Читать книгу The Ray Cummings MEGAPACK ®: 25 Golden Age Science Fiction and Mystery Tales - Ray Cummings - Страница 7

CHAPTER 5

THE WORLD IN THE RING

The Chemist paused and relighted his cigar. “Perhaps you have some questions,” he suggested.

The Doctor shifted in his chair.

“Did you have any theory at this time”—he wanted to know—“about the physical conformation of this world? What I mean is, when you came out of this tunnel were you on the inside or the outside of the world?”

“Was it the same sky you saw overhead when you were in the forest?” asked the Big Business Man.

“No, it was what he saw in the microscope, wasn’t it?” said the Very Young Man.

“One at a time, gentlemen,” laughed the Chemist. “No, I had no particular theory at this time—I had too many other things to think of. But I do remember noticing one thing which gave me the clew to a fairly complete understanding of this universe. From it I formed a definite explanation, which I found was the belief held by the people themselves.”

“What was that?” asked the Very Young Man.

“I noticed, as I stood looking over this broad expanse of country before me, one vital thing that made it different from any similar scene I had ever beheld. If you will stop and think a moment, gentlemen, you will realize that in our world here the horizon is caused by a curvature of the earth below the straight line of vision. We are on a convex surface. But as I gazed over this landscape, and even with no appreciable light from the sky I could see a distance of several miles, I saw at once that quite the reverse was true. I seemed to be standing in the center of a vast shallow bowl. The ground curved upward into the distance. There was no distant horizon line, only the gradual fading into shadow of the visual landscape. I was standing obviously on a concave surface, on the inside, not the outside of the world.

“The situation, as I now understand it, was this: According to the smallest stature I reached, and calling my height at that time roughly six feet, I had descended into the ring at the time I met Lylda several thousand miles, at least. By the way, where is the ring?”

“Here is it,” said the Very Young Man, handing it to him. The Chemist replaced it on his finger. “It’s pretty important to me now,” he said, smiling.

“You bet!” agreed the Very Young Man.

“You can readily understand how I descended such a distance, if you consider the comparative immensity of my stature during the first few hours I was in the ring. It is my understanding that this country through which I passed is a barren waste—merely the atoms of the mineral we call gold.

“Beyond that I entered the hitherto unexplored regions within the atom. The country at that point where I found the forest, I was told later, is habitable for several hundred miles. Around it on all sides lies a desert, across which no one has ever penetrated.

“This surface is the outside of the Oroid world, for so they call their earth. At this point the shell between the outer and inner surface is only a few miles in thickness. The two surfaces do not parallel each other here, so that in descending these tunnels we turned hardly more than an eighth of a complete circle.

“At the city of Arite, where Lylda first took me, and where I had my first view of the inner surface, the curvature is slightly greater than that of our own earth, although, as I have said, in the opposite direction.”

“And the space within this curvature—the heavens you have mentioned—how great do you estimate it to be?” asked the Doctor.

“Based on the curvature at Arite it would be about six thousand miles in diameter.”

“Has this entire inner surface been explored?” asked the Big Business Man.

“No, only a small portion. The Oroids are not an adventurous people. There are only two nations, less than twelve million people all together, on a surface nearly as extensive as our own.”

“How about those stars?” suggested the Very Young Man.

“I believe they comprise a complete universe similar to our own solar system. There is a central sun-star, around which many of the others revolve. You must understand, though, that these other worlds are infinitely tiny compared to the Oroids, and, if inhabited, support beings nearly as much smaller than the Oroids, as they are smaller than you.”

“Great Caesar!” ejaculated the Banker. “Don’t let’s go into that any deeper!”

“Tell us more about Lylda,” prompted the Very Young Man.

“You are insatiable on that point,” laughed the Chemist. “Well, when we left the sleigh, Lylda took me directly into the city of Arite. I found it an orderly collection of low houses, seemingly built of uniformly cut, highly polished gray blocks. As we passed through the streets, some of which were paved with similar blocks, I was reminded of nothing so much as the old jingles of Spotless Town. Everything was immaculately, inordinately clean. Indeed, the whole city seemed built of some curious form of opaque glass, newly scrubbed and polished.

“Children crowded from the doorways as we advanced, but Lylda dispersed them with a gentle though firm, command. As we approached the sort of castle I have mentioned, the reason for Lylda’s authoritative manner dawned upon me. She was, I soon learned, daughter of one of the most learned men of the nation and was—handmaiden, do you call it?—to the queen.”

“So it was a monarchy?” interrupted the Big Business Man. “I should never have thought that.”

