Microcosmic God (27 page)

Kidder waved a hand northward. “Conant!” he screamed over the uproar. “It’s Conant! He’s going to kill us all!”

“The plant?” said Johansen, turning pale.

“It’s safe. He won’t touch
that!
But … my place … what about all those men?”

“Too late!” shouted Johansen.

“Maybe I can—Come on!” called Kidder, and was off down the trail, heading south.

Johansen pounded after him. Kidder’s little short legs became a blur as the squadron swooped overhead, laying its eggs in the spot where they had met.

As they burst out of the woods, Johansen put on a spurt, caught up with the scientist and knocked him sprawling not six feet from the white line.

“Wh … wh—”

“Don’t go any farther, you fool! Your own damned force field—it’ll kill you!”

“Force field? But—I came through it on the way up—Here. Wait. If I can—” Kidder began hunting furiously about in the grass. In a few seconds he ran up to the line, clutching a large grasshopper in his hand. He tossed it over. It lay still.

“See?” said Johansen. “It—”

“Look! It jumped! Come on! I don’t know what went wrong, unless the Neoterics shut it off. They generated that field—I didn’t.”

“Neo—huh?”

“Never mind,” snapped the biochemist, and ran.

They pounded gasping up the steps and into the Neoterics’ control room. Kidder clapped his eyes to a telescope and shrieked in glee. “They’ve done it! We’ve done it!”

“Who’s—”

“My little people! The Neoterics! They’ve made the impenetrable shield! Don’t you see—it cut through the lines of force that start up that field out there! Their generator is still throwing it up, but the vibrations can’t get out! They’re safe! They’re safe!” And the overwrought hermit began to cry. Johansen looked at him pityingly and shook his head.

“Sure—your little men are all right. But we aren’t,” he added, as the floor shook to the detonation of a bomb.

Johansen closed his eyes, got a grip on himself and let his curiosity overcome his fear. He stepped to the binocular telescope, gazed down it. There was nothing there but a curved sheet of gray material. He had never seen a gray quite like that. It was absolutely neutral. It didn’t seem soft and it didn’t seem hard, and to look at it made his brain reel. He looked up.

Kidder was pounding the keys of a teletype, watching the blank yellow tape anxiously.

“I’m not getting through to them,” he whimpered. “I don’t know what’s the mat—Oh, of
course!”

“What?”

“The shield is absolutely impenetrable! The teletype impulses can’t get through or I could get them to extend the screen over the building—over the whole island! There’s
nothing
those people can’t do!”

“He’s crazy,” Johansen muttered. “Poor little—”

The teletype began clicking sharply. Kidder dove at it, practically embraced it. He read off the tape as it came out. Johansen saw the characters, but they meant nothing to him.

“Almighty,” Kidder read falteringly, “pray have mercy on us and be forbearing until we have said our say. Without orders we have lowered the screen you ordered us to rise. We are lost, O great one. Our screen is truly impenetrable, and so cut off your words on the word machine. We have never, in the memory of any Neoteric, been without your word before. Forgive us our action. We will eagerly await your answer.”

Kidder’s fingers danced over the keys. “You can look now,” he gasped. “Go on—the telescope!”

Johansen, trying to ignore the whine of sure death from above, looked.

He saw what looked like land—fantastic fields under cultivation, a settlement of some sort, factories, and—beings. Everything moved with incredible rapidity. He couldn’t see one of the inhabitants except as darting pinky-white streaks. Fascinated, he stared for a long minute. A sound behind him made him whirl. It was Kidder, rubbing his hands together briskly. There was a broad smile on his face.

“They did it,” he said happily. “You see?”

Johansen didn’t see until he began to realize that there was a dead silence outside. He ran to a window. It was night outside—the blackest night—when it should have been dusk. “What happened?”

“The Neoterics,” said Kidder, and laughed like a child. “My friends downstairs there. They threw up the impenetrable shield over the whole island. We can’t be touched now!”

And at Johansen’s amazed questions, he launched into a description of the race of beings below them.

Outside the shell, things happened. Nine airplanes suddenly went dead-stick. Nine pilots glided downward, powerless, and some fell into the sea, and some struck the miraculous gray shell that loomed in place of an island, slid off, and sank.

