The Second Murray Leinster Megapack (32 page)

Dorothy pressed close: “Jimmy—I was afraid! Don’t let’s ever—be separated again! Please! I—I’m frightened! I’m afraid I’ll—get hysterical!”

“Shock,” said Jimmy. “That’s all. You need a change of scene. And—and so do I. Lord, yes!” He laughed shakily. “You said something about—getting married tomorrow. I think that would take our minds off—all this. We could go up in the mountains and watch sunsets and forget all science. How does that strike you as an idea?”

“I think,” said Dorothy, “it’s fine! I—always said you were brilliant, Jimmy.”

*

THE ETERNAL NOW

(Originally Published in 1944)

CHAPTER I

Infinity Machine

There was sunlight. There were colors. There were noises. They stood in a perfectly normal office, on a perfectly normal afternoon, in a perfectly normal world. A typist was at work in an adjoining room. There was a deep humming noise in the air, which was the city itself, vividly alive and in motion.

“And, Dr. Brett, this is my niece, Miss Hunt,” Laura’s uncle said comfortably. “I think she’ll be inter-”

Harry Brett’s hand closed on that of the girl as she smiled at him. Her hand in his was very pleasant, and she was a very pretty girl…

He felt an intolerable shock in every atom of his body. It was like a blow which hit him simultaneously all over, inside and out. He had a feeling of falling endlessly and a sensation of bitter cold. His eyes were closed, and he opened them, and then he sat upright with a gasp of amazement.

He was no longer standing in the office of Burroughs and Lawson, in the Chanin Building on Forty-second Street. He was sitting down—reclining, rather—in what felt like a beach-chair. But it didn’t look like a beach-chair. He was out-of-doors somewhere, but it didn’t look like out-of-doors. He was in a city, but it looked like no city he had ever dreamed of. His first instinct was to think that he had died, somehow, and this was the vestibule of another world. The setting was appropriate for a waiting-place beside the Styx.

Everything was gray, and everything was silent, and there were no shadows. After the first stunned, unbelieving instant, he saw that he was on a sort of terrace, as if outside a penthouse in a quite impossible universe. There was a thin dry mist everywhere, but nearby an angular structure soared skyward. It was gray, like everything else. It possessed rows of windows, but they appeared to be filled with an opaque gray material instead of glass. He saw that building over a sort of hedge which resembled box-wood, but it was gray—and there were no shadows between the leaves. Close beside him there was a climbing plant which had gray leaves, and gray stalks, and gray flowers. There was, however, no fragrance in the air. There were no smells at all. The result was startling.

But the silence was enough to crack his ear-drums. He swallowed, and the noise in his own throat seemed thunderous. The buildings stood. That was all. No movement. No life. No sound! There was not even the normally unnoticed murmur of a breeze.

He pinched himself, and it hurt. He stirred speculatively, and the cushion rustled beneath him. He stood up, and his feet made noises on the gray stone beneath the chair. To himself he seemed to make a terrific clatter as he moved across the terrace to look incredulously over the edge.

His sleeve brushed against one of the plants. There was the sound of ripping cloth. He was startled. In this noiseless gray twilight without shadows he could not credit what his eyes told him. He had torn his coat on a fragile shrub. He struck a match to see the plant more clearly. It shone out in the matchlight a dark blue-green. It looked more than ever like box. It was! But he touched a leaf, and could not believe his senses. The leaf was immovable. It was as rigid as a stone wall. It was harder than iron. He could not bend it. When he pushed with all his strength he could feel no trace of yielding. When he touched the dirt under it, his fingers slid over the irregularities as if they had been glass.

He muttered incredulously and looked over the edge. The gray haze hid the ground beneath. It hid the sky. But he seemed to see dimly the outline of another building through it.

His match scorched his fingers. He blew it out and stared at them. His flesh was the same dead-gray as everything else. It moved and wrinkled naturally, but it looked like gray marble. He struck a second match—and his hand was normal in color.

