Читать книгу Shadow Gold - Raymond King Cummings - Страница 4
ОглавлениеThe Unknown
Johnny Hall Boards the Transition Express for Bhana, the City Beyond Space, Where Treasure Is Cheap as Dirt and Enemies Lust for Power!
Johnny Hall sat alone, and with trembling fingers opened the letter. Nearly a hundred pages were here in this communication from his dead father which had been lying in the Trust Company for fifteen years. He scanned the top page.
Weird, incredible message! So many things of mystery in his own boyhood memories of his father now were being explained. That night, for instance, when as a little boy he had joined his father in the mysterious workshop. Three milky, fluorescent beams of light converging on a little screen. Then the screen had turned into a dim yellow vista of darkness; and then things were to be seen. As though from a height, he had gazed far down upon a placid landscape, alive with shimmering yellow water.
A glimpse into another realm. But his father never would explain it. And then, a week later, that horrible scene of his father's death.
Johnny, six years old then, had awakened in the night; had sneaked into the laboratory room to find his father. Sight most horrible! His father was lying on a couch. He was wearing some kind of headgear; a sort of bathing suit; and there were wires running down his arms and legs. Not dead; his eyes were open, and one of his hands was fumbling at his chest. His whole figure was dissolving. A ghost shimmering there. It seemed drifting slowly down through the bed. And then it was gone!
Weird, never-explained mystery. But this letter was explaining it now:
When you read this, Johnny, I will have been gone into a new Time-realm, for what of your life will be fifteen years—a different state of matter, because it has a different Time-dimension. The same Space as that which our own world occupies, but held separate by that mysterious stream we call Time. The two realms—ours and this Unknown—are swept close together now. It is my opportunity. Another such proximity will come shortly after your twenty-first birthday. If I am not back with you before then I may have perished. Or I may be alive—but unable to return.
I want you to come and join me, Johnny. The trust fund will give you four thousand dollars. In a vault at the bank you will find, and now must claim, a small metal casket. No one but us two know what is in it. Take it to a place as near the couch in the laboratory of our old home as you can manage. The casket contains two transition mechanisms. At midnight of the tenth day after your birthday, from this designated place, I want you to come after me. I will have kept track of your Earth Time-flow if I possibly can—and if I am still alive I will meet you. Come to me, son. A great adventure....
There followed ten busy days for Johnny. The old frame house of his boyhood was still standing; empty of furniture now, shabby and decrepit. He got a temporary rental of the premises. By night he brought in the metal, coffinlike box. He put it in his father's laboratory room, with a board table and chairs. He worked almost entirely at night studying his father's technical instructions.
Then came the last night. Ten o'clock. Johnny was ready; he sat waiting for midnight. There was only one person here on Earth, whom Johnny was leaving with any pang of regret. Anne Johnson. He had just come back from saying good-by to Anne. Swearing her to secrecy, he had told her what he was about to do. His six-foot bulk had towered over her as she stood suddenly shrinking against him. Then she was crying—and he had torn away and run from her home.
A knock sounded at the front door of the house! It startled Johnny so that he sat transfixed, frozen. It came again; insistent. Johnny padded into the dark front hall. He called gruffly through the barred door:
"Who is it? What you want?"
"Johnny! Johnny, dear—"
Anne's voice! He flung open the door. She scurried in like a dark little shadow, and he banged the door closed and barred it again.
"I was so afraid I'd be too late—"
She was breathless, pallid, tense; beautiful little dark-haired girl—but she was disheveled, wildly excited now. She held a small bundle under her arm, enveloped by her blue cloak.
"I came—to go with you, Johnny."
"Anne, you're crazy—" But the thing set his heart pounding.
He said at last, "All right—you win. You go in there. Put on one of the suits. Call me when you're ready."
He stood waiting.
"All ready, Johnny."
She stood in a sleek black bathing suit; her clothes lay in a little heap at her feet. Admiration for her swept him. Slim, sleek little Diana. She shivered a little as he buckled the heavy wire mesh belt around her slim waist. The adjustable headgear slipped over her coiled black hair and strapped under the chin. Wires connected it with a flexible necklace; wires were strung down her arms to bracelets; and others down her legs, fastened at the knees and ankles.
