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Roy Glashan's Library
Non sibi sed omnibus
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Astounding Stories, Jan 1937, with "Beyond Infinity"
A tale of scientific forces which protect life
against unknown powers of destructive genius.
THE human race was at bay. Deep within the bowels of the Earth its scattered remnants were making their last desperate stand against the teeming hordes of Antares. It was a losing fight. Three times interstellar space had erupted its strange peoples upon a beleaguered solar system; twice the invaders had been beaten off at tremendous cost; but now the task seemed hopeless. Earth was doomed—its long line of imperfect evolution destroyed, its mounting civilizations cut off, and the green face of the planet given over to aliens from an alien system.
Within the hollow round of the vast underground cavern, ten miles beneath the surface of the New Mexican desert, the huddled people—the old men, the women, the children, the scanty reserves—watched the visor screens with a dull despair.
High above, crouched behind an impermite shield, the gallant defenders were making their last stand at the five-mile lock of the huge shaft that led to the surface. Inexorably, they had been driven back from the one-mile, two-mile, three-mile locks by the mighty weapons of the invaders. Once past the five-mile barrier, only one other, a scant two miles from the artificial cave, intervened between them and destruction.
There were only a thousand of them now. There had been five thousand when the long-disused alarm system had clanged its raucous warnings around the Earth. The people of the scientific colony of New Mexico had dived headlong into the great shaft, had descended in swift magnetic elevators into the bowels of the Earth, down to the great, artificial bore that had been prepared a hundred years before against such a day.
Children clung to their parents, frightened; infants wailed against their mothers' breasts; women held tenaciously to snatched-up, incongruous possessions, treasures to be saved from the alien invaders. Men of fighting age swore under their breaths, their faces taut and grim, and buckled their flame guns and conite disruptors hastily to their belts.
All over the world similar tragic, heartbreaking scenes were being enacted. The depths of the Earth were honeycombed with burrows, in which the harried Earthlings might take refuge when the next wave of stellar invasion broke overwhelmingly upon the solar system. For they had known that the immunity of millions of years was a thing of the past.
The first swift invasion, in the year 3195, had caught Earth unprepared. Interplanetary flight had been a reality for a dozen centuries before, but there had been no menace to Earths billions in that. Of all the Sun's satellites, only Mars and Venus had been found to harbor forms of life. A thin, degenerate race clung sluggishly to the shrunken vegetation areas of Mars, forgetful of past glories. Venus was still void of the higher forms of life—a dense, steamy jungle in which weird monsters prowled.
The bolder spirits looked longingly to the vast reaches of interstellar space, but voyagings, even to the nearest star, seemed impossible of accomplishment.
Then, without warning, came the first attack—a mass drive of thousands of gleaming metal space ships, hurtling almost at the speed of light from far-off Rigel. A migration of a whole people, fleeing from impending doom, seeking refuge on a world where life might be sustained. Earth beckoned them as such a world.
They were a strange race—vegetative rather than animal in form and function, and slightly in advance of Earth's population in scientific knowledge. Their first slashing attack was victorious.
They landed in the lush jungles of the Matto Grosso, ruthlessly obliterating human life over a constantly widening area. After the first stunned shock of surprise, however, the nations of the world rallied, sank their sectional differences, and in the great Interstellar War of 3207 overwhelmed the intruders, and slew them to the very last Rigellian. In the doing, however, a billion humans died.
From Rigellian captives a very little had been learned. It was extremely difficult to establish communication—vegetative thought processes could not readily be transmuted into recognizable form. But enough was discovered to send the nations digging feverishly into the ground, as deep as modern instruments could bore, where life might exist for indefinite years.
For, said the captives, the whole universe was in motion. Space seethed with the ships of alien hordes, come from no one knew where. Fright dyed the bulbous bodies of the Rigellians purple as they spoke of these beings, as strange to them as the Rigellians were to the people of Earth. Beings of far more ancient and mighty civilizations, impelled outward in concentric waves from the unfathomable center of the universe, themselves fleeing some monstrous doom, seeking new worlds on which to settle, driving before them the rooted inhabitants, in turn to fall upon the denizens of suns and planets farther away, like beating tides roaring out from a central convulsion of ocean.
WHEN, in 3241, the crab-men of Betelgeuse poured in a hundred thousand ships upon a beleaguered Earth, the nations were prepared. Atomic guns belched wild disintegration, brought the invading vessels down by the thousands. Flame guns seared and burned with inextinguishable fires; men fought and died bravely in a thousand unknown battles against monstrous Crustacea, whose knobbed antennae crackled with green death. There were billions of them, spawning incredible multitudes more, even as they fought. Down into the prepared depths the Earthmen retreated, leaving the surface to the triumphant crab-men of Betelgeuse. There they were safe, temporarily, while the aliens swarmed over the planet and swam the seas.
But allies arose to aid the cowering people in the sunless depths. The lowly fungi and molds found the tender flesh of the Betelgeusans, underneath their armored carapaces, an ideal base for growth. Soon a destroying plague burrowed deep into the helpless aliens, smothered them in a mesh of sucking, growing rootlets. When the Earth people finally ventured to the surface, not a Betelgeusan remained alive. But two billion more humans had died in the invasion.
From the few captives, whose waving claws traced a geometric speech, the wild tales of the Rigellians were confirmed. The Galaxy was in convulsion. The Betelgeusans themselves had been forcibly dispossessed from their ancestral, home, to seek safety and the conquest of a new world. The hordes of the universe were in flight, flowing outward from some mighty central doom, fleeing blindly, pushing the farther planets ahead of them, a tidal wave that would eventually lash against the outermost island universes. What it was that had started the mass hegira of planets and suns they knew no more than had the Rigellians.
The Earth nations knew now that other invasions were on the way. Only a bare half a million people had survived the two holocausts. With the grimness of despair they set to work to prepare against the inevitable day. The pitiful few were concentrated in strategic centers, close to the mouths of the great shafts that led down into the depths. An intricate signal system was initiated, whereby warning could be sent around the Earth in a flash of light. The caverns were fortified, stocked with concentrated food; lakes were drained into them for water supplies, artificial lighting and oxygeneration apparatus installed; the shafts were protected with hypermite shields and all the weapons that a feverishly active science could invent.
But when the attack came, in the year 3326, in spite of all preparations, the nations were caught hopelessly unawares. For the life forms of Antares were of a civilization mightier by far than either of the two former invasions. They came in individual shells of etheric force, at a speed far greater than the speed of the light waves that should have brought warning to vigilant Earth eyes of their approach. They came, not along the world lines of space time, but piercing through the warped curvatures of a matter-distorted space.
Thus it was that four hundred thousand died before they had even seen the purveyors of their death. By the time the signal could be flashed, a scant hundred thousand were able to dive into the depths of the Earth and close the ponderous locks behind them.
But the Antarians were possessed of weapons to which those fashioned by the scientists of Earth were puny toys. Even the shields of impermite, of close-packed neutrons hailed as impenetrable to atomic disintegration itself, yielded eventually to dispersal rays that were tapped from a subspace.
Earth was doomed. Already the visor screens had brought sickening scenes to the huddled people of the New Mexico sector. All over the Earth, the Antarians had attacked the cavern deeps with relentless might. Lock after lock had been forced as they drove resistlessly down the shafts of a hundred havens of refuge. Subsector after sector had whiffed out in a blinding flame of extinction, so dazzling that the visor screens sizzled and crackled with the pallid simulacrums of their destruction. Then a blank grayness covered the moveless surface, as the victorious Antarians destroyed all connections.
When the last screen went blank, a groan of tortured anguish burst from the pitiful thousand in the New Mexican subsector. They were the sole survivors of a once vivid, swarming race—a scant thousand out of the teeming billions who for aeons and aeons had populated the planet Earth.
GARTH ANDERS clenched his big, hairy fists. His dark, heavily bearded face knotted with straining muscles. His eyes glowered at the sole remaining visor screen. "We're through, finished," he groaned. "We're still alive only because Allan Hale's in command of the third lock. And they're beginning to break through now." He whipped savagely away from the screen. "I'll be damned if I'm going to stay down here like a coward any longer. Allan and his men are up there fighting, sacrificing their lives, while I——"
The girl turned her horror-stricken eyes from the telltale screen. Her pallor accentuated the delicate lines of her face. She had seen sights it was not good for a woman to see, and all about her the shadow of impending death lay heavily on the tortured countenances of her people.
