The Second Murray Leinster Megapack (33 page)

He stopped. The girl shivered. They had reached the bottom of the stair-well. There was a respectable blaze of yellow light ahead. It came out of an open door and shone into an elaborate foyer and upon an absolutely rigid, absolutely motionless elevator-operator with a braided uniform. Brett clamped his jaw tightly and, led the way toward the lighted door. It was most likely that he had been lured here to read a mocking message bidding him remember the heap of dust which had been the mouse of his experiment and promising to watch for the imponderable remnant which, in normal time, would, soon be Dr. Harry Brett.

He entered the door, prepared for any mockery. But he faced a desk, lighted by hundreds of candles in receptacles. He saw Professor Aldous Cable sitting at that des), lean and dark and shaking with hatred, with heaps of hopeless calculations and diagrams before him.

“Hello,” said Brett ironically; “Why did you bring us here?”

Cable ground his teeth. His features expressed at once the bitterest possible hatred and a haunting horror. But rage overlaid all of it.

“You know where you are!” he said thickly.

“I can make a pretty good guess,” admitted Brett coolly.

“Then, find a way to get back,” said Cable savagely. “I can’t!”

CHAPTER II

Fool for a Master

Brett found there was almost a community of people in the duplex apartment which had an entrance behind the desk. Cable had been working desperately on his problem when Brett and Laura Hunt arrived. Now he led them to an inner door, shaking with a rage which choked him. He flung open the door.

“Here he is,” he cried savagely. “Tell him what to do.”

He pushed Laura through. Brett followed quickly. The door closed. Professor Aldous Cable remained outside, his hands clenched.

The room was huge, and there were almost a dozen people in it. Four or five were men, mostly younger than Cable, and the balance were women of various types but tending toward the lean and intellectual. There was one girl of a lush, red-headed beauty, though. All of the people had one thing in common. Each had eyes which were filled with horror close to madness.

A record on a phonograph came to an end and stopped.

“Turn it on again, for heaven’s sake!” someone said desperately.

A man put the needle back in its groove. It began to grind out a senseless melody which had only one virtue, that of noise. At once Brett understood. By the looks of things these people had been here for a long while, corresponding to weeks. And this world was silent, and still, and changeless. Time had stopped. Motion had stopped. Human figures in the streets glowed faintly in the gray twilight. And these people were nearly mad with horror.

A young man with a twitching face came over to Brett. “You’re B-Brett?” he stuttered. “Professor C-Cable said you’d get us out of this! Are you Dr. Brett?”

Brett nodded. The young man gulped.

“Then help us!” he cried shrilly. “We’re all going crazy! Professor Cable is crazy already! We’ll all go m-mad.”

Tension broke. A girl cried out. The cry went around the room. There was a rush, and Brett found them crowding about him, pawing at him, babbling at him. They were nerve-racked and trembling. They were starey-eyed and shivering. All of them appeared to be hysterical. Brett pushed Laura Hunt behind him.

“Stop it,” he said sternly. “Hold everything—hold onto yourselves!”

But it had no effect. The babble grew to a clamor, a wild uproar. They pulled at Brett. They shrieked at him. They gibbered at him. He was the center of what seemed to be a mass nervous breakdown. It was deafening, inarticulate, terrible. Brett was shocked to see otherwise unharmed human beings so completely shattered by long-continued horror.

The door behind Brett opened again. The tall, lean, raging figure of Cable stalked in. For the moment he was not seen, but he quickly compelled attention.

“Quiet!” he roared.

Instantly the shrieking ceased. Save for the wheezy, senseless noise of the mechanical phonograph at the other end of the room, there was dead silence. These persons who had seemed so frenzied, cringed before Cable. They were like people stricken dumb. Fearfully they moved back. But they looked even more fearfully from Brett to Cable and back again.

“Answer his questions,” stormed Cable. “Tell him what he wants to know. Do whatever he tells you. But be quiet!”

He did not look at Brett. He went out of the door again and closed it behind him. There was a terrified hush. Brett felt a trembling hand upon his arm. It was Laura, wide-eyed and white. He covered her hand with his own.

“Steady!” he said in a low tone. “I didn’t look for anything like this, but it’s a darned sight better than I did look for.”

He understood, now, why he had been allowed to waken on that terrace out-of-doors, in a still unidentified apartment. Cable was frantic with rage because he had been forced to call upon Brett. He had wakened Brett high overhead, and led him down the long stair-well by lighted candles to mark the way, because it was intolerable to him to face Brett. By having Brett waken and find out for himself that he was in a world where time had stopped, he could avoid having to explain the facts that Brett was forced to discover.

Now by thrusting him among these poor devils for further explanation he could avoid otherwise necessary face-to-face talk with the man he envied, hated, and had robbed. He could have made the explanations ten times more clearly himself, but he hated Brett so vindictively that he must have someone else beg the aid that he needed, himself. So Brett must learn all necessary facts indirectly.

He faced the nerve-racked people sternly.

“Sit down!” he commanded. “I just got here. I know what all this is about, but I’ve got to find out what’s happened in order to fix it. Sit down and answer some questions.”

He could guess something from the types of the people before him. They were the sort of persons who would flatter Professor Cable’s vanity—and he had an enormous and insatiable vanity. Cable had been a brilliant student, and great things were prophesied for him. He’d been the youngest full professor of physics in America, for a time. But his reputation had never increased. He was a poor instructor because of his arrogant, contemptuous manner toward his pupils. Professor Cable had contributed nothing in the way of original research except pretentious papers announcing enormously important discoveries which never quite checked up. In the end he’d been asked to resign his professorship because of an attempt to win recognition for an alleged discovery by blatant trickery. The fact was simply that he was not qualified for original and independent work, and his vanity would not allow him to admit it. But he was a capable man under direction, and as Brett’s assistant he had been useful enough. Now, though, Cable had certainly managed to mess things up!

