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Roy Glashan's Library
Non sibi sed omnibus
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Astounding Stories, March 1935,
with "Mind of the World"
THE vast rotunda of the Hall of Science was packed to suffocation. Tier on tier the scientists sat, thousands of them, representatives of every Tribe in the world, all faces converging in eager absorption on the speaker's platform at the bottom of the bowl. So tremendous was the hall that the outermost benches would never have been able to distinguish the tiny doll-like figure whose hand was raised for silence had not the delegate of the Opticos thoughtfully provided them with highly efficient view-glasses.
Unfortunately some of the scientists, notably those from the Tribes devoted to subdivisions of the social sciences, could make neither head nor tail of these strange instruments, and inasmuch as the Opticon felt that he had been sufficiently benevolent in distributing an adequate supply, there were scattered delegates who left the hall under the impression that the Tropo-Chemists, in the person of Warren Bascom, the chairman, were manikins rather than normal human beings, and therefore not worthy of serious consideration.
What happened was that these deluded scientists had reversed the view-glasses in bringing them to bear on the speaker, with truly surprising results.
The Tropo-Chemists had. made a brave attempt to refurbish the faded splendors of the Hall of Science for the occasion, but the accumulated dust and grime of centuries could not be easily removed. The tremendous structure was a venerable antiquity, a monument to the third millennium when the people of the earth were still divided into nations based upon the accident of contiguous birth rather than upon community of interest in work and scientific labors.
Warren Bascom raised his hand again. A vast hush followed the buzz of the assembled scientists. He was tall and stooped and wrinkled. The snow of his fine silky hair testified to a goodly number of years, and the wide-spaced eyes and generous mouth to a certain benevolence of disposition that was unfortunately rare in the thirty-second century.
"Representatives of the Tribes of the World," he said, "the Tropo-Chemists bid you welcome to this first Intertribal Conference. The response to our invitation has been overwhelming and beyond all expectations. I admit it was with a good deal of hesitancy that I issued the call, in view of that last memorable meeting of the Association for the Advancement of Science in the twenty-eighth century when certain scientists attempted to incorporate with their own experiments the hastily and illy digested reports of research in other specialized fields, with results that were disastrous and from which the world as a whole has only recently recovered.
"But," and he took a deep breath, "desperate times demand desperate measures. The very fact that you have decided to attend a general meeting shows that you are aware of our deficiencies."
The delegate of the Psychopaths leaned confidentially to his neighbor.
"That's true," he said. "My Tribe's been living from hand to mouth since the last drought destroyed our crops. We'll starve if something isn't done. Otherwise I'd never have left the experiment I was conducting on the effect of switched neuron paths on hallucinations to walk five hundred weary miles to this conference."
His neighbor looked at him blankly. He was a Rocketor. "Neurone paths?" he echoed with a puzzled air. "I don't know what the devil they are, but the fact that you walked here amazes me. Why, I came from a considerably farther distance—four thousand miles, to be exact—and made it in four and a half hours. Why any one should walk when there are rockets is beyond me."
The Psychopath said enviously: "I've heard of such machines, but there's no one in our Tribe who ha's the faintest idea of how they are made."
"Simple enough," the Rocketor remarked with a certain degree of condescension. "But you are right about the general situation. Something has to be done. Our crops gave out, too. We've barely enough to keep us alive another month."
"Pardon me for interrupting," said the man on the left. He had been following their conversation with the closest attention. "Neurons and rockets mean nothing to me. Wouldn't know a neuron if I met one face to face. But your discussion as to failure of crops and possible starvation is almost inconceivable. This, gentlemen, is the thirty-second century, not the twentieth. Why depend on the whims of nature for your sustenance? We Food-Synthesists get ample nourishments from small pellets. Make them ourselves from very common elements."
The Psychopath and the Rocketor turned to him eagerly. "Maybe you could teach me——" they began simultaneously.
The Food-Synthesist smiled a superior smile. "We've worked at the problem for hundreds of years, and you think you could be taught in——"
"Sssh!" Angry whispers buzzed around him. "We can't hear a word with all that chatter. Keep quiet!"
The offending delegates subsided guiltily and tried to pick up the thread of Bascom's speech.
"AS early as the twentieth century," the Tropo-Chemist was saying, "science had reached the first crude steps of specialization. No longer could any one say with that ancient philosopher, Bacon, that he had taken all knowledge to be his province. Scientific facts and scientific theory had branched out into such innumerable ramifications that it was impossible for any man to have a thorough knowledge of more than one particular science.
"Soon even that, with the sweeping progress of new discoveries and investigations, became a dream rather than a reality. No longer was one a physicist, an astronomer, a chemist—he became a mathematical physicist, an opticon, a radio engineer, an atomist, a colloidal chemist, an electrochemist, an astrophysicist, a spectroscopist. The gulf widened and deepened. The fields became divided and subdivided, until a scientist spent his whole life in studying a certain small sector of knowledge. He went deep, to be sure, but he knew nothing, could know nothing, of the rest of the vast panorama of science, except such small allied fields as impinged directly upon his particular subject."
Young Allan Carey, of the Tribe of Vector-Analysts, wriggled in his seat. "That's not true!" he exploded in an angry Whisper to his neighbor, Clyde Moorhouse. "There is at least one man in the world to-day who combines most brilliant special knowledge with that all-embracing knowledge of which the mythical ancient boasted."
Clyde Moorhouse smiled thoughtfully.
He was there in an anomalous capacity; in fact, as a species of superdelegate for all the numerous and varied Tribes among whom the study of mathematics was subdivided.
"I suppose you mean Kalen Thorn," he said innocently. "And I am inclined to agree with you. He is without doubt a great man. He dominates his Tribe, and Wave Mechanics is fundamental in the structure of the universe."
The young man exploded even more angrily: "That charlatan!" He glanced scornfully in the direction of the front row, where a dark, heavily built man was lounging with elaborate carelessness and a faint sneer on his thick, muddied features. "I did not mean him. I meant you, Clyde Moorhouse, and no one else. Why, the very fact that the forty-odd Tribes of Mathematicians did the unprecedented thing in voting you as chief of all their delegates shows that."
Moorhouse blushed a bit at the immoderate worship in young Carey's eyes. He was a slight, unassuming man with hair just graying at the edges and a soft, mild voice.
"We had better listen to Bascom," he said hastily, "or we'll have nothing to report back."
"Gradually the old national distinctions were obliterated," Warren Bascom continued. "Research workers joined their fellows in the common fields of their endeavor, worked together, lived together, acted together. By so doing, they immeasurably added to the minutiae, the details of learning, in the subdivided subjects. The Tribes were formed; the children took up the work where the fathers had left off. Specialists bred specialists. The Tribes became a rigid caste system. They drew away from each other, tried to become self-sufficient.
"Cooperation, the old glory of science, no longer existed. In fact, with the increasing depth of specialization, it became impossible. A lifetime was hardly sufficient to master the tremendous amount of data available in one's particular Tribe. The rest was a howling wilderness of ignorance."
Bascom smiled apologetically. "I am a Tropo-Chemist because my father and his father were Tropo-Chemists. It is a fascinating subject, I grant you. I know all there is at present to be known about the reactions that take place in living protoplasm when subjected to the influence of light. I know less about the influence of sound or electricity. Others in the Tribe have delved into those phases. I know nothing at all about neutrons for instance, or the historical evidences of geology, or the inner constitution of the sun, or what takes place in my mind when I think. We live precariously on green plant life only because we were compelled to cultivate chlorophyll-bearing plants for the furtherance of our studies."
The Rocketor asked his neighbor, the Psychopath, curiously: "What is chlorophyll?"
"You've got me, brother," the Psychopath answered humorously. "I'm a stranger in these parts myself."
Clyde Moorhouse listened intently. No one in the vast audience, not even his young friend and worshiper, Allan Carey, knew that he was directly responsible for this conference. All the ideas that Bascom was propounding to the assembled delegates were his, the fruit of years of solitary observation of the strange complexities of the world, of silent delving into the past, and of certain secret conversations with his old friend, Bascom.
The Tropo-Chemist had protested: "Why don't you issue the call yourself, Clyde? It's your idea and you're entitled to all the credit."
But Moorhouse replied earnestly: "I'm too inoffensive a type for missionary work. I couldn't get it across. You could. You've got brains and energy and a certain aggressiveness. Besides, if the plan was known to emanate from me, Kalen Thorn would automatically oppose. You know that."
BASCOM knew, and yielded the point. Thorn hated Moorhouse. The mathematician was the only man in the world whose reputation for all-around learning was greater than his. Publicly Thorn might sneer at the superior attainments of his rival, but privately, in the recesses of his own consciousness, he acknowledged their force and hated him all the more for being compelled to admit it.
The Tropo-Chemist lifted his voice. It rang through the great hall.
"It is a strange and a terrible thing to say," he declared, "but it is my belief that the very advances in science of which we are so proud have proved a great and overwhelming disaster to the world. In our very heights of knowledge we have grown abysmally ignorant. The earth was a far happier place and, yes, a more civilized and scientific place, in the twenty-fourth century when science was still a cooperative affair and not a matter of neat little watertight and mutually exclusive compartments. The wisdom of one was the wisdom of all; it was not hoarded, as now; it was squandered for the benefit of all mankind. Who shall say we are happier to-day? Who shall say we, as individuals, as members of disparate Tribes, possess half the good things of life, possess half the learning, attainments, or broadmindedness of a man, say, of the twentieth century, even?"
He paused and looked dramatically around. Yet inwardly he was frightened at his own temerity. He had used bold words, and the delegates might resent them. The Tribes were vain and touchy about their respective fields of research. To each, no matter how tiny a sector it might be, it represented the very pinnacle of human thought, and all other Tribes and their particular problems were looked down upon as from an Olympian height.
A wind stirred through the delegates at the challenging assertion. It was an uneasy, half-angry restlessness. Men looked furtively at each other, seeking a lead. The smallest spark might touch them off, one way or another.
IT was the Psychopath who furnished the spark. He rose suddenly from his seat, high up on the terraced bowl.
"What Bascom has stated in such bald terms is the truth," he shouted passionately. "I am a Psychopath, a delver into the twisted abnormal workings of the human mind. I was contented, immersed in my work. Just now, however, for the first time, I realize my deficiencies, the deficiencies of all of us. I heard to-day of achievements of which my Tribe has never been able to avail itself, of which, in fact, I had only the faintest knowledge.
"I walked five hundred miles to attend this conclave; my friend, the Rocketor, on my right, flew eight times that distance in a few hours. My Tribe is starving because our primitive method of farming is inadequate; the same is true of the Rocketors. Yet I understand from my left-hand neighbor, a Food-Synthesist, that his Tribe is independent of nature's vagaries; that they manufacture their food direct from the elements themselves.
"I see now what Bascom is driving at. We have been inordinately selfish; we have allowed science.to master us, instead of our being its master. We must cooperate, as did a younger world. We must share our knowledge, so that the good fruits of our researches are available to all, so that I, too, may ride the upper regions of the air in rockets and. be assured of a never-failing food supply."
He sat down, and delegate murmured approvingly to delegate. There was scattered hand-clapping; soon it would grow to a torrent. Bascom's wrinkled face was further creased with smiles. The unknown's irruption was most opportune.
Carey turned eagerly to Moorhouse. "Splendid!" he whispered, all aglow. "Now is the time to spring that new invention of yours."