"You will stay, Garth," she said decisively. "Allan ordered it so, and he knows best. No one can accuse you of cowardice. Allan has enough men to man the shield; more would only get in each other's way. You're in command of the reserves here, in case"—she hesitated, and for the first time her voice quivered—"in case they break through the fourth lock."
The big man swung on her. "In case?" He laughed harshly. "You know damn well they'll break through.
They've done it everywhere else. Allan's flung himself against them as a last gallant, hopeless resort. They'll blast through the impermite and smear him as they've smeared the whole Earth."
Kay Dorn shrank from the man's brutal candor, every nerve tingling. Her face drained of what little blood had remained. Her eyes clung in dreadful fascination to the visor screen. The great cavern was silent. All eyes stared with desperate intentness at the tremendous struggle that was raging five miles up—five miles of solid intervening rock. Only one man in all the throng did not watch, did not seem even to realize that his fate depended on the outcome of that last futile stand.
He was as remote from the utter despair that crowded around the televisors as though he were on another planet. He sat in a crystal chamber that made a sheathed bubble at the farther end of the underground shelter. No faintest noise, not even the shattering detonations of nitrobryl dust, could penetrate his soundproof fastness or disturb his concentration. Sheets of fibroid paper littered the flat desk before him. He was writing, steadily and evenly. Not for a moment did he pause for thought. When one sheet was covered with strange symbols, he added it to the steadily growing pile, commenced a fresh one, still at the same even pace. To one side was another flat table. On it were miniature models of fantastic design, intricate, lovingly built, like nothing that Earth had ever seen before.
The occupant of the crystal room was long past the prime of life. His thin, ascetic face was lined with the wrinkles of age. The hand that guided the stylus on its endless task was slim and finely veined. The sparse hair that thatched his skull was snow-white. But his eyes were strangely youthful, and their glance was calm and unafraid.
Out in the huge cavern the screen dazzled and blared with sound. The titanic combat above was reaching a climax. Only fifty of the original hundred defenders still crouched behind the impermite shield. A tall, blond young man was their leader. His face was black with the dust of disintegration, but lips and eyes grinned infectiously. He was a whirlwind of activity, cheering on his fainting cohorts to greater efforts. Narrow slits opened and shut in the impermite shield in flashes of thousandths of a second. Automatically synchronized, flame guns and atomic blasts ripped destruction through the momentary openings, cut. great swaths through the close-packed hordes of Antarians above.
But the shield was steadily growing thinner. Invisible dispersal waves lapped against it, pressed the neutron orbits farther and farther apart, ate through the lessening thickness with slow but remorseless strides. And every so often a beam would synchronize with the quick whirl of the slits, and blast atomic gun and defenders alike into a blaze of flaming ruin.
A GREAT wail arose from the straining watchers. The last weapon had just flashed into extinction, and with it all of the outpost but Allan Hale and a scant dozen. The impermite shield sagged, bellied inward—a paper thinness of futile defense.
Kay Dorn clapped her hand over her mouth to stifle the welling scream. Garth glowered at her bitterly. She loved Allan, the reckless, the smiling. While he, Garth, who would have gladly died for her, was but a friend, an elder brother—old enough almost—his bearded mouth twisted crookedly—to be her father, For a split second a wild, insane hope lashed through him. If Allan Hale, his own best friend, died up there, perhaps Kay, in the few hours or days left them of life, might——
He grinned again, a grin that was filled with hate for himself. "You love him, Kay?" His voice could be oddly gentle for such a hulk of a man.
She tore her clinging eyes away from the screen. "I would not survive him," she answered simply.
He swung away with a bull-like roar. "Reserves!" lie shouted in stentorian tones. "Follow me!"
Two hundred men stepped forward unhesitatingly. They and the defenders of the fifth lock were the last of the man power left to a denuded Earth. The others in the cavern were the old, the halt, the women and children.
"Where are you going?" Kay asked. "To reenforce Allan."
The men exchanged quick glances. It was suicide. Already the impermite shield was bulging alarmingly. Once it burst—— But no one held back. Conite disruptors were gripped in steady fingers.
The girl swayed forward. "No!" she whispered. "It is madness. You could not help—and you would join his fate. You are needed, Garth. The fifth lock—the very last——"
A woman shrieked suddenly. "Too late! My Lord! It's too late!"
The screen was a blaze of blinding madness; the hollow cavern echoed with thunderous blasts. The impermite shield had vanished; the great shaft was a dark flood of descending Antarians; and nowhere was there any sign of Allan Hale, or of the few who had survived with him to the last destroying shock. Then the screen went blank.
Garth's eyes went blindly to Kay. She had not moved, had not uttered a sound. Nothing seemed to have changed. Through the man's pain-shot grief for his friend was a curious streak of semi-gladness. Allan Hale had been his rival. But the deadness in the girl's eyes slapped him back to realities. For him there was no hope—now or ever. Poor Allan had died in vain. He, Garth Anders, was now in command. On him devolved the last hopeless fight, the last desperate staving off of the inevitable. Well, it did not matter much any more.
But a blaze of anger surged out at the sight of that calm, white-haired man, still bent over his curious calculations within the inviolable sanctity of the crystal bubble. He had not even raised his head at the concussions that had shaken the cavern with earthquake intensity; he never once had looked in the direction of the fatal screen. Damn Peter Loring with his futile scribblings! For the past month he had immured himself in that hermit shell, unmindful of the fact that Earth was a shambles, that soon the Antarians would break into this last stronghold and eradicate all traces of the human race—including himself.
True, he had invented the impermite shields that had staved off the invading hordes this long, but that was over. Instead of fiddling with figures and toy-models of outlandish design, why didn't he reenforce the shields, suggest ways and means to overcome the Antarians? He had been the dean of Earth's scientists, the greatest mathematical physicist of them all.
Something had evidently sapped his courage. The dispersal waves of the Antarians, perhaps. Their scientific weapons, so far in advance of anything he could hope to fashion. He was an old man, but he should not have retired into his tower of silence to scribble academically. Writing his memoirs for the delectation of the Antarians, Garth thought sarcastically. A lot of good that would do! It was a man's duty to fight to the bitter end, even though the result were certain. Allan had done so, up there at the fourth lock.
Yet Allan had always stopped his grousing over the futility of Peter Loring with that queer, infectious grin of his. "Let him alone," he had said. "He knows what he is doing. He can't lick that dispersal ray. We're a million years behind the Antarians in knowledge. It's our job now to hold them off as long as possible."
And now Allan was dead, and Kay Was as good as dead. He had seen the soul die in her eyes. Well, it didn't much matter. Soon all of them would be little grains of blazing dust. But he'd die fighting. He reached over, twisted the dial on the visor screen with a big, hairy hand. It flashed into new life. The fifth and final, lock sprang into being. A slender company of men, a bare hundred, crouching behind the impermite, swinging their guns feverishly into place, their faces grim with the shadow of on-rushing death. Beyond the shield thousands of Antarians, each encased in his etheric shell, were dropping with breathtaking speed.
Garth whirled on his men. "We're no good here," he roared. "Up there at the fifth lock is our place. Come on!"
They answered him with an eager shout. They were of good stock, these last Earthmen, picked for special qualities. Even their women restrained their emotions, ironed out their deathly pallid countenances.
THE magnetic lift stood waiting. Garth flung a last look at Kay. She was staring straight ahead, without life, without motion. With a groan Garth jerked toward certain death. But, even as he did, the lift suddenly whirred into motion, shot upward with lightning speed into the shaft.
The black brow of the man grew even blacker. Had the defenders quailed; were they preparing even now to abandon the lock without a fight? But the screen showed the lock still intact, the men still at their posts. Already the guns were blazing through the rapidly opening slits at the hordes on the other side.
Garth was bewildered. Then who—what—— There was a whir, a flash, a swift deceleration, and the lift was back in its cradle. Figures stirred on it—blackened, unrecognizable figures. They stepped off, dragging something shapeless among them.
An incredulous cry burst from some one's throat—a cry compounded of unbelief and flooding joy. It was Kay Dorn, suddenly released from frozen immobility. She darted forward, arms outflung, her voice a great sob.
"Allan! You are alive!"
"No reason why I'm not," answered the blackest, the most disheveled of the figures cheerfully.
The next instant Kay was in his arms, unmindful of dust and soot, unmindful of everything but that he had been miraculously restored to her. But the others were not so forgetful. They clustered around the six Earthmen, clamoring, exclaiming, crying out their wonder. Garth shouldered through the throng, wrung Allan's hand. Now that it was over, he realized what his friend's supposed death had meant to him. Then his quick eye caught sight of the thing they had dragged from the lift with them, and a gasp of astonishment burst from him.
