Where Eternity Ends, Page 3

  “Daughter!” gasped Fostar. “Marten Crodell’s daughter? But your name—”

  “It Alora Templeton Crodell! I didn’t tell you that night, because I knew you were angry with ihy father.”

  Rolan Fostar had a more bewildered feeling than when the transspace drive had brought the queer wrongness. This was wrong, too—that this attractive, intelligent young woman should be the daughter of Earth’s most autocratic moneylord. No, it was right! Too bitterly right. Things dovetailed immediately. Her own spoiled attitude—her contempt of their theory—her outspoken criticism. They were all of the Marten Crodell flavor.

  He moved away from her so obviously that she flushed. “I might have known it!” he said;, with cold rage. “You’re just as stubborn, narrow-minded—”

  “Stow it, lad,” interjected Angus Macluff. “You might at least use a civil tongue to the little la—person. Look—the poor child is ill—”

  The girl’s flush had changed to a ghastly paleness. She swayed on her feet and the engineer leaped forward to catch her. But Fostar was there ahead of him. He picked her up in his arms and carried her to a bunk. His emotions altered inexplicably as he looked down at her closed eyes and drawn features. He couldn’t feel angry with her any more.

  “Take care of her, Angus,” he muttered. He turned away, knowing that the gnarled old engineer would doctor her up skilfully with the supplies of the medicine chest.

  Angus announced, a while later, that the girl—the “new gentleman” he called her—had passed into a quiet sleep. Also tired from the long, tense drive of the past day, the three men retired. His bunk usurped by the girl, Angus rolled himself in a blanket on the floor. There was no need of a guard awake. The air and heating equipment, long a standard item of space-ships, was automatic.

  The next “morning”—by the chronometer—Rolan Fostar peered out of the side port. Nothing had changed. Back of them was still an almost impossible blackness, where the hidden universe and its laggard light impulses lay. It hurt the eyes to look into that rayless cauldron.

  Ahead lay the shimmering mirage-universe, no nearer, no farther—unchanged. Because of their supervelocity, they were in reality seeing an older and older picture, like the unwinding of a reel backward, but it meant nothing. The stars, to human eyes, had held their configuration for untold centuries.

  Fostar was aware when Alora Crodell arose. He heard Angus Macluff inquire solicitously after her health, and her reply that though a little weak, she was all right. He felt her gaze on the back of his head and turned to meet her amber eyes. Pie met obvious coolness, though not hostility.

  Fostar turned his eyes away quickly. Then, ashamed of himself, he whirled again.

  “Look here,” he said gruffly, “we’re going to be aboard this ship together for some time. Let’s at least be half-way civil to each other.”

  “That’s the right spirit, lad!” approved Angus Macluff. He added dolefully, “With our hours numbered, we should have no quarrels among us.”

  Fostar saw the instant reaction in the girl. She smiled disarmingly, and came forward.

  “I’m glad you said that!” she murmured. Then she gasped as her wide eyes took in the panorama of space, it was breath-taking, at first glance.

  Fostar had to explain the mirage-universe to her. “You’re one of the first four humans to go faster than light,” he reminded her.

  “I’m glad I’m along,” she said abruptly, taking a deep breath. “This is such a strange journey, so thrilling and adventurous!”

  Her face was aglow. Lit by the soft radiance of the reflected universe, her elfin features captivated Fostar’s interest. She was lovely; that was the plain fact.

  And then, suddenly, she was hideous.

  Her fair complexion changed to a ghastly green. Auburn hair became a violent purple. Her teeth, from between her slightly parted lips, shone with a stained crimson. Her amber eyes gleamed stark white!

  Alarmed, Fostar saw that the girl was looking at him with horror! He flashed his eyes around and saw a mad scene of riotous colors, as though gallons of lurid paint had been dumped in the ship. The silvery walls were funereal blue, instruments mottled in purple, yellow and scarlet hues. Angus Macluff’s florid face was a venomous emerald, his heavy eyebrows dripping with bright orange!

