John Russell Fearn Omnibus

by John Russell Fearn

  Utterly dazed and dumfounded, the unfortunate Anderson was whirled into the next room and handcuffed for a moment to the massive iron fireplace while the constable departed to call a car. As he stood there, panting and furious, Anderson became aware of the sleek, strange-eyed Gaston standing beside him. He was smiling bitterly.

  “Well?” Anderson snapped venomously. “What in hell are you laughing at, you swine?”

  “Remember the young woman you killed in that operation, Anderson? Remember the young girl, aged just twenty-four—young and beautiful and charming—suffering from a mere abdominal growth that any surgeon should have removed without difficulty? And remember how your knife slipped? How you killed her? Destroyed her?”

  Gaston’s lips writhed back from strong teeth in a deadly snarl. “That girl was my sister, you devil! My sister, all in the world to me, and I entrusted her to the hands of a—a butcher! But the knife that killed her will kill you! I stole it from your instruments; yes, I’ve kept it all these years, and waited and waited for the moment when I could get you where I wanted you. You will be certified mad, Anderson; I will see to that! I know enough about the vibrator to stop and start it, and I’m hoping to experiment to the full while you are in a cell—a padded one, I hope! Yes, I took your glove. I stabbed Renhard after he had died through getting in the way of the vibrator after it was supposedly switched off, and actually was not, because of a loose whisker of wire.”

  “I did not purposely kill your sister, you fool!” Anderson panted. “It was a mistake; too much talc powder in my glove—my hand slipped on the knife. I have never operated since.”

  “No, and you never will again,” Gaston muttered. “I’ll see to that, Butcher Anderson!”

  *

  The law was ruthless with the unfortunate, helpless Anderson. Before he scarcely realized what had happened, and mainly owing to the insidious tongue of the vengeful witness, Gaston, he was certified insane, inclined to violence with murderous intent, and promptly removed to an asylum. All the efforts of his distracted wile and influential friends failed completely to alter the decision.

  He was probably the only man at that time who could possibly hope to avert the catastrophe that only too plainly was approaching from this mad idea of stopping the dust.

  *

  III

  *

  And things began to happen in the outside world. In some ways, Gaston was a scientific man. He understood what the vibrator did—that it destroyed dust, and human life also, if one chanced to get in direct line with the stream of vibration. So it came about that Gaston operated the machine to his own satisfaction, pointing it always to the black sky, until one day an accident happened.

  Somewhere inside the instrument a wire or piece of mechanism slipped, and all the external efforts of Gaston failed completely to stop the machine running. The interior he dared not explore for fear of coming into contact with the deadly energy. He feared that stored-up energies might be released if he investigated too closely.

  Thus the machine just ran on, he himself becoming more afraid of it every day, striving to think of a way around the difficulty, but failing. Only Anderson knew enough about the machine to stop it and repair it—and he was safely put away. Gaston, from then on, became a peculiar study in hatred and fear.

  On the day of Anderson’s arrest, London experienced the most amazing morning of its life—a morning that brought about an almost incredible return of religious revivalists and so-called seers, who read in the black, sun-and-starlit sky, a potent message of impending destruction from the Almighty.

  Collisions in the streets were remarkably frequent, occasioned mainly by the absolute blackness of the shadows of buildings. In these shadows it was as black as Erebus; there was no diffusion of light whatever, and the result was that, in areas greatly overhung by tall buildings, buses and motor cars crashed helplessly into each other, drivers strangely confused by the swirling lights of approaching traffic, and unable to distinguish the innocent from the dangerous. Even collisions between pedestrians were equally prevalent, and the hospitals experienced the busiest morning for years, treating casualties.

  Toward noon, as the black sky and panic continued unabated, a deputation visited Greenwich Observatory. The official in charge was sympathetic, but vague. He confessed that he had no idea what had caused the celestial phenomenon. The only explanation possible was that by some peculiar means all the processes of refraction and de-fraction had suddenly become set at naught—perhaps through an agency of some annihilating gas in outer space, through which the earth, following her orbit, was passing.

