A large anthology of sci.., p.138
A Large Anthology of Science Fiction, page 138
“I’m going to give you the twenty millions for your society now.” As the three uttered exclamations Grant Perry raised his hand. “Don’t thank me—what does the money mean to me now? But Loring, if you and your friends come over with me to my office we’ll put it through now.”
IN A FEW minutes the four were outside in the bright sunlight of Michigan Avenue, hailing a cruising taxi.
As they rode down the busy street through the thronging traffic, Grant Perry stared without speaking through the cab’s window. Neither Loring nor Gunnett nor Dwale broke the silence.
When they reached the office where Grant had talked first with Loring, he gave brief orders that sent his secretaries hurrying. Within an hour a flat packet lay on Grant’s desk and a legal-looking sheet that he signed.
“The twenty millions, Loring,” he said. “It’s for your society to use for the specified purpose of establishing a non-mechanical community on some Pacific island, you to direct all expenditures and operations.”
“Grant, you know what it will mean to me,” Loring said, “and to Dwale and Gunnett and all our society.”
“And what it may mean to humanity, to the world!” added Martin Dwale. “The humans it may preserve from that monstrous slavery to machines you saw in the future!”
“From which slavery we failed to save Eda,” said Grant Perry softly. “But no matter—here’s the twenty millions, Loring, and you know I wish your society success.”
He was extending the packet and sheet to Robert Loring when the door of the office opened suddenly. In it stood a girl modern in dress from the small hat on her dark hair to her trim high-heeled shoes. But the girl—
“Eda!” cried Grant. He met her, held her close.
“Eda, how did you get here? How could you get here?”
“Grant, I’m not Eda at all,” she said. “I’m Edith—Edith Loring.”
“Edith Loring?” repeated Grant, stupified. “Then Loring here—”
“Is my father,” she said. Robert Loring had come forward, his face pale.
“Edith, you have ruined everything,” he said quietly. “All our society’s work—all its hopes—”
“I couldn’t help it!” she cried. “I couldn’t bear to go on hurting Grant—letting him think he had failed to save me from torture and death.”
“What does all this mean, in God’s name?” demanded Grant Perry dazedly. “Eda—Edith—I left you ten thousand years in the future in the hands of those machine Masters!”
“You didn’t, Grant,” said Edith Loring. “You see, you were never in the future at all.”
“But the time drug!” Grant exclaimed. “And that underground city of mechanical Masters and human slaves—we were in it—escaped from it! Don’t tell me that it wasn’t real!”
“It was real, Grant, but wasn’t the future,” she said. “Before I tell you the whole plot, Grant,” she continued, “I want to make one thing clear to you, and that is that my father and all the other members of his society are absolutely sincere. They believe with all their souls that humanity will be menaced in the future by its own machines, and believe equally that only by setting up a non-mechanical community in this time can any of human civilization be saved from that menace.
“But they could not set up such a community without the necessary money for support, twenty millions at least. They thought that they might get this amount from you but knew you would not give it unless you were absolutely convinced, as they already were and are, that such a machine menace would imperil men in the future. They determined therefore to convince you utterly by pretending to take you into the future to see the machine peril for yourself!
“Father’s society numbers several hundreds of people, as he told you, and they joined together in the necessary work. The first thing we did was to find some stretch of land on the lake’s edge not too far from Chicago, which would have no sign at all of human civilization or structures, and which would have the same general appearance as the landscape at Chicago would have if there were no buildings or people there.
“We found such a place not too far north from here, a beach with a green plain running inland. There was no sign of human buildings or presence there yet it could be reached in an hour by plane, since it lay on a barren part of the Wisconsin coast. The place being found, the next step was to prepare it, and for several months we joined in the work, constructing the supposed underground city that you saw there.
“But I can’t believe that!” Grant Perry exclaimed. “Yours nor fifty societies could not have constructed that vast underground city with its thousands of corridors and rooms!”
Edith Loring shook her head. “Grant, you got an impression of a vast under-city from the hundreds of shaft-mouths you saw on the plain. It was the impression father and the rest planned to give you, but the city didn’t exist!. Those round holes in the plain were only dug for a few feet into the plain, just enough to make them appear as so many well-mouths. Only one of them, the nearest to the beach, the one you entered, was of more than a few feet depth.”
“But suppose I had gone near any of the others—it would have given the whole thing away then and there?” Grant said.
“You couldn’t have gone near!” she answered. “If you’ll think you’ll remember that your movements were directed from first to last either by the Masters whom you thought had deadly beams, or by father.”
“But we did go down into that one shaft,” Grant Perry insisted. “We did see one great cell.”
AGAIN she shook her head. “Think back, and you’ll recall that all you saw was the shaft we went down, the corridor leading from it for a few hundred feet, and three rooms along that corridor, one in which you glimpsed humans serving the Masters, another in which was the Master-Who-Thinks and another the supply-room in which you hid. You saw many doors, you inferred rooms behind them, got the impression of a vast under-city of numberless corridors and rooms, but that was all you saw, and that was all there really was!