"Hush!" Moorhouse cautioned him. "Bascom knows what to do."
But another than Bascom rose to speak. The clapping died suddenly; all eyes turned to the heavy figure in the front row who faced the multitude.
"Kalen Thorn!"
The whisper ran like fire through stubble. There was a deathly silence. His name was known throughout the Tribes; the nature of his work in Wave Mechanics and a certain genius for publicity, quite rare in that day and age, had seen to that.
His black-browed features were imperious, compelling.
"I say it is all nonsense," he said coldly. "A delusion, a figment of the imagination. We have progressed far beyond such primitive arrangements. We cannot go backward, even if we wished. Only disaster would result from the half-baked attempts of any of us to comprehend and utilize the arduously acquired knowledge of the other Tribes. Remember what happened in the twenty-eighth century when a similar experiment was tried. It would be far worst to-day; in my Tribe alone the researches of that century are considered crude and fumbling. Who is there not of our Tribe who could possibly utilize what we have spent whole lifetimes in acquiring?"
A voice from the middle section came faint, but clear: "But you, Kalen Thorn, could apply your gigantic grasp of the Wave Mechanics to the problems of the others."
There was a ripple of applause. Delegate nudged delegate at the telling point.
Thorn bowed to the flattery. He was not displeased. But he said: "I haven't the time. All my poor life is devoted to my science, to the accumulated learning of my tribe."
Carey muttered some very disrespectful words to himself. Bascom felt it was time for him to intervene.
"Kalen Thorn is quite right," he said very courteously. "Unaided, it would be an impossible task for any man or even group of men to cope with the gigantic wealth of unrelated knowledge that the numerous Tribes possess. I would not have called you here in convention unless I had the answer. It is really very simple, or, rather, it is made simple by means of a marvelous invention that has been brought to my attention by one of you who for the present prefers to remain unknown."
There was a low buzz of excitement. Thorn looked blank.
"It has all been explained to me," Bascom continued, "and it sounds plausible, even though my special knowledge is not competent to cope with all its intricacies. But those of you in whose provinces they lie can check each of the underlying principles.
"Knowledge, thought, is a matter of certain physical and chemical activities in the neurons; or specialized cells of the brain, and their interlocking dendrones. Synapses, I believe, is the technical term for the paths of connection."
The Psychopath and the delegates of affiliated psychological subdivisions nodded vigorously.
"The physicochemical activity known as thought, however," Bascom continued, "gives rise to tiny electrical impulses. These impulses radiate in space on definite wave lengths as do all other forms of radiation. But they are infinitesimally short, and their radius of propagation limited. What our anonymous benefactor has done was to invent tiny broadcasting units which could fit inconspicuously inside of light flexible helmets. These are clasped to the head.
"The broadcasting unit amplifies the radiations, steps them up in power, so they can be transmitted over sizable distances. Another unit, a receiving one this time, is installed in another helmet, which steps down the radiations to normal intensity. Special antennae, with the exact nature of which I am unfamiliar, cause the impulses to penetrate to the recipient's neurons and synapses, there to set up the same physicochemical reactions as in the brain of the broadcaster. In other words, the wearer of the receiving helmet achieves all of the knowledge and thought processes of the broadcaster without long years of study and tedious toil.
"By a judicious selection from each Tribe, there would soon grow up a body of men possessed of sufficiently broad and pertinent knowledge to permit a goodly portion of the experiments of each subdivision to be appropriated and coordinated for the benefit of all. Within a year, I would venture to say, the human race would achieve heights undreamed-of to-day."
He paused, a practiced orator, waiting for comment. Doubt and indecision overcame the delegates. Each step of the disclosed invention checked scientifically with the special knowledge of certain groups, but no one could envisage the whole. The great hall buzzed with low, excited conversation. Clyde Moorhouse sat unperturbed. Allan Carey wriggled with impatience.
"Think they'll agree?" he whispered.
"It's an experiment," Moorhouse answered quietly.
KALEN THORN scowled blackly. Inside he was a seething furnace. He alone grasped the thing entire, saw in a blinding flash its tremendous implications. Why hadn't he conceived this invention, utilized it for his own purposes? Who the devil was this unknown genius? He must kill this thing boldly, publicly, before it ran away from him. Then, in the privacy of his laboratory, he would begin work.
He arose.
"A very pretty conceit," he said with just the right tinge of condescension. "Unfortunately, however, such an apparatus, even if theoretically possible, would be tremendously difficult to construct. I for one can see certain important obstacles. So it is quite necessary that we know the name of this—er—genius before we decide."
"That is just what I am forbidden to disclose," Bascom returned with some heat. "And only because the man is too modest, too self-sacrificing, to take the credit that is rightly his. I can vouch for his—as you said—genius. Yet what does it matter? The important tiling is whether the apparatus works. He has already built the helmets and is willing to have them tested."
Thorn whirled on the rising murmur of approval, shouted it down with stentorian tones: "No one but a quack, a charlatan, would hide in anonymity. There may even be a sinister purpose behind all this. Who knows what effect the apparatus may have; who knows but it may do irreparable harm to the wearer? We must have the name of the inventor as evidence of good faith."
Thus he clamored, feeling assured that he could load down with innuendoes and contumely the reputation of any tribal member who avowed the invention of such an all-embracing unit. His mind was working darkly and swiftly.
The delegates looked aghast at each other. There was much in what Thorn had said. They had been on the verge of something hasty, of something——
Carey could stand it no longer. Breathing quickly, aware of his youth and inexperience, yet irresistibly impelled, he shouted:
"The name, if you must know, O Kalen Thorn, is Clyde Moorhouse!"
THE rising tumult went down with dramatic suddenness. The Mathematician shrank in his seat, flushed, embarrassed. His plucking fingers had been a shade too late in grasping at young Carey's arm. Bascom murmured a silent prayer of thanksgiving. He blessed the hot-headedness of the Vector-Analyst.
Thorn scowled darkly. His thoughts raced on and on. He should have known that it could have been no one else. Already his practiced mind sensed the approval that was gathering strength in the great concourse of delegates. His face broke into a rare smile. He shifted his tactics.
"Moorhouse!" he exclaimed with a certain bluff heartiness. "That, of course, is different. I have the. utmost faith in his disinterestedness and wide learning. The machine will work. Now the question is just how to apply it for the greatest possible good of humanity. Bascom, our chairman, has made a suggestion. It is fair, but it doesn't go far enough."
He looked winningly at Moorhouse. "I am sure my friend, the inventor, will agree with me that this plan is a mere makeshift."
Carey started from his seat angrily, but Moorhouse plucked him down.
"Let him talk. He is putting over the idea for us," he murmured.
"But don't you see he is trying to steal the credit from you?"
"What of it?" Moorhouse returned tranquilly.
Thorn appeared to be thinking deeply. His face lighted up. "Ah, I have it! The very plan! So simple I'm surprised the sponsors of the invention hadn't thought of it before. Why utilize hundreds of scientists, removing them from their necessary work, to pick up stray tags of knowledge here and there?
There would be too much confusion and duplication of effort. The result, while an improvement, would still be unsatisfactory.
"We want cooperation, do we not? We wish to have the entire fund of knowledge now sealed in millions of separate and alien minds utilized for the common good, brought to bear as a coordinated unit on the solution of any given problem. Very well, then.
"Select one scientist, a man already possessed of an agile, nimble brain, a man who has already proved himself by reputation and by deed. Give him the receiving helmet. Then build millions of broadcasting helmets, one in fact for every man and woman in the world. Let them wear these helmets simultaneously. Do you see what would happen?"
His voice rose to oratorical heights. It beat and thundered through the vast rotunda, deafening with its richness, stirring with its simulated enthusiasm. He thrust back his head and narrowed his eyes.
"A gigantic vision! All the accumulated wisdom of millenniums of mankind pouring in a waveless flood into one man's mind. Facts, hitherto seemingly unrelated, dovetailing like the pieces of a puzzle, conception rubbing against conception and emitting vital sparks, theory smoothing on theory to make order, unity, truth, where only chaos had reigned before.
"Think of it! What problem now troubling science, the world, would remain insoluble; to what supernal heights could not the human race attain? A single mind—the world's repository of knowledge, the common reservoir in which all scientists may dip and find the answers. He would no longer be a man, an individual; he would be a symbol, the common possession of the world. His life, his mind, would belong to all humanity."
His voice sank to a thrilling whisper, while the delegates hearkened in fascination, a many-stopped organ on which he played with skillful fingers. Already had they forgotten, in the magic of his speech, the real inventor of the apparatus of which he disposed so cavalierly.
"It would be a sacrifice," he whispered, "a tremendous sacrifice. The chosen scientist must give up the privacy of his own mind, yield himself for the common good. Yet do I, Kalen Thorn, announce unhesitatingly that I would gladly——"
"It's a trick!" Carey yelled furiously.
He was on his feet, pushing his way forward. But it was too late.
The delegates had swallowed the bait. A thundering roar cut off what Thorn was going to say. It sped like a wave over the tiers and crashed in clipped syllables against the quartzite outer panels.
"Thorn! Kalen Thorn!"
Thorn held his hands outspread. "You have decided," he said. "It is not for me to refuse."
The great council broke up in a torrent of hoarsely shouting, perspiring men, eddying in hero worship around Thorn, who had offered himself for the supreme sacrifice.
Clyde Moorhouse still remained in his seat, ashen-faced, staring thoughtfully into blankness. Only two men were at his side; no one else remarked his presence.
Warren Bascom said in strained tones. "Good Heaven, Clyde! If I had known—it was your job; you should have let me——"
Moorhouse said wearily: "I would have refused. I had thought of this single-repository idea myself, and it made me very much afraid. It is efficient, yes; but I trembled at the temptation of such vast power in the hands of one man. I couldn't trust myself, even."
"It would have been all right with you!" cried Carey. "But Thorn!" He turned almost fiercely on Moorhouse.
"You must refuse to manufacture the apparatus; you must not let him have it."
The gray-tinged scientist shook his head. "The council has decided, and I must obey its commands. Kalen Thorn is a great scientist; we may have misunderstood him. His speech really moved me."
"Speeches!" Allan Carey muttered, and was perforce compelled to accept the older man's decision.
THREE months later the great experiment was about to be concluded. Kalen Thorn had made his headquarters in the great Hall of Science in the territory of the Tropo-Chemists. It required infinite labor on the part of Moorhouse to assemble sufficient materials for the manufacture of his helmets from the hitherto self-sufficient and disparate Tribes. But with Bascom and Carey as assistants he managed it at last, set up factories, and turned out the slender broadcasting helmets by the millions.
They were beautiful bits of workmanship. Silvery gray, flexible and form-fitting, composed of the new rubber-beryllium alloy, they weighed only a fraction of a pound. Cupped over each ear were the broadcasting units which caught the electrical impulses from the thought-processes of the brain and sent them hurtling through space.
The receiving helmet, of which only one was constructed, was a magnificent thing. It sparkled with golden iridescence and the crest held in a hollow compartment the tiny vacuum tubes and resistance coils which stepped down the impinging waves to the infinitesimally tiny vibrations that would activate the neurons to conceptions and ideas exactly similar to those of the sender.
Kalen Thorn was a revelation to the three suspicious friends. He conducted himself modestly and discreetly; he made graceful little speeches lauding the genius of his good friend and confrere, Clyde Moorhouse; he listened with eager humbleness to all suggestions.
