Title: Dark Reality
Author: Williams, Robert Moore
Language: English
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*** Start of this LibraryBlog Digital Book "Dark Reality" ***


                             DARK REALITY

                       By ROBERT MOORE WILLIAMS

                 _Out of a future too dimly discerned
                 to be comprehensible one was chosen.
                   Why--no one knew or could know._

           [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from
                            Comet March 41.
         Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that
         the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]


Slowly, wearily, the yellow sun went down the sky. From the east the
night came on, as dark and as deep as the night that has no ending.

The last rays of the sun washed down over the planet, over the low
rounded hills and the trees that grew on them, through the shallow
valleys where the grass grew rank and luxurious. The last songs of
the birds came undisturbed through the dusk. A deer snorted. From
somewhere came the bark of another animal, a bark that ended in a howl,
long-drawn and mournful.

Dawn world or dusk world?

The night flowed into the valleys, filled them with a mystic darkness.
The darkness crept to the tops of the low hills. Slowly it crept around
a huge ball that rested on top of the nearer hill. The ball, perhaps
fifty feet in diameter, lifted a foot from the ground. It quivered,
lifted two feet, then slowly settled back to earth.

The darkness came in around it, touched it, hid it from sight.

       *       *       *       *       *

Lee Garth twisted in his chair. Wearily he laid the pencil down.
The equations wouldn't work right. They kept trying to run off into
impossible combinations. There was an erratic but persistent gadfly of
thought buzzing in his mind, a vague shadowy movement in his brain.
Like a ghost from shadow-land it twisted through his brain, twisting
through the dark convolutions where his memory lay testing the open
synapses, seeking a place where a short circuit would result in action.

Fretfully, Lee Garth picked up the pencil. But there was a thinking in
his mind, a formless thinking that was somehow purposeful. He sensed
the import of that purpose. Tiny chills ran over his body, tiny rivers
of icy cold. His fingers trembled. The pencil moved over the page.
Garth was first puzzled, then perturbed, then lost in a vast unease.

       *       *       *       *       *

Here and there upon this earth are fields where men, looking backward,
see how the stream of history shifted.

There is a field in Greece.

       *       *       *       *       *

Xerxes gave his orders to his captains. He waited while his host was
led forth. Footmen, archers, men with slings. The cavalry would not
be of value, for the barbarians, up there, were in a narrow mountain
pass. It did not matter. The light-armed troops were more than capable
of dispelling these wild tribesmen. By noon, or the middle of the
afternoon, the way would be clear to the peninsula beyond. Thus
reasoned Xerxes.

When the night came the barbarians were still holding. Tomorrow, Xerxes
thought, his troops would be victorious.

Tomorrow came and fresh troops went forth. And eventually the news
came back to where Xerxes waited that his army had been routed and was
fleeing in disorder.

It was fate, Xerxes perhaps decided. Fate was a chancy thing. No man
could know for certain what the morrow would bring. Tomorrow was a dark
reality and the paths to the future were uncertain and tortuous.

But if Xerxes had ravaged the peninsula of Greece in 480 B.C. in all
probability Plato would not have been born in 427, and he would not
have had as his pupil a youth named Aristotle, and the thinking of
the scientists of twenty-five coming centuries would have lacked the
guidance of these two men. Into the dark reality of the future the
human race would have followed other paths and the man-world of 1940
would not have come into being.

There is a pass in Greece called Thermopylae.

       *       *       *       *       *

Lee Garth watched, his eyes following the pencil. Cold winds seemed
to blow on him. They blew colder each time he realized he was not
dictating what the pencil was writing. He watched the factors appear
on the paper. There was a meaning in those symbols, a meaning and a
purpose stretching across the long, long gulfs of time, reaching from
the amoeba, in the protoplasmic slime of steaming seas that are long
gone, forward to the creature that shall emerge in some other era, in
some century of the far future.

Through him the meaning ran, through Lee Garth, who was 37 years old in
1940.

       *       *       *       *       *

There is a field in France.

The far-flung southern horn of the Saracen crescent, sweeping northward
in its history changing flight, found the field in France where Charles
Martel--Charles the Hammer--waited. With keen sword, and long lance,
and hissing arrow, all day long the armies battled, and when the night
came on, the Saracen host, smashed and bleeding under the blows of the
Hammer, reeled backward, fled back out of France. To the Saracens,
tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow, was the backward turning road. The
glowing sun of Islam flickered, and never again burned so brightly.
There was a shift in history, and another world evolved because of
Charles Martel.

There is a field in France called Tours.

Lee Garth mopped the perspiration from his forehead. He stopped writing
for a moment, pushed back his thinning hair, pulled a cigarette from
the package on his desk, struck a match. The smoke was blue and
indistinct in that shadowed room. Far off, from another world it
seemed, there came the raucous hoot of an automobile horn. Somebody
going home, or going to work, or going somewhere but probably going
home, since the hour was so late. Didn't matter.

There was a gadfly buzzing in his brain.

Again the pencil raced over the paper.

       *       *       *       *       *

Jan Lippershey's children played in his yard, and now and again, when
he would let them, they played in the shop where he worked. They liked
to play with the things he made. Lenses, convex and concave. The
children played with the lenses, and the telescope was born. Now men
could see farther.

That happened in Holland, early in the 1600s.

Perhaps it was more important than Thermopylae or Tours.

Men looked at the stars. World on world on world--world without end--as
far as the first telescope showed, the dance of the suns went on. Men
made bigger lenses. Beyond those limits the suns were to be found. Did
space go on forever? Bigger lenses, bigger lenses.

But still men could not see into tomorrow. It was a formless void of
unreality and no instrument could penetrate it. Men had to go blindly
into tomorrow, fearing, hesitating, drawing back, until they were
kicked there by relentless time.

In 1940 men worked on a lens 200 inches in diameter.

       *       *       *       *       *

In 1940, all through a sleepless night, Lee Garth watched his racing
pencil write factor after factor, watched the equations grow from page
to page. Still the pencil raced. He watched it.

