Part 1

DARK REALITY

By ROBERT MOORE WILLIAMS

_Out of a future too dimly discerned to be comprehensible one was chosen. Why--no one knew or could know._

[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Comet March 41. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]

Slowly, wearily, the yellow sun went down the sky. From the east the night came on, as dark and as deep as the night that has no ending.

The last rays of the sun washed down over the planet, over the low rounded hills and the trees that grew on them, through the shallow valleys where the grass grew rank and luxurious. The last songs of the birds came undisturbed through the dusk. A deer snorted. From somewhere came the bark of another animal, a bark that ended in a howl, long-drawn and mournful.

Dawn world or dusk world?

The night flowed into the valleys, filled them with a mystic darkness. The darkness crept to the tops of the low hills. Slowly it crept around a huge ball that rested on top of the nearer hill. The ball, perhaps fifty feet in diameter, lifted a foot from the ground. It quivered, lifted two feet, then slowly settled back to earth.

The darkness came in around it, touched it, hid it from sight.

* * * * *

Lee Garth twisted in his chair. Wearily he laid the pencil down. The equations wouldn't work right. They kept trying to run off into impossible combinations. There was an erratic but persistent gadfly of thought buzzing in his mind, a vague shadowy movement in his brain. Like a ghost from shadow-land it twisted through his brain, twisting through the dark convolutions where his memory lay testing the open synapses, seeking a place where a short circuit would result in action.

Fretfully, Lee Garth picked up the pencil. But there was a thinking in his mind, a formless thinking that was somehow purposeful. He sensed the import of that purpose. Tiny chills ran over his body, tiny rivers of icy cold. His fingers trembled. The pencil moved over the page. Garth was first puzzled, then perturbed, then lost in a vast unease.

* * * * *

Here and there upon this earth are fields where men, looking backward, see how the stream of history shifted.

There is a field in Greece.

* * * * *

Xerxes gave his orders to his captains. He waited while his host was led forth. Footmen, archers, men with slings. The cavalry would not be of value, for the barbarians, up there, were in a narrow mountain pass. It did not matter. The light-armed troops were more than capable of dispelling these wild tribesmen. By noon, or the middle of the afternoon, the way would be clear to the peninsula beyond. Thus reasoned Xerxes.

When the night came the barbarians were still holding. Tomorrow, Xerxes thought, his troops would be victorious.

Tomorrow came and fresh troops went forth. And eventually the news came back to where Xerxes waited that his army had been routed and was fleeing in disorder.

It was fate, Xerxes perhaps decided. Fate was a chancy thing. No man could know for certain what the morrow would bring. Tomorrow was a dark reality and the paths to the future were uncertain and tortuous.

But if Xerxes had ravaged the peninsula of Greece in 480 B.C. in all probability Plato would not have been born in 427, and he would not have had as his pupil a youth named Aristotle, and the thinking of the scientists of twenty-five coming centuries would have lacked the guidance of these two men. Into the dark reality of the future the human race would have followed other paths and the man-world of 1940 would not have come into being.

There is a pass in Greece called Thermopylae.

* * * * *

Lee Garth watched, his eyes following the pencil. Cold winds seemed to blow on him. They blew colder each time he realized he was not dictating what the pencil was writing. He watched the factors appear on the paper. There was a meaning in those symbols, a meaning and a purpose stretching across the long, long gulfs of time, reaching from the amoeba, in the protoplasmic slime of steaming seas that are long gone, forward to the creature that shall emerge in some other era, in some century of the far future.

Through him the meaning ran, through Lee Garth, who was 37 years old in 1940.

* * * * *

There is a field in France.

The far-flung southern horn of the Saracen crescent, sweeping northward in its history changing flight, found the field in France where Charles Martel--Charles the Hammer--waited. With keen sword, and long lance, and hissing arrow, all day long the armies battled, and when the night came on, the Saracen host, smashed and bleeding under the blows of the Hammer, reeled backward, fled back out of France. To the Saracens, tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow, was the backward turning road. The glowing sun of Islam flickered, and never again burned so brightly. There was a shift in history, and another world evolved because of Charles Martel.