"There, you see," Moorhouse told the others, "we have misjudged the man."
Bascom agreed with him, but Carey only snorted and worked on with a certain savage intentness.
At last the great day came. The helmets had been completed; each tribal delegate had sped back with his Tribe's full complement to his own territory.
The Hall of Science seemed bare and dismal, though there were almost two hundred present.
Kalen Thorn, seated on the dais, looked somehow startling and magnificent in his glittering helmet; like Mars in the full panoply of war, or Jove in Olympian council grasping a thunderbolt. On either side of him stood Clyde Moorhouse and Allan Carey, both bareheaded. Carey was sullen while Moorhouse was thoughtful.
In front of them, filling the first tier of seats in a compact knot, sat the Tribe of Tropo-Chemists, with Bascom. The broadcasting helmets rested lightly on their heads. Their faces were at once serious and excited. It was obvious that they were concentrating their minds on exalted problems, on rapid resumes of all their knowledge, so as to assist the process.
A single button rested under the Mathematician's finger. From it wires spread, disappeared in sheaths under the ebony platform. There was a breathless pause. Moorhouse hesitated, took a last swift glance at the inscrutably dark features of Thorn, breathed deeply, and pressed the button.
The signal flashed to every Tribe in the world, assembled in its own conclave. Helmets were adjusted and the scientists, men and women of the world, leaned back fearfully, enthusiastically, or with blank indifference, according to their temperaments. Though instructions had been detailed and careful, most of them were disappointed. For the helmets produced no sensation whatever. In fact, they were exceedingly comfortable.
A Historicon said with some surprise to his wife, similarly adorned: "Why, these contraptions could easily be worn all the time without any trouble."
KALEN THORN gripped the arms of his chair. For a moment he was filled with alarm. Would the helmets really work? Would they accomplish everything their inventor claimed for them? He was of two minds. If they failed, his rival, the man he hated, would be forever discredited before the world. It was a tempting thought. He rolled it secretly around his tongue; then resolutely discarded it.
The helmets must work.
He watched Moorhouse press the button that would determine their fate. It fascinated him, that slight pressure of the forefinger. Then he had no time for visual observations.
His brain seemed to warm, to expand, to flow gratefully atop a widening river of coruscating, sparkling sensations. His eyes widened. Problems that had puzzled him for years suddenly floated to the surface, pellucid, orderly in their neat solution, so simple he was surprised he had not stumbled on the answers long before this.
New knowledge seeped into his brain by imperceptible stages. The stars in their course—in one flashing vision he penetrated their innermost secrets, saw the flaming atoms at work. Unrelated facts and ideas, hitherto locked separately in innumerable minds, clicked into place, made a pattern that explained for the first time the seeming paradox of matter which partook both of the nature of waves and of discrete particles. He wanted to shout out his discovery to the world—and locked his lips.
He, who had neither known nor cared for the history of the planet he inhabited, saw the Neanderthal man painfully rising from the brute; saw the Cro-Magnon artist put the last loving touches to the red-ochered aurochs on the cave wall; thrilled to the building of Solomon's temple; followed Alexander in his magnificent march through the Asiatic hordes; surged with the swelling verse of Shakespeare's "Hamlet," sole extant play of that mythical genius; heard the toy guns thudding in the first World War; shivered to the mightier crashes of the second war; entered the last Council of the Scientists to follow the hasty gobbling of knowledge and the half-baked experiments that burned whole sections of the globe with ineradicable atomic fires and traced the inevitable splitting into Tribes.
Chemistry yielded its secrets; so did biology. The secret of the creation of life leaped full-born into his brain; the facts were all there, but no one had encompassed them for the final delicate step. He pigeonholed that idea in one corner of his steadily swelling mind. Physics in all its phases was an open book, and geology, and anthropology.
He floated on and on in the ever-widening stream of inpouring minds; he felt godlike, supernal. He saw things in flashes of omniscience—fewer and fewer were the problems he could not solve.
He was the brain of humanity, the reservoir of the race, the communal aspiration of its soul.
The little audience was surprised at the subtle changes in Thorn's countenance, the illumination that spread over it like a flame.
"Why, he's like a god," some one murmured in awe.
Thorn felt other influences. Not only the wisdom of the people flowed into his brain, but also their innermost thoughts, their desires, their secret hopes. The minds of all mankind were open books to him. No one had anticipated this; not Thorn, not Moorhouse himself. If Moorhouse had, he would deliberately have destroyed his invention. Yet it was severely logical. The helmets were unthinking mechanisms and made no fine distinctions between electrical impulses emanating from diverse thought processes.
Thorn smiled—people were to call his smile godlike—and said nothing.
For increase of intellectual power brought no appreciable difference in his moral nature. It only added sharpened weapons for the furtherance of the things he had always subconsciously dreamed of doing.
He turned to Moorhouse. The scientist, slight, unassuming, gray around the temples, looked insignificant in the presence of the gold-helmeted Thorn.
"The experiment is an unqualified success," he said. "My mind teems with the wisdom of all mankind. Consider me a storehouse, a library of knowledge from which the scientists of the world may draw what they may need. I am no longer Kalen Thorn; I am the collective intelligence of the race."
Thus Thorn, canny as ever. He remarked with inward fury the fact that Moorhouse had not worn a helmet. Carey's refusal did not matter very much, though he resented the sullen suspicious stare of the young man. But there were certain mathematical problems in his mind clamoring for solution, problems that required the finishing touch which only the brilliant solitary researches of Moorhouse could add. Yet he dissembled under a gracious exterior. The time was not ripe.
"I trust you will use your wisdom in accordance with your professions," Moorhouse said meaningly.
In spite of Thorn's seeming acquiescence, he was afflicted with a strange uneasiness. It was that feeling which had made him doff his helmet just before the test. Carey had been frankly rebellious.
SIX months had passed since Thorn had become the collective intelligence of the race; months of tremendous activity, of broadening of the boundaries of human thought. Thorn seemed everything he had proclaimed himself to be.
From his quarters in the Hall of Science, clad night and day in the golden helmet, he organized and planned. Tremendous energy infused him; his orders crackled out in an unending stream.
One of the first of these was that every one should wear his helmet, even as he did, night and day. He explained by saying that until the world was fully organized on its new basis he needed every bit of their separate ideas. It sounded reasonable. Besides, as has been noted, the helmets were quite comfortable.
Then he sat and pondered, and issued more orders. Rockets were developed to greater speeds and range of flight and made available to all the Tribes. Food, in the form of synthetic pellets of complete nourishment and varied palatable flavors, put an end to back-breaking farming and dependence on nature. Disease became an anachronism, except for arteriosclerosis, cancer, and a few rare and obscure ailments. On these there was not sufficient data for him to coordinate. He mapped out lines of attack and set all the Tribes of Medicine and Biology to work.
For Thorn still adhered to the divisions into Tribes. It made for greater thoroughness in research, he explained, though Carey grumbled that it was because he wished no one else to pull out of the narrow rut of ideas.
Within three months the world blossomed into an earthly paradise. Food, communications, disease, entertainment, climatic control, luxuries, all were ordered in such wise that the name of Kalen Thorn became deified in the popular consciousness. Men and women traveled in the new swift rockets from the remotest places of the earth to pay their homage, and were received with becoming graciousness and modesty within the Hall of Science.
Moorhouse smiled quizzically at his young friend, Carey. "Now you see," he reproved, "how limited our understanding of the human mind really is. I admit at first I was somewhat infected with your skepticism, but it would have been impossible to find a better man in whom to have submerged the collective intelligence of the race than Kalen Thorn. He has surpassed all my expectations.
Allan Carey raged inwardly. He could not answer Moorhouse's arguments. They were logically unanswerable. There was not the tiniest flaw to be found in Thorn's magnificent structure of the world. Yet suspicion lingered; all the more searing because he laid himself open to ridicule by admitting it. If only Moorhouse—true genius that he was—had not been so ridiculously supine; had seized the chance for himself.
Yet he could not resist one little stab.
"Wasn't it a little strange, though," he mused as if to himself, "that your plans and all the materials for the manufacture of the golden helmet should have been destroyed by fire within a week after Thorn's assumption of the collective intelligence?"
Moorhouse started. "Nonsense!" he said half angrily. "It was during a thunderstorm. Lightning struck the factory and burned it down. It would have happened in any circumstances."
Carey probed relentlessly. "I suppose," he said quietly, "that is why you and I have inserted the microscopic breaker in our helmets' broadcasting units."
Moorhouse looked shamefaced. Though Thorn had elaborately avoided the issue, it had become increasingly embarrassing for them to appear in public without the helmets. Others looked at them askance. There were mutterings, too, about self-centered men, unwilling to merge in the greater good of humanity. The fact that Clyde Moorhouse was the original inventor was by now completely forgotten.
These scandal-mutterings had been deftly instigated by Thorn.
At last they were compelled to don the helmets. But at Carey's insistence and in accordance with Moorhouse's own secret feelings, the Mathematician installed a contact-breaker, so small that it was not visible except under high magnification, yet so sensitive that it made contact only when the will of the wearer concentrated on the transmission of thoughts. Thus Thorn received only such thoughts and thought-pictures as they wished him to receive.
At first he was highly exultant. Certain mediocre mathematical formulas filtered through Clyde's mind; nothing that Thorn did not know already. Could it be that the famous Moorhouse, whom he had always secretly envied, was merely a charlatan, a pretender to knowledge he had never possessed? It was a warm and thrilling feeling, even though the problems he had postulated on what Moorhouse knew could not now be solved.
Then slowly suspicion came to him. There was something wrong. Whereas the life of every one else was an open book for him to read, concentrate as hard as he would, no hint of the personal thoughts of the scientist came through. What, for instance, he really thought of Thorn; of the fact that he had practically stolen his invention and the ensuing credit and power. There were gray hiatuses that could not be penetrated. And the same held good for the young puppy, Allan Carey. It was passing strange.
Thorn concentrated on them while they were in his presence, but all he found were certain stereotyped ideas and bright thoughts that were manifestly artificial. Their real minds were as blank as their faces. He examined their helmets, under friendly pretense, and found nothing amiss.
Thorn was puzzled; more, he was angry. A most ungodlike fury seized him. But he restrained himself. In another month when his plans were matured—— He smiled grimly. Moorhouse would be kept alive, unless it was true that his mind had nothing to offer, and Carey would die.
AT the end of six months, however, the cloven hoof began to peep surreptitiously from under the pure white garment of sanctity. Thorn had consolidated his position; more, he was becoming auto-intoxicated with his own supreme power.
He rose to infinite heights, from which he looked down at the tiny, average mortals toiling and grubbing on the earth with contempt. They were insignificant, worm-like creatures while he was—yes, a god! At first he said it guiltily, defiantly, to himself, then he grew assured and proclaimed it to the world in mystic, hieratic phrases.
He forgot that he was the collective intelligence of the race; that all his wisdom and knowledge was merely the result of a certain golden helmet—the invention of another—which brought to him the reapings and gleanings of every man, woman, and child in the world. He fancied himself now as the source of all wisdom, and humanity as lesser creatures basking in the effulgence of his god-like powers.
