Science Fiction by Gaslight: A History and Anthology of Science Fiction in the Popular Magazines, 1891-1911

by Sam Moskowitz (ed. )

  I put the stone on a glass shelf in the next room while looking for the slide. You can imagine my sensation when that diamond, with something like a flash of shadow, so intense and swift it was, burst into a hundred rays of blackness and subsided—a pile of carbon! I had forgotten that the shelf happened to be negatively polarized, consequently everything it touched sharing its polarization, and that in pursuing my experiment I had polarized myself also, but with the opposite current; thus the atoms of my fingers passing through the spaces of the atoms of the stone already polarized, separated them negatively so far that they suffered disintegration and returned to the normal. “Good heavens! What has happened!” I cried before I thought. In a moment he was in the rear room and bending with me over the carbon. “Well,” he said straightening himself directly, “you gave me a pretty fright. I thought for a moment that was my diamond.”

  “But it is!” I whispered.

  “Pshaw!” he exclaimed roughly. “What do you take me for? Come, come, I’m not here for tricks. That’s enough damned legerdemain. Where’s my diamond?”

  With less dismay and more presence of mind I should have edged along to my batteries, depolarized myself, placed in vacuum the tiny shelf of glass and applied my Y-ray; and with, I knew not what, of convulsion and flame the atoms might have slipped into place. But, instead, I stood gasping. He turned and surveyed me; the low order of his intelligence could receive but one impression.

  “Look here,” he said, “you will give me back my stone! Now! Or I will have an officer here!”

  My mind was flying like the current through my coils. How could I restore the carbon to its original, as I must, if at all, without touching it, and how could I gain time without betraying my secret? “You are very short,” I said. “What would you do with your officer?”

  “Give you up! Give you up, appear against you, and let you have a sentence of twenty years behind bars.”

  “Hard words, Mr. Brant. You could say I had your property. I could deny it. Would your word outweigh mine? But return to the office in five minutes—if it is a possible thing you shall--”

  “And leave you to make off with my jewel! Not by a long shot! I’m a bad man to deal with, and I’ll have my stone or—”

  “Go for your officer,” said I.

  His eye, sharp as a dagger’s point, fell an instant. How could he trust me? I might escape with my booty. Throwing open the window to call, I might pinion him from behind, powerful as he was. But before he could gainsay, I had taken half a dozen steps backward, reaching my batteries.

  “Give your alarm,” I said. I put out my hand, lifting my lever, turned the current into my coils, and blazed up my Y-ray for half a heart-beat, succeeding in that brief time in reversing and in receiving the current that so far changed matters that the thing I touched would remain normal, although I was left still so far subjected to the ray of the less displacement that I ought, when the thrill had subsided, to be able to step through the wall as easily as if no wall were there. “Do you see what I have here?” I most unwisely exclaimed. “In one second I could annihilate you—” I had no time for more, or even to make sure I was correct, before, keeping one eye on me, he had called the officer.

  “Look here,” he said again, turning on me. “I know enough to see you have something new there, some of your damned inventions. Come, give me my diamond, and if it is worth while I’ll find the capital, go halves, and drop this matter.”

  “Not to save your life!” I cried.

  “You know me, officer,” he said, as the blue coat came running in. “I give this man into custody for theft.”

  “It is a mistake, officer,” I said. “But you will do your duty.”

  “Take him to the central station,” said Mr. Brant, “and have him searched. He has a jewel of mine on his person.”

  “Yer annar’s sure it’s not on the primmises?” asked the officer.

  “He has had no time—”

  “Sure, if it’s quick he do be he’s as like to toss it in a corner—”

  I stretched out my hand to a knob that silenced the humming among my wires, and at the same time sent up a thread of white fire whose instant rush and subsidence hinted of terrible power behind. The last divisible particle of radium—their eyeballs throbbed for a week.

  “Search,” I said. “But be careful about shocks. I don’t want murder here, too.”

