Entities: The Selected Novels of Eric Frank Russell (107 page)

“It is.”

“But since the Department of Special Finance is not involved, it cannot have an interest in the matter?” Beach’s dark, finely curved brows lifted questioningly.

“No,” agreed Graham. Taking off his ring, he handed it across. “Probably you’ve heard about those even if you haven’t seen one. Its inner surface bears a microscopic inscription which is my warrant as a member of the United States Intelligence Service. You may check it under a microscope, if you wish.”

“Ah, the Intelligence Service!” The eyebrows sank into a thoughtful frown. Beach rolled the ring to and fro between his fingers, gave it back without bothering to inspect it. “I’ll take your word that it is what it purports to be.” His frown deepened. “If you want to know why the silver nitrate exploded, I cannot tell you. In the next few weeks I shall be asked for an explanation by policemen, factory inspectors, industrial chemists, press reporters, time and time again. They’ll all be wasting breath. I am totally unable to offer an explanation.”

“You lie!” declared Graham, flatly.

With a resigned sigh, the scientist came to his feet, walked slowly to the door through which they had entered. Finding a hooked rod, he used it to drag a large screen down from its slot in the ceiling. Satisfied that the screen completely covered the door, he returned to his seat.

“Why do I lie?”

Back hairs were erect on Graham’s neck as he answered, “Because you, and you alone, know that the stuff was mysteriously disrupted by some weird phenomena that you were trying to photograph. Because someone working under your command finally took a forbidden picture—and Silver City died in the counterblast!”

He swallowed hard, feeling certain that in speaking thus he had signed his own death warrant, and was amazed to find that he still lived. Studying Beach for the effect of his words, he noted only the spasmodic tightening of the folded hands, and an almost indiscernible flicker in the burning eyes.

“Whatever wiped out that town,” continued Graham, “were the same thing or things that have eliminated an unknown number of the world’s best scientists. It is my investigation of the deaths of some of those scientists—American ones— that has led me to you!”

Producing his wallet, he extracted a telegram, passed it to Beach. The latter murmured its words as he read them.

“GRAHAM CARE OF BOISE POLICE: SOLE COMMON DENOMINATOR DASH ALL WERE FRIENDS OF BJORNSEN OR FRIENDS OF HIS FRIENDS STOP HARRIMAN.”

“That refers to last month’s quota of dead.” Graham stabbed an accusing finger at the scientist.
“You
were a friend of Bjornsen’s!”

“True,” admitted Beach. “True.” He looked down at his hands, ruminated awhile. “I was a very old friend of Bjornsen’s. I am one of the few such who still remain.” He raised his gaze, looking his opponent straight in the face. “I will also confess that I have much information which I intend to keep entirely to myself. What are you going to do about it?”

The other’s bold defiance might have beaten individuals less persistent than Graham, but the investigator was not to be so easily defeated. Leaning forward, arms akimbo on broad knees, his muscular face intent, the Intelligence man did his best to convey the impression that he knew far more than the other suspected, more than he was ready to state at that moment.

Earnestly, he said, “Irwin Webb left a concealed message that we deciphered, a message telling much of what he had discovered. He declared that it was a picture which must be shown the world—if it can be shown without massacre.”

“Massacre!” Beach’s voice was harsh. “Is not the fate of Silver City enough? One man finds the picture, looks at it,
thinks
about it—and in a lightning flash thirty thousand pay the penalty with their earthly bodies and perhaps with their very souls. Why, even now your own thoughts are your most dangerous enemy. Knowing what little you may know, thinking about what you know, pondering it, turning it around in your mind, you invite destruction at any given moment, you tag yourself as a child of perdition, you are doomed by the involuntary activity of your own mind.” His gaze slid toward the door. “If that fluorescent screen over the door happens to glow, neither I nor the strength of the civilized world can save you from instant death.”

“I am aware of the fact,” responded Graham, evenly. “My risk is no greater than your own, and cannot be increased by knowing the things you know. I cannot die
more
by knowing more!” He refrained from looking round at the screen, kept his whole attention upon the brilliant eyes opposite. If anything illuminated that screen, he would see it in those eyes. “Since there has been massacre despite the fact that the truth is not generally known, matters could hardly be worse if the truth were known.”

