Sinister Barrier (7 page)

“A revealing angle on the ever-present unknown?” Graham suggested.

“Precisely! When Galileo peered incredulously through his telescope he found data that had stood before millions of uncomprehending eyes for countless centuries; new, revolutionary data which overthrew the officially endorsed but thoroughly fatuous Copernican system of astronomy.”

“It was a wonderful find,” agreed Graham.

“The microscope provides a far better analogy for it. disclosed a fact that had been right under the world’s nose since the dawn of time, yet never had been suspected—the fact that we share our world, our whole existence, with a veritable multitude of living creatures hidden beyond the limits of our natural sight, hidden in the infinitely small. Think of it,” urged Beach, his voice rising in tone, “living, active animals swarming around us, above us, below us, within us, fighting, breeding and dying even within our own blood-streams, yet remaining completely concealed, unguessed-at, until the microscope lent power to our inadequate eyes.”

“That, too, was a great discovery,” Graham approved. Despite his interest, his nerves were still jumpy, for he started at the unexpected touch of the other’s hand in the gloom.

“Just as all these things evaded us for century after century, some by hiding in the enormously great, some in the exceedingly small, so have others eluded us by skulking in the absolutely colorless.” Beach’s voice was still vibrant and a little hoarse. “The scale of electro-magnetic vibrations extends over sixty octaves, of which the human eye can see but one. Beyond that sinister barrier of our limitations, outside that poor, ineffective range of vision, bossing every man jack of us from the cradle to the grave, invisibly preying on us as ruthlessly as any parasite, are our malicious, all-powerful lords and masters—the creatures who really own the Earth!”

“What the devil are they? Don’t play around the subject. Tell me, for Pete’s sake!” A cold sweat lay over Graham’s forehead as his eyes remained fixed in the direction of the warning screen. No glow, no dreadful halo penetrated encompassing darkness, a fact he noted with much relief.

“To eyes equipped to see them with the new vision, they look like floating spheres of pale-blue luminescence,” declared Beach. “Because they resembled globes of living light, Bjornsen bestowed upon them the name of Vitons. Not only are they alive—they are intelligent! They are the Lords of Terra; we, the sheep of their fields. They are cruel and callous sultans of the unseen; we, their mumbling, sweating, half-witted slaves, so indescribably stupid that only now have we become aware of our fetters.”

“You
can see them?”

“I can! Sometimes I wish to God that I had never learned to see!” The scientist’s breathing was loud in the confines of the small room. “All who duplicated Bjornsen’s final experiment became endowed with the ability to penetrate that barrier of sight. Those who saw the Vitons got excited about it, thought about the discovery and walked in the shadow of death. From within limited distance, the Vitons can read human minds as easily as we could read an open book. Naturally, they take swift action to forestall the broadcasting of news which eventually might lead to our challenging their ages-old predominance. They maintain their mastery as cold-bloodedly as we maintain ours over the animal world—by shooting the opposition. Those of Bjornsen’s copyists who failed to hide the knowledge within their mind, or, possibly, were betrayed by dreams while helpless in their slumbers, have had their minds and mouths closed forever.” He paused, added, “As ours may yet be closed.” Another pause, timed by the steady ticking of the little clock. “There, Graham, is your living purgatory—to know all is to be damned. An exceptionally powerful mind may seek refuge by controlling its daytime thoughts, all the time, every minute, every second, but who can control his dreams? Aye, in slumber lies the deadliest peril. Don’t get into that bed—it might be loaded!”

“I suspected something of the sort.”

“You did?” Surprise was evident in Beach’s tones.

“Ever since I commenced my investigation I’ve had queer, uncanny moments when I’ve felt that it was tremendously important to shift my thoughts elsewhere. More than once I’ve obeyed a crazy but powerful impulse to think of other things, feeling, believing, almost knowing that it was safer to do so.”

“It is the only thing that has spared you,” Beach asserted. “But for that, you’d have been buried at the start.”

“Then is my mental control greater than that of more accomplished men such as Bjornsen, Luther, Mayo and Webb?”

“No, not at all. You were able to exercise control more easily because what you were controlling was merely a vague hunch. Unlike the others, you did not have to suppress a full and horrible knowledge.” Ominously, he added, “The real test will lie in how long you last after this!”