He did not think of Leonidas, who had withstood Xerxes, or of Charles
Martel, or of Jan Lippershey, or any of the thousands of others
who have warped the course of human destiny--Kepler, Newton, Watt,
Einstein, Galileo, Copernicus, the little corporal who went down to
Saint Helena. He did not even think of Lee Garth. For that night Lee
Garth did not matter to himself. Nor ever again.

The dawn came in through the windows of the old house where he worked.
Softly, quietly, silently, the night went and the day came. Another
tomorrow became today, another dark reality lifted out of the formless
void of the future.

       *       *       *       *       *

George McNeil, Scot production foreman in charge of the cable
manufacturing department on United Electric's vast plant, stared at the
order that had come down to him. His face a wrinkled frown, he studied
the blue prints.

"Those domned monkeys with their domned slip-sticks," he grunted,
referring to the drafting department, "have made another mistake."

Specification sheets in hands, he stalked out of his cubby-hole and
headed for the office of the production manager.

The production manager examined the specifications. He called the head
of the drafting department on the office phone and got a short answer
for his trouble.

"The specifications are right," he said testily to McNeil. "Go ahead
and fabricate them."

"I can build the domned things," McNeil retorted. "But I'll sweat in
hell if I see any use for them. Solid copper bus-bars twenty-four
inches in diameter! We don't build a generator--and neither does
anybody else in the world--that needs such cables to carry the current
it produces."

"They're just part of a big order that came down from the front office
marked 'Rush'," the production manager answered. "But they do seem out
of reason--" His forehead wrinkled into a frown. He hesitated. "But
an order is an order. Build them. What the customer wants with them is
his business."

When McNeil left the office the production manager was still frowning.
Twenty-four inch cables--. He scratched his head, as if to stir to life
a sluggish idea. Then he got up, walked through the plant, up to the
general offices, and the girl in the beautifully finished reception
room said Mr. Tompkins would see him in a minute.

"The point I make is this," the production manager said to Mr.
Tompkins, "if anybody is building a generator that requires cables of
that size, we had better know about that generator."

Tompkins didn't show any emotion. He was a heavy man, not from fat but
from muscle. Strength. He had to have strength to hold down his job as
general manager. His eyes narrowed slightly and a tiny glow appeared in
them.

"A fellow by the name of Garth placed that order," Tompkins said.
"Garth? Garth? Where have I heard that name before? Umph!" He
remembered the presence of his subordinate. "Thank you. You may go."

The production manager went.

Tompkins flicked a switch on his desk. "Call Railton."

He went on thinking. His eyes narrowed to slits and the glow deepened.

Railton came. "You called me?" he asked. He was a slickie, a front man.
College, teck school. Knew all about electricity, and what made the
wheels go round. Knew how to talk it. Well dressed, smart.

"Go call on Lee Garth," Tompkins said. "You will find his address
in the files. Ask him if he will accept a ten day extension on the
delivery date of certain items of his order. That is your excuse for
getting in to see him."

"Lee Garth? He's a big shot theoretical physicist," Railton said.
"Worth a mint. Made his money on a bunch of inventions. The papers
call him another Einstein, but I personally think they over-rate him.
What has he been ordering from us and what am I to find out?"

"Find out why he needs solid copper bus-bars twenty-four inches in
diameter, but don't let him find out that's what you want to know."

"What?" Railton recovered his composure. "Yes sir."

"Get going."

Railton left. When the chief used that tone, he wanted results, and to
hell with expense and everything else that stood in the road of what
was wanted.

       *       *       *       *       *

Dawn or dusk? And which roads lead to the future? Or is there no
future? Is there only the present and the past, and is the present only
the husk of dying life?

Again and yet again and yet again the ancient yellow sun went down the
sky, and night, ever growing bolder, came each evening out of the east.
Again and yet again the darkness crept around the huge ball that rested
on the nearer hill.

The ball did not lift again, did not move, did not stir or struggle.
Like a huge stratosphere balloon made out of some strange metal, it
rested there, unmoving.

Animals ranged through the night. In the darkness lonely dogs howled
for lost masters. There was never an answer to the howling of the dogs.

       *       *       *       *       *

Scoop Martin's index fingers moved so rapidly they almost blurred. He
only used two fingers on the keyboard. Two were all he needed. The
typewriter carriage almost ran over itself getting across the paper. It
stopped abruptly and Martin read his lead.

"Secrecy shrouds new scientific development at Valley Park, where Lee
Garth, the world's outstanding physicist, has a large crew at work on
the construction of a large steel and concrete--"

Martin swore at himself, ripped the paper out of the typewriter. What a
hell of a lead for a story. It didn't tell anything. Vague, ambiguous.

But where in the hell could he start this story?

He remembered that steam shovel, ripping the earth down to bed rock.
Gangs of men, drilling into the rock and driving reinforcing steel into
it. Other gangs setting up forms for the concrete that was to come.
A concrete tower going up, a huge mixer being blocked into position,
lines of trucks dumping gravel and cement.

Floodlights overhead so when night came the work could go on.
Twenty-four hour a day schedule. Over the whole job the sense of
desperate urgency.

Martin tried to think what that urgency might be. That would be his
lead. A darned good one too. But he couldn't figure it out. All he
could say was that out at Valley Park men were tumbling over each other
getting done a job of work. They didn't walk. They ran. If a worker
gave out, he stepped back out of place, and a fresh man took over his
job while he rested.

It was costing a fortune. That didn't matter much. Lee Garth had a
fortune. He was spending it.

Martin thought of Lee Garth. In getting in he had practically forced
himself past an overworked secretary. Once in, he had found Garth in
front of a desk covered with papers.

Garth was not a big man, not an impressive-looking man. You had to
think twice to realize the reputation he had won for himself. Pale blue
eyes and thin black hair. He looked like a dreamer, or a poet. Not very
efficient. Or so he looked.

