Collected short fiction, p.274
Collected Short Fiction, page 274
“For our kind of life is a phenomenon of entropy increase. These beings are an alien part of the opposite process. We have set energy to flowing up the hall—and they were born to ride the current! They suck up radiation, simple atoms, all forms of energy. They exist through integration: the building of complex atoms.
“They are vampires! They take; they give nothing. They are actually vortices of intense heat. But they only absorb; they radiate nothing, so that they seem black and cold to us. They drink up the precious force of life itself——”
“Look!” cut in the deep voice of Ron Goneen. “There’s a ship—a strange, battered ship!”
His horror-widened eyes followed it, dropping out of the black sky athwart the weirdly blue-crowned crags of Pyralonne. Its hull was rusty, corroded, scarred as if by ten thousand meteoric collisions.
And it brought a disturbing memory.
“Queer!” he muttered. “But I thought—in the last instant before you shot—I thought there was a real ship ramming the tower!”
“And you fooled me!” the old man admitted. “For just an instant of helpless panic.” And, bitterly, he added, “I wish something had struck us, to stop my madness——”
“But—there!” Ron Goneen’s narrowed eyes were still upon the ancient space cruiser approaching. “It’s out of control!” he gasped. “Falling——”
THE VESSEL sagged drunkenly. It veered unexpectedly toward the tower, so that Ron Goneen caught his breath for fear that singular feeling should prove to have been a premonition. But its mighty prow crashed against the weirdly gleaming plateau, two miles away. It rolled half over, very deliberately, and lay still.
Ron Goneen’s breath went out in a long gasp of pain. “That—that’s the Silver Bird!” he breathed hoarsely. “But look at it—battered as if it had been drifting ten thousand years. And it left here, three hours ago, shining like new!”
Behind him, the hollow voice croaked, “I have done this, also! For time has gone mad, along with entropy—because the one is the child of the other.”
Still watching from the port, Ron Goneen’s rugged face was grim and drawn with horror. For a valve of the fallen ship had opened. His eye caught the motion of tiny figures.
Could one of them be—his heart leaped with hope and fear—Lethara?
He groped for a pair of binoculars hanging beside the port, lifted them. The harsh landscape seemed to leap at him: naked, black rocks, every jagged point limned with pale-blue fire.
It was as if some electrical energy were being drawn out of the planet, he briefly thought, and sucked away into space.
He found the running figures. They were only a score in number—of the great ship’s twelve hundred. Their leaping bodies were bulky in the space armor, heads visible in egg-shaped, transparent helmets. Every face was haggard, drawn, horror-twisted.
They were fleeing across that weirdly shining desert. And behind them, pursuing, came the shapes he had seen—the phantoms of black, freezing flame.
He saw one straggler fall behind. The spinning phantoms overtook him—or her, for Ron had failed to see. The figure stiffened, fell. Blue flame played briefly over it. It left the rocks, lifted into a whirling column of darkness. It was gone—consumed——
“The other life devours them,” said the hollow voice of Seru Gyroc. “It absorbs their heat, consumes their lives, integrates their atoms——”
Ron Goneen was suddenly rigid with hope and horror. For his staring eyes had found one familiar face, and then another—familiar still, although terrible with agonized dread.
“Lethara!” he gasped. “I see Lethara and her mother!”
The taller form of Karanora seemed weak, stumbling. The girl was aiding her. They were falling to the rear of the fugitive group.
Ron Goneen dropped the binoculars, ran toward the stair.
The lean, quivering fingers of Seru Gyroc clutched his tunic. “Wait!” the old voice quavered. “What are you doing?”
“I’m going to help them,” gasped Ron Goneen. “Let me go. Lethara needs me!”
The thin fingers closed hard on his arm. “You can’t live outside,” warned Seru. “Your body heat will draw the other life——”
“I must,” said Ron Goneen. “For Lethara——”
He broke free, stumbled down the steps toward the air lock. Swiftly, he flung himself into a suit of insulated pressure armor, slipped the transparent helmet over his head, let himself out of the valve into an explosive puff of freezing air.
