John Russell Fearn Omnibus

by John Russell Fearn

  Enrod shook his bald head impatiently. “You’re still up a gum tree, Coltham! A mathematical formula can never tell us what a thing is — only how it behaves. It can only specify an object through its properties.”

  “If only the external mathematics of a thing — such as mass, width, depth, and so on — are analyzed, yes. But an absolute analysis can alone explain the mysteries of dimensions, the electron waves of probability, the Fitzgerald limit of light — endless things like that. If we have an exact analysis of everything that goes to make up the universe as we know it, a task which I reckon would take about ten years, we have also the key to infinity itself. The basic universe-forms needed are not numerous. Most of the things we know are off-shoots of an original formation — such as steel is a form of iron.”

  Enrod shrugged. “You intend to solve why things are? That it?”

  Coltham pulled the cover from an instrument standing in the center of the laboratory floor. It reminded Enrod of a huge glass pear, stem downward. Inside its near-vacuum were queerly fashioned filaments, electrodes, and banks of tubes. Round the bottom edge of the globe, where its neck began, was a complete row of gray objects like the hammers of a piano. They formed a circle around the globe neck, and each one was carefully wired to lead to a matrix immediately under the strange contrivance.

  “Remarkable!” Enrod said, studying it. “Only a man of your brilliance could have invented such a thing!” Then as Coltham remained proud and silent, Enrod added naively, “What is it?”

  “A mathematical analyzer. It is composed of what I call metallic variants. You see those teeth round the inside of the globe neck? They all look alike, yet each one is specially prepared on its external surface to receive light or energy photons from anything placed in the matrix beneath. There are thirty metallic variants, each one capable of a different task. They analyze, in turn the mathematical outflow of whatever is in the matrix. Radiation, energy, light — all those different conditions have a mathematical sense which so far has escaped detection. Nothing on earth can be without some form of energy dissipation and, therefore, capable of analysis. Only in the absolute depths of space is it possible to find a body utterly at rest, and probably not even there.

  “So, the metallic variants analyze the color, the mass, the height, the depth — everything — of whatever is in the matrix. This thirty-toned key system here” — Coltham indicated an array of tiny pipes of odd crystalline substance which looked like a baby organ — “responds to the metallic variants’ vibrations and proceeds to perform the mathematical conceptions necessary to the analysis. From here the movement continues to what is really a glorified adding machine, sealed inside this massive box here. A result is finally arrived at — a one hundred percent analysis of anything. You, see?”

  “Partly,” Enrod mused. “How is the key system able to convert vibration into mathematics?”

  “That,” Coltham sighed, “is nearly as hard to explain as east wind in a bottle. I don’t just know how the vibrations are converted into mathematics. I only know it is so — just as we know that an electron is somewhere within a probability wave. I know from experiment that the crystalline used in the key system is sensitive to the vibrations of the variants. Maybe it is something inherent in the alloy I have used, something to do with the mathematical basis of the metal itself. Like many scientists, I understand what the alloy does but do not know what it is. However, suppose I demonstrate?”

  He threw a switch and the globe came to life. The various tubes glowed. Then as Coltham pulled a pencil out of his pocket and tossed it into the queerly fashioned matrix, clamping down the lid, the globe really jumped into activity.

  He and Enrod stood watching as mystic, unexplainable ripplings of color started to play along the circle of metallic variants. Some of these saw-teeth shone vividly, others only glowed. The weird crystalline substance of the key system was shot through now with unholy light.

  Dr. Enrod was convinced, as he watched, that some of the colors were not in the visible spectrum at all. He felt rather than saw them. A vague unease settled upon him. Little gusts of conception — fragments of amazing thoughts — twisted through his brain. Once he fancied he really understood the infinite calculus in its entirety for the first time. Then just as quickly the breathtaking conviction was gone.

  “You feel the mathematical vibrations?” Coltham asked dryly, eyeing him.

  “Is that it?” Enrod surveyed the globe intently. “Yes — I feel them.”

