lee said laconically. “I’ve had enough. And I’m damned sure Gerald has too. All I want to do is get back home to Haweford. I’ll probably never leave the farm again. My travelling days are over. I’ve had a bellyful of Toparians, never mind Vorteds. I don’t think you’d finished telling us about your heat-ray-toting-friends.”
“They are friendly,” Maver said earnestly. “I feel certain the ray was only used against you as a warning. They are harmless, and primitive.”
“I wouldn’t call their weapons harmless,” Lee rejoined with some sourness.
“The glass-dart projectors are used only for hunting the animals. If used against a man they would not kill him, only paralyse him. And the heat-rays have been developed primarily for cutting rock with which to build their houses, not as an offensive weapon. There is some similarity to our laser beams. The Toparians’ only enemies are the Vorteds, and they discovered long ago that the heat-rays are unable to penetrate or make any impression upon the force fields.”
Maver shrugged. “I’m not saying the ray isn’t a potentially dangerous weapon. It obviously is. I have had the opportunity of studying one closely. It is simplicity itself. A hollow tube with a reflecting device at one end to trap the sun’s rays, an adjustable series of focusing lenses at the other, and a battery of lenses in between. The secret lies in the substance of which the lenses and mirrors are made. In appearance it is similar to our glass, and in fact is obtained from the red sandstone which abounds on this planet. But there the similarity ends. It has vastly different properties from glass, having, among other things, a very high refractive index.
“Although I have actually handled one of the projectors for myself, I have only seen them used at a distance. As far as I am able to judge, the apparatus works by permanently retarding the speed of the concentrated light that passes along the tube. The result is a slow-moving wave front behind which light piles up—folding over on itself, if one can visualise such a process—finally becoming heat.
“They have found many uses for the glass-like substance. They have adapted it to replace the forbidden metals. And for the rest—”
Maver spread his hands in a gesture.
“Life is both hard and precarious for the Toparians. For their staple food they have to rely upon a tasteless creamy mixture made from the fleshy, pulpy top of a small tree that resembles the Earth palm. You must have seen them. The Toparians raise a small grain crop on what little soil there is, and from it make a kind of bread. The rabbit-type animal provides them with clothing and occasional meat. But the flesh is bitter—very much an acquired taste. If there were fish in the seas before the Magnetic War, there are none now. And because of the frequency and violence of the storms, the seas are unusable.
“The Toparians are faced with what seems an insoluble problem. Two problems perhaps, although they are allied. The major one is the provision of food. What little land is arable, is over-worked. And every day the population increases and there are more mouths to be fed.
“The other problem is the long-term one of the Vorted Nests. They are growing steadily, absorbing land. Slow though the process is, one day the Nests inevitably will become linked together. But by then the Toparians will have died of starvation. Unless they can find some way of putting an end to the threat. And with the materials, the technology at their disposal, that is clearly impossible.
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��But that day of final extinction of the race lies in the very distant future. It is a menace that troubles only the more far-seeing and intelligent of the Toparians, and they are very few and far between. The others are only concerned with the fact that each square foot of arable land absorbed by the Vorteds is one square foot less on which to grow food.”
The Professor fell silent. Lee leaned back, staring sightlessly at the ceiling. After a few minutes I came to my feet and went over to the window. The area in front of the house was still empty, but now it was very obvious by the long shadows thrown across the dusty red tract that the sun was sinking.
Behind me, the room was silent. The Professor had turned in his chair to see what I was doing. I could see his face and Lee’s reflected in the glass of the window, Lee’s lips pursed in a silent, pensive whistle, Maver’s eyes half closed, his craggy forehead deeply furrowed. Each, it seemed, had his own private thoughts to contend with.
As for myself, I felt sympathy for the primitive Toparians. All that the future held for them was slow, inevitable starvation. The Toparians had given us a rough time out there on the hill, but before that they had shared their food with us. They could quite easily have let us grow hungry. A kindly people … with stolid, dull-looking faces that rarely seemed to show expression. “The farsighted and intelligent of them,” Maver had said, “are few and far between.” Meaning that the average Toparian was content to exist from day to day without any thought for the future, without any regard for the scarcity of food. Feeding us would have meant no sacrifice to people like that. They would have given us food automatically, as we would have fed a stray dog.
