John Russell Fearn Omnibus

by John Russell Fearn

  In his cell Blake spent most of his time between sentence and execution brooding over the facts he had gleaned from his experiments. In the death house in prison he was certainly a model prisoner, quiet, preoccupied, just a little grim. His whole being was as a matter of fact built up into one fierce, unwavering concentration — the date of April twenty-first. Upon his mastery of elemental forces at the point of death depended his one chance of changing the law of time and confronting Hart Cranshaw with the impossible, a return from death.

  Not a word of his intentions escaped him. He was unbowed on the last morning, listened to the prison chaplain’s brief words of solace in stony silence, then walked the short length of dim corridor, between guards, to the fatal chamber. He sat down in the death chair with the calm of a man about to preside over a meeting.

  The buckles on the straps clinked a little, disturbing him.

  He hardly realized what was going on in the somber, dimly lighted place. If his mental concentration concerning April twenty-first had been strong before, now it had become fanatical. Rigid, perspiration streaming down his face with the urgency of his thoughts, he waited …

  He felt it then — the thrilling, binding, racking current as it nipped his vitals, then spread and spread into an infinite snapping anguish in which the world and the universe was a brief blazing hell of dissolution …

  Then things were quiet — oddly quiet …

  He felt as though he were drifting in a sea without substance — floating alone. His concentration was superseded now by a dawning wonder, indeed a striving to come to grips with the weird situation in which he found himself.

  He had died — his body had — he was convinced of that. But now, to break these iron bands of paralysis, that was the need!

  He essayed a sudden effort and with it everything seemed to come abruptly into focus. He felt himself snap out of the void of in-between into normal — or at least mundane — surroundings. He stirred slowly. He was still alone, lying on his back on a somber, chilly plain of reddish dust. It occasioned him passing surprise that he was still dressed in the thin cotton shirt and pants of a prisoner.

  A biting chill in the air went suddenly to his marrow. He shuddered as he got to his feet and looked down at himself.

  “Of course. I held my clothes in thought as much as my body, so they were bound to be recreated also …”

  Baffled, he stared about him. Overhead the sky was violet blue and powdered with endless hosts of stars. To the right was a frowning ridge of higher ground. And everywhere, red soil. Time — an infinitely long span — had passed.

  With a half cry he turned and ran breathlessly towards the ridge, scrambled up the rubbly slope quickly. At the top he paused, appalled.

  A red sun, swollen to unheard-of size, was bisected by the far distant jagged horizon — a sun to whose edge the stars themselves seemed to reach. He was old now, unguessably old, his incandescent fires burned out.

  “Millions of years, quintillions of years,” Blake Carson whispered, sitting down with a thump on an upturned rock and staring out over the drear, somber vastness. “In heaven’s name, what have I done? What have I done?”

  He stared in front of him, forced himself by superhuman effort to think calmly. He had planned for one week beyond death. Instead he had landed here, at the virtual end of Earth’s existence, where age was stamped on everything. It was in the scarcely moving sun which spoke of Earth’s near-standstill from tidal drag. It was in the red soil, the ferrous oxide of extreme senility, the rusting of the metallic deposits in the ground itself. It was in the thin air that had turned the atmospheric heights violet-blue and made breathing a sheer agony.

  And there was something else too apart from all this which Blake Carson had only just begun to realize. He could no longer see the future.

  “I cheated the normal course of after-death,” he mused. “I did not move to a neighboring plane there to resume a continuation of life, and neither did I move to April twenty-one as I should have done. It can only mean that at the last minute there was an unpredictable error. It is possible that the electricity from the chair upset my brain planning and shifted the focus of my thoughts so that I was hurled ahead, not one week — but to here. And with that mishap I also lost the power to visualize the future. Had I died by any other way but electricity there might not have been that mistake.”

  He shuddered again as a thin, ice-charged wind howled dismally out of the desolate waste and stabbed him through and through. Stung into movements, once more, he got up. Protecting his face from the brief, slashing hurricane he moved further along the ridge and gazed out over the landscape from a different vantage. And from here there was a new view. Ruins, apparently.

  He began to run to keep himself warm, until the thin air flogged his lungs to bursting point. At a jog trot he moved on towards the mighty, hardly moving sun, stopped at last within the shadow of a vast, eroded hall.

  It was red like everything else. Within it were the ponderous remains of dust-smothered machinery, colossi of power long disused and forgotten. He stared at them, unable to fathom their smallest meaning. His gaze traveled further — to the crumbled ruins of mighty edifices of rusting metal in the rear. Terrace upon terrace, to the violet sky. Here it seemed was a rusting monument to Man’s vanished greatness, with the inexplicable and massive engines as the secret of his power …

  And Man himself? Gone to other worlds? Dead in the red dust? Blake Carson shook himself fiercely at the inescapable conviction of total loneliness. Only the stars, the sun, and the wind — that awful wind, moaning now softly through the ruins, sweeping the distant corner of the horizon into a mighty cloud that blacked out the brazen glitter of the northern stars.

