The Mad Scientist Megapack

by Lawrence Watt-Evans

  “What was it like, Jan?” I demanded.

  “Oh…how do I know?” he answered jerkily, and began running both hands through his hair. “At first, I was too busy with the controls. Then I felt…very peculiar…as if an indefinite force were twisting and stretching me.”

  “But what did you see?” I was still eager, until I saw Pete shaking his head sadly; it must have been his first question.

  “Well…nothing,” Tukanin shrugged. “When I looked, there were just flashes of colors shooting through what was like a gray fog…or gray distance…as if the sky were gray…and you stared up into it…trying to find the limit…but without anything to focus on—”

  He ran down.

  “…and then I was back, with Pete staring at me.”

  “Listen!” said our director. “I can’t stop you from taking your head in your hands and turning it inside out. But there’s one thing I insist upon!”

  Their stares locked, and I placed a small mental bet on Pete. He draws the line about twice a year, but when he does it’s etched for the ages.

  “Oh, all right,” muttered Tukanin sulkily. “What do you want—a scale drawing of the whole works by five o’clock?”

  “No, I guess the rest of us could decipher your sketches and notes in not much over a year. But I want some record of your procedure each time, just in case you lay one of those ten thumbs of yours on a bare wire!”

  “Or if it melts around your ears,” I suggested helpfully. “We’d have a natural curiosity about what to avoid.”

  Tukanin flung me a split-second sneer.

  “Okay,” he agreed with an ill grace. “I’ll leave a note each time of how many minutes I try. Then you’ll know how far is safe before it melts the way Klinghoffer hopes!”

  After that, we put his hat and coat on him by force and dragged him down to the corner, where we poured beer into him until he was willing to speak to us again.

  Two days later, Pete dropped into my lab and said he had also ordered photos taken of the set-up, being doubtful about the clarity of our genius’s sketches and wiring diagrams.

  ”He’s behaving like a little gentleman,” he admitted, pulling some graph paper from his pocket to show me.

  There were four or five pieces, strips torn from an eleven-by-seventeen sheet. Scrawled across the green millimeter lines were terse pronunciamentos such as:

  Dear Pete—Am trying fifteen minutes this time—J. T.

  “He’s been…somewhere…at least twice,” said Pete. “A couple of times it didn’t work, but once he saw things.”

  “What things?”

  “You expect a clear description from Tukanin? Ask for the moon, boy!”

  “What did he say he saw, then?”

  ”From his description, it sounds like stars; but for reasons that elude me, he thinks he saw electrons. I can’t decide without looking for myself—which I wouldn’t try for a million dollars and a new hat!”

  “Is he working today?”

  “Yeah,” said Pete, moving toward the door. “I’m on my way there now. Come down the hall when you have time, and we’ll see what he has to say.”

  I fiddled around for ten or fifteen minutes, then realized that nothing pertinent to my current project was getting done. Thirty seconds later, I pushed open the door to Tukanin’s lab.

  Pete sat on a cleared end of the workbench, idly swinging his feet, leaning forward a little with his hands braced on the edge of the table beside his thighs. His expression made me look about hastily.

  “Where is he?” I asked, whispering in spite of myself.

  “An excellent question,” said Pete grimly.

  A low hum came from the apparatus. Lights glowed where some of the tubes were not enclosed. The control board which had lain on a stool on the platform was gone. The cable to it hung down into empty air…at an odd angle…and with a curiously fuzzy, fading end.

  “I thought at first,” murmured Pete, “that we’d pump out all the air in here and let you examine it microscopically. Then I decided it might be smarter to call up Palomar and ask if the Hale 200-incher is very busy tonight.”

  “What the hell are you talking about?” I demanded.

  “It’s too bad,” he said, in the same faraway tone, “that we don’t know yet if it goes up…or goes down…or to next week!”

  “Stop gibbering!” I snapped. “I thought you said he was leaving reports like a good boy, every time he blew his nose!”