“An assumption,” scoffed Beach, “based on the erroneous promise that whatever is bad cannot be worse.” He kept his gaze on that screen. “Nothing was worse than the bow and arrow—until gunpowder came. Nothing worse than that—until poison gas appeared. Then bombing planes. Then supersonic missiles. Then atom bombs. Today, mutated germs and viruses. Tomorrow, something else.” His laugh was short, sardonic. “Through pain and tears we learn that there’s always room for further improvement.”

“I’m willing to argue that with you when I’m in possession of all the facts,” Graham retorted.

‘The facts are beyond belief!”

“Do you believe them?”

“A fair question,” Beach conceded, readily. “With me, belief does not enter into the matter. Faith has no relation to what one learns empirically. No, Graham, I don’t believe them—I
know
them!” Moodily, he massaged his chin. “The incontrovertible evidence already accumulated leaves no room for doubt in understanding minds.”

“Then what are the facts?” demanded Graham, his expression urging the other to speak. “What blotted out Silver City? What cut short the experiments of a clique of scientists, ending their lives in manner calculated to arouse no suspicion? What murdered Police Chief Corbett this afternoon?”

“Corbett? Has he gone too?” With his blazing eyes directed over his listener’s shoulder toward the screened door, Beach pondered lengthily. There was silence in the room except where a tiny clock numbered the moments toward the grave. One mind worked hurriedly, while the other waited with phlegmatic grimness. Finally, Beach got up, switched off the lights.

“We can observe that screen more easily in darkness,” he commented. “Sit here next to me, keep your eyes on it, and if it glows, force your thoughts elsewhere— or heaven itself won’t help you!”

Shifting his chair next to the scientist’s, Graham gazed through the gloom. He knew that at last the case was about to break, and his conscience kept nagging him unmercifully.

“You ought to have obeyed orders!” silently screamed the still, small voice within him. “You ought to have made contact with Leamington as you were instructed! If Beach becomes a corpse, and you with him, the world will learn nothing except that you have failed—failed as have all the rest—because you refused to do your duty!”

“Graham,” commenced Beach, his voice rasping through the darkness, cutting short the investigator’s mental reproaches. “The world has been given a scientific discovery as great, as important, as far-reaching in its implications as the telescope and the microscope.”

“What is it?”

“A means of extending the visible portion of the spectrum far into the infrared.” “Ah!”

“Bjornsen discovered it,” Beach went on. “Like many other great discoveries, he stumbled across it while seeking something else, had the sense to realize what he’d found, developed it to usability. Like the telescope and the microscope, it has revealed a new and hitherto unsuspected world.”

“A revealing angle on the ever-present unknown?” Graham suggested.

“Precisely! When Galileo peered incredulously through his telescope he found data that had stood before millions of uncomprehending eyes for countless centuries; new, revolutionary data which overthrew the officially endorsed but thoroughly famous Copernican system of astronomy.”

“It was a wonderful find,” agreed Graham.

“The microscope provides a far better analogy, for it disclosed a fact that had been right under the world’s nose since the dawn of time, yet never had been suspected—the fact that we share our world, our whole existence, with a veritable multitude of living creatures hidden beyond the limits of our natural sight, hidden in the infinitely small. Think of it,” urged Beach, his voice rising in tone “living, active animals swarming around us, above us, below us, within us, fighting, breeding and dying even within our own bloodstreams, yet remaining completely concealed, unguessed-at, until the microscope lent power to our inadequate eyes.”

“That, too, was a great discovery,” Graham approved.

Despite his interest, his nerves were still jumpy, for he started at the unexpected touch of the other’s hand in the gloom.

“Just as all these things evaded us for century after century, some by hiding in the enormously great, some in the exceedingly small, so have others eluded us by skulking in the absolutely colorless.” Beach’s voice was still vibrant and a little hoarse. “The scale of electro-magnetic vibrations extends over sixty octaves, of which the human eye can see but one. Beyond that sinister barrier of our limitations, outside that poor, ineffective range of vision, bossing every man-jack of us from the cradle to the grave, invisibly preying on us as ruthlessly as any parasite, are our malicious, all-powerful lords and masters—the creatures who really own the Earth!”

