The World Beyond Page 2

  CHAPTER II

  _The Flight Into Size and Space_

  Lee came back to consciousness with the feeling that some great lengthof time must have elapsed. He was on a couch in a small, weird-lookingmetal room--metal of a dull, grey-white substance like nothing he hadever seen before. With his head still swimming he got up dizzily on oneelbow, trying to remember what had happened to him. That fingernail, orclaw, had scratched his face. He had been drugged. It seemed obvious. Hecould remember his roaring senses as he had tried to fight, with thedrug gradually overcoming him....

  The room had a small door, and a single round window, like a bullseyepane of thick lens. Outside there was darkness, with points of stars.His head was still humming from the remaining effect of the drug. Or wasthe humming an outside noise? He was aware as he got to his feet andstaggered to the door, that the humming was distantly outside the room.The door was locked; its lever resisted his efforts to turn it.

  There he saw the inert figures of the girl, and Tom Franklin. They werelying uninjured on two other small couches against the room's metalwall. The girl stirred a little as he touched her dank forehead. Herdyed blonde hair had fallen disheveled to her shoulders. Franklin laysprawled, his stiff white shirt bosom dirty and rumpled, his thin sandyhair dangling over his flushed face. His slack mouth was open. He wasbreathing heavily.

  At the lens-window Lee stood gasping, his mind still confused andblurred, trying to encompass what was out there. This was a spaceship! Asmall globular thing of white metal. He could see a rim of it, like aflat ring some ten feet beneath him. A spaceship, and obviously it hadleft the Earth! There was a black firmament--dead-black monstrous abysswith white blazing points of stars. And then, down below and to one sidethere was just an edge of a great globe visible. The Earth, with thesunlight edging its sweeping crescent limb--the Earth, down there with afamiliar coastline and a huge spread of ocean like a giant map inmonochrome.

  Back on the couch Lee sat numbed. There was the sound of scraping metal;a doorslide in the wall opened. A face was there--a man with a blur ofopalescent light behind him.

  "You are all right now?" a voice said.

  "Yes. I guess so. Let me out of here--"

  Let him out of here? To do what? To make them head this thing back toEarth.... To Lee Anthony as he sat confused, the very thoughts were afantasy.... Off the Earth! Out in Space! So often he had read of it, asa future scientific possibility--but with this actuality now his mindseemed hardly to grasp it....

  The man's voice said gently, "We cannot trust you. There must be nofighting--"

  "I won't fight. What good could it do me?"

  "You did fight. That was bad--that was frightening. We must not harmyou--"

  "Where are we going?" Lee murmured. "Why in the devil are you--"

  "We think now it is best to say nothing. We will give you food throughhere. And over there--behind you--a little doorslide to another room.You and these other two can be comfortable--"

  "For how long?" Lee demanded.

  "It should not seem many days. Soon we shall go fast. Please watch it atthe window--he would want that. You have been taught some science?"

  "Yes. I guess so."

  To Lee it was a weird, unnatural exchange between captor and captive.The voice, intoning the English words so slowly, so carefully, seemedgentle, concerned with his welfare ... and afraid of him.

  Abruptly the doorslide closed again, and then at once it reopened.

  "He would want you to understand what you see," the man said. "You willfind it very wonderful--we did, coming down here. This was his room--solong ago when he used it. His dials are there--you can watch them andtry to understand. Dials to mark our distance and our size. Thesize-change will start soon."

  Size-change? Lee's numbed mind turned over the words and found themalmost meaningless.

  "From the window there--what you can see will be very wonderful," theman said again. "He would want you to study it. Please do that."

  The doorslide closed....

  What you can see from the window will be very wonderful. No one, duringthe days that followed could adequately describe what Lee Anthony andThomas Franklin and Vivian saw through that lens-window. A vast panoramain monochrome ... a soundless drama of the stars, so immense, so awesomethat the human mind could grasp only an infinitesimal fragment of itswonders....

