COPYRIGHT INFORMATION
Copyright © 1948 by John Russell Fearn
Copyright © 2012 by Philip Harbottle
Published by Wildside Press LLC
www.wildsidebooks.com
DEDICATION
For Dave Gibson
CHAPTER ONE
THE EBON SPHERE OF SURREY
The car moved silently away from the house.
“Drive as I direct,” said Michael tersely.
Peter Curzon turned slightly and looked at his friend sitting beside him in the car. He sensed the hostility in the clipped tone, and felt uneasy. But it was dark and the light from the car lamps, high-powered though they were, reflected back only dimly from the road, and all he glimpsed was the vague paleness of hit friend’s face.
“Okay,” he replied lightly. “Lead on, Macduff. But why the eerie mystery? Why the great urge to drive at midnight? And why pick on me?”
“You’ll see. I have a surprise for you.”
“For me?”
“Yes, especially for you.”
Peter laughed aloud. “How you revel in the dramatic, Michael. You were always like that as a boy, and even at college. Always the same, moody, elusive, insinuating, theatrical. That’s you, Michael. Now, what’s it all about?”
But the other would not be drawn. “You’ll see!” he repeated. “Take the left fork here.”
“Right you are,” responded Peter obeying his instructions, “but I don’t see why you want to meander through Surrey with me on a pitch black night instead of being at home with Judith like a respectable married man.”
“You leave my wife’s name out of this!” snapped the other.
“Okay, okay! What’s bitten you now? You’re surely not jealous of Judith and me! Why, I’ve known her as long as you have. And you said you didn’t mind my taking her about while you were busy scientificating with your wonderful theories and inventions. So what?”
But the other remained silent.
Peter Curzon slowed the car down. He was a tall, broad shouldered young man with a loosely knit, muscular figure of great strength. He had fair, unruly hair, deep blue twinkling eyes and a jovial, fresh complexioned, good-humoured face. He was a general favourite, especially with the fair sex.
In marked contrast, Michael, though good-looking, even fascinating in his own way, was dark, serious minded, and of far slighter build. He was less athletic, less debonair, and certainly far less popular.
Yet despite his saturnine moodiness, he could be charming when he chose. He was remarkably clever, obviously destined for a brilliant career as a physicist.
And like all clever men he was dissatisfied, jealous of others for qualities he himself lacked. He envied Peter’s physical superiority and his natural easy manners that made him so popular.
Also, like most clever men, he affected to despise his mental inferiors, underrating his friend’s inherent sagacity and sound common sense.
For Peter, maybe no genius, was nevertheless, no fool. Nor was his good humour mere softness of character. He could, on occasion be firm and he was never comfortable unless and until he understood a thing clearly. Always he enquired and wanted to know with a persistence that could be embarrassing.
He stopped the car and turned to Michael. “Now then!” he cried, and there was an edge to his voice, “spill it my lad, and quick.”
Michael changed his tactics. He uttered an amused chuckle. “You are like a great blundering bear, Peter. There’s no finesse about you.”
“Well, what’s the joke?” asked Peter shortly.
“I’ll tell you, since you’re so pressing,” replied Michael.
He leaned closer to him. “I have been working on the greatest invention of all time. For centuries scientists have been studying it intermittently, but at last I have perfected it.” He lowered his voice a little. “Tonight I am putting it to the test and I am impatient to show it to you.”
Peter, though relieved, was still uneasy. “What is this invention?” he asked.
The other lowered his voice to an awed whisper. “I have discovered how to suspend entropy.”
“Suspend what?”
“Entropy, entropy.”
“What on earth...?”
Michael became impatient. “I’ll show you when we get there. You will understand. Come, drive on.”
Peter hesitated a fraction and then, slipping the gears in, settled himself at the wheel and they set off again.
By degrees, following Michael’s directions, he realised he was being detoured from the main Guildford-London road he had been following and was instead speeding down quiet, half-made country lanes. At last they came to a rising stretch of ground swelling up into hills against the stars.
“Guessed where we are?” came Michael’s voice out of the gloom.
“As near as I can tell,” replied Peter, “we are in the region of the old tin mines. I think I can see the outline of the old pitheads against the sky there.”
“Quite right!” Michael sounded pleased. “It may interest you to know that I’ve been doing a lot of exploring around here recently—chiefly at night—while you’ve been acting deputy husband for me.”
“But why should you want to poke about here?” Peter demanded. “Haven’t you enough to do without...?”
“Certainly I have, but in this case it was worth it. You’re my best friend—come with me and I’ll let you into my secret.”
They got out of the car. Taking a torch from his pocket, Michael led the way, across rough stone and rotting planks, to the ancient mine head which for many years had lain abandoned. Looking about him Peter saw that the mine was typical of dozens of such outworked sites scattered about Southern England.
“There are steps down here,” Michael said, flashing the light on iron footrests driven into the side of the shaft. “Take care how you go,” he warned. “Follow me.”
They went down for perhaps two hundred feet, then along a small narrow tunnel which showed dangerous signs of collapse; fissures and rents were cobwebbed across the curved roof and the old teak props, rotten with age and damp, were showing signs of crumbling and giving way.
