So far as he could tell, everything was in order. He searched for the necessary piece of potassium on the chemical side of the laboratory, placed it in the disintegrating chamber. Then, very cautiously, he closed the required switches one by one and listened to the dynamos taking up the whine of power.
His further movements were less confident. He had the vague feeling at the back of his mind that he ought to give the directions closer study—but against that he had weighed the necessity for immediate action and the desire to get out of this deserted world as quickly as possible.
Chapter V
Tracks in the Snow!
He worked on doggedly until well into the winter afternoon, adjusting the apparatus, the directions firmly held in his hand—and the more he progressed, the more his admiration for Nick’s genius increased.
He had devised an apparatus of amazing ingenuity and automatic surety to produce the desired effects. Even to him, it must have been difficult. To Blake it was meaningless. His actions were simply directed towards a given end. Of the intricacies, he knew less than nothing.
He stopped only once for a meal, then resumed as the winter darkness closed down. At last he had come to the final switch, the throwing of which would set the automatic apparatus into action by bringing in the dynamos. Within fifteen seconds, according to Nick, the atoms of the potassium in the disintegrating chamber would be crushed by nameless forces, their energy driven through specially constructed machinery and transformers to the outlet magnet.
Blake looked around pensively and stroked his bristly chin.
“Hope it works,” he muttered. “Not that it matters much anyway.”
For a fraction of a second he hesitated, then closed the master switch. At the sudden roar of power from the released machines, he backed to the door, opened it wide, and stood with his back to the piled-up snow outside. The icy wind whistled around him, ruffling his unkempt hair, chilling him after the warmth of the laboratory.
He felt very much like a man with a lighted bomb in his hands. Before him was the savagely working mechanism—behind him, the night and the snow. The electric light reflected back from the polished machines in their brazen, invincible array. For some reason, in those moments, he wondered if he wanted to die after all. Odd! He could think of hundreds of things he could do if he went on living. Suppose he didn’t die, and was horribly mangled instead!
His eyes fixed on the great magnet … Then something happened! One of the machines near the wall started to glow red hot, sent little whirls of blue smoke into the air from burning armatures. The stench of burning rubber arose instantly.
In an instant, Blake realized what had happened. Somewhere he had made a wrong connection, perhaps positive to negative leads, and the thing was short-circuiting. He looked desperately around, and at that identical instant, the red-hot machine came to an abrupt standstill, automatically cut out the other machines. The wall behind the faulty machine began to scorch dangerously—a sheet of flame leaped suddenly from smouldering rubber and shot towards the chemicals on the shelf above.
Blake staggered back before a rush of superheated air. An explosion dinned in his ears. He went reeling into soft snow and lay half-buried in it as splintering glass and pieces of metal flew over his head with devastating force. Then, at last, he dared to raise himself gently out of the white wetness, turned slowly and gazed helplessly at leaping, soaring flames from the laboratory. Within seconds, the whole place had become an inferno, well prepared by the inflammable chemicals and materials within it. Before his very eyes, everything was being destroyed—even the disks containing the instructions.
That brought him to his feet and he ploughed through the snow towards the open doorway, only to stagger back helplessly before the terrific heat. No use trying to save anything. March into the flames? He shook his head … Not that way!
He stood with bitter eyes, his fists clenched, watching the flames crackling to the snow-ridden sky. The fire would no doubt confine itself to the laboratory and not affect the rest of the great building. Did that matter?
“What does anything matter any more?” Blake asked himself slowly. “I didn’t commit suicide that way, but there are other ways.”
Inwardly, he knew he had only himself to blame for the failure of the machinery. He had hurried over the matter—should have read the notes more carefully.
Furiously he swung around, hands deep in trouser pockets, and regardless of the bitter wind and whirling flakes, he plunged through the knee-high snow away from the blaze—to anywhere, so long as he could try to collect his thoughts and stop himself from going mad. He realized that he was dangerously close to it, and to brood indoors, in the pilots’ mess perhaps, was no way to cure himself. Better be lost in this mad, white world … Much better. The idea grew to an obsession.
He had no idea which way he went, whither he intended going.
It was the same in all directions, anyhow. Pitch darkness, whirling snow, icy wind. His hands were already numb from exposure, his legs soaked to the knees.
Now and again he raised his face to the screaming dark, realized subconsciously that he was following one of the former suburban roads to the centre of New York…
He thought it might be a good idea to keep on walking until he dropped. Death from cold. He had heard it wasn’t so bad, at that. Sleepiness … extinction. Why not?
“Go on, blow!” he snarled to the wind. “Who the hell cares, anyway?”
He went on stubbornly, determined to walk until he could walk no longer. Time and again he fell into deep drifts, stumbled over objects covered in snow, found rusting automobiles buried nearly to their tops.
In the midst of the whirling darkness of New York, the snow was waist deep, reflecting back to him in the odd way snow has in the midst of the darkest night.
The metropolis was a city of ghostliness, its tall spires still rearing invincibly to the heavens. The snowflakes seemed wetter here; somewhere behind the ragged clouds a moon was trying to struggle through.
