“He complained of violent headaches, set up no doubt by the ever-increasing pressure of the enlarging machine. It at last burst its own space and came into ours, an object slightly bigger than a bullet, a perfectly made but extremely tiny object like a space machine, carrying beings maybe a quarter of a centimetre high. It passed through Bland’s skull and settled on the inkstand, which would appear to those within the machine to resemble a plain. The heat of the energy change and brief atmospheric friction made it hot enough to burn the wood of the inkstand. I also believe that these beings had the power of thought-transference, and because of their thoughts, Bland knew in advance what was coming, but he could only interpret it as horror at the prospect of destroying—and having destroyed—so many other universes.”
“This is ridiculous!” Wilson protested. “What about the bullet?”
“It is not ridiculous!” Lloyd declared. “For here is the atom-ship itself....” And from his overcoat pocket he took a gleaming copper object like a cigar. It had small, perfectly made portholes and a conning tower.
“Why, that’s mine!” Wilson exclaimed in amazement. “Where did you find it—?”
He stopped, confused, and looked about him. In amazement every eye was fixed upon him. He hesitated for a moment and then swung to a steel locker. Unfastening it swiftly, he searched within and brought a second copper cylinder to view, not unlike the one Lloyd possessed. He swung round sharply, to meet a levelled gun in Lloyd’s hand.
“As a private citizen, Mr. Wilson, I can use a gun to keep you covered whereas the police cannot,” he explained. With his free hand he tossed down his copper model on the bench.
“Model work is but another of my gifts,” he explained. “As I imagined an atomic space machine would look. I’m glad you tripped yourself up, Mr. Wilson. I’ll take that.”
He seized the copper cylinder from Wilson’s hand and set it carefully on the bench. Wilson breathed hard.
“All right, so you tripped me,” he admitted. “I didn’t murder anybody, though, so you can’t hold that against me.”
“No, but you did your best to get Travers convicted! Why?”
“Because he is a nuclear physicist and I am just a mathematician. The Board would have elected him as chief of this unit over me after Bland’s death, so I got him out of the way. There was a second reason. I wanted that atom ship for myself. I had intended to examine it thoroughly and open a branch of atomic science—atom travelling—which would have made me world famous.”
“Evidently you have a mathematician’s agile brain, Wilson,” Lloyd commented. “From the reports of your actions I will outline what happened—and don’t anybody dare interrupt me! You went with Dr. Bland to his sanctum as he asked. When there you saw him die, saw the projectile land on the inkstand. You are scientist enough to realize what had happened. You thought fast. Here was a new departure in science—atom travel—performed by beings from an unknown dimension. It could mean great power for you if you kept the secret. You returned here, took Travers’ gun from the locker, and went back to the sanctum. You fired a bullet silently somehow, probably by the old trick of smothering it in a cushion, which you afterwards hid. The bullet you put on the inkstand and took away the cooled atom-ship. The revolver you threw under the desk. It had no fingerprints. You must have put your own on it when firing it but naturally wiped them off again—and any of Travers’ also.
“Next you told Travers that Bland wanted him. He obeyed. You created a sound like a gunshot in the corridor where it could be heard—possibly by bursting a paper bag or something. The rest was simple. Travers had no alibi: it was known he did not like Bland, and there the thing was. How I arrived at my theory of an atom-ship I have already explained to Inspector Branson— Well, Wilson how right am I?”
“Dead right,” the mathematician growled. “I’d forgotten such scientific detectives as you even existed. But I did not kill anybody and I still claim that that atom-ship is mine.”
“Not yours exclusively,” Lloyd replied. “It is the property of science as a whole—a revelation of life within the infinite Small. As for you, my friend, your efforts to get Travers accused of murder are for the law to deal with.”
Lloyd turned away and looked at the perfect machine on the bench. With a small pair of tweezers he opened the airlock—with which Wilson had obviously already tampered—and rolled the ship on its side. Queerly dressed but perfectly formed creatures, no larger than a match-head, rolled out. They were stiff in death.
“A pity,” Lloyd sighed. “The journey killed them, otherwise—with my genius and theirs—what a story there would have been to tell!”
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
British writer John Russell Fearn was born near Manchester, England, in 1908. As a child he devoured the science fiction of Wells and Verne, and was a voracious reader of the Boys’ Story Papers. He was also fascinated by the cinema, and first broke into print in 1931 with a series of articles in Film Weekly.
He then quickly sold his first novel, The Intelligence Gigantic, to the American magazine, Amazing Stories. Over the next fifteen years, writing under several pseudonyms, Fearn became one of the most prolific contributors to all of the leading US science fiction pulps, including such legendary publications as Astounding Stories, Startling Stories, Thrilling Wonder Stories, and Weird Tales.
During the late 1940s he diversified into writing novels for the UK market, and also created his famous superwoman character, The Golden Amazon, for the prestigious Canadian magazine, the Toronto Star Weekly. In the early 1950s in the UK, his fifty-two novels as “Vargo Statten” were bestsellers, most notably his novelization of the film, Creature from the Black Lagoon.
Apart from science fiction, he had equal success with westerns, romances, and detective fiction, writing an amazing total of 180 novels—most of them in a period of just ten years—before his early death in 1960. His work has been translated into nine languages, and continues to be reprinted and read worldwide.
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