Collected Fiction, page 257
“What did you do to us?” Somehow my voice wasn’t quite as steady now. Deering’s quiet confidence shook my own.
“I own that property on the Hudson,” he said. “Where you left Miss Dunn. I’ve prepared all this long ago.
That hill under the golden dome was created by me, with the aid of my machine. I made it last night.”
“Made it?”
“Well—I made flowers, didn’t I? And robot humans? It was no more difficult to imagine an Eden and an impassable wall surrounding it. Impassable for your fiancée, that is.”
“Just what was your idea?”
He smiled a little. “An experiment. You see, that hill is, in a way, a conservatory, like a hot-house under glass. From outside it’s invisible. And, to anyone but you, the golden wall is impassable. No one can get in, and Eleanor Dunn can’t get out. The point is, Corbett”—he hesitated—“I’m not homo sapiens. Not human at all.” I stared. Deering extended a well manicured hand and glanced at it briefly.
“Remember how I made those robot bodies last night? Well, this body of mine was made artificially, too. As I say, I’m not human. My home is on a planet revolving around the star you call Algol. My natural shape isn’t palpable at all.”
My incredulity must have been obvious.
“I came to Earth to study your race, Corbett. Ours is highly intelligent. We conquered interstellar travel long ago. We’re evolved far beyond your own civilization. We are beings of pure thought-essence, in our natural forms. However, on our world, we needed a servant race, and we had one, adapted to our needs and trained over a period of centuries. But, lately, it became too decadent for our use. Expeditions were sent out to various planets to find another race suitable for our requirements. If human beings prove satisfactory, we’ll send a fleet of space-ships to convey enough men and women to Algol to start a new servant race.”
“You’re crazy!” I said.
“Wait a bit. My job here is almost done. Naturally, I had to investigate humans thoroughly. But this experiment is the last. When it’s completed, I’m going back to Algol. But when I first reached your planet, I decided I needed human shape. It would make my investigations easier. I made a robot”—he touched his chest—“and entered it. That enabled me to live among humans as a human, but it also handicapped me.”
THE word made me look up sharply. I glanced away immediately, but Deering had seen.
“That won’t help you. You see, in my own shape, I need no machine to materialize my thoughts. But, as a human, I do. Without my thought-device I’m just as vulnerable as you are.” He saw my muscles tense, and lifted the gun warningly. “Don’t misunderstand me. This body may be hurt without harming the real me. Only one thing can destroy my life.”
“What?” I asked the question with no expectation of an answer, but to my surprise I got one.
“Electricity. But I take care to stay away from anything of that sort.”
It showed how confident he was—to tell me that!
“You can’t be vulnerable while you have that machine in the cellar,” I said.
“Its powers are limited. All its strength now is being used to maintain the world-sector under the golden dome. But I shan’t further need to use the machine now, and, since I’ll be leaving your world soon, I’ll not need to build another. I need no supernormal powers now. Everything was planned carefully in advance, from the first moment I met you by the Hudson.”
“You planned that, eh?”
“Yes. My attack of illness was a trick, designed to get you both here.”
“But why us?”
He shrugged. “It might have been any young couple who were in love. You came along and fitted into my plans. The reason? Well, as I said, I’ve been charting and surveying the human race. I need only one more factor. Emotional values. We of Algol are emotionless. I want to find out just how important such a biological factor as love can be.”
I felt hot anger. “Well?”
“You can join Eleanor Dunn—forever—in her prison, or you can take up your life again without her.”
“Just what the hell do you mean?”
“When you go through the golden wall again, it will thicken into a prison for you, too. You will stay there until you die, with your fiancée. You’ll have plenty to eat and drink. And you’ll have each other. But there will be no other life.”
My lips were dry. Deering went on:
“That’s one choice—forget the girl and go on without her. She’ll be lost to you forever, of course—”
“Damn you!” I said.
