The Feminine Future: Early Science Fiction by Women Writers (Dover Thrift Editions) Page 8

  It was near morning when, having found Brant’s address, I passed into his house and his room, and took my bearings. I found his waistcoat, left the diamond in one of its pockets, and returned. It would not do to remain away, visible or invisible. I must be vindicated, cleared of the charge, set right before the world by Brant’s appearing and confessing his mistake on finding the diamond in his pocket.

  Judge Brant did nothing of the kind. Having visited me in my cell and in vain renewed his request to share in the invention which the habit of his mind convinced him must be of importance, he appeared against me. And the upshot of the business was that I went to prison for the term of years he had threatened.

  I asked for another interview with him; but was refused, unless on the terms already declined. My lawyer, with the prison chaplain, went to him, but to no purpose. At last I went myself, as I had gone before, begging him not to ruin the work of my life. He regarded me as a bad dream, and I could not undeceive him without betraying my secret. I returned to my cell and again waited. For to escape was only to prevent possible vindication. If Mary had lived—but I was alone in the world.

  The chaplain arranged with my landlord to take a sum of money I had, and to keep my rooms and apparatus intact till the expiration of my sentence. And then I put on the shameful and degrading prison garb and submitted to my fate.

  It was a black fate. On the edge of the greatest triumph over matter that had ever been achieved, on the verge of announcing the actuality of the Fourth Dimension of Space, and of defining and declaring its laws, I was a convict laborer at a prison bench.

  One day Judge Brant, visiting a client under sentence of death, in relation to his fee, made pretext to look me up, and stopped at my bench. “And how do you like it as far as you’ve gone?” he said.

  “So that I go no farther,” I replied. “And unless you become accessory to my taking off, you will acknowledge you found the stone in your pocket ——”

  “Not yet, not yet,” he said, with an unctuous laugh. “It was a keen jest you played. Regard this as a jest in return. But when you are ready, I am ready.”

  The thing was hopeless. That night I bade good-bye to the life that had plunged me from the pinnacle of light to the depths of hell.

  When again conscious I lay on a cot in the prison hospital. My attempt had been unsuccessful. St. Angel sat beside me. It was here, practically, he came into my life. Alas, that I came into his.

  In the long nights of darkness and failing faintness, when horror had me by the throat, he was beside me, and his warm, human touch was all that held me while I hung over the abyss. When I swooned off again his hand, his voice, his bending face recalled me. “Why not let me go, and then an end?” I sighed.

  “To save you from a great sin,” he replied. And I clung to his hand with the animal instinct of living.

  I was well, and in my cell, when he said. “You claim to be an honest man ——”

  “And yet?”

  “You were about taking that which did not belong to you.”

  “I hardly understand—”

  “Can you restore life once taken?”

  “Oh, life! That worthless thing!”

  “Lent for a purpose.”

  “For torture!”

  “If by yourself you could breathe breath into any pinch of feathers and toss it off your hand a creature—but, as it is, life is a trust. And you, a man of parts, of power, hold it only to return with usury.”

  “And stripped of the power of gathering usury! Robbed of the work about to revolutionize the world!”

  “The world moves on wide waves. Another man will presently have reached your discovery.”

  As if that were a thing to be glad of ! I learned afterwards that St. Angel had given up the sweetness of life for the sake of his enemy. He had gone to prison, and himself worn the stripes, rather than the woman he loved should know her husband was the criminal. Perhaps he did not reconcile this with his love of inviolate truth. But St. Angel had never felt so much regard for his own soul as for the service of others. Self-forgetfulness was the dominant of all his nature.

  “Tell me,” he said, sitting with me, “about your work.”

  A whim of trustfulness seized me. I drew an outline, but paused at the look of pity on his face. He felt there was but one conclusion to draw—that I was a madman.

  “Very well,” I said, “you shall see.” And I walked through the wall before his amazed eyes, and walked back again.

  For a moment speechless, “You have hypnotic power,” then he said. “You made me think I saw it.”

  “You did see it. I can go free any day I choose.”

  “And you do not?”

