“Which group of irrationalists?”
“Not irrationalists; scientists. It’s an experiment.”
Trudeau looked confused, the first time Louverture had seen it on his face. “Explain.”
“A series of larger and larger experiments. The theater accidents, the omnibus failures—they were done on purpose, to test how much it takes to change people’s behavior. The notes, and the bomb probably too—they were to test us. “
“Test us for what?”
“To see how much it would take to make us react irrationally, see every accident as sabotage, every abandoned briefcase as a bomb. Perhaps we too are just a test for a larger experiment.”
“But the notes,” Clouthier said, turning to face him. “Who were they threatening?”
Louverture glanced out the window, at the statue in the middle of the square. “Reason,” he said. “She dies tonight.”
“I’m sorry, Officier, but this makes no sense,” Trudeau said. “What would be the motive?”
“I’m not sure. Jealousy, a wish to possess reason for themselves alone? Or perhaps the motive is reason itself. Perhaps they simply want to know.”
“This is ridiculous,” Clouthier barked. “He wants us chasing phantoms. We know who the irrationalist leaders are; arrest them, and the others will follow soon enough.”
“And how will people react when they see the Corps out in force, with pistols? Will they remain rational, do you think?”
“I’ve ordered a couvre-feu for eight o’clock,” Clouthier said. “People will stay inside when they see the lights are out.”
Louverture closed his eyes. “As you say.”
“Will you join us, Louverture?” Trudeau said, his attention back on the maps on the desk. “We can use another man, especially tonight.”
“Is that an order, Commandant?”
There was a long pause; then Trudeau very carefully said, “No, Officier, it isn’t. Go home and get your rest—go quickly, and show your badge if anyone questions you.”
“Thank you, sir.”
Louverture went down the stairs, pushed through the gardiens assembling in the lobby; noticed Pelletier, saluted him. Pelletier did not answer his salute; perhaps the boy did not recognize him without his cap and uniform, and at any rate he was talking to the gardiens stagieres around him. Not wanting to interrupt, Louverture stepped outside.
The sun was nearly down, but the air was still hot; Reason’s torch cast a weak shadow on the number eight. Heading for Danton Street, Louverture saw a man approaching across the square. He was wearing a dark wool suit, despite the weather; a top hat and smoke-tinted glasses.
Louverture looked the man in the eyes as he neared, trying to read him; the man cocked his head curiously and gazed back at him. The two of them circled each other slowly, eyes locked. When they had exchanged positions the man doffed his hat to Louverture, his perfectly calm face creased with just a hint of a smile, and then turned and did the same to the statue of Reason. Louverture knew that look: it was the one Allard wore while measuring a skull. The man found an empty bench, sat down and waited, as though he expected a show to unfold in front of him at any moment.
The bells in the Cathedral of Reason rang out eight o’clock, and the sodium lamps in the square faded to darkness. The lights were going out all over town; Louverture did not suppose he would see them lit again.
THE WORLD IN A BOX, by Carl Jacobi
Jimmy Blane stopped his car, switched off the lights and paced to the door of the brownstone building. It was a huge many-windowed house of antique architecture, and the brass plate under the post box said: PROFESSOR SCOT HILLIARD.
Blane pushed the bell button, took a last puff at his cigarette and flung the butt over his shoulder.
“Sick of these Sunday supplement assignments,” he muttered to himself. “They’re all dry as dust. Wonder if McGraw’ll ever give in and let me have the police run.”
Presently heavy steps sounded within. A latch rasped and the door was thrown wide.
A huge, bulking figure stared out at the reporter. The man was dark-haired with a ragged, unkempt beard and thick-rimmed spectacles. An acid-stained rubber apron hung from his chest to his shoes, accentuating his height, and a green eye-shade was pushed far back on his forehead.
“Professor Hilliard?” Jimmy asked.
“Yes.”