From affability and gracious availability to all and sundry, he withdrew himself now into the august shadows. A golden shrine was built within the Hall of Science; armed men, fantastically dressed, guarded him night and day; visitors could penetrate into the holy of holies only after much genuflection, and even then the presence was only a voice. He was too sacred for human eyes; he was definitely on the way to becoming a god.
It was true that the earth still bloomed and prospered. Science made gigantic progress—each new fact discovered by a toiling specialist in a Tribe immediately was tabulated in Thorn's mind in juxtaposition to a hundred related facts disclosed simultaneously by other specialists; each vivid and novel theory that sprang to fruition in any corner of the world at once rubbed shoulders with a theory evolved at the opposite end of the earth. New inventions for increasing the comfort of the human race, for minimizing labor, came in an unending flow.
But there were drawbacks. Thorn was activated not by any abstract love of humanity, but by an insatiable lust for power. The people had everything, that is, along material lines, but they were slaves, whether they knew it or not. By imperceptible stages their lives were regimented and arranged for them, their waking and sleeping hours, their work, their very pleasures.
An efficient army of mercenaries, loyal only to Thorn, quietly sprang into being. They patrolled the air lines in swift rocket cruisers; they mingled arrogantly with the Tribes. There were mutterings among the older, more liberty-loving, members of the Tribes. They had been accustomed to fierce individualism, and now they were being herded. The sight of armed men with power of life and death and bearing the diamond insignia of a single man irked them.
They began to question privately, to long for the cruder, less scientific, but freer air of the self-sufficient Tribes. From inner doubts they proceeded to murmurings in secret among friends. Nothing stirred on the outside, but underneath was discontent that might lead to sudden explosion.
Thorn, seated god-like in his shrine, received the impact of these rebellious thoughts. When the time was ripe, he swooped with the speed and ruthlessness of a hawk. All over the world, in the dead of night, his soldiers penetrated the homes of bewildered, frightened families and arrested the ones whose thoughts had betrayed them. Thousands disappeared that night and were never heard of again.
The humble scientist, the storehouse of the world's collective wisdom, was gone; in his place was a dictator, a tyrant, to whom the people whose genius he abstracted were subject slaves.
Some there were to whom a glimmering came. They removed their helmets secretly, in spite of orders. But Thorn was prepared for that. He made removal of or tinkering with the apparatus punishable by death, and his mercenaries were given powers of summary execution.
Furthermore, he devised a recording machine which, when attached to his helmet, checked each individual wave length on a tabulator. Every man, woman, and child received two numbers—the first, the generic number of the Tribe; the second an individual one. Thus he could tell when any helmet was not transmitting properly.
It must not be assumed, however, that the vast mass of the people was discontented with the increasing tyranny of his rule. Quite the contrary. Most were sufficiently bovine in temperament to welcome the complete submergence of their wills and responsibilities to one central force. They were fed, clothed, and well taken care of physically and even mentally—the fact that the small spark of spiritual freedom was absent did not bother them in the least. The rebels had already been slaughtered.
Moorhouse watched all this with increasingly pain-stricken eyes. He saw his invention, intended for the common benefit of all mankind, utilized to enslave and destroy. In that mild-mannered, unassuming man glowed a vital spark, of which even Allan Carey, his worshiper, was unaware. In the Scientist and Mathematician was the stuff of which martyrs were made, once his eminently equable mind had weighed all possibilities and decided on a course of action.
Carey was in a perpetual stew. He, too, had seen the inevitable trend of events. He urged on Moorhouse the necessity of immediate action; of the physical danger to themselves if they delayed.
"You don't think," he said, "that Thorn will rest quietly while you are alive. He realizes that you are a perpetual threat to his continuance in power; that even with the intelligence of all the world to back him up, you have an individual reservoir of your own that surpasses his."
Moorhouse smiled. "Your friendship blinds you," he said mildly. Then he frowned. "I'm still waiting and hoping that Thorn will swerve from this new course of his; that it is only a passing phase."
THE following night the visor-signal buzzed in the Mathematician's room. He clicked it open.
The figure of Kalen Thorn, golden-helmeted, seated in a great golden chair, filled the white screen. Cold inscrutable power emanated from his still-muddied features.
"Clyde Moorhouse," he said without preliminaries, "you are to report to my presence at once, you and your companion, Allan Carey." He glanced meaningly at the silvered helmet that Moorhouse always wore. "I intend to see once and for all just what there is about your helmet that conceals your thoughts from me; or whether in truth you have only the mediocre mind you disclose."
The eyes of the Mathematician flashed dangerously, but his voice was calm and even. "And if I refuse to report?" he asked quietly.
Thorn's lips curled into a thin smile. "My soldiers will call for you within an hour if you do not appear."
Moorhouse said patiently: "Of course you realize that you have no right to authority or to an army of private mercenaries. Your function is merely that of a clearing house for the human mind, the servant of humanity. I am a free member of a free Tribe—the Tensor-Mathematicos. We do not accept orders."
Thorn smiled mirthlessly. "Don't be a fool, Moorhouse. You have evidently been living in a world of illusion. I'm afraid you never had the genius your reputation proclaimed for you. Remember, within an hour, my men will call for you, and their methods of persuasion are not too pleasant."
His mocking laughter still floated off the screen as his features faded.
For five minutes of precious time Moorhouse stood motionless, his eyes blank on the vacant screen. In those five minutes the destiny of the world was being rearranged.
At the end of that period of silent contemplation, the Mathematician sprang into action. Gone forever was his mildness, his inconspicuousness. His eyes blazed with strange lights; behind them the powerful dynamo of his brain sparked and crackled with energy; his manner was sharp, his speech incisive.
He knifed the switch to Carey. That young man appeared on the screen. "Hello, Moorhouse!" he greeted.
"I want you here in five minutes," Clyde snapped.
"What's the matter?"
"Ask no questions. We're going on a visit. Remember—five minutes!"
He snapped off the screen abruptly, leaving a very much bewildered youngster at the other end. If the wave was tapped, as no doubt it was, Thorn would believe that he had been frightened into obedience.
Allan Carey arrived with twenty seconds to spare. He was breathless. He had never heard Clyde Moorhouse in such a short mood before. He was even more surprised in his physical presence.
"For Heaven's sake, what's the matter?" he gasped.
For answer the scientist leaned over, ripped the silvery helmet—the badge of slavery—off Allan's head. Then, almost in the same motion, he ripped off his own and flung them both violently into a corner.
Allan stared at him incredulously; then, with dawning comprehension, came another gasp.
"You—intend—fighting now," he whispered, almost awed.
"Yes. It came before I was really prepared, but Thorn forced the issue. Within an hour we are supposed to be dead men."
Characteristically Carey overlooked the personal danger. He was staring at his companion with new eyes.
"You mean," he asked, "that all along you had been intending to do something?"
"Of course! A blind man could see what Thorn was developing into. I did not dare tell even you of my plans, for fear of a leak. The preparations are not complete; there are vital factors missing. I needed another month. But Thorn must have sensed something, or felt himself powerful enough now to obliterate us. So we must act."
Allan thought of all his angry exasperations with this strangely transformed little man with the gray-tinged hair, and swore: "Well, I'll be damned!" Enthusiasm flooded him. "We'll sweep Thorn off the face of the earth in no time."
Moorhouse shook his head soberly. "Don't fool yourself. We are up against an almost insuperable task. We are fighting, not one man's mind, but the collective intelligence of a billion brains. We are fighting, not one man's brawn, but the physical strength of a billion bodies. The people are slaves, yet they do not realize it; they are content. To them we shall be traitors, destroyers of their ordered world, anathema."
Carey grinned confidently. "I'll stack your brain against the rest of the world any day," he said. "And as for strength——" He flexed his muscles with lithe, animal grace.
"Fond delusions!" murmured Moorhouse, pleased in spite of himself. "But time is getting short. We have much to do before the soldiers arrive."
"WHERE are we going?" Allan asked, as they walked rapidly through the warm, glowing night. It was midwinter, but Thorn had found a way of relaying tropical winds to the farthest reaches of the earth so as to maintain perpetual spring and summer. Also, by ionization of the air molecules, a phosphorescent glow had been imparted which illuminated night into a paler softer day.
"To Warren Bascom."
Allan stopped. "But he will betray us; he wears the helmet. He doesn't know anything——"
"Of course not! I didn't dare tell him. But Bascom is a friend of mine and loyal to his ideals."
They were not announced. Moorhouse knew of a back entrance to the quartzite establishment. They went in silently, trod the moving escalator to the sleep-floor, stood before the couch on which Bascom had flung himself in sleep.
Clyde Moorhouse studied his friend a moment. There were many more fine lines in his seamed face than there had been six months before; his mouth was drawn and tired, and his hair thinner and whiter. The silvery helmet hugged even his dream thoughts with its closeness.
Moorhouse bent down, caught the sleeping man's head with both hands, and jerked. The helmet slid off and went sailing across the room. Bascom cried out, awoke with fear-stricken eyes.
"It's all right, old friend," Moorhouse soothed him. "I had to be rough and quick. Otherwise your thoughts might have betrayed us to Thorn."
Bascom sprang from the bed. "What's up?"
Clyde explained rapidly. "I was sure I could count on you to help. You remember I hinted a long time ago that you guard your thoughts carefully."
Warren Bascom's face went bitter. "It was a terrible strain," he said feelingly. "Seeing Thorn rise to be a god—forsooth—and keeping my thoughts and emotions as blank as possible. But now, whether I live or die is not of much importance. At least I shall have struck a blow for liberty."
"Good! Now get into your clothes. We have only fifteen minutes to spare."
In three minutes they were on their way again, avoiding the pacing guards who haunted the park areas of the great city. Also they avoided as they would the plague the fast-moving ribbon conveyors that hurtled passengers across the countryside at graded speeds of twenty to two hundred miles an hour. They used their own legs and went along deserted footpaths.
At the end of the allotted time they were seated in a small rocket plane. It had been cached in a cleverly concealed hollow in a deserted valley. As they went upward into the night with soft roarings, mercenaries of Kalen Thorn broke into Clyde Moorhouse's private quarters.
FOR a while nothing was said. Moorhouse piloted the rocket with sure touch. They were up in the stratosphere, thirty miles high, above the usual traffic lanes and patrol ships, making better than a thousand miles an hour.
By now they knew the alarm was out for them, and earth and sea and air were being combed in a gigantic man hunt. Yet Carey smiled comfortably; he felt an abounding confidence in his friend. If only he could see Thorn's face for an instant when he heard that his prey had escaped him!
An hour and a half's flight, and Moorhouse broke the silence.
"We're dropping here."
The two others stared down through the golden night at the sullen-forested terrain below. Desolate mountain ranges swept away as far as the eye could see; to the extreme east stretched a surging sea.
"Where are we?" Bascom asked.
"Labrador!"
The pair looked at each other, wondering. But Moorhouse vouchsafed no further information. The rocket was dropping with breath-taking velocity, straight for a cleft in the hills. When it seemed almost as if they would crash, flame and sound thundered out from the forward jets, and, cradled in blasting, retarding gases, the ship eased gently into the gash, down to a smooth terrain and alongside a rough log cabin of an older day.
"Headquarters!" Moorhouse said with new-found brevity.
They stretched cramped limbs and entered. A maze of machinery greeted them—complicated coils and condensers and tubes and dynamos. All scaled down, almost to toy proportions. Yet bulky enough to leave bare room for three bunks flush against the wall.