“Why should all this have to happen to one man?” Blake demanded, stumbling along. “Why should I, of all the people that were once on the Earth, be doomed to die alone?—more alone than any man has ever been since the world began?”
The moan of the wind was the only answer.
He went on more slowly, stared at the long white-ridden vista ahead of him, with the buildings rising darkly on either side of it. How different it all was, how different from the New York, of old times!
He smiled twistedly. He was beginning to feel sleepy at last. He hardly knew he had a body; it was frozen through and through. The moon came briefly from between flying clouds, turned the world around him to sepulchral, gleaming white.
His smile broadened to a laugh—then the laugh faded from his lips as that transient moonlight revealed something to him—marks through the snow! Marks such as a body might make—such as his own body had made behind him.
The trail stretched right ahead of him.
“No!” he whispered, shaking his snow-covered head. “No, I’m dreaming it! I’m falling asleep!”
But he knew that was not true.
He forced himself onwards again by main strength. The moon vanished once more, but he could see enough by reflection. There was the trail of somebody or something, quite recently made; it came from somewhere on the right, and now joined his own trail. If it had been a human, the person had been waist deep in snow; if an animal, it could only have been a giant dog or a horse—a possibility that seemed highly unlikely.
Mad pulsating joy suddenly raced through Blake. Something else was alive in this sepulchre of a world!
“Ahoy!” he yelled desperately. “Ahoy! Where are you?”
There was no sign of a response, and his wild hopes sank a little. Probably there’d be a very ordinary explanation at the end of the trail. His numbness was a nuisance now, and so was this raging desire to go to sleep. The very thing he’d set out to do looked likely to prove his undoing.
>
“Why should it be?” he roared out furiously, thrashing himself into activity. “Why should everything sour on me? This is one rap I’m not taking—”
The activity he suddenly conjured up was terrific—and it did him good. It helped to restore his sluggish circulation, rid him of his numbness. The going was easier now, too; the unknown one had ploughed a trail for him and the moon was coming out in increasingly long spells.
He found at last that he had reached the centre of the street. What street it was, he had not troubled to notice. His whole attention was concentrated on the fact that the trail had suddenly turned off to a large open doorway. He followed it avidly and the snow thinned off, was ankle deep—then only sole-thick. With blank amazement, he looked down at the granite step of the building. There was the distinct imprint of shoes, hardly even blurred by more recent snow—
A woman’s shoes!
“Now I know I’m crazy!” Blake looked around him with burning eyes. Then he abruptly realized where he was—Sheila Berick’s apartment building!
Instantly he took a step back into the snow and stared up at the rearing facade to where he knew her window was situated. At the higher levels, the snow had not encased the windows so thickly, blown away by the wind. Blake wondered if his heart stopped beating when in the window on the third floor he detected a faint evidence of light, such as a candle might make.
“Sheila?” he breathed through dry lips. “Can it…?” His heart started to pound again. He swung around, plunged through the open doorway like a lunatic and charged for the stairs.
“Sheila!” he screamed frantically. “Sheila! Sheila!” and the great building rang with the echoes of his cry.
Up he went, slipping in the darkness, slamming into the walls and hardly feeling it. He arrived at last on the third floor corridor, stopped dead. Yellow light was shining from the open doorway of the girl’s room. He remembered he and Nick had smashed the lock.
“Sheila!” he called gently.
Still no answer. Hardly daring to imagine what he might find, he tip-toed forward, peered around the door jamb. The room was pretty much as he and Nick had left it, save that a candle, burned low, stood on the table now. Its pale, flickering glow cast upon a motionless, heavily coated figure sprawled face down on the carpet. Instantly Blake reached down, turned the figure over and gazed stupidly into the white face and closed eyes, the dark hair peeping under the fur hat … It was Sheila!
He muttered things he hardly understood—then with a sudden effort he raised her, carried her into the next room and laid her on the bed. He returned for the candle, then forcing himself to calmness, he set to work. The first horrible thought that the girl was dead was banished as he detected the slow beat of her pulse. Immediately, he searched around and found brandy, soaked his handkerchief in water, and bathed her forehead. It seemed hours to him before she finally stirred, opened her eyes wearily. Gradually they became puzzled, regarded his face in bafflement.
“Blake!” she whispered. “How—how did you—?”
“Sheila,” he murmured gently, seizing her in his arms. “How did you ever come to escape the dissolution of life? How?!”
“Dissolution of life?” she repeated, surprise dashing all the haziness out of her mind. “What dissolution?”
Blake stared at her. “But—but like everybody else, you were surely caught up in the radiation that destroyed all life?” he cried. “I’d given you up for dead!”
The girl rose to a sitting position, her eyes amazed in the light of the candle.
“Just what are you talking about?” she demanded.
Solemnly, he told her the details. When he finished, she shuddered.
“So that is why the whole world seemed so empty and deserted when I landed late this afternoon!” she murmured. “I saw out in space how deserted it all looked. I was frightened— Oh, of course, you don’t understand even now. It really isn’t so mysterious. You know I wanted to go with you on that trip into space?”
“Uh-huh,” Blake acknowledged.