  “But they’re as vague as waves of probability,” Coltham sighed. “Vibrations from which the very universe was fashioned, no doubt. It is so hard to understand the functions of pure mathematics. Ah! I believe we are ready!”

  He studied a dial for a moment, then shut off the power. The main mathematical machine continued working. The subsidiary calculator clicked suddenly and thrust out a sheet of stiff paper into Coltham’s waiting hand. He smiled triumphantly, but Enrod blinked as he peered at it.

  “Great heavens, it even analyzes the composition of the graphite and the basic constituents of the timber used for the pencil! Coltham, do you realize what this brain-child of yours is doing? It roots out elements that are not even in our Periodic Table! Look here — it says there is a mathematical percentage of Element 85. That is one of our blanks, but where does it fit into a common pencil?”

  Coltham shrugged. “What did I tell you? Somewhere in the graphite — among these multitudinous other elements that go to create graphite — is Element Eighty-five. This, my doubting friend, is pure mathematical analysis! We see from this formula our common, or garden pencil, is made up of no fewer than seventy-five different elements! The graphite, timber, and paint are analyzed exactly into seventy-two elements, and the precise atomic formation and weight and mass of each is given.” His eyes sparkled. “Now we see what a field is opened up. We might find it possible to go on analyzing down and down, to the end and the beginning of atomic energy itself — right into the microcosm —”

  Coltham stopped, slightly astounded by the magnitude and depth of the thing he had plumbed. This was the first time he had given the machine a complete test. That it was successful there was no shadow of doubt.

  “At least I am convinced now I am right,” Enrod breathed. “I said before that you were playing with fire — and that was when I had only heard the theory. Since I have seen this thing in practice I — I tell you the device is dangerous! Suppose you were to put radium in the matrix, or something highly complicated such as that? Think of the vast number of interlocked equations and mathematical variants this thing would form. It might even turn into a thinking machine all on its own!”

  “Absurd,” Coltham smiled. “This machine of mine is simply a vastly improved version of the mechanical brains in use in various universities today for solving difficult problems too abstruse for tired human minds to grapple with. A thinking machine! Rubbish! No thinking machine can be made by man.”

  “But in the case I am stating it wouldn’t be made by man,” Enrod cried. “If mathematical vibrations are the basic form of the universe, what is to prevent a complex mass from forming their own thoughts and playing the devil with our known laws?”

  “Since you put it that way, nothing,” Coltham admitted. He frowned, then laughed off a momentary twinge of anxiety. “I’m a scientist, not a pessimist,” he said. “Your imagination is going to trip you up one day, my friend. Here — you try the device. Anything you like.”

  Enrod elected to analyze his cigarette case, and he thought a few things about the man that had sold it to him for solid gold when he saw the equational formula. Thereafter he forgot his cold calculating prescience in sheer interest.

  In fact both men became fascinated. They analyzed glass, chromium, sand, soil — got dizzying results that ran into almost incomprehensible equations and deep mathematics.

  “We’re worse than two kids,” Coltham exclaimed at last. He was flushed with triumph. “But at least we’ve got something no scientis
ts ever got before. Here, I figure we ought to finish off with a chunk of common iron. After all, it’s the commonest element of the universe, if not the basis of the universe itself. Let’s see what it’s really composed of.”

  He tossed it into the matrix, closed the lid, and waited.

  “Just what is the matrix made of?” Enrod asked, looking at it more closely.

  “Tungsten alloy mainly, coated on the inside with my crystalline to facilitate the mathematical vibrations. Time’s up!”

  But this time there was no click from the calculator. And even when Coltham cut off the power the globe went on glowing steadily with some inner power of its own.

  Coltham glanced uneasily at his friend and opened the lid of the matrix. A start shook him. Enrod gazed too, and it required all of his common sense to believe it.

  The chunk of iron had vanished completely! The matrix was empty …

  *

  Fanny Reardon, star leg attraction in Maybury’s Cafe chorus, was massaging a silk stocking onto her shapely limb when the door of her dressing room opened abruptly. A man with dark eyes, well dressed, and with heavily brilliantined hair, entered. He quickly locked the door behind him.