“Lylda called their leader a king. In reality he was the president, chosen by the people, for a period of about what we would term twenty years; I learned something about this republic during my stay, but not as much as I would have liked. Politics was not Lylda’s strong point, and I had to get it all from her, you know.

“For several days I was housed royally in the castle. Food was served me by an attendant who evidently was assigned solely to look after my needs. At first I was terribly confused by the constant, uniform light, but when I found certain hours set aside for sleep, just as we have them, when I began to eat regularly, I soon fell into the routine of this new life.

“The food was not greatly different from our own, although I found not a single article I could identify. It consisted principally of vegetables and fruits, the latter of an apparently inexhaustible variety.

“Lylda visited me at intervals, and I learned I was awaiting an audience with the king. During these days she made rapid progress with my language—so rapid that I shortly gave up the idea of mastering hers.

“And now, with the growing intimacy between us and our ability to communicate more readily, I learned the simple, tragic story of her race—new details, of course, but the old, old tale of might against right, and the tragedy of a trusting, kindly people, blindly thinking others as just as themselves.

“For thousands of years, since the master life-giver had come from one of the stars to populate the world, the Oroid nation had dwelt in peace and security. These people cared nothing for adventure. No restless thirst for knowledge led them to explore deeply the limitless land surrounding them. Even from the earliest times no struggle for existence, no doctrine of the survival of the fittest, hung over them as with us. No wild animals harassed them; no savages menaced them. A fertile boundless land, a perfect climate, nurtured them tenderly.

“Under such conditions they developed only the softer, gentler qualities of nature. Many laws among them were unnecessary, for life was so simple, so pleasant to live, and the attainment of all the commonly accepted standards of wealth so easy, that the incentive to wrongdoing was almost non-existent.

“Strangely enough, and fortunately, too, no individuals rose among them with the desire for power. Those in command were respected and loved as true workers for the people, and they accepted their authority in the same spirit with which it was given. Indolence, in its highest sense the wonderful art of doing nothing gracefully, played the greatest part in their life.

“Then, after centuries of ease and peaceful security, came the awakening. Almost without warning another nation had come out of the unknown to attack them.

“With the hurt feeling that comes to a child unjustly treated, they all but succumbed to this first onslaught. The abduction of numbers of their women, for such seemed the principal purpose of the invaders, aroused them sufficiently to repel this first crude attack. Their manhood challenged, their anger as a nation awakened for the first time, they sprang as one man into the horror we call war.

“With the defeat of the Malites came another period of ease and security. They had learned no lesson, but went their indolent way, playing through life like the kindly children they were. During this last period some intercourse between them and the Malites took place. The latter people, whose origin was probably nearly opposite them on the inner surface, had by degrees pushed their frontiers closer and closer to the Oroids. Trade between the two was carried on to some extent, but the character of the Malites, their instinctive desire for power, for its own sake, their consideration for themselves as superior beings, caused them to be distrusted and feared by their more simple-minded companion nation.

“You can almost guess the rest, gentlemen. Lylda told me little about the Malites, but the loathing disgust of her manner, her hesitancy, even to bring herself to mention them, spoke more eloquently than words.

“Four years ago, as they measure time, came the second attack, and now, in a huge arc, only a few hundred miles from Arite, hung the opposing armies.”

The Chemist paused. “That’s the condition I found, gentlemen,” he said. “Not a strikingly original or unfamiliar situation, was it?”

“By Jove!” remarked the Doctor thoughtfully, “what a curious thing that the environment of our earth should so affect that world inside the ring. It does make you stop and think, doesn’t it, to realize how those infinitesimal creatures are actuated now by the identical motives that inspire us?”

“Yet it does seem very reasonable, I should say,” the Big Business Man put in.

“Let’s have another round of drinks,” suggested the Banker—“this is dry work!”

“As a scientist you’d make a magnificent plumber, George!” retorted the Big Business Man. “You’re about as helpful in this little gathering as an oyster!”

The Very Young Man rang for a waiter.

“I’ve been thinking—” began the Banker, and stopped at the smile of his companion. “Shut up!”—he finished—“that’s cheap wit, you know!”

“Go on, George,” encouraged the other, “you’ve been thinking—”

“I’ve been tremendously interested in this extraordinary story”—he addressed himself to the Chemist—“but there’s one point I don’t get at all. How many days were you in that ring do you make out?”

“I believe about seven, all told,” returned the Chemist.

“But you were only away from us some forty hours. I ought to know, I’ve been right here.” He looked at his crumpled clothes somewhat ruefully.