“I suspect that most of you knew Professor Cable before this,” said Brett. “A sort of coterie, eh?”

It was true. One trembling voice offered a fact, and another offered another. In minutes Brett had their part in the picture.

Cable had surrounded himself of evenings with an admiring group because of his pretensions to enormous authority and prestige as a scientist. He fed upon their admiration—and was galled by his subordinate position to Brett. Brett’s success with the mass-nullifier research had filled him with raging envy because he could not claim it for himself. And when Brett ruefully decided that his results were too dangerous to be published, Cable had no reason to be discreet.

He boasted to his admirers of the mass-nullifier, as if it were his own discovery. He painted a picture of a journey in a time-field, when as the field operated the world seemed to stop dead in all its affairs, the light of the sun slowed so that its yellow glare faded to deep red and went out, and a man would see briefly by slowed-up X-rays, and then later by the ghostly light of cosmic rays themselves. As the time-rate went up and up, Cable had said, there would come at last a ghostly gray light which would be that of the infinitely short vibrations which are gravitation. And he pictured such a journey as possible in the machine he told them he had devised.

One of his admirers quoted Wells’ “The Time Accelerator,” and spoke of the opportunity such a device would offer to criminals. Cable explained, tolerantly, saying a person in such a monstrously accelerated time-rate could easily see objects which moved too fast for ordinary perception. A bullet in mid-flight would seem stationary, to him. Even a lightning-flash would seem the most deliberate of motions. But his own efforts would be too brief to affect any object still remaining in a normal time-rate. Nothing which moved more slowly than miles per second would seem to him to stir. For him to thrust at a thread with all his strength would be an application of force for such an infinitesimal fraction of a second that he could not stir it enough for him to see its motion. He could not raise it to a speed of miles per second—stated in normal time—with a thrust which—again in normal time—might last only for millionths or billionths of a second. And of course he couldn’t steal anything or kill anyone.

“Unless,” Cable had explained, “he took another machine with him and brought the thing he wanted to steal or the man he wanted to kill into his own fast time-rate.”

Then he started. The phrase was a flash of pure perception. It was probably the most brilliant thought Cable ever had in his life. He’d already made a mass-nullifier of his own. It worked, as he knew, because it converted the energy of mass into the energy of time-speed. He had not tried it, but he was confident that it would work better than any Dr. Harry Brett had made because of an “improvement” he had made in the design. Now, having caught at this new inspiration, he embodied a second mass-nullifier. He got into the field of the first machine, carrying the second. He turned on the first. The light of the sun turned red and died. Ultimately he saw a dull-gray misty twilight which was the earth’s gravitational field changed into light by the incredible time-rate to which he had attained.

The fawning, nerve-racked folk told all this to Harry Brett in the great living-room in which they were camped like looters. They could not explain much more, but he could fill additional details for himself.

* * * *

Cable had used the second machine. He had been able, of course, to march through the utterly soundless city, and when he coiled the machine’s field-cable about an object in normal time—an object he could not possibly stir—and threw the switch, that object came into accelerated time, and he could do as he pleased with it. He opened doors and entered banks and jewelry shops. He gathered himself a king’s ransom in portable but stolen wealth. Yet he was inherently a fool. He needed admiration. Having gathered riches, he craved applause.

He found one member of his coterie, seemingly frozen and certainly immobile like the rest of the world. He encircled her with the field-cable—it was the lushly beautiful redhead—and brought her to consciousness in the world of gray twilight. Her name was Ruth Jones. She was a girl cub reporter. Maybe Cable had some idea of getting publicity through her story. But the girl instantly became hysterical with terror. She clung to him, however, because he was alive in a world which was like a nightmare of death. He was not afraid—he was a fool and her terror made him feel strong and admirable. He found others of his usual circle of admirers. They wakened to find themselves in this world of no-time, this world of an eternal now. They were terrified, but they followed him docilely because only he could take them back to the normal world.

For days he exulted in his strange position. He was lord of the treasures of the Earth. There was no single object upon the globe that he could not take if he wished. He was master of the lives of those he had brought here. Food? There was food in plenty all about, but it was gray and faintly luminous unless a light from a high-time-rate light shone upon it. And even then it was utterly unreachable. It could not be moved or taken or eaten. Even water could not be drunk unless Cable used his mass-nullifier to turn it to liquid. His victims could not defy him. They could only fawn upon him for life and the means of living.

“He must have had a swell time,” said Harry Brett grimly. “The man’s crazy with vanity. But you left something out. There’s a great deal of jewelry around.”

There was. Even the men had jewelry wherever jewelry could be put. They looked uneasily at each other. But Dr. Harry Brett was now their only hope. So they told him that Cable had, on occasion, grandly distributed largesse. He was master of the treasures of the world. He let them help themselves to wealth. Every one had a small fortune in gems or paper money hidden away in their clothing. But they would give it all, they babbled fearfully, to see sunlight once more and to hear noises that other people made.

“No doubt,” said Brett. “But why can’t he take you back?”

Voices lowered. They looked fearfully at the door. At long last, they said, Cable had consented to return them to the formal world. They had all trooped within the field-cable of his original machine. They were rich, but even then they were nervous and jumpy. Whenever Cable scowled at them, they were filled with panic. Finally he had taken his own place among them and thrown the switch!

Nothing had happened. Nothing had ever happened. He’d worked feverishly, even frenziedly, and a dozen times they’d got within the field-cable’s circuit, but they could not return to normal time. They were marooned in this world in which time did not pass, this world in which it was eternally now.