"Mr. Garth, I'm Martin of the _Globe_. We would like to have a story
about you and about the construction work going on out here. What are
you building? A new observatory, a laboratory, a workshop, or what?"

Scoop had smiled in his most winning manner. He had a nose for news and
a way of getting it.

Garth blinked at him. He seemed to withdraw his mind from a vast
distance to meet the problem presented by the newspaper man. He
hesitated.

When he spoke, he gave a hint of the man he was. "Sorry, but I am not
interested in publicity."

"Not interested in publicity!" Martin found that hard to believe, even
from Lee Garth.

"But why all this construction work? What are you building?"

"There is a need for it. I am not quite certain I know everything about
that need, that I really know anything about it, except that it exists."

"What is this need?" Martin insisted. "You've got twice as many men as
you can really use. You're working your crews twenty-four hours a day.
What is it you need? What are you doing?"

Fretfully, Garth answered. "I can't tell you about it. It wouldn't make
sense because it doesn't exist now. It exists two million years from
now."

Two millions years! What the hell? Garth was cracked, he was bugs, he
was off his nut.

Garth punched a button. To that plain secretary he said, "Stella, show
Mr. Martin out. And see that no one else without business here gets in.
Hire guards."

"Yes, Mr. Garth."

There had been a sleek, prosperous-looking chap waiting in the outer
office when Martin went out. He had heard the secretary say, "Mr. Garth
will see you now, Mr. Railton."

       *       *       *       *       *

Two million years. Scoop Martin twisted at his desk, ran another sheet
of paper into his typewriter. Two million years. Why, recorded history
didn't run back over five thousand years. That guy Garth was nuts. Or
was he? Those scientists talked damned funny at times. What would the
earth look like in two million years? A baked, waterless plain, broken
by jagged mountains? Dead, deserted, lifeless? Man and all of man's
achievements gone?

This was 1940. If you added two million to that, what would the number
be? It would be darned hard to remember that it was 2,001,940.

Two million years. It was a gag, it had to be a gag. Two million years
didn't mean anything, didn't make sense. Yea, it was a gag. Well, he'd
just make it a good one. There was his lead. He'd fix Garth for tossing
him out on his ear.

His index fingers raced over the keyboard, his thin face writhed into a
wolfish grin.

"Prominent Scientist forecast doom of earth in two million years--"
Scoop let his imagination go. It would be a good yarn at that. Might
even make the front pages. No, not likely. Hitler was holding down the
front pages.

       *       *       *       *       *

Railton came through the front office at a dead run.

Mr. Tompkins swallowed his annoyance at the sight of the young man
leaning against his desk. Mr. Railton was no longer sleek and capable.
He was panting and sweating, actually sweating.

"Chief," he panted, holding his side and gasping for air. "That guy
Garth, he's got--he's got _atomic power_."

It was the first time Railton or anyone else had ever seen Tompkins
show surprise.

"What?" he snapped.

"Atomic power," Railton parroted. "That's why he needed those bus-bars!"

Tompkins settled back into his chair. His face turned faintly purple.
His eyes bored into the disheveled Railton.

"You got a lot of guts," he rasped, "coming back to me with a cock and
bull story like that."

Railton whitened. Doggedly, he persisted in his story. "I'm telling you
just what he told me."

"All right," Tompkins said heavily. "Tell me what happened."

"I went out to see him, and just as you suggested, I asked him if he
would accept a ten day extension on the delivery date of part of his
order. Chief, as sure as we don't make delivery as per contract, that
fellow will sue us for the last dollar in the treasury. He says he has
to have delivery on August 21, without fail. He means it. What the hell
he is working on, I don't know, but that man is in a hurry and he means
business."

"We will make delivery as scheduled unless it is to our interest to do
otherwise," Tompkins interrupted. "Get to the point."

"In order to pacify him, I told him we would guarantee delivery. Then I
went over his whole order with him, to make certain that everything was
right. When we got to those bus-bars, I suggested there must have been
some mistake."

"He said, 'No. No mistake. The specifications are right.'"

"I protested that there wasn't a generator made that needed bars of
that size to carry its load."

"He said, 'No, but there is going to be one. Those cables aren't any
too heavy to carry the power of the bursting atom.' Those are his exact
words. 'The power of the bursting atom.'"

Tompkins leaned back in his chair. Viciously he bit the end off of a
cigar.

"Then Garth is crazy, instead of you!" he said.

Railton's face turned white. "Well--" He made futile noises deep in his
throat. "Well, you may be right. Because, well--if Garth has discovered
atomic power--it--it doesn't mean much to him. He isn't interested in
it. He isn't working on it. He's working on something else, something
bigger, and atomic power is just one of the little things he needs to
reach the goal he wants...."

Railton's voice trailed off. He was a slickie, a smoothie. He knew all
about electricity, and the power industry. He knew all about uranium
235, and why it wouldn't work. He knew what atomic power would do to
the power industry. He was wondering if Garth _was_ crazy. Or what was
Garth trying to do? What purpose was so vast that atomic power was
only incidental to it?

There was silence in the room. The clamor of traffic outside did not
penetrate here. The only sound was the soft whisper of a fan pushing
cool air through the conditioning apparatus.

Tompkins cleared his throat. "Thank you. You may go."

"You mean--that's all?"

"That's all."

"But what do you think?"

Tompkins stirred restlessly. "I don't know what to think."

Railton left.

Tompkins sat without moving. Garth, Lee Garth. Atomic power. He didn't
dare take a chance. Too much was at stake. He had to know. He picked up
the phone. His secretary got the connection for him.

"Sullivan? This is Tompkins. There's a fellow out at Valley Park by
the name of Lee Garth. I don't know but I suspect that somewhere in
his house you would find blueprints, if you look. If I were you, I
would have one of your boys do a little looking. Yes, the financial
arrangements will be taken care of to your satisfaction."

Tompkins hung up the phone. He turned his mind to other matter.

Sullivan ran a detective agency. If you didn't like your wife, he would
make it easy for you to get a divorce. If your employees were demanding
a higher wage rate, he could handle that too. Divorces, strikes,
anything.