"By the nine gods of the universe, what is that?"
Allan disengaged himself gently from Kay's clinging arms, grinned. "Just an Antarian who was rash enough to come through the shield before his fellows. We brought him along as a souvenir when we ran for it."
The alien from a far-distant sun stood encased in his shell of etheric force, proudly aloof, openly contemptuous of these primitive beings who through sheer mischance had managed to capture him. The Earthlings crowded around him with mingled wonder and bitter hate. None of them had ever seen any of the invaders at such close range.
There was indeed much to wonder at. The Antarian was a gelatinous cylinder, formless, featureless, without arms or legs or other appendages, glowing bluely with an inner phosphorescence. Featureless, that is, except for a spherical protuberance above, from which two knobs projected. The dispersal waves, all the mighty, destructive forces of which they;were capable, flashed from those knobs, tapped by an inner body alchemy from subspace itself.
The wonder gave way to low growls of rage. The growls rose, were caught up by a thousand throats, changed ominously to shrieks of hate. "Kill him! Blast him down! Damn him and all his kind!" Sinewy fingers tightened on conite disruptors, hand flame guns. A hundred wicked orifices trained on the alien captive.
Allan lashed forward, thrust himself between the Antarian and the furious Earth people. "None of that!" he announced grimly. "He's my prisoner, and he's not to be harmed." He swung on Garth. "Here, Garth, you take him in charge. Bring him up to Peter Loring. He asked me to get him a captive—thinks he can clear up certain points if he can get him to talk. And," he ended grimly, "Peter will make him talk."
"But it will take weeks, months to establish a mode of communication," Kay cried. "By that time——"
"I think not," Allan interrupted cheerfully. "Besides, the fifth lock still holds, and"—his face hardened—"it will have to hold for at least another month."
"Here, where are you going?" Garth demanded suddenly.
Allan was already halfway to the lift. "A commander's first duty is to be with his men," he said quietly.
In three long strides Garth was at his side, his huge hand clamped on his friend's slender shoulder. His bearded face was screwed into a terrific scowl. "Your place is down here with Kay, you damn fool!" he growled. "You've done enough already. I'm going up."
"Insubordination, huh!" Allan rasped, struggling to release the bear-like grip. "I tell you——"
Garth flung him backward with a mighty shove. "Hey, stop that!" Allan shouted, righting himself and running forward. "I command you——"
IT was too late. Already Garth was on the lift, shooting upward in swift acceleration. He was grinning sourly, his finger waggling at his nose in unmistakable gesture.
"Damn him!" Allan stormed helplessly, "It's suicide up there."
"It was suicide for you as well," Kay said quietly. A stab of pain for the older man pierced her heart. Poor Garth! She knew why he had done it. A gesture of sacrifice, for herself as well as for Allan. With a woman's sure intuition she knew of his hopeless, unuttered passion.
Still grumbling, Allan turned hack. There was nothing else he could do. The lift was the sole method of physical communication with the shaft. He gave Kay's arm a quick squeeze; then his eyes narrowed. There was much to be done. Perhaps Garth had been right——
His flame gun gestured at the Antarian. "Get moving," he ordered briefly. The words meant nothing, but the gesture was obvious. The alien cylinder, ringed in by hostile men, had shown no alarm, no sign that it realized its danger, except for a certain deepening of the blue phosphorescence.
Now it floated forward, a foot above the ground, moved by internal forces in the direction in which the gun had pointed. Allan followed watchfully, Kay keeping even pace with him. Straight toward the crystal chamber they went, up to its gleaming wall. Peter Loring still bent over his sheets, still writing furiously, seemingly not even aware of their presence.
Allan grinned widely. "Good old Peter!" he ejaculated. "Not even the collapse of the universe could keep him from his equations."
"But what good are they now?" Kay demanded with faint scorn. "In a short while both he and his equations will repose in equal oblivion."
Allan shook his head. "I don't know," he confessed. "But when Peter Loring asks for uninterrupted quiet, I won't stand in his way—even though he didn't take me into his confidence. The only time he was to be interrupted, he said a month ago when he entered the chamber, was to bring him a captive Antarian. Well, I've brought him."
He pressed a button embedded in the wall. But even as his finger jabbed forward, Loring's stylus stopped racing, his head jerked up, and a flame of exultation enwreathed his ascetic countenance.
"He just solved something," Allan murmured. The signal buzzed inside, jerked Loring's head farther around. His eyes glowed on Allan, on Kay, blazed at the sight of the motionless prisoner. His thin hand stabbed downward.
A CRYSTAL panel slid open. They entered, and behind them the panel closed noiselessly. Loring rose, shook their hands cordially. The Antarian floated quietly to one side, close to the models. The blue glow pulsed rapidly in his body, as if here, for the first time, this inheritor of a mighty, alien civilization had found something to excite his interest.
"Welcome, my friends," the old scientist greeted them. "Allan, my boy, you've done wonders. I asked you for a month of warding off the Antarians, and it's a month almost to the day. I asked you for a prisoner, and you brought him along." He glanced fondly at Kay. "You're a brave girl," he said gently. "I knew your father well. He was a good chemist and an honorable man." He turned back to Allan. "I think," he continued slowly, stressing the last word, "I've found something. Now if you could promise me another month of time—"
Allan answered confidently. "A month? A month and a half if you like."
Kay shot him a quick look from under long lashes. She knew that Allan's placid tones covered an inner despair. A month? Only the fifth lock stood between them and the end. The fourth impermite shield had blasted away in exactly two weeks.
But Loring rubbed his thin hands in satisfaction. "Splendid!" he exclaimed, all unknowing. "That will be just about enough time. Look, my boy!" He picked up his final sheet, thrust it almost under Allan's nose.
Allan stared at it, shook his head with a grin. "My math ended with matrix mechanics," he said. "The schools teach no further. I don't recognize a single one of those symbols."
"Of course!" Loring seemed somewhat abashed. "I forgot you wouldn't know, that no one would. I invented these symbols myself, within the last month, to express something that not a single mathematician had even thought of in all the history of mankind."
"And that is——"
Loring thrust the sheet back on top of the pile. "Allan, Kay," he said impressively, "for over five thousand years mathematicians have been following a will-o'-the-wisp, a false gleam. Even the matrix mechanics, the summation, seemingly, of all knowledge, of the universe itself, has been wrong—wrong from beginning to end."
"What's that?" Allan leaned forward, stared at those strange symbols again. He was genuinely startled. In fact, had it not been for his utter trust in Loring, in the knowledge that he had been Earth's foremost thinker, he would have laughed aloud in amusement. All his life, all the innumerable lives before him, mankind had held fast to one solacing thought. That, in a world of mutability, of change, one thing was changeless, perfect—the noble structure of pure thought that the mathematicians had reared. Old Peter Loring himself had so taught in the schools where Allan had first made his acquaintance.
The old scientist smiled. "I would have been as much surprised myself a few months ago," he acknowledged. "But this last invasion of Earth set me thinking. Something is happening in the depths of space, something that has set innumerable worlds in motion, fleeing from an inner, dreadful calamity. What is the nature of it? So far we haven't been able to find out. Our fathers questioned the Rigellians; I, as a young man, helped examine the crab-men of Betelgeuse. They did not know, either. But the fact remained that they had been dispossessed from their planets by repeated waves of invasion, a tide that rolled outward from the very center of the universe in resistless flood. What had started the inner denizens in motion; what had compelled them to swift flight? What had made them leave their ancient homes, the seats of mighty civilizations to which the Antarians themselves are far lower in the scale of evolution than we to them?"
Allan laughed dryly. "A rather academic question now, I'm afraid."
"Not at all," Loring retorted with some warmth. "For this academic question led me, by logical steps, to reexamine afresh the fundamentals of our mathematics—that mathematics by which we have hitherto been well able to explain the universe in which we live, even space time itself."
"And you found——" Allan prompted.
"That the fundamentals are imperfect, incomplete. In a sense this was recognized as long ago as the nineteenth century, when Riemann and Lobachevski reexamined the axioms of Euclid, upon which all geometry had been built, and discovered not only that they were incapable of proof, but that other and equally logical geometries could be built on entirely different sets of axioms. But they went no further, and no one has done so since. For their geometries, including that of Euclid, satisfied the visible, tangible universe of their senses and instruments, and they were content."
