“The needle is now pointing to the converter-globe two miles away,” Grifa explained. “Any great center of electricity attracts the needle—or if need be any particular mass of matter.” He paused. “We are dead-sighted on that abominable creation of yours. Let’s see what we can do with it.”
Switches moved. Power hummed. Nothing of a visible nature left the gigantic projector, but after a second or two the needle in the vacuum-globe suddenly jumped into a vertical position and became steady. Grifa gave a deep sigh and stood back.
“It’s destroyed,” he said thankfully. “The electrical mass is no longer there. The needle proves it. We had better look for ourselves.”
They hurried out of the laboratory together and to the main rooms on the ground floor. From the window they gazed out beyond the milling people and caverns of darkness to the spot where a glowing point of light had been. It had vanished. There was void.
“And—and that should cure the trouble?” Nal asked.
“Perhaps.” The First Physicist turned from the window as an eddying gust of wind hurled expected rain against it. Outside, lightning blazed transiently. “Perhaps,” he repeated moodily. “At least it means that the effect cannot go on being created. What remains can only be from the initial trouble and ultimately the balance should settle down. We destroyed it in the only way we could. Cutting off the power would not have done it. It was alive within itself.”
“And—Mydia Fro?” Nal asked somberly, then he turned and looked sharply at the desk where Grifa usually worked. In a sudden blur the desk vanished and left empty floor.
“So,” Grifa muttered, “the effect still goes on. So I suppose it will do until every displaced probability wave has found its proper position and a new order of things is established. It may take years—centuries—aeons.”
A clap of thunder drowned the remainder of his words. Nal looked about him dully, still almost bereft of the power to think. In fact only two realizations had any deep significance for him. One was that Mydia had gone, he knew not where. The other, that he had brought about the destruction of the city he loved.
Then with devastating abruptness the storm that had been gathering since the breakdown of the Climatic machines burst in a deluge of rain against the window. It rattled violently, and rattled again to the booming roar of a hurricane wind. Nal turned a grim face and stared outside. Across the broad avenue three giant buildings dissolved even as lightning illumined them. For a split second there was a vision of swirling humanity fleeing for shelter—
The ground trembled as deep down under the earth probabilities gave way to new probabilities and matter in places ceased to be, or was transferred elsewhere.
The lights in the glazed ceiling died and a moment later the visiphone buzzed for attention. Grifa strode across to it on the wall, his way lighted by a chaotic blaze of forked lightning. As he pressed the switch, no face appeared on the glass screen but a troubled voice chattered to him.
“Excellence, I have been trying to make contact with the king. Probably he has been killed. There are none left who can take control. This is the First Adviser speaking. What am I to do? What has happened?
“I—I have seen things appear and disappear without reason. The latest reports from our exploration fliers state that even our traditional Sphinx and Pyramids have been transported two thousand miles to the middle of an empty desert! How could that come about?”
“The explanation is scientific, my friend—a gigantic scientific flaw,” Grifa responded. “There is nothing you, or I, or anybody can do about it. Watch out for your own safety, until the disturbance subsides. The whole basic structure of matter is undermined.”
The communication was cut off suddenly. An entire wall of the building dissolved and Grifa and Nal found themselves battered by cyclonic winds and saturating rain before they even had a chance to move. The First Physicist went sprawling. Nal seized him and dragged him to his feet again.
“We’ll have to find shelter!” he shouted into the savant’s ear.
Drenched, Grifa gazed at the chain lightning whiplashing the raging heavens. He shook his head.
“There’ll be no shelter for us, son—not for days or weeks, maybe not for years. Everything in this area is toppling into a new balance. The effect will go on throughout the planet, progressively, maybe even into space itself for generations yet to come.”
“But we might survive,” Nal said desperately. “Some of us have got to, if only to perpetuate the science of our race.”
“Some of us will,” the savant agreed. “But as I see it, after the horror that has been released they will almost certainly be witless savages, groping for shelter in a shattered, bewildering world. Science and education always vanish before elemental fury, Nal.”
The earth gulped and heaved. Both men staggered heavily amidst the swamping rain. Far away to the east, momentarily lighted by the lightning, was a clear silver line carrying with it a roar that penetrated even the storm.
“That’s—that’s the ocean!” Nal gasped, fascinated. “It must mean that our whole city is sinking—perhaps even the continent itself. It’s a tidal wave! It’ll crash down on us! Do you understand, sir?” he shouted. “Then you say some of us will survive!”
“Some will, as the waters subside.” The First Physicist stared at the advancing line for a moment. “What you have done, Nal, will be long remembered,” he said at length. “Those who come after us—generations as yet unborn—will wonder whence came a Sphinx and Pyramids in the middle of a desert. Whither went a race of scientists who must have existed in this part of the world.
“Unexplained things in unexplained places—eternal riddles. Mighty objects that could never have been moved by mortal agency. All the work of shifting probabilities which began this night.”
Grifa seemed suddenly possessed of visionary power in the face of imminent death.
“Perhaps the perfect balance will never be found. New probabilities will appear like bubbles in the space-time continuum, but with gradually diminishing frequency. Human beings and animals will vanish from the midst of their fellows without trace. Ocean ships which must come again in course of time will sail and never be heard of again. Airplanes will hurtle through the sky and into unexplained extinction.