He lifted a hand. “This is an experiment with me. An experiment dealing with emotions. I know that men will fight and die to save their mates, but many men believe in an after life. So death is not hard to face. But a completely sterile existence may be. You must decide, then, whether you are willing to give up everything else for this girl.”
MY mind was chaotic. I loved Eleanor, and she loved me. But if the two of us were locked up in a sterile Eden, would that love last? Day upon unending day of utter sameness. Perhaps we would come to loathe one another, without any outside interests at all—living the lives of animals, feeding, sleeping. No, not animals. We would be tortured by memories and hopes.
“This is inhuman,” I said unsteadily.
Deering nodded. “I’m not human.”
“You can’t get away with it!”
“I’ve taken precautions. Last night I examined your minds and got what knowledge I needed—where you live, and so on. If you decide to join the girl, I shall make use of your robot doubles. I’ll give them guns, command them to go to your homes, and destroy themselves. It will appear suicide, since they are perfect dummies.”
I didn’t answer. A thought had come to me. Why had Deering taken this precaution? Because he feared our disappearance might be traced to him?
Yet what could harm him? Anything—while he was still in human shape, and without the use of the thought-materializer.
“Listen,” I said. “I’ve about fifteen thousand bucks in the bank. Can’t I—”
Deering’s pallid face did not change. “Why should I want money? I made all I needed, and I’ll be leaving Earth as soon as you’ve made your decision. It will take me a week or so to build the apparatus for releasing my real self from this body, but I’ve enough money for that equipment.” He shrugged. “You must make your decision. Join the girl, or live without her.”
My mind went back to that Eden, a world of wonder under a golden sky. A small world—but it held Eleanor. And would hold her till the day she died.
Two of us, a man and a woman, living without any outside contacts, in utter sterility . . .
I remembered that Adam and Eve had left Eden.
“Okay,” I said suddenly. “I’ve decided.”
“What?” Deering leaned forward, interested. I longed to get my hands on his gun, but I knew that bullets couldn’t kill that inhuman thing. And Eleanor would still be a prisoner . . .
“I’ll go back,” I said.
Deering expelled his breath in a long sigh. “Well, that decision completes my survey of Earth.” He glanced at me sharply. “I don’t intend to relent. You must go through with it.”
“I know,” I said, standing up.
He left me at the door. I drove off, turned into a side street and parked. For an idea was glimmering in my mind. Deering had taken every precaution, but he wasn’t invulnerable. There might be a chance. A desperate one, but I was desperate.
As soon as I went back to Eleanor, the golden wall would close permanently behind me. Well, I wasn’t going back—not just yet.
Instead, I returned to Deering’s mansion.
It was a rickety old place, and I anticipated little difficulty in effecting an entrance, unless burglar alarms had been installed. Luckily, they hadn’t been. Deering had been very confident. I prayed he wouldn’t discover me here until I’d finished the job I had to do.
THE room I entered, through a window I pried open, was dusty and unused. I tiptoed to the door and gently opened it. Where was Deering? A crackling sound of fire made me tiptoe along the hall to the room where we had talked. Deering was there, burning papers in a fireplace. Destroying all traces of his task on Earth.
He didn’t hear me. I went back, found the door to the cellar, and gingerly descended the ancient steps. Once they creaked under my weight, and I froze for a moment, but there was no alarm.
The cellar was, as I remembered, cluttered with empty packing-boxes which had once been filled with scientific equipment. The two doubles stood motionless against the wall, dimly visible in light that filtered in through a dusty window. My heart hurt at sight of that staring, familiar figure that was Eleanor in everything but mind.
On an impulse, I went to the inner door and opened it. The phosphorescent sphere still hung suspended in air. If I could only destroy it! But I couldn’t even touch the thing, existing as it did in another continuum.
I found a crowbar and went back to the doubles. Eleanor’s duplicate I ignored. My own figure I examined carefully. It even breathed. That made it shockingly difficult when I lifted the crowbar and smashed it down on the thing’s head. The results were—well, up to expectations.
