Another voice took the place of the first: “Eastern seaboard under water. New York stations dead. No replies to calls from any coastal cities between Nova Scotia and the Florida Keys. This is Pittsburgh, Station NV-Theta—NV-Theta. Nothing from Asiatic cities for the last several minutes. Japanese islands believed disintegrating. Trouble began coincidentally with the accident at the Scanlon power house an hour and nine minutes ago. Phenomenal activity of Scanlon plant still in progress.”
Finally Feodor Moharleff came onto the air, presenting his theories coolly from a Minneapolis station: “Our friend, Jefferson Scanlon, seems to have tampered with something too big for him to control; that is, if this is not a deliberate scheme to bring the nations of the world to their knees that he may dictate his terms. What has happened is perfectly clear. His plant is drawing far more energy from the rotation of the Earth than was intended. It is acting as a brake, slowing our planet’s rate of axial rotation to such an extent that its internal balance has been disrupted. The results are earthquakes, tidal waves, volcanic eruptions, and storms, all of a violence hitherto unheard of. The Scanlon Tower must be destroyed—”
THE COMMUNICATION ended, and more reports of death and destruction roared from the diaphragm.
Jeff, lying on the metal floor of the great chamber, listened to it all with a kind of fearful fascination. Several times he had tried to rise, but as yet there was insufficient strength in his battered body. He could only drag himself feebly to a corner, leaving behind him a blood-flecked trail, like a wounded animal. He sprawled there panting and perspiring. His thoughts were not of Jefferson Scanlon, but of the millions of human beings that would suffer and perish in the holocaust.
It was easy for one’s imagination to fill in the gaps neglected by the generalized news-disseminator accounts, giving heart-rending detail to the picture of the calamity.
Without realizing it, Jeff had climbed above his egotism. The pettiness in him had minimized. He reached out toward the stars.
“Heaven give me some way to help!” he screamed despairingly, forgetting the smug pride of his usual oratory.
His face was buried in the hollow of his doubled arms. His every muscle and nerve was taut. And his emotions were a driving, throbbing fury, whose sole objective was to lash his sluggish faculties to action that they might find a means to combat the hell which he seemed to have unwittingly created.
He could not stop the functioning of the plant. The lancing, roaring flames around all its controls prevented that. He could hope that attempts would be made to destroy his great tower; but considering the tremendous solidity of its construction, and the storm of forces that now raged around it, the task would be anything but easy.
Possibly it was the inner tension which possessed Jeff that served to puncture, in some small degree, the barriers which kept the storehouse of his subconscious memory hidden from him.
He was like a man beginning to recover from an amnesia that has been with him through his entire life. Things that had been implanted in the convolutions of his brain long ago came foggily into view.
He saw again, though clearer than ever before, that picture of unutterable desolation—a landscape that was not a landscape, for the ground did not give the impression of even reasonable levelness, like the surface of a sphere. It was broken and harshly jagged, like the mad, formless contour of a fragment of a shattered world. There was no air; the sky was not azure, but a hueless gray, like slate over which chalk dust has been smeared unevenly. There were sharp stars, and there was a sun of dazzling brilliance. This part of the memory was almost as vivid as if he had visited the place yesterday.
JEFF raised himself feebly on his elbows, a wild hope shining in his eyes. “They’re wrong!” he said defiantly. “Feodor Moharleff and all the rest of ’em! A bunch of liars! Because—because they’ve got to be!”
Feverishly, Scanlon continued to review the memory picture. Interwoven with the shattered rocks that strewed the planetoid were twisted braces and girders that must once have formed the framework of buildings. And there were other things which gave more intimate hints of the lives and personalities of the creators of those buildings.
Pinched between two great lumps of stone, was a torn bit of pale-blue fabric, sheer as silk. Uncounted eons in the cold vacuum of space had changed it not at all. It seemed to be part of something else—something hideous and brown and dried, like a mummy. Crushed between the great stones with its visage showing, it formed one of the most prominent elements of the scene. It might have been human once; it might have been beautiful; it might have been capable of feeling love and hate and fear and tenderness, like any man or woman of Earth. But that had been a long, long time ago.
