Sam shrugged. “Very well, then, Dr. Long. But you will be very sorry you have no time for me. Good day to you.”
From there Sam went direct to his flat. His wife, curiously greasy and besmudged, with a cretonne apron tied almost painfully round her middle, came shuffling into the little drawing room as he entered.
“What’s the matter, Sam? Why aren’t you at the office?”
“Because I’ve more important things to do, Elsie. Law doesn’t interest me when the fate of a planet is at stake. Here I am, with the one cure for a world disease in my very hands—written down on these very papers—and Dr. Long won’t listen to me because it looks as though I’m telling him his own job. Bah! The little-mindedness of it all! I think I prejudiced him by telling him I was a lawyer’s clerk. Had I given the Russian name of ‘Brownofski,’ and presented myself with a bushy beard and a fierce compulsion in my eyes, I might have got somewhere with him.”
“Well, I told you to stick to law, Sam.” Elsie wiped her lard-smeared hands on her apron and thoughtfully sucked a hollow back-tooth. “You should have stuck to your affidavits and —”
“Elsie,” Sam interrupted her suddenly, “I married you because I loved you—and I still do—but if you keep on harping on what I ought to have done, instead of what I am going to do, I’ll hit you over your dense head with your own rolling pin! So think that over. Now get on with your cooking, and leave me to think.”
“Oh, all right—but goodness knows what you’re going to think with.”
“Something you haven’t got, if you must know!” Sam snapped. “Now clear out!”
Elsie slowly obeyed, and Sam did set himself to think—hard. He spent a time gazing out of the window over the lowering roofs of the tenement houses contiguous to his own flat. Then he looked up at the black sky.
“Either a devil or a saint,” he whispered. “Either the creator of this trouble sought to improve the world, or else he sought to make it a world of terror. The destruction of dust! Now what could cause that? Vacuum? Not on such a scale. Or tremendous wind pressure? No; that would necessitate a gale, and it has been as still as the grave ever since this business started. Electricity? Hm-m-m—that might be responsible for anything, as so little is really known of its fundamentals. I’ll work that out.”
After some difficulty he located a writing pad and flung it on the table beneath the electric light—a light that had never been extinguished for nine days except during sleep, for the flat was in the shadow—and set to work to figure the matter out. The moment he began, Sam Brown, the clerk, vanished, and the precise, unerring mind of the true scientist came into being.
By the time Elsie had shuffled in again he had the thing clear in his mind.
“Elsie,” he said decisively, “it’s disruption. Electrical disruption. Figures prove that it could be done.”
“What’s electrical dis-dis—whatever you called it?” Elsie inquired.
“Disruption of the atoms, of the molecules, of the very being of dust, by some electrical energy.”
“Well, now you’ve found that out, what do you propose doing about it?”
“I’m going to stop it!”
“How?”
“By an improved system of my cure for the disease.” He paused, marshalling his thoughts.
“You see, when the atoms of dust start to disrupt upon a human being, the only thing to stop it is the removal of the dust atoms themselves. I didn’t know until I worked it out that it was the atoms of dust that were causing the trouble. I merely thought the dust itself was somehow disrupting. The thing to stop the latter condition would be a very powerful but minute electrical vacuum capable of drawing off every particle of dust from a human form. That would stop the disruption spreading until it became fatal. Once it reaches the vital organs nothing can be done about it, of course; the thing to do is to check it in its incipiency.
“But now that I know it is the atoms of dust that are being disrupted—possibly the disintegration of the electrons causing collapse of the atomic structure—I can work even more successfully. The dust atoms that are whole must be divided from the disrupting atom areas by a beam or shield of sufficient vibration to prevent the further disruption of atoms continuing. Like an asbestos screen would stop a fire spreading any further. You get the idea? A shield between the disrupting sections and the whole sections. And it must be vibration capable of exerting a negative effect upon the exploding atoms. That will require some working out.”
