The Lost Master - The Collected Works

by Stanley G. Weinbaum

  "We'll find her," reiterated Harbord.

  But they didn't find her. After a futile, exhausting search, Ham ordered the Gaea to a point at which their wire-bound circle was tangent to the two circles already explored, and grimly began again.

  Thirty-one hours had passed since the girl had disappeared, and the three were nearing exhaustion. It was Cullen who yielded first, and groped his way wearily back to the ship. When the other two returned to move to a new base, they found him sleep-Mg fully clothed beside a half-drained cup of coffee.

  The hours dropped slowly into eternity. Saturn was pulling steadily ahead of the misty planet, bound placidly for their next meeting forty years in the future. Harbord said not a word concerning the passing of time; it was Ham who broached the subject.

  "Look here," he said as the Gaea slanted down to a new position. "Time's short. I don't want you two marooned here, and if we don't find Pat in this area, I want you and Cullen to leave. Do you understand?"

  "I understand English," said Harbord, "but not that sort."

  "There's no reason for you two to stay. I'm staying. I'll take our portion of food and all the arms and ammunition, and I'll stay."

  "Bah!" growled Harbord. "What's forty years?" He had turned sixty.

  "I'm ordering you to leave," said Ham quietly.

  "You don't command once we're clear of the surface," grunted the other. "We're staying. We'll find her."

  But it began to seem utterly hopeless. Cullen awoke and joined them as they emerged into the infinite fog, and they took their places at six hundred and sixty foot intervals along the wire. Ham took the outermost position and they began their endless plodding through the mists.

  He was close to the breaking point. For forty hours he had neither slept nor eaten, save for a hurried gulp of coffee and a bite of chocolate when they moved the Gaea. The fog shapes were beginning to take the weirdest conformations in his tired eyes, and they seemed to loom ever closer, and to grin more malevolently.

  So it was that he had to blink and squint and peer very closely when, a quarter way around the circuit, he saw something a little denser than the fog shapes in the gloom.

  He jerked the wire once to halt Harbord and Cullen, and stared fixedly. There was a sound, too—a faint, steady thrumming quite different from the eerie rustles of the fog shapes. He started sharply as he heard still another sound, indescribable, muffled, but certainly a physical sound. He jerked the wire three times, that would summon his companions.

  They came, and he pointed out the dusky mass. "We can reach it," he suggested, "if we tie a couple of our ropes together. Two should be plenty.”

  They moved cautiously into the mist. Something—something was stirring there. They crept quietly on, fifty feet, sixty. And suddenly Ham realized that he saw a chain of the multiple creatures—a vast chain, apparently, for it was still passing before them. In utter despondency he stopped, staring hopelessly ahead; then, very slowly, he tamed back toward the wire.

  A sound—a sharp sound—froze him. It sounded like a cough!

  He whirled back. Regardless of the dangerous file close before him, he shouted. "Pat! Pat!"

  The sublimity of relief! A thin little voice quavered beyond the line. "Ham! Oh, Ham!"

  "Are—you—are you safe?"

  "Y-yes.”

  He was at the very side of the passing file. Beyond, pale as the mist itself, was Patricia, no more than ten feet away.

  "Thank God!" he muttered. "Pat, when this chain passes, run straight here. Don't move a single step aside—not a single step!"

  "Passes?" she quavered. "Oh, it won't pass! It isn't a file. It's a circle!"

  "A circle!" Comprehension dawned. "A circle! Then how—how can we get you out? We can't break it or—" He paused. Now the queer parade was leaderless, helpless, but once it were broken at any point, it would turn into a fierce and bloodthirsty thing—and it might attack the girl. "Lord!" he gasped.

  Harbord and Cullen were beside him. "Here!" he snapped. He seized the remaining rope. "I'm going across. Stand close."

  He crawled to the shoulders of the two. From that height it might be possible to leap the creatures. It had to be possible.

  He made it, though it left Cullen and Harbord groaning from the thrust of his hundred and eighty pounds, Uranus weight. He spent only a moment holding Patricia to him; the menace of those circling monsters was too imminent.

