Metamorphosis

by Sesh Heri

  In the corridor Jack and Charmian came upon Mr. Czito who had returned command of the Cypher to Mr. Tesla. Jack took the Navy revolver out of Charmian’s hand and gave it to Mr. Czito.

  “It’s a little lighter now,” Jack said.

  Mr. Czito checked the revolver’s chambers.

  “You can owe me,” Mr. Czito said.

  Out in the clearing, all the surviving Martians had retreated back into their ship. Two last Martians appeared flying up from the red sphere. They were carrying the Bell in anti-gravity grips. They flew down to a door in the Martian ship, brought the Bell through the door, and then slid it shut after them. The Martian airship then lifted off from the ground and began arcing into the sky.

  Mr. Tesla stood in the pilot’s cabin watching this. The white pigeon stood perched next to the pilot; it had suddenly revived down below and told Mr. Tesla to go up to the pilot’s cabin.

  They are attempting to return to 1915, the pigeon thought to Mr. Tesla.

  “Mr. Czito!” Mr. Tesla called into the ship’s speaker. “Get up here to the control room!”

  The pilot and Mr. Tesla watched as the Martian airship rose into the sky. The compression vortex from the Bell was gone; the sky was returning to a clear blue.

  “Lt. Nimitz!” Mr. Tesla snapped into the ship’s speaker. “Do you have all aboard?”

  “All the surviving men,” Lt. Nimitz said, “and Mr. and Mrs. London.”

  “What about Houdini?” Mr. Tesla asked.

  “We don’t have him,” Lt. Nimitz replied over the speaker. “No one knows what happened to him. Mrs. London said she left him in a stone tower not far from here.”

  “I see the Martians circling about over a spot in the jungle. They’ve taken possession of the Bell and brought it aboard their ship” Mr. Tesla said. “Come up here as soon as you get out of your gear.”

  Mr. Tesla turned to the pilot and said, “Take us up to where the Martians are circling.”

  “What do you think they’re looking for?” the pilot asked.

  “The same thing we are,” Mr. Tesla said, “Harry Houdini.”

  “Hold your concentration!” Djudhi commanded in a voice reaching into the depths of my mind.

  I focused on that spinning wheel of light, spinning all about my view of the cavern.

  “Now will your body to slowly descend,” Djudhi said to me in a quiet voice.

  I did as he told me, and my body floated upside down over the molten lava to the wall of rock that surrounded the caldera. I passed over the wall, and then slowly lowered into the cavern, until the crown of my head rested on the floor of volcanic rock. I held that position a moment and then pivoted upon my head, and came down in the air until I was lying on the floor on my back. The wheel of light spinning in the field of red before me slowed its motion and came to a stop so that I could see the arms of light shining from the unmoving star. The field of red became gray and the light of the star faded and winked out.

  “You may open your eyes now,” Djudhi said.

  I opened my eyes and looked up. Djudhi and the other priests looked down upon me with concern a moment, but then, in unison, they all smiled.

  “Se-Shu-Teni ankh!” Djudhi cried.

  “Se-Shu-Teni ankh!” the other priests cried.

  “We say that Houdini lives!” Djudhi said to me. “Houdini lives again who among us was Se-Shu-Teni! For truly you have counted, measured, and divided this day! Truly you have divided NYMZA from the souls of men! And truly you have returned here to your home universe from which you had been divided.”

  “Truly, I will not ever forget you, Djudhi,” I said, “nor will I forget your counterpart in that parallel universe.”

  “But you must leave us now,” Djudhi said. “Stand, and we will take you to your clothes, and then to the surface.”

  Mr. Czito and Lt. Nimitz had returned to the control room and now they stood with Mr. Tesla at the windows of the pilot’s cabin.

  “That must be the stone tower that Mrs. London described,” Lt. Nimitz said.

  “Yes,” Mr. Tesla said. “It appears to be part of some kind of complex, perhaps a religious temple of some sort. The Martians seem to be very interested in it.”

  “Sir,” a sailor said in the control room, “I’m getting some energy beam returns from the Martian ship. They’re shining something down at the ground.”

  “What do you think, sir?” Lt. Nimitz asked Mr. Tesla.

