Sense of Wonder: A Century of Science Fiction (84 page)

“You infernal young idiot,” it ran, “I’d like nothing so well as to twist your miserable neck! Day after day my daughter sits like a statue and it quite gets on her mother’s nerves and mine, to get into communication with her. But now to cap the climax! She has a severe case of measles and the doctor tells us she will likely have the disease for the next five years!”

With a sob, Edgar flung the letter from him and seized the vial of colorless fluid.

“Let it be ten drops,” he said hoarsely. “I shall go as old Nap did—but no—I shan’t prolong it, I will take the entire two ounces that I have made. The quicker the better!”

Now the reader at this point will doubtless be prepared for the hasty conclusion of this story, but such, I regret to say, is not the case. Have you never heard that one hundred thousand volts of high frequency electricity can be discharged through a living body with no apparent damage, but diminish the number of volts to five hundred or a thousand at a lower frequency and death is instantaneous? Something of the quality of the mysterious force known to us as electricity was contained in that harmless looking liquid. Before Edgar had put the entire two ounces into his arm he was conscious of a deafening roar and of intermittent flashes of brilliant lights. He felt as if he were falling through interstellar space. He seemed to be passing suns with planets swinging in their orbits about them. Great universes stretched on and on without end! At first he thought, “They are universes of solar systems, containing suns and planets.” Then with sudden lucidity came the thought, “They are molecules made up of atoms, containing protons and electrons! I am going, not the way of the telescope, but of the microscope!”

A physics professor, who had been considered a little wild in his theories, had once said these words and they had never been forgotten by the student, Hamilton.

“Our Earth in the ether of space is as but a grain of sand upon the sea-shore. Our universe may be but a molecule in a greater universe, and all our ages since the beginning of time, record but a second in the time of that larger cosmos. Then take it the other way too. In this grain of sand which I hold in my hand, there may be other universes which, while I have talked to you, have come into being, and vanished. Students, perhaps time is the fourth dimension we have sought after so long!! Would not this theory prove that the time element enters into the size of things?”

Then Edgar understood. Ellen had been headed the way of the telescope, but
only to an infinitesimal degree.
His body was hurtling
millions of times more rapidly
in the direction of microscopic infinity, and as his physics professor had explained, the atomic space is as vast, proportionally, as interplanetary space. The difference is that of rates of vibration, and with his bodily shrinkage, Edgar was expending his bodily energies at a relatively rapid rate.

Unable to measure the passage of time, Edgar drowsily felt himself losing consciousness. If this was death it was actually a pleasurable experience.

Again consciousness, sharp and acute. Edgar looked about him and raised himself to a sitting posture. In
his ears pounded an almost deafening roar, and a strong wind was blowing steadily. He seemed to be lying upon a stone-paved floor. Then he observed that it was a great ledge, as broad as the length of a city block. He could see where it made a straight horizon with the sky a few rods away. But the fearful roar! He turned toward the near edge of this ledge, and there, stretching in endless billows that tossed and drove great waves to points within not more than ten feet from the top of the huge wall, was a vast watery expanse, the most restless, writhing body of water that Edgar had ever imagined. Nothing but water, a deep blue sky (not the cerulean blue of the skies of Terra, but a deeper royal blue) and the stone paving of this vast shelf of rocks! Edgar took a few steps toward the farther edge. As he
walked, he noticed how evenly and smoothly the slabs of stone had been fitted together. It was like one vast block of concrete.

He approached curiously and cautiously the opposite edge, and peered below. He drew back in even greater alarm, for he had glimpsed a pit of fire that sent up great tongues of flame. He seemed literally between the devil and the deep sea! Stepping back a few paces he commenced to walk along the paving which seemed the only safe place upon this strange world. To the left stretched the boundless sea and to the right the awful semblance of Hades!