And ashore, a man named Wright sat in a car, half dead with fear, while government men surrounded him, approached cautiously, daring instant death from a now-dead source.

In a room deep in the White House, a high-ranking army officer shrieked, “I can’t stand it any more! I can’t!” and leaped up, snatched a red cube off the President’s desk, ground it to ineffectual litter under his shining boots.

And in a few days they took a broken old man away from the bank and put him in an asylum, where he died within a week.

The shield, you see, was truly impenetrable. The power plant was untouched and sent out its beams; but the beams could not get out, and anything powered from the plant went dead. The story never became public, although for some years there was heightened naval activity off the New England coast. The navy, so the story went, had a new target range out there—a great hemi-ovoid of gray material. They bombed it and shelled it and rayed it and blasted all around it, but never even dented its smooth surface.

Kidder and Johansen let it stay there. They were happy enough with their researches and their Neoterics. They did not hear or feel the shelling, for the shield was truly impenetrable. They synthesized their food and their light and air from the materials at hand, and they simply didn’t care. They were the only survivors of the bombing, with
the exception of three poor maimed devils who died soon afterwards.

All this happened many years ago, and Kidder and Johansen may be alive today, and they may be dead. But that doesn’t matter too much. The important thing is that the great gray shell will bear watching. Men die, but races live. Some day the Neoterics, after innumerable generations of inconceivable advancement, will take down their shield and come forth. When I think of that I feel frightened.

J
UST A GAG
, that’s all—a gag. I’m sure it was. It had to be. Heck, we were wise, Tommy and me. Tommy was a radio technician and a good one, and I knew the gadgets to the last hidden loudspeaker and the last Fahnestock clip almost as well as he did. Tommy was a funny egg, anyway. Foggy, you know—the kind of guy that shows up at work with one brown shoe and one black, or dunks his cafeteria check in his coffee and hands a doughnut to the waiter to punch. But—he knew his stuff, he had the apparatus, and the idea tickled him. I can see his point there. Scaring the living daylights out of a cool cookie like Miriam Jensen was a challenge to any man.

Her rock-hard nerves were by no means her only striking characteristic. She was smooth—smooth to look at, smooth to talk to, smooth in the way she thought and acted and moved. Tall, you know—dark brunette, long slim neck, small head and features; quite tall—that kind. A knockout. Brains, too, and she used them. I don’t believe anything but hard exercise could raise her pulse more than one-two beats a minute. I know that the funny idea I had that it would be nice to be married to her didn’t have her at all fluttery. She laughed me off. When I asked for her lily-white hand, did she say she’d be a sister to me? Did she tell me tenderly that we weren’t suited? Did she say so much as “No”? Uh-uh. She said: “You’re cute, Bill. Didn’t anyone ever tell you how cute you were?” And she giggled. I stood there with my teeth in my mouth and my bare face hanging out, watching her walk away; and then and there I said to myself, “I’m going to shake her off her high horse, by all that’s unholy, if I have to kill her to do it.”

I came home—lived in an apartment hotel then—and met Tommy in the hall. I dragged him into my place, stuck a drink in his hand, and figuratively wept on his shoulder about it for the best part of an
hour, while he sat there doddering his untidy hair up and down and watching the bubbles collect on the bottom of an ice cube.

“W-what do y-you want to do about it?” he asked.

“I told you—slap her down. If I could think of a way to slap her down so that it would do
me
some good, I’d do it, too. But you can’t walk up to a woman, take a poke at her, and expect her to marry you for it.”

“You can with s-some women,” Tommy observed with the profundity of a confirmed celibate.

“Not with this one,” I snorted. “No, I’ve got to scare the bustle cover off her, and then rescue her, maybe. Or show her that I’m not scared by the same thing. Or both. Got any ideas?”

“I th-think you’re a ph-phony, Bill.”

“I didn’t mean your ideas about me. Come on—you’re supposed to run to brains. Forget the personalities and let’s have a brain wave or two.”

Tommy stared at the ceiling and gravely ground out his cigarette two inches away from an ash tray. “What’s she sc-sc-frightened of, do you think?”

I walked up and down for a couple of minutes, trying to frown out an answer to that one. “Nothing, as far as I’ve ever heard,” I said. “Miriam will dive off a sixty-foot platform, or break a bronc, or drive a midget racer, and breathe no harder for it than she does after a fast conga. I tell you, that girl’s nerves—if she has any—are made of iridium-plated piano wire.”

