Avon Science Fiction Reader 2

by Unknown Author

  She straightened her gingham dress and tucked away a wisp of hair behind her ear.

  “What’s that?” she asked, touching a smoothly rounded bump at one end of the metal box lying on the floor. Looking over it she noticed another at the opposite end.

  Her husband grunted.

  “That’s the nub of the whole thing. It equalizes about a million different factors all at the same time: plane distortion, temperature warp, atmospheric density inside the box, impact of cosmic rays, vibrations from one end of the spectrum to the other and ordinary earth movements. In some ways, though, it isn’t as important as this prism.” He paused and touched an arrangement of polished glass directly in the center of the top of the steel box. ‘‘This reflects light down into the box to another prism which directs the beam toward one of the mirrors mounted on the inside of those bulges.

  She considered this for awhile.

  “Didn’t you tell me that the interior prism was the last stumbling block? You had to get it out of the way without destroying the reflection.”

  He puffed on his pipe. His eyes lit up with deep satisfaction.

  “That’s easy—now.” He walked to a cabinet and brought out a violin. Caressingly, he ran his fingers down the polished surface.

  “At the precise instant when the beam flashes down through the prisms and into the mirrors, I play a certain note on this violin and the interior prism shatters. The note is attuned to its structure and to none other. A neat bit of reasoning. I wonder if it will work.”

  She smiled, patted him on his shoulder and left.

  For a while he stood silent, then lifted the instrument, placed its chin rest against his throat and played. Charley remained motionless, squatting near the floor, bathed, like a devil out of hell, in the glow of the torch still spitting noisily on a metal grid.

  Randolph put down the violin abruptly.

  “Let’s see if it works,” he said softly.

  They played with it for a while until their supply of prisms ran out and then opened the box. On the dark metal floor, between the poised mirrors, lay several microscopic lumps of matter that had not been there when they locked the top earlier in the evening.

  Randolph shut off the flashlight that had been shining into the primary prism and rolled it into a tool box. He moved to a wooden bench and sat down. Nervously he relit his pipe which had gone out and set his face firmly between his hands, elbows planted on the top of the table before him,

  “Charley,” he called softly, inclining his head.

  The big man shuffled over and leaned heavily on the table, the muscles on his brawny arms standing out like linked walnuts.

  “Yeah, it worked. What are you going to do now?”

  The Professor looked up at him.

  “Charley, I’m going to materialize a sun beam.”

  The other stared at him for a moment, uncomprehending. Then, the untutored brain, keen, penetrating, direct, suddenly understood. But Small, although a grown man, was still emotionally a child. He ran out, holding his head in his hands.

  The next morning Randolph had the thing out in the big pasture. It was a strange sight, the bronzed body bent slightly over the huge box supported on an old table, his arms holding lightly the body and bow of a violin. He opened the shutter of the prism, aimed it at the sun and drew the bow across the strings of the instrument. There was a tearing noise and a faint tinkle and suddenly it was all over.

  Randolph quickly unscrewed the top of the box and looked within. Suspended in the center, directly between the two mirrors, an infinitely tiny, bisected ball of pure light spun and hummed. He’d gotten more than his sunbeam. He’d gotten a tiny half sun.

  As he watched, the tiny dot began to grow. In half an hour it was double its original size and getting bigger every minute.

  Randolph, paralyzed, stared at the growing dot with undisguised terror. He realized, with awful clarity, that he had stumbled upon something entirely new, and that a whole set of laws governing its action and reaction was coming into being. He fled to the house, frantically grabbed pencil and paper and busied himself for an hour with calculations.

  Martha came home from town as he rushed out wildly waving a sheaf of papers. He was shouting incomprehensively, something about the dot growing until it burned the earth to a cinder. She calmed him down as only she knew how and presently he poured out the whole story.

  “But if it increases in size only in light, why not bury the thing? It can’t grow if it can’t feed.” Her voice was calm, reassuring.

