Astounding Stories of Super-Science, December 1930, Various [top 100 books to read .txt] 📗

and, moving closer to Hale, with an impulsive, almost childish gesture, slipped her arm through his.

“Let us take him to our village, Unani Assu!” she suggested. “I like him.”

It was Hale’s turn to flush, which he did like a schoolboy.

Unani Assu’s brows drew together in a scowl. The hand holding his blow-pipe jerked convulsively.

“A�a! Come away!” he growled. “You mustn’t touch a stranger!”

A�a’s blue eyes stretched with astonishment. “But I like to touch him, Unani Assu!”

The tall Indian, with a half comical gesture of despair, said:

“Don’t misunderstand her, stranger. She is young, very young, ah! And she has known only the reborn men of the Ungapuks.”

He stepped firmly over to A�a, and, taking the girl by the arm, drew her away.

“Run ahead,” he commanded, “and tell Aimu that we come.”

A�a, her feathered bamboo anklets clicking together, sped away.

Unani Assu bowed courteously to Hale.

“Come, stranger. If you are an enemy, it is you who must fear.” He motioned for him to proceed down the jungle path.

The path ended at a clearing studded with moloccas, the Indian grass huts made of plaited straw. Altogether the scene was peaceful and sane and far removed from the strange tales that Hale had heard concerning the Ungapuks.

Hale was conducted to a long, low stone building, where, in the doorway, 299 stood a tall and emaciated white man.

“Aimu!” said the Indians reverently, and bowed themselves.

Over the bare, brown backs, the white man looked at Hale.

“Sir Basil Addington?” asked the young man.

“Yes. You are welcome. Come in.”

Hale entered the building.

He was in a book-filled study, furnished with hand-made chairs and a desk. Sir Basil asked him to be seated. He offered the young man long, brown native cigarettes and a very good drink made from yucca.

After several minutes of conversation, Sir Basil suddenly changed his manner.

“And now,” he shot out, eyeing the young man through narrowed lids, “will you please state the purpose of this visit?”

Hale looked squarely at his questioner. “Frankly, Sir Basil, I have called on you because I am so intensely interested in your work among the Ungapuks that I wish to offer my services.”

He gave in detail his family history, his education, and his experience as a teacher and a scientist.

Sir Basil tapped his teeth thoughtfully with a pencil.

“But why do you think you can be of assistance to me?”

“That, of course, is for you to decide.”

Hale thought that the scientist looked like a huge, starved crow in his loose-fitting coat. He was so fleshless that, when the light fell strongly on his face as it now did, the bones of his head and hands showed through the skin with horrible clearness.

Hale, under Sir Basil’s scrutiny, decided instantly that he did not like him.

“I need a helper,” the scientist went on, with the air of talking to himself. “A white assistant who neither loves nor fears me. Unani Assu is good enough in his way, but I need a helper who has had technical training.” Suddenly he wheeled on Hale and asked sharply, “How are your nerves, young man?”

Hale started, but managed to answer calmly. “Excellent. My war record isn’t half bad, and that was surely backed with good nerves.”

“And you say you have no close relatives, no ties of any sort to interfere with work that is dangerous—and something else?”

“Not a soul would care if I passed out to-day, Sir Basil.”

“Good! And now tell me this: are you one of those scientists whose minds are so mechanical, so mathematically made, as it were, that your entire outlook on science is based on old, established beliefs, or do you belong to that rare but modern type of trained thinker and dreamer who refuse to permit yesterday’s convictions to influence to-day’s visions?”

Hale smiled quietly. “I recently lost my chair in a famous university because of my so-called unscientific teachings regarding ether-drift.”

Expressing himself in purely scientific terms, he went into an elaboration of his revolutionary theory. When he had finished, Sir Basil reached out his clawlike hand to him.

“Good!” he approved. “You have dared to think originally. Now listen to my theory of mind-electrons which has grown into the established fact that I have discovered the secret of life and death.”

