“I’d give just about one leg for the gist of that conversation. That was the Rhamda; but who is the other ghost?”
“Do you think it has to do with the Blind Spot?”
“I don’t think,” averred Hobart. “I know. Wonder what’s the time.” He glanced at his watch. “Eleven thirty.”
Just here the young man at the table raised up his head. The cigarette was still between his fingers; he puffed lamely for a minute, taking a dull note of his surroundings. In the well of gaiety and laughter coming from all parts of the room his actions were out of place. He seemed dazed; unable to pull himself together. Suddenly he looked at us. He started.
“He certainly knows us,” I said. “I wonder—by George, he’s coming over.”
Even his step was feeble. There was exertion about every move of his body, the wanness and effort of vanished vitality; he balanced himself carefully. Slowly, slowly, line by line his features became familiar, the underlines of another, the ghost of one departed. At first I could not place him. He held himself up for breath. Who was he? Then it suddenly came to me—back to the old days at college—an athlete, one of the best of fellows, one of the sturdiest of men! He had come to this!
Hobart was before me.
“By all the things that are holy!” he exclaimed. “Chick Watson! Here, have a seat. In the name of Heavens, Chick! What on earth—”
The other dropped feebly into the chair. The body that had once been so powerful was a skeleton. His coat was a disguise of padding.
“Hello, Hobart; hello, Harry,” he spoke in a whisper. “Not much like the old Chick, am I? First thing, I’ll take some brandy.”
It was almost tragic. I glanced at Hobart and nodded to the waiter. Could it be Chick Watson? I had seen him a year before, hale, healthy, prosperous. And here he was—a wreck!
“No,” he muttered, “I’m not sick—not sick. Lord, boys, it’s good to meet you. I just thought I would come out for this one last night, hear some music, see a pretty face, perhaps meet a friend. But I am afraid—” He dropped off like one suddenly drifting into slumber.
“Hustle that waiter,” I said to Hobart. “Hurry that brandy.”
The stimulant seemed to revive him. He lifted up suddenly. There was fear in his eyes; then on seeing himself among friends—relief. He turned to me.
“Think I’m sick, don’t you?” he asked.
“You certainly are,” I answered.
“Well, I’m not.”
For a moment silence. I glanced at Hobart. Hobart nodded.
“You’re just about in line for a doctor, Chick, old boy,” I said. “I’m going to see that you have one. Bed for you, and the care of mother—”
He started; he seemed to jerk himself together.
“That’s it, Harry; that’s what I wanted. It’s so hard for me to think. Mother, mother! That’s why I came downtown. I wanted a friend. I have something for you to give to mother.”
“Rats,” I said. “I’ll take you to her. What are you talking about?”
But he shook his head.
“I wish that you were telling the truth, Harry. But it’s no use—not after tonight. All the doctors in the world could not save me. I’m not sick, boys, far from it.”
Hobart spoke up.
“What is it, Chick? I have a suspicion. Am I right?”
Chick looked up; he closed his eyes.
“All right, Hobart, what’s your suspicion?”
Fenton leaned over. It seemed to me that he was peering into the other’s soul. He touched his forearm.
“Chick, old boy, I think I know. But tell me. Am I right? It’s the Blind Spot.”
At the words Watson opened his eyes; they were full of hope and wonder, for a moment, and then, as suddenly of a great despair. His body went to a heap. His voice was feeble.
“Yes,” he answered, “I am dying—of the Blind Spot”
THE RING
It was a terrible thing; death stalking out of the Blind Spot. We had almost forgotten. It had been a story hitherto—a wonderful one to be sure, and one to arouse conjecture. I had never thought that we were to be brought to its shivering contact. It was out of the occult; it had been so pronounced by the professor; a great secret of life holding out a guerdon of death to its votaries. Witness Chick Watson, the type of healthy, fighting manhood—come to this. He opened his eyes feebly; one could see the light; the old spirit was there—fighting for life. What was this struggle of soul and flesh? Why had the soul hung on? He made another effort.
“More drink,” he asked; “more drink. Anything to hold me together. I must tell you. You must take my place and—and—fight the Blind Spot! Promise that—”
“Order the drinks,” I told Hobart. “I see Dr. Hansen over there. Even if we cannot save him we must hold him until we get his story.”