  “I must be vindicated.” And I told exactly what had taken place with Brant and his diamond. “Perhaps that vindication will never come,” I said at last. “The offended amour propre, and the hope of gain, hindered in the beginning. Now he will find it impossible.”

  “That is too monstrous to believe!” said St. Angel. “But since you can, why not spend an hour or two at night with your work?”

  “In these clothes! How long before I should be brought back? The first wayfarer—oh, you see!”

  St. Angel thought a while. “You are my size,” he said then. “We will exchange clothes. I will remain here. In three hours return, that you may get your sleep. It is fortunate the prison should be in the same town.”

  Night after night then, I was in my old rooms, the shutters up, lost in my dreams and my researches, arriving at great ends. Night after night I reappeared on the moment, and St. Angel went his way.

  I had now found that molecular displacement can be had in various directions. Going further, I saw that gravity acts on bodies whose molecules are on the same plane, and one of the possible results of the application of the Y-ray was the suspension of the laws of gravity. This possibly accounted for an almost inappreciable buoyancy and the power of directing one’s course. My last studies showed that a substance thus treated has the degenerative power of attracting the molecules of any norm into its new orbit—a disastrous possibility. A chair might disappear into a table previously treated by a Y-ray. In fact, the outlook was to infinity. The change so slight—the result so astonishing! The subject might go into molecular interstices as far removed, to all essential purpose, as if billions of miles away in interstellar space. Nothing was changed, nothing disrupted; but the thing had stepped aside to let the world go by. The secrets of the world were mine. The criminal was at my mercy. The lover had no reserves from me. And as for my enemy, the Lord had delivered him into my hand. I could leave him only a puzzle for the dissectors. I could make him, although yet alive, a conscious ghost to stand or wander in his altered shape through years of nightmare alone and lost. What wonders of energy would follow this ray of displacement. What withdrawal of malignant growth and deteriorating tissue was to come. “To what heights of succor for humanity the surgeon can rise with it!” said St. Angel, as, full of my enthusiasm, I dilated on the marvel.

  “He can work miracles!” I exclaimed. “He can heal the sick, walk on the deep, perhaps—who knows—raise the dead!”

  I was at the height of my endeavor when St. Angel brought me my pardon. He had so stated my case to the Governor, so spoken of my interrupted career, and of my prison conduct, that the pardon had been given. I refused to accept it. “I accept,” I said, “nothing but vindication, if I stay here till the day of judgment!”

  “But there is no provision for you now,” he urged. “Officially you no longer exist.”

  “Here I am,” I said, “and here I stay.”

  “At any rate,” he continued, “come out with me now and see the Governor, and see the world and the daylight outdoors, and be a man among men a while!”

  With the stipulation that I should return, I put on a man’s clothes again and went out the gates.

  It was with a thrill of exultation that, exhibiting the affairs in my room to St. Angel, finally I felt the vibrating impu
lse that told me I had received the ray of the larger displacement. In a moment I should be viewless as the air.

  “Where are you?” said St. Angel, turning this way and that. “What has become of you?”

  “Seeing is believing,” I said. “Sometimes not seeing is the naked truth.”

  “Oh, but this is uncanny!” he exclaimed. “A voice out of empty air.”

  “Not so empty! But place your hand under the second coil. Have no fear. You hear me now,” I said. “I am in perhaps the Fourth Dimension. I am invisible to any one not there—to all the world, except, presently, yourself. For now you, you also, pass into the unseen. Tell me what you feel.”

  “Nothing,” he said. “A vibration—a suspicion of one. No, a blow, a sense of coming collapse, so instant it has passed.”

  “Now,” I said, “there is no one on earth with eyes to see you but myself !”

  “That seems impossible.”

  “Did you see me? But now you do. We are on the same plane. Look in that glass. There is the reflection of the room, of the window, the chair. Do you see me? Yourself ?”

  “Powers of the earth and air, but this is ghastly!” said St. Angel.

  “It is the working of natural law. Now we will see the world, ourselves unseen.”

  “An unfair advantage.”

  “Perhaps. But there are things to accomplish to-day.” What things I never dreamed; or I had stayed on the threshold.