The long, thin hands reached into a pocket for a box of pills. He swallowed one greedily, and immediately his emaciated face seemed charged with new virility.

He spoke out suddenly. “Our world, you know, is made up of three powers: matter, energy and what you call life. I might really say that there are but two powers, for matter, in its last analysis, is a form of energy. And what is life? You can’t call it a form of energy, for every inorganic atom has 300 energy without having life. Life, Mr. Oakham, is mind or consciousness.”

He began pacing the floor restlessly. “Everything that lives has this consciousness, and I say this in defiance of some fixed scientific views. The amoeba in a stagnant pool, a thallophyte on a bit of old bread, any of the myriads of trees and plants that you see in the jungle all have consciousness as well as you. And why?”

He brought his fist down upon the table. “Because they issue from the same source as you and I, the almighty mind, eternal, indestructible, which has permitted itself to be enslaved by matter. You are Hale Oakham. I am Basil Addington, yet we are one and the same. Let me illustrate.”

He seized a glass and poured it full of masata. “Look! Two portions of masata. But I pour what is in the glass back into the bottle. The molecules cohere and the two portions become one again. Some day you and I—our individual consciousnesses—will flow back to the Whole. That sounds mystical, but listen.

“We scientists hold that the electron explains nearly all the physical and chemical phenomena. I go further and say that it explains all. Matter, electricity, light, heat, magnetism—all can be reduced to the ultimate unit. So, Mr. Oakham, I am going to make clear to you how life itself is electronic.”

His long finger touched Hale’s arm. “You, I, yonder mosquito on your sleeve, even one of the germs that is causing my malaria, all being individual living things, are the ultimate units of what I shall personify as the Mind. When I say you I do not speak of that mound of flesh in which you exist, and which can be reduced to the same familiar basic elements and compounds as make up inorganic structures; I speak of your mind, your consciousness—for that is the real you. Are you following me?”

“Perfectly, Sir Basil.” Hale reached for another drink. “But do you mean to say that you and I are no more than a mosquito, a malaria protozoan, or even one of those trees in the jungle?”

Sir Basil’s dry skin slipped back into a long smile. “Startling, isn’t it? You, I, and all other living organisms are nothing but matter, energy and consciousness. You and I have a larger share of consciousness, because our organic structure permits the mind-electrons greater freedom over the matter than composes our bodies. We are more acutely aware of the universe about us, have a greater facility for enjoyment and suffering, a more intricate brain and nervous system. Yet when our bodies die and our consciousness is released, the mind-electrons enslaved by our atoms go back to the elemental Whole. This holds good for the protozoan, the tree, the man—for all things that live.”

Hale was drinking again. “You mean, Sir Basil, that there is a sort of war waged against what you personify as the Mind by matter; that matter is constantly seeking to enslave mind-electrons, so that it may become an organism which, for awhile, may enjoy what we call life?”

Sir Basil pushed back his tufted hair and looked happy. “Yes! And it’s Nature’s supreme blunder! In the end, the Mind always conquers and gains its release, yet the eternal chain of enslavement goes on and on, and will continue to go on as long as there is a living organism in the world to bind mind to matter.”

Hale was excited now, as much from the fiery intoxicant as from the scientist’s weird revelation. “I get you,” he said, rather inelegantly for a professor. “You mean that if every living thing in the world should pass out, every man, every plant, every animal, even down to microscopic infusoria, the Mind would collect all its electrons, and through some more jealous law of, er, cohesion hold these electrons inviolate from matter and energy?”

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“Right! And again, as in the beginning, the Mind would rule supreme. By what I have proved, you and I and all other creatures that now have life may, as separate unfleshed electrons, enjoy eternal consciousness as a part of the Mind.” A new passion leaped to his dark eyes. “When I have finished my mission, no more need we be slaves of the dust, subject to all the frightful sufferings of this dunghill of flesh.”

He brought his fist down upon his skinny leg with a resounding blow.