Carey and Bascom looked at their friend in bewilderment. He smiled.
"I've been up here almost every night for the past four months, transporting supplies in the rocket ship, working until just before dawn. Then back to my own place to catch a few hours' sleep."
"Have you been able to duplicate the receiving helmet?" Bascom asked eagerly.
The Mathematician's features clouded. "No," he admitted. "In the first place, my calculations were destroyed—by fire, Thorn said—and it would take years to retrace the formulas; in the second place there were certain elements in the tubes that require the use of stelline, and the only mine in the world of that rare material is in the territory of the Lepidopterists. I made discreet inquiries recently. The mine has been excavated at a furious rate and every ounce of material transported to an unknown destination."
Bascom's heart sank. He had been counting on his friend's ability to duplicate the receiving helmet; to fight Thorn's omniscience with equal omniscience. Now that hope was lost, and, with it, fresh evidence of Thorn's resourcefulness and ruthless plans.
One man against a world of men, embodied in a single individual. Bascom had no illusions. His own specialized knowledge in Light-tropic Chemistry meant very little in the ensuing titanic conflict. Carey's youthful vigor was an asset of course, though little enough in all conscience. The complex of instruments and machines meant nothing to him; he could not recognize a single one. They seemed pitiful toys. All then depended on the slight shoulders of one man, a genius, true, but still only a man.
Yet his voice was gay as he said: "Good! You won't be confused then by a lot of conflicting ideas and dullards' concepts."
Carey said with a joyous grimace: "Bring on your world."
But Moorhouse was not fooled by the old man's pitiful attempt at encouragement.
"If I had another month's grace," he began, when a voice crashed in among them with the startling suddenness of a clap of thunder.
It came from nowhere and from everywhere. The hut was filled with its resonance. It was the voice of Kalen Thorn.
"Clyde Moorhouse!" it boomed. "By your guilty flight you have confessed yourself a traitor, a hatcher of foul conspiracies against common humanity. I knew of your plot to wreck the world in a mad attempt to seize all power, but in the goodness of my heart I hoped to show you the error of your ways.
"Now you have fled to consummate your despicable plans—you and your co-conspirators, Allan Carey and Warren Bascom. I, Kalen Thorn, the all-seeing, the omniscient, despise your puny efforts. I shall crush you like an insect underfoot. Even now you are under my constant supervision, under my very eye. Surrender yourself at once, or I shall not yield to further leniency."
THE voice ceased, and silence reigned in the hut more appalling than any sound. Carey had sprung to his feet at the first syllable, eyes swift around the room for hidden men, body tensed for action. Bascom was suddenly bowed down by the weight of years. His eyes were wide with inner agony. Only Moorhouse listened to the end without movement, calmly, inscrutably.
"There's a loud speaker somewhere around," Allan cried, feverishly thrusting into the maze of instruments. "Thorn discovered your hide-out, installed the unit before we got here."
"You won't find a speaker," Clyde replied, "and you'll only damage my apparatus."
As Carey emerged a bit sheepishly, Clyde continued: "Nor does Thorn know of this place. If he had, he wouldn't have wasted time on silly threatening speeches; he would have had men placed here to arrest us on landing."
It was so obvious that it left them only the more confused.
"Then how in Heaven's name——"
Bascom began helplessly.
"The collective intelligence of a whole world is nothing to underestimate," Moorhouse returned gravely. "This is only a foretaste of what we are up against. I am somewhat in the dark as to the exact details of this broadcast voice, which, without doubt, has been duplicated all over the earth wherever such conditions exist as we have here."
"And those are?"
"The presence of vacuum tubes. He knew that my flight was not aimless or merely erratic; that I had been prepared against the day. And there are few instruments in a nonspecialized scientific laboratory that do not depend in part on the use of vacuum tubes."
"But the tubes were cold, without any current," Carey expostulated.
"Tubes that have been used are never completely de-activated. There is an electrical lag. In other words, the moving electrons which make up the current continue to flow for long periods after the power is shut off, though at a reduced rate and in minute quantities. Thorn evidently discovered this principle and availed himself of it. A super-penetrating wave would derive as much power from the feeble electron flow as ordinary broadcasting waves do from currents of normal intensity."
"And the reproduction of the voice without a sounding unit?"
"That," declared Clyde, "is the most inexplicable of all."
He stared hard at an innocent-seeming vacuum tube inconspicuously set in a machine. He reached for it suddenly, plucked it out of its socket.
"Just as I thought," he announced with a shade of relief. "Look at the bulb."
They did and saw nothing unusual. Moorhouse tapped it with his finger. It gave out a clear, bell-like note. He tapped it farther up on the bulge. The tone deepened.
"Sono-glass," he said. "The new composition evolved by the Quartz-Molders under Thorn's direction. Its peculiar crystalline form permits it to vibrate along internal planes without distorting the rigidity of the whole. Thorn made the change-over to tubes of sono-glass in anticipation of some such emergency as this, and without my having realized it."
Bascom was frightened; he trembled in every limb. How could they fight against such supernal intelligence? They were doomed. Yet he resolved to die rather than show the terror that ate at his vitals.
"All right," said Moorhouse. "We'll swallow a few pellets first—I'm hungry—and then we'll get to work. There's a certain piece of apparatus that must be completed."
ALL that night and all the following day they worked under Clyde Moorhouse's whiplash energy. Neither of his assistants knew exactly what it was they were doing, but Moorhouse radiated confidence, and they were content.
Twice a certain delicate instrument sent its pointer quivering over a dial. At once all work stopped and every machine idled to a halt, every source of current was promptly shut off. Holding their breaths almost, they watched the telltale pointer until it slowly sank back to quiescence. A sigh of relief, and work, indefatigable, furious, went on and on.
"No use taking chances," said Moorhouse. "I am giving Thorn credit for knowing at least as much as I do. This detectometer gives warning of every possible type of vibration within a radius of one hundred miles. Light waves, sound waves in the atmosphere, electrical disturbances, all react on its sensitive cells. Just now there was a focus of vibration moving through a point some forty miles southwest of here and three miles up—a rocket ship. Thorn is searching for us. No doubt he has equipped his cruisers with instruments similar to mine. That is why we had to quit until it was gone."
Late at night the apparatus was completed. Moorhouse stepped back to survey it with fond, understanding eyes. The others looked wearily blank.
"Well," Carey asked doubtfully, "now that we have it, what is it?"
It was strange enough in all conscience. A series of short thick steel bars made a complete circle parallel to the floor. Each bar was attached by wires to a dynamo. In the center of the charmed ring towered a huge quartzite tube. It in turn was attached by radiating spokes to an uninterrupted circular tube running parallel to and within the series of steel bars. From this at spaced intervals rose more tubes which twined together in a dome effect over the huge central quartz.
Bascom gaped at this until his eyes hurt. Never had he or any other mortal seen such intricate, insane curves and convolutions as the knot into which the tubes were twisted at the top. They seemed alive, snakelike, in their writhings. He could have sworn that they moved in a shimmering dance too rapid for him to follow.
But the most grotesque nightmare of all was the sight of a single quartz jet which emerged from the shining confusion, sharp and clear for eight inches, to blur suddenly into a haze and taper off into nothingness, dangling, so to speak, in mid-air.
"This," said Moorhouse without exultation, "is the weapon by which I mean to blast Kalen Thorn into nothingness." Silence greeted him.
He smiled. "I don't blame you for polite disbelief. But it is so. And Thorn, I am positive, knowing nothing of its fundamental principle, will be unable to defend himself against it.
Not," he added apologetically, "that I wish to boast. But it involves tensors of a nature that I alone have investigated. No one else in the world even knows of their existence."
"But what does it do?" Carey asked with just a tinge of impatience.
"I'm coming to that. Up to a certain point it is the usual machine for building up high voltages. The current flares through the central quartz reservoir, issues through the radiating spokes into the outer circular tube. There it goes round and round, receiving tremendous kicks from the parallel magnets which are magnetized in progressive series. Thus the voltage is eventually stepped up to a hundred million volts. So far there is nothing that is not familiar to specialist Tribes. Now, however, comes the novelty.
"The tremendous voltage is led into the interlocked array of domed tubes. They are barely visible; they seem to blur on your vision. There is a reason for that. They trace a series of curves of the fourth order, curves that conform to tensor formulas which make them undulatory. The crowning achievement of all is that final tube which blurs off into nothingness. That, my friends, is the last tensor, an equation of strain worked into matter which penetrates the fourth dimension, the space-time continuum. Put your hand over it."
Bascom waved his hand tentatively a foot above the invisible end and recoiled with a cry. "There's an invisible wall!" he gasped.
"Exactly! The fourth-dimensional boundary, harder than the hardest beryllium steel, impenetrable except by means of that one equation."
Carey was awed but practical. "Interesting," he said, "but what——"
"Wait a moment! In the space-time continuum our three-dimensional planes lie side by side. I've calculated the respective positions of our base and the Hall of Science where Thorn holds forth in god-like seclusion. The nozzle of the tube is so directed as to be not more than a dozen linear feet from the throne he has built."
Carey took a deep breath. "I see," he said slowly. "You will generate a bolt of lightning powered with a hundred million volts, shoot it through the fourth dimension directly into his chamber and blast him out of existence." A shadow passed over Clyde's features. "Heaven help me for taking human life, but——"
"It means the salvation of all mankind," Bascom put in with energy.
"The Tribes will not thank us. They are happy and contented as it is."
"Future generations will see our act with clearer sight."
"Perhaps!" Moorhouse sighed. Then once more he was alert, dynamic. "Tomorrow » morning, at eight, we act. Thorn invariably enters his inner chamber by then."
ALLAN CAREY tossed all night. He could not sleep. He listened to the deep steady breathing of the older men and envied them their calm. The fate of the world depended on the next few hours, and they snored. As for him he was too excited. He listened to the murmuring of waters outside, the wind rushing through the trees, the far-distant roar of the ocean.
Moorhouse had evidently staked all on this one blasting venture. If it did not work, if Thorn escaped its hurtling impact, they were as dead men. Thorn, with the mighty combined intelligence of a world behind him, would ferret them out, destroy them ruthlessly.
He awoke to find Clyde Moorhouse shaking his shoulder, and the dawn sun slanting over his bunk.
"Wake up, sluggard!" The Mathematician smiled. "It's almost time." Muttering incoherent apologies, Allan sprang into his clothes, sloshed his face with water to clear his addled brain, gulped a few food pellets. Bascom was already stationed at the dynamo, watching the time signal.
One minute to eight.
Labrador and the Hall of Science were on the same meridian, hence there would be no difference in time.
Allan jumped to the magnetic switches. That was his job. Clyde took care of the tube controls.
Eight o'clock! Zero hour!
"Dynamos!" Moorhouse said in a low, tense voice.
Warren Bascom knifed the switches. The machines whirred into sparking life. The current sluiced into the central tube, flared with blue leaping flame in the vacuum. It sprayed through the spoked tubes into the outer circle, made a complete circumference of sheeted light. The dynamos hummed with gathering power.
"Magnets!"
Allan made contact. Electricity surged into the short steel bars, one after the other, in rapid progression. Mighty fields of magnetic force picked up the swirling current, kicked it along with boosts of energy. Faster and faster the magnetic fields alternated; faster and faster sped the current in the circular tube. The blue flame became a racing, pulseless vortex of energy.