I went and fetched Hansen over.
“A strange case,” he murmured. “Pulse normal; not a trace of fever. Not sick, you say—” Hobart pointed to his head. “Ah, I see! I would suggest home and a bed.”
Just here Watson opened his eyes again. They rested first upon the doctor, then upon myself, and finally upon the brandy. He took it up and drank it with eagerness. It was his third one; it gave him a bit more life.
“Didn’t I tell you, boys, that there is not a doctor on earth that can save me? Excuse me, doc. I am not sick. I told them. I am far past physic; I have gone beyond medicine. All I ask is stimulant and life enough to tell my story.”
“My boy,” asked the doctor kindly, “what ails you?”
Watson smiled. He touched himself on the forehead.
“Up here, doc. There are things in the world with which we may not tamper. I tried it. Somebody had to do it and somebody has to do it yet. You remember Dr. Holcomb; he was a great man; he was after the secret of life. He began it.”
Dr. Hansen started.
“Lord!” he exclaimed, looking at us all; “you don’t mean this man is mixed up in the Blind Spot?”
We nodded. Watson smiled; again he dropped back into inertia; the speech he had made was his longest yet; the brandy was coming into effect.
“Give him brandy,” the doctor said; “it’s as good as anything. It will hold him together and give him life for a while. Here.” He reached into his pocket and flicked something into the glass. “That will help him. Gentlemen, do you know what it means? I had always thought! I knew Dr. Holcomb! Crossing over the border! It may not be done! The secret of life is impossible. Yet—”
Watson opened his eyes again; his spirit seemed suddenly to flicker into defiance.
“Who said it was impossible? Who said it? Gentlemen, it IS possible. Dr. Holcomb—pardon me. I do not wish to appear a sot; but this brandy is about the only thing to hold me together. I have only a few hours left.”
He took the glass, and at one gulp downed the contents. I do not know what the doctor had dropped into it. Chick revived suddenly, and a strange light blazed up in his eyes, like life rekindled.
“Ah, now I am better. So?”
He turned to us all; then to the doctor.
“So you say the secret of life is impossible?”
Chick smiled wanly. “May I ask you: what it is that has just flared up within me? I am weak, anaemic, fallen to pieces; my muscles have lost the power to function, my blood runs cold, I have been more than two feet over the border. And yet—a few drinks of brandy, of stimulants, and you have drawn me back, my heart beats strongly, for an hour. By means of drugs you have infused a new life—which of course is the old—and driven the material components of my body into correlation. You are successful for a time; so long as nature is with you; but all the while you are held aghast by the knowledge that the least flaw, the least disarrangement, and you are beaten.
“It is your business to hold this life or what you may. When it has gone your structures, your anatomy, your wonderful human machine is worthless. Where has it come from? Where has it gone? I have drunk four glasses of brandy; I have
a lease of four short hours. Ordinarily it would bring reaction; it is poison, to be sure; but it is driving back my spirit, giving me life and strength enough to tell my story—in the morning I shall be no more. By sequence I am a dead man already. Four glasses of brandy; they are speaking. Whence comes this affinity of substance and of shadow?”
We all of us listened, the doctor most of all. “Go on,” he said.
“Can’t you see?” repeated Watson. “There is affinity between substance and shadow; and therefore your spirit or shadow or what you will is concrete, is in itself a substance. It is material just as much as you are. Because you do not see it is no proof that it is not substance. That pot palm yonder does not see you; it is not blessed with eyes.”
The doctor looked at Watson; he spoke gently.
“This is very old stuff, my boy, out of your abstract philosophy. No man knows the secret of life. Not even yourself.”
The light in Watson’s eyes grew brighter, he straightened; he began slipping the ring from his finger.
“No,” he answered. “I don’t. I have tried and it was like playing with lightning. I sought for life and it is giving me death. But there is one man living who has found it.”
“And this man?”
“Is Dr. Holcomb!”
We all of us started. We had every one given the doctor up as dead. The very presence of Watson was tragedy. We did not doubt that he had been through some terrible experience. There are things in the world that may not be unriddled. Some power, some sinister thing was reaching for his vitality. What did he know about the professor? Dr. Holcomb had been a long time dead.