“The change of time-progress was one of the surprises of my adventure,” said the Chemist. “It is easily explained in a general way, although I cannot even attempt a scientific theory of its cause. But I must confess that before I started the possibility of such a thing never even occurred to me.”

“To get a conception of this change you must analyze definitely what time is. We measure and mark it by years, months, and so forth, down to minutes and seconds, all based upon the movements of our earth around its sun. But that is the measurement of time, not time itself. How would you describe time?”

The Big Business Man smiled. “Time,” he said, “is what keeps everything from happening at once.”

“Very clever,” laughed the Chemist.

The Doctor leaned forward earnestly. “I should say,” he began, “that time is the rate at which we live—the speed at which we successively pass through our existence from birth to death. It’s very hard to put intelligibly, but I think I know what I mean,” he finished somewhat lamely.

“Exactly so. Time is a rate of life-progress, different for every individual and only made standard because we take the time-duration of the earth’s revolution around the sun, which is constant, and arbitrarily say: ‘That is thirty-one million five hundred thousand odd seconds.’”

“Is time different for every individual?” asked the Banker argumentatively.

“Think a moment,” returned the Chemist. “Suppose your brain were to work twice as fast as mine. Suppose your heart beat twice as fast, and all the functions of your body were accelerated in a like manner. What we call a second would certainly seem to you twice as long. Further than that, it actually would be twice as long, so far as you were concerned. Your digestion, instead of taking perhaps four hours, would take two. You would eat twice as often. The desire for sleep would overtake you every twelve hours instead of twenty-four, and you would be satisfied with four hours of unconsciousness instead of eight. In short, you would soon be living a cycle of two days every twenty-four hours. Time then, as we measure it, for you at least would have doubled—you would be progressing through life at twice the rate that I am through mine.”

“That may be theoretically true,” the Big Business Man put in. “Practically, though, it has never happened to any one.”

“Of course not, to such a great degree as the instance I put. No one, except in disease, has ever doubled our average rate of life-progress, and lived it out as a balanced, otherwise normal existence. But there is no question that to some much smaller degree we all of us differ one from the other. The difference, however, is so comparatively slight, that we can each one reconcile it to the standard measurement of time. And so, outwardly, time is the same for all of us. But inwardly, why, we none of us conceive a minute or an hour to be the same! How do you know how long a minute is to me? More than that, time is not constant even in the same individual. How many hours are shorter to you than others? How many days have been almost interminable? No, instead of being constant, there is nothing more inconstant than time.”

“Haven’t you confused two different issues?” suggested the Big Business Man. “Granted what you say about the slightly different rate at which different individuals live, isn’t it quite another thing, how long time seems to you. A day when you have nothing to do seems long, or, on the other hand, if you are very busy it seems short. But mind, it only seems short or long, according to the preoccupation of your mind. That has nothing to do with the speed of your progress through life.”

“Ah, but I think it has,” cried the Chemist. “You forget that we none of us have all of the one thing to the exclusion of the other. Time seems short; it seems long, and in the end it all averages up, and makes our rate of progress what it is. Now if any of us were to go through life in a calm, deliberate way, making time seem as long as possible, he would live more years, as we measure them, than if he rushed headlong through the days, accomplishing always as much as possible. I mean in neither case to go to the extremes, but only so far as would be consistent with the maintenance of a normal standard of health. How about it?” He turned to the Doctor. “You ought to have an opinion on that.”

“I rather think you are right,” said the latter thoughtfully, “although I doubt very much if the man who took it easy would do as much during his longer life as the other with his energy would accomplish in the lesser time allotted to him.”

“Probably he wouldn’t,” smiled the Chemist; “but that does not alter the point we are discussing.”

“How does this apply to the world in the ring?” ventured the Very Young Man.

“I believe there is a very close relationship between the dimensions of length, breadth, and thickness, and time. Just what connection with them it has, I have no idea. Yet, when size changes, time-rate changes; you have only to look at our own universe to discover that.”

“How do you mean?” asked the Very Young Man.

“Why, all life on our earth, in a general way, illustrates the fundamental fact that the larger a thing is, the slower its time-progress is. An elephant, for example, lives more years than we humans. Yet how quickly a fly is born, matured, and aged! There are exceptions, of course; but in a majority of cases it is true.

“So I believe that as I diminished in stature, my time-progress became faster and faster. I am seven days older than when I left you day before yesterday. I have lived those seven days, gentlemen, there is no getting around that fact.”

“This is all tremendously interesting,” sighed the Big Business Man; “but not very comprehensible.”