Not far from the withered body, trapped amid the conglomeration of junk and broken rock, was a large sphere, battered and dented in spite of the fact that, as Jeff knew from the memories that had been transplanted into his brain, it was almost solid.
In a hollow cavity at its center rested the intricate thing that was its reason for existing. The thing was not alive; it had no sense of being, like a man; and yet, in a way, it could think, as much simpler devices, such as the calculating machines of Earth, are able to think. Partly it was a clock, which counted the passage of ages as easily as it counted the seconds and hours. Partly it was a record of the thoughts and preparations of a race that had perished; and partly it was the instrument for putting those preparations into effective action.
It could not move from its tremendous protecting shell, which had already shielded it from calamity unutterable; but piercing that shell was a small, cylindrical passage which provided a means of entrance and exit for the soulless, mothlike fabrication that was its messenger.
Jeff Scanlon, deafened by the mounting bedlam going on around him, and sickened and dazed by the pain of his injury, could still grasp much more of the truth than he had ever, previously, been privileged to see. The dim hints which had been given him in past years, and which he had consciously ignored, had now assumed shadowy meanings, though much was still hidden.
Gingerly, he raised himself from the trembling steel floor under him, and stood on his unsteady legs. Oblivious now to the blaring declarations of calamity which continued to come from the news-disseminator diaphragm, he let his mind rove briefly to other things.
He thought of Bessie, his domineering wife, and of his nephew, Dave Scanlon. But such human attachments were trivial. He thought instead of the ruddy, ominous little planet that had now come close to the Earth. Far out there in the region of Saturn, it had been too small to see; but, because of its incredible density, its gravity was something terrific.
“ALMARLU!” he muttered under his breath; but he knew, even as he spoke, that he was making a mistake. The red midget was not Almarlu; it was rather the insensate, unreasoning fiend that had brought ruin to Almarlu and her inhabitants. It followed a tremendous, elliptical orbit around the Sun, returning from its prodigious plunge into the interstellar depths once in many ages.
“But hardly anybody even bothers to notice the things!” Jeff complained childishly. “They’re too busy watching me!”
His brows puckered partly in vexation, but mostly because there was still so much that was veiled and mysterious. And so he continued to mumble to himself, as if, by so doing, he would be better able to straighten matters out. His words were halting and jangled, and his manner was that of one person advising another:
“Neutronium, Scanlon,” he said. “Don’t you remember? It’s the heaviest substance that can be conceived to exist. Sixty million tons to the cubic inch, it’s supposed to weigh, according to how the old-timers in the third decade of the Twentieth Century figured. No—ah—normal atoms in it. Neutrons. Compact, lying close together, with no space between. Dense as the devil. Certain stars—the White Dwarfs—are supposed to have quite a lot of the stuff in them. And there’s supposed to be some at the center of the Earth, and at the centers of—ah—other planets. It could have collected there from s
ubmicroscopic particles of the dope floating in space.
“They’re so heavy they could fall right through any other substance—right through the body of a man, even, without his knowing it—most likely. And our little red visitor from space is made mostly of neutronium—of compact particles called neutrons, each one of which consists of a normal electron and proton in contact, without any silly planetary electrons revolving in their orbits and taking up room!
“That’s why this—ah—small visiting world has so great a force of gravity. Its mass must be many times greater than that of the Earth; and gravity is proportional to mass. That’s why—”
Jeff paused in his monologue, and began to pace unsteadily up and down. His struggle with the memories that were his, and yet not his, had whimsically taken a new track. His scowl of concentration darkened.
“Why are you always thinking of life spores, Scanlon?” he demanded of himself. “Why can’t you remember? And who made you the—ah—goat? That is—who gave you all your information? The machine on Almarlu—on a fragment of Almarlu? Fragment—”
He uttered this last word with a kind of blurred excitement, for it was significant. It started a fresh chain of probing thought, angling back over the loose bits of information he had covered before.