  Blake Carson turned at last. At the far end of the ruins his eye had caught a faint gleam of reflection from the crimson sun. It shone like a diamond. Baffled, he turned and hurried towards it, found the distance was deceptive and that it was nearly two miles off. The nearer he came the more the brightness resolved itself into one of six massively thick glass domes some six feet in diameter.

  In all there were eight of them dotted about a little plateau which had been scraped mainly free of rubble and stone. It resembled the floor of a crater with frowning walls of rock all round it. Mystified, Carson moved to the nearest dome and peered through.

  In that moment he forgot the melancholy wind and his sense of desperate loneliness — for below was life! Teeming life! Not human life, admittedly, but at least something that moved. It took him a little while to adjust himself to the amazing thing he had discovered.

  Perhaps two hundred feet below the dome, brightly lighted, was a city in miniature. It reminded him of a model city of the future he had once seen at an exposition. There were terraces, pedestrian tracks, towers, even aircraft. It was all there on an infinitely minute scale, and probably spread far under the earth out of his line of vision.

  But the teeming hordes were — ants. Myriads of them. Not rushing about with the apparent aimlessness of his own time, but moving with a definable, ordered purpose. Ants in a dying world? Ants with their own city?

  “Of course,” he whispered, and his breath froze the glass. “Of course. The law of evolution — man to ant, and ant to bacteria. Science has always visualized that. This I could never have known about for the future I saw was not on this plane …

  And Hart Cranshaw? The scheme of vengeance? It seemed a remote plan now. Down here was company — intelligent ants who, whatever they might think of him, would perhaps at least talk to him, help him …

  Suddenly he beat his fists mightily on the glass, shouted hoarsely.

  There was no immediate effect. He beat again, this time frenziedly, and the scurrying hordes below suddenly paused in their movement as though uncertain. Then they started to scatter madly like bits of dust blown by the wind.

  “Open up!” he shouted. “Open up. I’m freezing.”

  He was not quite sure what happened then, but it seemed to him that
he went a little mad. He had a confused, blurred notion of running to each dome in turn and battering his fists against its smooth, implacable surface.

  Wind, an endless wind, had turned his blood to ice. At last he sank down on an out-jutting rock at the plateau edge, buried his head in his hands and shivered. An overpowering desire to go to sleep was upon him, but presently it passed as he became aware of new thoughts surging through his brain, mighty thoughts that were not his own.

  He saw, in queer kaleidoscopic fashion, the ascent of man to supreme heights: he saw too man’s gradual realization that he was upon a doomed world. He saw the thinning of the multitudes and the survival of the fittest — the slow, inexorable work of Nature as she adapted life to suit her latest need.

  Like a panorama of the ages, hurdling great vistas of time, Blake Carson saw the human body change into that of the termite, of which the termite of his own time was but the progenitor, the experimental form, as it were. The termites, invested with more than human intelligence, had formed these underground cities themselves, cities replete with every scientific need and requiring but little of the dying Earth so small were they. Only underground was there safety from the dying atmosphere.

  Yes, Nature had been clever in her organization and would be even cleverer when it came to the last mutation into bacteria. Indestructible, bacteria that could live in space, float to oilier worlds, to begin anew. The eternal cycle.

  Carson looked up suddenly, puzzled as to why he should know all these things. At what he beheld he sprang to his feet, only to sit down again as he found his legs were numbed with cold.

  There was a small army of ants quite close to him, like a black mat on the smooth red of the ground. Thought transference! That was how he had known. The truth had been forced into his mind deliberately. He realized it clearly now for there came a bombardment of mental questions, but from such a multitude of minds that they failed to make any sense.

  “Shelter,” he cried. “Food and warmth — that is what I want. I have come out of Time — a wanderer — and it was an accident that brought me here. You will regard me as an ancient type, therefore I am surely useful to you. If I stay out here the cold will soon kill me.”

  “You created your own accident, Blake Carson,” came one clear wave of thought. “Had you died as the Time-law proclaimed you would have passed on to the next stage of existence, the stage apart from this one. You chose instead to try and defeat Time in order that you might enact vengeance. We, who understand Time, Space, and Life, see what your intentions were.

  “You cannot have help now. It is the law of the cosmos that you must live and die by its dictates. And death such as you will experience this time will not be the normal transition from this plane to another but transition to a plane we cannot even visualize. You have forever warped the cosmic line of Time you were intended to pursue. You can never correct that warp.”

  Blake Carson stared, wishing he could shift his icebound limbs. He was dying even now, realized it clearly, but interest kept his mentality still alert.

  “Is this hospitality?” he whispered. “Is this the scientific benevolence of an advanced age? How can you be so pitiless when you know why I sought revenge?”

  “We know why, certainly, but it is trivial compared to your infinite transgression in trying to twist scientific law to your own ends. Offense against science is unforgivable, no matter what the motive. You are a throwback, Blake Carson — an outsider! Especially so to us. You never found Hart Cranshaw, the man you wanted. You never will.”

  Blake Carson’s eyes narrowed suddenly. He noticed that as the thoughts reached him the body of ants had receded quite a distance, evidently giving up interest in him and returning to their domain. But the power of the thoughts reaching him did not diminish.