KAY moved impatiently. This was arid, profitless discussion. Why didn't he seek the information he desired from the prisoner? Perhaps there was a way of circumventing the invaders. But old Loring seemed to have forgotten the presence of the Antarian. The blue cylinder in its shell of force had drifted over to the table, was quivering over the sheets with oscillating rays. Kay knew the aliens could see, in spite of their lack of human sense organs. Doubtless etheric waves, of a far greater range than in the case of man, were translated within their jelly-like interiors into clear perceptions.
"When that remarkable ancient, Isaac Newton," Loring continued, "discovered the infinitesimal calculus, mathematics commenced its real upward climb. The theory of infinitesimals, and its converse, the theory of integration, have been the basis of all our present science, all our present knowledge. It seemed to fit the universe perfectly, to explain, to prophesy even, before experimentation could catch up with the equations of the mathematician. But what, after all, is the real basis of the calculus?"
The young man grinned. "You are not very flattering," he commented. "I had to know that before I could even come near your courses. The theory is simple. It deals with continuously varying magnitudes approaching a limit."
"Is that limit ever reached?" Loring inquired.
"Technically, no," Allan admitted. "But actually the infinitesimals come so close to totality that the differential is smaller than any number or magnitude known to man."
"Exactly." Loring nodded. "So man has argued, and so he has reared his impressive structure of mathematics. But the foundation is insecure. For this differential, no matter how slight, is still an entity, and, being an entity, prevents all mathematics based on the calculus from being completely accurate. Just as the geometry of Euclid was shown to be very slightly off when relativity and the electron were discovered."
"But the geometric aberration has been known for many centuries," Allan declared in some bewilderment, "whereas all our progress, all our knowledge of the universe, based on the underlying theory of the calculus, has been proven time and time again to be absolutely accurate as a weapon of analysis."
"And so did Euclid's geometry," amended Loring, "in the days when man's measurements were confined to the comparatively short distances of the solar system, and to particles no smaller than the atom. When his range extended to the island universes on the one hand, and to the interior of the atom on the other, the defects of Euclid became glaring."
"But how does that affect the calculus?" Allan protested.
Loring smiled. "We've widened the range again sufficiently to find its margin of error, also. As a matter of fact, the twentieth century had the facts in hand, but didn't realize their implications. That century knew that the universe was exploding, that it had started from some inner primordial atom of gigantic size, that, as it expanded, it created space time out of whatever lay beyond. The telescope of the twenty-eighth century actually penetrated to the blank wall of nonspace and nontime."
"And the calculus with its superstructure of vectors and matrices explained every detail of the expanding universe," Allan declared triumphantly.
"Exactly," Loring admitted with a little smile. "Because the universe was, as we knew it, a magnitude varying continuously toward a limit never to be fully reached. The mathematics fitted the imperfection of the universe. But now we have reached the limits, both ways, and the calculus of variables no longer applies."
Allan stared. "What limits are you talking about?"
"The outer nonspace, nontime on which the exploding universe is always encroaching, yet never engulfing, and the inner core of the explosion. The latter was always implicit in the theory, yet no one ever saw it. For, when the primordial universe atom exploded, its matter thrust outward in all directions. During the billions of years that have elapsed since the initial push, a gigantic central sphere must have been created, free of all matter.
But we know that space time does not exist without the presence of matter, even as it does not exist outside of the rushing nebula. Hence, the universe is only a mere shell, with totality within and totality without. Only inside the shell is there matter, space time, restless change. And that," he ended calmly, "explains the vast outward rush of the peoples of the inner suns. They are being swallowed up, sunk without a trace in the nonspace time of the inner explosion. My calculations prove that the inner process is accelerating, gathering speed in a geometrical progression, while the outer shell is attacking the outer nonspace time in the order only of an arithmetical progression."
"In other words," Allan contributed dully, "not only we are doomed, but the universe itself is doomed. The force of the inner explosion will gradually eat through the matter and space time of the universe until it joins the outer nothingness."
Kay shivered. "Then what are they all fleeing and fighting for?" she exclaimed. "Eventually the explosion will catch up to them."
"It may take another million years," Loring explained, "and the lust for life is strong. But," he warned, "it's theory. That is why I wanted to capture an Antarian. Only a race that could travel faster than light could know anything of what is taking place at the core of the universe. For the explosive impulse is now of the order of a million miles a second, and accelerating every second."
"But how will you communicate, with him?" Kay demanded.
"I've been observing the invaders in a special magnivisor I constructed," the scientist replied. "I've prepared a way." He strode over to the second table, picked up a metal hood of silver transparency.
SO engrossed was the Antarian in that last sheet of equations that he did not notice the approach of the Earthman until the hood had been suddenly thrust over his knobby head. He straightened quickly, jerked away from the desk, his gelatine form blazing with lightning flashes of blue.
"No, you don't," Allan rasped warningly, as, through the transparency of the thin, unknown metal, the two knobs of the Antarian quivered and crackled.
His flame gun was trained directly on the alien. In all the discussion he had never once permitted his eyes to waver away from him. Swift death was in those knobs.
The Antarian understood; again the protuberances collapsed. Then, suddenly, upon the silver surface of the hood, sounds seemed to condense, and a metallic Earth speech poured forth.
"I had not expected to find any of the primitives inhabiting this world to be so clever," the strange, grating voice admitted grudgingly. "You have copied, a bit crudely, it is true, the thought helmet of the scientists of Antares."
Allan lowered his gun in his astonishment.
Kay cried out: "He speaks—our tongue!"
The cylinder of blue flame inclined toward her. "Not at all," the transparent hood remarked. "My thoughts condense on the radioactive substance of which this hood is composed, and are transformed into sound. Your fumbling scientist, from mere observation alone, was able to fathom its composition, to regulate the vibrations so that the electromagnetic thought impacts set in motion the sound waves of your own type of speech. The converse is also true. Your explosive little noises, impinging on the helmet, create the necessary ethereal vibrations that constitute the subtleties of our thought."
Peter Loring leaned forward, eyes aglow with excitement. "We are wasting time, being of Antares," he said. "Is it true that your race is fleeing the devouring nonspace of the central core of the exploding universe?"
The blue flame flickered, died momentarily, glowed again, as if with surprise. But the voice of the helmet was as flat, as mechanical as before. "You are indeed a superior order of an inferior creature," he declared. "It is true. We barely escaped with our lives. Had it not been for our method of space-warp transection, we would have been caught in the annihilation of Antares and the planet on which we lived; for the expanding nonspace time was traveling far faster than light itself."
"Good!" Old Loring rubbed his hands in utter satisfaction. "If that part of my theory is true, then the rest follows."
"Your calculations interest me," resumed the Antarian. "They seem vaguely to point to some goal I myself have been driving for. But I do not understand all of the queer symbols you have employed. If you will transform them into sound, the helmet will translate them into intelligible thought for me."
The Earth scientist shook his head decisively. "You ask for more than I care to tell," he said quietly. "Your people have come as enemies, not as brother members of a common universe, bound together by a common doom. You have destroyed and slain; you wish to wrest our poor world from us for the remaining years of existence before the inner explosion overtakes us all. I shall say nothing to further your conquests."
ALLAN squeezed the trigger of his gun. He had been watching the Antarian with hawk-like eyes. There had been a sudden quivering of those dim-seen knobs under the transparency. In a split second death would have leaped out at them all. But in that instant flame spurted in a long, thin stream. It splashed against etheric envelope, ripped through in a blinding flash of fire. The Antarian swayed, a red, fiery blaze, crumpled to the crystal floor in a spatter of dust.
"I had to do it," Allan explained regretfully to the others. "It was our lives or his."
Kay hid her face in her hands. "What a cruel universe we live in!" she cried brokenly. "It is kill or be killed—here on Earth, in the farthest reaches of interstellar space. Everywhere is struggle, ruthlessness, brutality, the law of tooth and fang and claw. Life itself is a disease."
"You are right," the old man said softly, his eyes shining. "Life partakes of the nature of the universe in which it is entangled. It is imperfect, evolving toward a perfection it can never attain. That is why, as long as the universe exists, there will be pain and envy and suffering and torture."
"That will soon come to an end," Allan commented dryly, "if your calculations are correct. Then, extinction, the Nirvana of the ancient Hindus."
"Yes, Nirvana!" Loring said strongly. "But a different Nirvana from that which you contemplate. For perfection does exist, and I don't think it means extinction."
