The Creator and Other Stories Read online

  The Creator seemed to be addressing the three.

  'Here,' he said, 'are some new arrivals. They came here, I gather, in much the same manner you did. They are great scientists, great as yourselves. You will be friends.'

  The Creator turned his attention to us.

  'These beings which you see came here as you did and are my guests as you are my guests. They may appear outlandish to you. Rest assured that you appear just as queer to them.

  They are brothers of yours, neighbors of yours. They are from your — .'

  I received the impression of gazing down on vast space, filled with swirling motes of light.

  'He means our solar system,' suggested Scott.

  Carefully I built up in my mind a diagram of the solar system.

  Wo!' The denial crashed like an angry thunderbolt upon us. Again the image of unimaginable space and of thousands of points of light — of swirling nebulae, of solar systems, mighty double suns and island universes.

  'He means the universe,' said Scott.

  'Certainly they came from our universe,' I replied. 'The universe is everything, isn't it — all existing things?'

  Again the negative of the Creator burned its way into our brains.

  'You are mistaken, Earthman. Your knowledge here counts as nothing. You are mere infants. But come; I will show you what your universe consists of.'

  OUR UNIVERSE?

  Streamers of light writhed down from the cone toward us. As we shrank back they coiled about our waists and gently lifted us. Soothing thoughts flowed over us, instructions to commit ourselves unreservedly to the care of the Creator, to fear no harm. Under this reassurance, my fears quieted. I felt that I was under the protection of a benevolent being, that his great power and compassion would shield me in this strange world. A Creator, in very truth!

  The Creator glided across the floor to set us on our feet on the top of a huge table, which stood about seven feet above the floor level.

  On the tabletop, directly before me, I saw a thin oval receptacle, made of a substance resembling glass. It was about a foot across its greatest length and perhaps a little more than half as wide and about four inches deep. The receptacle was filled with a sort of grayish substance, a mass of puttylike material. To me it suggested nothing more than a mass of brain substance.

  'There,' said the Creator, pointing a light-streamer finger at the disgusting mass, 'is your universe.'

  'What!' cried Scott.

  'It is so,' ponderously declared the Creator.

  'Such a thing is impossible,' firmly asserted Scott. 'The universe is boundless. At one time it was believed that it was finite, that it was enclosed by the curvature of space. I am convinced, however, through my study of time, that the universe, composed of millions of overlapping and interlocking dimensions, can be nothing but eternal and infinite. I do not mean that there will not be a time when all matter will be destroyed, but I do maintain — '

  'You are disrespectful and conceited,' boomed the thought vibrations of the Creator. That is your universe. I made it. I created it. And more. I created the life that teems within it. I was curious to learn what form that life would take, so I sent powerful thought vibrations into it, calling that life out. I had little hope that it had developed the necessary intelligence to find the road to my laboratory, but I find that at least five of the beings evolving from my created life possessed brains tuned finely enough to catch my vibrations and possessed sufficient intelligence to break out of their medium. You are two of these five. The other three you have just seen.'

  'You mean,' said Scott, speaking softly, 'that you created matter and then went further and created life?'

  'I did.'

  I stared at the puttylike mass. The universe! Millions of galaxies composed of millions of suns and planets — all in that lump of matter!

  This is the greatest hoax I've ever seen,' declared Scott, a deliberate note of scorn in his voice. 'If that is the universe down there, how are we so big? I could step on that dish and break the universe all to smithereens. It doesn't fit.'

  The light-finger of the Creator flicked out and seized my friend, wafting him high above the table. The Creator glowed with dull flashes of red and purple.

  His thought vibrations filled the room to bursting with their power.

  'Presumptuous one! You defy the Creator. You call his great work a lie! You, with your little knowledge! You, a specimen of the artificial life I created, would tell me, your very Creator, that I am wrong!'

  I stood frozen, staring at my friend, suspended above me at the end of the rigid light-streamer. I could see Scott's face. It was set and white, but there was no sign of fear upon it.

  His voice came down to me, cold and mocking.

  'A jealous god,' he taunted.

  The Creator set him down gently beside me. His thoughts came to us evenly, with no trace of his terrible anger of only a moment before.

  'I am not jealous. I am above all your imperfect emotions. I have evolved to the highest type of life but one — pure thought. In time I will achieve that. I may grow impatient at times with your tiny brains, with your imperfect knowledge, with your egotism, but beyond that I am unemotional. The emotions have become unnecessary to my existence.'