“Out in space stars will come and go for no known reason. Shiftings—probabilities, until the perfect balance is attained when thermodynamic equilibrium is reached in the unthinkably distant future.”
Suddenly Grifa was gone, transposed by a probability shift to a lonely planet circling Antares. For a second or two he gazed upon the lonely, deathly world on which he stood and then he died, rent asunder by the explosion of air within him.
Nal Folan, stíll on Earth, gazed stupidly at the spot where the First Physicist had been. Then he glanced up at the roaring waters sweeping down upon what remained of tottering Atlantis.
He started to run. He had no idea where, over rocks and fallen metal, with the mighty tide surging irresistibly behind him.
Then it had vanished. Nal was reeling through long rank grass under a calm moon and stars. Nowhere was there a sign ofAtlantis, of havoc, of tidal wave. Probability had decided that he should be an unknown distance from the spot where Deluge had struck.
Survivors? The thought twisted through his mind. Perhaps others would come to begin anew the task of building a race, which in turn would wonder upon the marvels, the mysteries, the unexplained riddles in the world about them.
Forever more there must be a planet in which there was no certainty, from which there would one day spring a Principle of Indeterminacy, a world wherein one might step from the everyday into a new probability and be gone from fellow men forever; where one might fly the heavens and never be heard of again. Where one might sail the oceans and never reach port. Where one might find the tombs of Egyptian kings in Pyramids that once held the ashes of the dignitaries of Atlantis.
Nal smiled wearily. These were things for the future. For the moment he had s
urvived. Perhaps he would continue to survive, to hand down records which in course of time would become legends of a master-race of Atlantis which had perished in the Deluge.... He had to find others of his own kind somewhere in this calm, unknown land where the moonlight shone silver on softly waving grass.
SWEET MYSTERY OF LIFE
To Idiot Jake the world was peaceful: it was devoid of all worries, tumults, and fears. To the intellectuals, Idiot Jake was an object of pity; to the harassed he was a man to be envied. His simple mind did not know the meaning of anxiety.
As long as he could sit on the parapet of the small stone bridge spanning the Bollin Brook he was satisfied. If he had any old paper which he could tear into fragments and toss into the gurgling water below, it was to him a close approach to Paradise.
The small English village where he lived with his hard-working widowed mother was serenely sleepy on this autumn Sunday morning. The sunlight gleamed on thatched roofs still damp from departed frosts; smoke curled lazily from crazy little chimneys into a placid blue sky....
And on the bridge over the brook Idiot Jake sat in his patched overalls and tattered panama hat. He was long and spare with a narrow face and cramped shoulders. Only in the receding chin and loosely controlled mouth was the evidence of his mental deficiency to be seen. Surprisingly enough, his eyes were very sharp and very blue.
Absently, he looked into the flowing water coursing below him and wished that he had some paper fragments to throw into it. Somehow, though, it was too much of an effort to go and search for them....
* * * *
Half a mile from the village center, on its outskirts, indeed, and well screened by dense beech trees, stood the home of Harvey Maxted. Nobody in Bollin village knew exactly how Maxted occupied himself. He seemed too young to be a hermit, too thoroughly sane and genial to be an inventor. So tongues wagged, as they always do in a little hamlet perched on the edge of the world
Actually, Maxted was by no means mysterious. He had quite a good Civil Service post in London, to which he traveled back and forth every day. If he chose to live in the quaint old house bequeathed to him by his parents it was entirely his own affair; and if he had decided to live alone except for a fifty-year-old manservant named Belling, that, too, was nobody’s business but his own.
He did it for a reason, of course—to have a quiet spot where he could pursue botanical experiments unhindered. Flowers, products of the most brilliant grafting processes, bloomed in every part of the great conservatories attached to the house. Even an old glass-walled, glass-roofed annex, which had once been his artist father’s studio, had now been converted into a horticulturist’s paradise, and apart from the flowers, it also boasted all manner of technical apparatus.
Harvey Maxted, thirty-eight, with plenty of money and a keen investigative brain, had one ambition—to produce that much-sought-after botanical miracle—a jet black rose.
On this particular Sunday morning he stood before a framed area of soil and fertilizer set directly in the rays of the hot September sun streaming through the glass wall. His young good-looking face was tense with effort. In some odd way his strong, masculine figure seemed out of keeping amidst the exquisite botanical creations looming all around him.
Going down on his knees, he went to work steadily in the special area, putting a slender cutting deep in the prepared soil and pressing down with his thumbs all around it. For half an hour he stayed at his task, then, thankful for relief from the intense heat of the window, he left the conservatory and wandered into the house, meditating .as he went.
Belling, his servant and confidant, was crossing the hall at the same time.
“Do you think you’ll be successful this time, sir?” he enquired, pausing.
Harvey Maxted smiled ruefully. “All I can say is that I ought to be—but with eighteen failures in trying to produce Erebus, the black rose, I’m losing some of my confidence. In fact, I’m probably crazy to try it anyway. Pride, Belling—that is what it amounts to. I want to feel that I am able to accomplish the impossible!”
