“Apparently I’ve wasted my time,” he added. “You seem to be well taken care of.”
The gray eyes in the ugly face gleamed at me disapprovingly.
“Oh—er—Mr. Jesmond—Mr. Cavendish,” Ellen introduced us. “Dale is a physicist, Bob, so you ought to have something in common.”
“Bob?” Dale Cavendish repeated. “That sounds interesting. Been having a good time together?”
“Look here,” I said quietly. “I don’t particularly care who you are, Cavendish, but I don’t like the way you behave! You—”
“Which of us is to see you home, Ellen?” he interrupted me.
“I—that is, we—” Ellen looked from one to the other of us helplessly. I even thought I saw her beseeching me to go away.
“Apparently,” I said, looking at Cavendish, “it has been your privilege up to now, and I wouldn’t dream of upsetting it. Thanks for a happy evening, Ellen.” I smiled at her. “I’ll make a point of seeing you at the institute tomorrow.”
With that I left them to it, chiefly because there didn’t seem to be anything else I could do—though I did wonder in a vague kind of way what a pretty girl like Ellen could see in an ugly devil like Dale Cavendish.
Next day I went out of my way to see her during the lunch hour, and by degrees I got the facts out of her.
“I’ve known him quite a few months, Bob.” She smiled a little self-consciously. “I met him when he was on the staff of the Daily Planet as science reporter. I had a job in the same office before I came here. We’ve sort of, well, gone about together. The only trouble is he’s so moody; always thinking about scientific things. Half the time he forgets to keep his appointments, and that’s why I can never rely on him—like last night, for instance. It was quite a surprise to me when he turned up.”
“Is there anything—serious in all this?” I asked.
She was silent; then she shrugged. “He’s wealthy, Bob. That means something.”
“He needs to be to offset a face like that,” I said bluntly, unable to keep it back.
“I suppose he is a bit clumsy featured,” she admitted. “But he seems kind enough—except for last night when he blew up. I like him well enough.”
I considered her intently and finally she looked away and changed the subject. If I was to be good mannered I could not bring the matter up again, so I left it at that. But in private I made up my mind that I’d give Dale Cavendish a run for his money. I had taken a profound fancy to Ellen Fielding.
I was surprised, therefore, on returning to my apartment that evening to find Dale Cavendish awaiting me. The janitor had let him in and he was sprawled in an easy chair, smoking and glancing through a magazine. He got up the moment I entered and held out his hand. His big, ugly face was smiling.
“Hope you won’t mind me barging in like this.” I shook his hand and considered him dubiously. “I felt that I should apologize for last night. I didn’t behave at all well. Just that I was a bit piqued. You know how it is sometimes.”
I murmured something and asked him if he’d have a drink. He accepted. We got to smoking, and by the end of an hour’s chat I was quite convinced that he really was contrite. When he left it was with the invitation for me to call upon him and take a look at his scientific apparatus sometime; as a scientist myself I might be interested.
I was interested, because I had heard a good deal at odd times about his scientific attainments. It occurred to me that I might learn plenty from a man of his talents. So a week later I called upon him and he showed me around his private laboratory. It was the first of many calls on my part. In two months I was dropping in on him regularly, chiefly because I was by this time absorbed by some sort of theory he had on ‘timeless evolution’.
“I see you don’t grasp the idea, Bob,” he said one evening, when we were in his laboratory. “To you evolution simply means progress through time, doesn’t it?”
“Naturally. What else can it be?”
“That’s natural evolution,” he said. “There’s another form of it—disorganization of energy.”
I contemplated the electromagnetic apparatus about us—particularly a gigantic instrument like an enlarging camera with a downwardly turned lens. Dale Cavendish stood regarding me with a faint smile on his abysmally ugly face.
“As we progress through time the more energy becomes disorganized,” he went on. “You know the commonly accepted fact that there was more order in the universe yesterday than there is today.”
I nodded, and he spread his hands.