His own equipment was similar. And then they sat down to wait until midnight. Johnny found himself queerly breathless. Soon he and Anne would be gone from this room. Vanished. Yet, scientifically, mathematically, they would still be here. The same dimensions of length, breadth and thickness. But a different factor of Time. No two material bodies may occupy the same Space at the same Time—
He thought, "We're explorers of the shadows—" It was like dying. He shook off the thought. This was a scientific thing; a change of bodily density—a different quality of Matter, altered by the mysterious electronic current of the mechanism. A change of Time-flow. Not a change of time, like yesterday compared with today or tomorrow. An alteration of the flow of Time—so that his human existence would move forward to its destination of death at a different rate.
A factor so fundamental, so vital, that its alteration altered every quality of Matter itself, to create another realm of existence. A scientific thing—frightening to do only because he had never done it before.
Midnight. Johnny shook himself into alertness. Anne's face was pale and grim; her dark eyes stared at him.
"Over there on the floor—lie down there," he said. He gestured. "That's where father's couch stood. He started from there. I'll blow the light out now."
He lay down beside her. It seemed that with the puffing out of the light they had cut themselves off from the world. She was clinging to his hand. He said, "I'll tell you when to throw the switch on your belt. To the first intensity only—we've got to start slowly—avoid any great shock. Understand?"
"Yes." He could hear her quickened breathing.
"Move your switch—just a little—"
She did it. He heard the hum of the circulating current, her gasp, and in the darkness he saw the silvery glow of her mechanism. Instantly he moved his own switch.
A tingling thrill shot through him. His senses reeled.
In a moment Johnny's senses steadied. The network of wires on him tingled his flesh. They were vibrating with an oscillation, tiny, infinitely rapid. It seemed, all in that instant, that the vibration communicated to his body. It brought a thrill. A sense of excitement. But it was more than that. His whole being seemed tingling. It was a physical vibration, so that every tiny cell within him seemed quivering.
They were drifting downward. It was a sensation utterly strange. Weightless bodies hovering in a soundless void. The world above was gone now. The outlines of the room had flickered, tenuous as a wisp of smoke above them—and vanished.
He murmured, "We'd better try the higher intensities of the current. Ready now! We must keep together. Second! Third! Fourth!"
It swept them into an intensification of all the weird sensations. The humming within them increased.
An interval of Time passed. Time? A blurred, queer interval—Time of a new quality—a new rate of flow, coming into their being now. Johnny saw clouds whirling toward them—imponderable clouds through which they passed and could feel nothing. It was a grey scene, not empty now but filled with shadowed shapes, blurred and indefinite. A monochrome of grey. Then presently a little color was coming to it. A distant yellow glow.
He remembered his father's detailed directions. The first color would be yellow. A golden tinge. "We've got to slow down," he said. "Third ... Second ... First! Stop there!"
They were no longer in a void of emptiness. Distant shapes were taking form. The faint golden light was a blur overhead, but beneath them now were shapes of apparent solidity.
Off to one side, something solid—huge as a great golden mountain—reared itself up. And things were moving here in the air. Was that a slowly swaying human shape, off there not far away? He heard Anne suck in her breath as she saw it. The thing was a blob, with swaying arms and legs. It was human. A man. The daylight gleamed golden upon him.
The surface was steadily rising. It was only fifty feet under them now as they wafted gently down. Off in the distance there was a broad spread of water, rippled by a breeze. A mile or so away was a golden-glowing city, set back from the lake shore.
From the ground came a dim, red beam. The signal! His father's letter had arranged it.
Johnny cried, "He's alive, Anne! We're arrived! Normality!"
They turned their switches. Normal now to this new environment. They had arrived in the new realm. It was day. Not sunlight. The sky everywhere was flooded with a bright but diffused golden light. The red signal beam was extinguished. The figures by the fern-clump scattered as Johnny and Anne drifted down. Solid ground touched Johnny's feet. He scrambled, clutched at Anne, and they stood erect, swaying.
Strange, weightless bodies! It struck Johnny with a sudden mental shock. Gravity was hardly apparent here. He stood balancing, swaying as though the gentle breeze would waft him away. His body weighed hardly more than a few pounds.
"Johnny! Thank God you're safe!"
His father's voice. Familiar timbre, out of the memories of his childhood. And he saw a man's figure come with rhythmic swaying arms and legs in a glide through the air toward him.