"Perfection?" Allan repeated incredulously. "Where? You yourself said it was impossible in this universe."
"And I repeat it," the old scientist told him calmly. "But outside—in the nonspace time, beyond infinity itself, where matter, that strange disease, has never existed—there should be that perfection toward which the universe has restlessly expanded since the beginning of time, and, by its very nature, has destroyed in the vain attempt to reach."
"Riddles!" Allan retorted a bit impatiently. Up there at the fifth and final lock Garth Anders was waging the last hopeless fight, and he, Allan Hale, the titular commander, was discussing fruitless abstractions and a mystical philosophy while their world was crashing about their ears.
"Not at all," the aged scientist answered equably. "For in that present nonexistence beyond the universe of things is our salvation—more, the unimaginable perfection toward which our race has climbed these long, weary aeons."
Kay uttered a little gasp. Allan snorted. Poor Peter Loring! His vast brain had finally snapped under the terrific strain of their approaching doom.
"Of course," Alan remarked, with thinly veiled sarcasm, "it is a mere nothing to transport us to that place of nonexistence, where infinity itself has been left behind. And, of course, our poor, material, space-time-bound bodies will find that nothingness capable of sustaining life."
Loring did not seemed perturbed. "You are quite right," he replied slowly. "I have found the means of transportation. The answer lies in these final equations, and in a certain extension of those models I have fashioned. The Antarian, with his superior mentality, recognized the fact that the solution was there. Given time, he would have unraveled the riddle of the unaccustomed symbols. Had he been successful in eliminating us and escaping to his fellows, the Antarians would then have been the only race in all the universe to reach the ultimate goal. Now it will be the remaining people of the unimportant planet, Earth!"
Allan stared down at the strange equations. lie remembered the Antarian's behavior. Perhaps old Loring was not mad, at that!
THE scientist tapped the sheet with his stylus. "This," he continued, with a certain pride, "is the new, the final mathematics. I started where the calculus left off. I investigated the properties of the last differential, that tiny differential which the calculus proclaimed so infinitely small as to be disregarded, and erred in so doing. I have fashioned a new calculus—the calculus of the totality. Those equations represent the end result. They represent not only what may be termed the 'beyond infinity' element of the universe as we know it, but also the 'beyond infinity' element, the totality, of ourselves, of our machines, of every speck and grain of dust, of every electron that ever existed.
"For the first time since Schrodinger discovered the strange wave-particle nature of matter, with its unintelligible positions of probability, a true explanation has been offered of the anomaly. In these totality equations, the probabilities, the indeterminacies, are gone. It will be a comparatively simple matter to build machines based on these equations, to extend ourselves into the 'beyond infinity' trains of our constituent parts. Thus we may free ourselves forever from the limiting curse of our present selves, from the danger of eventual annihilation between the two infinities, both inner and outer. And," he went on with a little smile, "we shall escape the very present certainty of hastened annihilation from the efforts of the Antarians."
Kay's head spun. It was too much for her. But Allan puckered his brow furiously. The thought had penetrated. Yet one insuperable objection still clamored in his brain. "But what will happen to us in that strange place beyond the universe; how can we exist?" For the first time Loring seemed to have lost his self-confidence. "I—I really can't answer that." he admitted hesitantly. "I can only hope that in the perfect state we, too, shall become perfect. I grant you," he added hastily, "that it's a wild chance; but—what have we to lose?"
That last phrase echoed and reechoed in Allan's brain. What, in fact, had they to lose. Inevitably, the Antarian hordes would break through the last impermite shield. What mattered it—extinction beyond the universe or extinction ten miles beneath the surface of that Earth they would never see again? Something stirred within him. The unimaginable adventure of it; the strange voyaging to a place at the thought of whose very being the human mind reeled dizzyingly. Half-forgotten lines of a wholly forgotten poet ran in his ears:
This gray spirit yearning in desire To follow knowledge like a sinking star, Beyond the utmost bound of human thought.
His hand went out sudden, frankly. "Peter Loring," he said, "how long will it take to make ready?"
The old man's eyes kindled. Age seemed to drop from his stooped shoulders like an outworn cloak. "One month."
"Then," replied the younger man steadily, "for one month we shall hold off the Antarians."
Kay looked at him with quick side glance. They had figured at the most on two or three weeks' grace. But, if Allan Hale extended the time limit, she rested quietly in the firm assurance that he could do it.
But it was not Allan who held off the irresistible alien attack. It was Garth Anders. That worthy listened in silence to Allan's rapid explanations, all his attention seemingly concentrated on the disruptor that shot blasts of disintegration through the rapidly opening and closing slits in the impermite shield. Three hundred men had been stationed at the fifth lock; already fifty had died. The neutron barrier was inches thinner, slowly vanishing under the steady, resistless dispersal rays. Beyond the shield, the peri-visor disclosed the upper lift of the huge shaft, filled with the charging Antarians. each inclosed in his etheric shell, scorning all weapons extraneous to the deadly powers residual in their gelatinous forms.
Still higher, in the light of that Sun they would never see rise and set again, countless millions of the invaders had spread over the green Earth, were already establishing their cities, rebuilding their mighty civilization. This last mopping up of a few trapped Earthmen could safely be left to a single battalion of their kind.
WHEN Allan was through, Garth checked the synchronization apparatus carefully, screwing up his black-bearded countenance in a terrific scowl. Then he laughed, loudly, derisively, until the other sweaty, dust-embroidered defenders looked up from their interminable crouch in surprise.
"So that's the crazy scheme old Loring was wasting his time on this past month!" he cried. "I might have known it." Then, suddenly, his irritating amusement fell from him. He was silent again, serious. "At that," he said in a lower key, "we're dead men here; might as well be dead men in the realm of nowhere. But," and he raised his head defiantly, "I'm staying up here in command, and you are going back to help Loring get ready. He wants a month, eh? Well, he'll get it. Tell him I said so."
They quarreled bitterly at that. Allan insisted it was his job to hold the lock, and Garth called him a fool and a numskull who couldn't be trusted against the wily Antarians. "Besides," he shouted, "Kay needs you." He grinned painfully. "We may all live only another month."
"Do you think," Allan said, "I'd permit my private affairs to interfere with my duty?"
Duty, hell! Garth groaned to himself. If Kay had loved him, he'd have let the whole human race rot rather than quit her side for an instant. But Kay loved Allan, not him—therefore——
He took another tack. His huge paw dropped on his friend's shoulder. "You're right, Allan. No matter how painful duty may be, we must obey its dictates. Now, I'm only a fighting fool. I'm good for blasting Antarians out of their shells, but for nothing else. I never could make head or tail of theoretical mechanics or the rarefied rot of matrices and what not.
"Old Peter Loring needs help and plenty of it—brain help! That's your job, Allan. I can handle this end as Well as you; no one can handle the organization down below but yon. Now, go on, get going." He shoved the still-protesting, half-convinced young man toward the magnetic lift. "My regards to Kay," he shouted as it whirred out of sight.
But his joviality left him as he turned back to the grim, hopeless defense before him. With sudden clarity he realized that he would never be one of those to take the great adventure into the unknown. He was going to die—here—fighting off the Antarians until the very last possible moment. A vision of Kay swam before his tortured senses. Very likely Allan would even forget to transmit those poor last regards. He laughed harshly, swung on his gaping men.
"Get back to your posts, you idiots," he shouted. "What do you think this is—a tea party? This is war—war without quarter. We're stopping those damned sons of an alien sun out there, and we know it. Come on, give it to them again!"
Once more the shaft resounded with shattering blasts, filled with the fumes of disintegration, blazed with eerie light. Another gun exploded as a purple beam lashed through the whirling slit. The crew screamed as one man, horribly——Then the black dust of what had once been men settled in a thick cloud on the heads of their comrades. The lock was an inferno of sight and sound.
Beneath, the great artificial cavern galvanized into a fever of activity. Under the driving lash of Allan, encouraged by the cheerful, soothing words of Kay, the despairing remnants of a once-numerous Earth people pushed on to tasks of whose exact nature they were only dimly aware. But anything was better than the slow waiting for an inevitable end, and the name of. Peter Loring still held its ancient magic.
Old men, women, even the little children helped in a frenzy of straining effort. Exploratory shafts dug deeper into the dense core of the Earth; manganese, iron, nickel, beryllium, titanium, uranium, radioactive metals, were mined out, flung into the huge electric furnaces, where a hundred thousand degrees of heat fused them into new and strange alloys.