  “The thing will grow on any sort of impact vibration whatsoever. These figures prove it. What about cosmic rays? They penetrate many feet of lead. We’d go bankrupt buying a box big enough to hold it.”

  She shook her head.

  “You told me once that a certain amount of ground depth was the equivalent of the quantity of lead necessary to stop the rays. Why don’t you throw it down the crack in the rock on the other side of the pasture?”

  He looked at her wildly.

  “Darling, of course!” he shouted and danced a jig.

  She stood for this a while, then drew him away to the box. Peering over the edge, she glimpsed the evilly glowing whirling dot and shuddered,

  “The box is too heavy,” she cried, “And that crevice- is over half a mile away.”

  He considered a moment, then brought his fist clown on the edge of the table on which the machine rested.

  “Martha, empty the fish bowl and bring it back here, quick. Just the fish, not the water!”

  She left at high speed and returned in a few minutes. Seizing the huge object, he turned it over, and with a hiss the ball of fire fell into the large bowl of water. Without wasting an instant he cupped a hand over one end and dashed madly for the other end of the field.

  He returned in about an hour to find his wife screwing on the top of the box.

  “Is it safe?” she asked anxiously, wiping a smear of grease from her hands.

  He looked at her with a relieved expression on his face.

  “Safe. Buried a thousand feet down.”

  They walked arm in arm toward the house.

  For a while the box was forgotten, but little by little the desire to explore its possibilities grew back in Randolph’s mind. He spent long hours of the evenings, poring over calculations, working out its mathematics. Finally he decided to have a go at it again. This time there would be no danger, he promised himself.

  He went to see Saunders, the president of the town’s small bank. Saunders was sitting at his desk as he walked in. He blinked his small piggish eyes rapidly and fiddled with the gold watch chain strung from the pockets of his vest.

  “Afternoon, Professor,” he said evenly in his clipped mid-western accent. “They told me you’d phoned about a loan.”

  Randolph sat down.

  “Yes. I’m conducting some new experiments …”

  Saunders smiled primly and looked over the top of his pince-nez.

  “Yes, yes. Of course. I know of your work. Some very valuable things; you turned out for the clinic. Pity you didn’t patent them.”

  As the bank president had been one of the cabal who had swindled him out of the proceeds of his clinical researches, Randolph tried to let this pass with as much aplomb as was possible considering the circumstances.

  “I want fifty thousand dollars,” he said flatly, without further pause. Saunders blinked his eyes twice when he heard this. The pince-nez came off and fell with a clank into his lap.

  “Wha—what—what’s that? Fifty thousand dollars?”

  The Professor nodded grimly.

  Saunders raised his hands in horror.

  “What could you do with so much money?” he asked in a strained falsetto. “I said that I was conducting some new experiments,” replied Randolph firmly.

  “Of what nature?”

  “I cannot explain that until I’ve some concrete results to offer. But I need enough money to buy immense quantities of lead. Once that is acc
omplished I feel that anyone financially connected with the experiment would be in on a goldmine.”

  “You mean that literally?”

  The Professor’s face lost its serious mien.

  “Yes, I do,” he said, smiling. “A goldmine. Quite literally.”

  Saunders opened his eyes as wide as they could go and pressed a stud on his desk. Within a minute his secretary walked in. The bank president looked up at her with an amused smile playing about his thin lips.

  “Please show the Professor out,” he snapped, losing his smile almost immediately, “I’m afraid he’s slightly touched.”

  Randolph stared at him for a moment, then began to laugh. He waved the; astonished secretary aside and walked out.

  There were no experiments for a time after that, and the box lay untouched in a corner of the shack because it represented a trillion tons of unexploded trinitrotoluene. He looked at it during the long autumn evenings, and sometimes his wife came in and stood by his side and regarded

  the box anxiously. The bolted top imprisoned a devil and her supple hands caressed away at such times his desire to let it loose.