THE dark, rocky waste stretched before him, every ragged point still shining with eerie and ominous blue. Far in the distance he saw the little group, each frantic figure outlined in a terrible aura.
He came shuddering against a strange wall of cold. Despite the insulation of the suit, he felt as if chilling fingers had reached through to probe his body.
This was the same piercing cold he felt in the dream.
Fighting it, he ran toward the distant group. They still fled before the black phantoms. One and another, as he watched, stiffened and fell—and the things swept down upon them, lifted and consumed their bodies.
Not half the original score were left when he plunged into a depression that was a vale of shining horror, a cup of cold, blue dread.
Panting, breathless, sweat-drenched and yet shivering, he mounted the burning slope beyond. Cold fear smote him. Only three of the fugitives were left. And one of them, as he looked, grew stiff and fell.
For a moment it lay still, the core of a blue shimmer. Then a tentacle of spinning blackness touched it: it whirled upward like a leaf in the wind: it was gone.
Ron Goneen stumbled onward, toward the two.
They saw him. One of them beckoned in wild appeal for aid. The other made a frantic gesture as if to warn him to go back.
Then he could see their faces, through the blue glow surrounding their helmets. They were Karanora and Lethara. The girl was still aiding her mother. It was she who had beckoned him back.
The mother suddenly stiffened, as the others had done, and fell. With another frantic, warning gesture at Ron Goneen, the girl bent over her, tried in vain to lift her.
Staggering, his body stiff and leaden with penetrating cold, Ron Goneen came up to them. The once lovely form of Karanora Quane lay stiff upon the shining rocks. Her face was already blue and lifeless, a frozen mask of horror unutterable.
Anxiously, the younger woman touched the arm of his suit. “Oh, Ron!” she cried. “My mother! Help my mother!” Her own face was pinched and white with cold, her violet eyes wide and strange with uncomprehending dread.
“It’s too late,” Ron Goneen gasped into the tiny microphone before his half-frozen lips. “Karanora is dead—and there’s just the barest chance for us! Come——”
But she tried with her feeble strength to push him away. “Then go back,” she begged. “Save yourself, Ron! I’m too weak to go any farther—too cold!”
He held her unwilling arm, pulled her toward the tower at a stumbling run.
BUT his stiff body ran like an ill-oiled machine. Every step took an age of effort. He ached with fatigue, with the queer, numbing pain of this penetrating cold. The blue flame was denser about him.
He fastened his dimming eyes upon the black tower. Squat and immense, it seemed an infinite distance across the shining waste.
“Go on, Ron,” the girl was sobbing. “Leave me. It was brave of you to come. But it was no use. Death is in me, already. The black, freezing flames—— They sucked out something. Leave me, Ron. Just remember that—I loved you!”
Her hand went rigid in the insulated glove. She fell.
Ron Goneen bent, picked her up in his great, numb arms and ran on. All his body was dead now. It seemed that it was not he who moved, but some lifeless machine—that he merely watched.
The machine stumbled and fell. It picked itself up, lifted the girl, staggered on.
Behind came whirling black pillars of darkness; vampires hungry for the little heat left in the machine, for the atoms that formed it.
Again the machine toppled forward. This time it could not rise. It pushed stiffly forward on hands and knees, dragging the stiffened body of the girl.
The black base of the tower was near, the square entrance of the air lock outlined with glowing blue. Warmth! And a haven from the destroying phantoms!
Struggling grimly for mastery of the dead machine, Ron Goneen felt suddenly the tiny pressure of a little round object, under his tunic—the singular bubble of light that he called the Jewel of Dawn: the luminescent holy stone of the Andromedans, that he had taken for a torch, had carried since as a badge of triumph. No, carrying the jewel, he couldn’t give up!
The leaden limbs moved stiffly. The machine inched forward, dragging the girl. And at last they were inside the black, square chamber. Darkness came again, as his fingers closed over the control wheel.
VIII.