The unimaginable pressure of columns of volcanic magna was utilized to twist them into strange and fantastic shapes. Hyperbolic paraboloids, lituoloids, solid trochoids, curves for which no possible name could be assigned—wavering oft into a seeming fourth-dimensional continuum—poured forth in endless profusion, obedient to the directions transmitted from the crystal inclosure to Allan, and distributed by him to numerous assistants.
NIGHT and day they labored, in the interminable glow of the "cold light" tubes, while Loring tossed off endless equations with his unresting stylus, translated them into tangible models such as no man's eyes had ever rested on before.
And all the while Allan watched the visor screen with a gnawing, growing anxiety. The impermite barrier was getting perilously thin. Only a scant inch of close-packed neutron elements remained to shield them from whelming destruction. The attack was growing in savage intensity, as the Antarians concentrated on the last frail barrier, A single flame gun, a solitary disruptor, remained to the battling Earthmen. The others had been blasted into fine dust. Of the defending force of three hundred, a bare fifty were left. And a week was still required for the final setting up of Loring's queer apparatus.
But Garth screwed up his dark, shadowed face more fiercely than ever, and drove his sooty demons on to superhuman efforts. "Another week is needed, you sons of disintegration," he roared, "and by the nine gods of the universe you'll give it to them."
To Allan's anxious calls, to his hurried visits and prayers, commands, even threats to take over the perilous post, Garth interposed lurid language. "Get below!" he shouted. "Get back to your job, and don't interfere with mine."
Day and night, night and day, the insane driving went on, Allan did not sleep—neither did Garth, nor did Loring. They were gaunt shells of their former selves. Kay sagged on her feet with brave weariness.
At last the cavern took definite shape and form. Huge reflectors of fantastic shapes and more fantastic alloys ringed the great round with shining, pointing surfaces. Gigantic machinery tapped the liquid veins that lay perilously close to the walls of the underground retreat, transmuted pressure and heat alike into electromagnetic stresses of unimaginable intensity. Within the huge circle of enringing reflectors, a cupped platform, curving to a hyperbolic function, reared itself from the stony ground. It was vast enough to hold within its embrace all of the pitiful few who were left of Earth's innumerable races, and it shimmered with a strange iridescence.
The old scientist straightened his stooped shoulders with an effort. He had aged terribly. The lines of his face were ravaged pits; his wrinkled skin hung in pouchy folds. Even his voice was a bare whisper. "Almost finished," he quavered. "Another half dozen hours of making the last connections, tightening, welding—and we journey forth into the unknown."
Kay supported his tottering frame with the last strength of her own infinitely tired arm. "We'll make it, Peter," she said with an effort. "You must rest now."
Allan groaned. "Six hours!" he said bitterly. "We might as well ask for all eternity. Look at the visor screen."
The impermite screen was sagging, bulging inward in paper thinness. The solitary gun was silenced, sheered off cleanly at the middle. A scant dozen blackened demons crouched behind the bursting barrier, hand guns ready, waiting for the last terrific smash. Garth's mighty shoulder pushed against the shield, as if to support it against the terrific dispersal rays.
Allan straightened grimly. His voice rose, crackled out swift orders. The weary people hurled themselves desperately back to their tasks—men, women, children.
To Kay, Allan spoke quickly. "Take over, dear. Get old Peter onto the platform, hustle the others on as fast as they're finished with their particular jobs. Every second will count. You know the master switch. Pull it, and pull it hard. Bye!" Then he was gone.
"Allan, darling!" The girl's voice was taut with anguish. She started after him, stopped. It was too late. Already the lift was speeding up toward the battle zone.
She turned blindly toward the scientist. He patted her shoulder. "He's a brave lad," he whispered. "Come, we must not let him down."
Garth Anders turned his black, suffering face toward the newcomer. "Damn you, Allan!" he howled. "You get away from here. Get back to Kay. I told you I'll keep the lock."
Allan grinned softly. "I know you did, old-timer," he said gently. "But six hours is a long time to fight alone. I'll keep you company."
Garth stared around in bewilderment. He had not realized that he was the sole survivor of the company. Three hundred men were dust and ashes—a black soot on the metal floor. Then he shook his head, grunted. This was like old times. Allan and he, shoulder to shoulder, fighting overwhelming odds with a song on their lips. Only this time, he grimaced painfully, there would be no way out. Both loved the same girl. They would die together. It was justice.
FLAME-GUNS in hand, they crouched low, eyes slitted, trying to synchronize the blast of their triggers with the still-revolving, evanescent openings. An hour, two hours, three. The shield was bulging in a great arc. In spots the layer of neutrons was so thin they could see beyond, see the interminable flood of Antarians, feel the spent energy of dispersal rays and annihilating death alike, as they wormed through the transparent layer. Four hours, five hours, five and a half. The visor screen crackled with desperate pleas from beneath. Hold them off a few more minutes! The last cables were being rushed into place. Already the old, the halt, and the children were streaming into the cupped platform.
Allan grinned. He did not know what a furious scowl it made. "We'll hold them," he said painfully. The neutron shield had cracked. Steadily, they pumped conite disruption in a solid blast at the openings. As long as the stream continued, the Antarians were at bay. But a split second's interval, an instant's halt in the steady flow, and the aliens would be upon them.
Their fingers froze to the triggers. The energy potentials were receding at an alarming rate toward zero. When that happened——
"I think we'll just make it," Allan said quietly to Garth. "They'll get away in time."
"And we?" Garth spat out.
Allan did not answer. But under his breath he muttered something. To Garth it sounded like, "Good-by, Kay darling!"
The big, bearded man edged stealthily toward him, still pumping disintegration blasts toward the Assuring shield. With a quick sweep of his left arm, he caught Allan a smashing blow across his chin, sent him sprawling headlong back upon the magnetic lift. With his foot he kicked back at the control lever.
Allan stumbled groggily to his feet, lurched forward desperately. But already the lift was accelerating. The last thing he saw was the giant form of Garth, shoulders squared, hurling his empty, futile gun straight toward a rushing torrent of Antarians. The impermite shield had blasted wide open. There was a roar, a searing flame—and Allan felt the bottom drop out of the world.
VAGUELY, he heard distant voices calling his name; in a whirling haze he felt his lagging feet propelled rapidly over hard ground. Then a dash of cold water, and he sputtered into awareness. He was within the cupping platform, supported by two men with the shadow of death on their countenances. All about him was a milling, wailing mass of people. Old Peter's voice was lifted, youthfully strong once more. "Quiet, every one! We have not a moment to loser——
"Kay! Where are you?" The name burst from Allan's lips. He tore loose from the men who held him up, lurched forward.
Some one screamed. "They're coming——"
A great cry of dread went up from five hundred throats; there was a mad scramble toward the center—anywhere, to get away from the triumphant invaders.
The Antarians had descended the shaft, blasted the encumbering magnetic lift from their path, and were pouring into the cavern, each cased in his shell of etheric force, knobs quivering with blazing purple death.
Fifty Earth people puffed into flaming extinction at that first impact. Then a hundred whiffed into impalpable dust. More and more Antarians were dropping into the last underground shelter of the human race, glowing with fierce, angry lights.
"Kay!" Allan shouted again, thrusting with swinging fists through the panic-stricken crush. Then he caught a glimpse of her—helpless in a wild rush, struggling futilely to gain the lever at the outer edge. A hundred more spattered into flaming disintegration.
Allan whirled, smashed his way toward the lever. He must get there before, before——
His fingers gripped, pulled.
There was a sudden cessation of sound, of sight, of everything. Cavern, terrified people, Antarians, apparatus, disappeared. A pearl-gray, unfathomable nothingness surrounded him, enveloped him in a warping shroud. He was everywhere; he was nowhere; he floated in an empty void; he was surging forward at a speed beyond the limiting speed of light, beyond any concept that the puny human mind could frame. He was alone, yet, somehow, the whisper of other forms—close by, or millions of light years away, he could not tell—interlocked with his being.
He was no longer matter, a thing of protons, electrons, and neutrons. He was somehow an infinite train of probabilities made substantial, reaching out along the rushing waves, elongating in terrific expansion. He was no longer a finite entity, hampered and restrained by an imperfect, limiting universe. He was totality, a mathematical calculus in which the last differentials had been surmounted and passed. He was greater than the universe; he was beyond it.
He did not know how he knew all these things. They pervaded his being with a calm, omniscient awareness.