  “You’re a no class heel, Nick,” Fanny observed pleasantly, continuing her dressing. “I know you ain’t a gentleman, so I won’t ask you why you didn’t knock.”

  “Hush!”

  Nick Blake came over to her and the urgency in his dark eyes made her glance at him in surprise.

  “Well, what’s steaming you up?” she asked. “You look as though the cops are right on your tail.”

  “They soon may be,” he said, keeping his voice low. “I got him, Fanny — Spike Munro. He’s deader than last night’s kiss, and here’s the turnover.” He flashed part of a bundle of notes. “Two hundred thousand!” he said eagerly. “Right out of his safe. Everything fixed, just like I told you it would be. I’ve planned it so that Boyd Amos will take the rap. We’re getting out quick — to Florida!”

  Fanny added more lipstick to her already heavily painted lips.

  “And I get a hundred thousand out of it?” she asked. “You had better keep to your bargain, Nick. Now you’ve told me this much I could tip the cops off in double-quick time.”

  “Everything to be as we fixed it,” Nick Blake said earnestly. “We have two hundred thousand between us and nothing to worry about — except getting married. The plane is all set to go from that field at the back of Logan’s Auto Wrecking Dump. Meet me there in a half an hour. Now I’ve got to go. Remember — half an hour!

  He gripped her plump arm in farewell, then hurried over to the door. For a moment or two, after he had slipped out, Fanny Reardon sat before the mirror with its horseshoe of globes, looking at her attractive reflection.

  “One hundred thousand and Nick, a murderer, for my ball-and-chain?” she mused, “or should I take two hundred thousand and remain here to catch a better fish? And stay clear of a murder rap, too!” She fluffed her blonde hair daintily. “Mrs. Reardon’s little girl wasn’t born yesterday. No, sir …”

  On the seventh floor of the Barlow Building, Joseph Barlow faced his Board of Directors — every one of them hand-picked and most of them having said “Yes!” to the big fellow more times than they could remember.

  “Gentlemen!” Barlow got to his feet, tall and commanding. “I called you together especially to hear the result of our plans for the Grayham Dam. As all of you know — Or should know if you have kept abreast of politics — this Corporation of ours stands to receive a great impetus in building and constructional tenders if only I can become a Senator.”

  There was a general nodding of heads.

  “I have always had to play second fiddle to ‘Honest’ Adam Grayham, as they call him. Were he out of the way there would be nothing to stop me.” Barlow paused and cleared his throat. “To eliminate him in the usual way — by murder, if you want it plainly — would be too risky. There remains only one alternative, to discredit him. At last the chance is ours! As you are aware he has done a lot of political campaigning to get his bill passed authorizing the Grayham Dam project. Now he has managed it, and I have used my not inconsiderable influence to get the contract for it.”

  Barlow looked around the faces, then slammed his fist on the shiny table.

  “Gentlemen, that dam will be built, but it will not, stand up to what Grayham expects. It will, as well, smash, irrevocably and utterly, his reputation! We shall not be implicated. I have things too well planned for that. Only Grayham and his faulty engineering theories will be involved. Inevitably I will become Senator Joseph Barlow in his stead. In due course, my power will increase.”

  The big fellow smiled at the rosy speculations racing through his mind …

  In his penthouse-de-luxe, atop a towering apartment building, J. Clayton Withers stood facing another man across a broad desk. Withers himself, six feet of prosperous well-being, with the face of a prize bulldog, was immaculate as usual. But the other man, his secretary, was not so well dressed. In fact, he had only one thing in common with his boss — he was angry.

  “I am not going to do it, Mr. Withers!” he declared flatly. “I’ve never refused to obey orders before, but this time I have a personal reason. If you corner Amalgamated Copper, as you intend, hundreds of small-time investors are going to lose every cent they’ve got — including my brother and several of my friends. No, I won’t do it!”