“Very well, then. If instead of waiting for normal progress to disorganize the atoms of which we’re composed, we artificially disorganize them, they can be made to form into a pattern they would normally possess at a much later date.”
“Presumably,” I said, “the same effect as moving normally to the time when that pattern would exist?”
“Exactly!” He looked pleased. “That’s the purpose of this apparatus here.”
I studied the apparatus for a moment or two and then looked back at him. “But look here, Dale, how do you know what sort of pattern future atomic setups will have? How can you plan for a fixed pattern produced by a given amount of disorganization?”
“I’ve spent years on that problem,” he answered, musing. Atoms, Bob, move in charted paths as the stars do. It is possible, by studying atomic science to the last detail, to predict with mathematical certainty what sort of a pattern will be produced from a given quantity of disorganization.
“That is, up to a point. If one tries to work it out too far, the accumulated postulations get out of hand. But, at least, I know what vibration is needed to produce a pattern of, say, a man as he will appear five thousand years from now!”
His eyes were upon me—piggy little gray eyes that had nothing in common with the brilliant brain he possessed.
“And after that?” I asked grimly.
He shrugged. “I just don’t know. There are limits to my calculations. Five thousand years’ patterning is as far as I can get at the moment. It becomes conjecture after that, but obviously the patterns will form as they would have formed had normal evolution taken place. What comes after the man of five thousand years hence, I don’t know. Not that I need to,” he added, and even then I didn’t notice that a sinister edge had crept into his voice.
“But what’s the good of the idea?” I demanded. “What does it prove?”
“You’re a scientist, and you ask me that! Isn’t it obvious what a benefit it will be to scientific knowledge to know just how a thing will be at a time in the future? With this system we can positively know the appearance of anything from a lump of soil to a man. Science can then plan and chart accordingly. That is what I propose to do, and incidentally make myself famous as the greatest mathematical scientist of my age…. But there is a small personal matter to which I must attend first.”
I waited. He turned and to my surprise locked the door of the laboratory, then without glancing at me he went to the switchboard and closed several knife-blade contacts. I heard a hum of power from somewhere, and the vibratory apparatus for the shuffling of atomic setups came to life. I watched the glowing tubes and complex meters with their quivering needles; then I moved my eyes to find Dale was studying me intently.
“You’re not a bad-looking chap, Bob, are you?” he asked pensively.
I grinned. “You don’t expect me to answer truthfully, do you?”
“Compared to me, I mean.” He brooded. “I’m as ugly as sin, and I know it. Ellen knows it too, but I think my other—er—attractions such as money, scientific fame, and so forth could have kept her interested in me—if you hadn’t darned well got in the way!”
Suddenly his voice was hoarse, malignant. I stared at him in amazement. At that time I was, I suppose, pretty good-looking—even handsome compared to Dale Cavendish—but naturally I had never taken it into account. It was only now, in this moment, that I saw how he really writhed at the thought of his own ugliness.
“I’m ugly, yes,” he breathed, clenching his fist and still glaring at me, “but compared to a man of five thousand years hence I won’t be! By present-day standards a man that far ahead would be grotesque, a—a baroque!”
I glanced about me. Something ominous was coming. Jealousy had evidently gone to his head.
“Why do you think I’ve cultivated your friendship?” he demanded. “Why do you think I have so lightly passed over your constant association with Ellen? For only one reason, to study you, to study your electronic pattern on my instruments without your being aware of it.
“I know all about you, Bob—and you’re going to be my guinea pig! If you become a baroque—as you will!—I know Ellen won’t have you. I don’t say she will have me instead, but at least I’ll stand a better chance than I do now.”
He broke off, and nodded to an instrument rather like a radio beside the vibratory apparatus. “See that?” he snapped.
“Well?” I asked coldly.
“It’s a thought recorder. Your thoughts and mine are picked up by it, and electronic processes convert them back into actual words so that everything that happens can be repeated. Even as you hurtle forward in a disorganization-path, you will still think, and I shall know what you are thinking, and be able to turn the history of your scientific change to my own advantage.”