Finally they came to an old door, which Michael with considerable effort dragged open on squeaking hinges.
“There!” he exclaimed, waving the torch beam into a roomy cave. The light reflected back from a row of heavy machinery ranged along the walls. In the middle of the floor stood a long narrow table, not unlike an operating table, whilst yards of snaked and looped wire festooned the whole space.
“What on earth’s the idea?” Peter asked blankly. “How did all this stuff get down here?”
Michael stepped forward into the cave and switched on a battery-driven roof light.
“I brought all this stuff here myself,” he explained, his voice tense with emotion. “Bit by bit, whilst you were going about with Judy, I assembled it all. As you know I am a wealthy man, but the purchase of some of this stuff has nearly cleaned me out—including the cost of the land in which this ancient mine lies. Not that I object, mark you. It’s surprising sometimes how much a man will pay for revenge, isn’t it?”
“Revenge?” Peter looked at him sharply„ then his eyes dropped to the automatic Michael was holding. With a swift movement Michael kicked the door shut, locking it with his free hand. The forced air of geniality had gone from him.
He was cold, merciless.
“If you make a move, Peter, I’ll kill you,” he said with calm deliberation. “I may save your life—but you will live it in a time and place infinitely far removed from Judith, from me, from this day and age altogether! I’ve planned an elaborate reward for you for the way you’ve taken Judy from me.”
“From you?” The good humour in Pet
er’s face changed into stern lines. “What the hell am I supposed to have done?”
“You know perfectly well! You’ve loved Judith ever since we were at school together. You never quite got over her choosing me instead of you. You’ve done your best to take her for yourself, thinking I was too busy to notice. But I wasn’t as busy as that, I was preparing my revenge all the time!”
Michael nodded at the machinery, and Peter gave a quick glance about him.
Was Michael joking, or was he mad? Certainly this equipment was obviously too costly to be prompted by a joke. Therefore....
“Lie down on that table!” Michael snapped.
“Not if I know it!” Peter retorted, clenching his powerful fists. Then regardless of the automatic he flung himself suddenly forward, aiming straight for Michael’s jaw.
Michael sidestepped. His gun did not fire. Instead it jerked up, then down viciously. Peter went crashing into darkness from a savage blow across the base of the skull.
He returned to his senses with an aching head to find himself securely strapped down upon the long table. He tried to move, but his arms were pinned to his sides whilst thick leather thongs stretched across his throat, ankles, and waist.
With difficulty he turned his head. Michael was standing a yard or two away, grinning faintly, hands in coat pockets.
“Better?” he inquired laconically.
“What the devil’s the idea of all this?” Peter demanded. “For Heaven’s sake, man, explain yourself and get me off this damned table!”
Michael shook his head and lounged forward. He stood looking down at Peter’s drawn face pensively.
“That’s the last thing I intend doing,” he said. “You’re a prisoner, Peter, and you’re going to remain one for such a long time that I shudder to think of it, Anyway, I’ll tell you my plan for revenge. It’s a scientific one, because as a physicist I think in terms of science. What do you know about entropy? Or maybe you just don’t know anything.”
Peter remained silent, bewildered by his friend’s madness.
“For your information then,” Michael continued. “It’s the increasing disorder of the Universe, the process by which the Universe moves gradually to dynamic equilibrium, that being a state where everything is balanced and all exchanges of energy are complete.”
“What of it?” Peter asked.
“I decided when your love for Judy first became clear to me, to try to create artificially a state of non-entropy, a state where nothing ever happens. I found this old mineshaft and decided it was the ideal place for my purpose. I could work alone undisturbed. In this space, Peter, I intend to create what I call an entropy-sphere, the walls of which have attained complete equilibrium and whose vibrations extend inwards to everything inside the sphere. Including you! By that, I mean that everything inside the sphere will achieve equilibrium almost instantly instead of after tens of thousands of years. Do you understand?”
Peter struggled savagely against the straps. “You mean that everything inside the globe will be plunged into a state of timelessness? A perpetual Now?” he ventured, as the terrible thought occurred to him.
“You’re smarter than I thought,” Michael said grudgingly. “Yes, that’s exactly what I do mean. At your feet is one magnet and at your head another. Between them they will build up the hemispheres of the entropy-sphere, and for you inside it, time will cease to be. Release may never come to you. If it does, it will be only through the work of scientists far cleverer than me. You see, I can lock the door, but I can’t unlock it. Years, centuries, ages, may pass before you’re found!”
“Man alive, you’re stark crazy!” Peter shouted frantically, as Michael went over to the switchboard. “You can’t do this thing! I shall be missed and the Police will start teaching for me until I am found.”
“I doubt it,” Michael grinned. “And even if you were found you’d be untouchable.”
“Michael, wait! You’ve got everything so....”
Michael flung a switch on the board in the corner of the cave and watched with detached scientific curiosity as a perfectly transparent bubble of elemental force came into being from a point just above Peter’s chest. It expanded at high speed, cutting Peter’s words off in mid-sentence and then engulfing him and the table.
It spread wider and wider....