  They found the little door which led into another apartment. There weretables and chairs of earth-style, quaintly old-fashioned. Food and drinkwere shoved through the doorslide; the necessities of life and a faircomfort of living were provided. But their questions, even as the timepassed and lengthened into what on Earth might have been a week or more,remained unanswered. There was only that gentle but firm negation:

  "We have decided that he would want us to say nothing. We do not knowabout this girl and this smaller man. We brought them so that they couldnot remain on Earth to talk of having seen us. We are sorry about that.He probably won't like it."

  "He? Who the devil are you talking about?" Franklin demanded. "See here,if I had you fellows back on Earth now I'd slam you into jail. Damnedbrigands. You can't do this to me! My--my father's one of the mostimportant men in New York--"

  But now the doorslide quietly closed.

  A week? It could have been that, or more. In a wall recess of the roomLee found a line of tiny dials with moving pointers. Miles--thousands ofmiles. A million; ten millions; a hundred million. A light-year; tens,thousands. And, for the size-change, a normal diameter, Unit 1--and thenup into thousands.

  For hours at a time, silent, awed beyond what he had ever conceived theemotion of awe could mean, he sat at the lens-window, staring out andtrying to understand.

  * * * * *

  The globe-ship was some five-hundred thousand miles out from Earth whenthe size-change of the weird little vehicle began. It came to Lee with asudden shock to his senses, his head reeling, and a tingling within himas though every fibre of his being were suddenly stimulated into a newactivity.

  "Well, my Gawd," Vivian gasped. "What're they doin' to us now?"

  The three of them had been warned by a voice through the doorslide, sothat they sat together on one of the couches, waiting for what wouldhappen.

  "This--I wish they wouldn't do it," Franklin muttered. "Damn them--Iwant to get out of here."

  Fear seemed to be Franklin's chief emotion now--fear and a petty senseof personal outrage that all this could be done to him against his will.Often, when Lee and the girl were at the window, Franklin had satbrooding, staring at his feet.

  "Easy," Lee said. "It evidently won't hurt us. We're started insize-change. The globe, and everything in it, is getting larger."

  Weird. The grey metal walls of the room were glowing now with somestrange current which suffused them. The starlight from the window-lensmingled with an opalescent sheen from the glowing walls. It was like anaura, bathing the room--an aura which seemed to penetrate every smallestcell-particle of Lee's body--stimulating it....

  Size-change! Vaguely, Lee could fathom how it was accomplished; his mindwent back to many scientific articles he had read on the theory ofit--only theory, those imaginative scientific pedants had considered it;and now it was a reality upon him! He recalled the learned phrases thewriters had used.... The _state of matter_. In all the Universe, theinherent factors which govern the state of matter yield most readily toa change. An electronic charge--a current perhaps akin to, but certainlynot identical with electricity, would change the state of all organicand inorganic substances ... a rapid duplication of the fundamentalentities within the electrons--and electrons themselves, sounsubstantial--mere whirlpools of nothingness!

  A rapid duplication of the fundamental whirlpools--that would add size.The complete substance--with shape unaltered--would grow larger.

  All just theory, but here, now, it was brought to an accomplished fact.Within himself, Lee could feel it. But as yet, he could not see it. Theglowing room and everything in i
t was so weirdly luminous, there was noalteration in shape. These objects, the figure of Vivian beside him, andthe pallid frightened Franklin, relative to each other they were nodifferent from before. And the vast panorama of starry Universe beyondthe lens-window, the immense distances out there, made any size-changeas yet unperceivable.

