I lit a cigarette and went into Fabrin’s office, wondering. There were papers scattered all over a big mahogany desk, and I glanced at them idly. But they were merely case histories and business letters; I turned away as a girl came running in.
She pulled up short at sight of me. I looked her over. A nurse, obviously, and a very pretty one, with auburn hair curling from under the white cap, and a round little face that was thoroughly frightened at the moment. Her blue eyes were desperate.
“Oh . . . where’s Doctor Fabrin?”
I shrugged. The girl looked around frantically.
“I’ve got to find him. I—I—something’s happened!”
“Can I help?” I asked, and without waiting for an answer I took her arm and steered her back into the hall. If there was any news breaking in Palmview Hospital, Bob Hailey was going to get it.
The nurse seemed scared to death. She hesitated a second, and then hurried back to the room which I had left a while ago, where the “bleeder” had been.
I got one look at the incredible thing there, and shut the door in a hurry, dragging the girl inside with me. My stomach started to jerk. The nurse’s hand flew up to her mouth and she got even paler.
I didn’t blame her. The wheel-chair was lying in crushed ruin, and beside it was—a head. The head of some animal, though I didn’t recognize it. It was as big as the bed, covered with warty grayish hide, with a single huge eye glazing in death. That impossible monstrosity looked something like a toad’s head, a toad grown to elephantine size, and out of the slobbering muzzle protruded a man’s head and shoulders.
I recognized the poor devil—the bleeder, with an expression on his face that turned me sick. He was dead, and I hoped death had come quickly. His chest cavity, I could see, had been crushed and mangled by the jaws of the monster.
The nurse started to tremble violently; she was on the verge of hysteria. I pushed her out into the hall. “Wait a minute,” I said. “Get a grip on yourself, for God’s sake.” But my own voice was unsteady.
WHEN I went back into the room. I had a job to do, and I didn’t like it. I examined that ghastly monstrosity thoroughly, and was no wiser when I had finished. At first I did have some crazy idea that Doctor Fabrin had removed the growth limitations from a frog or a toad—made it into a giant by glandular treatment. or something of the sort. Like in Wells’ Food of the Gods. But that wasn’t it. This creature wasn’t a toad; it was something I had never seen before.
I did make one discovery. The thing’s head had been sliced cleanly from its body; a sticky whitish sort of blood was oozing from the stump, and I could see the gray of cartilage and nerve-tissue, not torn, but cut as though with a razor. It was utterly impossible. For one thing, a head of that size couldn’t have got in by door or windows. For another, the body would have been as big as a dinosaur’s, and you couldn’t hide such a gigantic mass of flesh under the bed. It just couldn’t have happened.
The nurse was waiting outside the door when I went out. She’d managed to calm down a bit, though her eyes were wide and afraid. “Is—he’s dead, isn’t he?” she got out.
“Yeah,” I said. “What happened.”
“I heard the boy scream. When I went in, it was like that. Only he was still alive, and that thing was—chewing—” She started to shiver again. Before she could get hysterical I said:
“Just the head? No body?”
“Just as you saw it. That head—”
“We’re going to find Fabrin,” I grunted. An interne came along, and I called him over.
“Listen,” I said. “You stay outside this door on guard. Don’t let anybody go in—except Fabrin. And don’t go in yourself. Get it?”
He looked at the nurse. “Is that okay, Jean—Miss Benson?”
She managed to nod, and I said, “Where’s Fabrin, anyway?”
“With Humphreys.”
Jean said swiftly, “That’s upstairs.” I followed her as she ran along, with a flashing of slim silken legs.
“Humphreys?” I asked as we hurried up the stairway. “The big-shot gambler?”
“Uh-huh. He was shot—”
I remembered. Humphreys had tried to horn in on too many rackets, and somebody had put six slugs in him a few months before.
“His lung was pierced,” Jean told me. “The right lobe. He won’t live, I’m afraid.”
WE FOUND Fabrin with Humphreys, trying to calm the gambler. The patient, a short, chunky guy with stiff black hair growing down almost to his shaggy eyebrows, was scared to death. He was trying to get out of bed, and Fabrin was holding him back.
