I followed him up the stairs. He climbed them so slowly and with such difficulty that I had to wait on each step until he was above me once more. Watching that weak and uncertain ascent of his, I felt once more the pity and the desire to help him that had been so strong in me on the first morning of my visit. In all this confusion and tragedy Julian had behaved with more poise than the rest of us, an undeviating control over himself which contrasted with my own behavior of the night before. But then, he knew what it was all about. There was no reason for him to feel fear.
Julian’s room was a good deal like mine in its bleakness, though it was smaller. There was something monastic about the meticulously neat bareness of that cubicle where he slept. It must have been a servant’s room when the house was first built, but the fact that it was immediately opposite the door of his workroom was obviously the reason for his selecting it. We sat on the edge of his narrow cot, and I filled and lit my pipe. Julian watched me with impatience.
“Richard,” he began, “before I show you my work in the next room, I want to explain it to you in some detail. Otherwise, you will not be able to appraise the nature of the difficulty that confronts me.”
“I wish you would,” I told him. A sense of sudden excitement came over me. This was the opportunity for which I had been waiting, the chance that Anne and I had tried to plan for. If I was ever to be able to save Julian, it would be now, in the next few minutes. I shook the lethargy and resentment out of my mind and leaned forward to listen.
“You probably know,” Julian began, “that a good many men have tried to do what I am engaged in at the moment. That is, create a mechanism for communication with those who are no longer alive.”
“I didn’t know that.”
“Oh yes. All kinds of machines have been built. Even Thomas Edison tried his hand at one. But of course he never completed it. He had not the background, for one thing . . . In any case, these machines have had one element in common. They have proceeded upon the principle of delicacy. The men who built them apparently believed that sensitivity of mechanism was the most important thing. So they used delicately balanced scales, or needles. Or they created, in a room where all other conditions were controlled, a diaphragmed pressure chamber, wired to reveal whether there was any sentient control able to alter pressures on either side of their instrument. And so on. Hundreds of such experiments must have been made. I surveyed them all years ago. All were failures. Inevitably, because they proceeded on the wrong basis. Radio itself, for example, would have failed as an important medium of communication had it been compelled to rely on nothing but the old-fashioned crystals. It was the vacuum tube, or valve, that opened the way . . .”
He stopped speaking for a moment and I noticed that he was kneading his fingers together as though this summary of his were causing him intense pain. Then he went on, his gaze fixed at the gray sky beyond the window. “When I had finished my survey of the preceding work in the field, I was discouraged. I realized that I should have to begin at the very beginning and I knew there might not be enough time in which to finish. So I did something that you will believe was weak and credulous, Richard. I went to seances.” He looked sidewise at me to see how I took this statement; then apparently reassured by my lack of surprise, he continued: “I can only compare that experience to Benjamin Franklin’s, in his investigation of electricity. He found it in the lightning, so to speak, but mostly there was nothing but darkness.” He smiled at that, slowly and with relish. “Not a bad joke, my boy. ‘Mostly there was darkness.’ But once in a while there was a flash of revelation. I won’t bore you with accounts of them. They convinced me, personally, that Helen was not . . . gone. That she was still alive, and waiting for me. It was in those days that I first met Esther Walters.”
I knew that was the way it must have been, but I was not quite prepared for the sudden wave of sympathy that came up in me as I listened to Julian. Something about that desperate search for reassurance which had taken him so far afield, into places and groups of people that must have seemed fantastically unrelated to his academic life and his own rigid standards of work, made a lump come in my throat. He had always had courage . . . I had to remind myself that I was there to cure Julian, not to abet him in his obsession.
“Of all the people to whom I went,” he continued, “she most clearly demonstrated the power to transcend the immediate physical world. I say ‘immediate’ because, Richard, I am coming to believe that in the space-time continuum there is, perhaps, another world, and that what we call death is more like a . . . removal . . . from our world to that other one. I hope in a moment to give you some proof of that. Anyhow I began to think about my problem in a new way. It was, essentially, a question of bridging a gap. I looked into many things before I satisfied myself that the gap could be bridged.” He looked at me gravely. “I am talking to you as if you were still an undergraduate, Dick. But I want to be clear and untechnical, at least at the start.”
“Quite right,” I assured him. “You understand that I know nothing about this problem of yours. We psychologists leave it alone.”
The irony that I had intended missed its mark. “Yes,” he remarked tolerantly, “I know you do. You put rats in mazes. One of your fellow scientists,” and the way he pronounced that word made me squirm, “once went so far as to put a crab in a maze. The miserable creature darted into one blind alley after another. Then, when it could not solve the maze and reach the food, it huddled in a corner and pulled off its own legs, one after the other . . . That crab was an experimental psychologist of the first water.” He gave me a dry smile.
“What I did next,” he said finally, “was to attempt to discover how, or in what way, the occasional seance, the rare medium of Mrs. Walters’ type, was able to bridge that gap and why the process was so unreliable. My work on this point led me back into my own field of electrophysics. I came to the conclusion that the human nervous system is, in part, an electrophysical field, to put it crudely, and that the elaborate machinery of the seance was a rough and unreliable method of charging that field with a certain potential. In some way which I do not wholly understand, that potential is what bridges the gulf between ourselves and the others.”
