DENHAM remembered the soporific drug Varr had once given him, and tested the antidote. He discovered that it speeded up natural function, so that a man dosed with it could work twenty times as fast. That helped, too.
One elad went by, two, part of a third. In the sky a dim star hung: the meteor that was hurtling down with ever-increasing velocity. The meteor that would strike and destroy a world, unless the task was completed in time.
Denham and his helpers were worn and haggard. They could not remember when they had last slept. They existed for only one thing—work. And the machine grew higher.
Time went by. The meteor roared on through the airless void, a cosmic bullet aimed at a planet. When it struck—
The task was finished at last, very close to the deadline. In the small room atop the Tower, above the control room. Denham waited with Varr. Through a window he could see the monstrous, skeletal bulk of the new ray-projector as it towered against the sky, its triple shadows cast grotesquely toward them.
For miles around the Tower, men gathered, waiting, their faces turned upward to where the meteor hung, blotting out half the firmament.
Pitted and scarred and cracked, the monstrous globe was larger than the three moons.
“Ready, Varr?” Denham asked, staring up.
“Yes. It is time.”
He looked into her green eyes for a long moment. She made a queer little gesture, like a salute, and turned away to stare at the oncoming meteor. Denham silently touched a stud on the switchboard near him.
He, too, looked toward the window. From the top of the giant projector a ray was streaming, pale yellow, like a golden river rushing up toward the stars. It seemed to melt into the dark sky, vanishing as though dissipated. Yet Denham knew that those powerful vibrations were continuing on through space itself, reaching out toward the meteor.
Silence. Varr gave a low cry.
“We’ve failed, Denham,” she said, “You destroyed the Listeners, but not their power for evil.”
“It will take time for the beam to reach the meteor,” he reminded her, tight-voiced.
Again he stared at the pallid, scarred globe of the meteor. It was—
It was smaller!
Incredibly, within the space of a few heartbeats, the disk in the sky dwindled, shrank to the size of the smaller moon—and continued to shrink! As the ray tore energy from it, compacting the atomic structure, that cosmic missile of doom shrank—
To invisibility! It was gone!
Denham, weak with reaction, turned off the power, realizing that his hand was shaking. Varr’s face was hidden. And from the thronged thousands outside rose a booming roar of triumph. The waves of sound gusted in through the window. In the distance the lake lay motionless, golden bright in the glow of the triple moons.
“I wish you had tobacco in this world, Varr,” Denham said unevenly. “I’d give plenty for an ordinary cigarette.”
Two elads had passed. One evening Varr found Denham by the lake, where he had first landed. He sat motionless, despondent, staring out at the zones of light on the smooth waters. He did not look up when the girl called to him.
“What is wrong?” She dropped beside him, stretching like the cat she was. “It is good to rest for a bit. But soon I must be back at the Tower. There is so much to do, so much reorganization.”
Denham sighed.
“Your battle’s won, Varr. The Listeners are destroyed. But I’ve lost my battle.”
“Lost?” She turned to look at him. “How?”
“The instant I return to my own world, my time-sense will slow down to normal. The hammer will be falling on Maxwell’s gun. You remember—”
“Of course.” Varr nodded. “A bullet will kill the girl, Lana. But a shield, perhaps—”
“You forget how small I am now. Lana is light-years away from me. The moment I become large, the hammer will fall on that revolver.”
“Could you return with a fire-ray and kill Maxwell?”
“There would be no time. Lana would still die.”
“There is a way,” Varr said very slowly. “It may not work, but it did once.”
“Eh?” Denham jerked around, staring at her. “What do you mean?”
For a moment Varr did not answer.
“That meteor was a bullet fired against this planet,” she said thoughtfully.
Denham drew in his breath.
“The meteor? But—” His eyes narrowed. “Varr, you’re right. That was a bullet—exactly the same problem as mine. And I can solve it the same way!”
Varr was silent, eying him. Denham paused, scowling.
“There’s a difference, though,” he said slowly. “By our standards, that bullet is several light-years away and incredibly vast. Each atom in it would be a solar system to us. It’s too big, Varr. I can’t shrink a universe.”
