by Jean Rabe
Turning it over and over in his hands, he found the lever that controlled the shutter and the ingress optic that concentrated the sunlight for transmission. He craned his neck until he found the white speck that had to be Nicole’s airship, then positioned the heliostat so the shutter pointed directly at it. A few steps and a quick turn admitted the sun into the optical port on the top of the black box. He began opening and closing the lever to send bright flashes to attract her attention. It was wrong to enlist the aid of a woman in such an imbroglio, but she sported a weapon. If Lawrence lacked one, the fray would be over quickly. He flashed his message, such as it was, to attract her attention, but he saw no evidence that she received his impassioned plea.
A terrible screeching noise sounded from the direction of the mineshaft where the experiment ran at full power. The actinic glare from the tube almost blinded him—but the sight of the mountaintop sinking like a fallen soufflé caused him to drop the heliostat and run back down the hill to the mine.
“Fulton!” he cried. The mechanical dog snuffled and hissed, then clacked his teeth as he turned toward the mine. “Is he in there? Lawrence? Is he?”
The dog rotated his head about, then stiffened all four legs in a movement Francis had never seen before. The emphatic nature of the reply told him Lawrence had, indeed, entered the mine in spite of the ray—and in spite of the way the rock above the shaft was curiously sagging as if it melted.
But it never dribbled down as a fluid might. Instead it simply ceased to . . . exist.
“Lawrence, come out! The whole mountain is falling in on your head!” His plea was drowned out by the tearing sound of metal grinding against unlubricated metal as the steam engines started to fail. Then a new sound became preeminent. He glanced over his shoulder to see Nicole’s airship swinging about and heading directly for the mouth of the mine, skimming along ten feet above the ground.
“Fulton, go to her. Warn her.” He saw more of the mountaintop collapse in on itself but where did the rock go? The mineshaft with the long, evacuated tube containing the transmogrification ray remained intact.
“Mr. Barstow! The entire mountain is vanishing. Come to me. Get into my ship!”
Francis was torn between the safety offered by the woman’s airship and examining his experiment before the mountain collapsed.
“My notes. Lawrence has my notes!”
With that, he sidled along the mine’s ragged rock wall, the purple beam encased in its glass containment tube just inches away and edged his way deeper. Repeatedly looking up, he saw no hint that the roof was caving in on him, yet there was a sucking sound—or was it the noise of a voracious carnivore devouring its prey?
He moved faster.
The cavity they had excavated for the experiment was lit with the unearthly purple of his transmogrification ray. The block of lead inside the crystal bell jar had vaporized and coated the insides of the bell jar—with a gleaming gold.
“I’ve done it!” He reached for the jar, only to have his hand batted away. Startled, he looked up at Lawrence, who sneered.
“You’ve done it. The perfect weapon. It disintegrated the lead the instant it was turned on.”
“Give me my notes!” He lunged, knocking the glass collimation tube off target. The purple beam shone brightly against solid rock at the rear of the chamber.
“I’m going to give you what you deserve,” Lawrence said.
Something made Francis look up at the roof. His mind refused to comprehend what slipped lower into the chamber. It was a speck so black it denied the very existence of light—and he saw how the rock from the mountain fell into it and simply vanished. He started to warn Lawrence, but only a gasp escaped his lips. The jot of darkness sank lower, and Lawrence appeared to turn to melted butter, flowing into the hole hardly the size of a pinhead. He did not even scream as he was sucked upward. Or did the black eye of God descend?
Francis grabbed the bell jar and held it to his body as he backed away. The blackness continued to sink, devouring solid rock and anything else in its path. When the vacuum in the collimating tube broke, shards of glass flew in all directions before being vacuumed into the nothingness that had somehow been formed during the experiment.
Francis edged back along the mineshaft, then ignored how he was slashed and cut by the tube that had once held a high vacuum and the purple beam he had generated.
“Run, run for your life!” Nicole cried. “The entire mountain is simply disappearing!”
