Avon Science Fiction Reader 2

by Unknown Author

  “Points on the adjacent leaves of a book are far apart, considered two-dimensionally. But, with the book closed, and to a three-dimensional perception which can see across from one page to another, the two points are. very near together. You seep”

  I nodded again.

  “Now look!”

  I saw a dense swamp, among huge trees with broad, rich green leaves. Gigantic saurians stalked about and splashed hugely.

  “It is like a story of evolution,” I couldn’t help remarking.

  He nodded in satisfaction and mused on:

  “Each of these must be a separate and distinct world. I Can go back and forth among them at will. It is not a continuous story. There are steps. Definite jumps. Nothing between. I can see any one of them at any time. Like the leaves of a book!”

  I looked again. The professor had not touched the setting and the scene was exactly the same. A huge saurian was devouring some living creature from the water. The water was threshed into a pink foam, and light-red blood was splashed over the green foliage. The professor was talking:

  “What we see is worlds or universes arranged side by side in the fourth dimension. Like leaves in a book. “Heavens! What an encyclopedial”

  “I see,” I said slowly, not sure that I really did. “Like serial sections cut in a microtome.”

  “Comparable. But not really sections. Separate worlds. Three-dimensional Worlds like our own. Side by side, each of them one page ahead of the preceding. Three-dimensional leaves in a four-dimensional book.”

  It was a little difficult to grasp. I thought a while.

  “I’d like to have Carver of Purdue see this,” I said. “Do you remember his article in the Scientific Monthly about your four-space equations? It was almost personal. Ill-becoming to a scientific man. I’d give my shirt to -see his face when he sees this. Let’s bring him down.”

  Professor Cosgrave shook his head.

  “What object can there be in causing the man any unpleasant feeling? The world holds enough unpleasant situations without our multiplying them. I shall break the news to him pleasantly when the opportunity presents itself.”

  That was typical of Professor Cosgrave. That is just how considerate and sympathetic he always was. Always he was trying to spare other people unpleasantness or discomfort. The man was wasted on our present-day selfish and discourteous age. He ought to have been born into some future Utopia.’

  What would he do now? I wondered. There was obviously a vast number of worlds to observe. It would take a lifetime to have a good look at each One of them. Would he spend his time on satisfying his curiosity and turn his back on mathematical physics? He still had numerous important problems ahead of him in the latter field. He was barely started on his career as a mathematical physicist, yet the world was expecting great things of him.

  However, for the present there was apparently one phase of the purely observational pursuit for him.

  “The ‘leaves’ in this book seem to be arranged in absolutely orderly succession,” he said. “By chance I began at the end where the evolutionary development was lowest. By swinging my visual field through the unknown dimension in one direction, I can see the worlds in succession, each a little further evolved than the preceding. Now, I’m a physicist, and cannot afford to waste much time in gratifying idle curiosity. But, I must spend a few days or weeks in following out this evolutionary series before I turn it over to some biologist. This is too much of a temptation for any kind of a scientific man.”

  For several days I would come into the room and see him there with his eyes glued to the oculars, too absorbed even to notice my entrance. His attitude was one of tense and motionless concentration. I would steal out again, loath to disturb him. Once I came in and noted that he was trembling violently all over as he gazed into the machine. A couple of days later I found him in the same position, as though he had not moved since I had been there last. His whole body was set and rigid. I was alarmed at the way he looked. I stepped closer; his jaw was set and his breathing was shallow.

  I felt concerned about him, and I made a sound to attract his attention. He started suddenly and leaped to his feet, and turned to me a face that was white with horror.

  “I’ve been a student!” he gasped. “A scientific man. I never stopped to realize that men were like that.” He sank into a chair, his hands on his knees, his head drooped.

  I looked into the stereoscope. This time there were men. An army stood drawn up, with shining helmets and fluttering pennants, extending far into the dim distance. The foreground was red and active; everything was splattered with blood; men were swinging swords. There were rows of captives and men cutting their heads off. I watched only a second before I recoiled, but saw a dozen heads roll on the ground and fountains of blood gush over victims and executioners alike.

  “You have no business looking at that!” I exclaimed.

  It was incongruous. This delicately organized, unselfish, tenderhearted man to be spending his days gazing at those things.

  “It’s been that way from the beginning,” he whispered, shuddering. “Ever since rudimentary humans appeared in the series … war, brutality, cruelty, wanton killing of people . .

  But I couldn’t keep him away from the thing. He called me to it and explained:

  “As far as I can understand this, I am swinging the field of view through an arc in a dimension that extends at right angles to the three known dimensions. At intervals I see a world. In between there is nothing. The swing is accomplished by changing the intensity of the electrical field through crystals of this zirconium compound, which alters their refractivity.

  “I am going steadily down my scale toward zero. The worlds are getting further and further advanced in the scale of evolution. I can see it clearly now.”

  In a moment he was back at the instrument, completely absorbed, and i oblivious of me. I was worried about him. I came in daily to watch him, and many a time I came and went without his having been conscious of my presence. There was something wrong about the thing; the intense absorption of a man of his sympathetic type in scenes of inhumanity such as I had Seen. One day when I opened the door, he was facing it, waiting for me.