       *       *       *       *       *

Dawn world or dusk world?

Overhead the sun slanted westward, and the night, black and ominous,
came out of the east. The birds sang their songs as the day closed, and
the animals that moved in the night awakened, and ranged abroad. And on
the hills there was the sound of mournful howling, like the baying of
lost and lonely dogs seeking their masters; but not finding them, not
ever.

       *       *       *       *       *

Scoop Martin twisted in his sleep. Or was he asleep? It was hard to
know, when you were sleeping. You might be awake. Or you might be
dreaming. But how would you know for certain?

He sat up in bed, stared at the window. The moon was shining through
the window, casting a thin, ambiguous light into the room.

"Two million years," he whispered.

Hell, yes, he was asleep, he was having a nightmare. He laid down and
rolled over. Suddenly he was wide awake.

       *       *       *       *       *

The house was dark, Mike Ritter saw. Good. The boss wanted some
blueprints, or plans, out of that house. Fifty bucks for them. They
must be important if the boss was willing to pay that much for them.
Well, his job was to get them.

He slipped through the darkness toward the house. Over to the right,
at a distance of about three hundred yards, there was a lot of lights.
He stopped to stare. A building of some kind was going up. Trucks were
coming up a lane, dumping gravel and cement. Under the lights men were
pouring concrete until hell wouldn't have it.

"What's the hurry?" Mike wondered.

Well, it wasn't his affair. His job was to get into that house. He
turned. The beam from a flashlight struck him in the face.

"Buddy," a voice growled at him. "You better get out of here a damned
sight faster than you got in."

Mike blinked. The boss hadn't said anything about guards. What the
hell....

"Get going. And don't come back. Or is it a poke in the snoot you'll be
wanting now?"

Mike got going. This would require some careful planning.

       *       *       *       *       *

Tompkins picked up the morning _Globe_. The war was still going on.
Raids on Britain. The blitz was coming. He read the accounts through.

What was this?

"Prominent scientist forecasts doom of earth in two million years. Lee
Garth...."

He read the article through. He thought heavily for a few moments. Then
he spoke into the box on his desk.

"Get me Sullivan on the phone."

       *       *       *       *       *

The bell of an invisible alarm clock was ringing in Lee Garth's mind.
He turned over, tried to go back to sleep. Sleep was such a wonderful
sensation, especially when you were so tired. He wanted to sleep
forever, and forever. There wasn't enough time left for him to get
rested. Days and yet more days the driving pressure of screaming energy
had run through him. It had burned out his muscles, put a flutter in
his heart. His whole body screamed for rest. He had to rest. He tried
to go back to sleep.

The invisible alarm clock rang again.

Abruptly, Garth rolled over and sat up. Yawning, he flexed his arms.
Every nerve ending in his body told him to lie down again, called to
him to lie down, begged him. He was going to lie down.

The alarm bell in his mind rang again.

What did it mean, he wondered.

Oh, yes, now he knew. It was August 21.

Today United Electric began making deliveries. The construction work
was already finished, the concrete dry, the forms already off.

Suddenly he was wide awake. Suddenly he was out of bed, and dressing
frantically.

       *       *       *       *       *

Jimmie Blake excused himself from dinner. His dad and mother smiled
wistfully as he dashed upstairs.

Jimmie whistled as he shaved. Shaving was really not necessary, but
he imagined it was, and in consequence it was a ritual not to be
neglected. For he was a man now. Next week he was going off to college
again. He would be a sophomore this year. No more green caps, no more
hazing. The whistle swelled in prideful strength.

He looked out of the bathroom window. The sun, already at the edge
of the horizon, flung its rays over the suburb of Valley Park. The
grass was dry and the leaves were beginning to change color. It was
September, September 8, 1940. Jimmie burst into song. One more week and
he would be off to college.

Over there, perhaps half a mile away, he could see the sunlight shining
on fresh concrete. Garth's Folly, they were calling it already. Garth
had spent a fortune building a house that would stand to the end of the
world. Two million years, that newspaper article had said.

Too bad. Garth had gone off the deep end, of course. Just when he was
really becoming distinguished, he had cracked. Why didn't they have him
in an asylum, Jimmie wondered, staring from the window.

Oddly, the landscape shifted. It blurred and twisted, just like it did
when you looked through a pane of bad glass. But he wasn't looking
through glass.

The air was tinged with a deep violet color. From somewhere, from
nowhere and from everywhere, came a shrill whining note, a screaming
frequency that lifted rapidly up the scale. It went quickly out of
hearing.

The violet deepened to black and the light was gone. Suddenly knives
were tearing at his flesh. His body was racked by a thousand pains.

Jimmie Blake screamed. The scream was choked off into horrible silence.

His father came to the foot of the stairs.

"What's wrong, son?" he called.

There was no answer.

His father went upstairs. Mystified, perplexed, he began to search.

"Jimmie!" he called. "_Jimmie!_"

There was no answer.

Jimmie's mother came up the stairs. Her face was suddenly white. One
hand was pressed over her heart.

"What--" she began.

Her husband was standing in their son's room. She had not known he was
so old, so haggard, and so tired looking.

"Jimmie's gone," he whispered.

He barely managed to catch her as she fell.

       *       *       *       *       *

Lee Garth's face was white, drawn, pinched. Bloodless. His hair was
twisted and tangled, there was a stubble on his face.

He lifted blood-clotted eyes from the screen in front of him, the
screen that had suddenly gone blank as he flipped a dial set in the
control-studded table on which his hands rested.

Deep in the heart of the tower of steel and concrete a lion-roar went
into silence.

"God," Garth whispered. "Dear God."

His voice was cracked and chipped and lined with pain.

His head slumped forward, rested on the table.

Behind him there was a tiny creak as a door opened. He lifted his head
to stare dully at the person who stood there.

"Stella? I thought I told you I didn't need a secretary any longer, to
write yourself a check and go away?"

"Yes, Mr. Garth."