Each magnetic field, flashing on and off, stepped up the voltage, each revolution made the speed of the streaming electrons even more inconceivable.
Moorhouse watched the special voltmeter like a hawk. A by-pass through measured resistance coils gave voltage of measurable figures. Multiplication by a fixed factor gave the true result.
One hundred million volts hurtled through confining tubes—man-made lightning of irresistible power.
With a queer reluctant gesture Clyde opened the perpendicular sluice. The leaping electricity roared into the complex of tensor-curved tubes overhead. An instant's dazzling sheeting of flame, then the open dangling tube lighted up with a brilliant blue. There was a rending crackling sound, and the tremendous bolt of electricity vanished abruptly into nothingness, into the space-time continuum of the fourth dimension.
"I hope——" started Bascom.
That was all. What it was he had hoped, no one ever knew. There was no chance even for a cry of warning. Light impulses traveled no faster than the disaster that overtook them.
A split second only had intervened since the missile of destruction had sped on its way. Split second of fate! Back from the fourth dimension, retracing its path with treacherous fury, came the gigantic lightning bolt.
Roaring out of nothingness, it slammed into the dangling tube, sped with frightful velocity through tensor tubes and strange dimensional curves, back into the circular sluice and into the maw of the central quartz. The walls could not contain its shattering impact.
There was a spouting column of flame, a gigantic rending noise, and the universe collapsed in blinding heaving light on the three scientists in the laboratory.
ALLAN CAREY moaned and opened his eyes. Unbearable weights tried to keep them closed. Every nerve ending in his system shrieked with agony. He lifted his hand slowly, felt his head. Sticky fluid came away with it—blood.
For a moment he lay on his back, looking stupidly at the open sky, the blazing sun. The peculiar odor of burning beryllium rubber affronted his nostrils. They twitched, and with the reflex came comprehension.
The death-dealing missile aimed at Thorn, the immediate revenge, that last monstrous flare-up. How was it he had not died? Where were——
A weak groan answered him, a querulous, pain-stricken voice:
"For Heaven's sake, Carey, don't lie there forever! Take this magnet off my leg."
Allan tottered joyfully to his feet, heedless of aching limbs. Bascom lay close by, pinned under one of the heavy bar magnets, his seamed face blackened and twisted, his white hair smeared with blood and grime.
One heave of powerful shoulders and Bascom sat up, gasping.
"I'm all right," he managed to say. "Where's Clyde?"
"Here, my friend!"
A cheerful voice seemed to come out of the ground at their feet. The Mathematician crawled from under a section of smoking roof. An open gash sliced his forehead, and he limped.
The crippled trio looked at the charred and twisted ruins. Smoke still gushed from smoldering embers. Not a single piece of apparatus remained in recognizable, much less usable, shape.
Three helpless, hopeless men, deprived of all aids, wounded, stranded in the Labrador wilds, in the middle of pathless mountains and forests, hunted outlaws with a world against them!
Warren Bascom said with quiet bitterness: "We might as well die right now. It will be swifter and more painless than at Thorn's hands."
Carey squared his shoulders, shook his fist in futile defiance at an unknowing south. "Damn you, Kalen Thorn!" he shouted. "You've won the first trick. It took a billion minds to do it; you couldn't have done it alone. But wait—wait——" He trailed off sheepishly.
"The apparatus didn't work," he finished dully.
Moorhouse stared at the wreck of his hopes with bright, sharp eyes. "But it did," he said.
Warren Bascom started eagerly. "Then Thorn is dead?"
"Unfortunately no! He couldn't duplicate the feat, but he did something else, quite as effective. He has anticipated an effort on our part to hit directly at him and built up a defense wall of perfect resilience and elasticity. Just what the nature of this wall is, I don't know. It might be a new material hitherto unknown to science, or it might be an interlocking skein of vibrations.
"In any event, with ideal elasticity, Newton's first law operated with classic efficiency. To every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. The resilient wall caught the lightning bolt as it emerged from the continuum and rebounded it along the path it had just traced with equal speed and energy. It wrecked our laboratory, just as Thorn had intended it should."
Bascom cried out suddenly: "A rocket ship, heading this way!"
Startled eyes followed his rigid finger. Far to the south, silhouetted against the morning sun, was a tiny speck. It grew momentarily on the sight; it was coming along fast.
"Into the woods!" Allan yelled and started to run.
"Come back!" Moorhouse called. "We have our own rocket."
Carey had forgotten about it. They reached it with furious pounding feet, slammed the air locks behind them.
A blue streak left the side of the oncoming cruiser, came sizzling through the miles of distance, and crashed into the ground not ten feet from their quivering hull. Rocks, trees, and earth fused into fiery liquid and evaporated in a blast of heat. Thorn had discovered atomic disintegration and had harnessed it as a lethal weapon. The next shot would catch them square.
"Hold tight!" the Mathematician yelled.
He jerked the levers of the rocket tubes wide open. There was no time for normal acceleration. Flame spurted from the banked tubes with continuous roars. The rocket shuddered and leaped straight up into the air. Bascom was thrown violently against the side, Carey into the controls. Moorhouse wrenched his arm in a grim death grip on the steering apparatus.
AT five miles Clyde straightened out its violent gyrations, sent it hurtling due north. The pursuit cruiser, heavily armed, could not keep pace. Within ten minutes it was helplessly behind. Within twenty they were over the eternal ice packs of the Northern seas. And still Clyde held the plane to its furious pace.
"What now?" asked Bascom with a shrug. "Every rocket cruiser in the world will be on our trail. We're bound to be caught."
The voice of Kalen Thorn resounded in the slender confines of the hull. This time they were not astonished; there were vacuum tubes in the broadcasting unit.
"I am glad you did not perish in the explosion, Clyde Moorhouse." There was a new sardonic quality to the voice. "It is sport to frustrate your puny plans. It is a relaxation from arduous duties. I am following every move you make. You cannot escape. The vibrations of your rockets are caught on the new sensitometer I have just constructed and give me directional bearings. You are now over the ice pack, ten degrees northeast of Baffin Bay. If you shut off your rockets you crash; if you land, you will freeze to death.
"I have arranged a novel experiment to test your powers of ingenuity. The air deflectors in the vicinity of the arctic circle will create a polar area of glacial cold and bitter storms. We shall see how long you can survive. A cordon of rocket cruisers armed with atomic disintegrators lies just outside the proscribed area to prevent your escape. You are to be confined to the circle of cold, until life has fled your stiffening bodies. Know that a supernal intelligence is diverting itself with you."
The voice of Thorn faded out on a chuckling note.
"Let's make a dash south," said Carey grimly, clenching his hands. "At least we can die fighting."
But Moorhouse held the nose of the rocket northward. His eyes were bright with thought. He said nothing.
Bascom wrenched at his arm. "Have you gone mad, Clyde?" he shrilled. "It's our last chance, and you're wasting time. Don't you believe that Thorn can do what he said; do you think he was just boasting?"
Moorhouse held the controls on their steady course. He did not even turn his head. A little smile quirked at the corners of his lips.
"I know that Kalen Thorn was not bragging," he replied. "I know that he can and will do what he threatened. He will deflect the warm currents he has relayed from the equator into the upper regions of the arctic atmosphere. The cold blasts, originating over the wastes of ice around the pole, will sink into the semi-vacuum beneath.
"The temperature will drop to eighty or more below zero. But that is not all. The vast influx of winds will create tremendous storms; the joinder in upper air of spatial cold and warm tropic breezes will precipitate their weighted load of moisture, and the arctic circle will be enshrouded in a perpetual blizzard of hail and snow."
Allan stared at him aghast. "Yet in spite of the terrible picture you have just painted, you are deliberately heading into disaster, instead of taking the one chance we have to the south."
"It is because I want Kalen Thorn to go through with his program that I am heading north," Clyde replied softly. "He traces our path by the vibration of our rockets and is content. I would not have him otherwise. For with all his magnificent control of nature, for all his collective wisdom, I believe he is digging his own grave."
Carey relaxed with a grin. He still had overwhelming faith in his friend.
But Bascom looked worried. The small seeds of doubt had been sown in him. The ridiculous ease with which Thorn had circumvented and rebounded, almost to their own destruction, the fourth-dimensional trap that Moorhouse had set had left him shaky. The man was in truth a god.
ON and on they went. The drifting icebergs, the open slashes of water, were gone now. The world beneath was a solid blinding sheet of ice. A white immensity in which no living thing stirred, as desolate and cruel as outer space itself.
At the north pole, Moorhouse cut the rockets and glided to a bumpy halt over uneven hummocks of ice. The same dead waste surrounded them here as elsewhere; there was nothing to show that they had reached the top of the world.
Bascom looked out through the glassine panels at a fast-lowering sky and shrugged futile shoulders. It was too late now to protest.
High overhead, in the upper reaches of the stratosphere, swirled the heated air from the tropics. The sun misted over with frozen vapor, thrust its last rebellious rays toward the earth, and expired in a bloody haze.
A pall of dense frost overlaid the world. From the frozen reaches of the stratosphere, ice particles, sleet and hail, fell with gravitational acceleration.
Then, far off on the limitless horizon, a dark, funnel-shaped cloud appeared. Even as they watched, it grew with seven-league strides into a twisting, murky shroud that enveloped ice field and sky in Stygian darkness.
It descended on them in a solid wall of wind that sent the rocket, wedged as it was between hummocks of ice, careening over on its side. The roar and the fury of the hurricane were indescribable; the world was a lashing, pelting, crashing hail of ice and snow. Every strut and girder in the vessel swayed and groaned under the terrific impact. No storm created by natural forces ever equaled in power and vehemence this man-made cyclone.
The temperature dropped to one hundred below. Outside, it was impossible for any life to exist; inside, the chilling cold of space crept into their bones. The lights dimmed. A terrific clap of thunder shouted defiance above the hurtling roar; lightning blasted with jagged glare through the inch-thick ice on the glassine panels.
Buffeted, bruised, barely able to make themselves heard by yells above the elemental noise, stiffened with cold, they hung desperately to the straps and swings of the rocket. Every time a new blast twisted and flung the ship violently against the confining ice, the beryllium plates grated ominously. One tiny leak, and they were doomed.
Bascom was old—he knew it now. He was fast approaching the limits of his strength. Poor Clyde Moorhouse—adversity had addled his brain. He could not pit his single brain against the centralized mind of Thorn. In any event it would soon be over.
A particularly heavy gust struck them with express speed, almost turned them on end. Moorhouse staggered and would have fallen. Young Carey sprang to his support, shouted something in his ear. But the lash of the wind, the grinding noise of ice against the hull, made speech impossible.
Moorhouse, holding onto his strap with difficulty, was nevertheless placid of countenance. He looked at his time signal. Within one hour the storm would approach its climax. Hasty calculations, based upon observable air currents, had told him that. It was time now to act. Not even the staunchly constructed rocket could withstand the added bufferings. Yet the crux of his careful plan depended on maximum elemental differences. It was a desperate, dangerous undertaking, yet the chances of ultimate success were—well——
He set his teeth, nodded to Carey, and snapped a switch directly over his head. As if by magic the smashing tumult of the cyclone-blizzard ceased. A deathly silence reared like a palpable wall within the cabin. Only the shuddering pitches of the ship showed that the storm still raged.
Bascom righted himself, shouted as if he still had to make himself heard above the gale: "What did you do?"