  He flung an end of the rope to the two beyond the circle. "Can you swing across if we hold it high enough, Pat?" The girl seemed on the verge of exhaustion.

  "Of course," she murmured.

  He helped her lock elbows and knees around the rope. Slowly, painfully, she inched her way in the manner of a South American tree sloth. Ham had one terrible instant of fear as she wavered directly over the file, but she made it, dropping weakly into Harbord's arms beyond.

  Then she cried out, "Ham! How can you get across?"

  "Vault 'em!" he flashed.

  He spent no time in reflection. He gathered all the strength remaining in his body, drew back for a short run, and actually cleared the six foot barrier of deadliness, his knuckles just touching a black, blubbery back.

  Patricia struggled to her feet, clinging to him. He held her a moment, then said huskily, "Lord! If we hadn't found you—"

  "But you did!" she whispered. Suddenly she began to laugh hysterically, the sound broken by choking coughs. "Only what kept you? I expected you sooner!" She stared wildly at the circling file. "I short-circuited them!" she cried. "I—short-circuited —their brains!"

  She collapsed against him. Without a word he lifted her and followed Harbord and Cullen back along the wire to the Gaea. Behind him, revolving endlessly, was the circle of doomed creatures.

  Uranus was a banded green globe behind the flare of the afterjets, and Saturn a brilliant blue star to the left of a tiny, very fierce sun. Patricia, her cough already improved in the conditioned air of the Gaea, lay passively in a pivot chair and smiled at Ham.

  "You see," she said, "after I cast off the rope—Wait! Don't lecture me again about that!—I stepped just the merest few paces into the fog, and then, after all, the plants I had seen turned out to be the same old zigzag ones I named Cryptogami Urani, so I started back and you were gone."

  "Gone! I hadn't moved."

  "You were gone," she repeated imperturbably. "I walked a short distance and then shouted, but the shouts just sort of muffled out. And then I heard a couple of shots in another direction, and started that way—and suddenly the chain gang came plunging out of the fog!"

  "What'd you do?"

  "What could I do? They were too close for me to draw my gun, so I ran. They're fast, but so am I, and I kept ahead until I began to lose breath. Then I discovered that by sharp dodging I could keep away—they don't turn very quickly—and I managed for a few minutes, although that blinding fog kept me in danger of tripping. And then I had an inspiration!"

  "You needed one!" he muttered.

  She ignored him. "Do you remember when I mentioned Fabre and his studies of the pine processionary caterpillars? Well, one of his experiments was to lead the procession around the edge of a big garden vase and close the circle! He did away with the leader, and do you know what happened?"

  "I can guess."

  "You're right. Lacking leadership, the circle just kept revolving for hours, days, I don't know how long, until at last some caterpillar dropped from exhaustion, and a new leader was created by the gap. And suddenly that experiment occurred to me, and I set about duplicating it. I dodged back toward the rear end of my procession, with the front end following me!"

  "I see!" muttered Ham.

  "Yes. I intended to dose the circle and dodge outside, but something went wrong. I caught up with the rear all right, but I was just about worn out and I stumbled or something, and the next thing I remember was lying on the ground with the feet of the things pounding by my face. And I was inside the circler

  "You probably fainted from exh
austion."

  "I never faint," said Patricia with dignity.

  "You did when I got you out."

  "That," she retorted, "was simply a case of going to sleep after about forty hours of staying awake without food. Fainting, or syncope, is quite different, being due to an undersupply of blood to the brain—"

  "All right," cut in Ham. "If fainting needs a brain, obviously you couldn't faint. Go on."

  "Well," she resumed placidly, "there I was. I could have shot a break in the circle, of course, but that would have brought an attack, and besides, I hadn't the least idea where the Caea was. So I sat there, and I sat a week or ten days or a month—"

  "Forty hours."

  "And the fog shapes kept rustling over the file of sausage creatures, and they kept flickering and rustling and whispering until I thought I'd go mad. It was terrible—even knowing what they were, it was terrible!"

  "Knowing what— Do you know what they are?"

  "I figured out one good guess. In fact, I had a suspicion as soon as I saw Cullen's infra-red photographs."