Feeling sick, I dragged the now limp dummy behind a packing box, covering it with sacks. There were no stains on the floor. I took the robot’s place beside Eleanor—and waited.
I waited a hundred years, it seemed.
It was the hardest, most grueling task I had ever undertaken in my life. I was impersonating a robot, mindless and soulless. More than ever I was conscious of the innumerable distractions that always keep one from remaining perfectly motionless. My nose itched. My throat was dry. My skin crawled and was damp with perspiration. Would Deering’s eyes fathom the trick I was playing upon him?
A door opened. Footsteps sounded on the stairs. Deering came into view, a gun in each hand.
I forced myself to stand motionless, my eyes unblinking.
Deering did not even glance at the packing case that hid the ruined robot, though my eyes ached to turn in that direction. He put one gun in my pocket, one in the other figure’s purse.
He spoke clearly and distinctly. “You already have your directions. Go to the places I told you, wait till you are alone, then shoot yourselves in the head. Here are the keys to the two apartments.”
He gave them to us—Eleanor’s key and my own, stolen from our pockets last night.
“Now go.”
The robot figure beside me stirred. It walked forward and up the stairs. I followed, conscious of Deering’s eyes on my back.
He opened the front door for us, closed it, and I walked along the street in company with a living robot.
The robot turned left. I followed, but at the first corner halted. The dummy walked on. I knew it would go to Eleanor’s apartment and kill itself.
I GOT in my car, after a hurried half-block walk, and drove hurriedly to my lawyer’s office. I didn’t know how much time I had, but now that my plan was started, I had to carry it through.
My attorney was startled when I told him I wished to change my will immediately. I rushed him through the procedure. It took less than twenty minutes.
I left all my possessions to Eleanor Dunn. I stipulated that, should she predecease me, the legacy would go to John Deering. His card was still in my pocket, and I verified the address by that.
Then I went out and telephoned the police.
“This is Barney Corbett,” I said. “You don’t know the name, but I’m going to be murdered. See my attorney. He’ll know about it.”
I made no mention of Deering, and purposely kept my mind from him. So I was able to talk without a mental block on my tongue.
After that I got in my car and raced hell-bent up the Hudson.
I got out at the place I remembered, walked up the slope, and stopped at the edge of the bare plain. I stepped through the invisible barrier. And Eleanor was running to meet me down the hill of magic.
“It’s all right, darling,” I said, holding her tightly.
Gingerly I reached out behind me and touched the golden wall. It was solid. I was imprisoned with Eleanor in Eden. Forever.
Forever?
It was a little time before I was able to tell her what I’d done. I wouldn’t let her leave this spot, beside the barrier. We sat down on the soft grass and I talked.
“The police will get in touch with my attorney,” I said. “He’ll be suspicious, because of the new will, and send them to Deering’s place. They’ll find what looks like my body, murdered, and hidden in the cellar. They’ll know I left my money to you, look for you—and find that you’re presumably dead. It’ll be your robot double, of course, but they won’t know that.”
Eleanor bit her lips. “What good will that do, Barney?”
“It’ll pin a murder rap on Deering, that’s all.”
“But if he’s superhuman—”
“He isn’t—that’s just it. Without his thought-machine, he’s just as human and vulnerable as we are. And it’d take him a week to build a device to free his intelligence from the body he created for it.”
“They can’t kill him, though.”
“Electricity will kill him. He admitted that. Know what happens to murderers in this state, darling? They get a big jolt of electricity.”
“But how will that help us?”
“Deering doesn’t want to die. But without the thought-materializer, he’s vulnerable.”
“He’ll use it.”
“I hope so,” I said grimly. “At present, all its powers are being used to maintain our own private hell. If he uses it, ‘Eden’ stops existing. That’s how I figure it, anyway. Now all we can do is wait.”
