“Is it worth going to look?” Blake asked keenly.
“Maybe it is, but I’ve more important things to do. If you’d like to wait until I’ve finished my experiments, we can go together. It needs two of us in space, you know…”
And at that, the matter lay in abeyance for a time.
****
In mid-November, the first snowfall of the winter arrived, whirling through feral New York with biting savagery, whisked along by an eighty-mile-an-hour gale. Its roaring moan was the only sound outside the Enterprise Building.
Blake, held up by the weather from further touring, mooched around the mess, taking stuff from the supplies, sitting before the electric stove, in action again now that Nick had fixed the Company’s self-generated plant, driven from a specially constructed bore from the Hudson.
Nick himself was over at the laboratory, as usual, across the tarmac square formed by the half-circle of buildings. What he was doing, Blake could only guess at.
Moodily, he got up and went to the window, stared out over the white carpet of the square, the whirling flakes. Then he became alert again as Nick suddenly appeared in the laboratory doorway, his coat tails flying. Nothing but the greatest urgency could have caused Nick to behave so hurriedly. He started to run, his mouth open as though he were shouting.
Blake swung round and ripped open the mess door. In a moment, he had raced along the corridor and down to the lower ground floor. Then, on the steps of the building, he stopped in stunned amazement. Nick was fading oddly as he approached! His breathless, ebbing words were snatched away by the wind.
“I was … the disks…”
Then he vanished! Blake started in stunned horror at a vision of footprints in the snow leading half across the huge square, then abruptly ceasing.
“Nick!” he screamed suddenly. “Nick! Where are you?”
Only the savage wind answered, and the snow, piling thick and gentle against the walls, melting in the warmer air of the big doorway. Heedless, Blake dashed outside and plunged around like a madman, staring at the baffling footprints, gazing dazedly into emptiness.
Hardly aware of what he was doing, he finally blundered into the laboratory, closed the door, and stood breathing heavily with his back against it. With a vast effort, he fought for control over himself, tried to still his hammering heart.
At last he sank down weakly on a solitary chair amidst a mass of strange, puzzling machinery, looked dully around him on generators, tubes and coils, insulator banks and switchboards. Predominant among the whole gamut of stuff was a horseshoe-shaped magnet. None of the machinery was at work now, though there was a certain heated air about the place, a smell like hot oil that seemed to indicate it had not long been idle.
Blake was calmer now. He tried to face with courage the staggering realization that he was one man alone in all the world, surrounded by scientific mysteries. What were the fading words Nick had uttered? Something about “Disks…”
He turned and began to look about him, but all his searching failed to reveal anything that might pass as a disk. At last, he gave it up and went over the rest of the machinery instead. He began to see why Nick had gone to such effort in the past weeks to collect all this stuff, though its purpose was still as obscure as ever. Blake cursed his lack of engineering knowledge, his relatively sparse conceptions of science. Space-piloting was his profession, and because he had made it his speciality, other pursuits had gone to the wall. Now he regretted the fact.
Gingerly, he tried the switches on the board, and after a while succeeded in getting the generators going—driven of course by the sunken Hudson bore turbine plant—then just as quickly switched them off for fear of trouble. He would have to make a complete study of the whole business, before daring to do anything rash. Otherwise he might blow himself sky high.
Not that it mattered, he reflected bitterly. He was alone now and—of course, there was that mysterious life on Mars. Life of another planet? Not his own kind? Blake shook his head moodily; there was little advantage in exploring its possibilities.
He spent another hour studying Nick’s notes, but they were in the advanced jargon of the professional scientist and made little sense to him. He could hardly understand the symbols, much less piece together their meaning. In the end, he returned wearily across the square to the mess room, sat down and relapsed into thought. Time and again that last incredible vision of Nick disappearing into thin air kept returning to him.
What had the laboratory machines had to do with it? Why had he so suddenly disappeared? Blake rubbed his unshaven chin in perplexity, drummed on his out-thrust legs in bafflement. Back of his mind was dim hope that Nick would return. But the hours passed by and nothing happened.
The ghastly, maddening silence continued, rendered doubly intense by the softly falling, blanketing snow. At last the night closed down, wild and bitter, with the wind howling with increased fury around the great building, snow piling thick on the window ledges, whirling across the darkened square.
Blake still sat on before the electric stove, food and drink forgotten.
“Only man in the world…” he kept muttering to himself. “Only man in the world…”
He thought of the immensities of outer space as he knew them—the eternal reaches of the infinite, the coldly winking stars, always friendless, always cruel. He thought of the great barren world around him, the endless miles of decaying ruins, the shipless seas. Only the plants still lived, and they too were asleep now that winter had come. No living thing to talk to—all of the joys of human companionship, the eternal struggle for existence, the hopes, the fears, the achievements—wiped out!
“It’s more than any man can stand!” he shouted hoarsely, at last, leaping to his feet—and with sudden fury, he kicked his stool across the room. It struck his own particular metal locker with considerable violence, clicked the door open. With savage strides, he went across to close it, then stopped as his eyes fell to the little black book on the top shelf.