This was getting beyond me. It seemed the rankest form of wishful thinking on Julian’s part, a hocus-pocus of hypotheses that no sane research man would bother with for a moment’s time. But Julian was never wholly a sane man. His genius was too great for any such label. He was now, however, so fully launched into his explanation that I had no time for reflection. “Of course,” he pointed out, “I knew that my time, like that of every living man, was limited. In my case only a few years remained to complete the work. So I was unable to make the exhaustive researches at every point in my progress which you and my own colleagues would no doubt regard as essential. I formed the conclusion that the uncertainty of the seance, or of the single medium, and the transitory manifestations of the true other world, were due to the difficulty of building up this potential and the relative speed with which it was discharged. It occurred to me that I might reasonably expect to achieve far better results if I could create that potential, independently of the seance room and even of a medium.”
His eyes were now alive in his head. They no longer looked burnt-out and heavy with weakness and fatigue. His voice was louder, more sure of itself. He stood up and began to pace up and down the room before me. “So I studied the whole matter of the body’s electrical fields. I measured them by certain criteria. I reduced my problem to a formula. And I began the construction of a machine which would make that formula a fact, which would build and maintain the potential of which I have spoken, not only at the level of the seance room or the mediumistic trance, but with infinitely greater power.” He paused in his striding and for the first time his voice lost its assurance. “Possibly I have employed too much power.”
“Is this machine of yours complete, Julian?”
He shook his head. “No, because it does not do all the work f
or which it was built. And yet, I have put into it everything I know. Everything I have been able to discover. There have been times when I was certain of success. But last night—and several times before as well—I have been genuinely distressed by the appearance of certain epiphenomena that I had not expected and which I should like to
show you for the benefit of your opinion. Of course,” he said, more to himself than me, “you will not be able to understand my invention. But you may be able to suggest something in connection with these epiphenomena . . . they worry me a good deal.”
“Is that noise one of them?”
He looked away from me swiftly, as if to hide something which I might read on his face. “You can judge that better in a few moments. All that I want to add now is that Mrs. Walters is at the end of her usefulness to me. She does not understand that fact. Of course I am grateful to her. I shall see that she is rewarded for what she has contributed.” He sighed. “But that does not appear to satisfy her. She wants control over what we have worked out together. We have quarreled about this and a day or two ago I discovered that, against my express instructions, she has been tampering with the machine itself.” He hesitated for a second and I saw his tongue slide over his gray lips. “Tampering is not quite the right term. Experimenting with it. Naturally, in spite of all my warnings and in spite of my telling her that we must proceed with great caution, she has no real understanding of the enormous energies, the terrific potential which the apparatus creates . . .” Something passed across his face as he spoke that elaborate sentence. It was a shadow, whether of sorrow or horror I could not quite determine.
“I have forbidden her further entry to the room where the apparatus now is—across the hall, as you know. She believes that I am trying to exclude her from the final fruits of the research. She also is afraid that I mean what I said yesterday, in that dismal Barsham Harbor courtroom, about making my discovery public without commercializing it.” His face darkened. “Mrs. Walters is a paradoxical person. I think she is as genuinely eager to . . . communicate . . . as I am, but she wants also to make a business of it when we have succeeded. That, of course, is impossible. This is my last piece of work, Dick. I want it to mean the most to the whole world. It should be— it must be—absolutely free to anyone who has need of the same kind of assurance as that for which I have been hungry these last years.”
When he had his voice once more under control, he said, almost
humbly, “Well, that’s the story. I have told you because there is a chance that you will need to know it. And because, if you are to observe with intelligence what I want to show you you will have to understand at least as much as I have told you. I know that you will never repeat it, even to Anne.”
“Of course not, Julian.”
“If you have any questions, save them until later. I want to give you a demonstration now, before we are . . . interrupted.”
I wondered how he expected us to be interrupted, but forbore putting the question. Instead, I followed him out of the room and across the hall. The steel door opened to his key and I stepped behind him over the threshold. I heard the door click shut behind my back.
27.
THREE people only had seen that room in which I found myself: Julian, Mrs. Walters, and Elora Marcy. I was the fourth. Whatever was in here, it would be strange. My heart was hammering at my ribs, and expectation had keyed my nerves high and tense. Julian’s long speech had impressed me. It had left a thousand unanswered queries behind it, but it had convinced me that I was to see something of a sort which no one had beheld before.
My first sensation was one of disappointment. The four windows of the room were shuttered so tight that no light at all came into them except a gray crack or two that left the room almost black. Then there was a click and a sudden blaze of strong light. Julian had turned on a great reflecting lamp that was fastened to the ceiling. The very shock of electric light was a considerable one. The rest of the house, a century old, and the candles and lamps to which I had grown accustomed in the two days I had been in it, made the sudden flood of white light that struck my eyeballs seem unbelievable and out of place. I blinked and looked round me. And then, in one sudden instant, I knew why Julian had kept his apparatus covered when Mrs. Marcy came in to clean. The first sight of it nearly stopped the heart in my chest.