There is a field in France called Tours.

Lee Garth mopped the perspiration from his forehead. He stopped writing for a moment, pushed back his thinning hair, pulled a cigarette from the package on his desk, struck a match. The smoke was blue and indistinct in that shadowed room. Far off, from another world it seemed, there came the raucous hoot of an automobile horn. Somebody going home, or going to work, or going somewhere but probably going home, since the hour was so late. Didn't matter.

There was a gadfly buzzing in his brain.

Again the pencil raced over the paper.

* * * * *

Jan Lippershey's children played in his yard, and now and again, when he would let them, they played in the shop where he worked. They liked to play with the things he made. Lenses, convex and concave. The children played with the lenses, and the telescope was born. Now men could see farther.

That happened in Holland, early in the 1600s.

Perhaps it was more important than Thermopylae or Tours.

Men looked at the stars. World on world on world--world without end--as far as the first telescope showed, the dance of the suns went on. Men made bigger lenses. Beyond those limits the suns were to be found. Did space go on forever? Bigger lenses, bigger lenses.

But still men could not see into tomorrow. It was a formless void of unreality and no instrument could penetrate it. Men had to go blindly into tomorrow, fearing, hesitating, drawing back, until they were kicked there by relentless time.

In 1940 men worked on a lens 200 inches in diameter.

* * * * *

In 1940, all through a sleepless night, Lee Garth watched his racing pencil write factor after factor, watched the equations grow from page to page. Still the pencil raced. He watched it.

He did not think of Leonidas, who had withstood Xerxes, or of Charles Martel, or of Jan Lippershey, or any of the thousands of others who have warped the course of human destiny--Kepler, Newton, Watt, Einstein, Galileo, Copernicus, the little corporal who went down to Saint Helena. He did not even think of Lee Garth. For that night Lee Garth did not matter to himself. Nor ever again.

The dawn came in through the windows of the old house where he worked. Softly, quietly, silently, the night went and the day came. Another tomorrow became today, another dark reality lifted out of the formless void of the future.

* * * * *

George McNeil, Scot production foreman in charge of the cable manufacturing department on United Electric's vast plant, stared at the order that had come down to him. His face a wrinkled frown, he studied the blue prints.

"Those domned monkeys with their domned slip-sticks," he grunted, referring to the drafting department, "have made another mistake."

Specification sheets in hands, he stalked out of his cubby-hole and headed for the office of the production manager.

The production manager examined the specifications. He called the head of the drafting department on the office phone and got a short answer for his trouble.

"The specifications are right," he said testily to McNeil. "Go ahead and fabricate them."

"I can build the domned things," McNeil retorted. "But I'll sweat in hell if I see any use for them. Solid copper bus-bars twenty-four inches in diameter! We don't build a generator--and neither does anybody else in the world--that needs such cables to carry the current it produces."

"They're just part of a big order that came down from the front office marked 'Rush'," the production manager answered. "But they do seem out of reason--" His forehead wrinkled into a frown. He hesitated. "But an order is an order. Build them. What the customer wants with them is his business."

When McNeil left the office the production manager was still frowning. Twenty-four inch cables--. He scratched his head, as if to stir to life a sluggish idea. Then he got up, walked through the plant, up to the general offices, and the girl in the beautifully finished reception room said Mr. Tompkins would see him in a minute.

"The point I make is this," the production manager said to Mr. Tompkins, "if anybody is building a generator that requires cables of that size, we had better know about that generator."

Tompkins didn't show any emotion. He was a heavy man, not from fat but from muscle. Strength. He had to have strength to hold down his job as general manager. His eyes narrowed slightly and a tiny glow appeared in them.

"A fellow by the name of Garth placed that order," Tompkins said. "Garth? Garth? Where have I heard that name before? Umph!" He remembered the presence of his subordinate. "Thank you. You may go."

The production manager went.