“And you gave up a steady job to discover that!” Elsie sighed. “I’ve not the least idea what you’re talking about, and I’m not altogether sure that you have, either.”
Sam chuckled. “Leave it to me, Elsie. You won’t regret this day. You’ll rejoice in the future that it ever came to be. Now be a good girl and leave me to work in peace.”
*
V
*
The next two days brought trouble and strife in the dustless world. The farmers rose in a body and made a vehement deputation to the government—an urge to make some attempt to remove the conditions that were existing. Plants and crops were commencing to die from the continued lack of moisture. Never a cloud was seen in the sky—it remained coal-black; never any dew or frost. All rivers and brooks were at the lowest ebb for years, and becoming still less.
And now a greater and more serious problem was hovering on the landscape. Water was coming to an end! The chief water office engineers for London and environs reported that the water supply in the reservoirs was dropping lower and lower, and there was not the vaguest chance of rain. Little by little troubled humanity began to realize that it was being forced into a tight corner.
The water shortage was the seed of disaster creeping over the world with the gradual spreading of the dark areas. More and more remote was becoming the view of a blue sky. Sam Brown, realizing this, worked night and day, that he might have a blue, dusty portion of sky left on which to experiment.
The advance of time brought about water rations. Public transport services were curtailed. Even automobiles were run only occasionally, for the water ration made it almost prohibitive to use water in the radiators. For a time milk and spirits were used, but after a while, with the slow dying of cattle, even this ceased.
So desperate was the position becoming, a conference of the world’s governments was convened to review the situation. It was at best a pretty absurd idea, with the cancer now so far advanced, but public force demanded action.
The meeting, naturally, came to nothing. Nobody could explain the cause of the trouble and nobody knew how to stop it. The idea of consulting some of the great scientists and electricians never seemed to occur to these political geniuses. Probably the idea was as far from their minds as the thought of Sam Brown having the key to the problem in his hands.
For he most undoubtedly had.
So, very gradually, utter and complete catastrophe began to make itself felt. In all countries where the dark areas were at their worst, trouble was rife. Death, famine, and pestilence were the order. Cattle, plants, trees, the very grass was shriveling, warped and withered under the black, star-and-sun-ridden sky. At night there was no change, save for the fact that the sun vanished to give place to a steely moon, and strange, hitherto unknown constellations gleamed forth from various quarters of the heavens.
Presently, efforts were made to filter the oceans, but so complicated was the task, and so short the water to give to the workers, that the idea fizzled out. To supply the world with filtered seawater became a stillborn idea on the threshold of impending death.
London, New York, Berlin, Paris, Brussels, Vienna—all were no longer cities of business. They were cities of thirst and misery, of pestilence and incurable disease. And yet everything, by grim irony, was as bright and clean as though washed with flowing streams. Nowhere a speck of dust—and nowhere a drop of water!
Only a track of five hundred miles of blue sky now remained, and this had its center over the plains of Central Russia
—the one point in the world where the atomic disruption had not yet reached, where the consummation of dust destruction still hung fire.
But, minute by minute that stretch was narrowing; minute by minute, the sky of man was melting away.
*
It was at this point in the tragic history of stopping dust that Sam Brown completed his invention. It was a brilliant piece of work, but only his eyes admitted the fact. To his wife it was a cumbersome affair of boxes and dials that consumed a great deal of privately generated electricity to keep it going—for the ordinary current had long since ceased, owing to failure of water energy.
“My figures prove that it works, Elsie,” Sam said. “The only way I can get help is by getting somebody to finance me to Central Russia where the remaining path of blue sky exists. If that gap vanishes, I’m powerless! All dust will be gone and I can’t separate the normal from the explosive. I’m going to the government—to Downing Street—right away.”
“Downing Street?” his wife echoed.
“Yes, and if I don’t come back, don’t worry. I haven’t a moment to lose: I’ll return when my work is ended. Now be a good sort and help me pack these things up.”
