The Frank Belknap Long Science Fiction Novel

by Frank Belknap Long

  In another instant, Joyce felt herself being lifted up, with Betty Anne still clinging to her hand. Betty Anne had become to scream with fright. Joyce tightened her grip on the child’s hand. Her only hope was that the wind would set them down again before they went crashing into a tree and were knocked senseless.

  A great roar had begun to fill the forest, as if the wind was converging on the trees from all directions, ripping and tearing at them amidst a vortex of seething violence.

  And suddenly Joyce and Betty Anne were high above the trees, spinning about in a wind that was carrying them toward the marsh with a swiftness that made it almost impossible for them to breathe, but was less violent than the winds that were causing many of the trees below them to topple to the ground now, with crash after deafening crash.

  Their journey was of short duration. The roar beneath them subsided, became a dwindling echo, as faint as an elfin drum. They continued to spin about high in the air until the marsh came into view and they saw beneath them, dazzling in its brightness, an immense, circular object at least a hundred feet in diameter. In another moment they were descending toward it.

  CHAPTER SIX

  At first the men and women imprisoned in the metal-walled compartment had been strangers to one another—and to themselves. When a familiar way of life has been torn up by the roots there is often a brief loss of identity, an inability to function as an independent individual in a world in which everyday reality has lost much of its meaning. Thoughts arise which are chilling—thoughts which seem alien to normal experience and are separated, by no more than a hair’s breadth—from madness, with all of its shrieking terrors.

  To the imprisoned men and women, habits that had been cultivated from childhood, ways of thinking and feeling that had been taken for granted could no longer provide support. And yet, in a strange way, the peril which they all shared made them draw closer together, unconsciously at first and then with a growing awareness of how desperately important it was to become united in their resistance to a coldly merciless foe.

  It was the kind of battle which could not be won if each captive, trapped by a feeling of total isolation, attempted to wage it unaided. A companionship based on mutual trust had to be swiftly established, and more and more the need to achieve such a meeting of minds began to dominate all of their thinking.

  It was not easy to achieve, for the captive men and women differed widely in age, social background and emotional and imaginative sensitivity. But once it had been accomplished, they were amazed to discover how quickly a companionship arising from a shared danger could deepen into a firm and unshakable friendship.

  Joyce Drake and a young man she had never set eyes on before she had been escorted with the Four Children into the compartment, had been the first to be drawn to each other.

  Joseph Wilmont was a garage mechanic and a high school dropout who had spent the last seven years of his uneventful life in California, making it possible for the owners of old-model cars to get a little more mileage out of their sadly battered purchases.

  His specialty was cars, but Joyce soon discovered that he was an all-around mechanical genius and that he was quite remarkable in other respects. Despite his lack of formal education he had read, from the age of fourteen, every book of major importance in the realm of mathematical physics he could borrow, beg or steal.

  He was almost as much interested in biochemistry, comparative anthropology, and ethnology and had given a great deal of thought to the precise role which genetics played in relation to environment in the overall pattern of human behavior.

  He was a little weak on fiction. But he knew enough about educational psychology to discuss some of the new trends with Joyce in a most enlightening way. In fact, there were moments when she would have given way to despair, were it not for his ironic humor. (He had almost succeeded in convincing her that the M.A. she had worked so hard to secure could severely handicap an orphanage supervisor.)

  She stood with him now, and the bright overhead light brought his boyish features into sharp relief. It glinted on his gold-rimmed glasses and the tousled brown hair which did not seem quite suitable to his voice and manner. He seemed much older than his years, more thoughtful and mature than most boys of twenty-two. Even when he was engaging in banter to relieve the tormenting strain and uncertainty which he shared with her and which she could see in his eyes, there was nothing callow about him.

  His maturity she liked—she needed that now. She would have welcomed at her side the presence of a man of forty or forty-five with the quiet inner strength that went with early middle-age, if such a man was neither a coward nor a fool. But Joseph Wilmont was a very good stand-in for that kind of security and something had happened that was making her feel she would not have exchanged him for anyone else, even if he had been as immature inwardly as his boyish resilience seemed occasionally to suggest.

  Her wrist watch told her that it was just two days and seven hours since she had fallen in love for the first time in her life—completely, madly, desperately in love with a boy who was two years younger than herself. And that was just part of the miracle. She could tell by the way his eyes lighted up whenever their hands touched or he looked directly at her that it wasn’t—couldn’t have been—a one-way madness.

  What made it even more of a miracle was the fact that she wasn’t pretty. She had become firmly convinced of that, despite the fact that a few men had thought otherwise before she’d majored in educational psychology at a woman’s college and turned into a tight-lipped potential spinster at twenty-four.

  Now they were observing together the fourteen adults and eight children who shared their captivity. The children were all on their feet, moving about so rapidly that they seemed more numerous than they actually were.

  They ranged in years from five or six to twelve—children who should not be where they were, exposed to a horror that was shattering enough for an adult to endure, and might well leave their young minds permanently scarred, even if the ordeal was of short duration.

