The Edmond Hamilton Megapack: 16 Classic Science Fiction Tales (87 page)

Grag spoke up loudly. He was standing, a seven-foot giant of metal, with his head turned and his photoelectric eyes staring intently across the big room.

“Curt, someone’s been here,” his great voice boomed.

“No. I checked the recorders,” Newton said without turning.

“I don’t care,” Grag persisted. “That chair by the vault door has been moved. I was the last one out when we left and I remember exactly where it stood. It’s been moved a good three inches.”

Otho burst into laughter. “Listen to Old Hawkeye. Three inches!” The android, so perfectly human in appearance that only something bright and strange lurking in his green eyes betrayed an inner difference, went on mockingly, “Are you sure it’s not two and a half inches?”

Grag began to protest angrily in his foghorn voice. Curt swung around irritably to silence them. But Simon Wright said gravely, “Wait, Curtis. You know that the constitution of Grag’s metal brain makes his memory absolutely photographic. If he says the chair has been moved it has been moved.”

“But the recorders?”

“They could have been blanked, you know. It’s theoretically possible.”

“Only theoretically—” Curt began and then he stopped and swore. “Blast you, Grag! Why did you have to raise a doubt in my mind? Now I’ll have to take down the recorders to check them and that’s the devil and all of a job.”

Irritation riding him, he went out of the big room and came back with tools. He scowled at Grag. “You’d better be right!” Simon and Otho helped him in the delicate work of disassembling the recorders. They examined both the microfilm and the interior relay circuits bit by bit.

Curt’s irritation left him suddenly. He looked sharply at the others. He had found it—the minute blurred line where the film had started to roll and been arrested. The relay circuits were a fraction of a decimal out of synchronization now.

Otho whistled softly. “Blanked!” he said. “And so beautifully done—nothing fused or blown out, the derangement so small that you’d never notice it unless you were searching for it.”

“So I was right?” Grag boomed triumphantly. “I knew I was right. When I see a thing that’s changed I—”

“Shut up,” Curt Newton told him. He looked, puzzled, at Simon. “No criminal did this—no ordinary criminal. The job of blanking these relays required tremendous scientific ability.”

Simon brooded, hovering. “That’s obvious. Only an expert in sub-electronics would be capable. But that seems incongruous. Why would a top scientist come prowling in here like a common thief?”

Curt turned. “Grag, will you see if anything else has been moved or taken?” The metal giant started stalking through the rooms. Curt remained silent and thoughtful, the frown on his tanned face deepening.

Grag came back. “No. Nothing else has been tampered with.”

“Yet it was,” Curt said slowly. He looked again at Simon. “I’ve been thinking. An expert in sub-electronics… Do you remember the nuclear physics man down at New York Tech whom we met at Government Center a few months ago?”

“Garris? Garrand—some name like that? I remember. A nice little man.”

“Yes, I thought so too—very eager about his work. But I remember now he asked me a question—”

Curt broke off suddenly. He went rapidly across the big room, unlocked the vault door and inside the silent lunar cavern he went straight to the files.

Simon had followed him. And when Simon saw the spool that Curt drew from the file his lens-eyes turned to Curt’s face with a startled swiftness.

“Curtis, no! You don’t think—”

“It was what he asked me about,” Curt said. “The Birthplace.”

The word went echoing solemnly back and forth around the cold rock walls. And Curt stared at Simon, not really seeing him, seeing uncanny awesome things that lived in memory, and a strange look came into his face—a strange look indeed for the man Curt Newton. A look of fear.

Simon said, “How could he know of the Birthplace?”

That word had never been spoken to anyone. They hardly spoke it even among themselves. Such a secret was not for the knowledge nor the use of men and they had guarded it more carefully than the sum total of all other knowledge they possessed. Now the very sound of that name brought Grag and Otho to the door and wrought a sudden tension that filled the cavern with a waiting stillness.

Curt said heavily, “He connected the theoretical possibility with the work we did on Mercury. He’s a brilliant man, Simon—too brilliant.”