  I wanted St. Angel to know the manner of man this Brant was. We went out, and arrested our steps only inside Brant’s office.

  “This door is always blowing open!” said the clerk, and he returned to a woman standing in a suppliant attitude. “The Judge has gone to the races,” he said, “and he’s left word that Tuesday morning your goods’ll be put out of the house if you don’t pay up!” The woman went her way weeping.

  Leaving, we mounted a car; we would go to the races ourselves. I doubt if St. Angel had ever seen anything of the sort. I observed him quietly slip a dime into the conductor’s pocket—he felt that even the invisible, like John Gilpin, carried a right. “This opens a way for the right hand undreamed of the left,” he said to me later.

  It was not long before we found Judge Brant, evidently in an anxious frame, his expanse of countenance white with excitement. He had been plunging heavily, as I learned, and had big money staked, not upon the favorite but upon Hannan, the black mare. “That man would hardly put up so much on less than a certainty,” I thought. Winding our way unseen among the grooms and horses, I found what I suspected—a plan to pocket the favorite. “But I know a game worth two of that,” I said. I took a couple of small smooth pebbles, previously prepared, from the chamois bag into which I had put them with some others and an aluminum wafer treated for the larger displacement, and slipped one securely under the favorite’s saddle-girth. When he warmed to his work he should be, for perhaps half an hour, at the one-billionth point, before the virtue expired, and capable of passing through every obstacle as he was directed.

  “Hark you, Danny,” then I whispered in the jockey’s ear.

  “Who are you? What—I—I—don’t ——” looking about with terror.

  “It’s no ghost,” I whispered hurriedly. “Keep your nerve. I am flesh and blood—alive as you. But I have the property which for half an hour I give you—a new discovery. And knowing Bub and Whittler’s game, it’s up to you to knock ‘em out. Now, remember, when they try the pocket ride straight through them!”

  Other things kept my attention; and when the crucial moment came I had some excited heart-beats. And so had Judge Brant. It was in the instant when Danny, having held the favorite well in hand for the first stretch, Hannan and Darter in the lead and the field following, was about calling on her speed, that suddenly Bub and Whittler drew their horses’ heads a trifle more closely together, in such wise that it was impossible to pass on either side, and a horse could no more shoot ahead than if a stone wall stood there. “Remember, Danny!” I shouted, making a trumpet of my hands. “Ride straight through!”

  And Danny did. He pulled himself together, and set his teeth as if it were a compact with powers of evil, and rode straight through without turning a hair, or disturbing either horse or rider. Once more the Y-ray was triumphant.

  But about Judge Brant the air was blue. It would take a very round sum of money to recoup the losses of those few moments. I disliked to have St. Angel hear him; but it was all in the day’s work.

  The day had not been to Judge Brant’s mind, as at last he bent his steps to the club. As he went it occurred to me to try upon him the larger ray of displacement, and I slipped down the back of his collar the wafer I had ready. He would not at once feel its action, but in the warmth either of walking or dining, its properties should be lively for nearly an hour. I had curiosity to see if the current worked not only through all substances, but through all sorts and conditions.

  “I should prefer a better pursuit,” said St. Angel, as we reached the street. “Is there not something ignoble in it?”

  “In another case. Here it is necessary to hound the criminal, to see the man entirely. A game not to be played too often, for there is work to be done before establishing the counteracting currents that may ensure reserves and privacies to people. To-night let us go to the club with Judge Brant, and then I will back to my cell.”

  As you may suppose, Brant was a man neither of imagination nor humor. As you have seen, he was hard and cruel, priding himself on being a good hater, which in his contention meant indulgence of a preternaturally vindictive temper when prudence allowed. With more cunning than ability, he had achieved some success in his profession, and he secured admission to a good club, recently crowning his efforts, when most of the influential members were absent, by getting himself made one of its governors.