  “They’re using some kind of x-ray beam, I think,” Mr. Tesla said. “Searching for hollows and voids in the substructure. There could very well be lava tubes below surface, caverns.”

  “People down there?” Mr. Czito asked.

  “Mrs. London said something about caverns and a little man they encountered,” Lt. Nimitz said. “Do you think…?”

  “Let me have your binoculars, Lieutenant,” Mr. Tesla said.

  Lt. Nimitz gave Mr. Tesla his binoculars. Mr. Tesla looked through them, and in a moment said, “Yes! I see him! It’s Houdini. He’s on the top of that tower!”

  I had quickly dressed, Djudhi had led me to the surface, and he had moved aside the stone.

  “Goodbye, Djudhi,” I said.

  “Goodbye, he-who-was-my-father-but-is-no-more,” Djudhi said, and he bowed.

  I bowed to him and went through the opening and mounted the spiral steps rapidly. The moment I got to the top I saw the two airships— the Martian airship and the Cypher.

  “Hey!” I shouted. “Over here!”

  I doubted anyone up there could hear me, but I’ve always felt it pays to try even when it doesn’t seem to be worth trying. I kept shouting and waving my arms, and in a moment, the Martian airship swooped down and hit me with an anti-gravity beam and I started to rise in the air.

  “No,” I shouted, “not you!”

  I lifted off the tower and flew up into the air, immersed in the field of the anti-gravity beam. I looked down and saw the long, black hull of the Cypher move between me and the ground. A beam shot out from the top of the Cypher and intersected the Martian’s anti-gravity beam. It shifted upwards and shined upon me, and I felt the cross-forces of the two beams.

  I was hanging in mid-air between the two ships. Now I tried swinging and kicking my arms, as if I was swimming in water, to wiggle my way across in the sky out of the influence of the Martian beam and down into the anti-gravity beam of the Cypher. Just as I began to do this, the Martian airship sped up, and I almost fell out of the influence of both beams. But then the Cypher again matched the pace of the Martian ship, caught me in its anti-gravity beam, and I slithered my way down it and out of the Martian beam’s field of influence. The moment I had gotten clear, the beam from the Cypher pivoted downward and delivered me rapidly to its top deck. I hit the rubbery top surface of the ship with the soles of my shoes and then rolled. I sat up, and looked about. We were about a thousand feet in the air with the Martian ship looming above us by perhaps another five hundred feet.

  The top hatch of the Cypher opened and I went over to it to be pulled inside by a sailor— I thought.

  I wasn’t met by a sailor.

  It was Jack London wearing a sailor’s shirt who extended his hand for me.

  “Now don’t ever tell me you haven’t anything to write,” Jack said with a grin.

  I grabbed his hand and scrambled down through the hatch after him and followed him on down the ladder.

  “The Martians still have Charmian,” I said.

  “Not anymore,” Jack said. “I got her back. She’s here in the ship.”

  I got down to the first deck where Jack had jumped off, and got off the ladder. A sailor climbed rapidly back up the ladder and shut the top hatch and snapped down a steel lever that locked the hatch in place.

  “There’s an old man on board the Martian ship,” I said to Jack.

  “I know,” Jack said. “Mr. Dellschau. We got him, too.”

  “I’d like to see him,” I said.

  “Come on, then,” Jack said.


  Jack got back onto the ladder and began climbing down to the lower deck. I got on the ladder and followed him on down. We got to the lower deck and Jack took me to a room where Mr. Dellschau lay in a bunk. A medic sat next to him. As soon as we came in, Mr. Dellshau opened his eyes, recognized me, and held out his hand which I grasped.

  “Wonder weaver,” Mr. Dellschau said.

  “I’m sorry I couldn’t free you from the Martians as I promised,” I said.

  “You did much more,” Mr. Dellschau said. “You have freed me at last from NYMZA. I have fought a mental battle with them for decades and finally I am free of them. They have been pushed back into the black depths of their astral prison. I know. I could see what you did to them in my mind’s eye.”

  “You’ll be all right now, Mr. Dellschau,” I said.

  “I know,” Mr. Dellschau said. “I will see my home again.”

  “You should rest now,” I said.