  Dr. Bronzun’s excited voice clipped out, as he scurried for his instrument bench:

  “A shift in the spectrum!” he informed. “Another manifestation of natural laws suspended. Nothing dangerous. It simply means that all the light around us has changed its wave-length a good many microns. I must measure the amount—”

  Alora laughed weakly, in the following relief. “You look like a monster from some other universe!” she said impishly to Fostar. Then she looked in her hand-mirror and shrieked. The eternal feminine came to the fore and she tried to soften the ravages of the misplaced spectrum with cosmetics. The result, if anything, was more frightful, as she applied purple powder and indigo lipstick.

  The phenomenon passed in five minutes, and all was normal again.

  “Spacetime is thinning gradually, as we approach the Edge of Space,” murmured Dr. Bronzun. “The cosmic-rays have fallen off ten percent.”

  “How far out are you going?” asked Alora, in a subdued voice.

  “As far as we need to, for undeniable proof,” answered Fostar. “Perhaps to the very Edge of Space!”

  The girl shuddered. “You make it sound real, the way you say it so sepulchrally!” She laughed shortly. “But you’ll excuse me if I just keep on believing that my father’s right—that you’re fanatics—and on a fool’s errand!”

  Fostar conquered a stab of anger. “You’ll see!” he promised grimly. “You’ll see!” challenged the girl. “None of us will see!” came Angus Macluff’s pessimistic grumble. “Unless fate is very, very kind!”

  CHAPTER IV

  INFINITY’S BOUNDARY

  ON AND on the wayward ship hurtled, carrying its four passengers toward the rim of things. Behind them—nothing. Before them—a ghostly, mocking universe.

  A chill descended over their spirits. Even Alora Crodell, with her skeptical attitude, grew subdued and kept her opinions to herself. Angus Macluff’s dolorous mutterings ran the gamut of pessimism. Dr. Bronzun’s calm eyes had a certain bleak tenseness in them.

  A succession of strange phenomena occurred.

  Once, at mealtime, they were unable to sweeten their coffee, though they heaped in sugar. They tried the sugar separately, to find it absolutely tasteless. Dr. Bronzun made a tentative test with his chemical kit and announced that it had changed to a polysaccharide. A few minutes later it was normal sugar again. They had passed through an area of thinned space-time in which disaccharide carbon-chains could not exist!

  At another time, Fostar, talking to Angus, found the engineer looking at him blankly, as though he heard nothing. Then Fostar suddenly realized he couldn’t hear his own voice!—nor any other sound. There was an utter, grave-like silence—a complete, eerie absence of sound—in the ship’s interior, for several nerve-wracking minutes. Then sound came back again, like an avalanche of thunder, but it was welcome.

  Dr. Bronzun conjectured that the laws of sound propagation had temporarily become dispelled. Perhaps, as with the shift of spectrum, there had been a shift of sound vibration, but so much that it passed the range of their ears.

  Angus Macluff unwittingly demonstrated the power of thought, on another occasion. Peering at the cabin’s thermometer, he let out a shout and began mopping his forehead. The temperature read 96 degrees Centigrade!—almost the boiling point of water, and far above the temperature any man could stand for more than a few seconds. Dr. Bronzun calmed their momentary panic by simply pointing out that it wasn’t that hot. The temperature had not changed a degree. The thermometer had undergone an individual phenomenon.

  Angus Macluff, at this, stuffed his handkerchief away sheepishly. The sweat on his forehead had been very real, however.

  The staid laws of
geometry underwent a baffling metamorphosis for one period. They suddenly found their eyes playing them tricks. Small objects looked large, large ones small; curves were straight, and edges were looped. A hand moved nearer to the eyes shrank; moved away, it loomed large. It was similar to the hazy effects of rotating space-time, with the trans-space drive, but much more clear-cut and nightmarishly real. Fostar barely choked off a yelp of dismay as Alora’s bodyless head, multiplied a hundred times, seemed to roll at his feet. Most baffling of all, closing their eyes did no good. The distorted visions went on unabated, till the phenomenon had run its course.

  “We were rotated at another angle to space-time for a moment,” remarked the scientist. “Thank heaven we didn’t stay in it!”