She came forward holding a tray.

"But I think you need me now more than ever. And so I stayed. I will
leave if you order it."

He stared at her. She wasn't pretty, or he had never thought she was.
But on her face at this moment was something that made her beautiful.
Her eyes were filled with a deep glowing.

He remembered the years she had been his secretary, the years of hard
work perfectly performed. If they worked until midnight, she had never
complained. Summer, winter, spring, and autumn. Why she had never had a
vacation! But then Lee Garth had never had a vacation. He didn't know
what the word meant.

He stared at her, at the radiant glowing that was transforming her.

"But--but you must not stay here. You _must not_. Don't you understand?
This is the end."

She set the tray in front of him.

"You must eat something. You haven't had a good meal in weeks. Here is
a sandwich and a glass of milk."

He was vaguely aware of a gnawing in his stomach, a persistent ache.

"Why--thanks--Yes, I am hungry!" He looked at the tray.

The door creaked as she left the room.

He wolfed the food. He turned again to the table in front of him. He
pressed buttons.

Under him, in the belly of the squat tower of concrete and steel, a
lion began to roar. The roar increased until the whole structure was
shaking with the pressure of inconceivable energies seeking release. It
became a whirling, roaring, thundering torrent of sound, a screaming
pulse of incalculable force.

       *       *       *       *       *

Madeline Brown went out into the garden. Her mother watched her go. Not
much longer, her mother thought, would she have a daughter. The girl
was blooming into womanhood. Within a year or two some young fellow
would claim her. The boys were already becoming a bother with their
phone calls. Madeline Brown's mother wondered how it would feel to be a
grandmother. Lord, she was getting old.

As from a great distance, she heard her daughter call. She rushed into
the garden, recognizing the panic in that call.

Madeline was gone. There wasn't a sign of her anywhere. There was only
the night coming down.

The mother's scream ripped through the gathering darkness.

"Madeline!"

There was no answer.

       *       *       *       *       *

A winding river ran through Valley Park, and beside the winding river,
in the star-sprinkled September night, John Bruce walked with Jennie
West. The browning leaves were beginning to fall. Soon it would be
autumn, soon it would be October, and after October, there would not
be any Jennie West. There would be Mrs. John Bruce. John hoped that a
clerk's salary would support her, but if it wouldn't, he'd darned well
get another job.

They stopped beside the river wherein the stars up in the sky were
reflected, and it was in his mind to kiss her, but she was in a
mood for teasing and she slipped away from him into the soft night.
Laughing, he started after her.

Suddenly she screamed in fright.

"Jennie! What is it? Where are you?" John Bruce shouted.

She didn't answer. He started running in the direction from which her
scream had come.

He couldn't find her.

"Jennie!"

The stars shifted, the trees bent, the earth twisted, heaved, and
rolled. His body was cut with a million knives. There was a whistle in
the air.

Then there was silence.

       *       *       *       *       *

Scoop Martin almost jumped out of bed. He could have sworn the
telephone was ringing. But it wasn't. Or was it?

Just another of those nightmares, he decided. He hadn't been sleeping
well for over a month. It was hell not to be able to sleep.

He laid down again.

The telephone lifted him out of bed like a jumping-jack coming out of
its box.

"Who is it? Oh, I'm sorry, chief, I didn't know it was you. What do you
want? Working for you, hasn't a man got any rights at all?--Huh?--I'm
sorry. Huh!--_Thirty-eight people gone, just like they had walked off
the face of the earth?_ And more reports coming in all the time? All
right, all right; I'm on my way to Valley Park right now."

       *       *       *       *       *

Outside the police station, the street was jammed by a silent crowd, a
tense, straining, shifting mass of people. Scoop fought his way through
them.

Inside, the station was alive with reporters, A.P. men, specials, U.P.
men, a leg man from every sheet in the city. They were all asking
questions. A brawny man, with his uniform coat flung open, was trying
to answer them. The phone kept interrupting him. Every time it rang,
the room dived into silence.

"Madam, I'm sorry. Yes--yes--We'll send a detail right away. You look
around the neighborhood yourself. Perhaps she has just gone to the drug
store. Yes.... I'm sorry, but I don't know what to tell you. We'll do
the best we can."

"Another one?" a reporter queried as the phone went back on the hook.
The chief of police nodded.

The strained silence was broken by the harsh breathing of frightened
men.

"Lord!" a reporter whispered. "That's seventy-three now. And nobody
knows how many may have vanished without being reported!"

The phone rang again. The chief of police grabbed it.

"Hello ... Oh ... Governor. You're right we want the guard. We want
them as fast as we can get them."

       *       *       *       *       *

Martin found a reporter he knew, plugged questions at him.

"They just go out of sight, that's all," the reporter told him. "How
it happens, why it happens, nobody knows, least of all the police.
When the first two reports came in, they thought it was a couple of
snatches, but they've been scared out of that idea now. There's no rime
or reason to it. Youngsters, nineteen, twenty years old; boys, girls,
couples. Somebody hears them scream, but by the time anybody gets
there, they're gone. God knows where they've gone or what has happened
to them. Jack Lecroy, heir to the biggest fortune in this town, is
gone. Two Polish factory workers, brothers, were in their room. Their
old man went in to ask them something. They weren't there. College
girls, shirt factory girls. It doesn't discriminate. Talk about the
Pied Piper!--What's that?"

Outside the building a voice had begun to screech.

"It's the end of the world. The angel Gabriel is blowing his horn and
the goats are being separated from the sheep. I'm ready, Lord, I'm
ready. Come and take me--"

The reporter's face went a shade whiter. "That's another one gone off
his nut. But he may be right, for all I know. Where you going?"

Scoop Martin was shoving his way toward the desk of the chief of
police. In his mind a phrase had clicked.

"Chief, I'm Martin, of the _Globe_. Listen to me.... I know you don't
want to answer any more questions, but I've got an idea. About a
month ago I interviewed a scientist living here in Valley Park, Lee
Garth. Did you read the story I wrote? He prophesied the end of the
world. Then he got busy and built himself a castle that a regiment of
artillery couldn't blast down.... Listen, maybe he knows more about
this than he told."