At Downing Street, Sam was listened to attentively, mainly because of his earnestness, his apparatus, and his perfectly logical reasoning. The chairman of the meeting, at Sam’s request, sent for an electrical expert from Greenwich, and this individual, after checking up Brown’s figures, sat in awed silence for a while.
“Mr. Brown, it’s a masterpiece!” he declared at last. “If the cause of the disruption is what you think it is, then undoubtedly this machine will stop it, I —” He paused, and the chairman frowned as a clerk entered, bearing a card.
“All right,” the chairman growled. “Show him in, please.”
A tall man with bushy eyebrows entered—and bowed stiffly.
“Your mission is urgent, Dr. Long?” the chairman asked. “I am much occupied.”
“My mission is a matter of life and death. People are dying by hundreds. It is essential that something be done. Everybody must help in this crisis. I wish you to have the government, issue an order that all houses are to be opened up for public service—as hospitals. I seek your most earnest cooperation, and —”
Dr. Long paused and stared hard at Sam, who had just raised his face from his notes.
“Mr. Brown!” he ejaculated. “You!”
“Who else?” Sam inquired pleasantly. “But don’t let me interrupt you, doctor.
“I’ve been searching all over London for you,” Long said intensely, clutching the unmoved Sam’s arm. “You never left your address when you visited me. That cure of yours! We are ready to try it! Ready to do anything to try to stop this malady —”
Sam shrugged. “I have had too much important business elsewhere recently to try and interest other dolts in my antidote for the malady,” he remarked coldly. “Here are the papers—take them and perhaps they’ll help you to learn that nobody is ever too clever to learn.”
Long almost snatched the papers and raced from the room.
“Mr. Brown,” the chairman remarked, “it indeed seems as though you are going to be our savior. We will do anything you wish; even if you do not succeed it cannot make things any worse. What are your orders?”
“The fastest possible airplane to Central Russia. I require several trained electric experts, and a good pilot who knows his way to the one remaining fragment of blue sky by the shortest route. That is all.”
“It shall be done immediately, Mr. Brown.”
*
So it came about that when the last stretch of blue sky in the entire world had shrunk to only ten miles in width, Sam Brown set up his apparatus among the barren hills and plains of Central Russia, amid cutting winds and bitter cold, surrounded by his little group of picked experts, two high-powered airplanes, and the intensely anxious government representative.
“If my theories are correct, the vibration energy from this instrument of mine should give a fan-shaped extension of vibration upward to a fourteen-mile limit,” Brown said: “If we calculate the velocity of the disrupting vibration at 180 frequencies—and that is about what I think it is—it stands to reason that the frequency of my ‘curtain,’ working transverse to the disrupting energy, and having a frequency of over 2000, will block the path of the disrupting atoms and save that bit of normal sky which is left. After that, when the last of the disrupting atoms on the disruptive side of my screen have exploded, we can remove the shield, and very gradually the dust will again spread and multiply from that blueness, and disseminate throughout the world again. We will build fires, make great smoke columns, do hundreds of things to make dust.
“Now, are we ready?”
The instruments were set up in their predetermined positions, and for a time everything was strain and anxiety. Sam flitted about in his huge overcoat like some goblin, peering at this and inspecting that until at last he raised his hand and gave the signal.
Sam Brown’s apparatus immediately worked, and a pinkish screen spread outward and upward toward the blue sky that remained, its edges sharply notched out with the encroaching black.
In utter silence the watchers stared upward; then with a bitter oath Sam tore off his hat and flung it on the iron-hard ground.
“Failed!” he groaned hoarsely. “Look! The black is still spreading! My judgment has been at fault.”
“But your figures—your calculations!” the electrical expert protested.
“I know that, but —”
Brown stopped dead; then suddenly he snapped his fingers.
“Got it! Whatever is causing the disruption is still working, and it is stronger than my apparatus. I underestimated its power.”
He looked round on his silent colleagues.