  But it could not remain the same always. His machines were silent, and Charley came over oftener now and helped him stare at the bulky object. Finally flesh and blood collapsed. Caution flew out of the window.

  He bought a telescope and rigged it up to focus on small objects such as clay pigeons and dolls bought in the five-and-dime store in the nearby town and he found that when his prisms shattered, a small, almost microscopic, replica lay amid their powdered ruins. Complex physical laws governed the various reactions. All the replicas grew slowly, in proportion to the amount of light used in reflecting them, but faster when more vibrations were allowed to drench them. In some unknown fashion the scanning telescope became almost a living thing, automatically adjusting the rate of expansion in accordance with the light used and the size of the original object. Thus, when one day he trained the refractor on the top of a nearby mountain, the resulting bisected image grew much more rapidly than usual until it threatened to bulge the sides of the reproducing machine. With infinite labor he carted the expanding mass with the generous help of Charley Small to the crevice and buried it safely. Small objects when reproduced reacted differently. Their rate of growth was slower. And there seemed to be a limit. The magical power of the simple telescope astounded him. Sitting at his calculations he concluded that he had stumbled across natural laws unknown previously, operating logically with rigid mathematical precision.

  Many strange reproductions followed the first few simple things. The side of a horse, a frothy section of cloud that inundated the shack and only ceased growing when the ground had absorbed it completely, a clock with hands but only a solid mass where the works should have been. The matter composing the objects seemed totally different from any earthly composition. It seemed a sort of rubbery soil that varied in composition, texture and strength; it duplicated the matter of the object, hut only in a thin shell.

  Presently the crevice filled up. He spent days blasting out another.

  The crowning experiment was undertaken on a snowy winter’s night in January of the following year. Ensconced on a tall chair beside the box, which was mounted on its table in the pasture, and attended by the faithful Small, he opened the shutter of the device after focusing the telescope apparatus on Venus and then calmly drew the bow of his violin across the taut strings.

  Venus lay within the reproducer, a small, solid half sphere that grew as they watched it in the pale starlight. Randolph risked for a few moments the faint light of a flashlight shining on the planet. It lay fuming quietly on the bottom, a circular disc, growing, heaving, outlines of mountains and continents appearing. Finally they smashed it to powder with a pickaxe and dumped it down the new hole in the rock.

  With money saved from lowered food expenditures and articles written at a constant stream for well-known scientific journals which snapped them up because he was a genius and they knew it, he built large but flimsy lead boxes which held the halved reproductions of many commonplace objects and some which he never permitted Martha to see. He kept them for a while, made voluminous notes, then disposed of them in the usual way.

  When Spring came he understood the process thoroughly.

  “Stated simply,” he said to Charley as they leaned against a fence watching a nearby stream liberate itself from the winter ice, “it’s like this: The light is reflected between the two mirrors and, losing velocity, becomes mass, retaining its inertia. Just pure mass—matter, peculiar matter. And it grows. Slower or faster in proportion to the size of the object reproduced. It feeds on vibration because—well, because it’s matter that s been born suddenly and knows it’s alive. Not really alive, Charley, more like a stretched rubber band that is released and flies past its limit of elasticity. It’s based on a physics that seems to operate through the fourth dimension and into our space. I say the fourth dimension because I don’t know where it comes from and that’s as handy an explanation as any.”

  Small scratched his head.

  “Can it make money?” he asked naively.

  Randolph laughed.

  “1 told Saunders it could. Yes, with that machine I could reproduce enough gold, by simply focusing the telescope on a treasury Eagle, to buy the continent. And that’s precisely why I won’t. We’d inevitably overproduce and ruin the market and probably the whole economic system.

  “I’m just a damn fool, Charley,” he continued, “I’ve got a God in a box and I can’t even ask him for a bent penny.”