  It was not a cheering observation, at the best.

  Naturally, the reporters of the leading newspapers were quick to turn the information to their own uses, flavored, as ever, by their own distinctive “scare” methods. The first evening newspaper editions were permitted to have bolder, larger headlines than usual.

  EARTH IN DANGER OF DESTRUCTION!

  DISTURBANCES IN OUTER SPACE THREATEN THE EARTH!

  The man in the street, to whom the newspaper is all-in-all, the peak of perfect information, became a trifle worried. Business became jerky. In subways, trains and buses, the one topic of conversation was the black sky. Men and women who, previously had been so absorbed with their daily task that they would have been surprised at being told the sky’s normal color was blue, suddenly took on astronomical tendencies and revealed latent and unsuspected scientific qualities.

  Cinema audiences, and audiences at all public halls, were curiously restive that night. The condition lasted at the cinema until the show began, then at what they beheld the audience sat in sudden awed silence, astonished at what they saw.

  For the screen images were cut as though with stencil—were almost three dimensional! Yet between the screen and the projector box there was no beam!

  The more thoughtful of the audience pondered over this curious fact. More than one puzzled operator surveyed his sizzling carbon arcs with troubled eyes, unable to account for the sudden blinding brilliance, which certainly had not been in evidence the day before. Other operators studiously checked their ammeters to make sure their arcs were not taking an overload—and found everything in order. The trouble, whatever it was, must be in the air itself. And another occurrence in the cinema theater upon which almost everybody remarked was the almost unnatural clearness of the sound apparatus. Every word was clear-cut and keen; the most mumbling actor could be heard distinctly, and those who were acknowledged masters of elocution seemed as though they were going to walk right out of the screen and come down into the audience, so lifelike was the effect.

  Outside, the astounding clearness of sound was again evidenced. The very air seemed to crackle with crispness. The hooting of tugs on the Thames, the whistle of trains from the stations and yards, came clear and shrill above the deeper roaring note of the traffic.

  It was a suddenly changed world—a world of unaccountable happenings, a world in which sound and actual light had increased, and yet where silence and darkness were more profound than ever before.

  And still, in a little laboratory in Kensington, reposed the answer to the riddle.

  By midnight London, for a change, was comparatively silent. The populace, worried by the events of the extraordinary day, had retired earlier than usual. Hundreds heard Big Ben chime that night who had never heard it before, so distinctly did the sound carry through the still air.

  The following morning, the sky was still black; once more there was an unearthly sunrise of a blazing yellow-white ball that shed its pitiless brilliance on a panicky city. Then it became known that this black area had only a radius of two thousand miles, and beyond that radius was the blue sky and sunshine and shadows which man holds dear. As a result an exodus to places beyond the two-thousand-mile limit began.

  The newspapers, as usual, were full of remarkable information, the most important being two columns by the astronomical correspondent upon the finding, by the observers of Greenwich Obs
ervatory, of several new galaxies that had never been seen before! Also observations of Mars and Venus were greatly simplified, the markings on their respective surfaces being startlingly clear and comparatively free from vibration.

  It did actually jar the ordinary businessman to discover that, despite a night of intense coldness, there was no trace of frost the following morning. Nor dew! Yet the air was keen—incredibly, strangely keen.

  There was one man, however, who surveyed the strange happenings from a scientific angle.

  His name was not prepossessing—Samuel Brown—and his personality was obscure. To the outer world, Sam Brown was a lawyer’s clerk, but there were some who knew him to be a man of natural scientific talents, who now found ample scope for his hobby in the sudden odd happenings that had come to pass.

  It was on the second evening that he confided his opinions to his not-too-brilliant wife.

  “Elsie, there’s something more behind all this business than an agency in outer space!”

  His wife sewed deliberately for a space, then cocked one doubtful and slightly protruding blue eye upon him.