“Gentlemen, we have about twenty-four hours in which to locate the instrument that is causing the damage, and get back here. What are we to do?”
The engineers scratched their heads, the government representative stroked his chin, and two plane pilots fingered their coat belts. And above the blackness encroached a trifle further through the pink screen.
“We have not the time,” the government expert said at last. “We have not the time.”
Back in London, however, certain curious events were taking place.
At the house of the late Professor Renhard, a wild-eyed, unshaven individual was creeping down the stairs in utter silence. He crept down the hall and opened the front door. Then, like some hunted animal, he descended to the street—a street lit by the sun in the black sky; a street devoid of traffic, where the corpses of dogs and cats lay scattered here and there.
“Destruction! Death!” Gaston murmured. “Because I couldn’t stop the machine! I cannot stand it any longer. I must find Anderson! Do you hear, I must find Anderson!” he shouted to the black, starry skies, and wandered through the inky shadows, only one thought in his burning brain, tottering on the brink of insanity through lack of water, and a nursed revenge.
Tattered and unkempt, he drifted through the streets, halting ever and again at a despairing shout, slinking into the pitchy darkness as a huddled form would slink past him like an animal in the gloom.
Fear, darkness, and death. The three grim ghouls stalked through all the cities of the world.
At the gates of the asylum where he knew Anderson was imprisoned, Gaston collapsed. He was carried inside by attendants, into the main office.
“Anderson!” he muttered, clutching the coat lapel of the supervising officer. “I must see him! Let him free! Set him free! He is not mad; he is the only man who really knows how to stop this world disaster—how to take away this black sky. I got him in here by a trick. For God’s sake, let him out!”
“We can’t take your word for it,” said the officer stolidly. “There are many formalities to be gone through.”
Gaston sat up and looked at the officials with burning eyes. Then suddenly he whipped out a loaded revolver from his hip p
ocket. “Will you do as I say or not?” he demanded thickly. “Hurry, you idiots! There’ll be no red tape this time—just action!”
Other officials appeared, but they hesitated at the vision of Gaston’s blazing eyes and the revolver. Holding them at bay, dodging about with superhuman agility, he circumvented their every move, until at last he had forced them into the main corridor of cells.
“Get busy!” he commanded; and the wardens, all weakened by the strain of recent events, and their own torturing thirst, obeyed—obeyed with a weakness which certainly would never have obtained under normal circumstances. Down the passage a cell door opened and Anderson came staggering out, gaunt, hollow-eyed and bearded.
“Gaston!” he ejaculated hoarsely.
“Yes, it’s me, Anderson. I’ve done irreparable damage, and this is a slight effort to atone for it. That damnable vibrator has jammed—is running perpetually on its own power. It hasn’t a water generator, or else it would have stopped long ago. For God’s sake, stop it!”
Anderson clutched the ex-servant’s shoulder. “But even if I stop it now, the atomic disruption will go on!”
Gaston nodded weakly. “True. But when the last atom of dust has exploded, there will be no more disruptions if that instrument is shut off. Dust will gather again and settle, and the world of men will return. Go on, Anderson, do it—save the world of the future at least. I’m—done!” And with the words Gaston collapsed to the floor.
“You’re not leaving here; we must have proof of your sanity first,” snapped the supervisor.
“Proof be damned!” Anderson snarled, swinging round on him. “I’ll give you a proof such as no man has ever had before. Come with me—give me this one chance. Bring straitjackets, guns, revolvers—anything else you like, and if you’re not satisfied when I’ve finished, you can lock me up for life. Now come on.”
And not ten minutes later a powerful car swept out of the asylum drive toward the abode of the late Professor Renhard—the man who had stopped the dust.
*
“The blackness has ceased!” Sam Brown exclaimed suddenly, pointing upward. “We win, my friends! We win! See—the blue is spreading very slowly—already the dust is spreading outward—giving us back our blue sky—our world of men!”
John Russell Fearn Omnibus Page 5
