Sinister Barrier

Eric Frank Russell

Sinister Barrier

Foreword

It would be idle to pretend and dishonest to suggest that
Sinister Barrier
is anything other than fiction. Some may regard it as fantasy because it is placed in the future and depicts certain developments likely in times to come. But I regard it as a sort of fact-fiction solely because I do sincerely believe that if ever a story was based upon facts it is this one.

Sinister Barrier
is as true a story as it is possible to concoct while presenting believe-it-or-not truths in the guise of entertainment. It derives its fantastic atmosphere only from the
q
ueerne
ss,
the eccentricity, the complete inexplicability—so far as dogmatic science is concerned—of the established facts which gave it birth. These facts are myriad. I have them in the form of a thousand press clippings snatched from half a hundred newspapers in the Old World and the New. A thousand more were given me by adventurers hardier than myself; people who have explored farther and more daringly into forbidden acres where only one law operates: that curiosity kills the cat.

Despite my possession of a highly suggestive mountain of evidence, none of it jelled into a story until three Americans came at me, not together, yet with cumulative effect. They formed an unholy trinity out of whom was born
Sinister Barrier’s
religion of damnation. The first of these three, a San Franciscan lover of long-distance debate, asked, “Since everyone wants peace, why don’t we get it?” The second, a bellicose Iowan, demanded, “If there are extra-terrestrial races further advanced than ourselves, why haven’t they visited us already?” Until I encountered the third, Charles Fort, it didn’t occur to me that perhaps we had been visited and were still being visited, without being aware of it. Charles Fort gave me what might well be the answer to both these questions. Casually but devastatingly, he said,
“I think we’re property.”
And that is the plot of
Sinister Barrier.

When first this story appeared, its publishers, Street & Smith, of New York, gave it a tremendous boost throughout their chain of magazines, describing it as “the greatest imaginative yarn of two decades” and forecasting that it would “go down in history along with H. G. Wells’
War of the Worlds,
Jules Verne’s
Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea
and Sutton Vane’s
Outward Bound.”
At that time I thought they were overdoing it—they’d be the death of me yet. There are moments when it’s sinful to reveal the truth, and the wages of sin is death. But I remain alive, which is satisfactory proof that the story’s basis is a lot of nonsense… or do I owe my preservation to the need for that “proof?”

Anyway, this narrative’s sales have reached the quarter million mark and, inevitably, some readers have mailed me quantities of reports on supernormal happenings snipped from their local papers. Because of this further piling-up of evidence, and because of the bloody nature of the promised history through which the yarn has gone down, I remain more than ever ready to accept that there is some truth in its basic proposition, namely, that Man is not and never has been the master of his fate and the captain of his soul. “I think we’re property.” Charles Fort had something there! We’ve long been the property of common germs, haven’t we?

I wrote this story, but it isn’t mine, or not in the sense that other stories have been mine. This one is a multiple collaboration with a number of people who were brought to bear upon me in the strangest way, almost as if some outside influence had decided… but that is yet another yarn. To all those folk I acknowledge my indebtedness, and especially to the following:—

To Charles Fort, author of
The Book of the Damned, New Lands, Lo!
and
Wild Talents,
for providing the germ of the plot.

To the Fortean Society of New York, and to its redoubtable secretary Tiffany Thayer, for providing evidence of universal cowhood.

To John W. Campbell, Jr., editor of
Astounding Science-Fiction
and
Unknown Worlds,
for kicking me around until this story bore more resemblance to a story.

To H. W. Ralston, Esq., of Street & Smith Publishing Co. of New York, for releasing clothbound book rights and thus enabling the yarn to reappear in its present form.

To Julius Schwartz, editor of
Superman,
for providing the press clipping shown on a following page, and with it the spark-plug which got me going.

To Lloyd Arthur Eshbach and associates, of
Fantasy Press,
for encouraging my obsessions.

To thousands of science-fiction fans for being willing to enter the gates of hell—providing that they get in on the ground floor—and thus being willing to read this yarn.

Eric Frank Russell

Liverpool, England, January, 1948

Clipping from a New York daily:—

TO BE READ IN A DIM LIGHT, AT NIGHT.

The late Charles Fort, who was a sort of Peter Pan of science and went about picking up whimsies of fact, mostly from the rubbish heaps of astronomy, would have been interested in an incident that occurred Sunday morning on Fifth Avenue between Twenty-ninth and Thirtieth Streets.