Tompkins flicked a switch on his desk. "Call Railton."

He went on thinking. His eyes narrowed to slits and the glow deepened.

Railton came. "You called me?" he asked. He was a slickie, a front man. College, teck school. Knew all about electricity, and what made the wheels go round. Knew how to talk it. Well dressed, smart.

"Go call on Lee Garth," Tompkins said. "You will find his address in the files. Ask him if he will accept a ten day extension on the delivery date of certain items of his order. That is your excuse for getting in to see him."

"Lee Garth? He's a big shot theoretical physicist," Railton said. "Worth a mint. Made his money on a bunch of inventions. The papers call him another Einstein, but I personally think they over-rate him. What has he been ordering from us and what am I to find out?"

"Find out why he needs solid copper bus-bars twenty-four inches in diameter, but don't let him find out that's what you want to know."

"What?" Railton recovered his composure. "Yes sir."

"Get going."

Railton left. When the chief used that tone, he wanted results, and to hell with expense and everything else that stood in the road of what was wanted.

* * * * *

Dawn or dusk? And which roads lead to the future? Or is there no future? Is there only the present and the past, and is the present only the husk of dying life?

Again and yet again and yet again the ancient yellow sun went down the sky, and night, ever growing bolder, came each evening out of the east. Again and yet again the darkness crept around the huge ball that rested on the nearer hill.

The ball did not lift again, did not move, did not stir or struggle. Like a huge stratosphere balloon made out of some strange metal, it rested there, unmoving.

Animals ranged through the night. In the darkness lonely dogs howled for lost masters. There was never an answer to the howling of the dogs.

* * * * *

Scoop Martin's index fingers moved so rapidly they almost blurred. He only used two fingers on the keyboard. Two were all he needed. The typewriter carriage almost ran over itself getting across the paper. It stopped abruptly and Martin read his lead.

"Secrecy shrouds new scientific development at Valley Park, where Lee Garth, the world's outstanding physicist, has a large crew at work on the construction of a large steel and concrete--"

Martin swore at himself, ripped the paper out of the typewriter. What a hell of a lead for a story. It didn't tell anything. Vague, ambiguous.

But where in the hell could he start this story?

He remembered that steam shovel, ripping the earth down to bed rock. Gangs of men, drilling into the rock and driving reinforcing steel into it. Other gangs setting up forms for the concrete that was to come. A concrete tower going up, a huge mixer being blocked into position, lines of trucks dumping gravel and cement.

Floodlights overhead so when night came the work could go on. Twenty-four hour a day schedule. Over the whole job the sense of desperate urgency.

Martin tried to think what that urgency might be. That would be his lead. A darned good one too. But he couldn't figure it out. All he could say was that out at Valley Park men were tumbling over each other getting done a job of work. They didn't walk. They ran. If a worker gave out, he stepped back out of place, and a fresh man took over his job while he rested.

It was costing a fortune. That didn't matter much. Lee Garth had a fortune. He was spending it.

Martin thought of Lee Garth. In getting in he had practically forced himself past an overworked secretary. Once in, he had found Garth in front of a desk covered with papers.

Garth was not a big man, not an impressive-looking man. You had to think twice to realize the reputation he had won for himself. Pale blue eyes and thin black hair. He looked like a dreamer, or a poet. Not very efficient. Or so he looked.

"Mr. Garth, I'm Martin of the _Globe_. We would like to have a story about you and about the construction work going on out here. What are you building? A new observatory, a laboratory, a workshop, or what?"

Scoop had smiled in his most winning manner. He had a nose for news and a way of getting it.

Garth blinked at him. He seemed to withdraw his mind from a vast distance to meet the problem presented by the newspaper man. He hesitated.

When he spoke, he gave a hint of the man he was. "Sorry, but I am not interested in publicity."

"Not interested in publicity!" Martin found that hard to believe, even from Lee Garth.

"But why all this construction work? What are you building?"

"There is a need for it. I am not quite certain I know everything about that need, that I really know anything about it, except that it exists."