A thought hammered suddenly at the back of his head. “Mass-nullifier! Mass-nullifier!” Then he looked around him with his throat going dry as ashes. A horrible suspicion built up in his mind. It was something to make for insanity. Because he’d been working four years on a theory that mass was not an inherent, unchangeable property of matter. He’d proved it, but he’d come upon facts so dangerous and so deadly that he’d resolved to drop his experiments and destroy his apparatus. Yet this gray world about him was proof that someone else had made the same discovery.

He had a sensation as if ice water flowed in all his veins instead of blood. He was old all over. This gray world, this immovable plant—it could be nothing else. And there could be but one man who would have wished to do this, and it was irrevocable…

Then he heard a sound which was not of his own making. It was a gasp. He whirled, and made out a second beach-chair on the terrace. A gray figure stirred in it, and gasped again.

Dr. Harry Brett struck a third match. Its light showed color once more. The gray figure was a girl, Laura Hunt, with whom he had been shaking hands the instant before waking in this weird world.

“G-good heavens!” said the girl, staring in terror. “Where am I? What has happened?”

“I’m—not quite sure,” said Brett unsteadily. “I’m trying not to believe my eyes. Haven’t you any idea?”

He was not truthful. He did know where he was. When he was, at any rate. But it would be most merciful to keep her from knowing as long as possible.

“N-no.” The girl’s voice quavered. “There can’t be any place like this!” She hesitated. “Are we—dead?”

“Not yet,” said Brett in an attempt at humor.

He crawled, internally, because of what he knew. He had put a live mouse, once, into the field of his mass-nullifier. He’d turned the machine on and off again, instantly.

Where the mouse had been in its cage there was only a little heap of dust, with friable bits of unidentifiable bone and streaks of red rust. That had told him everything—why his first machines destroyed themselves, by rusting until he plated them with chromium, what the removal of mass from an object meant, and the real significance of Einstein’s formula for the mass and the time-rate of an object moving at the speed of light. Nobody had thought of the reverse of that formula, but he’d hit on it by accident when looking for something else. Now—!

“We’re not dead,” he said, steadying his voice deliberately. “I feel quite natural. I think we’d better try to find out what has really happened. We were just being introduced when this thing started,” he added. He spoke urgently because he saw a terror, close to hysteria, in the girl’s eyes. “Your name is Hunt, isn’t it?”

“Yes. Laura Hunt. And you are Harry Brett, some sort of scientist. Can you do anything?”

“I’m going to try,” said Brett. But he was utterly without hope. “First I’ll take a look around. Do you want to wait here?”

“I—” The girl looked around at the dead-gray, misty surroundings. “No! I’ll come with you!”

The match burned out between his fingers again. She cried out.

“I look like a ghost,” said Brett. “I know! So do you. Look at your hands.” She gasped at the gray, stony color of her skin. He struck yet another match. Her hands looked natural again.

“It’s the light,” said Brett. “There’s no color in this world.”

“There’s a colored light there,” the girl said faintly.

From inside a gray doorway, across a gray room, down a gray hallway, came a subdued yellow glow. Brett’s heart pounded. Hope would die hard, he knew. But there was only one man in the world who knew anything at all about Harry Brett’s mass-nullifier. That was Professor Aldous Cable, who had been embittered by the necessity of accepting employment as Brett’s assistant, and who hated him because Brett had achieved where he had not. There was no one else who could have brought this about, or wanted to do so.

“I don’t suppose the light will come to us,” said Brett. “I think we’d better go to it.”

He tucked the girl’s hand under his arm and moved toward the opening through which the light showed.

“I—really think I’ve gone crazy!” she said shakily. “This simply can’t be!”

Harry did not answer. They stepped through a doorway. They were no longer in the open air. But it was exactly as light, inside, as underneath the sky. The walls and ceiling and floor and furniture showed no shadows. The girl’s hand had tightened with alarm. Everything was luminous—even the two of them! She caught her breath.