Sheila’s diary. His passion drained from him. Gently, he took the book out, fingered it, gazed at it with hungry eyes. Slowly he turned the gold-edged pages, read words he had never been intended to read, the bare revelations of Sheila’s heart. He realized for the first time how deeply she had really loved him.
He forgot his loneliness for a while in reading the clear words, but it all filled him with a brooding sense of helplessness as he realized they were but the shadow memories of a girl he would never meet again, the recordings of one woman in millions who had gone into an Unknown. Then as he neared the end of the notes, he paused, frowned at what was clearly a recent coffee stain on the delicate paper. Sheila? Would she have been so careless with her revered diary? It was out of the question that she had ever allowed anybody else to read her notes, unless…
“Nick!” Blake breathed suddenly. “So he read all through this diary when he kept borrowing it—” he broke off, frowning at the page. Apart from the stain, it was dirty and thumb-marked, had plainly been read many times. He studied it closely, trying to find meaning in the words that had obviously interested Nick so deeply. The entry was for September 24, two days before the final entry.
“To kill time tonight I went to hear Professor Cardell’s lecture on the limitations of life. But either it was not very interesting, or else I’m very dull. He tried to prove by mathematics how thin is the hairline between creation and extinction of fleshly life, so thin indeed that the merest variation of cosmic forces might pitch the balance in the wrong direction. I think I’m fairly intelligent, but I couldn’t follow him … I wonder how far away dear Blake is now?”
“Variation of cosmic forces?” Blake muttered, frowning. “I wonder if—No, it’s impossible.”
But even as he repudiated his notions, something knocked hard in his reasoning. Nick had been no fool, and he’d seen something in that observation to demand a considerable study of it. Professor Cardell? Blake remembered the name vaguely…
He examined the
diary again, but no page had received such attention as that particular one. He read the final tragic entry again, then he put the book carefully in his pocket and ate a belated meal. But his thoughts were busy again now, dashing the deep melancholia from his mind.
At last, he reached a decision.
He went over to the laboratory again and, carrying a portable lamp around with him, finally unearthed a pile of books he had noticed on earlier visits. They were what he had hoped for—a whole series of books by Cardell brought by Nick from the public libraries.
Triumphantly, he put them down on the bench and began to study them, aided in places by the blue pencilled portions Nick had evidently considered of particular value. He read on and on—far into the night.
Chapter IV
Recipe for Suicide!
Blake found it hard going! His none too scientific mind grappled with the high-flown phrasing and technique. He had no early work up, but plunged straight away into the advanced enigma of science.
He made his quarters in the laboratory, and sat there hour after hour, day after day, except for the intervals for meals. He pored over Cardell’s books, but the theories of life expounded therein were so complex, he made but little progress…
After a week of pondering, he was but little nearer the truth than he had been at first. In that week, he had been subconsciously aware of almost continuous snowstorms, aided no doubt by the absolute lack of warmth from buildings and chimneys ascending into the air. He found he was pretty well snowbound in the laboratory. He slept there, had his meals there, gazed out on the carpet of white, pondered whether he should make an effort to reach Mars; then thinking better of it, he looked around at the machines.
“Somehow, these have got to be solved,” he muttered. “There may even be the chance that Nick was swivelled into another section of space. If he went, others might have gone before him. Sheila might even be there … Wonder what he meant by disks?”
He rubbed his head in bewilderment, stared absently at the abandoned radio, then suddenly he noticed something he had never seen before. The radio was switched over to the recording control … Instantly his eye followed the length of cabling from the radio apparatus to a self-recording machine in the corner.
“Of course!” he muttered. “Am I an idiot?! Disks! Records! Self-made records … now, let me see…”
He dived for the big cabinet under the recording machine and flung the doors wide. His eyes gleamed at the sight of a dozen small disks nearly numbered and fully indented with sound track.
“So that was what he meant,” Blake breathed. “He recorded his impressions. Just like Nick: methodical to the last. Why didn’t he say recordings in the first place?”
He put on the first disk, switched on to playback, and stood waiting expectantly. Nick’s recorded voice spoke.
“This is the voice of Nick Vane. Probably it will be you, Blake, who’ll hear me. In any case, anybody understanding English will know what I’m talking about. I’ve recorded matters like this because it is much easier to give my findings by talking than by writing them down—much faster, too. Another reason is, I’m not at all sure how my experiments are going to work out, and on the off chance that something may happen to me suddenly, I’m leaving a sure-fire explanation behind me. If I should happen to suddenly vanish, you will know that the theory I’m going to outline is the true one.
“Some time ago I mooted over the idea that the collision of those two stars in space had done something queer to earthly life. At that time it was a shot in the dark: since then I have backed the theory up with postulations from the works of Cardell, who knew more about earthly life any man alive. Earthly life exists only in very rigid limits. It came into being in the first place by a radiation from space—induced when our sun and a runaway crossed each other—and happened to be of just the right combination of wavelengths to produce life.