Eight starlings in flight suddenly plummeted to the feet of Patrolman Anton Vodrazka, dead. There was no sign of a wound or any other indication of what caused their end. It was at first thought that they might have been poisoned, as were some pigeons at Verdi Square, Seventy-second Street and Broadway, recently.

S.P.C.A. agents said it was most unlikely that eight birds, even if they had been poisoned, would succumb at the same moment in mid-flight. Another report from the same neighborhood a few minutes later didn’t help any. A starling, “excited and acting as if pursued by some invisible terror,” had flown into a Childs Restaurant on Fifth Avenue, banged into the lights and fallen in the front window.

What killed the eight starlings? What frightened the ninth? Was there some Presence in the sky?… We hasten to pass the idea on to the nearest writer of mystery stories.

Chapter 1

“SWIFT DEATH AWAITS THE FIRST COW that leads a revolt against milking,” mused Professor Peder Bjornsen. It was a new slant, and a wicked one, born of dreadful facts. He passed long, slender fingers through prematurely white hair. His eyes, strangely protruding, filled with uncanny light, stared out of his office window which gaped on the third level above traffic swirling through Stockholm’s busy Hötorget. But those eyes were not looking at the traffic.

“And there’s a swat waiting for the first bee that blats about pilfered honey,” he added. Stockholm hummed and roared, a city unconscious of its chains. The professor continued to stare in silent, fearful contemplation. Then suddenly his eyes lifted, widened, flared with apprehension. He drew away from the window, slowly, reluctantly; moving as if forcing himself by sheer will-power to retreat from a horror which beckoned, invisibly beckoned.

Raising his hands, he pushed, pushed futilely at thin air. Those distorted optics of his, still preternaturally cold and hard, yet brilliant with something far beyond fear, followed with dreadful fascination a shapeless, colorless point that crept from window to ceiling. Turning with a tremendous effort, he ran, his mouth open and expelling breath soundlessly.

Halfway to the door he emitted a brief gasp, stumbled, fell. His stricken hand clutched the calendar from his desk, dragged it down to the carpet. He sobbed, hugged hands to his heart, lay still. The spark which had motivated him became extinguished. The calendar’s top leaf fluttered in a queer, inexplicable breeze from nowhere. The date was May the seventeenth, 2015.

Bjornsen had been five hours dead when the police got to him. Imperturbably, the medical examiner diagnosed heart disease and left it at that. Snooping restlessly around, Police Lieutenant Baeker found on the professor’s desk a note bearing a message from the grave.

“A little knowledge is a dangerous thing. It is humanly impossible to discipline my thoughts every minute of the day, to control my involuntary dreams every hour of the night. It is inevitable that soon I shall be found dead, in which case you must—”

“Must what?” asked Baeker. There was no reply. The voice that could have shocked him with its answer was stilled forever. Baeker heard the medical examiner’s report, then burned the note. The professor, he decided, like others of his ilk, had grown eccentric in his old age, being burdened by too much abstruse learning. Heart disease it was, actually and officially.

On May the thirtieth, Doctor Guthrie Sheridan walked with the deliberate, jerky step of an automaton along Charing Cross Road, London. His eyes were shining, frozen lumps, and he kept them focussed on the sky while his legs made their mechanical way. He had the eerie appearance of a blind man following a thoroughly familiar route.

Jim Leacock saw him wending his fascinated way, failed to notice anything abnormal. Dashing up, he yelled, “Hey, Sherry!” all set to administer a hearty slap on the back. He stopped, appalled.

Turning upon him pale, strained features framing eyes that gleamed like icicles seen in bluish twilight, Guthrie seized an arm and chattered, “Jim! By heavens, I’m glad to see you!” His breath was fast, his voice urgent. “Jim, I’ve got to talk to someone—or go crazy. I’ve just discovered the most incredible fact in the history of mankind. It is almost beyond belief. Yet it explains a thousand things that we’ve merely guessed at or completely ignored.”

“What is it?” demanded Leacock, skeptically. He studied the other’s distorted face.

“Jim, let me tell you that man is not and never has been the master of his fate, nor the captain of his soul. Why, the very beasts of the field—!” He broke off, grabbed at his listener. His voice went two tones higher, held a hysterical note. “I’ve thought it! I’ve thought it, I tell you!” His legs bent at the knees. “I’m done for!” He slumped to the pavement.

Hastily, the startled Leacock stooped over him, tore open his shirt, slid a hand down his chest. No beat was discernable. The once wildly beating heart had packed up—for keeps. Sheridan was dead. Heart disease, apparently.