“What the devil are they? Don’t play around the subject. Tell me, for Pete’s sake!” A cold sweat lay over Graham’s forehead as his eyes remained fixed in the direction of the warning screen. No glow, no dreadful halo penetrated encompassing darkness, a fact he noted with much relief.

“To eyes equipped to see them with the new vision, they looked like floating spheres of pale-blue luminescence,” declared Beach. “Because they resembled globes of living light, Bjornsen bestowed upon them the name of Vitons. Not only are they alive—they are intelligent! They are the Lords of Terra; we, the sheep of their fields. They are cruel and callous sultans of the unseen; we, their mumbling, sweating, half-witted slaves, so indescribably stupid that only now have we become aware of our fetters.”

"You
can see them?”

“I can! Sometimes I wish to God that I had never learned to see!” The scientist’s breathing was loud in the confines of the small room. “All who duplicated Bjornsen’s final experiment became endowed with the ability to penetrate that barrier of sight. Those who saw the Vitons got excited about it, thought about the discovery and walked into the shadow of death. From within limited distance, the Vitons can read human minds as easily as we could read an open book. Naturally, they take swift action to forestall the broadcasting of news which eventually might lead to our challenging their ages-old predominance. They maintain their mastery as coldbloodedly as we maintain ours over the animal world—by shooting the opposition. Those of Bjornsen’s copyists who failed to hide the knowledge within their minds, or, possibly, were betrayed by dreams while helpless in their slumbers, have had their minds and mouths closed forever.” He paused, added, “As ours may yet be closed.” Another pause, timed by the steady ticking of the little clock. “There, Graham, is your living purgatory—to know all is to be damned. An exceptionally powerful mind may seek refuge by controlling its daytime thoughts, all the time, every minute, every second, but who can control his dreams? Aye, in slumber lies the deadliest peril. Don’t get into that bed—it might be loaded!”

“I suspected something of the sort.”

“You did?” Surprise was evident in Beach’s tones.

“Ever since I commenced my investigation I’ve had queer, uncanny moments when I’ve felt that it was tremendously important to shift my thoughts elsewhere. More than once I’ve obeyed a crazy but powerful impulse to think of other things, feelings, believing, almost knowing that it was safer to do so.”

“It is the only thing that has spared you,” Beach asserted. “But for that, you’d have been buried at the start.”

“Then is my mental control greater than that of more accomplished men such as Bjornsen, Luther, Mayo and Webb?”

“No, not at all. You were able to exercise control more easily because what you were controlling was merely a vague hunch. Unlike the others, you did not have to suppress a full and horrible knowledge.” Ominously, he added, “The real test will lie in how long you last after this!”

“Anyway, thank heavens for my hunches!” murmured Graham, gratefully.

Beach said, “I suspect that you do not have hunches. If those feelings of yours, though vague and unreasoning, were powerful enough to command obedience in defiance of your rational instinct, it is evident that you have extrasensory perception developed to an unusual degree.”

“I’d never thought of that,” Graham admitted. “I’ve been too busy to take time off to analyze myself.”

“The faculty, though not common, is far from unique.” Getting up from his chair, Beach switched on the lights, pulled a drawer from a large filing cabinet. Raking through a mass of press clippings that filled the drawer, he extracted a bunch, looked them over.

“I have data concerning many such cases going back for one hundred fifty years. Michele Lefevre, of St. Ave, near Vannes, in France, was repeatedly tested by French scientists. Her extrasensory perception was estimated as having sixty percent of the efficiency of her normal sight. Juan Eguerola, of Seville, seventy-five percent. Willi Osipenko, of Poznan, ninety percent.” He pulled a clipping out of the bunch. “Here’s a honey. It’s taken from British
Tit Bits
dated March 19, 1938. Ilga Kirps, a Latvian shepherdess, of Riga. She was a young girl of no more than average intelligence, yet a scientific curiosity. A committee of leading European scientists subjected her to a very thorough examination, then stated that she undoubtedly possessed the power of extrasensory perception developed to such an amazing degree that it was superior to her natural eyesight.”