“Of course!” he said suddenly. “Almarlu broke up—exploded—to form the minor planets of the asteroid belt. Her people were wise, but they didn’t know of the danger soon enough to escape. So they—they—” Jeff halted, and then leaped at a more significant piece of information: “Now there’s going to be another asteroid belt,” he stated, before he grasped the full import of what he was saying.
DURING the next few seconds his round face, already pale because of his physical injury and because of the strain he had been under, went ashen.
“No!” he shrilled. “No! It can’t be as bad as that! The Earth is too solid—too permanent. It couldn’t—break up! The whimwhams it’s got will end some way before that happens!”
But even as he spoke he knew that he was only trying to reassure himself, and to deny the workings of an immutable destiny. They of Almarlu had made a mathematical prediction of the calamity an incalculable time ago. Then, too, Titan, moon of Saturn, had burst— A giant of tremendous strength had gone mad in its vitals.
Jeff’s dread suddenly vanished, and a great calm took its place. The progress of events was not over yet; it had little more than begun. Even now the earthquake temblors, which made the huge tower groan and vibrate, seemed to grow heavier and more frequent. But he knew that the plans of ancient wizards of Almarlu were fairly certain of fulfillment.
So far, in spite of their complexity, they had worked out to perfection. He glanced toward the crystal case which contained the controlling mechanism of the power plant; and he knew that it could guide all necessary functions of this mighty marvel he had built. Several matters were still unclear to him; but there was one task which he must take care of. He must broadcast a message to the world. After that, his usefulness as a pawn would be at an end. Death for him seemed to be decreed; but, of course, that was too trivial to make any difference.
With some semblance of litheness, he strode to the microphone of the news-disseminator radio.
III.
DAVID SCANLON, favored nephew of a world’s money baron, heard the report of the mishap at the power station, along with every one else. The titanic blaze of lavender flame around the two-mile tower of the plant had been spotted instantly by planes flying over the arctic wastes; and the news of the phenomenon was whisked over the world by the magic of man’s science.
Radio, developed and refined to a point where static no longer interfered with transmission, continued to function as usual, blaring out reports over the vast news-disseminator network.
Conforming to the dictates of his nature, Dave Scanlon was in a night club at the time. The city was London, and his companion was a blonde. They had just arrived; but, true to his nature, Dave Scanlon was already bored. He wasn’t worried about this circumstance, however. The music was sweet, and as soon as he got tight he’d feel better.
When the diaphragm of the news disseminator began to rasp, he wheeled around lazily and listened to what the thing had to say. The information it conveyed produced no startling result in the youth. The left shoulder of his tall, angular form, sagged a bit more truculently. With a reflective air he pulled at an ear lobe, and the sour expression on his face changed to a rueful, one-sided grin. That was all.
He turned to the girl. “Looks as though I’ve got a job, Evelyn,” he remarked mildly. “I’ll be seeing you some other time, maybe.”
Evelyn made heated protests, to which no response was offered. Without haste, young Scanlon slouched his way to a phone booth. Once latched behind its soundproof door, he communicated with the local offices of the International News-disseminator Co., and discovered that in the past twelve hours, no message had been received from Jefferson Scanlon, alone on the arctic island of the tower. Ordinarily, this information would have been no special cause for worry; but, under existing circumstances, it looked a bit suspicious.
Even Dave Scanlon had his loyalties. His Uncle Jeff was the object of one of them. He was ready to make any sacrifice for him, providing that conditions involved the conceited little man in real danger, and not merely in exasperating inconvenience. Dave didn't care whether Jeff Scanlon had inconvenience or not. In fact he had frequently been the cause for such inconvenience. But now things were different; they looked serious. Dave Scanlon was ready to respond to duty.
He made another phone call, this time to Chicago by radio. For secrecy, revolving disks at the transmitting stations, both in London and Chicago, changed the wave length of the carrier wave during every second of a communication; and other disks at the receiving stations, synchronized with those of the transmitters, retuned the receivers for each change, so that for the persons speaking with each other, the messages remained unbroken. But since the disks were hourly readjusted to a fresh wavelength pattern, there was small possibility that an outsider would be able to pick up the conversation.