“Gentlemen. You must hear my story; I haven’t long to tell it. However, before I start here is a proof for a beginning.”
He tossed the ring upon the table.
It was Hobart who picked it up. A beautiful stone, like a sapphire; blue but uncut and of a strange pellucid transparency—a jewel undoubtedly; but of a kind we have never seen. We all of us examined it, and were all, I am afraid, a bit disappointed. It was a stone and nothing else.
Watson watched us. The waiter had brought more brandy, and Watson was sipping it, not because he liked it, he said, but just to keep himself at the proper lift.
“You don’t understand it, eh? You see nothing? Hobart, have you a match? There, that’s it; now give me the ring. See—” He struck the match and held the flame against the jewel. “Gentlemen, there is no need for me to speak. The stone will give you a volume. It’s not trickery, I assure you, but fact. There, now, perfect. Doctor, you are the sceptic. Take a look at the stone.”
The doctor picked it up casually and held it up before his eyes. At first he frowned; then came a look of incredulity; his chin dropped and he rose in his chair.
“My God,” he exclaimed, “the man’s living! It—he—”
But Hobart and I had crowded over. The doctor held the ring so we could see it. Inside the stone was Dr. Holcomb!
It was a strenuous moment, and the most incredible. We all of us knew the doctor. It was not a photograph, nor a likeness; but the man himself. It was beyond all reason that he could be in the jewel; indeed there was only the head visible; one could catch the expression of life, the movements of the eyelids. Yet how could it be? What was it? It was Hobart who spoke first.
“Chick,” he asked, “what’s the meaning? Were it not for my own eyes I would call it impossible. It’s absurd on the face. The doctor! Yet I can see him—living. Where is he?”
Chick nodded.
“That’s the whole question. Where is he? I know and yet I know nothing. You are now looking into the Blind Spot. The doctor sought the secret of life—and found it. He was trapped by his own wisdom!”
TANKS
Murray Leinster (1923)
Two miles of American front had gone dead. And on two lone infantrymen, lost in the menace of the fog-gas and the tanks, depended the outcome of the war of 1932.
THE PERSISTENT, OILY smell of fog-gas was everywhere, even in the little pill-box. Outside, all the world was blotted out by the thick gray mist that went rolling slowly across country with the breeze. The noises that came through it were curiously muted—fog-gas mutes all noises somewhat—but somewhere to the right artillery was pounding something with H E shell, and there were those little spitting under-current explosions that told of tanks in action. To the right there was a distant rolling of machine-gun fire. In between was an utter, solemn silence.
Sergeant Coffee, disreputable to look at and disrespectful of mien, was sprawling over one of the gunners’ seats and talking into a field telephone while mud dripped from him. Corporal Wallis, equally muddy and still more disreputable, was painstakingly manufacturing one complete cigarette from the pinched-out butts of four others. Both were rifle-infantry. Neither had any right or reason to be occupying a definitely machine-gun-section post. The fact that the machine-gun crew was all dead did not seem to make much difference to sector H.Q. at the other end of the telephone wire, judging from the questions that were being asked.
“I tell you,” drawled Sergeant Coffee, “they’re dead… . Yeah, all dead. Just as dead as when I told you the firs’ time, maybe even deader… . Gas, o’course. I don’t know what kind… . Yeh. They got their masks on.”
He waited, looking speculatively at the cigarette Corporal Wallis had in manufacture. It began to look imposing. Corporal Wallis regarded it affectionately. Sergeant Coffee put his hand over the mouthpiece, and looked intently at his companion.
“Gimme a drag o’ that, Pete,” he suggested. “I’ll slip y’ some butts in a minute.”
Corporal Wallis nodded, and proceeded to light the cigarette with infinite artistry. He puffed delicately upon it, inhaled it with the care a man learns when he has just so much tobacco and never expects to get any more, and reluctantly handed it to Sergeant Coffee.
Sergeant Coffee emptied his lungs in a sigh of anticipation. He put the cigarette to his lips. It burned brightly as he drew upon it. Its tip became brighter and brighter until it was white-hot, and the paper crackled as the line of fire crept up the tube.