  J. Clayton Withers’ eyes glinted in the fat encircling them.

  “I cannot believe, Mason, that you are such an idiot as to prefer to go to jail just because you won’t handle this negotiation in the usual way. For you will, I’ll see to that!”

  There was silence in the great room for a moment, the stock market tycoon grinning sardonically and Mason staring at him fixedly. At last Mason again shook his head firmly.

  “No, sir, I won’t do it. I am not going to encompass the ruin of innocent people. Get on with it yourself.”

  Withers reflected for a moment. Then, to Mason’s surprise, he took an automatic from the desk drawer and leveled it.

  “On second thought,” he said slowly, “it will not suit my purpose to have you leave here. You can talk quite a lot before I get you clamped in jail. One word from you about Amalgamated Copper, and the game would be up. That being so I’m afraid our association has got to come to an end, rather abruptly. And, of course, I shall see to it that it is — suicide …”

  Ten thousand million miles away in space a cruiser of the void moved with easy velocity. For nearly five years now it had been pursuing its leisurely trip from the vast reaches near Alpha Centauri.

  Within its monstrous, radiation-proofed depths was almost an entire city, complete with every need — strange needs indeed, for the denizens of the space cruiser were as unlike Earthlings as anything imaginable.

  In appearance the travelers were insectile, with massive chitinous bodies and saucer-like faceted eyes. Only the delicate way in which they handled machinery gave the clue to the high reasoning power motivating them. Of them all, Dath Rasor was the cleverest, a scientist infinitely superior to anything ever produced on Earth. What was more, Dath Rasor believed in defeating the cruel edicts of Nature if there was any possible way to do it.

  Behind, he and his fellows had left a world suddenly overtaken by a poisonous gas outflow from Alpha Centauri, their sun. There had barely been time for them to get away. Now it meant another world on which to live, a conquest by force if need be.

  A faraway pinprick of reflected light, third planet from a C-type dwarf star, looked promising enough through their enormously powerful telescopes. It was, obviously, a fresh and still youthful world, not very much unlike their own, and possessed, too, of an oxygen-hydrogen-nitrogen atmosphere. That was the thing. The life on it was not particularly advanced, could soon be destroyed.

  Now that Dath Rasor came to inspect the little planet at this nearer distance he was clearly pleased. He spoke in his flutelike voice.

 
“Within a very short time, my friends, if we increase speed — possibly even before that distant world has even turned once more on its axis — we shall be within range of it. The animate life on it is very ordinary, composed apparently of hair-topped bipeds. Their greatest achievements, so far, seem to be television and air flight. They know nothing of bending space, of warping gravitation, of unlocking energy, all of which forces we can project from this cruiser. Within a few hours we can volatilize all the life there and prepare the place for our landing.”

  To Dath Rasor there did not seem to be anything ruthless about his plan. He regarded the life on distant Earth as a man might regard a horde of dangerous insects, as something to be stamped out in order to gain absolute security.

  Dath Rasor’s fellows glanced at each other with their huge eyes, nodded complacently, then looked back to the mirror. It was a lovely world, so young and promising, so worthy of the trivial expenditure of spatial energy necessary to feed the destructive projectors.

  Soon, within hours perhaps, this eternal wearying journey through infinite space would be at an end …

  *

  Professor Coltham took another stiff drink poured out a second one for Enrod. Then they looked at each other over the emptied glasses.

  “You went, too far.” Enrod had been saying this for nearly an hour now. “I warned you, Coltham! The iron just couldn’t vanish. It must have been transmuted into something else. It’s — it’s the law of Nature. Matter — energy. Energy-matter.”

  Coltham put his glass down rather unsteadily.

  “I can’t understand it,” he muttered. “For over an hour now that machine has been working with the power off. I suppose we ought to take another look,” he ventured. “Time’s getting on, nearly twelve-thirty already. Come on! If we don’t we’ll be worrying all night. No use running away from science. Let’s face it.”