  “Oh, he did, he did,” said Pete, eyeing the apparatus. “I won’t really worry till the day a fuse blows, or the power is interrupted some other way. After that, we’ll never be sure!”

  I think I choked or moved toward him about then, because he raised his right hand and shoved the graph paper at me.

  I took it and read Tukanin’s scrawl, since which time I have lost considerable sleep. Some days, I catch myself holding my breath while I examine the air before my nose; and on clear nights, I keep peering over my shoulder at stars.

  The note said:

  Dear Pete—Am going all the way—J. T.

  THE CORPSE ON THE GRATING, by Hugh B. Cave

  It was ten o’clock on the morning of December 5 when M.S. and I left the study of Professor Daimler. You are perhaps acquainted with M.S. His name appears constantly in the pages of the Illustrated News, in conjunction with some very technical article on psycho-analysis or with some extensive study of the human brain and its functions. He is a psycho-fanatic, more or less, and has spent an entire lifetime of some seventy-odd years in pulling apart human skulls for the purpose of investigation. Lovely pursuit!

  For some twenty years I have mocked him, in a friendly, half-hearted fashion. I am a medical man, and my own profession is one that does not sympathize with radicals.

  As for Professor Daimler, the third member of our triangle—perhaps, if I take a moment to outline the events of that evening, the Professor’s part in what follows will be less obscure. We had called on him, M.S. and I, at his urgent request. His rooms were in a narrow, unlighted street just off the square, and Daimler himself opened the door to us. A tall, loosely built chap he was, standing in the doorway like a motionless ape, arms half extended.

  “I’ve summoned you, gentlemen,” he said quietly, “because you two, of all London, are the only persons who know the nature of my recent experiments. I should like to acquaint you with the results!”

  He led the way to his study, then kicked the door shut with his foot, seizing my arm as he did so. Quietly he dragged me to the table that stood against the farther wall. In the same even, unemotional tone of a man completely sure of himself, he commanded me to inspect it.

  For a moment, in the semi-gloom of the room, I saw nothing. At length, however, the contents of the table revealed themselves, and I distinguished a motley collection of test tubes, each filled with some fluid. The tubes were attached to each other by some ingenious arrangement of thistles, and at the end of the table, where a chance blow could not brush it aside, lay a tiny phial of the resulting serum. From the appearance of the table, Daimler had evidently drawn a certain amount of gas from each of the smaller tubes, distilling them through acid into the minute phial at the end. Yet even now, as I stared down at the fantastic paraphernalia before me, I could sense no conclusive reason for its existence.

  I turned to the Professor with a quiet stare of bewilderment. He smiled.

  “The experiment is over,” he said. “As to its conclusion, you, Dale, as a medical man, will be skeptical. And you”—turning to M.S.—“as a scientist you will be amazed. I, being neither physician nor scientist, am merely filled with wonder!”

  He stepped to a long, square table-like structure in the center of the room. Standing over it, he glanced quizzically at M.S., then at me.

  “For a period of two weeks,” he went on, “I have kept, on the table here, the bod
y of a man who has been dead more than a month. I have tried, gentlemen, with acid combinations of my own origination, to bring that body back to life. And…I have—failed!

  “But,” he added quickly, noting the smile that crept across my face, “that failure was in itself worth more than the average scientist’s greatest achievement! You know, Dale, that heat, if a man is not truly dead, will sometimes resurrect him. In a case of epilepsy, for instance, victims have been pronounced dead only to return to life—sometimes in the grave.

  “I say ‘if a man be not truly dead.’ But what if that man is truly dead? Does the cure alter itself in any manner? The motor of your car dies—do you bury it? You do not; you locate the faulty part, correct it, and infuse new life. And so, gentlemen, after remedying the ruptured heart of this dead man, by operation, I proceeded to bring him back to life.

  “I used heat. Terrific heat will sometimes originate a spark of new life in something long dead. Gentlemen, on the fourth day of my tests, following a continued application of electric and acid heat, the patient—”

  Daimler leaned over the table and took up a cigarette. Lighting it, he dropped the match and resumed his monologue.