“My name is Blane—of the Star-Telegram. I came in regard to an address you made before the Gotham Science Club, an address in which you declared you could reproduce in living miniature the prehistoric life of the earth. The University science staff has denounced your assertions as being false in every detail. Could I have a statement from you, please?”
For a long moment Scot Hilliard made no answer. Then he shrugged, curled his lips and nodded scornfully.
“Come in.”
Jimmy followed the man into the entrance-way and from there up a flight of stairs. At the second level he halted before a large double door that opened on the right, hesitated, and whirled abruptly.
“If I grant you this interview,” he said, “I must insist you write only the facts as I give them to you. I’ll show you my invention, yes, but I’m not interested in having it introduced to the general public in a sensational manner, colored by idiotic journalism. Understand?”
Blane nodded. The door swung open, and he passed into a brilliantly illuminated room. Two feet over the sill he stopped short, turning his eyes slowly about him.
The chamber was a huge laboratory, occupying apparently the full width of the house. From ceiling to floor the walls were lined with shelves, jammed with vials, tubes and glasses. Strange-looking apparatus glittered on all sides. The center floor was occupied by an enormous square-shaped object, fully fifteen feet across, its nature hidden by a loosely draped canvas.
But there was something else that stopped Blane’s roving gaze and held it while his heart thumped a little faster. Directly across from the door, bent over a zinc-topped table, stood a young girl. A girl with a satin complexion, black, lustrous hair and large, brown eyes. Even in the dark-colored smock, with her hands swathed in heavy rubber gloves, she was a vision of feminine loveliness.
Hilliard slid a stubby briar pipe between his lips and waved his arm stiffly in introduction.
“My niece, Eve Manning,” he said. “Mr. Blane is from the press. He’s come to ask me about my invention.”
A frown furrowed across the girl’s face as she heard these words. Her eyes narrowed.
“But Uncle,” she protested, “you’re not going to demonstrate that machine tonight! You haven’t tested it yet, you know, and something might happen.”
Hilliard smiled and patted her hand. “No danger,” he said easily. “Mr. Blane is just the type of witness I’ve been waiting for, and everything is in readiness.” He turned again to the reporter. “Your hat and coat, please, and make yourself comfortable while I get you a pair of colored sunglasses. I’m using a new kind of mango-carbon arc, and the glare might injure your eyes.”
He shoved a chair forward, turned and disappeared through a connecting doorway. Jimmy sat down and looked at the girl.
She was even prettier than first glance had showed. There were attractive dimples on either side of the mouth, and the mouth itself was a delicate carmine bow with just the right touch of cosmetics. For a moment she stood there, answering his gaze silently. Then, darting a look over her shoulder, she stepped closer and spoke in a low, hurried whisper.
“Mr. Blane,” she said, “you must leave here at once. Now, before my uncle returns. I’ll tell him you were suddenly called away on another matter. I’ll tell him you were—”
“Go?” Jimmy stared at her curiously. “Why, I’ve just come. Why on earth should I go?”
“You must go, I tell you. You’re in great danger. Greater danger than you possibly could imagine.
Uncle has been holding off his experiment until he found a man of your type. A young and athletic man. If you stay here you may never leave this laboratory. Oh, I know all this sounds mad, senseless, but please believe me.”
Jimmy crossed his legs and glanced thoughtfully at the array of equipment surrounding him. A long interval passed while he groped for words to answer the girl.
“I’m a reporter,” he said at length. “I came merely to interview the professor, and I fail to see how any danger—”
The door slammed at the far end of the laboratory, interrupting further conversation, and Hilliard returned to the room. Striding to a switch-box on the near wall, the man made a careful adjustment to its contents, then crossed over to a chair opposite the reporter. In his hands were several pairs of green spectacles.
“Blane,” he said slowly, “I presume, since you were sent here to interview me, you know something of geology, something of the ancient rock-preserved history of the earth?”
Jimmy nodded, drawing forth pencil and paper. “I spent two years on the subject at Boston Tech,” he replied. “But I’ve probably forgotten as much as I ever learned.”