The thing was right in the middle of the room and there was almost nothing else in the place except a pair of wooden kitchen chairs and an old table littered with papers. The walls were bare and discolored with age, but I knew that, like the living room below it, this had once been a noble room. There were windows along the east and south walls and, in the sharp light of the ceiling reflector, I saw that they, too, were of steel like the door. The green paint on their inside surfaces glistened as if they had just been completed and I guessed that they had not been open, in all probability, since the day they were installed.
The apparatus itself was so much of a nightmare that my glance slid off it the first time without any precise attempt to understand what I saw. My impression was of seated figures, human and yet horribly not human, ranged round a black table with a sort of lectern at one end . . . On the second inspection I saw the thing more intelligently. There was, indeed, a table, its top made of ebonite, or some similar plastic, and rubbed to a polish, so that it caught the light from the ceiling in a sort of dark mirror and gave it back to the eye in flashes of negative light.
They were sitting around this table.
There were seven of them. One, with its back toward me, at the rear end of the table, and three along either side. The far end, where the lectern was, appeared to be empty. They were, I saw, all alike, all polished till the copper of their wires glowed, and they were holding hands. At least, their arms ended in five filaments of wire and these were, in each case, linked with the fingers of the figures on either side. From head to foot they were made of wire and there was something terrible in the fact that I could look clean through them. Ludicrously enough, though their posture was that of seated figures, there were no chairs. Instead, they seemed to be fastened to the table itself and supported by ebonite braces at regular intervals.
I looked for one freezing instant at the tableau and then, half-hysterically, I began to laugh. “Good God, Julian,” I said, “when you duplicate a seance, you duplicate it. This looks like a Black Mass in a futurist play.”
He smiled absently and went down the room. “Yes, I suppose it is a bit startling at first. I suspect, too, that a good deal of this is unnecessary. But as I told you, I had no time to experiment at every step of the way. Having discovered how to increase my bridging potential, I made my electronic fields from circuits as close to the ones which actually exist at a seance as I could.”
He went down the row of those fantastic figures, touching one after another. “We have our silly moments, I suppose, Mrs. Walters and I. We’ve named them all.”
“Have you really?” I said in a faint voice. “
This is Hugo,” Julian remarked. “Mrs. Walters named him after a man that used to come to her seances. She told me once he used to try to pinch her in the dark. I’ve never known whether to believe her.” He patted one of the figures on its insubstantial head. “The others are various people, of course. I call the one at the end of the table Arthur. You know, after Arthur Wallace. He loves to preside at any kind of meeting. Or used to.”
“He hasn’t changed,” I replied. It was difficult for me to speak at all. Surprise, the kind of aberrant impulse of humor that makes you want to laugh in church, and a deep alarm and revolted incomprehension made my throat thick. Was it possible that this gleaming travesty of wires and plastics was the source of that sound that had gone whispering through the old, shadowy house and terrified me the night before past all endurance? Had it created that torrent of noise that rolled over Anne and me in the rain-lashed meadow?
Julian was matter-of-fact, of course. It was a familiar story to him and, in one unexpected way, I felt no unfami
liarity myself. Julian’s handiwork was always distinctively his own. Even here I recognized the style of his work, once the first shock of my surprise had worn off. The apparatus shone just as all his equipment had gleamed in the big laboratory back at the university. The absence of every comfort and convenience except the essentials was typical of him. And the curious blend of literalness and imagination, that had made him one of the great creative minds of our time, was evident in this last project as in all the others. Only a literal mind would have been directly impelled to so tremendous a project in the first place. And that same literalness had made him recreate this optical travesty of a seance in the second.
“Come here, Dick,” he said when I remained rooted by the door, staring at his handiwork, minute after minute. “I know this is a curious experience, but I have brought you here not to look at my apparatus, but to show you what it does.” He was standing at the upper end of the table, behind the thing that looked like a reading desk. I went toward him, walking wide around the table, and looked over his shoulder.
It was not a lectern, but a control board. Its face slanted toward him and the dials that sprinkled its slope were, I saw, lighted dimly from below. In the middle of the thing was a single large handle which appeared designed to move in a slot in the face of the instrument itself. Below the table, I noticed, and across the floor, electric cables snaked to a number of outlets along the wall.
“Lord,” I told Julian, “but you’ve polished everything off neatly. It looks completely finished.”
He gave me a single abstracted glance. “Yes. I like things neat. But that is not the point, either. We must hurry; I want you to have plenty of time to observe the phenomena of which I spoke. Are you ready?”
I swallowed. “Yes,” I answered.
He pressed a button and the ceiling light became dim. There remained plenty of light by which to see. I think I could well have read by the light which remained, and that is important in view of what I am about to describe. Julian was talking more to himself than to me, in a low, rapid voice. “I am not sure whether light has an inhibiting effect. It does, of course, in a seance, but that may be a human psychological factor unconnected with the bridging potential. Generally I reduce the amount of illumination and I believe, too, that the power should be applied slowly . . .”
The Rim of Morning Page 45
