Compleat collected sff w.., p.166
COMPLEAT Collected SFF Works, page 166
In the oblivion that washed over him was so sure a consciousness of her omnipresence—in all the centuries that were sweeping past, in all the lands those centuries washed over, throughout time and space and life itself, her ever-present loveliness—that he welcomed the darkness as if he embraced the girl herself. It was full of her, one with her. He could not lose her or be far from her or even miss her now. She was everywhere, always. And the end was coming. Very soon—very soon he would know—
-
HE WOKE out of the oblivion, blindly into darkness. Like the fold of wings it engulfed him. If he was standing on solid earth, he did not know it. He was straining every faculty to pierce that blinding dark, and he could not. It was a living darkness, pulsing with anticipation. He waited in silence.
Presently she spoke.
"I have waited so long," she said out of the blackness in her sweet, clear voice that he knew so well he did not need the evidence of his eyes to tell him who spoke.
"Is this the end?" he asked her breathlessly. "Is this the goal we've been traveling toward so long?"
"The end?" she murmured with a little catch of mirth in her voice. "Or the beginning, perhaps. Where in a circle is end or beginning? It is enough that we are together at last."
"But what—why—"
"Something went wrong, somewhere," she told him softly. "It doesn't matter now. We have expiated the forgotten sins that kept us apart to the very end. Our troubled reflections upon the river of time sought each other and never wholly met. And we, who should have been time's masters, struggled in the changing currents and knew only that everything was wrong with us, who did not know each other.
"But all that is ended now. Our lives are lived out and we can escape time and space into our own place at last. Our love has been so great a thing that though it never fulfilled itself, yet it brimmed time and the void to overflowing, so that everywhere you adventured the knowledge of my present tormented you—and I waited for you in vain. Forget it now. It's over. We have found ourselves at last."
"If I could only see you," he said fretfully, reaching out into the blackness. "It's so dark here. Where are we?"
"Dark?" the gentle voice laughed softly. "Dark? My dearest—this is not darkness! Wait a moment—here!"
Out of the night a hand clasped his. "Come with me."
Together they stepped forward.
The End
MIRACLE IN THREE DIMENSIONS
Strange Stories - April 1939
Photography and Sound Recording Are Bound by a Man-made Limit—and Beyond that Lies Madness!
-
"I'VE got it, Abe! It's as near to life itself as the movies will ever come. I've done it!" Blair O'Byrne's haunted black eyes were bright with triumph.
Abe Silvers, gaunt and dark and weary-eyed, shifted the cigar to the other side of his mouth and stepped in under the doorway that made sharp division between the glare of California sunlight outside and the lofty shadows of O'Byrne's long, dim studio.
"I hope you're right," he said around the cigar. "I've waited a long time for it. And God knows you've spent more years than you ought, and more money than even you could afford. Why have you done it, Blair? A man with your money, your background, shutting yourself up here in the dark, sweating over shadows?"
"I haven't been shut up away from life—I've been shut in with it!" O'Byrne's smile spread across the pallor of his delicate face. "It's life itself I've been groping after all these years, and I've found it, Abe. I've got it!"
"Got the illusion of it, maybe. A little better than Metro-Cosmic has been filming for the last few years. And if it's as good as you say we'll buy it—and so what?"
O'Byrne turned to him fiercely, his dream-haunted eyes suddenly blazing.
"I tell you this is life! As near as shadows can come—too near, perhaps. 'Moving pictures'! They'll have to find a new name for what I've got. It isn't pictures—it's breathing, living reality. I've worked over it until nothing else seemed to matter, nothing else seemed real. I've got it, Abe. It's—life."
-
ABE SILVERS shifted the cigar back across his mouth, and if his eyes were understanding, his voice was only patient. He had heard such words before, from many fiercely sincere inventors. That he had known O'Byrne for many years did not alter his accustomed attitude toward such things.
"All right," he murmured. "Show me. Where's the projection room, Blair?"
"Here." O'Byrne waved a thin, unsteady hand toward the center of the big studio where under a battery of high-hung lights a U-shaped bar of dull silver rose from a low platform to the height of a man's waist. Beyond it against the wall bulked a big rectangular arrangement of chromium and glass, behind whose face bulbs were dimly visible. Silvers snorted.
"There? That thing looks like a radio—that doubled-over pipe? But the screen, man—the seats—the—"
"I'm telling you this is utterly new, Abe. You'll have to clear your mind of all your preconceived ideas of what a moving picture should be. All that is obsolete, from this minute on. The 'moving picture' is as dead as the magic lantern. This is the new thing. These batteries of lights, that 'radio' as you call it, the platform and bar, one for each individual spectator—"
"But what is it? What happens?"
"I can't explain it to you now," said O'Byrne impatiently. "For one thing, you wouldn't believe me until after you've seen it. And it would take weeks to give you enough ground-work to understand the principles. The thing's too complex for anyone to explain in words. I can't even explain the appearance except in metaphors—there's never been anything like it before.
