Astounding Stories of Super-Science, August 1930 by Various (reading books for 4 year olds .txt) 📗
- Author: Various
Book online «Astounding Stories of Super-Science, August 1930 by Various (reading books for 4 year olds .txt) 📗». Author Various
"Men go mad," said Bell coldly.
The Master smiled reproachfully.
"Ah, you are trying to make me angry, so that I will betray something! You are clever, Senor Bell. With my little medicine, in such quantities as I would administer it to you...."
"You describe it," said Bell harshly and dogmatically, "as a brain stimulant. But it drives men mad."
"To be sure," said The Master mildly. "It does. It is not excreted from the body save very, very slowly. But it changes in the blood stream. As—let us say—sugar changes into alcohol in digestion. The end-product of my little medicine is a poison which attacks the brain. But the slightest bit of unchanged medicine is an antidote. It is"—he smiled amiably—"it is as if sugar in the body changed to alcohol, and alcohol was a poison, but sugar—unchanged—was an antidote. That is it exactly. You see that I have taken my little medicine for years, and it has not harmed me."
"Which," said Bell—and somehow his manner made utter silence fall so that each word fell separately into a vast stillness—"which, thank God, is the one thing that wins finally, for me!"
e stood up and laughed. Quite a genuine laugh.
"Paula," he said comfortably, "get on the plane. In the cabin. Jamison and I are going to strip The Master."
Paula stared. The Master looked at him blankly. Jamison frowned bewilderedly, but stood up grimly to obey.
"But Senor," said The Master in gentle dignity, "merely to humiliate me—"
"Not for that," said Bell. He laughed again. "But all the time I've been hearing about the stuff, I've noticed that nobody thought of it as a drug. It was a poison. People were poisoned. They did not become addicts. But you—you are the only addict to your drug."
He turned to Jamison, his eyes gleaming.
"Jamison," he said softly, "did you ever know of a drug addict who could bear to think of ever being without a supply of his drug—right on his person?"
Jamison literally jumped.
"By God! No!"
The Master was quick. He was swarming up the plane-wing tip before Jamison reached him, and he kicked frenziedly when Jamison plucked him off. But then it was wholly, entirely, utterly horrible that the little white haired man, whose face and manner had seemed so cherubic and so bland, should shriek in so complete a blind panic as they forced his fingers open and took a fountain pen away from him.
"This is it," said Bell in a deep satisfaction. "This is his point of weakness."
he Master was ghastly to look at, now. Jamison held him gently enough, considering everything, but The Master looked at that fountain pen as one might look at Paradise.
"I—I swear," he gasped. "I—swear I will give you the formula!"
"You might lie," said Jamison grimly.
"I swear it!" panted The Master in agony. "It—If the formula is known it—can be duplicated! It—the excretion can be hastened! It can all be forced from the body! Simply! So simply! If only you know! I will tell you how it is done! The medicine is the cacodylate of—"[258]
Bell was leaning forward, now, like a runner breasting the tape at the end of a long and exhausting race.
"I'll trade," he said softly. "Half the contents of the pen for the formula. The other half we'll need for analysis. Half the stuff in the pen for the formula for freeing your slaves!"
The Master sobbed.
"A—a pencil!" he gasped. "I swear—"
Jamison gave him a pencil and a notebook. He wrote, his hands shaking. Jamison read inscrutably.
"It doesn't mean anything to me," he said soberly, "but you can read it. It's legible."
Bell smiled faintly. With steady finger he took his own fountain pen from his pocket. He emptied it of ink, and put a scrupulous half of a milky liquid from The Master's pen into it. He passed it over.
"Your medicine," said Bell quietly, "may taste somewhat of ink, but it will not be poisonous. Now, what do we do with you? I give you your choice. If we take you with us, you will be held very secretly as a prisoner until the truth of the information you have given us can be proven. And if your slaves have all been freed, then I suppose you will be tried...."
he Master was drawn and haggard. He looked very, very old and beaten.
"I—I would prefer," he said dully, "that you did not tell where I am, and that you go away and leave me here. I—I may have some subjects who will search for me, and—they may discover me here.... But I am beaten, Senor. You know that you have won."
Bell swung up on the wing of the plane. He explored about in the cabin. He came back.
"There are emergency supplies," he said coldly. "We will leave them with you, with such things as may be useful to allow you to hope as long as possible. I do not think you will ever be found here."
"I—prefer it, Senor," said The Master dully. "I—I will catch fish...."
Jamison helped put the packages ashore. The Master shivered. Bell stripped off his coat and put it on top of the heap of packages. The Master did not stir. Bell laid a revolver on top of his coat. He went out to the plane and started the motors. The Master watched apathetically as the big seaplane pulled clumsily out of the little cove. The rumble of the engines became a mighty roar. It started forward with a rush, skimmed the water for two hundred yards or so, and suddenly lifted clear to go floating away through the air toward the north.
aula was the only one who looked back.