“I seen it, I tell you,” Humphreys yelped. “Eyes, watching me—big staring eyes, and crazy colors and lights. Doc, I can’t stand it laying here not able to do anything. You gotta get me well—you gotta!”
“Hold on to yourself,” Fabrin soothed. “A few more weeks and you’ll be on your feet again.” The doctor’s beefy face was chalk-white as he glanced at us. “Miss Benson, help me! You too, Hailey.”
The three of us managed to keep Humphreys in his bed. The gambler finally lay quiet, his frightened eyes following Fabrin.
“You can cure me, Doc. You grew a leg on that cripple—you won’t let a few: slugs kill me, will you?”
Fabrin said a few soothing words and I took him aside. I told him what had happened. For a minute he looked like a madman.
“Oh, my God! Again!” He grabbed my arm. “Don’t write this up, Hailey! I’ve got to see you—explain. But this mustn’t get in the papers!”
I didn’t answer, and he rushed out, almost knocking over Hillman, whose bald dome was gleaming with sweat as he popped into the room. The Rural Correspondent was shaking with excitement. He tried to hold Fabrin, but the doctor shook him off. Hillman saw me.
“Hailey! Naismith’s got away—I couldn’t stop him. He’s downstairs. Go after him, will you? I’ll get Fabrin.” Without waiting for a reply he ran after the doctor. I turned to the nurse. “What’s he talking about? Naismith?” Before she spoke I remembered. Naismith was the physicist who had leased the basement for his work, and blown himself up a while ago.
Jean glanced at the gambler, who was lying back with eyes closed, whispering to himself.
“We’d better go after Naismith. Humphreys is all right now.”
And downstairs we went again. Apparently the elevators weren’t working.
My legs were getting pretty tired running around this madhouse.
A labyrinth of underground corridors, badly lighted, lay under the hospital. Jean seemed to know where to go. “He’ll head for his laboratory,” she told me—and she was right.
The sound of cracking wood revealed Naismith’s whereabouts. Along the passage we caught sight of a gaunt, tall man smashing his shoulder against a door. The panel gave as we ran forward, and Naismith plunged out of sight.
I reached the threshold in time to see the man run through a room cluttered with scientific apparatus, jerk open another door, and slam it behind him. I followed, Jean at my heels. I turned the knob quietly.
BUT there was no need for caution.
Naismith was standing, a lean silhouette, against a blaze of bluish light that glared out from a spot about in the center of the room, halfway between two metal globes propped up on stilts. It looked like one of those gadgets for making artificial lightning. Naismith turned around and saw us. His sallow face, all pounches and hollows, twitched and jerked.
His voice surprised me. It was deep and cultured; I had expected the shrieks of a madman, though I don’t know why; but Naismith simply said gently, “Where’s Fabrin, Miss Benson?”
“Upstairs. You shouldn’t be here, Mr. Naismith. You’re still convalescent.”
I was looking at the spot of light near by. Somehow I had a hunch. “Mr. Naismith,” I said. “I’m a reporter from the—’ ”
He stared, and then his worn face was suddenly hopeful. “A reporter! You’re just the man—the one man who can help. Listen, the hospital’s got to be
evacuated. Right now. There’s deadly danger here, and Fabrin’s incapable of realizing it. I’ve tried to tell him, but he sees a chance to make a fortune, and he won’t believe me. He won’t let himself believe.”
Naismith pointed at the gleaming point of light. “See that? It doesn’t look like much, does it? But it’s got more danger—more potential energy—than a billion tons of dynamite. It’s a new type of matter. No—I shouldn’t have said new, for it’s always existed in the Universe, though nobody has ever before realized what it is. In that speck is the explanation of the breakdown of causality. The explanation of Charles Fort’s mysteries.” I’d referred to the Fortean Society more than once in news stories, but I’d always been skeptical. “You mean Fort’s yarn about the sky being a solid, with the stars explained away as volcanoes?” Naismith made an impatient gesture. “Fort wasn’t infallible. That’s rot, of course. But he did collect a great deal of data that couldn’t be explained away by known physical laws. Liquids appearing out of nowhere—that tree in Akron where water kept falling, without a cloud in the sky to account for it. Stones dropping out of nowhere, fantastic monsters appearing, creatures that couldn’t be hybrids, the ultra-biological skull they found in Australia in 1846. The disappearance of the Cyclops. The woman found in her room burned to calcined bones, without her clothing or the carpet being scorched. The so-called fourth-dimensional gap in Bristol in 1873, when a man saw matter warped and twisted incredibly. Those aren’t ghost stories! They seem impossible—but not when the key’s found.”