  But they were considerably more startled the day certain objects in the ship could not be picked up. Fostar reached for the drinking cup under the water-carboy, but his fingers met, empty. He reached again, and clearly saw his fingers pass through the material of the metal cup, as though it were an unreal image. He felt only a slight tingling, but nothing tangible.

  Angus Macluff came from the pantry, his face wild, to stammer that he had tried ten times to pick up a coffee can, without being able to so much as feel itl Dr. Bronzun excitedly examined the objects, passing through them a variety of solid materials. All went through unchanged, untouched. Suddenly, some slight disturbance occurred that caused the objects affected to float up into the air and drift toward the hull. Vainly, they tried to catch them and knock them down, but it was no better than trying to grasp smoke, or a moonbeam.

  All of the objects but one drifted through the hull and were never seen again. The last object, one of Dr. Bronzun’s spectroscopic gratings, stopped just before it touched the hull, and gently slid toward the ship’s center of mass. The phenomenon had passed. The grating was solid again, and the scientist caught it, rather gratefully.

  “Another law of nature violated!” he observed. “That two objects cannot occupy the same unit spacetime!”

  Angus Macluff’s face reflected a resignation that had grown with the passing days, and added phenomena.

  “I like not these experiences,” he sighed. “Mark my words, gentlemen”—he stared hard at Alora, as he always did using that term—“one of them will be our finish!”

  Dr. Bronzun waved a hand, dismissing the engineer’s customary foreboding.

  But Fostar was thoughtful. He had felt for some days that their risks were mounting geometrically with every added linear mile toward the Edge of Space.

  “Perhaps we should be cautious,” he said to the scientist. “The phenomena are becoming more numerous, more prolonged, and more threatening. Space-time must be thinning rapidly. So far we’ve met only isolated patches of thinness, like those that have even reached Earth. But if we should happen to run into a wide belt or area—”

  He broke off the sentence. “Besides—” He hesitated, then went on without looking at Alora. “We have an added passenger. Our oxygen consumption has been increased, by that amount. We have to take that into account.”

  Fostar had tried to keep from showing it, but he knew that a faint trace of bitterness had crept into his voice. Out of the comer of his eye he saw the girl’s head toss.

  Dr. Bronzun nodded, without hesitation. “Begin deceleration,” he ordered. “We’re eleven days out, and almost three light-years from the sun. That is far enough, perhaps. The final Edge of Space can’t be more than two light-years further. I think all the proofs I will need can be gathered here, however.”

  FOSTAR sat before his controls, rather relieved that they were to begin deceleration. Dr. Bronzun started up his atomic-generator, and again the eery, lambent glow spread a colorful halo about the great coils of his trans-space drive.

  Fostar expertly turned the ship 180 degrees with offside blasts. Then, with the rocket jets firing into their line of flight, he brought the engine to its usual operating rate.

  Deceleration had begun, slowing their colossal speed of 100 times the velocity of light. In twelve hours, they would be stationary, relative to the sun they had left behind.

  Fostar heaved a sigh of relief. The trans-space drive, not tested as fully as they might have wanted for this hazardous trip, was proving itself equal to its task. He looked out of the conning port. Now, quite naturally, the region of the firmament before the ship’s nose was rayless, blank. The mirage-universe had taken up its position at the rear.

  Then another image appeared, reflected from the glass. It was Alora Crodell’s face. She was beside him, looking at him reproachfully, half angrily.

  “You made it rather pointed, a moment ago, that I was an unwanted passenger!” she said in injured tones.

  He grunted noncommittally.

  “We got along so well all this time,” she continued, her tone becoming softer, “that I thought we might become—friends!”

  “I understood it to be a truce,” Fostar returned shortly. “You still think this is a fool’s errand?”

  “Of course!” Alora returned sweetly. “But I’m still glad I’m along—for the thrill!”

  Fostar glanced at her. “That’s all it means to you?” he asked incredulously. “Haven’t any of those phenomena convinced you that something lies out here beyond human experience?”

  “I’m only convinced,” returned the girl evenly, “that you’ve exceeded the speed of light. The other effects may be due to that.”