“Cardell has only enlarged a trifle on the original theories of Sir James Jeans when he wrote his Mysterious Universe. Jeans said —and quite truly as I have since proven— ‘It becomes increasingly likely that what specially distinguishes the matter of living bodies is the quite commonplace element carbon, always in conjunction with other atoms with which it forms exceptionally large molecules. If that be so, life only exists in the universe because the carbon atom possesses such exceptional properties. Again, the carbon atom consists of six electrons revolving around the central nucleus, thereby differing from its two nearest neighbours in the table of chemical elements—boron and nitrogen—in having one electron more than the, former and one electron fewer than the latter. Yet this slight difference must account in the last analysis for all the difference between life and the absence of life…’ That ends Jeans’ observations…
“And it’s quite true; I’ve worked it out for myself. Life came into being because the original unique radiation at the birth of the Earth did things to carbon. Since that time, life has steadily progressed with not a thing in the world to disturb it, always hanging on the vague edge of disaster if the balance of the cosmos ever shifted in the least.
“That shift came! When those two stars collided way out in space, they created a radiation identical with the one that started life on Earth, but this time—because this radiation tried to create life again—it only succeeded in over-stimulating a life already well progressed. Over-stimulation killed it off entirely, just the same as in some experiments, a plant will grow rapidly under a fixed flow of radiation, but will die if it gets an excess. That’s what happened. The carbon atom structure just fell to pieces: all fleshly life ceased to be, vanished like mist and the Earth was empty, leaving only the non-carbon forms of life, or at least those which do not entirely rely on it for their basis…”
The disk came to a finish. Blake put on the next one and listened again with a certain growing horror at the cold inevitability of Nick’s conclusions.
“I was more than ever sure of the truth of this theory when you, Blake, reported life on Mars. Mars has always been sterile, but it has the same basic possibilities of life as Earth. Its atmosphere, though extremely thin, is suitable. It has a great amount of chemical resources, as we well know. Life could just as easily come to Mars at the moment Earth’s finished. On Earth, only the carbon-assimilating forms of life survived, such as trees and vegetation, but the direct carbon creations vanished.
“I have to admit one thing: I owe a lot to Sheila Berick’s diary. If it hadn’t been for her going to Cardell’s lecture that night, I’d have wandered around plenty before finding the right clue.
“There was only one way to prove the possibility of my theory to the uttermost, and that was by trying it out! Hence this recording, in case I’m successful. You’ll appreciate that it is a better way to give it than by odd snatches and drifts of personal conversation. In this way, you have all the facts before you. Funny thing, but I notice in my recording I speak as though events have already happened. Wonder if it’s premonition?
“When I wanted to try out the theory for myself, I realized that I was faced with certain difficulties. The etheric wave generated by the celestial collision could not happen again in history without the almost impossible occurrence of another collision. No use waiting for that. I considered the exact happenings at a celestial collision—the tremendous gravitational and stress fields set up, the spreading of the radiation’s influence. Most of the clues I got from our recording apparatus aboard the ship, which definitely gave all details and showed conclusively how we had been saved by our ship’s repulsion shield. How could I reproduce the collision of two suns in a laboratory?”
Again Blake changed the records.
“That had me floored for the time being, then I arrived at so simple a solution, I was quite amazed at myself. The collision of two suns is fundamentally the same thing as collision of electron and proton. One belongs to the macrocosm and the other to the microcosm, but the effects are identical in that they produce, the self-same radiation, the only difference being t
he enormously lesser scale of distance in the case of the microcosm.
“I suppose that I produced atomic force when I annihilated the protons and electrons of a piece of potassium forcing the released energy through special transformers. The influence radiated by the horseshoe magnet was very brief and limited. It satisfied me though, so much so I set to work to make these recordings because I’m going to try the thing again.
“If anything should happen to me, you’ll find instructions in disks eight and nine about how to control the thing. I’m going to set about that recording now—”
Blake took off the finished disk thoughtfully and stroked his chin.
“So he was right in his ideas,” he muttered. “Only thing I can think of is that when he made the final test, he got scared and made a dash for it. The influence of the magnet caught up with him and disintegrated him utterly. I was just out of reach and escaped … Hell! What a ghastly thought to chew over!”
He looked moodily around at the apparatus, at the snow-covered windows.
“Now that I know the truth, I’m not much better off,” he grunted. “Everybody’s dead, Sheila included. I’m just the last man on the Earth with one card left up my sleeve … I can commit suicide more elaborately than most guys…”
He swung around with sudden savage determination, snatched out disks eight and nine, put number eight on the machine, and listened carefully, scribbling down the detailed instructions Nick gave on the working of the machinery and switch manipulation.
It took him an hour to get it all down, then he switched the recording apparatus off and pondered his notes. His whole being now was mastered by an intense anxiety to get the thing done—get away from this eternal silence and drifting snow. At last he got to his feet, walked slowly around the machinery as he studied the directions, identified each separate piece of mechanism and attendant switches, opened the floor trapdoor and listened critically to the thunderous roaring of the deeply-sunken Hudson bore, the waters swollen by melting snow.
John Russell Fearn Omnibus Page 54