  It would be impossible to find a greater contrast to this wretch than in St. Angel—a man of delicate imagination and pure fancy, tender to the child on the street, the fly on the wall; all his atmosphere that of kindness. Gently born, but too finely bred, his physical resistance was so slight that his immunity lay in not being attacked. His clean, fair skin, his brilliant eyes, spoke of health, but the fragility of frame did not speak of strength. Yet St. Angel’s life was the active principle of good; his neighborhood was purification.

  I was revolving these things while we followed Judge Brant, when I saw him pause in an agitated manner, like one startled out of sleep. A quick shiver ran over his strong frame; he turned red and pale, then with a shrug went on. The displacement had occurred. He was now on the plane of invisibility, and we must have a care ourselves.

  Wholly unconscious of any change, the man pursued his way. The street was as usual. There was the boy who always waited for him with the extra but to-night was oblivious; and failing to get his attention the Judge walked on. A shower that had been threatening began to fall, the sprinkle becoming a downpour, with umbrellas spread and people hurrying. The Judge hailed a car; but the motorman was as blind as the newsboy. The shower stopped as suddenly as it had begun, but he went on some paces before perceiving that he was perfectly dry, for as he shut and shook his umbrella not a drop fell, and as he took off his hat and looked at it, not an atom of moisture was to be found there. Evidently bewildered, and looking about shamefacedly, I fancied I could hear him saying, with his usual oaths, “I must be deucedly over-wrought, or this is some blue devilment.”

  As the Judge took his accustomed seat in the warm and brilliantly lighted room, and picking up the evening paper, looked over the columns, the familiar every-day affair quieting his nerves so that he could have persuaded himself he had been half asleep as he walked, he was startled by the voice, not four feet away, of one of the old officers who made the Kings County their resort. Something had ruffled the doughty hero. “By the Lord Harry, sir,” he was saying in unmodulated tones, “I should like to know what this club is coming to when you can spring on it the election of such a man as this Brant! Judge? What’s he Jud
ge of ? Beat his wife, too, didn’t he? The governors used to be gentlemen!”

  “But you know, General,” said his vis-à-vis, “I think no more of him than you do; but when a man lives at the Club ——”

  “Lives here!” burst in the other angrily. “He hasn’t anywhere else to live! Is there a decent house in town open to him? Well, thank goodness, I’ve somewhere else to go before he comes in! The sight of him gives me a fit of the gout!” And the General stumped out stormily.

  “Old boy seems upset!” said someone not far away. “But he’s right. It was sheer impudence in the fellow to put up his name.”

  I could see Brant grow white and gray with anger, as surprised and outraged, wondering what it meant—if the General intended insult—if Scarsdale—but no, apparently they had not seen him. The contemptuous words rankled; the sweat stood on his forehead.

  Had not the moment been serious, there were a thousand tricks to play. But the potency of the polarization was subsiding and in a short time the normal molecular plane would be re-established. It was there that I made my mistake. I should not have allowed him to depolarize so soon. I should have kept him bewildered and foodless till famished and weak. Instead, as ion by ion the effect of the ray decreased, his shape grew vague and misty, and then one and another man there rubbed his eyes, for Judge Brant was sitting in his chair and a waiter was hastening towards him.

  It had all happened in a few minutes. Plainly the Judge understood nothing of the circumstances. He was dazed, but he must put the best face on it; and he ordered his dinner and a pony of brandy, eating like a hungry animal.

  He rose, after a time, refreshed, invigorated, and all himself. Choosing a cigar, he went into another room, seeking a choice lounging place, where for a while he could enjoy his ease and wonder if anything worse than a bad dream had befallen. As for the General’s explosion, it did not signify; he was conscious of such opinion; he was overliving it; he would be expelling the old cock yet for conduct unbecoming a gentleman.

  Meanwhile, St. Angel, tiring of the affair, and weary, had gone into this room, and in an arm-chair by the hearth was awaiting me—the intrusive quality of my observations not at all to his mind. He had eaten nothing all day, and was somewhat faint. He had closed his eyes, and perhaps fallen into a light doze when he must have been waked by the impact of Brant’s powerful frame, as the latter took what seemed to him the empty seat. I expected to see Brant at once flung across the rug by St. Angel’s natural effort in rising. Instead, Brant sank into the chair as into down pillows.