“I bet she’s superstitious,” said Tommy.

“What? Ghosts, you mean? Huh. Could be, but what—”

“Easy.” Tommy set his half-empty glass down on the floor from about waist height. “We’ll make her some ghosts—you’ll rescue her from them.”

“Swell. What do we do—draw some magic squares on the hotel carpet around a pot of devil’s brew or something?”

“N-no. We take a couple coils of wire and my little public-speaking s-system, and maybe a few colored lights and stuff. And we haunt a house. Th-then you bring your iridium girl friend in. J-just leave it to me.”

“That sounds like quite something, Tommy,” I said. I was so tickled with the idea that I remembered I hadn’t had a drink and began pouring myself one. “Miriam’s a sucker for a dare. But the Lord help me if she ever found out about this.”

Tommy looked at me vaguely and grinned. “I don’t know nothin’, ch-chief,” he said, and got up to go. “I’ll l-let you know what I dream up on this, B-Bill. Night.” He went through the door.

I thanked him, pulled him out of the bathroom, and saw him to the right door. I never did meet such a foggy fellow.

Inside of a week he had it rigged up and took me out there to look it over. The house was a chalet over a century old. It had hedges in front of it gone hog wild, and the once-green paint was a filthy gray. It had eleven-foot ceilings and Venetian shutters which were in the last stages of decay, full of tartar and cavities, as it were. I don’t know how Tommy had gotten hold of it, but he had, and man, how he’d rigged it up!

“You s-see,” he explained, “the old place has a history, too. There have been four murders here, and th-three suicides. The l-last guy who owned it starved to death in the cellar.” He motioned me after him and started through the weeds toward the back. I looked up at the gloomy old pile and shuddered. “What are we going around the back for?” I asked.

“So the dust in the f-front hallway will look as if no one has been here in the last twenty years,” he said, opening a cellar window. “G-go on—climb in.”

I did, and he tumbled in after me. He threaded his way though large piles of rubbish until he came to a partition. He opened a door in it and we found ourselves inside a neatly arranged control room. Pointing, Tommy said, “See th-that board? There’s a photo cell and relay laid across every door in the house. Any time anyone goes into a room I know which it is by the number underneath the light. There’s my mike over there, and phonograph pick-up. There’s a hot-air system in the house; I put the speaker in the furnace, and when I play my little collection of m-moans and groans and shrieks from those recordings, you c-can hear them all over the house. It sounds swell.”

“It does,” I grinned. “But why do you have to know which room we’re going to be in?”

“For the l-lights,” he said. He showed me a battery of half a dozen knife switches and a rheostat. “Some of the lights are ultraviolet, and they shine on fluorescent paint on the opposite wall. You s-see something there, and when you turn your flashlight on it, it’s gone. Some of the lights are photo flashes. Oh, it’ll be quite a sh-show.”

“It sure will,” I said, delighted.

“Now, when you b-bring your little lump of dry ice in,” said Tommy—I gathered he was referring to Miriam—“take her in the front way. Here—I’ve typed out all the stories about p-people who died in this place, and all the dope about how and where they g-got knocked off. Tell her all the yarns and take her into all the rooms. You’ll know what to expect. That’s all I can do—you’ll have to figure out the rest yourself.”

“You’ve done enough,” I said, slapping him on the back so that his glasses fell off and broke. He pulled another pair out of his pocket and put them on. “Don’t worry,” I said. “This ought to cut some of her ice.”

He gave me a few more details and took me on a tour of the place. Then I took my typewritten sheets and went home to bone up on them. It should be a snap, I thought. Anyhow, it should have been.

I cornered Miriam two nights later. I came up behind her and whispered in her ear, “Will you marry me?”

She said, “Oh, hello, Bill,” without even turning around.

“Miriam,” I said hoarsely, “I asked you a question!”

She gently slid her shoulder out from under my hand. “And I said ‘Hello, Bill.’ ” She grinned.

I gnashed my teeth and tried to be calm.

“Do you like ghosts?” I asked irrelevantly.

“Dunno. I never met one,” she said. “Don’t you ever ask girls to dance?”