He stood up.
“Wait a minute. Suppose I mounted a ray-projector in the hull of a spaceship, entered the ship and proceeded to grow large—to the size of a quarter inch in my own world. I could have another projector mounted in the bow.
“I could turn it on the bullet as it emerged from Maxwell’s gun—sure. But,” he sighed tiredly, “I couldn’t move fast enough.”
“The drug?”
Denham’s eyes gleamed with sudden hope.
“That’s it! Of course. The stimulant drug! It’d speed up my reactions to twenty times normal, for a brief period, and that’d be enough.”
He stared up, tilting back his head, at the coldly blazing stars, and his gaze went beyond them, into the farthest depths. He was seeing Lana again, in a world of incredible vastness. It was good to be alive.
“I’m going back to the Tower,” he said at last. “If I can only work this thing out—Coming, Varr?”
She shook her head.
“Not yet. I’ll rest a while.”
He hurried away along the shore of the lake. Once he glanced behind him, to see Varr still motionless, staring out across the golden waters.
CHAPTER XIII
journey’s End
DENHAM did not waste a moment. That night he began to make his plans, till exhaustion forced him to rest. His sleep was broken by dreams of Lana and a laughing, sardonic Maxwell, who suddenly changed into a bullet, cosmically huge.
The next few elads Denham never remembered quite clearly. All his thoughts were focused on finishing the task, preparing for the incredible experiment. And, impossibly, at last it was finished.
The spaceship had his ray-projector built into the hull, so that the space-vessel and all it contained were equally affected by the device. Nor was that all. A portable beam-projector was set in the bow, before a transparent window.
By the lake lay the spaceship, a gleaming torpedo of burnished metal. Against the darkening sky the Tower rose, like a gun pointed at the zenith. But the Tower was harmless now, the power of the Listeners forever broken.
Denham stood with Varr, Corek and Morlan beside the ship, letting his gaze drift out across the surface of this world of which he had seen so little. A sudden pang of nostalgia gripped him.
“I’d like to stay here longer,” he said at last. “But it isn’t my world, is it?”
Varr’s green, strange eyes searched his.
“No. And we are not your people. You have saved us, Denham. Perhaps you should not stay too long.”
An odd note had crept into her voice.
Morlan and Corek saluted Denham. In the gathering darkness, Varr pressed his hand and stepped back, a slim, feline figure that melted into the shadows and was gone. Her voice came, a little husky.
“Good-by.”
With a sudden shock Denham saw her cat-eyes shining in the dark.
Shining—with tears?
Then he was in the ship, the port had closed, and the dark landscape was dropping away beneath him. Again the glare of the sun bathed him as he rose. The Tower shone for a brief moment and was gone. The lake—vanished.
Gone, all of it. Denham caught his br
eath and turned to the control board. Grimly he made careful adjustments. When he looked again, the planet was a lonely sphere, spinning slowly through space, into the darkness from which there would be no return.
Denham seated himself before the projector at the bow, eyed the instrument panel and took a flask of the stimulant drug from his pocket. When he drank, his reactions would be twenty times as fast as normal—no, nearly fifty times, for he had analyzed and improved the elixir.
He drank. His finger touched a button. Now he must not hesitate.
Stars outside the window appeared to drive at him like fireflies as the spaceship expanded gigantically. It did not take long. Denham scarcely knew when those stars had coalesced into a lens-shaped shining mist. His perspective seemed to change. Beneath him was gray, rough surface.
Concrete. The concrete floor of the room under Science Hall at the university from which he had fled into Varr’s atomic universe.
Two gigantic figures loomed in the distance. Rex Maxwell, unscrupulous munitions broker, and Lana Bellamy, Denham’s fiancée. The killer’s gun was aimed at Lana’s temple, and the hammer was falling.
No—not yet. The stimulant drug had stepped up Denham’s life processes, making the tableau seem frozen before his eyes.