  She refused to allow herself to dwell on the possibility that the children might be white-haired before the ordeal ended—might not be returned safely to their homes this side of eternity.

  Yet, strangely enough, they did not appear to be genuinely frightened. They were darting about in a lively way, their activity accompanied by occasional outbursts of merriment, and they seemed no different from children strenuously engaged on a city street in a game of tag, leapfrog, or hide-and-seek.

  For a moment, Joyce’s eyes followed the Four Children for whom she had sacrificed her liberty, in a rescue attempt that had failed. Her feeling toward them had not changed. They were still her children—her own special charges.

  In this metal-walled compartment, a child at play could very easily stumble and be hurt. It happened often enough to cause parents and other guardians of the young some concern. But the compartment provided the Four Children with very little scope for mischief-making, and Joyce was pleased to see them mingling with the others without difficulty.

  The small boy, and the girl who appeared to be no older than Betty Anne, belonging to the tormented-looking man and woman who sat in a shadowed corner of the compartment with their lips tightly compressed, seemed a little more serious-minded than their seven playmates. But their lack of childish exuberance probably meant, Joyce told herself, that the grim concern of their parents had communicated itself to them.

  As if aware of her thoughts, Wilmont said: “Wentworth and his wife are very much in love.” And half to himself, he added, “Does it make it easier or harder, I wonder?”

  “Does what make what easier or harder, Joe? Are you asking yourself whether this awful situation we’re in is made more bearable for the Wentworth’s because they love each other?” He nodded silently, as she continued. “They say, ‘To the dying, speak of the glories of life.’ In other words, if life has been sweet, it is easi
er to die. If life has been barren and unfulfilled, then we go out struggling and saying, ‘But I never really lived at all.’”

  “Yes, I know what you mean,” he broke in eagerly. “There are two things involved here. First, our situation is so full of uncertainty, and in the mind of everyone here, except, thank God, the children, is the thought that we may be facing death…facing death without the small consolation of knowing how we will die. But the thought of facing death is less painful to the Wentworth’s because their lives have been filled with their love for each other and their children. And the second thought I had is that any conflict or problem that is faced by an individual is lessened when that person has a deep and loving relationship with someone. ‘Love is an armor that softens every blow.’… You know, I’ve never talked to anyone this way before.” He smiled, embarrassed by his own fervor.

  Joyce tenderly took his hand. A repressed and conventional person, who would never ordinarily take a baby step in the direction of an attractive man, she found herself propelled by the intimacy and feeling of warmth created by his heartfelt words, and by the incredible pressure of the strange dilemma that faced them all—propelled to speak and act in a manner completely new to her. “We don’t have time for games or maneuvering. I am going to be completely honest with you; take it as you will. I can’t analyze it or justify it, and I refuse to apologize for it…but…I love you. I have been a lonely person. I have never had for any other man the emotions that I have for you.”

  He enfolded her hands in his, and his face told her better than words that she was not being rejected, that he welcomed and responded to her feelings. “Oh, my dear wonderful girl, I can’t explain it, either. Maybe it is the circumstances, but I don’t care about the reason. I haven’t been exactly lonely…there have been several women in my life…”

  She laid two fingers on his lips, aware of the tumultuous pounding of her heart. “I don’t care about that. I don’t want to know about it. All I care about, all I want to know, is that we’re together in this. I’m glad I’ve been lonely up to now; I’m glad my loneliness didn’t push me into taking someone I didn’t really want.”

  “We don’t have to worry about loneliness now—or ever again,” he said, the instant she removed her fingers from her lips.

  “For as long as eternity is,” Joyce said, nodding. “But when we die, eternity may cease to exist for us. Or don’t you believe that?”

  “I’m not sure,” he said. “But right at the moment, it doesn’t seem important.”

  “Please kiss me.” Joyce said.

  “Here, in front of all these less fortunate people?”

  “The Wentworth’s will understand—and so may some of the others.”

  He took her quickly into his arms and for a full minute his lips remained on hers.

  When he released her she turned quickly, her eyes sweeping the compartment. The blood was pounding in her temples and she knew her face was flushed.

  She was sure that everyone in the compartment had been watching them. She wondered if their lovemaking was looked upon as a selfish intrusion when people were doing their best to meet a shared danger with courage and calm dignity.

  She did not see reproach or indignation in any of the eyes that were still trained on her and the children had gone right on playing. Seemingly she had been forgiven.

  Wilmont seemed to be unconcerned about the reactions of their comrades in disaster. He was staring intently at a panel which had glided shut a moment before.

  “You know, darling, we’ve seen that panel open and close at least fifty times on a gloved hand with a tray of food. But I’ve never before noticed—”

  He paused an instant to give her arm a squeeze before bending lower to bring the bottom of the panel on a level with his eyes.

  “I hadn’t noticed before that it isn’t just a perfectly smooth strip of metal grooved into the wall. It glides open and shut smoothly enough, without making a sound, and it looks as though it’s electronically operated. But it may operate on some principle that has nothing to do with electronics.”

  “What makes you say that?” Joyce asked, her interest immediately aroused.