  “I am nearly at zero. Look! A world much like ours.”

  In the lenses I saw the buildings of a city, rather odd, but for all the world suggesting London or Paris; swarming crowds of people, hurrying vehicles. It was quite like our world, but just enough different so that I was sure it was not our world.

  Professor Cosgrave was pale and agitated.

  “Man’s inhumanity to man!” he moaned. “It would drive me distracted, were there not one hope. Just now, in that fair city, I watched a mob drag men and women through the streets and stick their bodies up on poles on a bridge; and blood dripped into the river.

  “But, step by step, there is more intellect, more material progress. There •is hope that man will eventually develop intelligence enough to stop his senseless and cruel fighting, and learn cooperation and altruism. Each of these worlds seems to bring us a little nearer to that.”

  He called my attention as he turned his dials to zero, and looked into the instrument. He turned to me with a queer smile.

  “Look!” .

  I applied my eye again. There was the campus and athletic field, the gravel drives and the men’s dormitory. Through the stereoscope or through the window, I got the same view. ‘

  “At zero we see our own ‘plane’ of the unknown dimension. Our page in the book. You see?”

  “Now what?” I asked.

  “Now negative potential values. Now to see the pages ahead of us in the book. Worlds further evolved than ours. The future! Up to the limits of the inductance of my coils!”

  His eyes glowed and his breath came fast.

  “The future!” he whispered as he bent over the oculars and carefully turned his dials. “In the future lies man’s hope. In intelligence and science!”

  Again he sat in motionless absorption. Occas
ionally he touched a dial or whispered to himself. Finally, as he said not a word for a half hour, I tiptoed out.

  The next day I found him staringly expecting my arrival with wide-open eyes, like a man with exophthalmic goiter.

  “I don’t know what makes me go on with this!” he gasped. “Men are beasts. Hopeless. They never will be anything else. Twenty airplanes went over a city dropping bombs. Swept it away. It is burning now. In one place I saw through the smoke a small child hemmed in a courtyard by flames. A city as grand as Chicago. A sea of smoke and flame.” He sat with his head bowed in his hands.

  I didn’t know what to say. He seemed utterly crushed; I could not rouse him. Finally I led him out of the room, got him in my car, and took him home. I pondered on how I might get him away from that machine for a while.

  But the next day he was back again at the machine. I had classes until four o’clock that afternoon. Then I hurried into the laboratory. I found a changed man.

  He was stern and determined. This rather relieved me; for I had been worried about his hopeless depression, and I did not realize what was taking place in the man. It seemed to me then that he had shaken off the depression and had determined to do something about the situation of war and humanity.

  “Here is a world thousands of years ahead of ours,” he related. “Humanity crowds it densely beyond our conception. Thank God, it is another world somewhere else, and not ours. People have not risen an inch from bestiality in millennia. No—stay away from it; I can’t permit you to witness such horrors. Men and women soldiers piled up in mangled, bloody heaps as high as the Capitol Building. Each belch of that machine kills a thousand more—stay away!

  “It is not our world. We can still save our world from that. We start today, Harlan, you and I, to prevent such things from happening in our world.”

  “We’ve got to stop it!” he said again. But he sat and stared into the instrument.

  I was puzzled and not a little alarmed. The sudden, stern determination of the gentle little man fitted him most strangely. I would have thought him play-acting for my benefit, had he not looked most terribly grim. Anyway, I was relieved to see that terrible depression had left him, and that he had got hold of himself. That is what I thought then.

  He permitted me to lead him out again, and I took him home. He kept saying with grim determination:

  “Not to our human race! We wont let it happen!”

  On the following day I had no classes, and I called for him at his home early in the morning. He had already left. I hurried to his laboratory. He was already there, spinning dials feverishly, and then bending over the lenses. He had an unusual, nervous air about him.

  “Destructive rays!” he said to me as I came in, but without looking away from the oculars. “Wither up a thousand people like snowflakes in a chimney-blast. Terrific explosives. Deadly gases. Bombs filled with disease germs. Diabolical inventiveness.”

  He whirled around and faced me.

  “Everything indicates that our world is part of this scheme. It is going the same way. It will be what this is. We must stop it.”

  He stood up in the middle of the room and talked, and I took the opportunity to peer into the lenses. I saw a dead world. Wreckage. Ashes. Explosion holes. Disintegrating bodies. Nowhere a movement. Even vegetable life had withered. There was a pile of bombs ready to fire beside a huge gun and a gunner lay dead beside them.

  There was a queer declamatory quality to the speech that Professor Cosgrave was making. He said queer, silly things about Universal Peace. And yet I didn’t suspect.

  Only the next morning when I came in, it dawned on me. He was perched on a tall stool, with a wreath of twigs in his lips. As I came in, he put the wreath around his neck, and sang in a high key:

  “I am the Dove of Peace.

  Listen to me: All men are brothers.

  There shall be no more war. .

  I shall spread my wings over the world.

  I am the Dove of Peace.”