Michael cut the power and peered through the curved wall of force upon the scene within. The lights in the cavern roof, outside the bubble’s influence, cast a brief dying radiance within the sphere—brief because time and light and everything else were fact ceasing in there. Peter lay with his mouth open, halfway through his sentence, his eyes fixed towards the switchboard. His wristwatch had stopped at 12:20. The second-hand no longer moved.
Entropy was fast becoming fixed within the sphere. The energies from Peter and the table and the other articles about him and upon him were being impelled back and forward with ever increasing speed between the boundaries of the sphere’s walls, and so were heading towards the final state where no further exchange of energies would be possible.
Light rays ceased to shine in the sphere. It became like a polished ball of black glass. For a long moment Michael stood gazing at this incredible thing of non-time, this fragment which represented the Universe as it must one day become, knowing that it would remain thus for untold ages until the scientific key was found to open it.
He left the cave quietly, closed the ancient door, and then went halfway up the narrow passage. Here he paused beside an electric plunger. It was wired to the switchboard in the entropy-cave. Though, as far as he knew, no human agency could reverse the non-time state he had created, he decided to destroy the evidence of his handiwork. Grimly, he slammed the plunger home.
The passage reeled and gulped under the force of the explosion. Smoke and flame gushed from the entropy-cave as the door was blasted violently open. Overhead something cracked mightily; in sudden panic Michael glanced upwards in the light of his torch, and covered his face with his arms.
The walls, the roof, the entire rotten old mine succumbed to the shock, and with a thunderous crash the whole structure collapsed.
The mystery of the disappearance of Michael Blane and Peter Curzon found its way to the front pages of the press, but the only clue discovered by the police was the car outside the old mine entrance. For a week digging was attempted but was finally abandoned....
More than a century passed before miners, searching for the new and valuable mineral moxonite, blunted their atomic drills on something of incredible hardness.
They dug down deeply and finally came to an impenetrable curved surface, which, glowed faintly in the darkness, yet peculiarly enough was not transparent to light, nor yet reflected it. The interior of the sphere was as remote from the baffled miners as the interior of a distant star of a far corner of the Universe.
They found the sphere impossible to break into so, instead, the rock was smashed from around it and it was hauled to London where the best scientific brains of the day could work on it. But though the year 2148 was famed for its brilliant scientists, none was clever enough to find a way through entropy in its final state of equilibrium.
Because, paradoxically, the globe looked transparent and yet could not be seen into, it had become something of a legend, something to enshrine with each generation.
From the laboratories of the scientists it was transferred to the London Museum, where it remained a mighty heritage of a past age which might one day be explained, and till then was known as the Ebon Sphere of Surrey.
CHAPTER TWO
TWENTY-EIGHTH CENTURY
To Peter Curzon there was no consciousness of intervening time. One moment he was shouting—
“You’ve got everything so—” to Michael Blane, and the next he was saying “—hopelessly wrong!” to a tall impassive figure standing near him, silhouetted by a mighty window.
Peter stopped talking abruptly. It came to him slowly that he was free of straps. though he was still on the same l
ong table. He closed his eyes and then opened them again, staring at a high domed ceiling made of some glazed and exquisitely patterned metal.
Presently he dared to move his eyes sideways. The tall thin figure was still there, hands tucked Oriental-fashion in the wide cuffs in the single-piece black garment he was wearing. The light through the window was so bright that Peter could not immediately distinguish the outline of the man’s features; beyond him was a wilderness of machinery and complicated electrical equipment, technicians in close fitting overalls moving silently about appointed tasks....
Peter swallowed hard and peered at his watch. It was ticking steadily and said 12:22. Bewildered he looked back to the window. Outside tall buildings of glazed grey metal climbed into the blue brilliance of a summer sky.
He realised at length that the tall man had been studying him for he came forward slowly.
“You are to be congratulated, my friend,” he said. “At last we have succeeded in breaking into the mystical Ebon Sphere.”
Still Peter remained quiet—mentally stunned. If this was a dream it was a vivid one indeed. He remained with head slightly raised so that he could study the tall stranger thoroughly—and was not unduly impressed by what he saw.
The man’s face was as thin as his body. A fleshless nose curved with the sharpness of an eagle’s beak over a thin-lipped mouth and smooth, jutting chin. The cheeks were hollow under high bones, and utterly bloodless. From beneath very finely lined dark eyebrows two eyes of so light a grey they seemed transparent studied Peter with detached interest. His gaze went beyond them to the man’s extremely high forehead and the black hair flattened back from it. He was fifty, perhaps sixty, it was difficult to tell.
“Who...are you?” Peter found his throat hoarse as he asked the question.
“I fancy I might ask Your Excellence the same thing,” the man responded, with a slight shrug. “However, I am Mark Lanning, your Adviser-Elect and First Scientist of the Western Federation.”
“My Adviser-Elect?” Peter repeated, struggling into a sitting position and jabbing a troubled hand through his sandy hair. “But why? Who am I supposed to be?” Then he looked at the austere face in sudden sharpness. “Just a minute! You did call me ‘Excellence’, didn’t you? For what reason?”
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