The harassed officer stared at Martin, then grabbed his phone.
Eventually he laid the receiver back on its hook.

"Garth doesn't answer," he said.

He bit off the end of a cigar. "I'll send a squad."

Two brawny young cops forced their way through the massed throng. The
crowd caught the news that they were headed out to Garth's Folly.

They didn't come back.

Another squad, with orders to make a careful investigation, reported
that the car of the first squad had run into a tree beside the drive
inside the grounds of Garth's place, that the two men were missing,
and that Garth was not in his house but was probably inside his
concrete tower.

"Maybe," Scoop whispered, as the report came through. "Maybe Garth is
doing this. Or maybe--he talked about the end of the world two million
years from now--maybe he was lying. Maybe the end of the world is
coming right now. Maybe Garth can help us."

"If there is a chance that Garth is either responsible or can help us,"
the chief of police shouted. "By God, I'll get him out of that place if
I have to blast."

The phone rang again. He grabbed it, listened. "We'll do all we can,"
he said.

He hung up, looked at his own men, at the reporters. "Another one gone."

His fist came down on the desk.

"I'm going to see Lee Garth. Come on, men."

He led the way. Scoop piled into the car. Those who couldn't get into
the car, hung on the sides.

They came in sight of the tower of concrete. It was a squat fortress in
the starlight. There wasn't a light in it.

"There it is, men," the chief of police said. "Drive up to it. We'll
find out if Garth knows anything about this."

Suddenly, to the occupants of the car, the tower seemed to lean toward
them. The trees seemed to shiver in a blast of passing air.

But there was no wind. The air was very quiet.

How could trees dance in a wind when there was no wind?

The ground seemed to writhe. It seemed to twitch.

Men screamed.

The car left the drive, plunged forward into a tree. The motor
sputtered, coughed indignantly, died. Then the night was silent, except
for the deep, bull-throated roar pounding from the tower which Lee
Garth had constructed.

There wasn't a man in the car.

Scoop Martin never wrote his story that night. Nor any night thereafter.

       *       *       *       *       *

Garth had slumped forward, his head on his arms. He awakened to the
touch on his shoulder, turned tired eyes up to the girl who had entered.

"You?" his voice was dull and low. "You still here?"

"Yes, Mr. Garth. Here, I have some breakfast for you." Her face was
pinched and drawn and only her eyes were beautiful.

He gulped at the food. While he ate, she went to a small opening and
looked out. She returned to him, and when he had finished eating, she
spoke.

"The militia, or perhaps they are national guardsmen, are here. They
have surrounded us."

"What?"

For a moment, he did not understand. "Oh. So soon? No! You must be
mistaken."

He went quickly to the opening, stared through it. Minutes passed. To
the woman who watched him, he seemed to grow older with each passing
moment.

He turned. She was still there. He faced her.

"You--you haven't asked why the militia are here?" It was a question
and not a statement.

"No sir."

Her answer left him momentarily at a loss for words.

"You don't know--what happened last night?"

"No. I do not need to know. I doubt if I could understand. It would
make no difference." She spoke quickly, the words blurring into each
other.

There was suddenly hunger in Lee Garth's eyes, the hunger that grows in
lonely men.

"Stella--"

The flat smash of an explosion coming from outside jerked him back
to the opening. A deep, angry drone sliced through the morning air.
Another explosion slapped the earth.

"Bombers! A squadron of planes! The fools! What are they saying about
me out there, I wonder? No matter. I did what I had to do. Or tried.
There is only one thing left to do."

There was no anger in his voice. There was only resignation.

"Stella," he said, "if you ran from the door, I think they would let
you escape. They want me instead of you. You could say I had held you
prisoner."

Her voice was level.

"But what about you?"

"I will stay," Lee Garth answered.

"Here?"

He nodded.

"No!"

"I really didn't mean I will stay here," he amended. "I will go there.
I am needed, I think."

She did not understand. No one else would have understood. But she
had no need for understanding. She knew the secret that surpasses
understanding.

She shook her head. "If you stay, I stay."

His eyes met hers.

"There are numerous things," he whispered, "that I would like to do
over, if I had the chance. You understand?"

The smile that lifted out of her eyes was the most beautiful thing he
had ever seen. He choked. There was an obstruction in his throat.

"Stella--"

"Yes, Mr. Garth."

Smash!

The morning rocked with the explosion of another bomb.

"Quickly!" he gasped. "Stand here beside me. This tower won't stand a
direct hit. There isn't a second to lose."

[Illustration: _Another explosion! Another! The tower seemed to lean
forward--the steel was melting--running away in little streams_--]

She moved to his side.

He put his arm around her. His free hand moved among the controls on
the table.

Below them, in the heart of the tower of concrete and steel, a
bull-throated roar started building up, started howling as energies
beyond computation were set in motion.

"Don't be afraid," he whispered. "I think it won't hurt very long."

She was still smiling.

       *       *       *       *       *

Goggling, Tompkins read the description.

"Perhaps as the result of a direct bomb hit, but more likely as the
result of the release by Garth himself of some super-powerful explosive
that burned but did not explode, the tower vanished in flame. The
concrete glowed red, then appeared to run, then quivered for a moment
like jelly. There was a blast of furious heat which forced back the
attackers. The tower puffed into dust.

"There is now no question but that Garth was responsible for the people
who vanished. They stopped disappearing when the tower dissolved. What
Garth was attempting no one knows, but he escaped the stern justice
that would have been meted out to him by committing suicide."

"By the great Godfrey!" Tompkins muttered. "That fellow had discovered
atomic power. What he was using it for, I don't know. But he had it.
Nothing else could produce a result like that. He had it. And I let it
get away! I called Sullivan off, because that story in the paper about
Garth predicting the end of the earth made me think he was a cracked
fool. But he had atomic power. And I could have had it, if I hadn't
called Sullivan off. He had it. And I let it get away."

