It was night. The stars visible
through the laboratory windows winked violently in
the disturbed air of the Heaviside layer, for the molecular
ray screen was still up.
The laboratory was dimly lighted now,
all save the front of the room. There, a mass
of compact boxes were piled one on another, and interconnected
in various and indeterminate ways. And one table
lay in a brilliant path of illumination. Behind
it stood Arcot. He was talking to the dim white
group of faces beyond the table, the scientists of
Earth assembled.
“I have explained our power.
It is the power of all the universe Cosmic
Power which is necessarily vaster than all
others combined.
“I cannot explain the control
in the time I have at my disposal but the mathematics
of it, worked out in two months of constant effort,
you can follow from the printed work which will appear
soon.
“The second thing, which some
of you have seen before, has already been partly explained.
It is, in brief, artificially created matter.
The two important things to remember about it are
that it is, that it does exist, and
that it exists only where it is determined to exist
by the control there, and nowhere else.
“These are all coordinated under
the new mental relay control. Some of you will
doubt this last, but think of it under this light.
Will, thought, concentration they are efforts,
they require energy. Then they can exert energy!
That is the key to the whole thing.
“But now for the demonstration.”
Arcot looked toward Morey, who stood
off to one side. There was a heavy thud as Morey
pushed a small button. The relay had closed.
Arcot’s mind was now connected with the controls.
A globe of cloudiness appeared.
It increased in density, and was a solid, opalescent
sphere.
“There is a sphere, a foot in
diameter, ten feet from me,” droned Arcot.
The sphere was there. “It is moving to the
left.” The sphere moved to the left at
Arcot’s thought. “It is rising.”
The sphere rose. “It is changing to a disc
two feet across.” The sphere seemed to flow,
and was a disc two feet across as Arcot’s toneless
voice of concentration continued.
“It is changing into a hand,
like a human hand.” The disc changed into
a human hand, the fingers slightly bent, the soft,
white fingers of a woman with the pink of the flesh
and the wrinkles at the knuckles visible. The
wrist seemed to fade gradually into nothingness, the
end of the hand was as indeterminate as are things
in a dream, but the hand was definite.
“The hand is reaching for the
bar of lux metal on the floor.” The soft,
little hand moved, and reached down and grasped the
half ton bar of lux metal, wrapped dainty fingers
about it and lifted it smoothly and effortlessly to
the table, and laid it there.
A mistiness suddenly solidified to
another hand. The second hand joined the first,
and fell to work on the bar, and pulled. The bar
stretched finally under an enormous load. One
hand let go, and the thud of the highly elastic lux
metal bar’s return to its original shape echoed
through the soundless room. These men of the twenty-second
century knew what relux and lux metals were, and knew
their enormous strength. Yet it was putty under
these hands. The hands that looked like a woman’s!
The bar was again placed on the table,
and the hands disappeared. There was a thud,
and the relay had opened.
“I can’t demonstrate the
power I have. It is impossible. The power
is so enormous that nothing short of a sun could serve
as a demonstration-hall. It is utterly beyond
comprehension under any conditions. I have demonstrated
artificial matter, and control by mental action.
“I’m now going to show
you some other things we have learned. Remember,
I can control perfectly the properties of artificial
matter, by determining the structure it shall have.
“Watch.”
Morey closed the relay. Arcot
again set to work. A heavy ingot of iron was
raised by a clamp that fastened itself upon it, coming
from nowhere. The iron moved, and settled over
the table. As it approached, a mistiness that
formed became a crucible. The crucible showed
the gray of pure iron, but it was artificial matter.
The iron settled in the crucible, and a strange process
of flowing began. The crucible became a ball,
and colors flowed across its surface, till finally
it was glowing richly silvery. The ball opened,
and a great lump of silvery stuff was within it.
It settled to the floor, and the ball disappeared,
but the silvery metal did not.
“Platinum,” said Morey
softly. A gasp came from the audience. “Only
platinum could exist there, and the matter had to rearrange
itself as platinum.” He could rearrange
it in any form he chose, either absorbing or supplying
energy of existence and energy of formation.
The mistiness again appeared in the
air, and became a globe, a globe of brown. But
it changed, and disappeared. Morey recognized
the signal. “He will now make the artificial
matter into all the elements, and many nonexistent
elements, unstable, atomic figures.” There
followed a long series of changes.