“Well, father was against that, of course—but I decided I might try and join you on your return trip. I wanted to see that collision from space where I could have an uninterrupted view. I bribed one of the pilots to take me. He said it would be difficult, but if he could work it, he’d telephone me. He managed it all right, but we were desperately short of time. I had to dash away on the instant…”
“Then that’s why you left your diary on the table?”
Sheila nodded rather shyly. “Yes; I was writing it when Hawkins—the pilot—rang up. I was so pent up with excitement, the sudden ring of the bell made me jump like a fool. That explains the streak at the end of my writing.”
“Then what happened?” Blake persisted.
“Well, we were well out in the inner circle of space—that is, on this side of the outer planets—when the collision of the stars happened. We saw it beautifully, but a moment afterwards the ship rocked violently. Hawkins and I were thrown over. I was stunned by banging my head on a fixed chair, but poor Hawkins, I found later, had broken his neck. I found we were drifting in space, our nearest field of attraction being Mars. I don’t know much about space ships, but I did know enough standard emergency procedure to manage to activate the ship’s automatic pilot, which braked the ship’s fall and made a landing on the red planet.
“To my amazement, I found the planet teeming with rudimentary, fast evolving life, passing through all the stages that Earth-life has had since the earliest times. Vegetation, adapted to the thin air, is springing up. It can only mean that life has come to Mars in just the same way that it was banished from Earth, but for some reason—maybe because of the lesser gravity and lighter air— it is evolving at terrific speed. Eventually, I imagine, Mars will have life of a class and intellect close to our own!
“I stayed there until I had recovered my strength, then I started back for Earth. The automatic pilot made the journey possible. This evening I touched. Earth, had seen beforehand the deserted state of everything. The snow was tremendously thick when I left the ship. I got to my room here, was baffled to find the door lock smashed. I was afraid—of the silence. I found a candle and lighted it, then I think that the cold air after the long confinement in the space ship, my weariness and fright, suddenly reacted on me. I remember nothing more until I found you bending over me.”
Blake smiled. “So simple! I know there is a new life on Mars; I saw it myself through the telescope. If only I had counted the number of ships in the space-hangar I’d have found one short, but the idea never occurred to me. Hawkins took a risk, I guess. But that’s beside the point. Thank God you decided to do what you did—otherwise we would have been separated forever. So these Martians are evolving fast, are they?”
Sheila nodded slowly. “Very fast.”
Blake smiled a little. “We have an entire world here, only waiting to be tenanted. We have the knowledge, and the science—”
He broke off and gripped the girl’s arm. “Why not?” he breathed. “If we can scrape along somehow for the next few years, we can then start putting ideas forward to the Martians. We’re going to destroy all the great armament dumps located in various parts of the world. We’ll start out fair and square.”
“I’m with you,” Sheila smiled.
“It won’t be so long,” Blake murmured.
They sat looking eagerly at each other in the sputtering light of the candle. The kiss they finally gave each other sounded amazingly noisy in the vast, aching silence of a world waiting to be born anew.
War of The Scientists
Edited by Philip Harbottle
Introduction by Philip Harbottle
John Russell Fearn (1908-1960) was an English author who began his career as a science fiction writer in the American pulp magazines in 1933, when his first novel The Intelligence Gigantic was serialised in AMAZING STORIES. The following year he sold a short story “The Man Who Stopped the Dust” to ASTOUNDING STORIES, the first of many
outstanding ‘thought variants’ he was to contribute to the magazine over the next several years.
Over the next 15 years, Fearn published some 120 magazine stories in all of the leading pulp magazines under his own name and numerous pseudonyms, creating a variety of plot-forms under different styles that ranged from universe-destroying thought variants to the intensely human story. His most popular pen names were Thornton Ayre and Polton Cross. As Ayre he introduced detective story techniques to science fiction and also created the first female super-heroine, Violet Ray (the ‘Golden Amazon’) with four stories in FANTASTIC ADVENTURES (19439-43).
Post-war, using numerous pseudonyms, Fearn increasingly began to write novels for UK book publication, mainly science fiction, but he had equal success with westerns, detective thrillers and romances. When he died of a sudden heart attack, aged only 52, he had published over 150 books, most of them over a ten year period.
His grief-stricken widow fell seriously ill herself, and was unable to promote his work, or answer publishers’ letters. His work quickly fell out of print, and since much of it was under pseudonyms that were not generally known to be his, Fearn was in danger of becoming completely forgotten.
His reputation was only revived by the publication in 1968 of the present writer’s biography of Fearn, The Multi-Man, which included a detailed bibliography and revealed dozens of pseudonyms for the first time, and in 1970 his widow asked me to take over his representation.
Over the next 45 years, publishers on both sides of the Atlantic publishers began an extensive ongoing reprinting of his novels in all of the genres in which he had worked—this time under his own name.
They are now joined by Venture Press, who as well reprinting the first six “Golden Amazon” novels are issuing new collections of his best early science fiction pulp stories, beginning with The Best of John Russell Fearn in two volumes.
John Russell Fearn Omnibus Page 55
