Entities: The Selected Novels of Eric Frank Russell (133 page)

Calf muscles ached their protest against his fondness for walking. Omega rubbed them into submission, sat and rest awhile, then stepped off the battlement and floated to the silent boulevard beneath.

Eerily, like the central figure of an allegorical picture, his form drifted across the dusty, unmarked highway, his feet swinging restfully twenty inches above the surface.

No other forms were levitated, and none walked through the peaceful avenues of that once-mighty city. Silent spires spiked to the azure vault above. Idle battlement reproduced the skyline of ancient Tintagel. Flying buttresses arched boldly to walls that knew no secrets to conceal.

Omega moved toward a dull metal door set in the opposite wall.

The door opened, Omega floated through it, along a corridor and into his laboratory. His feet felt the cold kiss of stone; he stepped to a glass-topped case and peered into it with eyes that shone as brightly as eyes that found the world still new.

“Mana, ”
he murmured. His voice sighed softly, like the wind that quivers in the reeds along the water’s marge.
“Mana. ”
He often talked to himself. The habit was his only concession to loneliness. He pressed a stud that caused a dull, warm glow to spread through the interior of the case.

“Nothing,” they said, “could perpetuate mankind forever,” he proclaimed. “Nothing.

“Nothing that man could make, or produce could make, or produce, or build, or give, could endure as long as Nature endures. The valleys shall be raised, and the hills shall be made low. All that humanity has made, all that humanity can leave, shall crumble into the dust; and the empire that once was, and soon is not shall, shall be given over to the birds of the air, the beast of the field, the trees, the shrubs, and the creeping growths.”

His fingers rapped on the case; he noted resulting movements below the glass.

“Patience,” he told himself. “The thousandth failure may but precede the first success.”

Eagerly he strode to a complicated chair that stood with tilted back against a maze of instruments. Suspended above the seat by simple counterweights was a great metal hood.

“It must be photons,” declared Omega, standing before the chair. “A thousand experiments have shown that either cosmic rays or photons perform the function of carriers of
mana.
And I still maintain that it cannot be cosmic rays. If it were, there could be no
mana,
upon the ozone-wrapped Perdel, in Alpha Centauri.”

Seating himself in the chair, he continued to reason.

“Therefore, by simple elimination, it must be photons. And upon this planet only we bipeds were really susceptible to their natural intensity, other life being less affected. But if I can increase the strength, passing an abnormal load along a beam of photons, a positive reaction should be hereditary. It would, I think, be handed from generation to generation, and—”

His lips snapped shut: he raised an arm and pulled down the hood until it covered his head completely. A contact on the armrest closed beneath his firm fingers and the apparatus woke to life.

There was no noise, nothing to indicate action save a swift turn and steady trembling of needles within three dials, and a mighty, angling leap of a concentrated beam of cold light.

Omega sat limply, the machine behind him driving a double cone of pyschowaves through the back of his head. The cones narrowed through his brain, emerged from his eyes, passed through lenses set in the front of the hood, and entered the wave trap that gleamed mirrorlike at the base of the light transmission tube. In effect, the trap was the focal point of Omega’s mind.

The beam of cold light was a thin column of intense brilliance as it poured up the tube, angled across to the case, and again angled into the interior. The glow from the case was vanquished by the new and mightier illumination.

For fifteen minutes the last man sat half concealed beneath the metal sheath. Then his damp fingers opened the contact; his hand raised the hood and exposed a face strained with fatigue.

He crossed the case, stared through its glass top.

“Mechanistic behaviorism may serve as a crutch—but never as a ladder,” he told the unheedful subjects of his experiment.

A small heap of rotten wood lay in one corner of the case. In the center, between two highways swarming with pedestrians, stood a midget box mounted upon microscopic wheels. Near it rested a Lilliputian bow with a bundle of tiny arrows.

Raising the lid of the case, Omega inserted a hand and moved the little cart with a touch of slender fingers. Delicately, he shot an arrow from the miniature bow, and saw ants scuttle in all directions. Patiently, he rubbed two shreds of wood into flame, and let them burn at a safe distance from the rest of the heap.

