Читать книгу Beyond the Stars - Raymond King Cummings - Страница 3

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There is a saying in the Service that when Liner 40 N runs late the whole world waits. It may be true enough; I suppose it is. But to me, as Commander 3 of Liner 40 N on that night in May, 1998, it was a particularly annoying truth.

For I was running late; at the Azores I was a good twenty-eight minutes behind where I should have been, and it hardly made things any easier for me to contemplate an impatient world awaiting me.

All the way from Madrid our port meter 8 had been giving trouble. Then at 15 W. I had no sooner left the coast than a surge of wind from the northwest had swung down upon us, and I lost a good eight minutes trying unsuccessfully to climb over it. A mood of ill-nature possessed me. I was just twenty-four years old, the youngest of the three commanders who alternated on successive flights of the 40 N; this was only my seventh circle since promotion from the small equatorial liner of the East, and running the famous 40 N late under the eyes of a disapproving world disgruntled me.

At Meridian 45 W. the connecting Director at New York called me up. The Northern Express, flying north on Meridian 74 W., was already at New York waiting for me. The Director wasn’t very pleasant about it. If I held up the express in its flight over the Pole and down 106 E., every connection in the Eastern Hemisphere would be disarranged.

The mercurial screen on my desk glowed with its image of the director’s reproving face.

“You can’t expect McIleny to make up your lost time,” he told me. “Not on a night like this. The Bureau reports head winds for him all up to Baffin Land.”

“I’m having a few head winds myself,” I retorted.

But I grinned, and he caught my grin, and smiled back at me.

“Do the best you can,” he said. And disconnected.

I made no ocean stops; but the director at 55 was a fussy fellow. I was due to pass him at ten thousand feet, to clear the north-south lanes for the non-stop Polar freighters; and with this wind and the fog which was now upon me I knew I would receive a sharp rebuke from 55 if I passed too high.

A hum sounded at one of the dozen mercurial screens beside me. Director 55 already annoyed! But it was not he. The small rectangle of screen glowed with its formless silver blurs, took form and color. A girl’s face, ash-blond hair wound around her forehead, her white throat, with the square neck of a pale-blue jacket showing. And her earnest azure eyes searching mine, lighting with recognition as on her own screen she caught my image. Alice!

My annoyance at the threatened director’s call-down died. I seized my headphone, heard her voice.

“Len?”

“Yes, Alice.”

“I’ve been trying to get you all the way from Greenwich. They wouldn’t let me through, not until I told them it was important—I had to get you.” She spoke fast against the moment when the Vocal Traffic Timer would cut her off. “Len, grandfather wants you to come up and see us. At once—when you’re through with this circle. Will you?”

She saw the question on my lips.

“Don’t ask me now—no time, now, Len. But it’s important, and grandfather ... do you know where I can find Jim? We want him too, you and Jim.”

“He’s in the Anglo-Detective Division, London Air Service, New York Branch.”

“Yes, I know. But he’s in the air tonight. How can I get him?” Her smile was whimsical. “When I asked for a tracer, the Timer over there told me to get the hell off the air. I guess he thought I wanted to find Jim just to tell him I loved him.”

Her image blurred.

The Mid-Atlantic Timer’s voice broke in. “Fifteen seconds. Last call.”

“I’ll get Jim,” I said hastily. “Bring him with me. Soon as we can get there.”

“Yes. We’re waiting for you. And Len, you won’t need to sleep first. You can sleep after you get here. And tell Jim—”

A click silenced her. The screen went dark.

What could she want of me? It was pleasant to have seen and heard from her, this granddaughter of old Dr. Weatherby. In the stress of getting my appointment and continuous examinations and tests between voyages, I had not seen Alice since leaving the Equatorial Run. Nor Jim Dunkirk either.

I went after him now. The tracers could not rebuff me as they did Alice. They found him at last—at 120°E., 85°N. He was coming up over the Pole, and down Baffin Bay making for New York. His jolly face, with its ever present grin and the shock of fiery red hair above it, glowed on my screen.