“Hey!” said Corporal Wallis in alarm.
Sergeant Coffee waved him aside, and his chest expanded to the fullest limit of his blouse. When his lungs could hold no more he ceased to draw, grandly returned about one-fourth of the cigarette to Corporal Wallis, and blew out a cloud of smoke in small driblets until he had to gasp for breath.
“When y’ ain’t got much time,” said Sergeant Coffee amiably, “that’s a quick smoke.”
Corporal Wallis regarded the ruins of his cigarette with a woeful air.
“Hell!” said Corporal Wallis gloomily. But he smoked what was left.
“Yeah,” said Sergeant Coffee suddenly, into the field telephone, “I’m still here, an’ they’re still dead… . Listen, Mr. Officer, I got me a black eye an’ numerous contusions. Also my gas-mask is busted. I called y’up to do y’ a favor. I aim to head for distant parts… . Hell’s bells! Ain’t there anybody else in the army—” He stopped, and resentment died out in wide-eyed amazement. “Yeh… . Yeh… . Yeh… . I gotcha, Loot. A’right, I’ll see what I c’n do. Yeh… . Wish y’d see my insurance gets paid. Yeh.”
He hung up, gloomily, and turned to Corporal Wallis.
“We’ got to be heroes,” he announced bitterly. “Sit out here in th’ stinkin’ fog an’ wait for a tank t’ come along an’ wipe us out. We’ the only listenin’ post in two miles of front. That new gas o’ theirs wiped out all the rest without report.”
He surveyed the crumpled figures, which had been the original occupants of the pill-box. They wore the same uniform as himself and when he took the gas-mask off of one of them the man’s face was strangely peaceful.
“Hell of a war,” said Sergeant Coffee bitterly. “Here our gang gets wiped out by a helicopter. I ain’t seen sunlight in a week, an’ I got just four butts left. Lucky I started savin’ ‘em.” He rummaged shrewdly. “This guy’s got half a sack o’ makin�
�s. Say, that was Loot’n’t Madison on the line, then. Transferred from our gang a coupla months back. They cut him in the line to listen in on me an’ make sure I was who I said I was. He recognized my voice.”
Corporal Wallis, after smoking to the last and ultimate puff, pinched out his cigarette and put the fragments of a butt back in his pocket.
“What we got to do?” he asked, watching as Sergeant Coffee divided the treasure-trove into two scrupulously exact portions.
“Nothin’,” said Coffee bitterly, “except find out how this gang got wiped out, an’ a few little things like that. Half th’ front line is in th’ air, the planes can’t see anything, o’course, an’ nobody dares cut th’ fog-gas to look. He didn’t say much, but he said for Gawd’s sake find out somethin’.”
Corporal Wallis gloated over one-fourth of a sack of tobacco and stowed it away.
“Th’ infantry always gets th’ dirty end of the stick,” he said gloomily. “I’m goin’ to roll me a whole one, pre-war, an’ smoke it, presently.”
“Hell yes,” said Coffee. He examined his gas-mask from force of habit before stepping out into the fog once more, then contemptuously threw it aside. “Gas-masks, hell! Ain’t worth havin’. Come on.”
Corporal Wallis followed as he emerged from the little round cone of the pill-box.
The gray mist that was fog-gas hung over everything. There was a definite breeze blowing, but the mist was so dense that it did not seem to move. It was far enough from the fog-flares for the last least trace of striation to have vanished. Fifteen miles to the north the fog-flares were placed, ranged by hundreds and by thousands, burning one after another as the fog service set them off, and sending out their incredible masses of thick gray vapor in long threads that spread out before the wind, coalesced, and made a smoke-screen to which the puny efforts of the last war—the war that was to make the world safe for democracy—were as nothing.
Here, fifteen miles down-wind from the flares, it was possible to see clearly in a circle approximately five feet in diameter. At the edge of that circle outlines began to blur. At ten feet all shapes were the faintest of bulks, the dimmest of outlines. At fifteen feet all was invisible, hidden behind a screen of mist.
Classic Science Fiction and Fantasy Stories Page 46