Back and forth across the private office, he paced, muttering.

"He had it. He had atomic power. I could have had it. But I let it get
away."

       *       *       *       *       *

For an infinitesimal fraction of a second, as inconceivable energies
were somehow released, the low hills and the trees growing on the low
hills seemed to writhe and twist as if the light rays were being bent
by some refracting medium.

Then the translating force collapsed.

Lee Garth fell. Not far, not over a few feet. His legs buckled under
him as he landed. He rolled. He stopped rolling. The ground was soft,
and to his weary body it was a perfect haven for rest. Earth, soft
earth, and rest. His senses reeled. As he lost consciousness, he felt
someone tugging at him.

For a long time there was only the consciousness of complete
relaxation, rest, surcease from striving. Rest! How he needed it.

But a confused babble of voices kept intruding. And someone was rubbing
his head.

As he opened his eyes, he saw that his head was in a woman's lap. Who
was she? And why should she have his head in her lap? He had never had
anything to do with women. Oh. Stella. Oh....

"Mr. Garth," Stella whispered. "You had better stand up, if you can.
There is going to be--trouble."

Oh, yes, trouble. There had always been trouble, but somehow he had not
thought to find it here. But he got to his feet slowly.

He found himself in the center of a circle of people. Men and women.
Several of the men wore blue, police uniforms. The men in blue had
guns. The others had clubs. Some had rocks. Even some of the girls had
rocks.

"It's Garth," he heard a voice say.

"Yeah, it's Garth all right," another voice answered.

"Gentlemen," Lee Garth said.

"Shut up!" a voice answered.

"What have you done to us, Garth?

"Yeah, that's what we want to know: what have you done to us, Garth?

"Don't try to deny it! We know you did it.

"Where are we, Garth?

"You and your experiments!"

Lee Garth ran his eyes around the circle. A small, wolfish-faced chap
caught his attention. He recognized the man. Martin. A newspaper man.

"Hello, Martin," Garth said.

"What the hell have you done to us, Garth?" Martin said, scowling. He
was truculent. He was also scared. He had a rock in his hand.

"I--" Garth began.

A man with a club stepped forward. "Whatever you've done, I want you to
un-do it, see? You brought me here. You damned well better be ready to
take me back, see! And be fast about it."

"But that is impossible," Garth answered.

"What!"

"I can't take you back. I can't return you. You're here, and here you
will have to stay."

Anger ran through the group like a hurricane through a forest.

"Damn you, Garth!" a voice growled.

"What do you think we are--guinea pigs?"

"You're going to take us home, or else!"

"If you think you can move us into this damned country, where there
ain't a house in sight and no sign there ever was one, you've got
another think coming."

"Darn you, Garth."

In all the tumult Garth heard only one voice on his side, a girl's
voice.

"John Bruce," the girl said. "You give Mr. Garth a chance to explain.
He didn't do this without a reason."

"Aw, Jennie," the tall youth beside her answered. "You keep out of
this. Garth brought us here without asking us, and he's darned well
going to take us back."

"But I can't," Lee Garth said firmly.

Silence fell.

In the silence Stella whispered. "Mr. Garth, we had better run, if we
can. They won't listen, they don't want to listen. They're scared, and
dangerous."

The difference between a crowd and a mob is an angry voice expressing
the thoughts lurking in the minds of all.

"You can't return us, eh?" the angry voice said. "Well, we'll just fix
your clock. Come on, boys!"

Lee Garth would have stayed, but Stella pushed him, got him started. He
fought his way through the circle of men. Then the two were running.

The mob gave chase.

The crack of a pistol shuddered behind them. A slug tore into a tree
near Garth. The gun boomed again. Angry men screamed.

Run, Garth thought. It wouldn't do much good, but the instinct was to
run, to preserve life as long as possible. Run! Through the trees, up
the hillside. Men were coming. Run. Was this the right turning? It was.
Up the hill, up the nearer hill.

Only he couldn't run much farther. His heart was beginning to hurt.
Didn't matter. Death came to everything eventually, to Xerxes, to
Leonidas, to Charles Martel, to Copernicus, and Galileo. Death was
coming to him at the hands of those angry, frightened men, coming
quickly, unless he found what he sought, what he knew was here,
somewhere.

Where was the thing he sought? He had to find it, quickly. He couldn't
run much farther.

They were at the top of the nearer hill.

Then Garth saw what he was seeking.

A huge sphere. A ball made out of some strange, silvery metal. It
rested on top of the nearer hill.

Garth and the girl staggered toward it.

Out from it reached twin fingers of light. The streamers touched Garth,
they touched the girl.

"We're there," Garth sighed. "We've found the place. We've won. We're
safe."

Yelping with the lust to kill, the men came through the woods, came up
the hill.

Fingers of light reached out from the sphere. A glowing streamer
touched another man. He dropped the rock he was carrying. Another man.
He laid down his club.

Something rode the streamers of light. A message. It whispered to the
men the light touched. Their cries ran into quick silence. They looked
at each other, they looked at Garth and the girl with him. Both were
leaning against the sphere. They seemed to be drawing strength from it.
They were smiling.

An awed whisper ran through the men who had so recently been a mob.

"What is that thing, that ball?"

"Look at the light coming from it!"

"Say, I think we were wrong about this fellow, Garth."

"When that light touched me, I changed my mind about him."

"Let's go see what this is all about."

"Come on. Nothing is going to hurt us. I feel it."

Slowly, they approached. Anger had already left them. Now fear left
them. Only awe remained.

Then a voice began to speak.

       *       *       *       *       *

Here and there upon this earth are fields where men, looking backward,
say, "Here history was made. Because of what happened here, a new world
came into being."

There is a pass in Greece, a field in France, a backyard in Holland.
There are fields in America too.

There is a field two million years in the future!

       *       *       *       *       *

Dawn world or dusk world?