“Perhaps,” said Grag, “he only looked for the secret and couldn’t find it. After all, our filing system…”

Curt shook his head. “If he could get in here he could find what he wanted.” He examined the spool. “He could make a copy of this and there would be no way of telling that it had been done.”

He stood motionless for a moment longer and no one spoke. Otho studied his face and shot one quick bright glance at Simon. Simon moved uneasily on his gliding force-beams.

Curt replaced the spool and turned. “We’ve got to find out about this man. We’ll go to New York, at once.”

Very soon thereafter the Comet rose from the dark gap of the hangar-mouth and shot away toward the great green globe of Earth.

Not much later, at headquarters of the Planet Police in New York, old marshal Ezra Gurney stared at Curt Newton in blank amazement.

“Garrand?” he said. “But he’s a reputable man, a scientist!”

“Nevertheless,” said Curt grimly, “I want all the information you can get and fast.”

Simon spoke. “This is urgent, Ezra. We cannot afford delay.”

The grizzled old spaceman glanced from one to the other, and then to Otho. “Something really bad, eh? All right, I’ll do what I can.”

He went out of the office. Otho leaned against the wall and remained motionless, watching Curt. Simon hovered near the desk. Neither one of them was afflicted with nerves. Curt moved restlessly about, brooding, his hands touching things and putting them down again in wire-taut gestures. The intricate multichron on the wall whirred softly and the minutes slid away, on Earth, on Mars, on the far-flung worlds of the System. No one spoke and Ezra did not come back.

Simon said at last, “It would take time, even for Ezra.”

“Time!” said Curt. “If Garrand has the secret we have no time.”

He paced the small neat room, a man oppressed with heavy thoughts. The sound of the door opening brought him whirling around to face Ezra almost as though he were facing his executioner.

“Well?”

“Garrand took off from Earth on the twenty-first,” said Ezra. “He flew a ship of his own, apparently an experimental model on which he has been working for some time in company with a man named Herrick, who is also listed as chief pilot. Destination, none. Purpose, cosmic ray research beyond the System. Because of Garrand’s reputation and standing there was no difficulty about the clearance. That was all I could get.”

“That’s enough,” said Curt. “More than enough.” His face was bleak and the color had gone out of it under the tan. He looked very tired and in a way so strange that Ezra came up to him and demanded, “What is it, Curt? What did Garrand take from the laboratory?”

Curt answered, “He took the secret of the Birthplace of Matter.”

Ezra stared, uncomprehending. “Is that a secret you can tell me?”

Curt said hopelessly, “I can tell you now. For it’s known now to Garrand and this other man.”

“What is it, then?”

“Ezra, it is the secret of creation.”

There was a long silence. It was obvious from Gurney’s face that the term was too large for him to understand. Yet Curt Newton did not continue as yet. He looked beyond them and his face was drawn and haggard.

“We’ll have to go back there,” he said, his voice low. “We’ll have to. And I hoped never to go back.”

Simon’s expressionless eyes were fixed on him. Otho said loudly, “What’s there to be afraid of? We ran the whirls before. And as for Garrand and the other one—”

“I am not afraid of them,” Curt Newton said.

“I know,” said Simon. “I was the only one who was with you in the shrine of the Watchers there. I know what you are afraid of—yourself.”

“I still don’t get it,” Ezra said. “The secret of creation? Creation of what?”

“Of the universe, Ezra. Of all the matter in the universe.”

A strange wonder came on Gurney’s timeworn face. He said nothing. He waited.

“You remember,” Curt told him, “when we came back from our first deep-space voyage? You remember that right after that we designed the electron-assembly plants that they’ve used ever since to replenish Mercury’s thinning atmosphere? Where do you think we got the knowledge to do that, to juggle electrons into desired types of matter on a big scale?”

Gurney’s voice was a whisper now. “You got that knowledge out in deep space?”