“Behind the other doors was—nothing at all! Even so, it took us months just to prepare and wall with metal that shaft and corridor and those few rooms. Also we had to prepare machines and costumes, for some of us were to play the part of human slaves and some to play the part of Masters.
“The Masters that you thought living machines were only cubical boxes of metal in which a man could hide! It was possible to see out of them and to move in them by working pedals connected with the wheels beneath them. Also the man inside could speak through a diaphragm that made his voice toneless and metallic. The Master-Who-Thinks was simply a big metal hemisphere in which a man was hidden—in fact it was Dr. Dwale who was inside.
“Our society prepared all that,” Edith Loring continued, “and though it took us much work and more than a little money, we considered it an investment from which we would gain twenty millions to be used to establish the society’s non-mechanical community. When we had everything ready father came to you and offered to convince you of the need of such a community by taking you into the future with the time drug.
“You consented to go and when you came over to the society’s rooms took the drug, the red liquid. Father’s flask held only colored water but yours held a drug that was harmless but that produced unconsciousness almost instantly that lasted an hour or more. You took it, became unconscious, and thought it was from flashing into time.
“No sooner were you unconscious than father and Dr. Dwale and Gunnett bundled you up like an invalid and rushed you down to a plane waiting. The plane flew north and landed you on the beach near our fake under-city, and then went on to keep from being in sight. Dr. Dwale and Mr. Gunnett went on down into the under-city where the rest of us were waiting, ready to play our parts.
“When you showed signs of waking out on the beach, father pretended to be waking also. He managed it that you walked up to the ridge and saw the hundreds of openings in the plain. Before you could investigate them I, who had been waiting for you two to appear, ran out from the shaft-mouth as though in flight. When I spoke I used a changed, distorted kind of English, of course, as we all did. We had rehearsed everything so often!
“The two pseudo-Masters came out at once after me and I pretended their blue beams were deadly, so they could capture us. They did so and examined you and father, throwing your time drugs in the grass as planned, since had you retained them you would have tried to escape simply by taking the drugs. They took us back then and down into the one real shaft among those hundreds of faked openings.
“They took us along the corridor and of course the cringing humans you met, and the dozen or so Masters you saw down there, were simply adding to the impression of a swarming, populous under-city. The Master-Who-Thinks ordered me taken away, and then when you were taken Birk pretended to kill your Master guard. All he did, of course, was to crumple in the hemisphere on top and after that the man inside the cubical body remained inactive.”
“Birk!” exclaimed Grant Perry, interrupting her. “You said the blue beams weren’t deadly yet Birk was killed before our eyes!”
Edith Loring smiled, stepped to the door to call someone outside. A stalwart young man in modern clothes appeared with an embarrassed grin on his face, whom Grant recognized as Birk.
“My brother, Burke Loring,” Edith said. “He died realistically enough, but it was all acting. You see, we had decided that you should not stay long down there in our faked under-city lest some slip disclose the truth to you. And we thought that by making it seem that you and father and Burke were rescuing me, you would be less liable in the heat of action to doubt the reality of it all.
“So Burke hid you two in the supply-room, came then around the corridor—it ended around that turn—where I waited. The Master who discovered you in the room and the one who apparently killed Burke with his beam and the pursuit and our escape up and toward the drugs—it was all planned. And when you had taken the green drug and were becoming unconscious, I was torn from you to account for my not being with you when you got back to your own time, as you thought.
“Of course,” Edith Loring added, “as soon as you were unconscious the plane came, you were loaded into it as before and rushed south to wake in Chicago in the society’s rooms. Burke and I came in the plane too, with father and Dwale and Gunnett and you.” Grant Perry’s mind was whirling as she finished. “And it was all faked, from first to last,” he said slowly. “Time drug, under-city and Masters!”
“It was,” said Robert Loring, not without dignity. “I do not apologize for it, Perry. I considered and still consider the deception justified by its end, by the work the society could have accomplished with those twenty millions.”
“Faked,” repeated Grant. He gazed into Edith Loring’s face. “And I was playing the hero, trying to save you from the machine monsters, and you laughing inwardly at me all the time.”
“I wasn’t!” she denied, her eyes filling. “You were a hero, Grant—to you those blue flashlight beams were deadly peril and the Masters real and terrible. Yet you braved them to save me and it’s why I couldn’t go on without telling you the truth—couldn’t bear to see you hurt by thinking you had left me there to torture—couldn’t—”
But Edith’s sobbing voice was stilled abruptly against Grant Perry’s shoulder as he gathered her close again. He looked up in a moment, thrust the packet and sheet in his hand toward Loring.
“You get the twenty millions anyway, Loring, and I don’t hold the thing against your society.”
Robert Loring’s face flamed. “Grant, you mean it? It means the realization of our society’s dream after all—the establishment of our community—”
“Go ahead and establish it,” Grant Perry told him, “but leave one of your society’s members out of your plans.”
“Leave one of our members out? You mean—”
“I mean Eda—Edith. She’s going to stay right here in Chicago.”