  Apparently they also were of that mind. For, recovering their sight, they threw my coat over my shoulders and marched me between them to the station, where I was searched, and, as it was already late, locked into a cell for the night.

  I could not waste strength on the matter. I was waiting for the dead middle of the night. Then I should put things to proof.

  I confess it was a time of intense breathlessness while waiting for silence and slumber to seal the world. Then I called upon my soul, and I stepped boldly forward and walked through that stone wall as if it had been air.

  Of course, at my present displacement I was perfectly visible, and I slipped behind this and that projection, and into that alley, till sure of safety. There I made haste to my quarters, took the shelf holding the carbon, and at once subjected it to the necessary treatment. I was unprepared for the result. One instant the room seemed full of a blinding white flame, an intolerable heat, which shut my eyes and singed my hair and blistered my face.

  “It is the atmosphere of a fire-dissolving planet,” I thought. And then there was darkness and a strange odor.

  I fumbled and stumbled about till I could let in the fresh air; and presently I saw the dim light of the street lamp. Then I turned on my own lights—and there was the quartz slab with a curious fusing of its edges, and in the center, flashing, palpitating, lay the diamond, all fire and whiteness. I wonder if it were not considerably larger; but it was hot as if just fallen from Syra Vega; it contracted slightly after subjection to dephlogistic gases.

  It was near morning when, having found Brant’s address, I passed into his house and his room, and took my bearings. I found his waistcoat, left the diamond in one of its pockets, and returned. It would not do to remain away, visible or invisible. I must be vindicated, cleared of the charge, set right before the world by Brant’s appearing and confessing his mistake on finding the diamond in his pocket.

  Judge Brant did nothing of the kind. Having visited me in my cell and in vain renewed his request to share in the invention which the habit of his mind convinced him must be of importance, he appeared against me. And the upshot of the business was that I went to prison for the term of years he had threatened.

  I asked for another interview with him; but was refused, unless on the terms already declined. My lawyer, with the prison chaplain, went to him, but to no purpose. At last I went myself, as I had gone before, begging him not to ruin the work of my life. He regarded me as a bad dream, and I could not undeceive him without betraying my secret. I returned to my cell and again waited. For to escape was only to prevent possible vindication. If Mary had lived—but I was alone in the world.

  The chaplain arranged with my landlord to take a sum of money I had, and to keep my rooms and apparatus intact till the expiration of my sentence. And then I put on the shameful and degrading prison garb and submitted to my fate.

  It was a black fate. On the edge of the greatest triumph over matter that had ever been achieved, on the verge of announcing the actuality of the Fourth Dimension of Space, and of defining and declaring its laws, I was a convict laborer at a prison bench.

  One day Judge Brant, visiting a client under sentence of death, in relation to his fee, made pretext to look me up, and stopped at my bench. “And how do you like it as far as you’ve gone?” he said.

  “So that I go no farther,” I replied. “And unless you become accessory to my taking off, you will acknowledge you found the stone in your pocket-”

  “Not yet, not yet,” he said, with an unctuous laugh. “It was a keen jest you played. Regard this as a jest in return. But when you are
ready, I am ready.”

  The thing was hopeless. That night I bade good-by to the life that had plunged me from the pinnacle of light to the depths of hell.

  When again conscious I lay on a cot in the prison hospital. My attempt had been unsuccessful. St. Angel sat beside me. It was here, practically, he came into my life—alas! that I came into his.

  In the long nights of darkness and failing faintness, when horror had me by the throat, he was beside me, and his warm, human touch was all that held me while I hung over the abyss. When I swooned off again his hand, his voice, his bending face recalled me. “Why not let me go, and then an end?” I sighed.

  “To save you from a great sin,” he replied. And I clung to his hand with the animal instinct of living.

  I was well, and in my cell, when he said. “You claim to be an honest man—”

  “And yet?”

  “You were about taking that which did not belong to you.”