“Anyway, thank heavens for my hunches!” murmured Graham, gratefully.

Beach said, “I suspect that you do not have hunches. If those feelings of yours though vague and unreasoning, were powerful enough to command obedience in defiance of your rational instinct, it is evident that you have extrasensory perception developed to an unusual degree.”

“I’d never thought of that,” Graham admitted. “I’ve been too busy to take time off to analyse myself.”

“The faculty, though not common, is far from unique.” Getting up from his chair, Beach switched on the lights, pulled a drawer from a large filing cabinet. Raking through a mass of press clippings that filled the drawer, he extracted a bunch, looked them over.

“I have data concerning many such cases going back for one hundred fifty years. Michele Lefevre, of St. Ave, near Vannes, in France, repeatedly tested by French scientists. Her extra-sensory perception was estimated as having sixty per cent of the efficiency of her normal sight. Juan Eguerola, of Seville, seventy-five per cent. Willi Osipenko, of Poznan, ninety per cent.” He pulled a clipping out of the bunch. “Here’s a honey. It’s taken from British
Tit Bits
dated March 19, 1938. Ilga Kirps, a Latvian shepherdess, of Riga. She was a young girl of no more than average intelligence, yet a scientific curiosity. A committee of leading European scientists subjected her to a very thorough examination, then stated that she undoubtedly possessed the power of extra-sensory perception developed to such an amazing degree that it was superior to her natural eyesight.”

“Stronger than mine,” commented Graham as the scientist put the clippings back, turned off the light, resumed his seat.

“The power varies. Ilga Kirps was a Viton hybrid. Extra-sensory perception is a Viton trait.”

“What!” His fingers gnawing at the arms of his chair, Graham sat upright.

“It is a Viton faculty,” repeated Beach, calmly. “Ilga Kirps was the fairly successful result of a Viton experiment. Your own case was less fruitful, perhaps because your operation was prenatal.”

“Prenatal? By God, d’you mean—?”

“I’ve outgrown the age of saying what I don’t mean,” Beach assured. “When I say prenatal, I mean just that! Further, I say that had we never been cursed with these luminosities, we should not also be cursed today with most of our complications in childbirth. When someone suffers, it’s not the unfortunate accident it’s believed to be! Why, Graham, I now accept the possibility of a phenomenon which all my life I’ve rejected as patently absurd, namely, that of virgin births. I accept that there may have been times when helpless, unsuspecting subjects have been artificially inseminated. The Vitons are continually meddling, experimenting, practising their super-surgery on their cosmic cattle!”

“But why, why?”

“To see whether it is possible to endow human beings with Viton abilities.” There was silence for a moment, then Beach added, dryly, “Why do men teach seals to juggle with balls, teach parrots to curse, monkeys to smoke cigarettes and ride bicycles? Why do they try to breed talking dogs, train elephants to perform absurd tricks?”

“I see the parallel,” Graham acknowledged, morbidly.

“I have here a thousand or more clippings telling about people mysteriously endowed with inhuman powers, suffering from abnormal or supernormal defects, giving birth to atrocious monstrosities which promptly have been strangled or hidden forever from human sight. Others who have endured inexplicable experiences, unnatural fates. Remember the case of Daniel Dunglass Home, the man who floated from a first-floor window before the astounded eyes of several prominent and trustworthy witnesses? His was a thoroughly authentic case of a person possessing the power of levitation—the Viton method of locomotion! You should read a book called
Hey-Day of A Wizard.
It tells all about Home. He had other weird powers as well. But he was no wizard. He was a Vitonesque-humanoid!”

“Good heavens!”

“Then there was the case of Kaspar Hauser, the man from nowhere,” Beach went imperturbably on. “Nothing comes out of a vacuum, and Hauser had an origin like anything else. Probably his was in a Viton laboratory. That, too, may have been the eerie destination of Benjamin Bathurst, British ambassador extraordinary to Vienna, who, on November 25, 1809, walked around the heads of a couple of horses—and vanished forever.”

“I don’t quite see the connection,” Graham protested. “Why the devil should these super-creatures make people disappear?”

Beach’s grin was cold and hard in the darkness. “Why do medical students make stray cats disappear? From what wondering, puzzled pond vanishes the frogs that later are to be dissected? Who snitches a pauper’s body from the morgue when the viscera runs out a mile farther down the street?”