“Well, Len, say, it’s great to see you!”

“Alice just called me—Alice Weatherby. Doc wants us both—you and me—something important. Wants to see us. You off at New York?”

“You bet,” he grinned. “Had a chase down through Tibet; every cursed murderer thinks the grand idea is for him to swoop it for Lhasa and parts unknown. I have one here, now. When I get him in his airy cage I’m off duty for a while. Alice wants us?”

“Yes. I don’t know what for. She didn’t have a chance to—”

“Fifteen seconds. Last call.”

“The infernal bedamned it is!” came Jim’s belligerent voice.

“Last call, Liner 40 N—limit ninety seconds by general orders.” The Timer was imperturbably impersonal.

But not Jimmy Dunkirk. “You cut me off,” he roared. “I’ll have the General Inspector tell you who you are in thirty seconds. This is Chief Dunkirk, Patrol Liner A 22, Anglo-Detective Division. I’ve got a murderer here—understand? A murderer! Important official business.”

With the Timer cowed, Jimmy would have talked all night. But I was on duty.

“Good,” I said. “I’ll call you at your office after you get in.”

“Old Weatherby wants us?”

“Yes. Off, Jim.”

It was well toward dawn when I hooked up with him; together we flew up the river, where on the Tappan Zee, at the northern borders of the city, Dr. Weatherby had his home.

Alice was under the landing stage when we descended in the hand lift.

“Len, Jim, I’m glad to see you.” She gave each of us one of her cool white hands. “Grandfather is waiting to—Jim, let go of my hand; you’re squeezing my fingers. That hurts!”

He flung it away. He had always done that with Alice, to devil her.

“Next time,” she said soberly, “you bow to me. That’s all.”

He laughed gleefully. “Right. Sure, that’s safer when you look so pretty.”

She was indeed pretty. A tall, slender girl—an inch taller than Jim. Big, serious blue eyes she had, and that braided mass of ash-blond hair. She was dressed now in a pale blue jacket like a tunic, to her thighs, and long silver stockings from beneath the China-silk trousers that flared above her knees.

She smiled at Jim. “I’d never take you seriously. Dolores says—”

Jim sobered. “Dolores.”

“Dolores is waiting to see you both. She’s very excited.”

Dolores, the little sister of Alice. I never saw her without a pang. In this great age of science she is a pathetic example of what science cannot do.

Our wonderful, marvelous age of science! We pride ourselves on it. But this girl had been born blind, and she was one of those rare cases where all the learned surgeons of our learned world could not bring the light to her.

Jim called, “ ’Lo there, Dolores.”

“Jimmy! Is that you? I’m so glad to see you!”

See him! There was, to me, a grim pathos in her conventional words.

“Len is here too, Dolores,” Alice said gently.

“Len? Oh, how do you do, Len?” Her hand reached and touched my hair in recognition. Then she turned back to Jim. “I’m glad you’re here, Jimmy. They told me you were coming.”

He swept her up, whirled her through the air like a child, and set her gasping upon her feet.

“Well, well, how’s my little friend Dolores, huh? Want to do that again? Come on!” He whirled her again and panted. “Getting too big ... all grown up. Say, Len, she’s prettier every day, isn’t she?”

Dr. Weatherby was seventy-five years old at this time when he sent for Jim and me. He met us on the lower terrace of his home. He was a squat, powerfully thick-set figure, with long ape-like arms and a thick back slightly humped.

His head was overlarge, made to seem larger by its great mass of iron-gray hair. His face, large of feature, was unlined, save by the marks of character stamped upon it. A kindly face it was, smiling with friendship, but always stern in repose.

“Well, my boys, you came promptly,” he greeted us. “That’s fine. Come in.” His huge hands gripped us with a strength that made Jim pretend to wince and grin mockingly at Alice. “Come in. We’ll sit in the garden upstairs.”

He led us up the inclines through his rambling house and to its roof, where in the starlight we sat on leafy couches in a garden blooming with flowers, shrubs and coned ferns.