“Steady!” he said. “I’m just as scared as you are.”

He was in a worse mental state so far as apprehension went. He knew what had happened. Einstein has postulated that there is an inherent relationship of mass and time-rate, so that if a material object—such as a spaceship—went at only slightly less than the speed of light, its mass would be almost infinite and it would move out of normal time. What seemed a second to the space-navigators might seem a century or a millennium to the rest of the universe. But there was no question now of an increase of mass to near-infinity. The question was of its decrease to near-zero!

A flashlight lay on the floor beside the hallway. It was turned on, and its beam unwinkingly illuminated a room. Where the light struck, the room seemed completely normal. Rugs and furniture. There was a woman at a dressing-table, coloring her lips.

“I beg your pardon,” gasped Laura Hunt. “Will you answer a question?”

The woman did not move. She was unnaturally still. She was motionless as a stone is motionless. Brett moved forward. He touched her shoulder. It was as immovable as a mountain. Sweat started out on his forehead.

“What is it?” asked the girl, shivering.

“It’s what I was afraid of,” said Brett grimly. “But this light shouldn’t work, and it does. Let’s see!”

He touched the flashlight. It yielded He picked it up. It was a perfectly ordinary flashlight with dry batteries inside.

“Maybe this is intended to make me hope,” he said with a flash of bitterness. “The spirit may be of mockery but I am to accept facts. Come along!”

He swung the flashing beam about. Wherever it touched, the ghostly, glowing walls and floors looked, normal. The rugs? Brett touched one with his foot. Each separate thread was iron-hard and iron-firm. He could not bend the most minute fibre. He grimaced.

“We’re intended to hope—for a while,” he said grimly. “Let’s see what the rest of it is.”

The girl clung to him as he moved down the hallway.

“You know what’s happened?” she asked him.

“Now, yes,” said Brett. “I was messing around with a theory that mass mightn’t be inherent in matter. Einstein says that an object could have infinite mass. The quantity of substance wouldn’t change, but its mass could—and its time-rate. I wondered what would happen if you reduced an object’s mass to near-zero. And I’ve found out.”

They came to the open door of the apartment. The flashlight showed them elevator-doors. Harry Brett pushed his thumb against a call-button. It was immovable. He turned off the flashlight.

A flickering yellow glow showed in the stair-well. On the next landing down, a highly commonplace candle burned smokily,” stuck in the neck of a bottle.

“I see!” said Brett bitterly. “Cable’s arranged this. It couldn’t be anyone else. He was my assistant and helped in my experiments. I made a machine which would take the mass out of anything within its field. It was only part electrical, but it worked. I didn’t like what I found out, though. Einstein says an object can have infinite mass and a time-rate which is nil.”

Cautiously they went down the steps. He leaned over the stair-rail and saw other yellow glows below them. Markers, evidently, to lead them to some intended destination.

“I found a way to make a mass almost nil,” he told the girl. “Not quite nil, but almost. I found it implied a time-rate which was almost infinite! The obverse of Einstein’s formula. If one made a spaceship—or a man—have almost zero mass, instead of one second to him or them meaning centuries or aeons of normal time—why—an aeon of his time would pass in a second of normal experience. That’s what’s happened to us. We’re living perhaps a hundred million times as fast as normal. We could live here all our lives, and die of old age—and a clock in normal time wouldn’t have clicked off a single second.”

The girl stumbled. They passed another candle in a bottle. Harry held the flashlight before them and the separate steps were distinct.

“But how could it happen?”

“My assistant!” said Brett, bitterly. “Cable! He was jealous of the fact that I was getting results and he’s never been able to do any really original research. When I found out what my machine would do, I stopped. It had possibilities that were too horrible to think of. I didn’t think he knew them. But it’s evident that he duplicated my machine on his own, and that we’re here because he used his machine on us. That’s the only possibility I can think of, anyhow. Still, there are some oddities—”