The material shifted again, and again.
Finally the last of the natural elements was left
behind, all 104 elements known to man were shown, and
many others.
“We will skip now. This
is element of atomic weight 7000.”
It was a lump of soft, oozy blackness.
One could tell from the way that Arcot’s mind
handled it that it was soft. It seemed cold, terribly
cold. Morey explained:
“It is very soft, for its atom
is so large that it is soft in the molecular state.
It is tremendously photoe-lectric, losing electrons
very readily, and since its atom has so enormous a
volume, its electrons are very far from the nucleus
in the outer rings, and they absorb rays of very great
length; even radio and some shorter audio waves seem
to affect it. That accounts for its blackness,
and the softness as Arcot has truly depicted it.
Also, since it absorbs heat waves and changes them
to electrical charges, it tends to become cold, as
the frost Arcot has shown indicates. Remember,
that that is infinitely hard as you see it, for it
is artificial matter, but Arcot has seen natural matter
forced into this exceedingly explosive atomic figuration.
“It is so heavily charged in
the nucleus that its X-ray spectrum is well toward
the gamma! The inner electrons can scarcely vibrate.”
Again the substance changed and was gone.
“Too far atom of
weight 20,000 becomes invisible and nonexistent as
space closes in about it perhaps the origin
of our space. Atoms of this weight, if breaking
up, would form two or more atoms that would exist in
our space, then these would be unstable, and break
down further into normal atoms. We don’t
know.
“And one more substance,”
continued Morey as he opened the relay once more.
Arcot sat down and rested his head in his hands.
He was not accustomed to this strain, and though his
mind was one of the most powerful on Earth, it was
very hard for him.
“We have a substance of commercial
and practical use now. Cosmium. Arcot will
show one method of making it.”
Arcot resumed his work, seated now.
A formation reached out, and grasped the lump of platinum
still on the floor. Other bars of iron were brought
over from the stack of material laid ready, and piled
on a broad sheet that had formed in the air, tons
of it, tens of tons. Finally he stopped.
There was enough. The sheet wrapped itself into
a sphere, and contracted, slowly, steadily. It
was rampant with energy, energy flowed from it, and
the air about was glowing with ionization. There
was a feeling of awful power that seeped into the
minds of the watchers, and held them spellbound before
the glowing, opalescent sphere. The tons of matter
were compressed now to a tiny ball! Suddenly the
energy flared out violently, a terrific burst of energy,
ionizing the air in the entire room, and shooting
it with tiny, burning sparks. Then it was over.
The ball split, and became two planes. Between
them was a small ball of a glistening solid.
The planes moved slowly together, and the ball flattened,
and flowed. It was a sheet.
A clamp of artificial matter took
it, and held the paper-thin sheet, many feet square,
in the air. It seemed it must bend under its own
enormous weight of tons, but thin as it was it did
not.
“Cosmium,” said Morey softly.
Arcot crumpled it, and pressed it
once more between artificial matter tools. It
was a plate, thick as heavy cardboard, and two feet
on a side. He set it in a holder of artificial
matter, a sort of frame, and caused the controls to
lock.
Taking off the headpiece he had worn,
he explained, “As Morey said, Cosmium.
Briefly, density, 5007.89. Tensile strength, about
two hundred thousand times that of good steel!”
The audience gasped. That seems little to men
who do not realize what it meant. An inch of this
stuff would be harder to penetrate than three miles
of steel!
“Our new ship,” continued
Arcot, “will carry six-inch armor. Six inches
would be the equivalent of eighteen miles of solid
steel, with the enormous improvement that it will
be concentrated, and so will have far greater resistance
than any amount of steel. Its tensile strength
would be the equivalent of an eighteen-mile wall of
steel.
“But its most important properties
are that it reflects everything we know of. Cosmics,
light, and even moleculars! It is made of
cosmic ray photons, as lux is made of light photons,
but the inexpressibly tighter bond makes the strength
enormous. It cannot be handled by any means save
by artificial matter tools.
“And now I am going to give
a demonstration of the theatrical possibilities of
this new agent. Hardly scientific but
amusing.”
But it wasn’t exactly amusing.
Arcot again donned the headpiece.
“I think,” he continued, “that a
manifestation of the super-natural will be most interesting.