“Fantastic monsters appearing . . .” I was remembering that toad-creature upstairs, the frightful head that had apparently sprung out of empty air. Yet I wasn’t convinced. I listened skeptically as Naismith went on.
“The law of determinism has been broken down—that is, the rule of mathematical sequence of phenomena. One and one don’t always make two. Max Planck, Max Born, Weyl, Bohr—they’ve shown that, and Eddington has written a good deal about it. Perhaps you know his kettle analogy—the chance that if you put a kettle of water on the fire, the water will freeze. It isn’t much of a chance; it’s much more probable that the heat will flow from the fire to the kettle. But there is a chance that it’ll flow the other way. Look here!”
HE SNATCHED a book from a near-by table, thumbed through it rapidly, pointed to a marked paragraph. “Here’s Eddington’s explanation—see that?”
I read, “If the event happens . . . there is no foundation for the system of physical law accepted by science, and the apparent uniformity of Nature observed up to now is merely a coincidence.”
Naismith said, “Eddington refers to his kettle—he gives that as the most logical—or least illogical—explanation of a reversal of physical laws. But he’s missed an important point. His ‘apparent uniformity of Nature’ is a misstatement. What of the known reversals of Nature—Peter Rugg, the man who vanished without a trace, Fort’s data, that inexplicable poison gas that appears sometimes in a valley in—where is it? France or Belgium . . . it doesn’t matter. The fact remains that physical laws are broken, and causality fails, as every scientist should realize.”
Naismith pointed to the spot of light. “Our space-time continuum is stable, for the most part obeying stable laws. But there also exists a type of wave-motion that reverses stability. This vibration is diffused all through the Universe; we notice it in sub-atomic experimentation, but because of the diffusion this instability is usually confined to the sub-microscopic. We can’t accurately plot the path of an electron because of this strange wave-motion.”
I glanced quickly at the doorway, thinking I heard a rustle of movement. But it was not repeated. Naismith went on swiftly.
“Occasionally these instability waves may be compressed into a small area—crowded together, as the atoms in the interior of a star are compressed. When that takes place, causality is not only made invalid but reversed. Determinism fails, and indeterminism becomes the dominant characteristic. In such wave-eddies physical laws are based on instability instead of stability, and anything can happen. Liquids may appear from nowhere. Fantastic creatures may appear. A ship may be cleared of its crew but otherwise unharmed. A man—a Peter Rugg—may vanish.”
Naismith turned to the girl. “Miss Benson, tell this man the circumstances of my accident, please.”
The nurse said, “Why—I really don’t know. We found you in the furnace room downstairs, with a few contusions and a slight concussion.”
“Exactly. The furnace room was locked, wasn’t it? From the outside?”
Jean nodded.
“Well, I’ll tell you what happened. I attempted to concentrate these instability waves artificially—and I succeeded.” He pointed again at the spot of light. “Immediately the laws of illogic prevailed. A submicroscopic accident occurred. My body is composed of electric charges—their combined bulk amounting to less than a billionth of my own. I’m mostly emptiness. So is this concrete floor. It’s possible—but very improbable—that all the electric particles of the floor, might just happen to miss all the particles of my body, and in such a case I’d simply slide down through it, as I’d drop through water.
“One chance of illogic in a world of logic. But under the impact of the instability waves, the chance was reversed. It became one chance of logic in a world of illogic. I simply fell through the floor—and nearly killed myself.”
“Wait a minute,” I said sharply.
IT WAS almost certain I heard movement in the adjoining room. I made a step toward the threshold—and suddenly the door slammed shut. I heard a key click in the lock. The sound of footsteps came, and grew fainter.