"He's crying," she said uncomfortably.
"It isn't fear," said Bell quietly. "It's grief at the loss of his ambition. It may not seem so to you two, but I believe he meant all that stuff he told me. He was probably really aiming, in his own way, for an improved world for men to live in."
The plane roared on. Presently Bell said shortly:
"That stuff he has won't last indefinitely. I'm glad I left him that revolver."
Jamison stirred suddenly. He dug down in his pocket and fished out a cigar.
"Since I feel that I may live long enough to finish smoking this," he observed dryly, "I think I'll light it. I haven't felt that I had twenty minutes of life ahead of me for a long time, now. A sense of economy made me smoke cigarettes. It wouldn't be so much waste if you left half a cigarette behind you when you were killed."
he tight little cabin began to reek of the tobacco. Paula pressed close to Bell.
"But—Charles," she asked hopefully, "is—is it really all right, now?"
"I think so," said Bell, frowning.[259] "Our job's over, anyhow. We go up the Chilean coast and find that navy boat. We turn our stuff over to them. They'll take over the task of seeing that every doctor, everywhere in South America, knows how to get The Master's poison out of the system of anybody who's affected. Some of them won't be reached, but most of them will. I looked at his formula. Standard drugs, all of them. There won't be any trouble getting the news spread. The Master's slaves will nearly go crazy with joy. And," he added grimly, "I'm going to see to it that the Rio police take back what they said about us. I think we'll have enough pull to demand that much!"
He was silent for a moment or so, thinking.
"I do think, Jamison," he said presently, "we did a pretty good job."
Jamison grunted.
"If—if it's really over," said Paula hopefully, "Charles—"
"What?"
"You—will be able to think about me sometimes," asked Paula wistfully, "instead of about The Master always?"
Bell stared down at her.
"Good Lord!" he groaned. "I have been a brute, Paula! But I've been loving you—" He stopped, and then said with the elaborate politeness and something of the customary idiotic air of a man making such an announcement. "I say, Jamison, did you know Paula and I were to be married?"
Jamison snorted. Then he said placidly:
"No. Of course not. I never dreamed of such a thing. When did this remarkably original idea occur to you?"
He puffed a huge cloud of smoke from his cigar. It was an unusually vile cigar. Bell scowled at him helplessly for a moment and then said wrathfully:
"Oh, go to hell!"
And he bent over and kissed Paula.
(The End.)
[260]
n the burning solitude of the great Arizona desert, some two miles south of Ajo, a young scientist was about to perform an experiment that might have far-reaching results for humanity.
The scientist was Gordon Kendrick—a tall, tanned, robust chap who looked more like a prospector in search of gold than a professor of physics from the State University of Tucson.
Indeed, he was in a way, a prospector, since it was gold he sought—some practical method of tapping the vast radio-energetic treasure of the sun—and it was an apparatus designed to accomplish just this that he was about to test.
The primary unit of the mechanism comprised a spheroidal vacuum-tube measuring a little over a foot across its long axis, mounted in a steel bracket that held it horizontal with the ground. Down through its short axis ran a shaft on which was centered a light cross of aluminum wire, carrying four vanes of mica, one[261] face of each coated with lampblack. A flexible cable led from the bottom of this shaft to the base of the bracket, where it was geared to a small electric motor driven by two dry cells. A rheostat-switch for delivering and controlling the current was mounted nearby.
At the wide arc of the egg-shaped tube was a concave platinum cathode, at the narrow arc a nib of some sort, ending in a socket. From this socket, two heavy insulated wires extended sixty feet or so across the sand to the secondary unit of the mechanism, which was roughly a series of resistance coils, resembling those in an ordinary electric heater.
s Kendrick prepared to test this delicate apparatus that represented so much of his time and thought, held so much of his hope locked up in it, a turmoil was in his heart, though his brown face was calm.
If his theories were right, that revolving cross would tap and draw into its vanes radio-energetic waves of force, much as the whirling armature of a dynamo draws into its coils electro-magnetic waves of force. For the blackened sides of the vanes, absorbing more radiation than the bright sides, would cause the molecules to rebound from the warmer surfaces with greater velocity, setting up an alternate pressure and bringing the rays to a focus on the cathode, where they would be reflected to the nib as waves of heatricity, to use the word he had coined.
Those were Kendrick's theories, and now he moved to put them to the supreme test. Switching on the current, he set the motor going. In response, the cross began to revolve, slowly at first—then faster, faster, as he opened the rheostat wider.[262]
Eyes fixed on his resistance coils, he gave a sudden cry of triumph. Yes, there was no doubt about it! They were growing red, glowing brightly, whitely, above the intense desert sunlight.
Here was a means of convening solar radiation into heat, then, that offered tremendous commercial possibilities!
But even as he exulted, there came a blinding flash—and the overtaxed coils
Comments (0)