HE SENT the spaceship, no longer gigantic but small as a fly, racing forward. Momentum helped. He swerved up, flashing in between Lana and Maxwell.
The hammer had fallen.
The gun, seen through the transparent port, was like an incredibly gigantic picture. Denham decelerated with one hand and reached with the other for the stud that activated the ray-projector. He seemed momentarily to be back in Varr’s atomic world, with the meteor plunging down from the sky.
But it was not a meteor. It was Maxwell’s bullet, emerging from the gun’s muzzle. With his stepped-up senses, Denham could actually see the missile driving slowly toward him.
From the bow of the tiny spaceship a golden beam lanced out.
And the bullet dwindled and was gone. Just as the meteor had vanished, elads ago, shrunk by the power of Denham’s ray!
It was Maxwell’s last bullet, Denham knew. He had kept count. The man would have to take time to reload. In those few seconds, Denham must act.
He sent the ship driving down, grounded it and swung open the port. His own helmet projector—the original one—he slipped into place on his head as he leaped out on the concrete floor. He pressed the belt stud.
The room dwindled instantly. Things resumed their normal appearance. Lana was still where Denham had last seen her, off balance and falling. Maxwell, too, was collapsing.
As Denham plunged forward, he saw both figures strike the floor and lie still. Lana had struck her head; there was a blue welt rising on her forehead. But she was not seriously injured.
And Maxwell?
Blood stained the broker’s broad chest. Denham leaned closer and then he drew back, sickened, as he realized what had happened.
The shrinking ray had acted not only on the bullet. It had driven on inexorably through Maxwell’s body, leaving a neat hole that went directly through the killer’s heart.
Maxwell was dead.
Denham glanced down at the curious garments on his own body. Lana would be astonished. He bent down and lifted her limp body in his arms. He went toward the door.
It was all over. But before he crossed the threshold, Denham looked back. Later he would return to reclaim the spaceship. It was tiny now, but it could be expanded to a satisfactory size.
Now empty, save for Maxwell’s prostrate body, the cement room under the Science Hall stood bare. Yet a trillion worlds existed beneath Denham’s feet. On one of them, he realized, he had fought and lived and triumphed for months.
Poignantly came back the memory of the dark lake, with the triple moons glowing upon it, and the spire of the Tower threatening the sky.
He saw again the black girders of the gigantic ray-projector he had built. That projector had saved a world. Varr—strange, gallant Varr, with her catlike eyes and her almost human loveliness—
But Varr had died!
Time moved so much faster in the sub-atomic universe. Varr was dust. Dust, too, were all the others Denham had known in that bizarre, unearthly world.
A mere second here—years on Varr’s planet. The whole thing had passed like a dream, all those episodes of high adventure and dauntless battle. That dream would not come again, ever.
Denham stepped across the threshold, closing the door behind him. Lana’s slight body was comforting in his arms. She was real, at least.
There would be other dreams.
MASQUERADE
Watch out for trap-doors, secret panels and clutching hands . . . and the Henshawe vampires!
“LOOK,” I said to Rosamond bitterly. “If I started a story like this, any editor would shoot it back—”
“You’re too modest, Charlie.”
“—with the usual kindly crack about rejection-doesn’t-necessarily-imply-lack-of-merit-but-the-story-smells. So here we are. Honeymooning. Storm comes up. Forked lightning crackles across the sky. Rain comes down in torrents. And that house we’re heading for is obviously a deserted lunatic asylum. When we bang the old-fashioned knocker, there’ll be shuffling footsteps and a very nasty-looking old coot will let us in. He’ll be so glad to see us, but there’ll be a mocking gleam in his eye when he starts talking about a legend of vampires that hang out around here. Not that he believes in such things, but—”
“But what makes his teeth so sharp?” Rosamond gurgled, and then we were on the rickety porch and knocking on the oak panel that lightning showed us. We did it again.
Rosamond said, “Try the knocker. Mustn’t use the wrong formula.”