  “I hardly understand—”

  “Can you restore life once taken?”

  “Oh, life! That worthless thing!”

  “Lent for a purpose.”

  “For torture!”

  “If by yourself you could breathe breath into any pinch of feathers and toss it off your hand a creature—but, as it is, life is a trust. And you, a man of parts, of power, hold it only to return with usury.”

  “And stripped of the power of gathering usury! Robbed of the work about to revolutionize the world!”

  “The world moves on wide waves. Another man will presently have reached your discovery.”

  As if that were a thing to be glad of! I learned afterwards that St. Angel had given up the sweetness of life for the sake of his enemy. He had gone to prison, and himself worn the stripes, rather than the woman he loved should know her husband was the criminal. Perhaps he did not reconcile this with his love of inviolate truth. But St. Angel had never felt so much regard for his own soul as for the service of others. Self-forgetfulness was the dominant of all his nature.

  “Tell me,” he said, sitting with me, “about your work.”

  A whim of trustfulness seized me. I drew an outline, but paused at the look of pity on his face. He felt there was but one conclusion to draw—that I was a madman.

  “Very well,” I said, “you shall see.” And I walked through the wall before his amazed eyes, and walked back again.

  For a moment speechless, “You have hypnotic power,” then he said. “You made me think I saw it.”

  “You did see it. I can go free any day I choose.”

  “And you do not?”

  “I must be vindicated.” And I told exactly what had taken place with Brant and his diamond. “Perhaps that vindication will never come,” I said at last. “The offended amour propre, and the hope of gain, hindered in the beginning. Now he will find it impossible.”

  “That is too monstrous to believe!” said St. Angel. “But since you can, why not spend an hour or two at night with your work?”

  “In these clothes! How long before I should be brought back? The first wayfarer—oh, you see!”

  St. Angel thought a while. “You are my size,” he said then. “We will exchange clothes. I will remain here. In three hours return, that you may get your sleep. It is fortunate the prison should be in the same town.”

  Night after night then I was in my old rooms, the shutters up, lost in my dreams and my researches, arriving at great ends.

  Night after night I reappeared on the moment, and St. Angel went his way.

  I had now found that molecular displacement can be had in various directions. Going further, I saw that gravity acts on bodies whose molecules are on the same plane, and one of the possible results of the application of the Y-ray was the suspension of the laws of gravity. This possibly accounted for an almost inappreciable buoyancy and the power of directing one’s course. My last studies showed that a substance thus treated has the degenerative power of attracting the molecules of any norm into its new orbit—a disastrous possibility. A chair might disappear into a table previously treated by a Y-ray. In fact, the outlook was to infinity. The change so slight—the result so astonishing! The subject might go into molecular interstices as far removed, to all essential purpose, as if billions of miles away in interstellar space. Nothing was changed, nothing disrupted; but the thing had stepped aside to let the world go by. The secrets of the world were mine. The criminal was at my mercy. The lover had no reserves from me. And as for my enemy, the Lord had delivered him into my hand. I could leave him only a puzzle for the dissectors. I could make him, although yet alive, a conscious ghost to stand or wander in his altered shape through years of nightmare alone and lost. What wonders of energy would follow this ray of displacement. What withdrawal of malignant growth and deteriorating tissue was to come. “To what heights of succor for humanity the surgeon can rise with it!” said St. Angel, as, full of my enthusiasm, I dilated on the marvel.

  “He can work miracles!” I exclaimed. “He can heal the sick, walk on the deep, perhaps—who knows—raise the dead!”

  I was at the height of my endeavor when St. Angel brought me my pardon. He had so stated my case to the Governor, so spoken of my interrupted career, and of my prison conduct, that the pardon had been given. I refused to accept it. “I accept,” I said, “nothing but vindication, if I stay here till the day of judgment!”

  “But there is no provision for you now,” he urged. “Officially you no longer exist.”

  “Here I am,” I said, “and here I stay.”