"What is this need?" Martin insisted. "You've got twice as many men as you can really use. You're working your crews twenty-four hours a day. What is it you need? What are you doing?"

Fretfully, Garth answered. "I can't tell you about it. It wouldn't make sense because it doesn't exist now. It exists two million years from now."

Two millions years! What the hell? Garth was cracked, he was bugs, he was off his nut.

Garth punched a button. To that plain secretary he said, "Stella, show Mr. Martin out. And see that no one else without business here gets in. Hire guards."

"Yes, Mr. Garth."

There had been a sleek, prosperous-looking chap waiting in the outer office when Martin went out. He had heard the secretary say, "Mr. Garth will see you now, Mr. Railton."

* * * * *

Two million years. Scoop Martin twisted at his desk, ran another sheet of paper into his typewriter. Two million years. Why, recorded history didn't run back over five thousand years. That guy Garth was nuts. Or was he? Those scientists talked damned funny at times. What would the earth look like in two million years? A baked, waterless plain, broken by jagged mountains? Dead, deserted, lifeless? Man and all of man's achievements gone?

This was 1940. If you added two million to that, what would the number be? It would be darned hard to remember that it was 2,001,940.

Two million years. It was a gag, it had to be a gag. Two million years didn't mean anything, didn't make sense. Yea, it was a gag. Well, he'd just make it a good one. There was his lead. He'd fix Garth for tossing him out on his ear.

His index fingers raced over the keyboard, his thin face writhed into a wolfish grin.

"Prominent Scientist forecast doom of earth in two million years--" Scoop let his imagination go. It would be a good yarn at that. Might even make the front pages. No, not likely. Hitler was holding down the front pages.

* * * * *

Railton came through the front office at a dead run.

Mr. Tompkins swallowed his annoyance at the sight of the young man leaning against his desk. Mr. Railton was no longer sleek and capable. He was panting and sweating, actually sweating.

"Chief," he panted, holding his side and gasping for air. "That guy Garth, he's got--he's got _atomic power_."

It was the first time Railton or anyone else had ever seen Tompkins show surprise.

"What?" he snapped.

"Atomic power," Railton parroted. "That's why he needed those bus-bars!"

Tompkins settled back into his chair. His face turned faintly purple. His eyes bored into the disheveled Railton.

"You got a lot of guts," he rasped, "coming back to me with a cock and bull story like that."

Railton whitened. Doggedly, he persisted in his story. "I'm telling you just what he told me."

"All right," Tompkins said heavily. "Tell me what happened."

"I went out to see him, and just as you suggested, I asked him if he would accept a ten day extension on the delivery date of part of his order. Chief, as sure as we don't make delivery as per contract, that fellow will sue us for the last dollar in the treasury. He says he has to have delivery on August 21, without fail. He means it. What the hell he is working on, I don't know, but that man is in a hurry and he means business."

"We will make delivery as scheduled unless it is to our interest to do otherwise," Tompkins interrupted. "Get to the point."

"In order to pacify him, I told him we would guarantee delivery. Then I went over his whole order with him, to make certain that everything was right. When we got to those bus-bars, I suggested there must have been some mistake."

"He said, 'No. No mistake. The specifications are right.'"

"I protested that there wasn't a generator made that needed bars of that size to carry its load."

"He said, 'No, but there is going to be one. Those cables aren't any too heavy to carry the power of the bursting atom.' Those are his exact words. 'The power of the bursting atom.'"

Tompkins leaned back in his chair. Viciously he bit the end off of a cigar.

"Then Garth is crazy, instead of you!" he said.

Railton's face turned white. "Well--" He made futile noises deep in his throat. "Well, you may be right. Because, well--if Garth has discovered atomic power--it--it doesn't mean much to him. He isn't interested in it. He isn't working on it. He's working on something else, something bigger, and atomic power is just one of the little things he needs to reach the goal he wants...."