  Mr. Dellshau nodded and closed his eyes. Jack and I went out of the room and back up the ladder to the upper deck.

  When we got to the control room, I found the place buzzing with activity. Mr. Tesla stood at the pilot’s windows talking to Charmian. Like Jack, she was wearing a sailor’s shirt. Lt. Nimitz and Mr. Czito were engaged in conversation with two sailors sitting at control consoles.

  When Charmian saw me, she ran up to me and threw her arms around my neck and hugged me.

  “You’re all right,” she said.

  “So are you,” I said. “I wasn’t worried. Were you worried?”

  “No,” Charmian said, looking at me, shaking her head. “I wasn’t worried.”

  I turned to Jack.

  “Were you worried?” I asked.

  Jack shook his head, stopped, and then looked back and forth at Charmian and me, and then said: “Hell yes, I was worried.”

  “Can you tell anything different about me?” I asked.

  Jack looked me up and down.

  “Are you Houdini Number One?” Jack asked.

  “That’s me,” I said.

  “So you haven’t switched back?” Jack asked.

  “I have,” I said. “Can’t you tell? I’ve switched back here to my home universe.”

  “What’s he talking about?” Charmian asked Jack.

  “It’s a long, confusing story,” Jack said. “Right now, I am very confused myself. You are the Houdini I met originally?”

  “That’s right!” I said. “I’m Houdini Number One.”

  “That’s what the other Houdini called himself,” Jack said.

  “I know,” I said. “Just as your parallel self observed in that other universe: ‘All Houdinis in all possible universes are Houdini Number One. And all other Houdinis are Houdini Number Two— that is, by the reckoning of Houdini Number One, which is to say, by the reckoning of all Houdinis.’”

  “Thus,” Jack said, “we have a paradox of time and universes: there are only two Houdinis and at the same time, an infinite number of Houdinis.”

  “What the hell are you two talking about?” Charmian asked. “You’re not making a bit of sense!”

  “Believe me,” I said to Charmian, “it all adds up, but first— you’ve got to know the numbers.”

  “The Martians have just altered the field of their ship!” a sailor suddenly shouted.

  Mr. Tesla rushed to the sailor’s console and looked down at an undulating graph.

  “They’re getting ready to make a jump through time,” Mr. Tesla said. “Prepare to follow them. Track the frequencies of their field and feed those same frequencies into the ship’s generators.”

  “Aye, aye,” the sailor said.

  A familiar voice suddenly crackled over the ship’s speaker:

  “This is your Captain Wilson speaking! I am afraid I must bid you all farewell. Or follow us— if you can. But I don’t believe you can!”

  The voice of the Martian who had been impersonating Captain Wilson laughed maniacally and then the transmission broke off.

  I went to the pilot’s window and looked out. The Martian ship was moving rapidly away from us into the blue of the sky. Suddenly, their ship blinked out of view, and in that same instant, I saw a rippling of light in the sky, concentric, circular waves moving out from where the Martian ship had disappeared.

  “They just made the jump— the time shift!” the sailor said.

  “Engage the ship’s engines for time shift,” Mr. Tesla ordered.

  The communications officer closed a switch.

  “Engines engaged, sir!” the communications officer announced.

  The sky beyond the pilot’s windows suddenly blurred into a white haze. Then a tube of grid lines appeared and we began hurtling through it.

  Then, ahead in the tube, I could see the stern of the Martian ship.

  “Fire on them!” Mr. Tesla ordered.

  From the prow of the Cypher, an electric ray shot forth and hit the Martian ship. The tunnel of grid lines broke apart, and we hurtled out of it and across the sky of the earth.

  “What year?” Mr. Tesla asked.

  “1908!” Mr. Czito announced. “Mr. Tesla! We’ve emerged at exactly the same time in 1908 when we extracted energy from the Wardenclyffe Tower!”

  “When we fired on the Martians, it sent us all into a temporal node,” Mr. Tesla said.

  “How were we pulled into it?” Mr. Czito asked.

  “Perhaps the same way we are all pulled into life— by Destiny. Where are we on the earth?”

  “Siberia,” Lt. Nimitz said, looking into a viewing screen. “We’re over a lake.”

  “Of course,” Mr. Tesla said, “We’ve struck a space-time node. The body of water below us must be Lake Baikal.”