  On a brilliantly sun-lit day in July, a lead box containing an image of the planet Mars cracked from the pressure of the growing half-sphere within and began to expand over the floor of the shack. It grew unhindered because the Professor and his wife were in town buying household goods and nobody was there to stop it.

  Charley saw it as he approached the shack on Sunday. He saw the cottage suddenly pushed up in the air from beneath and suddenly a great hollow half-globe of rusty-red with many strange markings and convolutions on its surface began to spread out and grow larger and bulkier on the flat Illinois farm.

  By morning it had covered the town and the residents of the whole county were fleeing. Randolph and his wife drove the car until there was no gasoline left in the tanks, then stole some and continued to flee toward the west.

  In a month the state was overwhelmed, and the next three months saw the enormous mass of expanding matter pushing out over the Atlantic. Beneath it, from California to New York and from Maine to Mexico, the American continent lay crushed, pulverized. The expanding juggernaut had obliterated the highest development of a culture fifty centuries old.

  Randolph and his wife managed to reach the coast and take passage on a steamer that sailed south until it reached a tiny collection of islands near the center of the Pacific. There it landed. And the Professor began to write a diary in which he analyzed the Martian destroyer.

  “The ocean level is rising,” he wrote, “and soon even these high islands will be inundated. The enormous mass of Mars has filled up the ocean beds and will continue to grow until it reaches its theoretical limit of expansion. That limit is almost precisely half way around the Earth. From where I sit I can see the approaching wall—it must be fifty miles high— which signals the final destruction of life on this part of the globe. The Moon, sun and stars are no longer visible because of the weather. I do not think any life surviving in these latitudes will ever see the Moon again. The added weight on one-half of the planet will exert a tremendous pull and slowly bring it to a standstill, much closer to the Mars half of earth. The people up there—millions must have ‘climbed aboard’—will be lighter because the Moon’s pull will offset the combined gravitation of Earth and its Martian cap. The people down here will not be lighter or heavier— for they will be dead. I have murdered more than half a world. Maybe I’m the Devil. Maybe I’m just Science gone haywire.”

  And on another page.

/>   “Today is the last day. I’ve rigged up a steel container and I’ll put these papers in it and throw it into the dead volcano. I don’t know why. They’re Science and death. It can be of no use to any future civilization. But somehow I feel that it must go on. I feel no regrets. Mainly because the world was destroyed not by its evil but by its best. The end is clean. The end is Science.” ,

  Mo-Ad stepped back from the diagram and thoughtfully erased it with his foot. He glanced timidly at the Top and regarded for a long moment its lacy crown of swirling vapor.

  “Is there no way to mount the barrier?” he asked, finally.

  His father’s face was grim,

  “There is no need for us now to conquer the Cliff, Mo-Ad. Shortly we shall return to our home in the South and I shall create from the Books— with your help, my dear son—a machine that will rescue our people from this dry half-world of hunger and death. Come.”

  For many days and nights, the two traveled toward their home and came at last to the small village of tents that was the mightiest metropolis of the Bottom. They were welcomed joyously by the small population and feasted for several days.

  At the end of a week, Jo-Ad drew Mo-Ad away from his studies and showed him several old notebooks. On the cover one, old, threadbare, worm-eaten, was written in rust-brown ink the words, “Diary of Charters Randolph.” Two others, in the same condition of decay and decrepitude, were printed books. There were also several tightly-rolled parchment scrolls of a peculiar blue sheen with white lines upon them.

  Mo-Ad read the Diary through. It was written in an ancient form of his tongue, but the surpassing intelligence inherited from his father, the sole intellectual genius of the Bottom, stood him in good stead. When he was thoroughly acquainted with the story, Jo-Ad began work.

  Out of the poor materials dug from the earth by the tribe, he fashioned with infinite labor a small mirror-lined box surmounted with an intricate prism arrangement of smaller mirrors which were polished with great pains by Mo-Ad. Presently the apparatus, at the end of six months, stood complete in the sandy open circle surrounded by the city of tents.