  “You’re as hard-headed as your father,” commented Fostar, bluntly. His face was set as he went on. “All these have been the signposts of the future fate of Earth. We will return with news of—doom!”

  The girl shivered involuntarily. “No you can’t be right,” she whispered. “You can’t be! My father must be right—that you are fanatics, cranks. When I saw my father that day, after you had left, he said you were just being young and brave and foolish—about going out to the Beyond and proving it. That’s why I tried to stop you. I didn’t want it on my father’s head that he had driven you to it.”

  “There are many things on Marten Crodell’s head—” Fostar said stonily.

  “You’re wrong!” the girl blazed instantly. “You misunderstand him, as so many do. He’s trying to do good, with the power in his hands. He has a vision of the day when all his land holdings on other planets will be useful and productive—”

  “For his profit!” Fostar put in succinctly.

  The girl choked. “You—you beast!” she spat out.

  Fostar’s temper instantly flared, in keeping with her own. “And you,” he countered, “are a wilful, stubborn—”

  “Gentlemen, gentlemen!” came Angus Macluff’s chiding tones. “Words like that would not be pleasant on your lips—if at that moment they became the last you ever spoke!”

  Fostar looked at Alora, aware of the significance of those words. Certainly, with what ominous things lay outside the ship, their human differences dwindled to the utterly trivial. But at the same time, the spark of anger hadn’t quite cooled within him. He waited for her to speak, and when she didn’t—waiting for him—he turned away. But he hated himself for his own stubbornness. They didn’t speak to each other again for many hours.

  TWELVE hours later, the constant deceleration under the miracle-working of the trans-space drive had reduced their velocity to the point of one light-speed.

  As suddenly as was to be expected, the invisible universe they had left behind leaped into view. All the sixth magnitude and larger nebulae and stars flamed into the backdrop of space, to their eyes. In Dr. Bronzun’s electro-magnifier, all the other billions of spacial bodies peppered the interstices. He had looked for them, almost as though fearing they might not be there.

  Somehow, the sight of the normal universe, hidden from their eyes for twelve days, struck cheer in their hearts—though in the next instant, seeing the sun only as a brilliant first-magnitude star, they felt the depressing realization of the three tremendous light-years that lay between.

  Men had never before s
een their primary from such a remote vantage.

  Yet the greater chill came to them as they turned to view the Beyond. The mirage-universe had vanished, and now the true Edge of Space loomed before them—ultra-black, starless, rayless, horribly empty. There could be nothing comprehensible to human senses beyond it—neither matter, nor light, nor gravity, nor cosmic-rays, nor space-time.

  “What lies on the other side of the Edge of Space,” mused Dr. Bronzun, “would to us be the absolute zero of nothingness!”

  “And that’s what Earth will become when it crosses that Edge!” muttered Fostar grimly. He kept his eye on the instruments. When their velocity had become zero, they would begin gathering the proof for which they had made this unprecedented trip toward nothingness.

  He felt a little queer as he looked at the velocimeter—not because of its reading, which was quite correct, but due to the instrument itself. It looked, somehow, a little larger than it should. He rubbed his eyes, shook his head, and looked away. Hallucination, of course. He was tired from the long stretch of vigilance during deceleration.

  But he sneaked another look at the velocimeter. It looked even larger now! Furthermore, the other instruments appeared oversize also! Startled, he looked around—

  “Rolan, what’s wrong?” It was Alora’s voice, from back of him. “Why does everything look—larger!”

  Fostar darted his eyes about. Everything had become larger, and was becoming larger with each passing moment. The nearest port began to loom like a round window. The opposite walls had receded and lengthened. His instruments and pilot-board were now of proportions that might have suited a giant.

  And his clothes! They had suddenly become misfits, baggy and sagging into heavy folds.

  “We’re shrinking!” Angus Macluff’s hoarse voice boomed out. “This is our end, gentlemen!” His solemn tones held almost satisfaction at an end he had prophesied so many times. At any other time, Fostar would have laughed at the ridiculous figure he cut, with his clothing hanging about him like voluminous drapes.