  Suddenly the Martian airship turned about and fired an electric ray at us. There was an explosion of light across the pilot’s windows.

  “Fire on them!” Mr. Tesla ordered. “Full array! Then pull back immediately and reverse course!”

  Several electric rays shot out from the Cypher and struck the hull of the Martian airship simultaneously. The Martian airship shuddered in the sky.

  “Now!” Mr. Tesla shouted. “Reverse course!”

  The view in the pilot’s windows shifted in a dizzying blur.

  “Vertical ascent!” Mr. Tesla shouted. “Fifty thousand miles per hour! Now!”

  We rose rapidly above the earth, penetrated the last layer of atmosphere, and entered outer space.

  “Rotate ninety degrees,” Mr. Tesla said quietly.

  Below us, the dark surface of the earth was suddenly lit up by a series of lines of light rapidly moving and converging to a point directly below us that exploded like a small sun.

  “The time-reversed waves engulfed the area— and vaporized the Martian airship,” Mr. Tesla said.

  “With the Bell aboard,” Lt. Nimitz said.

  “Yes,” Mr. Tesla said. “The Bell has been destroyed for now.”

  “For now?” Lt. Nimitz asked. “What do you mean?”

  Mr. Tesla said, “If what Mr. Dellschau has just told me is accurate, then I am afraid that information on the construction of the Bell has been passed from the Martians to the Germans. It is only a matter of time before another Bell is built. The Martians may create one, or even the Germans. Whether or not they can recreate the precise engineering of the original device remains to be seen. Without the help of Mr. Dellschau or someone like him, they will have difficulty in recreating the correct sequence of the device’s electrical pulsations, its frequencies of operation. But even so, even an imperfectly recreated Bell could be an extremely dangerous weapon.”

  “Where would they build it?” Lt. Nimitz asked.

  “It could be constructed anywhere, Lieutenant,” Mr. Tesla said. “Anywhere at all.”

  Below us the earth raged in a fire that could be clearly seen from outer space.

  “Descend to the site of the explosion,” Mr. Tesla ordered the pilot.

  Before us through the windows of the pilot’s cabin we could se
e the surface of the earth spread out rapidly. A bright plain of orange fire stretched before us, and as we got nearer to it, we could see miles of forest and earth blackened, smoke billowing constantly across the landscape. All the trees were shorn of their branches and their trunks lay black and flattened against the scorched earth.

  Mr. Tesla now spoke to the communications officer:

  “Key the frequencies of the ship’s generators back into the time field of the sailor in the etheric scanning chamber.”

  “Aye, aye, sir,” the communications officer said, closing a switch. “Generators are keyed to chamber frequency.”

  “Engage the ship’s engines for time shift,” Mr. Tesla said.

  The communications officer closed another switch.

  “Engines engaged, sir!” the communications officer announced.

  The view beyond the windows of the pilot’s cabin flashed white and a tunnel composed of grid lines appeared. Our ship moved rapidly through the tunnel. The color within the grids became a pale blue, then a deeper blue, and then there was another flash of light and the tunnel disappeared leaving only a blue sky ahead of us.

  “We’re back in 1915, sir!” the communications officer announced.

  “Give the date and exact time,” Mr. Tesla ordered.

  Mr. Czito spoke up from where he stood bent over a viewing screen: “It’s Sunday, November 28th, 1915 at 5:26 AM.”

  “Position in space,” Mr. Tesla ordered.

  “Ten miles off the coast of California from San Francisco at two thousand feet above the Pacific Ocean,” the pilot replied.

  “We must complete a spatio-temporal transference of some complexity,” Mr. Tesla said, “Houdini, Mr. and Mrs. London must go down to the main escape trunk. Mr. Czito, you will come with me. Lt. Nimitz, you have command of the bridge.”

  Within minutes Charmian, Jack, and I had gone down to the escape trunk. We stood there a moment waiting, and then Mr. Tesla and Mr. Czito came through the door from the corridor followed by several sailors carrying cases of electrical equipment. One sailor brought in a heavy electrical cable and plugged it into one of the cases. Six more sailors entered the escape trunk, all of them wearing the new copper-colored enviro-suits.