“The law will have something to say about that,” I told him grimly. “Excluding the fact that I’m not quite the passive idiot you seem to imagine.”
He closed a switch and grinned crookedly. I said nothing but I felt some subtle, deadly influence sap every scrap of strength out of my system.
“Energy has been absorbed from you,” he said briefly. “That magnetic instrument behind you is doing it. I can be sure of you this way. As for the law, I have that taken care of, too. You fell into the range of my instruments by accident. No witnesses can prove you didn’t; none can prove you did. A man can’t be convicted on those grounds in British law. You’re going ahead five thousand years, my friend,” he whispered, approaching me, “and before my eyes I’ll watch you change, and know of what you are thinking!
“Five thousand years in about ten minutes. Interesting, isn’t it? The vibrations of this apparatus of mine, mathematically planned, will shuffle your atomic setup into the pattern you would possess if by some fluke you could live five thousand years and evolve normally.”
I couldn’t speak or move. I just stood and glared my helplessness; then suddenly he thrust out his hands and pushed me into the area of the thing like an enlarging camera lens. I landed flat on my back on metal plating, staring upwards at a glowing filigree of orange-tinted wires. They seemed to have a hypnotic effect upon me. I could feel my brain spinning in a gulf and the details of the laboratory became hazy.
Peculiarly enough, I did not lose consciousness. I was still aware of who I was, but not of where I was. The orange glow above faded out after a while, and I was in a blank grayness in which nothing moved. It was odorless, tasteless, formless, yet having a light that was neither sunshine nor daylight. Looking back on it, I can only think that it must have been time itself, so utterly jumbled and woven on itself that it made no sense. I was evolving, yes—if it could be called that. I was sternly conscious of the fact, but time itself was a condition outside my development.
So, helpless in this blank gulf—for I could not rise from the metal plating, which, in fact, I could neither feel nor see—I lay staring at myself, along my body and then at my hands. With every passing second, if seconds they were, I was changing incredibly.
The shufflings and patternings that were going on electronically within me were more or less painless. There was instead a sense of tremendous inner movement, a feeling upon my skin as though the wings of butterflies were burring against it. I cannot describe it in any other way. But my limbs were narrowing in dimensions, my hands were losing their flesh and becoming like claws. Presently my clothes rotted and fell away from me. I knew why. Since they were included in the electronic disorganization for 5,000 years ahead, they naturally could not exist then, but I could, because the normal event of death did not enter into the calculation.
Presently my head began to ache, and I could tell that it was swelling. My eyes seemed capable of penetrating the mist a little.
Suddenly the opacity was gone and the laboratory had come back. The orange lights were right above me. The sense of helplessness left me, and with a still aching head I staggered, naked, to my feet.
Dale Cavendish was contemplating me from the switchboard, a look of profound awe on his blunted features.
“It’s incredible!” he breathed, “it’s marvelous! I knew I couldn’t be wrong.”
I passed my hands over myself, quickly. My body was far smaller than it had been. I was only about five feet high, balanced on pipestem legs and with the skinniest chest and hands imaginable. My head was the biggest thing about me, aching abominably and feeling terribly top heavy.
“Take a look at yourself,” Cavendish ordered grimly, and he nodded to a full-length mirror at the other end of the laboratory.
I stumbled to it and saw something with a mighty cranium, tiny, socket-rimmed eyes, a button-hole of a mouth. It was a distended, mad creature that moved when I moved. It was myself.
“Dale, you devil!” I swung around to him and then broke off, startled by the reediness of my voice.
“How do you feel, superman?” he asked dryly. “Not that I need to ask you. Your thoughts were perfectly recorded, and I know exactly what you experienced.”
His voice goaded me, and I hurled myself at him, but with the merest flick of his arm he sent me sprawling into a corner.