  “At any rate,” he continued, “come out with me now and see the Governor, and see the world and the daylight outdoors, and be a man among men a while!”

  With the stipulation that I should return, I put on, a man’s clothes again and went out the gates.

  It was with a thrill of exultation that, exhibiting the affairs in my room to St. Angel, finally I felt the vibrating impulse that told me I had received the ray of the larger displacement. In a moment I should be viewless as the air.

  “Where are you?” said St. Angel, turning this way and that. “What has become of you?”

  “Seeing is believing,” I said. “Sometimes not seeing is the naked truth.”

  “Oh, but this is uncanny!” he exclaimed. “A voice out of empty air.”

  “Not so empty! But place your hand under the second coil. Have no fear. You hear me now,” I said. “I am in perhaps the Fourth Dimension. I am invisible to any one not there—to all the world, except, presently, yourself. For now you, you also, pass into the unseen. Tell me what you feel.”

  “Nothing,” he said. “A vibration—a suspicion of one. No, a blow, a sense of coming collapse, so instant it has passed.”

  “Now,” I said, “there is no one on earth with eyes to see you but myself!”

  “That seems impossible.”

  “Did you see me? But now you do. We are on the same plane. Look in that glass. There is the reflection of the room, of the window, the chair. Do you see me? Yourself?”

  “Powers of the earth and air, but this is ghastly!” said St. Angel.

  “It is the working of natural law. Now we will see the world, ourselves unseen.”

  “An unfair advantage.”

  “Perhaps. But there are things to accomplish to-day.” What things I never dreamed; or I had stayed on the threshold.

  I wanted St. Angel to know the manner of man this Brant was. We went out, and arrested our steps only inside Brant’s office.

  “This door is always blowing open!” said the clerk, and he returned to a woman standing in a suppliant attitude. “The Judge has gone to the races,” he said, “and he’s left word that Tuesday morning your goods’ll be put out of the house if you don’t pay up!” The woman went her way weeping.

  Leaving, we mounted a car; we would go to the races ourselves. I doubt if St. Angel had ever seen anything of the sort. I observed him quietly slip a dime into the conductor’s pocket—he felt that even the invisible, like John Gilpin
, carried a right. “This opens a way for the right hand undreamed of the left,” he said to me later.

  It was not long before we found Judge Brant, evidently in an anxious frame, his expanse of countenance white with excitement. He had been plunging heavily, as I learned, and had big money staked, not upon the favorite but upon Hannan, the black mare. “That man would hardly put up so much on less than a certainty,” I thought. Winding our way unseen among the grooms and horses, I found what I suspected—a plan to pocket the favorite. “But I know a game worth two of that,” I said. I took a couple of small smooth pebbles, previously prepared, from the chamois bag into which I had put them with some others and an aluminum wafer treated for the larger displacement, and slipped one securely under the favorite’s saddle-girth. When he warmed to his work he should be, for perhaps half an hour, at the one-billionth point, before the virtue expired, and capable of passing through every obstacle as he was directed.

  “Hark you, Danny,” then I whispered in the jockey’s ear.

  “Who are you? What—I—I—don’t—” looking about with terror.

  “It’s no ghost,” I whispered hurriedly. “Keep your nerve. I am flesh and blood—alive as you. But I have the property which for half an hour I give you—a new discovery. And knowing Bub and Whittler’s game, it’s up to you to knock ‘em out. Now, remember, when they try the pocket ride straight through them!”

  Other things kept my attention; and when the crucial moment came I had some excited heart-beats. And so had Judge Brant. It was in the instant when Danny, having held the favorite well in hand for the first stretch, Hannan and Darter in the lead and the field following, was about calling on her speed, that suddenly Bub and Whittler drew their horses’ heads a trifle more closely together, in such wise that it was impossible to pass on either side, and a horse could no more shoot ahead than if a stone wall stood there. “Remember, Danny!” I shouted, making a trumpet of my hands. “Ride straight through!”