SO we waited, for hours upon hours, it seemed. Behind us the hill of enchantment rose, exotic, alien, alluring. The brooklet sang, chuckling as it fled down the slope. Yes—it was Eden.
Then, without warning, the golden wall vanished like a dream. Before us stretched the familiar Earthly landscape, and the highway beyond. We plunged forward, racing on leaden feet, down to the fence, past it, to the road.
Once we looked back. The hill of dreams was gone. Only a flat, arid plain was there in its stead.
“Deering used the machine to save himself,” I said. “That diverted its powers from its other use. Long enough for us to escape, anyway.”
My car was waiting. We fled back toward New York. I kept one arm about Eleanor, holding her close. The sun went down beyond the Hudson before we crossed the Harlem River.
I anticipated trouble with the police. I was questioned, yes, but by baffled and incredulous men. The police had found my double’s body, and the corpse of what was apparently Eleanor Dunn. They had arrested John Deering. He had broken free, fled to the cellar, and locked himself in. When the door was battered in, they found his body, a bullet lodged in the brain.
I guessed that it wasn’t Deering’s body they had found. It was a double—a robot—created by him with the aid of his thought-materializer. With the attention of the police momentarily diverted, he had managed to escape, taking his machine with him. That could not have been difficult, once the incredible powers of the device were again his to command.
But, in order to use it, to save himself, he had been forced to free Eleanor and me from our prison.
The police were baffled by the disappearance of the three corpses. They had simply vanished—into thin air, as one frightened patrolman contended. I knew who was responsible for that.
Somehow I straightened matters out. We had committed no crime. And, finally, we were released, with admonitions.
We were married within the week.
That ended the affair, with one small postscript. It was a letter that arrived one morning, mailed from a small town in South Dakota. Here it is:
Dear Mr. Corbett:
I’m writing to reassure you. You won’t see “John Deering” again, for by the time you get this, I shall have left Earth in my true shape. I imagine you may fear a continuation of the experiment, however. You need have no such fear. You outwitted me, very cleverly. But I did not tell you the true purpose of my scheme. It was not to test emotional reaction at all. I was testing the intelligence of an ordinary human specimen. The whole affair was an apparently insoluble problem, and I wished to discover how the logic of homo sapiens would be applied to it. You solved the problem, neatly and cleverly, and incidentally gave me the data I needed on human intelligence. Your race is far too logical to be used as the servants of we of Algol. We will find material elsewhere, on some other planet, and in some less intelligent race. So my task on Earth is finished, and you need not fear that I, or any of my people, will ever return.
JOHN DEERING.
So, with receipt of that letter, the last shadow of doubt was lifted. Eleanor and I are married and rather incredibly happy. There’s only one small thing.
“When you came back, you knew we’d both get out of that prison,” Eleanor told me, a little while ago. “So you really didn’t make the decision Deering wanted. Suppose you’d have known there was no way of getting out. What would you have done?”
There was only one answer to that, of course. And I gave it. But Eleanor shouldn’t have asked me such a question.
For somehow, now, I can’t help wondering . . .
THE INFINITE MOMENT
A Refugee from Death, Physicist Lee Denham Flees to an Atomic Universe Beyond Belief!
FOREWORD
THIS is the story of an infinite moment.
It poses a problem for the reader. It is a mystery tale, in which the solution is based on sound scientific logic. There are no tricks or false clues.
First, the problem. It was, I think, Confucius who first pointed out the relativity of time. He knocked a cup of water from a table and, while it fell, he dreamed a dream a trillion years long—and awoke in time to catch the cup before it struck the ground.
But we shall not use a cup of water. Instead, we shall substitute a loaded revolver. You are watching as someone fires that gun at a friend—and you are not close enough to interfere. The hammer is already falling. At that exact second you are transported to another world—a different universe, highly civilized and advanced in scientific knowledge, but in which you are a stranger. Instantly time stops.