  * * * * *

  But the size-change had begun, there was no question of it. With hissenses steadying, Lee crossed the room. A weird feeling of lightness wasupon him; he swayed as he stood before the little line of dials in thewall-recess. Five hundred thousand miles from Earth. More than twice thedistance of the Moon. The globe had gone that far with acceleratingvelocity so that now the pointers marked a hundred thousand miles anhour--out beyond the Moon, heading for the orbit-line of Mars. Now thesize-change pointers were stirring. Unit One, the size this globe hadbeen as it rested on Earth, fifty feet in height, and some thirty feetat its mid-section bulge. Already that unit was two, a globe--which, ifit were on Earth, would be a hundred feet high. And Lee himself? Hewould be a giant more than twelve feet tall now.... He stood staring atthe dials for a moment or two. That little pointer of the first of thesize-change dials was creeping around. An acceleration! Another momentand it had touched Unit four. A two hundred foot globe. And Lee, if hehad been on Earth, would already be a towering human nearly twenty-fivefeet in height!

  Behind him, he heard Franklin suddenly muttering, "If only I couldchange without everything else changing! Damn them all--what I coulddo--"

  "You're nuts," Vivian said. "I don't see anything growingbigger--everything here--jus' the same." Her laugh was abruptlyhysterical. "This room--you two--you look like ghosts. Say, maybe we'reall dead an' don't know it."

  Queerly her words sent a shiver through Lee. He turned, stared blanklyat her. This weird thing! The electronic light streaming from thesewalls had a stroboscopic quality. The girl's face was greenish,putty-colored, and her teeth shone phosphorescent.

  Maybe we're all dead and don't know it.... Lee knew that this thing wasa matter of cold, precise, logical science.... Yet who shall say butwhat mysticism is not mingled with science? A thing, which if weunderstood it thoroughly, would be as logical, as precise as themathematics of science itself? Death? Who shall say what, of actuality,Death may be. A leaving of the mortal shell? A departure from earthlysubstance? A new state of being? Surely some of those elements were herenow. And, logically, why could there not be a state of being not allDeath, but only with some of its elements?

  "I--I don't like this," Franklin suddenly squealed. On the couch he sathunched, trembling. "Something wrong here--Lee--damn you Lee--don't youfeel it?"

  Lee tried to smile calmly. "Feel what?"

  "We're not--not alone here," Franklin stammered. "Not just you andVivian and me--something else is here--something you can't see, but youcan almost feel. An' I don't like it--"

  A presence. Was there indeed something else here, of which now in thisnew state of being they were vaguely aware? Something--like a fellowvoyager--making this weird journey with them? Lee's heart was so wildlybeating that it seemed smothering him.

  * * * * *

  Unit Ten ... Twenty ... a Hundred.... With steady acceleration, thelowest size-change pointer was whirling, and the one above it wasmoving. The globe was five thousand feet high now. And on Earth Leewould have been a monstrous Titan over six hundred feet tall. A globe,and humans in that tremendous size--the very weight of them--in a momentmore of this growth--would disarrange the rotation of the Earth on itsaxis!...

  And then abruptly Lee found himself envisaging the monstrous globe outhere in Space. A thing to disarrange the mechanics of all the CelestialUniverse! In an hour or two, with this acceleration of growth, the globewould be a huge meteorite--then an asteroid....

  He stared at the distance dials. With the growth had come an immenseaugmentation of velocity. A hundred thousand miles an hour--that hadbeen accelerated a hundred fold now. Ten million miles an hour....Through the window-lens Lee gazed, mute with awe. The size-change wasbeginning to show! Far down, and to one side the crescent Earth wasdwindling ... Mars was far away in another portion of its orbit--theMoon was behind the Earth. There were just the myriad blazing giantworlds of the stars--infinitely remote, with vast distances of inky voidbetween them. And now there was a visible movement to the stars! A sortof shifting movement....

  An hour.... A day.... A week.... Who shall try and describe what LeeAnthony beheld during that weird outward journey?... For a brief time,after they swept past the orbit of Mars, the great planets of Jupiterand Saturn were almost in a line ahead of the plunging, expanding globe.A monstrous thing now--with electronically charged gravity-plates sothat it plunged onward by its own repellant force--the repellant forceof the great star-field beneath it.