“Fabrin!” Naismith said. “He heard us!”
“Looks like it,” I grunted. “I’ll have to break down the door.” A thought made me turn to the physicist.
“Those miraculous cures—this, instability wave of yours is responsible for them ?”
“Of course. It was illogical for a man to grow a new leg, for a boy to be cured of hemophilia, but illogic is the dominant characteristic in this type of matter. Fabrin immersed the leg-stump in a saline solution, pumped in calcium, phosphates, iron—the elements that form the human body.” Now Naismith’s face was worried. “But occasionally there’s a pulsation—the thing throws out a wave of energy, some kind of quanta—and they spread out, like ripples on a pond, for a considerable distance. Everything in their path—”
“I get it,” I said, remembering the curious shock I had felt upstairs, just before things started to go haywire. “How far does this ripple of yours go?”
“Not far, I think. A few thousand yards before it’s diffused and dissipated into space. But everyone in this hospital is in deadly danger, subject to the instability laws.”
“Well, we’d better get out of here,” Jean said. “Can you break down the door ?”
“I’ll try it,” I said. But just then the key clicked again, and the panel opened.
A man stepped into the room and carefully shut the door behind him. It was Humphreys, the gambler, in his pajamas, and he had an automatic in his hand. His little eyes were bloodshot, the pupils distended.
“Back up,” he growled. “All of you. Quick!”
Jean started toward him. “Mr. Humphreys, you shouldn’t be out of bed—” He whipped out a hairy arm and thrust her roughly back. She fell against a table and nearly lost her footing. Humphreys said, “I’m onto you. The Doc told me what you was trying to do. You want to get me outa here, huh?”
Naismith said, “Listen, man, you’ve got to get out of Palmview. Everybody! You’re in danger—”
The gambler grinned angrily. “Yeah, the Doc was right. You’re all against me, trying to get me out so Fabrin can’t cure me. He says I’ll croak unless I stay here another week or two, with him ’tending to me.”
I realized that Humphreys’ mind had cracked. The fear of death, the fantastic things that had occurred, all these had made him a perfect tool for Fabrin.
“The Doc gave me this rod. Sai
d he’d let me croak unless I got you—all three of you. So—”
I HEARD a scuffle from beyond the door. Something went over with a crash and a tinkling of glass. I heard Fabrin’s voice raised in a harsh shout—and the voice of little Hillman, the Rural Correspondent, shrill with fear and anger. The gambler fired.
His hand was shaky; the bullet screamed past my ear, and a deep-toned vibration burst out behind me. Naismith cried, “The pulse—look out!”
From the corner of my eye I got a glimpse of the spot of light, its essence shaken and disturbed by the released energy of the bullet, expanding—spreading out in concentric ripples of radiance. But I was plunging toward Humphreys, my skin crawling with expectation of a slug, seeing the gambler’s gun swing in my direction. I heard the sound of a shot—
And again I felt the curious shock I had felt once before, the jolting, indescribable jar of Naismith’s instability wave. My arm was flung out in front of me, and I felt something strike my hand—very lightly.
I cannoned into Humphreys. That was the word! I smashed into him like a pile-driver, driving him back against the door, and—through it!
I heard him scream, his voice knife-edged with agony, as he went down. I couldn’t stop myself. There were two dark figures struggling before me, Fabrin and Hillman. Somehow I managed to swerve aside so I hit the doctor, but I saw little Hillman go spinning into a corner as my arm brushed him.
My shoulder drove into Fabrin. The man was a giant; I was no match for him physically. Yet under the impact of my rush he went plunging back, clear across the room, wrecking chairs and tables and equipment, and hitting the wall with a jolt that held him upright, unconscious, for seconds before he slid down in a heap.
I plunged at the wall, my arms outflung to break the force of the impact. My elbows cracked, nearly snapped. But I managed to halt, and stood there, gasping, trying to figure out what had happened.
Jean and Naismith ran out of the laboratory and stood staring at me. The girl had something in her hand, and she held it out wordlessly. A flattened little lump of lead that had once been a slug.
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