  “See those tiny, stippled dots? They’re arranged in a curious pattern and are so tiny you’d need a magnifying glass to bring them up to pinhead size. They would be invisible at twelve or fifteen inches.”

  Joyce lowered her head until their cheeks were almost touching. “Yes,” she said, after a pause. “I can see them now. What do you think they mean?”

  “Nothing, perhaps,” Wilmont said. “But then again—”

  He straightened abruptly and stared around the compartment, a speculative look in his eyes.

  “I can use a pair of glasses to magnify the dots,” he said. “See if you can collect two or three pairs. I haven’t your persuasiveness.”

  “I’ll try,” Joyce said. “But if I wore glasses, I wouldn’t want to take them off, even for a moment. This is not the right time or place to go stumbling about half-blind.”

  “Try to make them realize how important it is,” Wilmont said. “I’ll have to keep my glasses on, and I’d like to try at least three pairs. I’ll need a strong glass, but not one that is image-distorting. A strong reading lens would be better than a prescription lens. See what you can do.”

  Joyce crossed the compartment, miraculously escaping a collision with the children and approached the seated adults. Four of them were wearing glasses and she talked briefly to each in turn. Moments later she was back at Wilmot’s side.

  “Here are three pairs,” she said. “Mr. Tomlinson’s don’t magnify at all, or so he claims. I let him keep them on his stubby nose because he reminds me so much of an Alice-in-Wonderland rabbit.”

  “Perhaps we’ll have luck, with that kind of rabbit watching us,” he said, returning her smile. “We’ll see.”

  He squatted again, and he’d a lens of each pair in turn, an inch above the dots and then moved further from the panel to increase the magnification until the dots blurred.

  The first pair had evidently been prescribed to correct a bad case of astigmatism and while the magnification was pronounced, the dots looked like micro-organisms whirling about on a slide. The second pair magnified the dots about four times, but it also distorted them. The dots looked like microscopic tadpoles. But the third lens he tried was just right. The magnification, when he held it about seven inches above the panel, made the dots seem almost as large as peas.

  “The poor devil must be almost blind,” he said, “to need glasses this strong.” But Joyce had the feeling that he was saying that to mask his excitement over something that had nothing to do with the glasses or their owner.

  He stared at the dots for two minutes, with an expression of intense concentration. “The pattern,” he said at last, “it’s damned unusual, to say the least. It looks almost like the combination of a safe.”

  “But that’s crazy,” Joyce said. “If the panel is operated on a combination-lock principle, the dial would be on the outside, wouldn’t it?”

  “It isn’t a dial pattern exactly,” Wilmont said, “although it does suggest that. As for its being on the outside… I don’t know. It may be on both sides. Perhaps they want to guard against locking themselves in by accident. They seem to be very thorough about everything they do.”

  “Twenty dots, arranged in an unusual way,” Joyce said. “I hope you don’t seriously think you can get that panel open just by staring at them.”

  He turned and looked at her. “It’s unbelievable,” he said. “That’s precisely what I was thinking. Whatever put that idea into your head?”

  “I don’t know,” she said. “It just came to me.”

  “But you didn’t take it seriously,” he said. “I do.”

  “I was just speaking sarcastically, of course. You mean you really think—”

  “I don’t know
what to think. The same thought occurred to us both. Just suppose—I know it’s wild, but the whole thing is wild—just suppose that panel operates…well, telepathically, by thought impulses, or ESP or whatever you want to call it. Perhaps those dots are laden with a kind of thought-impulse energy—a static or stored up energy—that can be released if you stare at them in just the right way.”

  “It may be very different from a photo electric eye mechanism which can open a door when you approach, and close it again after you. And that stored-up, thought-impulse potential may be so strong that it communicated itself to us just now, made us both obscurely aware—gave us a hint—that the panel can be opened by the power of thought alone.”

  “But what would you have to do? Just continue to stare at the dots?”

  “Perhaps…with intense concentration. Or it may require more than simple concentration. The way the dots are arranged may be important. Why do they suggest the dial combination of a safe, when there’s nothing actually dial-like about the pattern? A dial of a safe has to be manipulated, either by someone who knows the combination or who has the skill of an experienced safe cracker. Perhaps, instead of being an agile-fingered safe cracker, I’ll have to be an agile-minded one.”

  Wilmont paused an instant, then went on thoughtfully: “When you stare at an object that’s complicated in structure or just at some unusual design—stare steadily for several minutes and let your vision become a little hazy—have you ever noticed how many incredibly fantastic shapes the object or design can assume? A flower can turn into a human figure, with well-defined arms and legs and a smiling face. Or a figured bookend can become a living-room, filled with brightly dressed men and women moving languidly about.

  “The blurring of your vision conveys an illusion of motion as well. I’ve often wondered if that charge is wholly illusionary. It may be that there is an actual rearrangement in the structural details of the object you are staring at in that almost hypnotic way. The power of thought alone can perhaps manipulate the dial-combination of a very unusual kind of safe and make the portals of the unknown open wide.