"Roughly, though, it's the projection of the illusion of life on a three-dimensional screen composed of fogged light. Other men are just beginning to fumble around with the principles of three-dimensional movies projected on a flat screen, giving the appearance of a stage with depth. That's going at it clumsily. I've approached the problem from a much newer angle. My screen itself is three-dimensional—the light that bathes you when the batteries of arcs are on. You're in the midst of it, the action is projected on the light all around you from double films taken from slightly different angles, on the stereoscopic principle. I'll show you later.
"And there is in that bar you're to hold on to, sufficient current to stimulate very selectively the nerves which carry tactile impression to the brain. You'll feel, as well as hear and see. You'll even smell. On occasion you may actually taste—it's close enough to the sensations of smelling to work out. Only that doesn't figure so much in this case, for you as a spectator will not enter into the action. You'll simply witness it from closer quarters than any audience has ever dreamed of doing before.
"Here, step up on the platform and take hold of the rod there, at the curve. That's it. Now hold tight, and don't be surprised. Remember, nothing like this has ever been done before. Ready?"
Abruptly the great banks of lights blazed into radiance that closed the dazzled Silvers about in soft, pouring brightness. There was a quality of mistiness about it that made even his own hands invisible before him on the bar. It was as if the light poured upon innumerable motes in the air, so refracting from their infinitesimal surfaces that nothing was visible but that shimmer of bright blindness. Silvers gripped the bar and waited.
Through the bright fog a voice as smooth as cream spoke in vast, clear echoes, rolling in from all around him at once, filling the little artificial world of mist wherein he stood lost. Mellowly the deep tones said:
"You are about to enter an enchanted wood outside Athens on a midsummer night, to share in a dream that Shakespeare dreamed over three hundred years ago. Titania, Queen of Faeryland, will be played by Anne Acton. Oberon, the King, is Philip Graves—"
Abe Silvers clutched the bar in amazement as that unctuous voice rolled on. Anne Acton and Philip Graves were under contract to his own Metro-Cosmic, and every one of the other names were stars of the first magnitude. The greatest actors of the day were playing in this incredible fragment of a Midsummer Night's Dream. What it had cost O'Byrne he shuddered to think.
The creamy voice died away. The mist began to clear. Silvers' hands closed hard on the bar and he stared in blankest incredulity about the dim blue glades of forest stretching around him, silvery in the light of a high-riding moon. A breeze whispered through the leaves, blowing cool on his face. Save that it did not stir a hair of his head he could have believed it an actual breeze sighing through the moonlit dark.
He looked down. He was himself invisible, disembodied, no longer standing on a bare floor but in the midst of a flowering meadow whose grasses were faintly fragrant at his feet. There was no flicker, no visible light-and-shadow composition of the projection upon this incredible three-dimensional screen that surrounded him. The glade stretched away into actual distances much deeper than the studio's walls could possibly contain; the illusion of deep, starry sky overhead was perfect; the flowers in the grass were so real he thought he could have knelt and gathered them in his hands.
Then, under the trees, the mists parted like a curtain and the Queen of Faeryland came splendidly into the moonlit glade. Anne Acton had never looked so lovely. The long veil of her silver-pale hair streamed like gossamer behind her, and every curve and shadowy roundness was as real as life itself. Yet there hovered about her a hint of unreality, so that she blended perfectly the illusion of fantasy and reality as she moved over the unbending grass, the bright wings streaming from her shoulders.
-
THERE was a blast of silvery challenge from elfin horns and into the moonlight strode Oberon, his lean features wrathful. The famous deep tones of Philip Graves resounded angrily through the moonlight. Titania answered in silvery defiance.
Then came full, rich human voices ringing through the wood. Phoebe Templeton in Hermia's rustling satin came radiantly into the glade, brushing so close by the watching Silvers that he caught a whiff of her perfume, felt the touch of her satin skirts. And he knew—almost he knew—that he could put out a hand and stop her, so warmly real was she at that close range. Her lovely throaty voice called to Lysander behind her.
And then somehow the forest was slipping away past Abe Silvers' face—somehow he had the illusion of walking as if in a dream down an enchanted forest aisle, the dim air quivering with starlight, and Helena came running and weeping through the trees, stumbling, sobbing the name of Demetrius.
She passed. Silvers started involuntarily as from a swaying branch above him pealed the wild, half-human laughter of Puck, delicate as the chatter of a squirrel, and down through the air over his very shoulder, the breeze of his passing fanning Silvers' face, the lithe little goblin sprang.
The scene clouded over as if a mist had been drawn across the moon. Silvers blinked involuntarily, and when he looked again Titania lay exquisitely asleep on the dew-spangled bank where the wild thyme grew.
Then through the magic-haunted wood suddenly shrilled a bell. Insistently, metallically it rang. Silvers glanced about the glades of the forest, trying to locate among the dew-shimmering leaves the source of that irritating noise. And suddenly the Athenian woods melted like smoke about him. Incredulously he stared around a big bare studio. It was like waking in bewilderment from a dream so vivid that reality itself paled beside its memory.