"I switched on the silence unit. Sends a wave of electrical impulses through the steel of the ship to dampen the sound waves beating against it. Now I can talk to Kalen Thorn without screaming."
Bascom groaned wearily. It was all too much for him. But Carey had little dancing lights in his eyes. He was beginning to see darkly as in a glass the strategy of the man and to marvel at his genius.
Moorhouse plugged in a wave length on his transmitter. It buzzed steadily for a minute. The ship pitched at more and more insane angles. Then a signal light glowed.
"Who calls the presence?"
A cold, arrogant voice, immensely sure of itself. The rocket ship was not equipped with a visor-screen.
"I, Clyde Moorhouse," the Mathematician answered in quiet, conversational tones.
"Ah!" A subtle change came over the disembodied voice. "Willing to beg for mercy, eh?"
"Not at all," Clyde replied sharply. "On the contrary, to give you warning. Your storm is a masterpiece; I grant you that. It is impossible to remain within the zone of its influence, so we are coming out."
"To surrender?"
"You would like that!" Moorhouse laughed. "We intend breaking through your cordon. Nor can you stop us, neither you nor all your rocket cruisers. This time you have met your match." The voice spluttered, went incoherent with fury: "Why—you—swollen——"
Clyde went on inexorably: "More, to show with what contempt we treat your alleged powers, I shall even tell you where our plane will emerge from the arctic gales. Mark it down; memorize it. Our path is the sixtieth meridian. Within an hour we shall leave the arctic circle."
There was a choking roar, which cut off abruptly as Moorhouse removed the plug.
BASCOM'S eyes shone with admiration. "A very pretty comedy," he observed. "While Thorn concentrates his forces on the sixtieth meridian in answer to your challenge, we'll slip out in the opposite direction."
Clyde surveyed him quizzically. "On the contrary," he said; "we're proceeding at once to the very point I described. I am a man of honor."
Bascom was taken aback, but only for a moment. He rallied gamely. "I see. You expect Thorn to disbelieve you and scatter his forces all along the circle."
"Thorn will know exactly where we're going by the vibration of our rocket tubes," Carey pointed out. The young man turned to the Mathematician.
"It's a bit hazy to me, your scheme; but it depends, does it not, upon luring Kalen Thorn into taking personal charge of the defense?"
"Exactly! On that we live or die. That is why I taunted him, to goad him on."
"If I know Thorn, he'll react in the proper way," Carey said confidently. "He is probably choking now with fury at the thought that we, three puny mortals, dare defy his god-like powers. He'll forget all ordinary caution in that overmastering mania."
Clyde Moorhouse glanced at his time signal, darted for the silencer, and snapped it off. He needed every ounce of power for the gigantic task ahead.
The storm beat around their stunned ears with redoubled fury. It was hard to believe that the plane could survive the gale. But Clyde, calmly confident, jockeyed it out of its perilous position with little bursts, and gave her wide-open throttle as it went bumping and careening over the frozen sea. Heavily and with much strainings the ship lifted into the teeth of the hurricane, her rocket tubes lashing out with flaming gases at a solid screaming wall of glacial wind and pelting ice.
At times it seemed as if they would turn completely over, or crash disastrously back to earth, but Clyde kept her nose steadily aloft, until the altimeter showed six miles and a drizzle of warm steam made impenetrable fog. Up there the winds were strong but steady.
"Here, take the controls, Allan. I've got to prepare my apparatus."
Without a word Carey took over, and they zoomed steadily south, while Moorhouse busied himself with certain mysterious duties. Only the softened gale outside broke the silence. Bascom wondered, but held his peace.
Within twenty minutes they would approach the appointed rendezvous. Already the mist and clattering sleet were thickening, even at that high altitude. The gale rose in fury, emulating the smashing chaos of the lower atmosphere to the north. Bascom strained forward, peering in vain through the black whirling masses that surrounded them.
Two hundred miles to the south was the limit of the arctic circle, the dead line that Thorn had established for the diverted winds from the equator. There, he knew, chaos must have reached its highest, most cataclysmic, flight. The powerful wind deflectors, smoothly pulsing, forced the warm winds upward, held the cold blasts within the swift-moving circle.
At the line of junction there were almost inconceivable conditions—the wall of glacial cold meeting in terrific struggle the beating wall of warmth; titanic gales, comparable in fury to the whirling photosphere of the sun itself; overwhelming oceans of rain and frozen steam to which the interior forces would be but gentle zephyrs; through this no rocket, no vessel made by man, could survive. And even if, by some miracle, Carey could pilot them through, the rocket cruisers of Thorn lay massed outside, safe in the warmth and golden twilight of Thorn's genius, waiting with deadly disintegrators.
Moorhouse grunted and rose from his task. It was hard to keep balance; they were pitching frightfully.
He fastened a last wire, and a little filament glowed. Outside, suddenly, the darkness fell away. An orange flare penetrated the driving ice for miles, illuminated the jagged crystals with iridescent color.
"Are you mad?" Bascom demanded incredulously. "You're making us a perfect target for Thorn's cruisers."
Clyde rubbed his hands almost jovially. "I hope they see us," he said. "There are enough infra-red waves in the light to pierce the storm wall ahead." Then he sobered. "It's a rather desperate plan I've evolved. The chances of our winning through are pretty slim. But if Thorn is outside, he'll go with us in the general smash, and the world will be rid of slavery forever. It is only just that I risk my life, inasmuch as I am really responsible for what has happened, but you two——"
"Never mind us," Carey interrupted, looking back from the controls, "if you think Thorn can be eliminated."
"This is my plan," Moorhouse said. He watched the distance magnet. Another hundred miles to victory—or death. "Thorn has arranged for us a certain set of conditions. Two walls of air, one deadly cold, the other heated with the sun, in close juxtaposition. A difference of one hundred and seventy degrees in temperature, and a tremendous difference in barometric pressure. Ideal electrical potentials.
"Furthermore—and no doubt forgotten on his part—the atmosphere is ionized, for the praiseworthy purpose of creating a phosphorescent similitude of day out of the darkest night. But here we have everything for the production of lightning—heavily charged air; heavy drops in potential."
CAREY abandoned the controls in his excitement. He saw it now in all its perfect simplicity. But Moorhouse waved him back as the craft keeled.
"The stage is set," he continued, "for lightning on a scale never before witnessed or known since the earlier semi-molten days of the planet. Thousands of square miles of surface ready for a spark to set it off.
"That spark we must furnish."
Bascom braced himself. "You mean," he said, very low, "we plunge into the maelstrom and use our electrical power as a catalyst? Very well; I am ready."
Moorhouse smiled affectionately. "That way would be certain death, with the probability that our power is not strong enough to set the vast natural forces in motion. I told you there was a chance of our winning through. I do not intend entering the zone of conflict. That is why I made ourselves into a target. I want Thorn's ships to sight us through the cloud masses, to train their atomic disintegrators on us.
"They have power, more power than is necessary for our needs. The disintegration of the atmosphere into negative electrons and positive protons will form the sluice through which the vast electrical forces will crash from high to low potential.
"Thorn will create his own disaster."
A long silence while Bascom's mind reeled under the impact of the mighty plan, its simple daring, its sublimity.
Fifty miles more.
Thorn's voice swirled in the cabin. It came through the vacuum tubes; the transmission units were closed.
"You are insane, Moorhouse," he said exultantly. "Your rocket is already under visual observation. I, the presence, am in command of my cruisers. Prepare to die!"
On the heels of the voice, a tube of sizzling flame seared through sleet and howling storm as if they were fat droplets in an electron furnace. It missed the ship by a bare six feet.
Clyde's voice rose even more exultantly than Thorn's. "The collective intelligence of the race is only a man, with all of man's passions. Vanity and hate have led him into the trap. All right, Allan; you know what to do."
The young man grinned and swung on the controls. Parallel to the arctic circle he fled, within the cataclysmic area, ducking, dodging, twisting with furious changes of pace, always within range of the outlying fleet, covering as wide a range as possible in his swift gyrations.
It was a grim game with death. The terrific bolts of disintegration screamed by them on all sides, ripping air and ice and snow into seeming nothingness. Inches separated them from eternity; a shaft sheered off a rocket tube, made control of flight more difficult. Allan, lips grim and white, swung again. The rocket responded lamely. They were bathed in a whistling, screaming, flaming furnace, the slightest direct touch of which was destruction.
"They'll get us now," Carey said tonelessly and swung again.
Moorhouse kept his eyes glued to the glassine panels. Was it imagination that made the storm swirl to the south lighten a bit?
No; there it was again. The faintest glow through black angry masses.
"Head north," he screamed, "for our lives!"
THE rocket wheeled clumsily to the power of straining muscles, jerked northward. Another rocket tube blasted into oblivion. The next instant the whole of the south seemed to explode. A great ripping, tearing sheet of flame, so dazzling blue it blinded the observers, split open both heaven and earth. It pulsed out into space itself; it swarmed overhead in a huge cataclysmic arch; it leaped after the fleeing rocket with sheeted ferocity; it caught the puny vessel in a shroud of fire and whirled it forward at inconceivable velocity.
No sound of the enveloping catastrophe ever reached its victims. The lightning bolt left the concomitant thunder crashes far behind. But the rest of the world, as far south as the equator, heard and saw. The nearer Tribes, hundreds of miles distant, saw the northern sky flame into a consuming pyre of light, and, minutes later, heard the overwhelming concussion of sound.
Quartzite dwellings flattened like houses of cards, seismic waves through a trembling earth made chasms where mountains had been. A huge cloud of smoke covered the arctic zone with thick, impenetrable layers. From outer space the staid, unchanging earth seemed momentarily like a nova, a flaming rebirth.
Days later, when the first Tribal contingents ventured cautiously to approach the area of catastrophe, the edge of the still-smoldering cloud, they found the fused fragments of a thousand rocket ships—the massed forces of the presence, Kalen Thorn. Of Kalen Thorn himself they found no sign, nor did they expect to in the indistinguishable mixture of metal and charred bones and shreds of flesh.
Kalen Thorn was dead—the mighty intelligence of mankind was immolated in a cataclysm of his own making. The first day the people mourned and continued to wear their helmets. But on the second day came thought. Thorn was then not the god he had pretended—he was fallible; he was mortal. Nor were his mercenaries now in evidence. Most of them had died in that gigantic funeral pyre. The survivors who had been in permanent garrison took council and prudently effaced themselves. They had not been over-popular, and too many men might remember their swaggerings and arrogance.
Accordingly, when a Tribal member thoughtlessly broke one of the many fixed and unyielding laws Thorn had set for their guidance, and awaited certain punishment with trembling limbs, nothing happened.
It dawned then that they were free; that once more they could act and do as they pleased. The load for the most part had been unnoted, unfelt, but now that it was removed, it seemed as if unbearable pressure had been lifted. Like the swift destroying lightning that had ushered in their freedom from the north, the heady wine of revolt ran through all the earth. Tribe after Tribe in session repudiated the laws, hunted out and exterminated the cowering mercenaries. Helmets were torn off and burned with formal ceremony and loud hosannas.
Individualism, as strong and unreasoning as had been their former subjection, held them in close grip. The pendulum had swung.
And still the heavy quiescent cloud of smoke enveloped the arctic and its secrets.