  * * * * *

  Lee stared at Jupiter, a lead-colored world with its red spot like amonster's single glaring eye. With the speed of light Jupiter wasadvancing, swinging off to one side with a visible flow of movement, anddropping down into the lower void as the globe went past it. Yet, as itapproached, visually it had not grown larger. Instead, there was only asteady dwindling. A dwindling of great Saturn, with its gorgeous,luminous rings came next. These approaching planets, seeming to shrink!Because, with Lee's expanding viewpoint, everything in the vast scenewas shrinking! Great distances here, in relation to the giant globe,were dwindling! These millions of miles between Saturn and Jupiter hadshrunk into thousands. And then were shrinking to hundreds.

  Abruptly, with a startled shock to his senses, Lee's viewpoint changed.Always before he had instinctively conceived himself to be his normalsix foot earthly size. The starry Universe was vast beyond hisconception. And in a second now, that abruptly was altered. He conceivedthe vehicle as of actuality it was--a globe as large as the ball ofSaturn itself! And simultaneously he envisaged the present reality ofSaturn. Out in the inky blackness it hung--not a giant ringed worldmillions of miles away, but only a little ringed ball no bigger than thespaceship--a ringed ball only eight or ten times as big as Lee himself.It hung there for an instant beside them--only a mile or so awayperhaps. And as it went past, with both distance and size-changecombining now, it shrank with amazing rapidity! A ball only as big asthis room.... Then no larger than Lee it hung, still seemingly nofurther away than before. And then in a few minutes more, a mile outthere in the shrinking distance, it was a tiny luminous point, vanishingbeyond his vision.

  Uranus, little Neptune--Pluto, almost too far away in its orbit to beseen--all of them presently were dwindled and gone. Lee had a glimpse ofthe Solar system, a mere bunch of lights. The Sun was a tiny spot oflight, holding its little family of tiny planets--a mother hen with herbrood. It was gone in a moment, lost like a speck of star-dust among thegiant starry worlds.

  Another day--that is a day as it would have been on Earth. But here wasmerely a progressing of human existence--a streaming forward of humanconsciousness. The Light-year dial pointers were all in movement. ByEarth standards of size and velocity, long since had the globe'svelocity reached and passed the speed of light. Lee had been taught--hisbook-learning colored by the Einstein postulates--that there could be nospeed greater than the speed of light--by Earth standards--perhaps, yes.The globe--by comparison with its original fifty-foot earth-size--mightstill be traveling no more than a few hundred thousand miles an hour.But this monster--a thing now as big as the whole Solar Systemdoubtless--was speeding through a light-year in a moment!

  Futile figures! The human mind can grasp nothing of the vastness ofinter-stellar space. To Lee it was only a shrinking inky void--anemptiness crowded with whirling little worlds all dwindling.... Thiscrowded space! Often little points of star-dust had come whirling at theglobe--colliding, bursting into pin-points of fire. Each of them mighthave been bigger than the Earth.

  There was a time when it seemed that beneath the globe all the tinystars were shrinking into one lens-shape
d cluster. The Inter-stellarUniverse--all congealed down there into a blob, and everywhere elsethere was just nothingness.... But then little distant glowing nebulaewere visible--luminous, floating rings, alone in the emptiness....Distant? One of them drifted past, seemingly only a few hundred feetaway--a luminous little ring of star-dust. The passage of the monstrousglobe seemed to hurl it so that like a blown smoke ring it went intochaos, lost its shape, and vanished.

  Then at last all the blobs--each of them, to Earth-size conception, amonstrous Universe--all were dwindled into one blob down to one side ofLee's window. And then they were gone....