“You are acquainted with the divisions of time into which prehistoric world history has been divided, the Archeozoic era to the Cenozoic era?”
Jimmy nodded again.
“And which of those eras or periods strikes you as the most interesting, the most dramatic? Which one, if it were possible for you to pass back through the millions of years, would you choose to view with your own eyes?”
For an instant the reporter hesitated. Hilliard sat there far forward in his chair, eyes glittering with crafty determination. There were power and mental strength in that bearded face. And there was something else that brought a little chill coursing down the young man’s spine.
“The Mesozoic, I guess,” he answered. “What is more commonly known as the Age of Reptiles. I’ve always thought it would be an impressive sight to see those prehistoric monsters roaming about the scenery. Dinosaurs and pterodactyls, lizards as big as a house, and flying dragons.”
Hilliard nodded in satisfaction, then leaped to his feet and strode to the square-shaped object in the center of the room. With a single movement of his massive hands he flung back the canvas covering and motioned the reporter closer.
Momentarily Jimmy’s eyes were confused by a glaring light that burned before him. Then his eyes accustomed themselves to the blinding illumination, and he saw the object that housed the light. It was a glass-walled box, not unlike an ordinary showcase, save that the sides were of great thickness and the corners were fastened together with plates of riveted brass.
The light came from the middle of the case. At the near end, hanging in mid-air without support was an object that looked like a small ball of clay. Extending from the right exterior wall of the case was a black instrument panel, replete with dials, queer-shaped tubes and several switches.
Hilliard pointed into the interior. “Blane,” he said, “you are looking at an experiment that has been my work, my sole work, for almost five years. When I was still a member of the University faculty I postulated such a machine as this to my immediate superiors. They laughed at me, said I was an eccentric dreamy fool and that it would never work.
“The inside of this case is an absolute vacuum, the nearest parallel to the phenomenon of outer stellar space. In the center you see a mango-carbon arc, suspended by a slender wire and giving off an intense amount of heat as well as light. Here at this end is a very small globe. Together the two objects represent a portion of the solar system, a diminutive cross-section of a tiny part of our universe.
“The space between the arc and the globe is the ninety-three millions of miles which separate our earth from the sun, lessened to a few feet. The diameter of the globe is the diameter of our planet, reduced in proper ratio from over eight thousand miles. In short, you are looking at the manufactured equivalent of our sun and our earth on a dwarfed scale. Do you understand, Blane? A miniature sun and a miniature earth! Watch closely!”
The man’s hand slid downward, pushed a large switch into contact. Instantly there was a thundering roar and a pulsing vibration under the floor. The roar died away as the globe within the glass case trembled violently. Then it began to rotate faster and faster, moved and supported by some unseen power. Slowly it approached the arc in the center.
There was a note of suppressed excitement in the professor’s voice as he continued.
“The globe is now rotating on its axis and moving in an orbit around the arc, which constitutes its sun. The axis, just like the axis of the earth, is inclined to the plane of the orbit. That globe is now a living, growing world!”
With rising interest Jimmy squinted through the sun spectacles. He was thinking of the strange warning given him by the girl.
“A growing world?” he repeated slowly.
Hilliard nodded…
“But there are a hundred other things necessary to a planet’s growth which you could never manufacture,” Jimmy protested. “Things beyond your power, things—”
“Storms, wind erosion, climatic changes, volcanic up-thrusts?” Hilliard shook his head. “All has been taken care of. The globe is igneous, volcanic in nature, carefully made of powerful gases and molten rock, which will create an atmosphere. It is now in the first stages of the Archeozoic age, the beginning of a world. In a short time warm seas will form at the globe’s equatorial zones. Early single-celled life will live and die on a microscopic scale in a matter of seconds. The lowest type of jelly fish will give way to the higher forms of mollusks, arthropoids, and so to the amphibians. By nine o’clock, if my calculations are correct, the globe will have passed through the Proterozoic era and the Paleozoic era. By nine fifteen it will be far advanced into the Mesozoic.”