  "Then what the devil are they?"

  "Well, you see I had a good chance to examine the chain things at close range, and they're not perfect creatures."

  "I'll say they're not!"

  "I mean they're not fully developed. In fact, they're larvae. And I think the fog shapes are what they grow up to be. That's why the fog shapes led the things to us. Don't you see? The chain creatures are their children. It's like caterpillar and moth!"

  "Well, that's possible, of course, but what about the weird faces of the fog Shapes, and their ability to change size?"

  "They don't change size. See here—the light on that part of Uranus comes from directly overhead, doesn't it? Well, any shadows are thrown straight down, then; that's obvious. So what we saw—all that flickering, shifting crew of gargoyles—were just the shadows of floating things, flying things, projected on the fog. That's why the fog shapes grew and shrank and changed shape; they were just shadows following some winged creature that moved up and down and around. Do you see?"

  "It sounds plausible. We'll report it that way, and in eighty years, when the north pole part of Uranus gets around to the Sunlight again, somebody can run up and check the theory. Maybe Harbord'll pilot them. Eh, Harbord? Think you'd be willing to visit the place again in eighty years?"

  "Not with a woman aboard," grunted the astrogator.

  THE POINT OF VIEW

  “I AM TOO MODEST!” snapped the great Haskel van Manderpootz, pacing irritably about the limited area of his private laboratory, glaring at me the while. “That is the trouble. I undervalue my own achievements, and thereby permit petty imitators like Corveille to influence the committee and win the Morell prize.”

  “But,” I said soothingly, “you've won the Morell physics award half a dozen times, professor. They can't very well give it to you every year.”

  “Why not, since it is plain that I deserve it?” bristled the professor. “Understand, Dixon, that I do not regret my modesty, even though it permits conceited fools like Corveille, who have infinitely less reason than I for concert, to win awards that mean nothing save prizes for successful bragging. Bah! To grant an award for research along such obvious lines that I neglected to mention them, thinking that even a Morell judge would appreciate their obviousness! Research on the psychon, eh! Who discovered the psychon? Who but van Manderpootz?”

  “Wasn't that what you got last year's award for?” I asked consolingly. “And after all, isn't this modesty, this lack of jealousy on your part, a symbol of greatness of character?”

  “True—true!” said the great van Manderpootz, mollified. “Had such an affront been committed against a lesser man than myself, he would doubtless have entered a bitter complaint against the judges. But not I. Anyway, I know from experience that it wouldn't do any good. And besides, despite his greatness, van Manderpootz is as modest and shrinking as a violet.” At this point he paused, and his broad red face tried to look violet-like.

  I suppressed a smile. I knew the eccentric genius of old from the days when I had been Dixon Wells, undergraduate student of engineering, and had taken a course in Newer Physics (that is, in Relativity) under the famous professor. For some unguessable reason, he had taken a fancy to me, and as a result, I had been involved in several of his experiments since graduation. There was the affair of the subjunctivisor, for instance, and also that of the idealizator; in the first of these episodes I had suffered the indignity of falling in love with a girl two weeks after she was apparently dead, and in the second, the equal or greater indignity of falling in love with a girl who didn't exist, never had existed, and never would exist-in other words, with an ideal. Perhaps I'm a little susceptible to feminine charms, or rather, perhaps I used to be, for since the disaster of the idealizator, I have grimly relegated such follies to the past, much to the disgust of various 'vision entertainers, singers, dancers, and the like.

  So of late I had been spending my days very seriously trying wholeheartedly to get to the office on time just once, so that I could refer to it next time my father accused me of never getting anywhere on time. I hadn't succeeded yet, but fortunately the N. J. Wells Corporation was wealthy enough to survive even without the full-time services of Dixon Wells, or should I say even with them? Anyway, I'm sure my father preferred to have me late in the morning after an evening with van Manderpootz than after one with Tips Alva or Whimsy White, or one of the numerous others of the ladies of the 'vision screen. Even in the twenty-first century he retained a lot of old-fashioned ideas.