Moorhouse and his friends were not dead. By some strange freak of nature the lightning blast hurled them hundreds of miles to the north, back to the frozen ice packs of the pole, tossed them into a hundred-foot drift of blizzard snow and buried them deep beneath the surface. Then the sheeted blaze flashed emptily out into space.
The three men were unconscious, of course. Human flesh and blood could not have been expected to withstand such terrific impacts without giving way. They were wrenched, twisted, bruised, maimed, toasted, burned—but alive.
Strangely enough it was Warren Bascom, the feeblest of the three, who awoke in utter darkness and, with much agony of soul and body, fumbled around until he found the others and restored them to some measure of life. It was Moorhouse, however, who managed to repair fused wires and burned-out bulbs and restored light to them.
Then they tended their hurts for a whole day and a night—as far as they could judge from the eternal darkness outside and from the irreparable ruin of all time signals. They also ate the scanty remains of their pellets, opened a port cautiously to scoop in drifted snow for drinking, and closed it hurriedly again.
They felt physically better now, but the future was dark, dark as the drift in which they were immured.
THE rocket would never move again, at least not without extensive repairs for which they had no tools. One hundred feet of snow smothered them under as in a grave. It was impossible to burrow through. And even if they reached the upper surface, a thousand miles of ice and icier water intervened before civilization could be reached. That is, if civilization was still extant. There was no means of knowing how extensive the cataclysm had been.
They stared at each other in the already dimming light with the faces of those about to die.
Clyde Moorhouse said steadily: "No matter! We have accomplished what we set out to do. Future generations will be grateful to us for this day's work. Kalen Thorn is dead."
Allan Carey grinned wryly. There was no fear in his clear eyes. "That is at least as certain as the fact that we also are as good as dead."
"Much less certain, young man, than the second half of your thesis."
Allan whirled around; so did the others. The metal door of the air lock slid open, and Kalen Thorn entered, holding a Dongan unit in his hand. Behind him crowded two mercenaries, similarly armed. His head was bare and his face immobile. But his eyes glinted with little lights.
"Thorn!" Bascom gasped unbelievingly. "But how did you escape——"
"The lightning blast?" Thorn smiled mirthlessly. "I am immune from destruction; my supreme intelligence foresees all contingencies and checkmates them with ease."
"You did not foresee the destruction of all your rockets and the collapse of your very clever plan," Carey said tactlessly.
Thorn's heavy features darkened and twitched with rage. His finger tightened on the Dongan unit. Then he smiled with glacial lips.
"Moorhouse has a certain modicum of brains," he admitted grudgingly. "He has annoyed me with pin pricks. But that is all over now."
Clyde watched him carefully. "You surrounded your ship with an area in which the electrical potential was higher than that of the charged atmosphere. As a result the lightning swerved away to seek lower potentials and left you unharmed."
"That is true," Thorn replied in some surprise. Unwilling admiration, not unmixed with fear, peeped out of his eyes. "Perhaps you know then how I found you."
"That was very simple," Moorhouse answered calmly. "Any member of a Physics tribe could have done the same. A magnetic ray would dip sharply over the spot where our rocket lay hidden."
Kalen Thorn recovered himself. "And now," he inquired with a slight sneer, "perhaps you can foretell your own immediate fate."
"That is difficult. I am not a prophet. But this much I do know: you will try to kill us. You would much rather have first absorbed whatever knowledge I possess—you still are in the dark as to superdimensional tensors—but unfortunately your receiving helmet has been broken—probably from the force of the explosion you avoided—and so you intend to glut your hate with our immediate deaths."
Thorn's free hand went instinctively to his bare head.
"I do not need your petty knowledge, nor any one else's for that matter. I am the presence, and I know more than the combined human race. As for the helmet, I am beyond its need. If necessary, I could rebuild it."
"No; you could not," returned Clyde. "I purposely left the last equation out of the plans you stole and pretended were destroyed by fire. It is a tensor equation, of which you know absolutely nothing."
They faced each other, these two mighty antagonists, breathing hard. An electric tensity filled the dimming confines of the buried rocket. Carey and Bascom on the one hand, and the two mercenaries on the other, watched with fascinated attention, forgetful of all else but the duel of these strange wills.
It was not man against man—it was man against the entire human race; lone knowledge against the collective knowledge of all time. And, strangely enough, it was Clyde Moorhouse, mild and slight, whose stature seemed to fill the cabin with majesty.
Thorn raised his Dongan unit. Its cone-like snout pointed directly at his adversary's heart. His mercenaries leveled their weapons at Carey and Bascom. The slightest touch of the Dongan pellets was death. Fingers tensed on pressure-disks.
Bascom held his leonine head proudly erect. He faced the muzzles with fearless eyes. Allan balanced on his toes. His knees flexed for a final desperate spring. If only he could reach Thorn, get his fingers on his throat before the Dongan pellets took effect, he would die content.
Clyde Moorhouse let his hand dangle carelessly near the curved wall behind him. He read the murderous purpose in Thorn's eyes, saw the pressure disk yield.
"If you shoot," he said conversationally, "we all die."
Thorn held his hand, startled, suspicious, "What do you mean?"
"My hand is touching a concealed button in the beryllium lining. If I fall, my weight completes the circuit. There is fifty pounds of dynol stored in a compartment behind the panel. Enough to blow our rocket and half the north pole into outer space."
"You lie!" Thorn cried, but his hand wavered uncertainly. Fear showed on the pallid faces of his mercenaries.
"If you think so," Moorhouse pointed out calmly, "you have only to shoot."
"Better not, your presence," one of the soldiers said hoarsely. "It may be the truth."
"Keep quiet!" Thorn snapped. He stared at the blank surface of the wall behind the Mathematician.
"There is no panel there, nor any button either," he decided.
Clyde shrugged indifferently. He stepped to one side, running his backward finger along the beryllium.
"You may examine it for yourself," he invited politely. "It's a hair line in the molding, rather than a button. I still am touching it."
THORN looked suspicious. His face clouded in thought. Suddenly he smiled. "Very well," he said, "I shall examine it. If the dynol is there, I shall have to let you go, of course. But next time——
He winked imperceptibly to his men. "Follow me. Stand with your backs to the wall and keep them covered."
They understood. Strapped to the small of their backs were paralyzing units, used in hand-to-hand struggles to disable an adversary. A surreptitious movement started the current flowing. They acted by creating an ideal conduction medium for all forms of energy—electrical, mechanical, and chemical.
Contact with a human body, for example, diverted brain, muscle, and nerve impulses, intended for normal animal functions, into the units, which represented the line of least resistance. As a result brain messages never reached muscle tissue, nerve endings failed to report outer stimuli, and complete paralysis set in.
Backed against the hair line of the alleged wire, no circuit could be completed by any move on Moorhouse's part. The current would flow into the paralysis units instead of into a possible cache of dynol.
The soldiers grinned and became mask-like again. His presence in truth had a superhuman mind. They moved on cat feet to the wall, swerved around, pressed close and released the mechanism.
Thorn ran his hand along the wall. Clyde even moved over a bit to give him room. There was nothing, just as Thorn had anticipated. Moorhouse had bluffed—and lost.
Yet even if there was, his men were now in position. He had played the game with absolute safety, as became a man of his infinite intelligence. Only limited minds took chances.
"All right, men," he said suddenly; "let them have it!"
Carey cried out at the lightning-fast lift of the deadly snouts. He lunged forward, with the sickening sensation that the pellets would have lodged in his body long before he touched Thorn.
Moorhouse smiled at the staring weapons. He was at the farther end of the wall. He pressed an inconspicuous depression in the metal.
The whole side of the rocket seemed to disappear. One moment it was there, shinily bright, silvery in color; the next it was gone, and a gray infinitude stretched impenetrably beyond. As if space and time and form had collapsed and a superspace had taken their place.
Thorn gave a startled cry and whiffed out like a blown candle. The Dongan pellets, pouring from the cone with tremendous velocity, as swiftly vanished. The mercenaries, guns spouting, merged into the gray matterless distance.
Allan, lunging forward, tried to check himself. For one horrible moment his feet slithered and slid on the slippery metal. He flung out a hand to catch at the sharply cut edge of the still-standing side. His clutching fingers slipped desperately along, within an inch of nothingness. Bascom sprang to snatch him back from the very brink.
"Good Heaven!" he gulped, the sweat of death cold on his brow. "Where is Thorn? What devil's magic have you employed, Moorhouse?"
Clyde looked strangely at the gray, featureless infinitude. "Keep away from it as you value your lives," he said. He was shuddering as though with cold. "It was a last resort. Thorn compelled me to do this to him. He should have died normally."
Allan exclaimed half angrily: "Pull yourself together, man. Thorn is dead. Don't talk gibberish."
Clyde passed a trembling hand over his forehead. "Thorn is not dead!"
"Then what——"
"He will never trouble us any more, nor any one else on earth. He is as close to us as our own hands and feet, yet he might just as well be trillions of light-years away."
"That means you have transported him into another dimension?" Bascom asked, awed.
"Exactly! That gray void is the boundary. One step into it, and you are gone forever. I had this rocket specially constructed in my youth, when adventure beckoned and I was intoxicated with the strange tensor equations I had discovered. I intended making the tremendous journey myself. I can transport any part or all of this ship into extra-dimensional space."
Bascom moved quietly away from the walls.
Carey's eyes were aflame. "Why did you drop your idea?"
"Because," Moorhouse replied very softly, his gaze intent on the featureless gray, "at the last moment it dawned on me that the tensor equation I had employed was irreversible; that it was a one-way ticket. There was no return."
Carey said in a hushed voice: "I almost begrudge Kalen Thorn."
"Don't! You have never known the horrors of eternal exile; you do not know what horrors await him in that new dimension." Clyde shook his head as if to clear too morbid thoughts from his mind.
"Now we had better find ways and means of returning home."
Bascom roused himself. "That's easy. Kalen Thorn drove a passage through the drift to reach us. His rocket ship must be lying outside ready for use.
THE three outlaws reached the Hall of Science to find themselves the acclaimed heroes of a new world. The first act of Moorhouse was to destroy all the plans and equations Thorn had secreted for the construction of a new thought-reception helmet.
"It's too dangerous a weapon for human frailty to employ," he answered Allan's protest. "We've had one example, and we want no more."
His next step was to reconvoke the General Council of the Tribes. He spoke long and to the point. Because Kalen Thorn had misused the advantages of cooperative science was no reason to swing to the opposite extreme of narrow individualism.
He suggested a new Tribe, to be called Coordinators. They were not to be specialists in any one branch of knowledge; they were to be trained from infancy in the ability to sense broad relationships, to pick unerringly essential facts out of a welter of data, and apply them to the construction of general theories. Thus, he maintained, would the human race forge ahead to new heights of civilization.
His suggestion was enthusiastically adopted. Clyde Moorhouse, by acclamation, was made first Coordinator of the new Tribe.
A GUARDING structure was placed around the seemingly illimitable area of the superdimensional space into which Thorn and his men had disappeared. For one thing it served to prevent wandering tribesmen from inadvertently falling through; for another it stood as a perpetual warning against any further attempts on the part of any individual to arrogate to himself tyrannical control over the earth and its people.
One of its most frequent visitors, however, was Allan Carey, who spent hours and days away from his proper duties as a Vector-Analyst to moon-dream before that eternal gray blankness.
Roy Glashan's Library
Non sibi sed omnibus
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