“I feel one degree more stupid after each attempt. The light must be transporting it somewhere.”

He watched the agitated ants as he stood and mused awhile. Then he sighed, closed the lid, and floated from the room.

Timeless day and immeasurable night upon a world that rolled in sluggish mourning for glories long departed. Omega stood upon a battlement and turned his face to the fiery ring that split the midnight sky from horizon to horizon. Incredibly ancient scrawlings upon records long since perished had described the beauty of the satellite from which this ring was born. Omega doubted whether the serene loveliness of the Moon had exceeded the glory of the remnants.

The light of the lees of Luna served to reveal the triumph upon the face of the last man, and the case of ants clasped firmly in his arms. With a frown for his sensation of mental weakness, but a contrasting smile upon his lips, he stepped off the battlement and glided like a phantom above the leafy cohorts that pressed eagerly upon the marble outskirts of Ultima. His figure floated onward, far above the treetops where wooden arms were raised in worship of the ring.

Over a tiny glade he ceased his forward progress, wavered in the slight, cool breeze, descended slowly, and felt his feet sink into a dewy cushion of earth. He placed the case upon the grass, opened its lid, tilted it, and watched the ants depart.

Satisfaction shone upon his features while he studied a group of insects laboriously surging out of the midget cart. They pushed, and pulled, twisted its wheels this way and that, and finally trundled it into the secret path of grassy jungle, He watched it disappear with its load of splinters of rotten wood, the bow and arrows resting on top. He stretched his form, and raised a glowing face to the heavens.

“When the first hairy biped rode the waters on a log, that was
mana,"
he proclaimed. “When fire was found, and made, and used, that was
mana.
Whenever men struggled one step higher up the ladder of life, it was
mana.”
He swung an arm in a sweep embracing the entire cosmos. “Even as it was given to us by those whom we could never know, I give it to those who can never know men. I give it as our everlasting monument.”

His nerves grew taut as he summoned his weakened will. He floated upward, faster, faster, toward the elegiac ring. He was bound for space, where eternal sleep came easily and was undisturbed. There were no regrets within his soul, and he uttered no farewell. He cast one glance downward at aimless billows surging on a printless shore. His eyes passed thence to the woodland glade, caught the first flicker of a tiny fire, and he was satisfied.

Omega, the last man, had presented the ants with fire, the wheel and the bow. Best of all, he had given them what both the first man and the last had called
mana
—
intelligence.

Astounding,
January 1941

It’s asking for trouble to fool around with the unknown. Burman did it! Now there are quite a lot of people who hare like the very devil anything that clicks, ticks, emits whirring sounds, or generally behaves like an asthmatic alarm clock. They’ve got mechanophobia. Dan Burman gave it to them.

Who hasn’t heard of the Burman Bullfrog Battery? The same chap! He puzzled it out from first to last and topped it with his now world-famous slogan: “Power in Your Pocket.” It was no mean feat to concoct a thing the size of a cigarette packet that would pour out a hundred times as much energy as its most efficient competitor. Burman differed from everyone else in thinking it a mean feat.

Burman looked me over very carefully, then said, “When that technical journal sent you around to see me twelve years ago, you listened sympathetically. You didn’t treat me as if I were an idle dreamer or a congenital idiot. You gave me a decent write-up, and started all the publicity that eventually made me much money.”

“Not because I loved you,” I assured him, “but because I was honestly convinced that your battery was good.”

“Maybe.” He studied me in a way that conveyed he was anxious to get something off his chest. “We’ve been pretty pally since that time. We’ve filled in some idle hours together, and I feel that you’re the one of my few friends to whom I can make a seemingly silly confession.”

“Go ahead,” I encouraged. We had been pretty pally, as he’d said. It was merely that we liked each other, found each other congenial. He was a clever chap, Burman, but there was nothing of the pedantic professor about him. Fortyish, normal, neat, he might have been a fashionable dentist to judge by appearances.

“Bill,” he said, very seriously, “I didn’t invent that damn battery.”

“No?”

“No!” he confirmed. “I pinched the idea. What makes it madder is that I wasn’t quite sure of what I was stealing and, crazier still, I don’t know from whence I stole it.”