AFTER A WAIT of only a few seconds, the youth was speaking with Jeff’s wife, who, disinterested in her husband’s achievement in so far as the technical side went, had remained in Chicago.
“The old nitwit seems to have got himself into a tangle, Aunt Bessie,” Dave explained in a brusque drawl. “I’m going to try pulling him out. And now here’s a little advice for your benefit: Stay where you are unless this thing leads to real trouble. I've got a funny feeling that certain saps are going to get mad about what’s happening. If they do, the name of Scanlon is going to be in hot water. Keep away from people as much as you can. If worst comes to worst, you could fly up to Uncle Jeff’s lodge in Canada. It’ll make a good hide-out.”
‘‘What—what do you intend to do?” Bessie Scanlon demanded.
“Oh, I dunno,” Dave replied. “Take my crate up north to the island, and see what’s happening, I suppose. The rest is in the laps of the gods. Take care of yourself, and don’t worry.”
Young Scanlon broke the connection abruptly, and ambled out of the booth. Just then he felt a perfectly perceptible temblor under his feet. Earthquake! Five minutes hadn’t elapsed since the report of trouble at Jeff’s island had come. Things were evidently moving pretty fast. Now the people around him were shouting excitedly and crowding toward the exits. He’d better hurry.
He got into the street. A cab, piloted by a driver with a scared look on his face, whisked him to the airport where his plane was housed in a public hangar. It was a new job, fitted both with rockets and with electric motors intended to draw their power from the Scanlon plant.
Dave got the machine rolled out onto the field. The receptor coils of red alloy were drawing plenty of power for the motors—too much, in fact; for Jeff’s huge apparatus, having gone crazy, was delivering energy to the atmosphere at a rate that was in excess of normal. But this excess, for some reason, was not nearly as
great as one might have expected. And Dave could overcome the difficulty it presented by moving a metal contact point, thus reducing the number of turns of the red coil acting to collect power.
The Earth was shaking with increasing violence at irregular intervals, as young Scanlon took off. He circled, and headed northwest. A hot, unnatural wind, gusty and treacherous, was on his tail. But he had no intention of remaining within any short distance of the ground. The quieter stratosphere was above; and, hampered by little resistance, one could attain terrific speeds there. The cabin of his plane was insulated and airtight; and the compressor-ventilator system would maintain an internal atmosphere of normal warmth, freshness, and density.
He pulled the joy stick back and nosed sharply upward. The roar of the rockets joined the thin screech of the motors. With all the majesty of some great meteor pursuing an inverted path, it growled and flamed its way skyward. The breathlessness of Dave’s climb was dizzying. But at last she shot through the last thin layer of clouds and attained the cold, calm glory of the stratosphere. The ship leveled out and screamed on at maniacal velocity toward its distant arctic destination.
GRIM-FACED, Dave looked about. To the east, amid the clear, sharp stars, was the Moon. It was the same as it had always been; or, was it a shade larger in appearance, as if some monstrous force had pulled it closer to the Earth? From far to the northwest a thin thread of lavender light angled up, its point of origin concealed somewhere far beneath the cloud-wrapped horizon. At this distance it was impossible to study details of the phenomenon. And so Dave turned his attention toward the west.
It was then that he glimpsed the small invading wanderer from space, for the first time. It was a tiny, reddish crescent, luminous only because its surface could reflect a little of the Sun’s light. A halo of gas clung around it, not fuzzy, as the atmosphere of a normal planet would be, but with outer limits that were defined much more sharply. A tremendous gravity had compressed it, making it so. Through the vaporous envelope, a solid surface was dimly visible. Though scarred and cracked, it seemed otherwise perfectly smooth. It was as though features such as mountains and hills could not exist on such a world, for their weight alone would be enough to flatten them.
Godson of Almarlu: A Collection of Science Fiction Novellas Page 11