  Abruptly he saw the reason for it. One termite, larger than the others, was alone on the red soil. Carson gazed at it with smoldering eyes, the innermost thoughts of the tiny thing probing his brain.

  “I understand,” he whispered. “Yes, I understand! Your thoughts are being bared to me. You are Hart Cranshaw. You are the Hart Cranshaw of this age. You gained your end. You stole my invention — yes, became the master of science, the lord of the Earth, just as you had planned. You found that there was a way to keep on the normal plane after each death, a way entirely successful if death did not come by electrocution. That was what shattered my plan — the electric chair.

  “But you went on and on, dying and being born again with a different and yet identical body. An eternal man, mastering more and more each time!” Carson’s voice had risen to a shriek. Then he calmed. “Until at last Nature changed you into an ant, made you the master of even the termite community. How little did I guess that my discovery would hand you the world. But if I have broken cosmic law, Hart Cranshaw, so have you. You have cheated your normal time action, time and again, with numberless deaths. You have stayed on this plane when you should have moved on to others. Both of us are transgressors. For you, as for me, death this time will mean the unknown.”

  A power that was something other than himself gave Blake Carson strength at that moment. Life surged back into his leaden limbs and he staggered to his feet.

  “We have come together again, Hart, after all these quintillions of years. Remember what I said long ago? To everything there is an appointed time? Now I know why you don’t want to save me.”

  He broke off as with sudden and fantastic speed the lone termite sped back towards the mass of his departing colleagues. Once among them, as Carson well knew, there would be no means of identification.

  With this realization he forced himself into action and leaped. The movement was the last he could essay. He dropped on his face, and his hand closed round the scurrying insect. It escaped. He watched it run over the back of his hand — then frantically across his palm as he opened his fingers gently.

  He had no idea how long he lay watching it — but at last it ran to the tip of his thumb. His first finger closed on his thumb suddenly — and crushed.

  He found himself gazing at a black smear on thumb and finger.

  He could move his hand no further. Paralysis had gripped his limbs completely. There was a deepening, crushing pain in his heart. Vision grew dim. He felt himself slipping — But with the transition to Beyond he began to realize something else. He had not cheated Time! Neither had Hart Cranshaw! They had done all this before somewhere — would do it again — endlessly, so long as Time itself should exist. Death — transition — rebirth — evolution — back again to the age of the amoeba — upwards to man — the laboratory — the electric chair …

  Eternal. Immutable!

  The Ultimate Analysis

  The two scientists were arguing vehemently. Not that this was anything new. For the forty years of their academic lives from the days when they had mixed odors of test tubes together in the college laboratory, they had argued. The point of significance was that Dr. Enrod was usually proven correct. He had greater vision but less brilliance than his friend Professor Coltham.

  Right now they stood in the Professor’s private laboratory, an isolated low-roofed building well separated from the house. Coltham, brooding like a bird of prey over his smaller friend, jabbed an acid-stained finger at him.

  “Your trouble, Enrod, is limitation!” he asserted. “You have always been the same — always ready to pull my experiments to pieces.”

  “For which very reason you have improved them.” Enrod smiled, and remained unabashed. “Nor am I limited. My imagination, but not my inventive faculty, completely transcends yours!”

  “Hmmm. Maybe.”

  “No doubt of it. And I’m telling you right now, Coltham, that if you go on with this latest invention of yours you are likely to stir up a scientific hornet’s nest!”

  “Supposing I do? Have not men stirred up hornet’s nests before when finding new paths in science? Frankly, I don’t think you have grasped the essentials, Enrod.”

  Because he was so
sure of the fact, Coltham started to elucidate again. “Several years ago Jeans worked out the space-time-matter conception in relation to mathematics. He was practically alone in his theory in those days, fifty years ago — practically alone in his belief that everything is in reality a mathematical abstraction, that the build-up of atoms, protons, neutrons, and so forth are just so many mathematical computations, sponsored perhaps by some creator who is mathematical to an infinite degree. Right?”

  “I know,” Enrod observed mildly. “You have told me all that.”

  “But you don’t seem to have grasped it! I said that for twenty years I have worked on this theory of Jeans’. What is more, I have proved that he was right. Jeans himself said, and we of today admit it freely, that it is no longer possible to assess Nature from the engineering or chemical standpoint. Mathematics alone can completely analyze the Universe and its myriad forces. We can only progress with any benefit by knowing the mathematical changes in a substance that cause it to be possessed of progressive entropy. Our Universe, because of the Theory of Relativity, is finite — and yet unbounded. It is finite because geometries limit it. It is infinite when understood through mathematics. Separate the mathematics from the geometry and then — then we shall understand the Universe for what it really is!”

  Enrod shook his head. “I do not agree even now,” he insisted. “To get to the root of mathematics is like — like trying to catch the east wind in a bottle. It just isn’t there. It’s a mental conception.”

  “There you have it!” Coltham boomed. “A mental conception! The intricate workings of mathematics are planted deep in our subconscious minds. Jeans said that, too. Because of this — because of our inability really to penetrate the subconscious mind — I have spent these years in devising a machine to do it for us, a machine which will analyze any known substance, organic or inorganic, down to the absolute mathematical basis.”