  “Suppose there is? What are you going to do about it, Sam?”

  “I don’t know—yet, but I’m going to have a shot at doing something. The death toll is mounting day by day. This is the time for those who understand a little to expound their views! The scientists are baffled, but I’m not so sure that I am.”

  He screwed his head round, struck by a sudden thought, and pensively surveyed the sideboard—a massive heirloom from his great-grandmother. Then he ducked his head, and looked intently along the top of the thing.

  “If you’re looking for dust, Sam, you’ll find plenty!” his wife remarked presently. “I haven’t cleaned that sideboard for days. What with cooking and washing, I never get the time. Why you don’t get a smaller sideboard instead of that lumbering thing, I don’t know.”

  Sam looked up, pondered for a moment, then quietly but forcibly took his wife’s arm and led her, protesting feebly, across the room. When they came to the sideboard he pushed her head down with delightful familiarity until her eyes were level with the sideboard top.

  “Look along there!” he commanded.

  She obeyed, and then gave a sharp exclamation.

  “Why, Sam, you’ve cleaned it for me! Why—and the polished wood round the carpet edge, too! What’s come over you?”

  Sam slowly shook his head. “No, Elsie, I haven’t cleaned anything. The solution is exactly what I’ve believed all along.

  “There is no dust!”

  And he stood looking at her solemnly, his round face full of the intensity of his statement.

  Elsie’s brows knitted. “No dust, Sam? Oh, go on with you!”

  “I mean it, Elsie. Here—come to the table and I’ll figure it out for you.”

  They sat down. Sam tore the margin from the evening paper and produced a stump of pencil; then he proceeded to execute what he was pleased to call “higher mathematics.”

  “Totally black sky, amazingly brilliant lights, remarkable astronomical observations, inky shadows, clear sound, and now—no dust on a polished surface. Elsie, somebody or something is annihilating dust!”

  “You—you mean stopping it, Sam?”

  “Yes, stopping it. But why, and how, is the point. I’m going to sort this out.”

  Elsie sighed and thoughtfully scratched the end of her nose. “And we’ve only just paid the first installment on the vacuum cleaner! If there’s no dust, we shan’t need it.”

  Sam smiled grimly. “Elsie, there’ll be a lot of things we shan’t need if this dustless world goes on. But it won’t go on! I promise you that!”

  His wife resumed her armchair and sniffed.

  *

  IV

  *

  “Gentlemen,” said the chairman of the Cleenwurld Vacuum Company’s board of directors, “our sales have dropped nearly seventy-five per cent during the past week. It is a week since this strange condition of a dustless, rainless, dayless world began. And our firm is on the brink of disaster! These conditions cannot go on!”

  Unfortunately, however, the chairman found no means of preventing the conditions from going on, with the result that shortly afterward, in common with other dust-removing devices, the Cleenwurld Vacuum Company vanished from the commercial map.

  About the same time, the street-cleaners of London were summoned and at once instructed to cease work. London was a city without dust. One or two mechanical contrivances could quite easily cope with the slight amount of paper litter and other details. So it was in every case where dust was the fundamental of employment. The figures of unemployment began to mount.

  Little by little the gray face of London underwent a change as the eighth day of black sky and blazing sun appeared. The buildings, buried for years in the grime and filth of ages, began to reveal their real faces from under the canopy. The dust was disappearing from their black facades and soot-encrusted ornamentations. Here and there the long-hidden eyes of gargoyles appeared and looked out anew on the infinite strangeness of the dustless city. The gray dinginess of the Thames Embankment took on a clean newness, as though sprayed with some all-powerful cleansing fluid.

  Everywhere dust was on the march, was vanishing and exploding beneath the force of the still-unchecked vibrator in the center of the city. The exploding of the dust atoms that had begun in the upper reaches of the air had now spread downward to the lower quarters—was making itself manifest in every nook and cranny.