“In deep, deep space, Ezra. Near the center of our galaxy, amid the thick star-clusters and nebulae beyond Sagittarius. There lies the beating heart of our universe.”

He made a gesture. “Back in the Twentieth Century the scientist Millikan first guessed the truth. The matter of the universe constantly melts away into radiation. Millikan believed that somewhere in the universe was a place where radiation was somehow built back into matter and that the so-called cosmic rays were the ‘birth-cry’ of the newborn matter. The fount of our material universe, the birthplace of material creation.”

Awe was in Ezra’s faded old eyes. “And you found that? And never told—never let anyone guess—”

“Garrand guessed,” Curt said bitterly. “He connected our work at Mercury with our mysterious voyage. He tried to learn what I knew and when I would tell him nothing he came to the Moon and risked death to steal our records. And now he’s gone to find it for himself.”

Simon Wright said somberly, “He will only reap disaster if he tries to take it. I saw what almost happened there to you, Curtis.”

“It’s my fault,” Curt said harshly. “We should have left no record. But I could not quite destroy it.” He paused, then went on rapidly. “We’ve got to overtake him. What the other man, Herrick, may have in mind we can’t tell. But Garrand is a fanatical researcher, who will tamper with the instruments of the Watchers as I did. He won’t stop where I stopped!”

Ezra jumped to his feet. “I can have cruisers after him in an hour.”

“They couldn’t catch him now, Ezra. The Comet might. We’ll have to make certain preparations and they’ll take time. But even so we may catch him.”

He turned, moving swiftly toward the door as though physical action were a relief from overpowering tension. Ezra stopped him. “Curt, wit! Let me go with you. I should, you know, if it’s a case of catching a lawbreaker.”

Newton looked at him. “No, Ezra. You’re only trapped by the lure of this thing as I was. As I was… No.”

Simon’s metallic voice intervened. “Let him go with us, Curtis. I think we might need him—that you might need him.”

A look passed between them. Then, silently, Curt nodded.

Back to the Moon, with five instead of four, went the Comet on wings of flame. In the hours that followed, the closed hangar-doors in silent Tycho gave no hint of the desperate rushed activity beneath.

But less than twenty-four hours after its return from Uranus the ship left the Moon a second time. It went out through the planetary orbits like a flying prisoner breaking out through bars, poised for a moment beyond Pluto to shift into a new kind of motion, then was gone into the outer darkness.

The Comet was a fleck, a mote, a tiny gleam of man-made light falling into infinity. Behind it, lost somewhere along the farthest shores of a lightless sea, lay Earth and Sol and the outposts of familiar stars. Ahead was the great wilderness of Sagittarius, the teeming star-jungle that to the eye seemed crowded thick with burning Suns and nebulae.

The five within the ship where silent. Four were busy with the memories they had of the time they had come this way before, with the knowledge of what was still to be encountered. One, Ezra Gurney, could find no words to speak. He was a veteran spaceman. He had been a veteran when Curt Newton was born. He knew the Solar System from Pluto to Mercury and back again and he knew how the naked undimmed stars could shine.

But this was different—this voyaging of deepest space, this pursuing of the fleets and navies of the stars to their own harbor, this going in among them. In a way Ezra Gurney was afraid. No man, not even Curt Newton, could look at that flaming sky ahead and not be a little afraid.

The Comet had come into the region of the great clusters. Mighty hives of gathered Suns blazed and swarmed, rolling across space and time, carrying after them sweeping trains of scattered stars. Between and beyond the clusters and their trailing star-streams shone the glowing clouds of nebulae, banners of light flung out for a million miles across the firmament, ablaze with the glow of drowned and captured Suns. And beyond them all—the nebulae, the clusters and the stars—there showed the black brooding lightless immensity of a cloud of cosmic dust.

The soul of Ezra Gurney shook within him. Men had no business here in this battleground of angry gods. Men? But was he here with men?

“One-point-four degrees zenith,” came the metallic voice of Simon Wright from where he hovered above a bulky instrument.