“You mean;” interposed Jimmy, his eyes wide with amazement now, “that the globe will develop life? You mean that there will be plants, trees, reptiles—living creatures?”
Hilliard nodded. “On a minute microscopic scale, that is exactly what I mean,” he said.
He seized a dial on the instrument panel and twisted it to its farthest marking. Beneath Blane’s eyes the globe leaped into faster motion, changed from a crystal clear object slowly passing about the arc-sun to a blur of light. Each revolution in the orbit constituted one year, and the decades and centuries were dropping into the discard like grains of falling sand.
For a moment Scot Hilliard watched the process intently. Then he jerked erect.
“With the globe moving as fast as it is,” he said, “it is impossible to study its surface without the aid of a specially designed rotating microscope. I have one in my other laboratory. One moment.”
He went out, closing the door, behind him. Silence swept into the white ceilinged room. Jimmy stood there, staring at the glass case, frowning. It wasn’t possible, this mad story he had heard. One man claiming he could reproduce in a few moments what nature had taken millions of years to accomplish. The reporter looked up as Eve Manning laid a hand on his shoulder.
“Will you go now?” she asked, a note of dread in her voice. “You have all the information necessary for your newspaper, and you can leave before Uncle returns. Please.”
Jimmy studied the pretty face deliberately.
“Just what,” he asked, “are you driving at?”
Her cheeks were ashen, her fingers trembling.
“Listen,” she said. “It’s not the geologic development of that little globe that Uncle is interested in alone. It’s something bigger, more dreadful, more horrible. He wants to see how man, civilized man of this age and generation, would act if he were suddenly thrown back to the Mesozoic age, the time of prehistoric reptiles. He wants to see if man’s brain would protect him against the hideous dangers which would then surround him.”
“He wants what?” repeated Jimmy blankly.
; “Oh, don’t you understand, Mr. Blane? If you stay here, Uncle will use you for this experiment. He’ll put you on that little world in the glass case. He’ll insert you on that miniature planet and watch you through his microscope as if you were a worm or an insect.”
The Telegram reporter burst forth in a harsh, dry laugh. “You’re talking riddles. I could drop that globe in my pocket.”
She looked at him quietly for a moment, then turned and led the way to a far corner of the laboratory. There she pointed a shaking finger to a large cabinet affair fashioned of sheet metal with an ordinary door at one side. At the front a flexible cone-like projector tapered to a needlepoint.
“That,” she said hoarsely, “is a size reducer. Uncle calls it something different, something scientific. But it too is his own invention. Once in it and the power turned on, a full-grown dog will emerge a creature of microscopic size, so small our most powerful glass is barely able to detect it. It will act the same with a man, with a human being. Uncle—”
Her words died off, and she stared past Jimmy, eyes suddenly wide with terror.
The reporter whirled. And what he saw made his heart skip a beat. Five feet away, swaying sardonically on the balls of his feet, stood Scot Hilliard. The man’s face had lost its friendly smile now. It was contorted into a leer of fanaticism, grotesque with craft and cruelty. In his right hand was a leveled revolver.
“Since my niece has so inadvisedly told you of my plans,” he said, “I need go into no further explanation. Blane, pace slowly backward, open the door of that cabinet and stand on the center of the contact platform inside.”
Rigid, the reporter stared at the man. “You’re crazy,” he said. “Put down that gun.”
“Uncle!” cried Eve. “You’re mad.”
Hilliard’s black eyes narrowed to thin crescents.
“Back into that cabinet,” he said again, “or I fire.”
Jimmy’s heart was racing now as he shot a look about him, searching for a way of escape. Suddenly he leaped forward and slammed his fist hard against the professor’s arm. The automatic clattered to the floor, and the man reeled backward in fury.
The Mad Scientist Megapack Page 41