“But you cannot reduce your theory to fact, Sir Basil!”

“No?” Again came that frightful grin to his cadaverous face. “Can you withstand shock?”

“If you mean shock to the eye, let me remind you that I served two years in the big fight.”

“Then come to my laboratory. Better take another drink.”

While Hale helped himself again from the masata bottle, Sir Basil swallowed another pellet.

Then the two went into the adjoining apartment.

Sir Basil, his hand over the doorknob, paused.

“Before we go in,” he said, “I want you to remember that we call natural that which is characteristic of the physical world. Everything alive in this laboratory was produced by nature. I merely made available the materials, or, rather, I made the conditions under which matter was able to enslave mind-electrons.”

He opened the door, slipped his body through, and, with his ugly, teeth-revealing grin, gestured for Hale to follow him.

Hale steeled himself and looked around half fearfully. The first glance took in a large and well-equipped laboratory, somewhat fetid with animal odors. The second lingered here and there on cages, aquariums, incubators, and other containers where creatures moved.

Suddenly, as something scuttled across the floor and disappeared into a hole in the wall, Hale cried out and covered his eyes with a hand.

Sir Basil laughed aloud. “Why didn’t you examine it closer?”

Hale looked nauseated. “My God, Sir Basil! A rat with a man’s head and face!”

Sir Basil’s voice was sharp, decisive. “Before you leave this laboratory, you’re going to come out of your foolish belief that man is a creature apart from other living organisms. You—the conscious you—is no greater, no more important in the final balance than the spark of consciousness in that rat. When your body and the rat’s body give up their atoms to nature’s laboratory, the little enslaved mind-electron that is you and the one that is the rat will be identical.”

Again Hale shivered and turned away from that cold, too-thin face.

The scientist was speaking. “Step around to all those cages and pens. I want you to see all my slaves of the dust.”

But long before Hale had encircled the room, he was so disturbed at what he saw that he could scarcely complete his frightful inspection. In every enclosure he viewed a monstrosity that in some way resembled a human. Every reptile, every insect, every queer, misshapen animal not only looked human in some shocking manner, but also seemed to possess human characteristics. It seemed as though some demented creator with a perverted sense of humor had attempted to mock man by calling forth monsters in his image.

At last the young man cried out: “How did you breed these freaks?”

“They are not freaks, and I did not breed them. They are nature’s parentless products whose basic elements were brought together in this laboratory, and, by a scientific reproduction of the functions of creation, endowed with the life principle, which is merely 302 mind-electrons.” He smoothed his long tuft of hair nervously. “Would you like to see how life springs from a wedding of matter, energy, and consciousness?”

“I suspect I can stand anything now,” Hale admitted.

“Then come and peep into a very remarkable group of apparatus I have developed, where you can watch atoms building molecules and molecules building living organisms.”

“You say I can see atoms?”

“Not directly, of course. The light waves will forever prevent us from actually seeing the atom. But I have perfected a system of photography which magnifies particles smaller than light waves, and, separating their images from the light waves, renders detail clear in the moving pictures.”

He went to a huge machine or series of machines which took up all the center floor space of the laboratory, where he busied himself in an intricate network of wires, mirrors, electrodes, ray projectors, and traveling metal compartments. Presently he called out to Hale.

“Let me remind you, Oakham, that while any scientist can break up any of the various proteid molecules which are the basis of all living cells, animal and vegetable, no scientist before me has been able to compound the atoms and build them into a proteid molecule.”

He bared his teeth in the smile that Hale hated.

“I am proud to tell you that the proteid molecule can be built up only when the third element of nature’s trinity is added—the mind-electron. I have found a means of capturing the mind-electron and of bringing it in contact with proteid elements. And now it is possible to bring forth life in the laboratory. Come closer and watch proteid forming protoplasm, protoplasm forming a cell, and the cell evolving into—well, what do you want, an animal, plant, or an insect?”

Hale had fallen