Then, out of the vague formlessness, strange things began to coalesce and streak by in misty blurs. Rushing paths of light—white, yellow, red, golden fireballs—along the tracks of eternity. Mighty suns, his inner awareness told him, through which he was hurtling at a speed of thousands of light years per second. Then they, too, were gone.
OUT, ever out, hurtling to the last confines of an ever-receding infinity, to the last warp that clothed the knowable in a cloak of majesty. Far behind, coalesced into a rounded shell, compressed into a single orb of undifferentiated light, was the universe of space and time. Then—the grayness glowed and pulsed in vast rhythmic beats, lapping him, urging him ever on. There was a flash that filled eternity—a violent, rending crash.
He had hurtled through the limiting barrier, had exploded into the outer nonentity, where space and time had not yet been born, where the spirit of non-being brooded and waited. He had passed the last differential. He was beyond infinity!
For what may have been an unimaginable fraction of a millisecond, or unimaginable aeons of time—how could he tell where time itself did not exist?—he lay and felt the flow of strange vibrations through his being. He tried to orientate, to localize himself—and could not. Space did not exist. He was wherever he thought, and thought itself was now a limitless process.
Then thoughts interlocked. First, as faint whispering threads reaching tentatively toward himself; then they grew stronger and stronger, until, with a quiver of glad awareness, Kay had joined him. Not her physical body, but the thought processes that were hers. They slid along his being, spoke to him intimately, lovingly.
"Kay!" he cried voicelessly. "Where are you? Come to me! Let me see you."
She must have laughed. "I am with you—now," she answered. "Thinking your thoughts, interpenetrated. I doubt if we have corporeal bodies; I feel no sensation of one."
"Nor I!"
"And I!"
Other thought processes crept into Allan's being. He recognized them—men and women who had journeyed with them on that last tremendous journey beyond the limits.
"We have achieved perfection," some one said joyfully. That was Peter Loring. "We are pure thought, the end-all of evolution. That is the secret of infinity. Matter, physical being, space time, are but momentary excrescences, diseases of an all-pervading thought. There, clad in limiting forms, we were tiny, struggling things, warped in thought as in space time, striving upward toward a goal we dimly perceived, but could never reach. Only as the expanding universe enfolded this outer thought into its being was life in any sense possible. But only beyond the universe could life divest itself of all impediments, leap at one great stride to pure essence, pure thought."
Some queer, matter-bound entity within Allan rebelled at that. Old Peter Loring had long been on Earth the personification of intellect. Age and self-discipline had quenched the physical, the joy of body, of tactile sensations. It was all very well for him. In this limbo of eternal thought, he would be infinitely happy. But Allan? He had been young and vigorous; even in this vague state he felt the tug of half-remembered things: the feel of Kay in his arms; the warm pressure of her. lips; the smell of new-mown hay; the deep intake of salt-sea air; the hard, firm, satisfying crunch of mountain trails; the gusty flavor of odorous foods; the pitting of muscle and brawn against resistant obstacles.
Thought was satisfying, the things of the intellect important. But they were not all of life. There were those other sensations as well, that gave the tang of variety, that made life what it was—a thing of struggle, of sorrow, of joy, of death even.
Regret sprayed through him. He should have fought to the end at Garth's side. At least, in the last flame of annihilation, he would have achieved his——
Earth destiny—not this pallid simulacrum of an extended, bodiless intellectuality. In a flash of clarity he saw the wisdom of the exploding universe. The Creator had done what he had with a true wisdom, a depth of understanding beyond the dreams of philosophers and mathematicians like Peter Loring.
Only in struggle, in upward evolution, in striving for a goal forever unachievable, could life find savor and gusto. Even in pain and suffering there were compensations. Suddenly Allan recoiled in bodiless horror from the thought of an immortality of pure, moveless thought, of interpenetrated entity, of emotionless wisdom. He wanted fiercely to see Kay once more, to behold her uplifted face. This bloodless interchange of thoughts was not for him. Perhaps in that last seething departure from Earth, some filaments, some probability trains of electrons, of protons, had not been cleanly severed, had left their impingements trailing back into the space-time continuum.
"I do not wish for this state," he thought deliberately. "I would rather be back in the universe of imperfections, content to suffer death and annihilation, fighting even the Antarians, than remain in this bloodless, endless staticism. Is there no way in which we can reverse the process, you who were once Peter Loring?"
Little quivering thrills shot along the interpenetrated skein of thoughts. There was Kay, quietly acquiescent. "Whatever you do, Allan, I am content." There were others, more timid, straggling in their responses. They hungered for their bodies, for the physical.
AFTER aeons of waiting, Loring sent his thought. "It is impossible, Allan Hale. The process was irreversible. I have achieved my goal; I am sorry you others have not. You have carried your Earthly bonds along with you; even into totality."
The quivers grew; on Earth they would have been recoils of despair. Somewhere, in the void, Kay was trying to comfort Allan, to reach him with immaterial arms.
Allan said fiercely. "There must be a way. Otherwise perfection itself is less than perfect. If we have attained totality, then implicit within our beings are all things, even that wild universe of suffering and disorder from which we fled—and for which we yearn."
Again aeons of waiting, while Loring pondered the problem. His thought was like the ghost of a sigh. "You are right, Allan. There is a way. But not the way you wish. You have evolved out of the old universe of space time; you cannot undo that process. The whole cannot shrink back into the part. But you can go on."
"Even from perfection?" some one cried.
"Even from perfection," Loring echoed with a wisp of sadness. "You may repeat what has been done before, an infinite number of times. Your former universe was not the first, and, because of your desire, it will not be the last. Totality contains within its womb the seed of new birth; of another universe that will commence afresh as a huge primordial bursting atom, and explode outward toward totality, again engulfing a shoreless infinity, until itself is once more engulfed by the accelerating force of the inner explosion.
"Now I understand the births and rebirths of new and ever newer universes. It had ever been a mystery before. Always, as life forms evolved, there were those who grasped the secret of escape from eventual annihilation. They, after aeons of pure thought, grew restless, even as you, and willed into creation a new space time, a new matter, to commence all over the endless treadmill."
"But how may we accomplish this?" Allan demanded.
"Merely by concentration of your collective thoughts. Was it not always suspected, from ancient Plato to medieval Jeans, that the universe was merely the creation of pure thought? What you will, must come into being."
"What about the still-existing universe from which we emerged?" Kay inquired. "Would there not be conflict between the two—a head-on collision?"
"Time," said Peter Loring gently, "has no meaning here. But in that temporary space time from which we came, a million million aeons have elapsed. The universe you knew has already been swallowed up, made one with totality. That is why I said there could be no return."
"Let us waste no more futile aeons of a time that does not exist," retorted Allan.
"First decide what type of universe you would will into creation," Loring said.
"The same as our old familiar space warp," answered Allan. "With all its imperfection, with all its insufficiency, we lived in it, loved and breathed and had our being. We would not be happy in any other kind of world."
Quivers of thought showed unanimous agreement. There was something else in Allan's mind. He wanted Kay back just as she had been, unchanged, adorable. In an experimental universe——
ATTUNED, their thoughts welled outward in mighty unison. It was an awe-inspiring idea. Thought—the concerted thought of a handful who had once been petty Earthlings—creating the majesty of a universe entire! Gods to whom the ancient deities of Greece and Rome had been but tribal localisms.
Totality quivered and moved with restless longing. The spaceless gray radiated into the essence of nonbeing. The viewless glow streaked with supernal fire. Thought itself rolled and coalesced on the weltering chaos. A universe was giving birth.
Again and again they willed. They were a storm center, a focus from which space time unwrapped in wide-darting unfoldments. The primal essence shook to the creative impact of their thought. Nonbeing whirled on its self and vortices were formed. The vortices moved and sent out infinite waves of probabilities. They acted and interacted on each other, merged into a gigantic globule of primordial matter, a single atom of monstrous size.
The atom revolved under the surge of united thought, slowly at first, then faster and ever faster. As it whirled, space time enfolded it in a spherical shroud. Light was born. The universe revealed itself in a luminous mist.
Faster! Faster! The periphery stormed around at inconceivable velocity. Gravitation was born; so was centripetal force. At the very core and center of the disturbance lay the immaterial totality of those who had been inhabitants of a forgotten, tiny Earth. Their thoughts surged forth in continued unison, willing the hurtling chaos into form and being. Around them, sheathing them, was still totality, "beyond infinity," a hollow nonspace time in the heart of the sphere.
The bubble of the universe was unstable. Thought pressed it outward from within; the whirling outside swept up new space time with each wild revolution. It could not last.