Remember that all you see is real, and all effects
are produced by artificial matter generated by the
cosmic energy, as I have explained, and are controlled
by my mind.”
Arcot had chosen to give this demonstration
with definite reason. Apparently a bit of scientific
playfulness, yet he knew that nothing is so impressive,
nor so lastingly remembered as a theatrical demonstration
of science. The greatest scientist likes to play
with his science.
But Arcot’s experiment now it was
on a level of its own!
From behind the table, apparently
crawling up the leg came a thing! It was a hand.
A horrible, disjointed hand. It was withered and
incarmined with blood, for it was severed from its
wrist, and as it hunched itself along, moving by a
ghastly twitching of fingers and thumb, it left a
trail of red behind it. The papers to be distributed
rustled as it passed, scurrying suddenly across the
table, down the leg, and racing toward the light switch!
By some process of writhing jerks it reached it, and
suddenly the room was plunged into half-light as the
lights winked out. Light filtering over the transom
of the door from the hall alone illuminated the hall,
but the hand glowed! It glowed, and scurried
away with an awful rustling, scuttling into some unseen
hole in the wall. The quiet of the hall was the
quiet of tenseness.
From the wall, coming through it,
came a mistiness that solidified as it flowed across.
It was far to the right, a bent stooped figure, a figure
half glimpsed, but fully known, for it carried in its
bony, glowing hand a great, nicked scythe. Its
rattling tread echoed hollowly on the floor.
Stooping walk, shuffling gait, the great metal scythe
scraping on the floor, half seen as the gray, luminous
cloak blew open in some unfelt breeze of its ephemeral
world, revealing bone; dry, gray bone. Only the
scythe seemed to know Life, and it was red with that
Life. Slow running, sticky lifestuff.
Death paused, and raised his awful
head. The hood fell back from the cavernous eyesockets,
and they flamed with a greenish radiance that made
every strained face in the room assume the same deathly
pallor.
“The Scythe, the Scythe of Death,”
grated the rusty Voice. “The Scythe is
slow, too slow. I bring new things,” it
cackled in its cracked voice, “new things of
my tools. See!” The clutching bones dropped
the rattling Scythe, and the handle broke as it fell,
and rotted before their eyes. “Heh, heh,”
the Thing cackled as it watched. “Heh what
Death touches, rots as he leaves it.” The
grinning, blackened skull grinned wider, in an awful,
leering cavity, rotting, twisted teeth showed.
But from under his flapping robe, the skeletal hands
drew something ray pistols!
“These these are
swifter!” The Thing turned, and with a single
leering glance behind, flowed once more through the
wall.
A gasp, a stifled, groaning gasp ran
through the hall, a half sob.
But far, far away they could hear
something clanking, dragging its slow way along.
Spellbound they turned to the farthest corner and
looked down the long, long road that twined off in
distance. A lone, luminous figure plodded slowly
along it, his half human shamble bringing him rapidly
nearer.
Larger and larger he loomed, clearer
and clearer became the figure, and his burden.
Broken, twisted steel, or metal of some sort, twisted
and blackened.
“It’s over it’s
over and my toys are here. I win, I
always win. For I am the spawn of Mars, of War,
and of Hate, the sister of War, and my toys are the
things they leave behind.” It gesticulated,
waving the twisted stuff and now through the haze,
they could see them buildings. The
framework of buildings and twisted liners, broken weapons.
It loomed nearer, the cavernous, glowing
eyes under low, shaggy brows, became clear, the awful
brutal hate, the lust of Death, the rotting flesh
of Disease all seemed stamped on the Horror
that approached.
“Ah!” It had seen them!
“Ahh!” It dropped the buildings, the broken
things, and shuffled into a run, toward them!
Its face changed, the lips drew back from broken,
stained teeth, the curling, cruel lips, and the rotting
flesh of the face wrinkled into a grin of lust and
hatred. The shaggy mop of its hair seemed to
writhe and twist, the long, thin fingers grasped spasmodically
as it neared. The torn, broken fingernails were
visible nearer nearer nearer
“Oh, God stop it!”
A voice shrieked out of the dark as someone leaped
suddenly to his feet.
Simultaneously with the cry the Thing
puffed into nothingness of energy from which it had
sprung, and a great ball of clear, white glowing light
came into being in the center of the room, flooding
it with a light that dazzled the eyes, but calmed
broken nerves.