“Ugh!” said Graham, with frank distaste.

“Disappearances are commonplace. For example, what happened to the crew of the
Marie Celeste?
Or the crew of the
Rosalie?
Were they suitable frogs snatched from a convenient pond? What happened to the
Waratah?
Did that man who, at the last moment, refused to sail on the
Waratah
have extra-sensory perception, or was he instinctively warned off because he was an unsuitable frog? What makes one man suitable, another not? Does the former live in continual peril; the latter enjoy lifelong safety? Is it possible that some peculiar, unidentifiable difference in our mutual make-ups means that I am marked for death while you remain untouchable?”

“That’s something only time will show.”

“Time!” spat Beach, contemptuously. “We’ve carried the devil on our backs perhaps a million years and only now are aware that he’s there. Homo sapiens—the man with a load of mischief!” He murmured some underbreath comment to himself, then went on, “Only this morning I was studying a case to which no solution had been found in ten years. The details are given in the London
Evening Standard
of May, 16, 1938 and the British Daily Telegraph of several dates thereafter. The 5,456-ton vessel
Anglo-Australian
vanished at short notice, without trace. She was a modern, seaworthy boat plowing through smooth, tranquil waters when she and her crew of thirty-eight abruptly became as if they had never been. She disappeared in mid-Atlantic, within fifty miles of other ships, shortly after sending a radio message stating that all was well. Where has she gone? Where are most of the thousands of people who have been listed and sought for years by the bureau of missing persons?”

“You tell me.” Graham’s eyes raked the darkness for the screen, failed to find it. Somewhere in the black it was standing, a silent sentry, waiting, guarding them, yet unable to do more than give them split-second warning of invaders that they alone must resist.

“I don’t know,” confessed Beach. “Nobody knows. All we can say is that they’ve been seized by agencies only now within our ken, powers unfamiliar but in no way supernatural. They have been taken for purposes at which we can but guess. They have gone as they have been going since the beginning of history and as they’ll keep on going in the future. A few have come back, warped in ways we’ve not been able to understand. Those, we have crucified, or burned at the stake, or shot with silver bullets and buried in garlic, or incarcerated in asylums. Still more have been taken and will continue to be taken.”

“Maybe,” said Graham, skeptically. “Maybe.”

“Only a month ago the New York-Rio strat-plane passed behind a cloud over Port of Spain, Trinidad, and didn’t reappear. A thousand eyes saw it one moment, not the next. Nothing has been heard of it since. Nine months ago the Soviet’s Moscow-Vladivostok new streamliner vanished in similar way. That’s not been heard of, either. There has been a long series of such cases going back for decades, right to the earliest days of aeronautics.”

“I can recall some of them.”

“What happened to Amelia Earhart and Fred Noonan; to Lieutenant Oskar Omdal, Brice Goldsborough and Mrs. F. W. Grayson; to Captain Terence Tully and Lieutenant James Medcalf; to Nungesser and Coli? Some, perhaps, crashed, but I have little doubt that others did not. They were snatched away, exactly as human beings have been snatched for century after century, singly, in groups, in shiploads.”

“The world must be told,” swore Graham. “It must be warned.”

“Who can tell, can warn—and live?” asked Beach, caustically. “How many would-be tellers lie tongue-tied in their graves? How many thousands more can be silenced as effectively? To talk is to think, and to think is to be betrayed, and to be betrayed is to die. Even we, in this lonely hide-out, may eventually be found by some roaming invisible, overheard, and made to pay the penalty of knowing too much; the price of inability to camouflage our knowledge. The Vitons are ruthless, utterly ruthless, and it is ghastly evidence of the fact that they blew Silver City to hell the moment they found that we’d discovered a means of photographing them.”

“Nevertheless, the world must be warned,” Graham insisted, stubbornly. “Ignorance may be bliss—but knowledge is a weapon. Humanity must know its oppressors to strike off their chains.”

“Fine-sounding words,” scoffed Professor Beach. “I admire your persistent spirit, Graham, but spirit is not enough. You don’t yet know enough to appreciate the impossibility of what you suggest.”

“That’s why I’ve come to you,” Graham riposted. “To learn enough! If I leave here ill-informed, the blame for my shortcoming will be yours. Give me all you’ve got—I cannot ask for more.”