WHEN Ron Goneen awoke—or came slowly back to a drugged half wakeness—he lay in the dark cubical space of the air lock. And Lethara was still inert beside him, very quiet in her bulky armor.
The inner valve had been opened, however. The air about them was not bitterly cold. And their transparent helmets had been removed so that they could breathe it.
Wondering how long he had lain unconscious, the space captain sat up painfully. His big body was still cold and stiff, and a leaden depression filled his mind. He shook his shaggy head, tried to rouse Lethara.
The girl would not completely wake, however, although she stirred uneasily and called his name in a low, half-eager, half-anguished tone.
He got awkwardly out of his own space armor, removed hers, and carried her in his arms up to the living quarters on the second floor of the tower. Still she slept, as he laid her in a bunk. Her oval face looked thin and pale.
He returned to pull the covers up about her shoulders, touched her pale-golden hair, and then hurried away to find her father, his bewildered mind full of this dread enigma.
Seru Gyroc was wearily pacing the wrecked laboratory above, running shivering fingers through his strangely bleached hair. His shriveled, haggard face, his glazed and sunken eyes, made a living mask of horror and despair. He started nervously.
“Ron, this is you?”
“It is!” The deep voice tried to sound cheerful. “I carried in Lethara. She is sleeping. I think she’s all right.
But Karanora——” Ron spoke gently.
“I couldn’t help her.”
The white head shook wearily.
“It makes no difference, about anybody,” whispered Seru. “Doesn’t matter-dead or alive——”
“But it does matter!” boomed Ron Goneen. “We’ll keep alive—somehow. We’ve got to keep her alive. The ship is wrecked, of course. But there’s a life tube here in the tower. We’ll manage to get back to the galaxy. We can do it—somehow!”
A ghastly, stricken figure, Seru Gyroc came unsteadily to stand in front of him and peer into his face with terrible hollow eyes.
“Don’t you realize, Ron? When I opened that shutter and stopped the apparatus, I turned something out—something that hasn’t stopped.” j
Ron Goneen gripped Gyroc’s thin shoulder with huge, anxious fingers. “There’s no way to stop it?”
“None. The Omega Ray went out faster than light! Faster than time—because it destroyed the meaning of time!” The white head shook. “There is nothing we can do, although the insulation of the tower will probably preserve our lives for a while—a little while.”
Ron Goneen searched his terrible face.
“How far will it go?”
“To the bounds of the universe—growing ever stronger! Because, like the force of cosmical repulsion, its effect varies directly with distance.”
Ron Goneen dropped his big hand and staggered back. “Then all,” he whispered, “all the galaxy—all humanity is——”
Great tears shone in the hollow eyes of Seru Gyroc. “All humanity,” his dry voice rasped, “all our cities, all our planets——” His silver head bowed.
“What happened to the Silver Bird and those aboard has happened everywhere——”
“Has happened?” gasped the space captain.
The stricken scientist nodded. “Sooner, probably, in the most distant galaxies than in our own,” he whispered. “Probably”—he swallowed with an effort, and went on in a dry, leaden tone—“there is not a human being left alive, save us in this tower!”
Trembling, his thin hand pointed at an unshuttered port.
“Look!” he quavered. “Look at the sky! You can see—already——”
RON GONEEN swayed to the tiny port, put his face to its heavy lens. Against the darkness above a ragged wall of blue-crowned summits, he could see the galaxy, a long spindle of silver spanning many degrees.
But it had changed! It was changing, incredibly, as he looked! The spinning rotation of its spiral arms was visible. In a second he saw the normal motion of a thousand centuries! And it was reversed, turning backward!
“What is it?” he gasped breathlessly. “What is happening?”
That terrible voice behind him croaked again, “Look at Andromeda! Look at the rest! Our galaxy, being nearest, was the last to change——”
Ron Goneen staggered across the wrecked laboratory, pushed aside the shutter from another port. He saw that the Andromeda Galaxy was also visible in its motion, and turning backward.
And it was shrunken!
The spiral arms were drawing in. And its silvery glow had darkened to an eerie, bluish hue, like the luminescence that covered the frozen rocks of this stark world.