  Limehouse, long lost in the filth and dirt of accumulated centuries, became a place of slowly whitening wonder. At each turn one was met by a building or street rendered suddenly and unaccountably unfamiliar by the change in its appearance. Even the grime of the great railway stations began to vanish, and as time passed Londoners were presented with the incredible spectacle of seeing Euston and other stations rearing up as bright-red buildings with clean glass roofs, every engraved foundation stone as clear-cut and plain to read as though an army of cleaners had scrubbed at them for centuries.

  So complex is the human mind, so unexpected man’s reaction to environment, it was considered quite natural when the earlier fears of the populace changed into awe and then pride. They became accustomed to the black sky, and powerful floodlighting now rendered shadows no longer dangerous. The first disasters were now absent. The travel companies, ever up to the topic of the moment, advertised cheap fares for visitors from other lands to come to view the transformation of a city.

  So it was at first. Then, presently, rather alarming reports began to be received by the world’s press.

  The blackness was spreading!

  It covered an area now of three thousand miles, and was spreading gradually with every hour, in a fan shape. The annihilation of dust atoms would go on, now it was started, until something was found to counteract it. Dr. Anderson, in his asylum cell, heard this news indirectly, and cursed the fates, circumstances, and Gaston.

  With this new information, fear began to reappear slowly—the novelty died away. The benefit of disappearing dust and its consequent lightening of labor, the rising of new clean cities out of the black masks of the old, could not allay that new deep-rooted fear. The terrible thought that perhaps blue sky would never return began to become an obsession. The fear heightened when a strange illness broke out in London. It commenced with a sensation of irritation upon the skin, more particularly on exposed parts, which rapidly spread to the entire body, finally to the mouth, and then caused death from uncontrollable coughing.

  The physicians could not understand the malady in the least; it was something that had never been known before. They were still in the dark when there appeared none other than Samuel Brown himself, neat, inconspicuous, and carrying a brief case in his hand. After a great deal of trouble he was admitted to the sanctum of the head surgeon of the most important institution—Dr. Long.

  Dr. Long was not very gracious.

  “It is to be hoped, Mr. Brown,” sa
id this individual testily, “that you have something of import to convey. Only on those conditions can I possibly spare the time to converse with you.”

  Brown smiled slightly. “You may perhaps feel a trifle more disposed to converse when you are aware that I have come to tell you what is the cause of the peculiar malady that has broken out in the dark areas.”

  Dr. Long permitted himself a faintly cynical smile.

  “You are the fourth person today who has undertaken to explain that,” he said coldly.

  “Man is ever ready to make capital out of either accident or circumstance,” Brown responded calmly. “I know what I am talking about. I have not come here to waste your time. As a lawyer’s clerk I know that time is valuable, and —”

  “A lawyer’s clerk! And you dare to come here and attempt to expound the nature of a new disease! Sir, this is preposterous!”

  “But the truth, all the same. Dr. Long, the cause of this deadly disease is dust destruction!”

  “Dust destruction?” Dr. Long’s eyebrows shot up and then down again. He fixed the unmoved Sam with a deadly stare.

  “The cause of the black skies and a clean London is occasioned by the same thing—annihilation of dust,” Sam went on steadily. “The trouble has now spread to human beings, who are always, no matter how clean, covered with a certain amount of dust. This dust is disrupting upon their skin, and, when it reaches the mouth and nose, sets up a fatal irritation. That is the explanation.”

  “Utter rubbish!” Dr. Long snapped hotly. “I have never heard such balderdash in the course of my entire professional career. The disease is simply an advanced form of—er—erysipelas.”

  “You do well to hesitate before using that word,” Sam said grimly. “You know as well as I do, Dr. Long, that this disease is as much apart from erysipelas as the North Pole is from the South. You don’t like being taught your job; that’s what’s the matter with you!”

  “How dare you, sir? How dare you? I am sorry, Mr. Brown, but I have no time for you. Good day!” The strong chin projected adamantly.