"The studio wants you on the telephone, Abe," said O'Byrne's voice. "Here, wake up! Didn't you hear the bell?"
-
SILVERS shook himself, laughed sheepishly.
"I'm still in Athens," he admitted, blinking. "That's the damnedest thing I ever—studio, did you say? Where's the phone?"
Thinly over the wire came a worried voice.
"Hate to bother you, chief, but I think you ought to know. Anne Acton's been mumbling around in a sort of daze for half an hour. The doctor can't do a thing with her. And Philip Graves passed out on set and is just kind of whispering to himself—poetry, it sounds like."
Silvers blinked. "D-don't let the papers get it. I'll be right over."
He slammed the telephone back on its cradle and turned blankly to O'Byrne.
"Something's gone wrong with a couple of our actors you stole," he said. "I've got to get back right away. But listen, Blair—you've got something! How long will it take you to have some more of these bar and platform arrangements rigged up? Say a dozen for a starter. I'd like to have our board see it as soon as possible. This is going to be the most tremendous thing that ever happened in motion pictures. When can you have things ready to show the board?"
"I—I don't know, Abe. Somehow—I'm a little afraid of it."
"Afraid? Good God, man, what do you mean?"
"I don't know, exactly—but did you have a feeling, as you watched the action, that somehow it came—too near—to life?"
"Blair—I'm afraid you've been working too hard on this. Let me handle it from now on, will you? And stop thinking about it. I've got to get back to the studio now and see what's happened to my actors—attack of temperament, probably—but I'll see you tonight about quantity production. Until then, you won't let anyone else in on this, will you?"
"You know I won't, Abe. It's yours if you want it."
All the way back to the studio Silvers' mind was spinning with the magnitude of what lay before him. He had dared to let the inventor know how enormously impressed he was, how anxious to have the new process, because he knew O'Byrne so well. The man was wealthy in his own right, indifferent to fame, to everything but the deep need to create which had driven him so hard for so many years toward the completion of his miracle. Miracle in three dimension! It seemed like a dream, what he had just seen, but behind it lay the prospect for a fortune vaster than any movie magnate had ever dared to hope for. To control this was to control the whole world. Silvers clenched his cigar tighter and dreamed magnificent dreams.
Anne Acton lay on a low couch in her lavish little dressing bungalow, staring up with conscious pathos into the doctor's face as Silvers came into the room. Somehow, illogically, it was a shock to him to see her here when he had so short a time before left that perfect illusion of herself in the enchanted wood outside Athens, asleep on the bank of wild thyme.
"How are you, Anne?" he demanded anxiously, for she represented a fabulous sum to the company and an illness now, in the midst of her latest picture, would be ruinous. "Is she all right, Doc? When did she come out of it?"
"While they were phoning you, Abe," said Acton herself in a faint, pathetic voice, moving her head uneasily so that the great slipping rope of silver-pale hair moved across the brocade. "It—it was all so queer. Suddenly I felt too tired to move, as if all the strength had drained right out of me. And I must have fainted, but I wasn't really out. Kept having sort of dreams—I don't remember now—woods, somewhere, and music. And suddenly it all ended and I opened my eyes here. I'm all right now, only I feel as weak as a kitten. Look." She held up an exquisite hand to show it quivering.
"What is it, Doc?" demanded Silvers anxiously.
"Um-m-m—overwork, perhaps, general exhaustion—it's impossible to say definitely without further examination."
"Will she be okay now?"
"I see no reason why, with rest and care, she shouldn't be."
"I'll send for your car, Anne," said Silvers authoritatively. "You're going home to bed. I'll see you later."
Philip Graves, in the braid-bedecked finery of a movie caballero, was sitting up on his couch and holding a cigarette in unsteady fingers when Silvers pushed through the little knot of attendants that surrounded him.
"Feeling better, Phil?" he demanded. "What was it?"
"Nothing—nothing," said the actor impatiently. "I'm okay now. Just passed out for a few minutes. I'll be all right."
Abe Silvers lost no time in calling a meeting of the board. The twelve members of Metro-Cosmic stood about in twos and threes, murmuring incredulously in the shadows of the O'Byrne studio on the night when the first dozen bar-platforms were erected. Silvers had not dared to describe fully this modern miracle.
"It's like nothing you ever saw before," he warned them as rather sheepishly they allowed themselves to be herded forward to the platforms. When they were all at their stations and Silvers signaled O'Byrne to begin, he glanced once around the little company before the lights blazed on. Doubtfully they returned his stare with a murmur or two of protest rising.
"Feel so damn' silly," an official said, "standing here. Mean to say there isn't any screen? What are we supposed to look at?"
-
AND then like a wall of brilliant blindness the foggy light closed down upon them and every man was cut off from his fellows so that he stood alone and disembodied in the heart of that soft, misty blaze. Startled exclamations sounded through the mist, murmurs that died away as Silvers heard for the second time the creamy smoothness of the announcer's voice rolling through the dimming brightness.