  Van Manderpootz had ceased to remember that he was as modest and shrinking as a violet. “It has just occurred to me,” he announced impressively, “that years have character much as humans have. This year, 2015, will be remembered in history as a very stupid year, in which the Morell prize was given to a nincompoop. Last year, on the other hand, was a very intelligent year, a jewel in the crown of civilization. Not only was the Morell prize given to van Manderpootz, but I announced my discrete field theory in that year, and the University unveiled Gogli's statue of me as well.” He sighed. “Yes, a very intelligent year! What do you think?”

  “It depends on how you look at it,” I responded glumly. “I didn't enjoy it so much, what with Joanna Caldwell and Denise d'Agrion, and your infernal experiments. It's all in the point of view.”

  The professor snorted. “Infernal experiments, eh! Point of view! Of course it's all in the point of view. Even Einstein's simple little synthesis was enough to prove that. If the whole world could adopt an intelligent and admirable point of view—that of van Manderpootz, for instance—all troubles would be over. If it were possible—” He paused, and an expression of amazed wonder spread over his ruddy face.

  “What's the matter?” I asked.

  “Matter? I am astonished! The astounding depths of genius awe me. I am overwhelmed with admiration at the incalculable mysteries of a great mind.”

  “I don't get the drift.”

  “Dixon,” he said impressively, “you have been privileged to look upon an example of the workings of a genius. More than that, you have planted the seed from which perhaps shall grow the towering tree of thought. Incredible as it seems, you, Dixon Wells, have given van Manderpootz an ideal It is thus that genius seizes upon the small, the unimportant, the negligible, and turns it to its own grand purposes. I stand awe-struck!”

  “But what—?”

  “Wait,” said van Manderpootz, still in rapt admiration of the majesty of his own mind. “When the tree bears fruit, you shall see it. Until then, be satisfied that you have played a part in its planting.”

  It was perhaps a month before I saw van Manderpootz again, but one bright spring evening his broad, rubicund face looked out of the phone-screen at me.

  “It's ready,” he announced impressively.

  “What is?”

  The professor looked pained at the thought that I could have forgotten. “The tree has borne fruit,” he expla
ined. “If you wish to drop over to my quarters, we'll proceed to the laboratory and try it out. I do not set a time, so that it will be utterly impossible for you to be late.”

  I ignored that last dig, but had a time been set, I would doubtless have been even later than usual, for it was with some misgivings that I induced myself to go at all. I still remembered the unpleasantness of my last two experiences with the inventions of van Manderpootz. However, at last we were seated in the small laboratory, while out in the larger one the professor's technical assistant, Carter, puttered over some device, and in the far corner his secretary, the plain and unattractive Miss Fitch, transcribed lecture notes, for van Manderpootz abhorred the thought that his golden utterances might be lost to posterity. On the table between the professor and myself lay a curious device, something that looked like a cross between a pair of nose-glasses and a miner's lamp.

  “There it is,” said van Manderpootz proudly. “There lies my attitudinizor, which may well become an epoch-making device.”

  “How? What does it do?”

  “I will explain. The germ of the idea traces back to that remark of yours about everything depending on the point of view. A very obvious statement, of course, but genius seizes on the obvious and draws from it the obscure. Thus the thoughts of even the simplest mind can suggest to the man of genius his sublime conceptions, as is evident from the fact that I got this idea from you.”

  “What idea?”

  “Be patient. There is much you must understand first. You must realize just bow true is the statement that everything depends on the point of view. Einstein proved that motion, space, and time depend on the particular point of view of the observer, or as he expressed it, on the scale of reference used. I go farther than that, infinitely farther. I propound the theory that the observer is the point of view. I go even beyond that, I maintain that the world itself is merely the point of view!”

  “Hub?”

  “Look here,” proceeded van Manderpootz. “It is obvious that the world I see is entirely different from the one in which you live. It is equally obvious that a strictly religious man occupies a different world than that of a materialist. The fortunate man lives in a happy world; the unfortunate man sees a world of misery. One man is happy with little, another is miserable with much. Each sees the world from his own point of view, which is the same as saying that each lives in his own world. Therefore there are as many worlds as there are points of view.