  Tears sprang to my eyes as the truth suddenly dawned upon me. I gulped as I hurried to another room to telephone. Poor Professor Cosgrave!

  Then, as they led him out, I looked into the lenses. There was a rugged Stretch, smooth, gently undulating holes and hummocks as far as the eye could reach, covered with a slimy, disgusting fungus growth. Here and .there the fungus covered a ragged shape suggesting the ruined wall of a building. There was no change in this scene during the four days before the machine’s batteries ran down (for I did not know how to shut it off). Now, no one knows how to operate it.

  Professor Cosgrave knows me. He is always glad to see me at his room at the sanitarium. But he talks to me only about Universal Brotherhood and about my duty to save mankind from strife and bloodshed. And he paps his arms like wings and coos.

  The Rebuff

  by Lord Dunsany

  You have probably read of speculations regarding the problem of signalling to Mars and of decoding signals from Mars, should the Martians deign to return the greeting. Lord Dunsany, whose “Jorkens” stories show a sly sense of humor at the mysteries of the universe, has presented in this very short story a not too impossible—considering the state of this world —solution.

  “YOU may not know,” said Rowston, ‘‘that some time in the last century a woman left a will providing money to communicate with Mars.” Talk had got very scientific in the Billiards Club, and Rowston, who was the most scientific man we have got there, was having it all his own way.

  “She was a Frenchwoman,” he went on, “and the scientists to whom the money was left had decided to mark out in bonfires all over the North of France the diagram of that wonderful proposition from the first book of Euclid, which proves that the square on the base of any right-angled triangle is equal to the sum of the squares on the sides. It is really a wonderful problem, for it’s hardly a thing you would think of to look at it. It seems so unlikely that, whatever the shape of a triangle, provided that one of its angles was a right angle, those squares would always be exactly equal; that is to say that the big one would always exactly equal the medium one and the little one added together. I often wonder how it was it ever occurred to Euclid.” .

  “And what good was that going to do?” asked one of our members, who was not so much interested in science as golf.

  “You see,” said Rowston, “those French scientists had worked out that the people of Mars, being more intelligent than us,-having started sooner, on account of their planet being smaller, and so cooling quicker than ours, would know all the things that we knew, as well as getting over a good many of our mistakes. To sum up their argument in a few words, they said that no highly intelligent people could be ignorant of that odd fact about those squares; and when they saw the diagram they would know that we were intelligent too. Then it would be up to them to answer.”

  “And what happened?” one of us asked.

  “What happened was,” said Rowston, “that the French government decided the woman was mad, and her legacy frivolous, and refused to allow the money to go where she had directed. It went instead to her relations. And, if she was mad, it seems to me that it might have been rather dangerous to let her relations have all the money, for they may have had a touch of insanity in them too; and the more money they had, the better chance the insanity would have to come out.”

  “She was not mad,” said Jorkens.

  “What do you mean?” said Rowston sharply, for he does not much like assertions from others when he is talking science.

  “She was perfectly sane,” said Jorkens. “The sign was eventually made, and Mars answered.”

  “Mars answered?” we said.

  And Rowston sat perfectly silent.

  “Yes,” said Jorkens. “I believe those scientists never really accepted their government’s decision. They were never really satisfied with it. What they did was quietly collect funds, which took them a very long time, and most of them died before they collected much money. In fact they are all dead lon
g ago. But the idea went on; and collecting very quietly, so as never to let the idea get out among the people who might think them crazy, they raised enough money to do what they wanted a few years before the Great War.”

  “And how do you know?” asked Rowston.

  “Because I happened to know the one man who was able to make out Mars’ answer,” replied Jorkens.

  “And why don’t we know?” asked Rowston.

  “Because it was all hushed up,” said Jorkens.

  “Hushed up?” replied Rowston.

  “Yes,” said Jorkens. “They lit their bonfires all right, not in France of course, because it had been decided there that the notion was crazy; and nowhere in Europe, because ideas spread pretty quickly through Europe nowadays. They went to the northern Sahara, and there they marked out the great diagram of that proposition of Euclid. No one to interfere with them there except a few Arabs, who of course thought them mad too, but didn’t trouble them in any way, because they regard madness as the affliction of God and not a matter for human interference. They must have raised a very large sum in the course of forty years, for the cost of transport alone must have been stupendous, water and timber and food being completely alien to the Sahara. But they found camels enough, and were able to do it. And one night they lit their enormous lines of bonfires. And Mars answered.”

  “Mars answered?” said Rowston.

  “Yes, in little more than a week,” said Jorkens. “They were Wonderfully quick at it. And they sent a diagram too.”

  “What did they send?” asked Rowston.

  “They lit bonfires,” said Jorkens, “as we did. It wasn’t so easy for them to signal to us as for us to signal to them, because they being further from the sun have the whole of their disc shining at us, whereas much of ours is often in darkness to them; but the people who made our signal picked up theirs with their telescope. And a good deal flattered they were by Mars’ rapid response.”

  “And the diagram?” asked Rowston.

  “They replied with another right-angled triangle,” said Jorkens, “but with different arrangements from ours.”