So I banged the old-fashioned knocker, and there were shuffling footsteps. Rosamond and I looked at each other incredulously and grinned. She’s very pretty. We like the same things—preferably unconventional—and so we get along well together. Anyhow, the door opened and a very nasty-looking old coot was standing there, with an oil-lamp in one gnarled hand.
He didn’t seem too surprised. But his face was such a nest of wrinkles it was difficult to make out any changes of expression there. A beak of a nose shot out like a scimitar, and his tiny eyes were greenish in the dim glow. Oddly, he had thick, coarse black hair. The sort that would look well on a corpse, I decided.
“Visitors,” he creaked. “We have few visitors here.”
“You must get plenty hungry between callers,” I cracked, and edged Rosamond into the hall. It smelled of must. So did the old man. He shut the door against the fury of the wind and beckoned us into a parlor. We brushed against old-fashioned beaded curtains and found ourselves back in the Victorian era.
Grandpop had a sense of humor. “We don’t eat visitors,” he remarked. “We just kill them and steal their money. But pickings are poor nowadays.” He laughed like a triumphant hen with embryonic quintuplets. “Me,” he said, “I’m Jed Carta.”
“Carter?”
“Carta. Sit down, dry off, and I’ll build a fire.”
We were drenched. I said, “Can we borrow some clothes? We’ve been married for years, if you’re wondering. But we still feel sinful. The name’s Denham, Rosamond and Charlie.”
“Not honeymooners?” Carta seemed disappointed.
“It’s our second honeymoon. More fun than our first. Romance, huh?” I said to Rosamond.
“Yeah. It gits yuh,” she agreed. A card, my wife. The only woman smarter than me that I don’t hate. She’s quite pretty, even when she looks like a drowned kitten.
Carta was building a fire on the hearth. “A lot of people lived here once,” he remarked. “Only they didn’t want to. They were mad. But it isn’t an asylum any more.”
“That’s your story,” I said.
He finished with the fire and shuffled toward the door. “I’ll get you some clothes,” he said over his shoulder. “That is, if you don’t mind being left alone here.”
“Don’t you believe we’re married?” Rosamond inquired. “Honest, we don’t need a chaperon.”
Carta exhibited a few snags of teeth. “Oh, it ain’t that. Folks around here have got some queer ideas. Like—” He chuckled. “Ever heard tell of vampires? People been saying that there’s been a sight of deaths in this neighborhood lately.”
“Rejection-doesn’t-necessarily-imply-lack-of-merit,” I said weakly.
“Eh?”
“It—doesn’t matter.” I looked at Rosamond, and she looked back at me.
CARTA said, “Not that I take any stock in such things.” He grinned again, licked his lips, and went out, slamming the door after him. He locked it, too.
“Yes, darling,” I said. “He had green eyes. I noticed.”
“Did he have pointed teeth?”
“He only had one. And that was worn down to the bone. Maybe some vampires gum their victims to death. It doesn’t sound conventional, though.”
“Maybe vampires aren’t always conventional.” Rosamond was staring into the fire. Shadows were dancing around the room. Lightning flared outside. Rejection-does-not-necessarily—
I found some dusty afghans and shook them out. “Peel,” I said briefly, and we hung our garments before the blaze, wrapping up in the afghans till we looked like indigent Indians. “Maybe it isn’t a ghost story,” I said. “Maybe it’s a sex story.”
“Not if we’re married,” Rosamond countered.
I just grinned. But I was wondering. About Carta. I don’t believe in coincidences. It was easier, somehow, to believe in vampires.
The door was opened, and the man who came in wasn’t Carta. It looked like the village idiot—a gross, obese mountain of a man with thick, slobbering lips and rolls of fat around his open collar. He hitched up his overalls, scratched himself, and smirked at us.
“He’s got green eyes, too,” Rosamond remarked.
The newcomer had a cleft palate. But we could understand what he said, all right.
“All our kin’s got green eyes. Grandpaw’s busy. He sent me back with these. I’m Lem Carta.” Lem had a bundle across his arm, and he tossed it at me. Old clothes. Shirts, overalls, shoes—clean enough, but with the same musty smell.
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