After several miles of weary walking, Edgar began to feel acutely the pangs of hunger. He ventured warily toward the right edge once more, and this time he did not draw back in alarm. Far, far below him lay a beautiful green valley with rolling swards and mossy hillocks. Dwelling-places dotted the landscape and figures moved about. From his lofty height the scene resembled the miniature card-board village of his childhood’s day. But how to descend into this Garden of Eden! There seemed to be no visible means of getting down to what seemed a veritable paradise, after the experiences of the past hour. Along the entire length of the wall, as far down as Edgar could see, in both directions, his eye could perceive nothing but a blank uniformity, unless—he peered more intently. A few feet directly below him he saw two small holes, and his heart gave a joyful bound. The holes must have been made there for the purpose of attaching the curved ends of a ladder used in ascending this most gigantic piece of masonry. Edgar decided to remain directly above the holes until one of the inhabitants of this miniature world should be moved by providence to investigate the top of the mammoth dike.

Many times during the days that followed, Edgar gave up in despair. He tried to shout, but his voice was completely lost in the unceasing roar of the ocean back of him. Too weak to hope longer, he lay down utterly despondent. And then came hope and with it a renewed strength!

Directly below him at the base of this vast wall which sloped toward the valley, at an angle of about thirty degrees, were many figures gesticulating and carrying long black objects upon their shoulders. Edgar in his weakness and excitement nearly lost his balance in watching the procedure. Then he was assured beyond the question of a doubt that one of them was scaling the wall. Over and over the ladder was being turned and attached into holes along the side. Nearer and nearer crawled a tiny saffron garmented creature until the ladder had been inserted into the last holes and an inhabitant of the remote valley stood in astonishment before Edgar Hamilton.

His short yellow garment hung by straps across his shoulders and extended below his waist where it ended in short bloomers, full enough to give the effect of a skirt. His features were in type not unlike those of the people of our eastern civilization of today.

Communication through a common language was, of course, impossible, but Edgar was able to indicate his desire for food and his wish to descend into the green valley. The stranger nodded and then ran to the opposite edge of the dike and gazed long and fixedly at the stormy sea. At length he turned back toward Edgar and the latter noticed that his face wore an expression of extreme anxiety.

They both descended by the ladder.

Once down among these people, so like and yet so different from himself, Hamilton learned many strange and wonderful things. Inside of a few weeks he had mastered their language. He became acquainted with numerous astounding truths concerning this planet to which fate had so strangely sent him. Chief among these was the fact that the large island upon which the people dwelt had at one time been part of a vast continent, but the larger portion of this land with its great cities and monumental temples, palaces and fertile plains had been swallowed up in the ocean. The remnant of the civilization living upon a lofty plateau had managed to survive the onslaught of the sea, whose waters seemed to creep up through the centuries, and threatened to engulf them. In reality it was not the water which rose, but the land that sank due to enormous subterranean gas pockets collapsing, the gas escaping through fiery volcanoes. This was a sunken land then that maintained its temporary safety only through the building and repair of its monstrous dikes.

Edgar thought of Holland on the far away Earth. (Ah I but was it so far away? He and all the universe about him were an infinitesimal part of the new blue-figured linoleum that he had purchased recently for his laboratory!)

“Not so much like Holland,” he said to himself one time, “as like the lost land of Mu, which, according to archeologists was a tropical continent larger than North America. It went to the bottom of the Pacific with its sixty-four million white inhabitants and their templed cities thirteen thousand years ago.”

Then
she
came into Edgar’s life and gradually he forgot the linoleum on the laboratory floor and the measles that threatened to last for five long years. She was the daughter of Elto, the chief inspector and engineer of the dikes. A sort of modern Nehemiah was he, as he superintended the continual erection of the rocky walls that preserved the land of Luntin from total annihilation. Her name was Yana and her pale, wild beauty outrivaled the charms of any earthly maiden Edgar had ever known.

One time they sat upon a grassy knoll outside Elto’s home. They looked in the direction of Mt. Karp, into whose forbidding depths Edgar had gazed at the time of his arrival upon this planet.

“The fiery mount has been very active of late years,” said Yana sadly, her sweet troubled eyes turned in the direction of the volcano. “Father says that the land is sinking rapidly and that the dikes have now been built as high as is possible without their crumbling. He and the wise Kermis predict that inside of the next fifty or sixty years our beloved Luntin and its inhabitants will be no more, and over all this will stretch that wild, roaring ocean!”