“Which is as plain as a pikestaff,” I commented.

“That’s nothing. After twelve years of careful, exacting work I’ve built something else. It must be the most complicated thing in creation.” He banged a fist on his knee, and his voice rose complainingly. “And now that I’ve done it, I don’t know what I’ve done.”

“Surely when an inventor experiments he knows what he’s doing?”

“Not me!” Burman was amusingly lugubrious. “I’ve invented only one thing in my life, and that was more by accident than by good judgment.” He perked up. “But that one thing was the key to a million notions. It gave me the battery. It has nearly given me things of greater importance. On several occasions it has nearly, but not quite, placed within my inadequate hands and half-understanding mind plans that would alter this world far beyond your conception.” Leaning forward to lend emphasis to his speech, he said, “Now it has given me a mystery that has cost me twelve years of work and a nice sum of money. I finished it last night. I don’t know what the devil it is.”

“Perhaps if I had a look at it—”

“Just what I’d like you to do.” He switched rapidly to mounting enthusiasm. “It’s a beautiful job of work, even though I say so myself. Bet you that you can’t say what it is, or what it’s supposed to do.”

“Assuming it can do something,” I put in.

“Yes,” he agreed. “But I’m positive it has a function of some sort.” Getting up, he opened a door. “Come along.”

It was a stunner. The thing was a metal box with a glossy, rhodium-plated surface. In general size and shape it bore a faint resemblance an upended coffin, and had the same, brooding, ominous air of a casket waiting for its owner to give up the ghost.

There were a couple of small glass windows in its front through which could be seen a multitude of wheels as beautifully finished as those in a first-class watch. Elsewhere, several tiny lenses stared with sphinx-like indifference. There were three small trapdoors in one side, two in the other, and a large one in the front. From the top, knobbed rods of metal stuck up like goat’s horns, adding a satanic touch to the thing’s vague air of yearning for midnight burial.

“It’s an automatic layer-outer,” I suggested, regarding the contraption with frank dislike. I pointed to one of the trapdoors. “You shove the shroud in there, and the corpse comes out the other side reverently composed and ready wrapped.”

“So you don’t like its air, either,” Burman commented. He lugged open a drawer in a nearby tier, hauled out a mass of drawings. “These are its innards. It has an electric circuit, valves, condensers, and something that I can’t quite understand, but which I suspect to be a extremely efficient electric furnace. It has parts I recognize as cutters and pinion-shapers. It embodies several small-scale multiple stampers, apparently for dealing with sheet metal. There are vague suggestions of an assembly line ending in that large compartment shielded by the door in front. Have a look at the drawings yourself. You can see it’s an extremely complicated device for manufacturing something only little less complicated.”

The drawings showed him to be right. But they didn’t show everything. An efficient machine designer could correctly have deduced the gadget’s function if given complete details. Burman admitted this, saying that some parts he had made “on the spur of the moment,” while others he had been “impelled to draw.” Short of pulling the machine to pieces, there was enough data to whet the curiosity, but not enough to satisfy it.

“Start the damn thing and see what it does.”

“I’ve tried,” said Burman. “It won’t start. There’s no starting handle, nothing to suggest how it can be started. I tried everything I could think of, without result. The electric circuit ends in those antennae at the top, and I even sent current through those, but nothing happened.”

“Maybe it’s a self-starter,” I ventured. Staring at it, a thought struck me. “Timed,” I added.

“Eh?”

“Set for an especial time. When the dread hour strikes, it’ll go of its own accord, like a bomb.”

“Don’t be so melodramatic,” said Burman, uneasily.

Bending down, he peered into one of the tiny lenses.

“Bz-z-z!”
murmured the contraption in a faint undertone that was almost inaudible.

Burman jumped a foot. Then he backed away, eyed the thing warily, turned his glance at me.

“Did you hear that?”

“Sure!” Getting the drawings, I mauled them around. That little lens took some finding, but it was there all right. It has a selenium cell behind it. “An eye,” I said. “It saw you, and reacted. So it isn’t dead even if it does just stand there seeing no evil, hearing no evil, speaking no evil.” I put a white handkerchief against the lens.