At the same hour of the same day, Doctor Hans Luther did a very similar thing. Carrying his deceptively plump body at top speed across his laboratory, he raced headlong down the stairs, across the hall. He fled with many fearful glances over one shoulder, and the glances came from eyes like polished agate.

Reaching the telephone, he dialled with shaking finger, got the
Dortmund Zeitung,
shouted for the editor. With his eyes still upon the stairs while the telephone receiver trembled against his ear, he bawled into the mouthpiece, “Vogel, I have for you the most astonishing news since the dawn of time. You must give it space, plenty of space, quickly—before it is too late.”

“Let me have the details,” suggested Vogel, tolerantly.

“Earth is belted with a warning streamer that says: KEEP OFF THE GRASS!” Luther watched the stairs and sweated.

“Ha-ha!” responded Vogel, without mirth. His heavy face moved in the tiny vision-screen above the telephone, bore the patient expression of one accustomed to the eccentricities of scientists.

“Listen!” yelled Luther. He wiped his forehead with the back of a quivering hand. “You know me. You know that I do not tell lies, I do not joke. I tell you nothing which I cannot prove. So I tell you that now and perhaps for thousands of years past, this troubled world of ours… a-ah!…
a-a-ah!”

The receiver swung at the end of its cord, gave forth a reedy shout of, “Luther! Luther! What’s happened?”

Doctor Hans Luther made no response. Sinking slowly to his knees, he rolled his peculiarly glistening eyes upward, fell on his side. His tongue licked his lips sluggishly, very sluggishly, once, twice. He died in awful silence.

Vogel’s face bobbed in the vision-screen. The dangling receiver made agitated noises for ears beyond hearing.

Bill Graham knew nothing about these earlier tragedies, but he knew about Mayo. He was right on the spot when it happened.

He was strolling along West Fourteenth, New York, when for no particular reason he cast a casual glance up the sheer side of the Martin Building, saw a human figure falling past the twelfth floor.

Down came the body, twisting, whirling, spread-eagling, as horribly impotent as a tossed bundle of rags. It smacked the pavement and bounced nine feet. The sound was halfway between a squelch and a crunch. The concrete looked as if it had been slapped by a giant crimson sponge.

Twenty yards ahead of Graham, a fat woman stopped in mid-step, studied the stain and the bundle while her complexion turned oysterlike. Dropping her handbag, she lay down on the sidewalk, closed her eyes, muttered nonsense. A hundred pedestrians turned themselves into a rapidly shrinking circle with the battered body as its center. They pushed and shoved as they guzzled the sight.

The dead had no face. Its sodden clothes were surmounted by a ghastly mask like one made of scrambled blueberries and cream. Graham felt no qualms as he bent over the corpse. He had seen worse in war.

His strong, brown fingers plucked at the pocket of a sticky vest, drew out a blood-spattered pasteboard. Looking at the card, he permitted himself a low whistle of surprise.

“Professor Walter Mayo! Good grief!”

Swallowing hard, he looked once more at the pathetic remnant sprawled at his feet, then forced his way through the swelling, murmuring crowd. The revolving doors of the Martin Building whirled behind him as he sprinted for the pneumatic levitators.

Fumbling the card with unfeeling fingers, Graham strove to assemble his jumbled thoughts while his one-man disk was wafted swiftly up its tube. Mayo, of all people, to pass out like that!

At the sixteenth floor the disk stopped with a rubbery bounce and a sigh of escaping air. Racing along the passage, Graham reached Mayo’s laboratory, found its door ajar.

There was nobody in the laboratory. Everything appeared peaceful, orderly, bearing no signs of recent disturbance.

A thirty-feet-long table carried a lengthy array of apparatus which he recognised as an assembly for destructive distillation. He felt the retorts. They were cold. Evidently the experiment had not been started.

Counting the flasks, he decided that the setup was arranged to extract the sixteenth product of something which, when he opened the electric roaster, proved to be a quantity of dried leaves. They looked and smelled like some sort of herb.

Papers on an adjacent desk danced in the breeze from a widely opened window. He went to the window, looked out, down, saw the crowd surrounding four blue-coated figures and a crushed form. A death wagon was drawing in to the curb. He frowned.

Leaving the window open, he searched hastily through the papers littering the dead professor’s desk, found nothing to satisfy his pointless curiosity. With one last keen glance around, he left the laboratory. His falling disk swept him past two ascending policemen.

A line of phone booths stood in the foyer. Entering one, he spun the dial, saw a girl’s clear features glow into the circular visor.