She shuddered and in that moment Edgar had clasped her in his arms and won from her the promise to be his bride.

Twenty-five years passed; years filled with much happiness, but clouded with an ever increasing anxiety for the fate of Luntin. Edgar and Yana had lived in happy companionship. They had a son whom they called Yangar. The lad was the pride of their hearts. He had inherited his grandfather’s constructive ability, and at the age of twenty-two was appointed chief engineer of the dikes, to succeed his late grandfather, Elto. In this capacity Yangar was a decided success, and by his ingenuity had more than once warded off dire calamity to his country.

Thirty-five years more! It looked as if the date set by old Elto for the inundation was nigh. Yangar, now a widower with a son of his own, Manly, was ingenious and vigilant, but even these qualities could not hold out forever against such a monster as hurled itself constantly against the walls. Yana grew thin and wasted away with worry and died. Edgar sorrowed greatly over the loss of his wife, and his son became doubly dear to him.

One time after Yangar had returned from an inspection of the dikes, his father showed him a bottle containing a yellow liquid.

“This,” he explained to Yangar, “is the way out of the catastrophe for us. It has taken me years to prepare it. I will divide it in thirds; for you, your son, Manly, and myself. It is a very concentrated form of a drug I prepared sixty years ago. The entire contents of this bottle is sufficient, if injected into the veins of you, Manly and myself, to so decrease the rate of our nerve impulses that we shall no longer be of this world.”

He paused, while in retrospection his mind’s eye saw the immobile form of that earthly maiden with her interminable smile.

“We shall not be of this world, father!” exclaimed Yangar. “Do you mean that we shall die?”

“Not that, I trust,”replied Edgar, “but as I have often explained to you before, time and size being purely relative, we cannot of necessity become infinitely slower in our rate of existence without at the same time growing infinitely bigger. This process employed at the crucial moment of disaster will lift us to a world in a universe next larger to our own. My bodily forces are about exhausted anyhow, but for you and your son Manly, it will mean the ability to complete the normal span of your lives.”

Then came a day when Edgar and his grandson, Manly, a young man of four and thirty, who bore a marked resemblance to his grandfather when the latter had come a stranger to Luntin, sat within the little stone house where they and Yangar dwelt together. The latter was away, as was his custom, to oversee work upon the dikes. On the morrow Manly would be one of the number chosen to labor for the safety of his land.

“Tomorrow you and Yangar must take with you your bottles containing your portions of this wonderful drug that diminishes nervous pressure,” said Edgar Hamilton, smiling with affection at his stalwart and handsome grandson. “It is no longer safe to be without it. The attached syringes will render its injection a matter of seconds only.”

He had scarcely finished speaking when a roar like thunder shook the very ground beneath their feet. Together they rushed to the entrance and lifted their eyes to the rocky wall that had held at bay their watery enemy for so many generations. The dike was a crumbling mass, a Niagara, increased to many times its earthly proportions.

* * * *

“May the saints preserve me!” exclaimed Agnes as she flew toward her room and locked the door. “This mornin’ I hands a note to master Edgar and he acts that queer I think he’s after losin’ his mind. Then this evenin’ I goes in, and there he’s a settin’ on the floor with next to nothin’ on, and an old man standin’ beside him! I’m through. If these goin’s on don’t stop, I’m after lookin’ for another job!”

At nine o’clock that evening the door-bell rang at the Gordan residence.

“The strange doctor who was called for consultation by Dr. Bennett, dear,” said Mrs. Gordan to her husband. “Dr. Bennett said he would send him to see poor Ellen. Will you go to the door?”

“If it’s the doctor, all right,” responded her spouse, “but should it chance to be that scalawag, Hamilton, down the front steps he goes faster than he came up!”

Mr. Gordan opened the front door and gave a little gasp of amazement. In the entryway, with the streetlight shining grotesquely upon his bent figure, stood an aged stranger.

“Are you the consulting physician to investigate Miss Gordan’s case?” asked Mr. Gordan.

The elderly individual bent an interested glance upon the man before him. Then he replied.

“I—that is—yes, I believe I have an excellent cure for her condition. May I see her?”