There was a blinding explosion, a mighty outward surge of rushing matter. The tremendous atom had shattered. Universe and nonuniverse rocked with the impact. The exploding matter hurled itself forward with greedy avidity. Space time went with it. Nebulae blazed into being, spiraled, coalesced into great suns. Within the central core, nonspace expanded, on the track of fleeing matter, like an unleashed hound after a rabbit. Slowly at first, unable to keep pace with the wild flight of the periphery, but gradually accelerating. A million aeons would elapse before the inner explosion would overtake and swallow the outer. The eternal cycle of birth, exploding universe, annihilation, and rebirth had been once more established.
Within the central bubble Allan ceased his labors. "You have started the process of infinite recurrence," Peter Loring told him mournfully. "Nothing more is necessary. Stars are evolving; soon planets will whirl in their orbits. Imperfection, the disease of matter, will strive again toward perfection, totality, and never reach the limits. Evolution will take hold; oceans will form; carbon and its associate elements will stir into that strange, crawling colloidal compound known as life. Men will rise from the brute, seek knowledge with their finite brains, fight and love and die without a grasp of the universe entire."
A great wave of thankfulness interpenetrated the composite Earthlings. Perfection was not for them; this future that spread before them was life. They yearned toward it as to a frolic; they were impatient for its commencement.
"COME," said Allan. "Let us go! I see in that distant middle galaxy a red sun somewhat akin to that old Sun which shed benign rays on our former home. I see planets of diverse size encircling it. One, in fact, is spinning on its axis, lapped with life-giving waters, from which land has emerged. A thick blanket of atmosphere envelops it, even as once before an Earth had been. There, my friends, is our home!"
"It is too early," Loring warned. "The planet you have chosen is young and steamy. Wait until the waters have settled, and the barrenness is covered with developed life."
"We can't wait," cried Kay with infinite longing. She was weary of immaterial thought; she wished to feel the solid, substantial warmth of Allan's arms about her. Nor were the others less eager for their loved ones, to gaze upon their faces once again.
"Very well," Loring said resignedly. "I cannot stop you; I have no wish to do so. Go, and may you find your heart's desire in that perilous imperfection."
"And you?" Allan demanded suddenly.
"I shall remain," answered the former scientist. "I have not your desires, nor loved ones to console me for the loss of this infinitude of thought. I have reached the Nirvana, and I am supremely content."
Nor could the voiceless impact of their minds dissuade him from his course. At length, reluctantly, yet filled with an abounding eagerness for the great adventure on which they were anew embarked, they willed themselves toward that distant planet, their goal.
Along their trains of probability they fled, hurtling toward the universe of space time which they had created. Behind them, fainter and fainter, came the thought processes of Peter Loring, bidding them Godspeed.
There was a sudden jar, a shattering crash. They had burst through the warp of space and time, were now within the universe of matter. Behind them, snapped off by the resilient envelope, trailed their totality differentials, their "beyond infinity" elements. They were finite beings once again, coalescing along electron trains, ripping through the ether with a speed beyond the limiting speed of light, decelerating as they fled. Ribboned bands of light that were nebula foreshortened became recognizable galaxies; tenuous streaks of fire grew oblate, condensed before their slowing rush as teeming stars.
Slower, slower, breasting the increasing resistance of the space warp, already feeling the gravitational tug of a mighty universe, down to the limiting speed of light, down to hundreds of miles a second—swinging, at last, into familiar world lines, slacking their wild, still immaterial flight, until, just ahead, a red star glared at them; planets swam in steady orbits, and a certain satellite—not unlike that unforgotten Earth—accompanied by two silver moons, spread its blanketed bosom far beneath.
For a flash of thought Allan had a sickening sensation. What would happen to them as they reached the focus at the surface toward which they had willed their desire? Perhaps they should have waited, as Loring had suggested. What manner of life awaited them on this suddenly alien-seeming planet? Would he ever see the comrades of his tremendous hegira beyond infinity and back; would Kay be at his side?
Kay! Frantically, he tried to call her, to break his interminable drop. But space surrounded him now, and time, and the laws of matter, obedient to a differential calculus from which he was no longer emancipated. There was no answering thought—from Kay, from any one else. He was alone, a streaking immateriality converging on a focus in an alien universe. Terror overwhelmed him—terror and vain regret that he had not heeded the perfection that was Peter Loring. He had lost Kay—forever!
He felt his inner being sucked into a whirling vortex; the new earth smeared before him in an unrecognizable splotch—and he knew no more.
THIS was exceeding strange! Consciousness had returned to him, but it was sluggish, dim. Thought was a vague process; he could not coordinate, could not organize those strange, quivering sensations, to which he seemed to have fallen heir, into intellectual being. Far off, so far it seemed to belong to another eternity, another infinity, he had been perfection, godlike, comprehending all things entire. Now he strained toward realization of the present, found his mind diffuse, scattered, undifferentiated. Already the memory of his former state, even that more limited existence on a bygone Earth, was fading fast. He tried to grasp the hem of its vanishing garment. It slipped from his fuddled consciousness. Soon even the memory of that memory would be gone.
What had happened to him? Why could he not think? Why were what passed for thoughts somehow vegetative, primitive, engrossed more and more completely with the limited present? Where was he f
Slowly, the blinding realization came to him, pierced momentarily the dulling inhibitions of his being. He was moving sluggishly through a warm, enveloping sea. Slowly, very slowly, with a queer, forward-flowing motion. The waters tossed him up and down in regular rhythm; above, a heavily charged sky steamed with beating rain. A huge, dim sun irradiated unendurable glare behind the thick curtain of clouds.
The light irritated Allan. Instinctively, he swelled, wrapped formless pseudopodium around minute globules of water, evacuated tiny bubbles of imprisoned air, and sank slowly and heavily into the darker, more inviting depths.
He was an amoeba—a microscopic blob of protoplasm!
Even in his simple consciousness the realization rocked his viscous frame, sent him quivering into the uttermost depths of a futile despair. Loring had known, had warned him. They had created a universe, but that universe must evolve along definite paths in accordance with the immutable laws of imperfection.
From barren matter must first come life in its most simple, undifferentiated form. Protoplasm! Amoeba! Only after millions of years would life grow upward into complexity—through polyps, sponges, fish, mammals, ape men, man!
Blindly, the protoplasmic ooze that was Allan went its sluggish way. A tinier bit of organism impinged on his tactile surface. Instinctively, he flowed around it, engulfed it. Digestion set in, and he found it good.
But still he tried to hold on desperately to the fast-fading memories of his former complexity. Kay! Again that name blasted him back to a certain dim coherence. She was lost to him, now and forever!
A TIDAL current caught him in its forward sweep, pushed him helplessly along. In the dim underwater light he perceived ahead of him a colony of vague shapes, fellow blobs of matter, swimming slowly. He caught up with them, feeling the security of his kind.
Dim, familiar vibrations emanated from them, tugged at the sentience that was now himself. What did it mean? He puzzled over the feeling, tried to think it out. It was exceeding difficult. He flowed closer.
A slender, graceful amoeba dissociated itself from the sluggish colony, put forth tactile pseudopodium. They impinged on his formless surface. A great, quivering thrill pulsed through his protoplasmic depths. This was Kay!
He lurched toward her dearness, clung with tenacious embrace to the jelly-like substance that was nevertheless Kay. Electric understanding passed between them. Happiness, sufficiency, pervaded all his being. About them, in a cluster, lay the colony of amoeba—they who had left an incredibly ancient Earth with him, had passed beyond infinity and back again. From them a new world of life would spring, and evolve painfully and adventurously into man. The cycle was complete!
Before the last vestiges of former memories left him, Allan saw as in a vision the dim outlines of the future. He and Kay—together through that long upward climb. Polyps together, slender, darting fish, lordly Neanderthaler and his mate, man and woman, devoted, eternally one!
A more-distant vision even was vouchsafed to him. A time when the universe would be close to annihilation; when he and Kay, colonists on the last remaining galaxy, rediscovered the calculus of the totality, and fled again beyond infinity, there to find Peter Loring, timelessly immortal, infinitely perfect.
The mists of present, primeval consciousness closed upon Allan and Kay in irrevocable shroud. They were two amoeba, existent in the moment, knowing nothing of past or future glories. Slowly, they swam through the steamy sea, seeking food and love. Behind them trailed the colony.
Roy Glashan's Library
Non sibi sed omnibus
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