“Give me Mr. Sangster, Hetty.”

“Yes, Mr. Graham.”

The girl’s face dissolved, was replaced by that of a heavy-featured man.

“Mayo’s dead,” Graham informed, bluntly. “He dropped down the front of the Martin about twenty minutes ago. He dived past sixteen floors, landed almost at my feet. He was unrecognisable except for the scars on his hands.”

“Suicide?” The other raised bushy brows inquiringly.

“That’s how it looks,” Graham admitted, “but I don’t think it is.”

“Why not?”

“Because I knew Mayo exceedingly well. As a government liaison officer between scientists and the U.S. department of special finance, I have dealt with him personally over a period of ten years. You will remember that I have negotiated four loans for the furtherance of his work.”

“Yes, yes.” Sangster nodded.

“In general, scientists are an unemotional crowd,” Graham continued, “and Mayo was about the most phlegmatic of the lot.” He gazed earnestly at the little screen. “Believe me, sir, Mayo was not capable of self-destruction—at least, not while in his right mind.”

“I believe you,” said Sangster, without hesitation. “What do you wish to have done?”

“The police have every reason to treat this as a simple case of suicide and I cannot interfere because I have no status in such cases. I suggest that all necessary strings be pulled to make sure that the police dismiss this matter only after the most thorough investigation. I want them to sift this to the bottom.”

“It shall be as you ask,” Sangster assured. His rugged features grew large as they were brought nearer to the distant scanner. “The appropriate department will intervene.”

“Thank you, sir,” Graham responded.

“Not at all. You hold your position only because we have complete faith in your judgment.” His eyes lowered to a desk not visible in the screen. A rustling of papers came over the wires. “Mayo’s case has a parallel today.”

“What?” ejaculated Graham.

“Doctor Irwin Webb has died. We were in contact with him two years ago. We provided him with sufficient funds to complete some research which resulted in our war department acquiring a self-aligning gunsight operating on magnetic principles.”

“I recall it well.”

“Webb died an hour ago. The police phoned because they found a letter from us in his wallet.” Sangster’s face became grim. “The circumstances surrounding his death are very strange. The medical examiner maintains that he died of heart disease—yet he expired while shooting at nothing.”

“Shooting at nothing?” echoed Graham, incredulously.

“He had an automatic pistol in his hand, and he had fired two bullets into the wall of his office.”

“Ah!”

“From the viewpoint of our country’s welfare and scientific progress,” continued Sangster, speaking with much deliberation, “the deaths of such able men as Mayo and Webb are too important to be treated lightly, especially when mysterious circumstances intervene. Webb’s case seems to be the more peculiar of the two. I want you to look into it. I would like you, personally, to examine any documents he may have left behind. Something of significance may be lying around there.”

“But I have no official standing with the police,” Graham protested.

“The officer in charge of the case will be notified that you have governmental authority to examine all Webb’s papers.”

“Very well, sir.” Sangster’s face faded from the visor as Graham hung up. “Mayo!—and now Webb!”

Webb lay on the carpet midway between the door and the window. Flat on his back, with his dead eyes wide open, the pupils were almost hidden where they turned up and under the top lids. The cold fingers of his right hand still grasped a dull blue automatic loaded with segmentary bullets. The wall toward which the gun pointed bore eight abrasions; a small group of weals where quarter sections of two split missiles had struck home.

“He shot at something along this line,” Lieutenant Wohl said to Graham, stretching a thin cord from the center of the weals to a point four or five feet above the body.

“That’s what it looks like,” agreed Graham.

“But he wasn’t shooting at anything,” Wohl asserted. “Half a dozen people were passing along the passage outside when they heard his gun suddenly start blasting. They burst in immediately, found him like this, breathing his last. He strove to say something, to tell them something, but the words wouldn’t come. Nobody could have got in or out of this office without being seen. We’ve checked on the six witnesses and they’re all above suspicion. Besides, the medical examiner says it’s heart disease.”

“Maybe it is,” Graham evaded, “and maybe it isn’t.”

A cold eddy wafted through the room as he spoke those words. A subtle tingling slid up his spine, stirred his back hairs and passed away. His inward self became filled with a vague unease, elusive but strong, like that of a rabbit which suspects the presence of a hawk it cannot see.

“All the same, I’m not satisfied,” continued Lieutenant Wohl. “I’ve got a hunch that this Webb suffered from delusions. Since I’ve never heard of heart disease causing hallucinations, I reckon he’s taken something that’s caused both.”