THE END
1932
THE RADIANT SHELL
Paul Ernst
Into the very jaws of death goes Thorn Winter on hie invisible quest.
“AND that, gentlemen,” said the Secretary of War, “is the situation. Arvania has stolen the Ziegler plans and formulae. With their acquisition it becomes the most powerful nation on earth. The Ziegler plans are at present in the Arvanian Embassy, but they will be smuggled out of the country soon. Within a month of their landing in Arvania, war will be declared against us. That means”—he glanced at the tense faces around the conference table—“that we have about three months to live as a nation—unless we can get those plans!”
There was a hushed, appalled silence, broken at last by General Forsyte.
“Nonsense! How can a postage-stamp country like Arvania really threaten us?”
“The day has passed, General,” said the Secretary, “when a nation’s power is reckoned by its size. The Ziegler heat ray is the deadliest weapon yet invented. A thousand men with a dozen of the ray-projectors can reduce us to smoking ruins while remaining far outside the range of our guns. No! I tell you that declaration of war by Arvania will be followed by the downfall of the United States inside of three months!”
Again the hushed, strained silence descended over the conference table, while one white-faced man gazed at another and all speculated on the incredible possibility of a world in which there was no United States of America.
“We must get the plans,” nodded Forsyte, convinced at last. “But how? March openly on the Arvanian Embassy?”
“No, that would be declaration of war on our part. The World Court, which knows nothing of the Ziegler plans, would set the League at our throats.”
“Send volunteers unofficially to raid the place?”
“Impossible. There is a heavy guard in the Arvanian Embassy; and I more than suspect the place bristles with machine guns.”
“What are we to do?” demanded Forsyte.
The Secretary seemed to have been waiting for that final question.
“I have had an odd and desperate plan submitted me from an outside source. I could not pass it without your approval. I will let you hear it from the lips of the planner.”
He pressed a buzzer. “Bring Mr. Winter in,” he told his secretary.
THE man who presently appeared in the doorway was an arresting figure. A man of thirty-odd with the body of an athlete, belied somewhat by the pallor of an indoor worker, with acid stained, delicate hands offset by forearms that might have belonged to a blacksmith, with coal black hair and gray eyes so light as to look like ice-gray holes in the deep caverns of his eye-sockets. This was Thorn Winter.
“Gentlemen, the scientist, Mr. Winter,” announced the Secretary. “He thinks he can get the Ziegler plans.”
Thorn Winter cleared his throat. “My scheme is simple enough,” he said tersely. “I believe I can walk right into the Embassy, get the plans—and then walk right out again. It sounds kind of impossible, but I think I can work it by making myself invisible.”
“Invisible?” echoed Forsyte. “Invisible!”
“Precisely,” said Thorn in a matter-of-fact tone. “I have just turned out a camouflage which is the most perfect yet discovered. It was designed for application to guns and equipment only. I’d never thought of trying to cover a human body with it, but I am sure it can be done.”
“But . . . invisible . . .” muttered Forsyte, glancing askance at Winter.
“There’s no time for argument,” said the Secretary crisply. “The question is, shall we give this man permission to try the apparently impossible?”
All heads nodded, though in all eyes was doubt. The Secretary turned to the scientist.
“You are aware of the risk you run? You realize that if you are caught, we cannot recognize you—that we must disclaim official knowledge of your work, and leave you to your fate?”
Thorn nodded.
“Then,” said the Secretary, his voice vibrant, “yours is the mission. And on your effort hangs the fate of your country. Now—what help will you require?”
“Only the assistance of one man,” said Thorn. “And, since secrecy is vital, I’m going to ask you, sir, to be that man.”
The Secretary smiled; and with that smile he seemed to be transformed from a great leader of affairs into a kindly, human individual. “I am honored, Mr. Winter,” he said. “Shall we go at once to your laboratory?”
IN the great laboratory room, the Secretary glanced about almost uneasily at the crowding apparatus that was such an enigma to one untrained in science. Then his gaze returned to Winter’s activities.
Thorn was carefully stirring fluids, poured drop by drop from various retorts, in a mixing bowl. All the fluids were colorless; and they combined in a mixture that had approximately the consistency of thin syrup. To this, Thorn added a carefully weighted pinch of glittering powder. Then he lit a burner under the bowl, and thrust into the mixture a tiny, specially constructed thermometer.
“You can really make yourself invisible?” breathed the Secretary.
“I can,” said Thorn, “if the blisters don’t upset my calculations by making my body surfaces too moist for this stuff to stick to. I’m going to have you paint me with it, you see, and it was never intended to cover flesh.”
He regulated the burner anxiously, and then began to take off his clothes.
“Ready,” he said at last, glancing at the thermometer and turning off the burner. He stood before the wondering Secretary, a fine, muscular figure. “Take this brush and cover me with the stuff. And be sure not to miss any of me!”
And then the Secretary saw why Thorn had said the colorless paint was never intended to be applied to human flesh. For it was still seething and smoking in the cauldron.
“Good heavens!” he said. “Don’t you want to wait till it cools a little?”