Railton's voice trailed off. He was a slickie, a smoothie. He knew all about electricity, and the power industry. He knew all about uranium 235, and why it wouldn't work. He knew what atomic power would do to the power industry. He was wondering if Garth _was_ crazy. Or what was Garth trying to do? What purpose was so vast that atomic power was only incidental to it?

There was silence in the room. The clamor of traffic outside did not penetrate here. The only sound was the soft whisper of a fan pushing cool air through the conditioning apparatus.

Tompkins cleared his throat. "Thank you. You may go."

"You mean--that's all?"

"That's all."

"But what do you think?"

Tompkins stirred restlessly. "I don't know what to think."

Railton left.

Tompkins sat without moving. Garth, Lee Garth. Atomic power. He didn't dare take a chance. Too much was at stake. He had to know. He picked up the phone. His secretary got the connection for him.

"Sullivan? This is Tompkins. There's a fellow out at Valley Park by the name of Lee Garth. I don't know but I suspect that somewhere in his house you would find blueprints, if you look. If I were you, I would have one of your boys do a little looking. Yes, the financial arrangements will be taken care of to your satisfaction."

Tompkins hung up the phone. He turned his mind to other matter.

Sullivan ran a detective agency. If you didn't like your wife, he would make it easy for you to get a divorce. If your employees were demanding a higher wage rate, he could handle that too. Divorces, strikes, anything.

* * * * *

Dawn world or dusk world?

Overhead the sun slanted westward, and the night, black and ominous, came out of the east. The birds sang their songs as the day closed, and the animals that moved in the night awakened, and ranged abroad. And on the hills there was the sound of mournful howling, like the baying of lost and lonely dogs seeking their masters; but not finding them, not ever.

* * * * *

Scoop Martin twisted in his sleep. Or was he asleep? It was hard to know, when you were sleeping. You might be awake. Or you might be dreaming. But how would you know for certain?

He sat up in bed, stared at the window. The moon was shining through the window, casting a thin, ambiguous light into the room.

"Two million years," he whispered.

Hell, yes, he was asleep, he was having a nightmare. He laid down and rolled over. Suddenly he was wide awake.

* * * * *

The house was dark, Mike Ritter saw. Good. The boss wanted some blueprints, or plans, out of that house. Fifty bucks for them. They must be important if the boss was willing to pay that much for them. Well, his job was to get them.

He slipped through the darkness toward the house. Over to the right, at a distance of about three hundred yards, there was a lot of lights. He stopped to stare. A building of some kind was going up. Trucks were coming up a lane, dumping gravel and cement. Under the lights men were pouring concrete until hell wouldn't have it.

"What's the hurry?" Mike wondered.

Well, it wasn't his affair. His job was to get into that house. He turned. The beam from a flashlight struck him in the face.

"Buddy," a voice growled at him. "You better get out of here a damned sight faster than you got in."

Mike blinked. The boss hadn't said anything about guards. What the hell....

"Get going. And don't come back. Or is it a poke in the snoot you'll be wanting now?"

Mike got going. This would require some careful planning.

* * * * *

Tompkins picked up the morning _Globe_. The war was still going on. Raids on Britain. The blitz was coming. He read the accounts through.

What was this?

"Prominent scientist forecasts doom of earth in two million years. Lee Garth...."

He read the article through. He thought heavily for a few moments. Then he spoke into the box on his desk.

"Get me Sullivan on the phone."

* * * * *

The bell of an invisible alarm clock was ringing in Lee Garth's mind. He turned over, tried to go back to sleep. Sleep was such a wonderful sensation, especially when you were so tired. He wanted to sleep forever, and forever. There wasn't enough time left for him to get rested. Days and yet more days the driving pressure of screaming energy had run through him. It had burned out his muscles, put a flutter in his heart. His whole body screamed for rest. He had to rest. He tried to go back to sleep.

The invisible alarm clock rang again.

Abruptly, Garth rolled over and sat up. Yawning, he flexed his arms. Every nerve ending in his body told him to lie down again, called to him to lie down, begged him. He was going to lie down.

The alarm bell in his mind rang again.

What did it mean, he wondered.