  “The patient turned suddenly over and drew his arm weakly across his eyes. I rushed to his side. When I reached him, the body was once again stiff and lifeless. And—it has remained so.”

  The Professor stared at us quietly, waiting for comment. I answered him, as carelessly as I could, with a shrug of my shoulders.

  “Professor, have you ever played with the dead body of a frog?” I said softly.

  He shook his head silently.

  “You would find it interesting sport,” I told him. “Take a common dry cell battery with enough voltage to render a sharp shock. Then apply your wires to various parts of the frog’s anatomy. If you are lucky, and strike the right set of muscles, you will have the pleasure of seeing a dead frog leap suddenly forward. Understand, he will not regain life. You have merely released his dead muscles by shock, and sent him bolting.”

  The Professor did not reply. I could feel his eyes on me, and had I turned, I should probably have found M.S. glaring at me in honest hate. These men were students of mesmerism, of spiritualism, and my commonplace contradiction was not over welcome.

  “You are cynical, Dale,” said M.S. coldly, “because you do not understand!”

  “Understand? I am a doctor—not a ghost!”

  But M.S. had turned eagerly to the Professor.

  “Where is this body—this experiment?” he demanded.

  Daimler shook his head. Evidently he had acknowledged failure and did not intend to drag his dead man before our eyes, unless he could bring that man forth alive, upright, and ready to join our conversation!

  “I’ve put it away,” he said distantly. “There is nothing more to be done, now that our reverend doctor has insisted in making a matter of fact thing out of our experiment. You understand, I had not intended to go in for wholesale resurrection, even if I had met with success. It was my belief that a dead body, like a dead piece of mechanism, can be brought to life again, provided we are intelligent enough to discover the secret. And by God, it is still my belief!”

  * * * *

  That was the situation, then, when M.S. and I paced slowly back along the narrow street that contained the Professor’s dwelling-place. My companion was strangely silent. More than once I felt his eyes upon me in an uncomfortable stare, yet he said nothing. Nothing, that is, until I had opened the conversation with some casual remark about the lunacy of the man we had just left.

  “You are wrong in mocking him, Dale,” M.S. replied bitterly. “Daimler is a man of science. He is no child, experimenting with a toy; he is a grown man who has the courage to believe in his powers. One of these days.…”

  He had intended to say that some day I should respect the Professor’s efforts. One of these days! The interval of time was far shorter than anything so indefinite. The first event, with its succeeding series of horrors, came within the next three minutes.

  We had reached a more deserted section of the square, a black, uninhabited street extending like a shadowed band of darkness between gaunt, high walls. I had noticed for some time that the stone structure beside us seemed to be unbroken by door or window—that it appeared to be a single gigantic building, black and forbidding. I mentioned the fact to M.S.

  “The warehouse,” he said simply. “A lonely, God-forsaken place. We shall probably see the flicker of the watchman’s light in one of the upper windows.”

  At his words, I glanced up. True enough, the higher part of the grim structure was punctured by narrow, barred openings. Safety vaults, probably. But the light, unless its tiny gleam was somewhere in the inner recesses of the warehouse, was dead. The great building was like an immense burial vault, a tomb—silent and lifeless.

  We had reached the most forbidding section of the narrow street, where a single arch-lamp overhead cast a halo of ghastly yellow light over the pavement. At the very rim of the circle of illumination, where the shadows were deeper and more silent, I could make out the black mouldings of a heavy iron grating. The bars of metal were designed, I believe, to seal the side entrance of the great warehouse from night marauders. It was bolted in place and secured with a set of immense chains, immovable.

  This much I saw as my intent gaze swept the wall before me. This huge tomb of silence held for me a peculiar fascination, and as I paced along beside my gloomy companion, I stared directly ahead of me into the darkness of the street. I wish to God my eyes had been closed or blinded!