“And you will, sir!” the older man declared, nodding his gray head reassuringly. “You see if you don’t.”
“Maybe you’re right....” Maxted reflected for a moment, then added: “I’m going out for an hour or two. See that the conservatory doors are kept locked.”
“You can rely on it, sir.”
* * * *
It was late evening when Maxted returned home. He ate a late dinner leisurely, read for an hour, then went into the conservatory annex for a final look at his rose clipping before retiring. But the moment he reached that frame of soil and fertilizer, he stopped in dismay.
The cutting had withered completely, lay limp and yellow, with every trace of life drained out of it! For a moment or two Maxted could not believe it—then he twirled round and shouted angrily for Belling. Within a moment or two the elderly manservant came hurrying in.
“Something the matter, sir?” he asked in surprise.
“I’ll say there is! Did you follow out my instructions and keep these doors locked while I was away?”
“But of course I did, sir.” Belling was genuinely distressed. “I know how valuable everything is in here.”
“You didn’t open any of the windows or ventilators from the outside?” Maxted broke off and grinned apologetically, patted the man’s arm. “Sorry, Belling—that was unfair of me. But it’s damned strange for that cutting to die like that! It means the end of twelve months’ careful grafting....”
Belling considered for a moment. “Perhaps the heat, sir?”
“Not in this case: the heat was an essential part of the experiment....” Maxted leaned over the frame and lifted the dead cutting between finger and thumb. “Just as though some other plant had claimed the soil and taken the nature out of it,” he muttered. “In the same way that cultivated plants have a struggle to live near strong trees.”
There was a puzzled silence for a moment or two, then Maxted stood straight again and sighed heavily.
“I simply don’t understand it, that’s all. I know this soil to be chemically pure.... I’ll have to sleep on the problem, Belling, and when I come home from town tomorrow night I’ll take a careful look at this soil.”
All next day as he pursued his normal occupation in the City Maxted could not help himself thinking about his dead rose cutting. Even a keen gardener might have been baffled by the occurrence, but with Harvey Maxted it was something much more. He was a botanical scientist, understanding mysteries of the plant world not even known in the ordinary way.... Yes, something was decidedly wrong, and nothing else but an analysis of the soil could show what it was.
Maxted wasted no time in getting home that evening and even less time on a meal. Then he unlocked the research conservatory and hurried in, switching on the powerful floodlamps.
The rose cutting had shriveled now into a mere piece of brown stick, but, in its place something else was showing, just peeping above the rich black soil. Maxted stared at it fixedly. It looked just like the smooth, fleshy head of a toadstool, perhaps an inch across, yet it was more bulbous.
Very cautiously he felt it and, to his amazement, it jerked away slightly from his touch, as though with nervous reflex action.
“What the devil—!” Maxted was dumbfounded for a moment, then he swung round and bawled, “Belling! Belling—come here!”
Belling came, his tired face troubled. In a moment he assessed the incredulity on Maxted’s face.
“Something gone wrong, sir?” he asked anxiously.
“I’ll be damned if I know—unless it is that I’ve worked so long among these plants I’ve started seeing things— Take a look at that thing where the rose cutting was. Tell me what you think it is. It—it recoils like the head of a tortoise when you touch it!”
Belling’s lined mouth gaped for a moment as he realized the immense implication behind the statement. Then he stretched out a bony finger and tapped the fleshy-looking nodule. Again it jerk
ed and the soil around it shifted infinitesimally.
“Great God!” he whispered, his eyes wide. “It’s alive, sir—definitely alive. But what is it?”
“I don’t know,” Maxted confessed worriedly. “I wanted to produce a rare specimen and it looks as though I’ve done it!”
His first shock over, Belling’s maturity came to his aid. Stooping, he looked at the nodule intently in the bright light. Presently he glanced up with the oddest expression.
“I think we should examine this under the microscope, sir,” he said. “Silly though it may sound, I believe I can see the outline of a—a face!”
“A what!” Maxted exclaimed, startled. “Hang it all, man—”
“The microscope should settle the argument, sir.”
Maxted rubbed the back of his head bemusedly, then he turned and went over to the bench. Bringing back the heavy binocular microscope, he succeeded finally in balancing it so that he could train the lenses directly on the object in the frame.
Wondering vaguely what he would see, he adjusted the eyepieces. Inwardly, he was prepared for the unusual, the fantastic—for anything indeed except the monstrous impossibility of what he did see.
For there was a face!
Belling had spoken the truth, and under the powerful lenses and brilliant light everything was in pin-sharp detail. The rounded nodule had now become a completely hairless head. Underneath it were perfectly chiseled features—a long straight nose, tightly closed lips, and round chin. The eyelids were lowered at the moment, giving the face a mask-like aspect of dead serenity.
“Well, sir?”
Bclling’s eager voice compelled Maxted to drag his gaze from the fascinating vision. He motioned helplessly to the microscope and Belling peered long and hard. When at last he withdrew his eyes, he and Maxted were two men facing the unbelievable.
“A plant—shaped like a human being—growing in soil....”
Dynasty of the Small Page 11