  * * * * *

  Just darkness now. Darkness and soundless emptiness. But as he stared atintervals through another long night of his human consciousness, Leeseemed to feel that the emptiness out there was dwindling--a finiteemptiness. He noticed, presently, that the size-change pointers hadstopped their movement; the ultimate size of the globe had been reached.The figures of the Light-year dials were meaningless to hiscomprehension. The velocity was meaningless. And now another little setof dials were in operation. A thousand--something--of distance. Therewas a meaningless word which named the unit. A thousand Earth-miles, ifhe had been in his former size? The pointer marked nine hundred in amoment. Was it, perhaps, the distance now from their destination?

  Vivian was beside him. "Lee, what's gonna happen to us? Won't this cometo an end some time? Lee--you won't let anybody hurt me?"

  She was like a child, almost always clinging to him now. And suddenlyshe said a very strange thing. "Lee, I been thinkin'--back there onEarth I was doin' a lot of things that maybe were pretty rotten--anglin'for his money for instance--an' not carin' much what I had to do to getit." She gestured at the sullen Franklin who was sitting on the couch."You know--things like that. An' I been thinkin'--you suppose, when weget where we're goin' now, that'll be held against me?"

  What a queer thing to say! She was like a child--and so often a childhas an insight into that which is hidden from those more mature!

  "I--don't know," Lee muttered.

  From the couch, Franklin looked up moodily. "Whispering about me again?I know you are--damn you both. You and everybody else here."

  "We're not interested in you," Vivian said.

  "Oh, you're not? Well you were, back on Earth. I'm not good enough foryou now, eh? He's better--because he's big--big and strong--that theidea? Well if I ever had the chance--"

  "Don't be silly," Lee said.

  * * * * *

  The sullen Franklin was working himself into a rage. Lee seemed tounderstand Franklin better now. A weakling. Inherently, with a complexof inferiority, the vague consciousness of it lashing him into baffledanger.

  "You, Anthony," Franklin burst out, "don't think you've been fooling me.You can put it over that fool girl, but not me. I'm onto you."

  "Put what over?" Lee said mildly.

  "That you don't know anything about this affair or these men who've gotus--you don't know who they are, do you?"

  "No. Do you?" Lee asked.

  Franklin jumped to his feet. "Don't fence with me. By God, if I wasbigger I'd smash your head in. They abducted us, because they wantedyou. That fellow said as much near the start of this damned trip. Theywon't talk--afraid I'll find out. And you can't guess what it's allabout! The hell you can't."

  Lee said nothing. But there was a little truth in what Franklin wassaying, of course.... Those things that the dying old Anna Green hadtold him--surely this weird voyage had some connection.

  He turned away; went back to the window. There was a sheen now. A vagueoutline of something vast, as though the darkness were ending at a greatwall that glowed a little.

  It seemed, during the next time-interval, as though the globe might haveturned over, so that now it was dropping down upon something tangible.Dropping--floating down--with steadily decreasing velocity, descendingto a Surface. The sheen of glow had expanded until now it filled all thelower hemisphere of darkness--a great spread of surface visually comingup. Then there were things to see, illumined by a faint half-light towhich color was coming; a faint, pastel color that seemed a rose-glow.

  "Why--why," Vivian murmured, "say, it's beautiful, ain't it? It lookslike fairyland--or Heaven. It does--don't it, Lee?"

  "Yes," Lee murmured. "Like--like--"

  The wall-slide rasped. The voice of one of their captors said, "We willarrive soon. We can trust you--there must be no fighting?"

  "You can trust us," Lee said.

  It was dark in the little curving corridor of the globe, where withsilent robed figures around them, they stood while the globe gentlylanded. Then they were pushed forward, out through the exit port.

  The new realm. The World Beyond. What was it? To Lee Anthony then camethe feeling that there was a precise scientific explanation of it, ofcourse. And yet, beyond all that pedantry of science, he seemed to knowthat it was something else, perhaps a place that a man might mould byhis dreams. A place that would be what a man made of it, from that whichwas within himself.

  Solemn with awe he went with his companions slowly down the incline.