He held onto the bell jar and stumbled toward her airship, which hovered only a few feet above the ground. Then he saw she had anchored it by giving Fulton one end of the tether. The brass dog clamped down firmly with his jaws on the rope, but a breeze was growing. It came from behind Francis and was sucking loose, light debris from the ground into the mineshaft.
Into the tiny hole.
“Here,” he said, tossing the bell jar to Nicole. She rolled it away and reached down for him.
“The mountain is half gone. I don’t know what is happening, but it will vanish entirely in another minute.”
“Lawrence,” he gasped out.
“Forget him.”
Francis knew that would never be possible. He took Nicole’s hands and was dragged up to the floorboard in the airship gondola.
“We’ve got to get out of here now.” She dropped into the pilot’s chair, trimmed the elevators and gunned the engines.
Francis started to urge her to more speed, then spun about, flopped on his belly and caught hold of the tether, now swaying beneath the rising ship.
“Hang on, Fulton. Hang on. I’ll get you to safety.” Grunting, straining, his muscles reaching the breaking point, he pulled in the cable until Fulton sat beside him on the airship floor. Several seals had ruptured, and he hissed constantly. “You’re safe!” He threw his arms around the brass neck and hugged, then wrenched away when Fulton tried to show affection by clamping his powerful jaws on his neck.
“Don’t fall out,” Nicole shouted. “We’ve got a race on our hands.”
“Race?” Francis looked out the still open hatch and saw the top half of the mountain where his experiment had been housed simply vanished. Somehow, the collapse caused air to rush downward, pulling powerfully at the airship. And then the ship surged as if they had turned on rocket propulsion. It took Nicole a minute to get the airship into level flight.
“Are you all right, Mr. Barstow?”
“Quite. And so is Fulton.” The robot rotated its head to one side in agreement.
“What happened? The entire mountain. I’ve never seen anything like it. It’s all gone.”
“The second order term,” he said, shaken. “The second order term I couldn’t figure out.”
“I don’t understand.”
“That’s all right. I don’t, either.”
“Lawrence is dead?”
“All my crew is gone,” Francis said, not sure how to feel about that. “So are my notes. There’s no way I can remember what was in them. He had my lab book on him when he was . . . disappeared.”
“Then the world has lost a great knowledge,” Nicole said, sighing.
“I still have this,” Francis said, looking into the bell jar. Every ounce of lead had been transmogrified into gold.
“But you can’t duplicate it, Mr. Barstow. You said your notes were destroyed.”
Fulton looked up at the woman. His eyes flashed as he recorded her likeness.
“Why don’t you call me Sir Francis? And let’s make a nice bed for my dog.”
She looked at him as if he were quite mad, but he didn’t care. He had ten pounds of gold to replace his equipment—and a dog with a photographic eye that had winked at his lab notes the night before.
And there was that second order term to explain. . . .
ABOUT THE EDITORS
Jean Rabe is the author of more than two dozen fantasy and adventures novels and more short stories than she cares to count. She relishes editing anthologies . . . this is her
16th . . . almost as much as she likes tugging on old socks with her dogs (and she likes that a lot). She resides in Wisconsin, where the winters are too long, the summers are too short, and the football and steampunk are just right.
Martin H. Greenberg is the CEP of Tekno Books and its predecessor companies, now the largest book developer of commercial fiction and non-fiction in the world, with over 2,250 published books that have been translated into 33 languages. He is the recipient of an unprecedented four Lifetime Achievement Awards in the Science Fiction, Mystery, and Supernatural Horror genres—the Milford Award in Science Fiction, the Solstice Award in science fiction, the Bram Stoker Award in Horror, and the Ellery Queen Award in Mystery—the only person in publishing history to have received all four awards.
Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright Page
Acknowledgements
Introduction
Chance Corrigan and the Tick-tock King of the Nile
Foggy Goggles
The Battle of Cumberland Gap
Portrait of a Lady in a Monocle
Foretold
The Echoer
Of A Feather
Scourge of the Spoils
Edison Kinetic Light & Steam Power
The Nubian Queen
Opals from Sydney
The Whisperer
Imperial Changeling
The Transmogrification Ray
ABOUT THE EDITORS