The sun went down the western sky. Its rays were flung over the group
clustered around the globe, over the listening men, who stared quickly
at each other, then away, then stole a glance at Garth, leaning against
that globe. Over the frightened, clinging, awed girls, who listened too.

In the air was a voice. It came from the sphere. It went directly to
the minds of the listeners, whispered as a thought current in their
brains, whispered as a ghost moving among the nerve endings. The voice
said:

"Thus the human race reached its goal. There were not many of us left,
a few hundred only. We had reached the point where mental activity
alone interested us.... Then our last genius invented what we can only
describe to you as a perfect brain. It was a substance that would
absorb and retain mental impulses. It would absorb and retain our
mental impulses. In effect, then, it would become us.

"That substance is housed in the heart of this sphere.

"We built the sphere, set forces in it that made it, to the best of our
knowledge, all powerful. We armed it with incredible weapons. We built
into it the apparatus to warp space--an adaptation of the drive we once
used on our space ships. Then, on the brain substance housed in the
heart of this sphere, we impressed the individual consciousness of each
living person, and the knowledge that each person had in his own mind,
which included all the knowledge that the human race has gained in
more than two million years. We blended into one mind the minds of the
two hundred humans who remained alive. Housed in a substance that was
eternal, sheltered in a sphere that could not be destroyed, it became
an almost perfect mind. We thought it was perfect. We discarded our
bodies, as outworn tools. Physically, the human race died. Mentally, it
would live forever.

"One thing we had never done--flown to the stars. We had reached the
planets and had almost forgotten them. But the stars in the sky we had
not reached. It was the last great voyage of discovery.

"We set out for the stars. And we reached them!"

The twinkling points of light that Jan Lippershey had shown to be suns
lost in the immensity of space!

The voice died into silence, seemed to rest, then whispered again.

"And near Antares a meteor swarm struck us. Inconceivable powers
were housed within this sphere. We tried to escape but the swarm
was moving almost as fast as light. We tried to blast the meteors
into nothingness, and we succeeded in this. But we could not succeed
forever. Eventually even the powers of this sphere were near
exhaustion. Thousands of pea-size meteors struck us. The force of those
collisions cracked the sphere itself. In time we limped back to earth,
limped back to a place where we could lie up and lick our wounds.

"We discovered that the wounds would not heal, that the damage was
irreparable. Energy was leaking from the sphere, a little by a little.
Somehow we had erred in its construction.

"Somehow we had gone down the wrong road, had taken the wrong turning.

"We could not anticipate that this would happen, we could not see what
would happen tomorrow. But we knew that our race, and your race, was
dying here, that you, back in the mists of time, were moving down a
road with death as your destiny.

"The drive that carries a race is not lightly ended.

"But the human race ended in us, in our error.

"It was our mistake. It was our task to correct it, if we could.

"We tried.

"We could not go back through time, but we could force our thoughts
back to certain cyclic periods. We could reach only a few periods, most
of them too early or too late to meet our needs. Eventually we found a
time that was right and a mind that could understand. To that mind we
gave instructions, to Lee Garth...."

The voice paused, sought for energy, slowly gathered it, then went on.

"That is why you were brought here--to repopulate a world, to take up
where we left off, to correct an error made two million years after
your time.

"We have taken the living from the remote past and used them to bridge
the chasm of death. Yours to carry on."

There was silence. Men moved awkwardly, staring at each other, at that
sphere, at Lee Garth. The girls, somehow, seemed to understand.

It was Scoop Martin who came out of the crowd, stood apologetically
before Lee Garth.

"Mr. Garth, sir, is that right, what we heard?"

Scoop's wolfish face was a mask of fear, doubt, and hesitation.

Garth swallowed. He nodded.

"But--" the reporter gestured toward the globe. "How can men be in
that?"

Garth answered slowly. "A lot can be learned in two million years. It
is not impossible. You, the you that really exists, your mind, your
consciousness, is a movement of thought within a suitable medium.
Evolution provided a chemical medium, a mass of tissue, your brain.
That is all you really are, the movement of current within your brain
cells.... The men who came two million years after us found a better
medium than the brain. Upon that better medium, they impressed their
thinking."

Garth hesitated, and when he spoke, it was not to Martin, but to
someone else.

"Is that not right?"

There was a rustle in the air. A voice whispered.

"In essence, that is correct. It was not so simple as that, but you
have the underlying thought. In the year that we have yet to live, we
will teach you the process. Perhaps you may discover our error. Perhaps
you will want to use other methods. We cannot advise on that point. The
only thing that matters is that the race must go on to whatever is its
ultimate destiny."

Sighing with the pulse of failing energy, the whisper ceased.

The group stirred again, moving restlessly.

"I'm sorry," Garth spoke, "that I did not ask your permission to
bring you here. But I had no choice. If I had asked for volunteers to
repopulate the world of two million years from our time, you would have
concluded I was crazy. So I had to bring you here without consulting
you."

They didn't seem to hear him. They stirred uneasily. All malice was
gone out of them. Only unease and trembling wonder were left.

Martin twisted. He spoke.

"We have to rebuild--to repopulate--a world. That's why we're here?"

Garth swallowed, fighting the lump in his throat. He nodded.

"It seems hard to understand, sir," Martin said. "But what can I do to
help?"

The lump in Garth's throat rose so high he could not swallow it.

A bulky figure in uniform came out of the crowd. "What can I do, Mr.
Garth, to help?"

There was a confused babble of voice. "What can we do, Mr. Garth, to
help?"

In that babble he heard only one voice, that of the girl at his side,
asking what she might do.

"You might remember," he answered, "that--that my name is Lee."

And when, during the shadow night that followed, the descendents of
the dogs the race had left behind them howled on the hills for their
lost masters, now there came an answer. Men whistled to them. Slowly,
hesitantly, fearfully, but gaining confidence as the whistles of men
roused half lost memories, the dogs came down from the hills to their
new masters.

Here and there, upon this earth, are fields.



*** End of this LibraryBlog Digital Book "Dark Reality" ***

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