  He was hanging on the grating. Hanging there, with white, twisted hands clutching the rigid bars of iron, straining to force them apart. His whole distorted body was forced against the barrier, like the form of a madman struggling to escape from his cage. His face—the image of it still haunts me whenever I see iron bars in the darkness of a passage—was the face of a man who has died from utter, stark horror. It was frozen in a silent shriek of agony, staring out at me with fiendish maliciousness. Lips twisted apart. White teeth gleaming in the light. Bloody eyes, with a horrible glare of colorless pigment. And—dead.

  I believe M.S. saw him at the very instant I recoiled. I felt a sudden grip on my arm; and then, as an exclamation came harshly from my companion’s lips, I was pulled forward roughly. I found myself staring straight into the dead eyes of that fearful thing before me, found myself standing rigid, motionless, before the corpse that hung within reach of my arm.

  And then, through that overwhelming sense of the horrible, came the quiet voice of my comrade—the voice of a man who looks upon death as nothing more than an opportunity for research.

  “The fellow has been frightened to death, Dale. Frightened most horribly. Note the expression of his mouth, the evident struggle to force these bars apart and escape. Something has driven fear to his soul, killing him.”

  I remember the words vaguely. When M.S. had finished speaking, I did not reply. Not until he had stepped forward and bent over the distorted face of the thing before me, did I attempt to speak. When I did, my thoughts were a jargon.

  “What, in God’s name,” I cried, “could have brought such horror to a strong man? What—”

  “Loneliness, perhaps,” suggested M.S. with a smile. “The fellow is evidently the watchman. He is alone, in a huge, deserted pit of darkness, for hours at a time. His light is merely a ghostly ray of illumination, hardly enough to do more than increase the darkness. I have heard of such cases before.”

  He shrugged his shoulders. Even as he spoke, I sensed the evasion in his words. When I replied, he hardly heard my answer, for he had suddenly stepped forward, where he could look directly into those fear twisted eyes.

  “Dale,” he said at length, turning slowly to face me, “you ask for an explanation of this horror? There is an explanation. It is written with an almost fearful clearness on this fe
llow’s mind. Yet if I tell you, you will return to your old skepticism—your damnable habit of disbelief!”

  I looked at him quietly. I had heard M.S. claim, at other times, that he could read the thoughts of a dead man by the mental image that lay on that man’s brain. I had laughed at him. Evidently, in the present moment, he recalled those laughs. Nevertheless, he faced me seriously.

  “I can see two things, Dale,” he said deliberately. “One of them is a dark, narrow room—a room piled with indistinct boxes and crates, and with an open door bearing the black number 4167. And in that open doorway, coming forward with slow steps—alive, with arms extended and a frightful face of passion—is a decayed human form. A corpse, Dale. A man who has been dead for many days, and is now—alive!”

  M.S. turned slowly and pointed with upraised hand to the corpse on the grating.

  “That is why,” he said simply, “this fellow died from horror.”

  His words died into emptiness. For a moment I stared at him. Then, in spite of our surroundings, in spite of the late hour, the loneliness of the street, the awful thing beside us, I laughed.

  He turned upon me with a snarl. For the first time in my life I saw M.S. convulsed with rage. His old, lined face had suddenly become savage with intensity.

  “You laugh at me, Dale,” he thundered. “By God, you make a mockery out of a science that I have spent more than my life in studying! You call yourself a medical man—and you are not fit to carry the name! I will wager you, man, that your laughter is not backed by courage!”

  I fell away from him. Had I stood within reach, I am sure he would have struck me. Struck me! And I have been nearer to M.S. for the past ten years than any man in London. And as I retreated from his temper, he reached forward to seize my arm. I could not help but feel impressed at his grim intentness.

  “Look here, Dale,” he said bitterly, “I will wager you a hundred pounds that you will not spend the remainder of this night in the warehouse above you! I will wager a hundred pounds against your own courage that you will not back your laughter by going through what this fellow has gone through. That you will not prowl through the corridors of this great structure until you have found room 4167—and remain in that room until dawn!”