“Just as I’d expected,” he commented, brooding. “Your atomic setup has configurated to that of a man five thousand years hence; and your brain-case has distended to allow for what, by normal evolution, would have been a superpowerful brain. Knowledge, however, is only gained through mental absorption in the normal course of time; therefore, you have no more intelligence than you ever had despite the massive brain-case. The body has wasted at the expense of what would have been the mental—”
“How do you suppose you’ll ever get away with this?” I shrieked at him, scrambling up again. “You daren’t reveal anything to the authorities because they’ll know I was your subject!”
“I have no intention of revealing anything about you, Bob. I’m using you as a guinea pig, so that later on I can state my conclusions with absolute certainty, knowing that when a subject is chosen I can’t help but be right because you will have gone before.” Cavendish paused, smiling cynically. “If only Ellen could see you now!”
It was sheer blind, exasperated fury that hurled me at him, but as he had said, he was superstrong compared to me. I was flung back and once more tumbled into the area of that devilish electronic machine. The paralyzing effect began to work on me again, then Cavendish came forward and stood looking down at me.
“Obviously,” he said, “I can’t have you running around loose like this. That would be bad for me. And I’m also wondering what configurations lie beyond the five thousand year span. I can’t compute them, but the apparatus will form the necessary patterns automatically. I think we ought to find out, don’t you?
“You see, as I increasingly disorganize the pattern of your atoms you become further and further removed from normal standards. And, by the way, the process is irreversible. There must finally come a time, I presume, when the limit is reached and you become a zero quantity with perfect thermodynamic equilibrium. Via the thought-recorder you can tell me what leads up to that state, can’t you?”
Protest was useless, physical attack out of the question. He had the orange glow upon me again in a few seconds and once more the atomic shiftings overwhelmed me. The gray mist returned, and this time it seemed to last an interminable length of time. As on the previous occasion I did not lose consciousness, but became gradually aware of change stealing over me. The grotesque form was slowly but inevitably di
ssolving and becoming something else. I waited in a kind of horrified interest to discover what next I was to become.
I only began to receive the first clue when I noticed a change in my hands. They were altering into claws like those of a lobster! My legs too were extending into even thinner appendages, covered with fine hair. Extra legs were appearing from the region of the pelvis, and at the same time my skin was giving place to a horny, shell-like substance.
How long it took for the metamorphosis to complete itself I have no conception. The one thing I did know was that I had lost the entity of man, and had become a termite of gigantic proportions. Cavendish must have been aware of what was happening from the thought-recorder, for when I merged back into the laboratory, he was waiting for me with a gun leveled in his hand. Obviously my appearance gave him a shock; his expression showed it.
“I thought it might mean this, but I wasn’t sure,” he said, staring at me. “Amoeba, fish, ape, man, and then ant—to deal with the underworld life of earth as the surface cools. Yes, a biological necessity.”
Naturally, I could not speak. Human speech had gone, but not human emotions. Something of Bob Jesmond still lived within me. I realized that I now had stupendous power, iron-hard mandibles with which to tear my tormentor to pieces.
Suddenly I sprang. Cavendish’s revolver exploded but the bullet ricocheted off my shell-like exterior. I snapped my mandibles within an inch of his legs, but he twisted free just in time and snatched at a bottle of acid. Before he could grasp it, my pincer claws had knocked his hand down and he went colliding into the bench.
He staggered away, whirled up a chair and smashed it futilely across my back. I went for him again, and then I got something I had not expected. He switched on the nozzle of the electric welding equipment and dived at me. My shell plating was not strong enough for that and I screeched involuntarily as the searing flame bit deeply into me.
Backwards I went, until too late I saw I was once again within the area of that orange glow. Holding me at bay with the flame Cavendish slammed switches with his free hand and plunged me into yet another utter disorganization of atomic paths. By degrees the termite I had been was changing yet again, and with the change the hurt of my burned body subsided.
Yondering Page 20