It was about an hour before dawn, cloudless, moonless—a brilliant firmament of gems strewn upon their purple velvet. Venus was rising now to be the morning star and herald the dawn; red Mars, lying opposite and low, glowed like the ashless end of a cigarro.

Below us over the parapet of roof was the crowded countryside, wan and still in the starlight, with the thread of river beyond—a river of silver with the blue-white lights of its boats skimming the surface. A few planes were overhead, the small local airline from Albany skimming past with a whir of its fans.

Dr. Weatherby chatted with us, rebuked me smilingly for running the 40 N late, and listened gravely, with occasional interested questions, to Jim’s vivid account of his world chase after the murderer, while Dolores snuggled up against him, thrilled, and timidly held his hand.

“Well, well, you boys do have an interesting life. Youth coming forward. Youth can do anything—the world waits on youth.”

“It did tonight,” said Alice, with a sly glance at me.

I wondered what Dr. Weatherby wanted us for. He had not hinted at it. He had spoken of a morning meal, and then we must have some sleep.

Then, abruptly he said, “I should not have sent for you unless it was important. It is. The fact that I need you—” He stopped as suddenly as he had begun.

I don’t know why a great tenseness should have fallen upon us all. But it did. I felt it. And in the insuing silence little Dolores left Jim and crept to her grandfather, leaning against him.

I began, lamely, “We came, of course—”

Dr. Weatherby was staring off at the stars moodily, with a look so far away I could have fancied he was gazing, not at the stars, but beyond them. And then he tore himself back, and smiled, lighting a cigarro, flipping the torch at me and asking me to step on it.

“I have so much to tell you,” he said. “I hardly know how or where to begin. You know, of course, something of my life, my work.

“Leonard, and you, Jim, I believe you’re familiar in a general way with what the physicists think of the atom? Radiant matter—these electro-rays that seem to solve everything and yet only add to the mystery?

“You know that savants would tell us that space is curved; so Einstein told us years ago? Well, I will tell you this. To-morrow, after you have slept, I believe I can make clear to you the real construction of our material universe.”

His hand checked us. “I have been working since 1970 along these lines. Alice recently has been helping me. And then Dolores—

“This child here, in the dark, it has been given her to see things denied to our science. Years and years ago a scientist proclaimed that thoughts themselves are a mere vibration, like light and heat and sound, and all these mysterious rays and flying electrons—electricity itself. They are all the same, though we name them differently.”

He had been talking swiftly, but quietly. “Tell them, Dolores.”

“A big open space,” she said slowly. “Mountains and a broad valley. A cliffside. People there on a ledge. A young man and a young woman, very white and pale, with blood on the man’s face. They were standing on a height, with a dark cavern behind them.

“Other people, or monsters down in the valley: something vague but horrible as a nightmare with a nameless horror. And the man was calling, Help. Not the word. I could not hear that, but I knew. Calling to me. He keeps on calling. I can hear him so often. Calling to me!”

She said it so strangely. At once it seemed uncanny, weird, almost gruesome. A thrill very akin to fear ran over me. This was not science. But Dr. Weatherby’s calm, precise voice was scientific enough.

“That was several years ago. We have found since that she is receiving thought-vibrations, not from here on earth, not from the planets, or the stars, but from beyond the stars. The greater realms out there, suspected to exist for so long, which now I know and can prove to exist!”

His voice had risen in an excitement, an exaltation. He went on more swiftly, “But all that is nothing. I wanted you to come here and help me. Dolores has had thoughts from out there beyond the stars ... and her own answering thoughts have been answered. Communication!

“Oh, I have guarded against delusion! I have sent messages through Dolores of scientific import, and been answered with scientific thoughts all beyond this child’s comprehension. Communications with the great unknown—the infinity of distance unfathomable.

“That started a year ago. Now I have done more. I have learned how to get there. I can transport myself, my girls and you! I am ready to make the journey now. That is why I want you, and need you. We are going. We want you to come with us, out beyond the stars!”