“Beyond!” quavered Seru Gyroc. “The rest!”
He thrust a pair of powerful binoculars into Ron’s stiff hands. Peering through them into the dark chasm of the empty sky, the space captain saw myriads of spinning, bluish motes, all rushing toward him, all shrinking and growing dark as they came.
“What is it, Seru?” he demanded again. “I knew that there was some danger—but I can hardly understand why——”
“Space itself is contracting,” echoed that doomed voice.——”All stellar and galactic motions have been reversed. The nebulae are contracting in the direction of their original condensations. Their radiation is being drawn back, absorbed, reintegrated into heavy atoms.”
“But how can we see it?” Ron Goneen demanded. “This light by which we see them was emanated a million or a hundred million years before the experiment was begun!”
The scientist shook his haggard white head.
“Time and the words ‘before’ and ‘after’ no longer have a meaning—except for events that take place in this insulated tower. For time is only our consciousness of the continual increase of entropy, a measure of the running down of the universe. And entropy—except in here—is nowhere increasing.”
Ron Goneen stared out again. The blue glow, he thought, was fading from the rocks; the blue, spinning motes of doomed galaxies were fainter in the sky.
“It will soon be dark,” Ron whiskered hoarsely. “Everything—gone——” He closed the shutter upon mind-staggering doom without. Swaying heavily, like a man dead drunk, he stared at Seru Gyroc. His hoarse voice masked faintly, “And what will be—the end?”
THE stricken scientist had resumed his weary, aimless pacing. His thin, quavering reply came in disjointed fragments, “We set the current of entropy to flowing backward. No stopping it——” The universe is winding up again. All matter will be condensed again into a single superatom. Even (this in the tower, after the insulation fails. Our bodies——
“No energy is ever created, ever destroyed. But we have undone all the work of time. Perhaps, eventually, the balance will be turned again—although not, I think, without the intervention of intelligence. The other life may do it.
“And the superatom will disintegrate again—disperse its matter through a space once more expanding, in galaxies, suns, planets. The river of entropy will flow down the hill again——”
Ron Goneen lurched forward protestingly.
“So man many be born again!” he muttered bitterly. “If the word ‘again’ has any meaning when time has been destroyed! He may again conquer the galaxy, and again attempt to master entropy, and again destroy himself and——”
His narrowed blue eyes, savage and brooding, stared at Seru Gyroc. “Tell me, my old teacher!” he demanded hoarsely. “Is that cycle of birth and struggle and doom, of birth and struggle and doom, of winding up and running down, of eternal, senseless repetition—is that less horrible than the single, inevitable death that might not have come for a billion billion years?”
The thin man stopped his restless pacing, bowed his bleached head. “It is more horrible,” he whispered. “It is infinitely more horrible. You were right, Ron, from the beginning. And I was a fool, an insane egomaniac. Your words were the truth. I have murdered mankind!”
His stricken voice sank. “I have murdered the universe!”
TO BE CONCLUDED.
[*] This “early genius,” of course, was Clerk Maxwell
A technical definition of entropy (Swann): “The change of entropy from one state of a system to another is the integral of dH/T from the first state to the second, the integral being taken along a reversible path, with dH representing the element of heat added at the temperature T.
A statistical interpretation of that definition is that every energy change in a system tends to proceed in the direction of maximum probability. That is, in the case of the confined gas, it follows from the conditions of probability that the molecules will tend to reach an average state of equally distributed energy in all parts of the system.
When a piece of red-hot iron is plunged into a bucket of cold water, it is not “impossible”—according to the classical laws of molecular dynamics alone—that the molecules of iron should continue to absorb energy from the molecules of water, until the water is frozen and the iron fused. That remarkable occurrence would involve, however, a decrease of the entropy of the system. Statistically, it is very improbable, because the energy present can be distributed among the molecules in an immensely greater number of ways when the water and the iron have both reached the same average temperature. And any blacksmith can testify that, actually, it seldom happens!