  I hurried to intervene.

  'My friend spoke without thinking,' I explained. 'You realize this is all unusual to us. Something beyond any previous experience. It is hard for us to believe.'

  'I know it must be hard for you to understand,' agreed the Creator. 'You are in an ultra-universe. The electrons and protons making up your body have grown to billions and billions of times their former size, with correspondingly greater distances between them. It is all a matter of relativity. I did not consciously create your universe, I merely created electrons and protons. I created matter. I created life — and injected it into the matter.

  'I learned from the three who preceded you here that all things upon my electrons and protons, even my very created electrons and protons, are themselves composed of electrons and protons. This I had not suspected. I am at a loss to explain it. I am beginning to believe that one will never find an end to the mysteries of matter and life. It may be that the electrons and protons you know are composed of billions of infinitely smaller electrons and protons.'

  'And I suppose,' mocked Scott, 'that you, the Creator, may be merely a bit of synthetic life living in a universe that is in turn merely a mass of matter in some greater laboratory.'

  'It may be so,' said the Creator. 'My knowledge has made me very humble.'

  Scott laughed.

  'And now,' said the Creator, 'if you will tell me what food and other necessities you require to sustain life, I will see you are provided for. You also will wish to build the machine which will take you back to Earth once more. You shall be assigned living quarters and may do as you wish. When your machine is completed, you may return to Earth. If you do not wish to do so, you are welcome to remain indefinitely as my guests. All I wished you to come here for was to satisfy my curiosity concerning what forms my artificial life may have taken.'

  The tentacles of light lifted us carefully to the floor and we followed the Creator to our room, which adjoined the laboratory proper and was connected to it by a high, wide archway. What the place lacked in privacy, it made up in beauty. Finished in pastel shades, it was easy on the eyes and soothing to one's nerves.

  We formed mind pictures of beds, tables, and chairs. We described our foods and their chemical composition. Water we did not need to describe. The Creator knew instantly what it was. It, of all the necessities of our life, however, seemed the only thing in common with our earth contained in this ultra-universe into which we had projected ourselves.

  In what seemed to us a miraculously short time our needs were provided. We were supplied with furniture, food and clothing, all of which apparently was produced synthetically by the Creator in his laboratory.

  Later we were to learn that the combining of elements and the shaping
of the finished product was a routine matter. A huge, yet simple machine was used in the combination and fixing of the elements.

  Steel, glass, and tools, shaped according to specifications given the Creator by Scott, were delivered to us in a large workroom directly off the laboratory where our three compatriots of the universe were at work upon their machines.

  The machine being constructed by the lone gangling creature, which Scott and I had immediately dubbed the 'walking-stick-man,' resembled in structure the creature building it. It was shaped like a pyramid and into its assembly had gone hundreds of long rods.

  The machine of the elephant-men was a prosaic affair, shaped like a crude box of some rubber material, but its inner machinery, which we found to be entirely alien to any earthly conceptions, was intricate.

  From the first the walking-stick-man disregarded us except when we forced our attentions on him.

  The elephant-men were friendly, however.

  We had hardly been introduced into the workshop before the two of them attempted to strike up an acquaintaince with us.

  We spoke to them as they stood before us, but they merely blinked their dull expressionless eyes. They touched us with their trunks, and we felt faint electric shocks which varied in intensity, like the impulses traveling along a wire, like some secret code tapped out by a telegrapher.

  'They have no auditory sense,' said Scott. 'They talk by the transmission of electrical impulses through their trunks. There's no use talking to them.'

  'And in a thousand years we might figure out their electrical language,' I replied.

  After a few more futile attempts to establish communication Scott turned to the task of constructing the time-power machine, while the elephant-men padded back to their own work.

  I walked over to the walking-stick-man and attempted to establish communication with him, but with no better results. The creature, seeming to resent my interruption of his work, waved his hands in fantastic gestures, working his mouth rapidly. In despair, I realized that he was talking to me, but that his jabbering was pitched too high for my ear to catch Here were representatives of three difference races, all three of a high degree of intelligence else they never would have reached this superplane, and not a single thought, not one idea could they interchange. Even had a communication of ideas been possible, I wondered if we could have found any common ground of understanding.

  I stared at the machines. They were utterly different from each other and neither bore any resemblance to ours. Undoubtedly they all operated on dissimilar principles.

  In that one room adjoining the main laboratory were being constructed three essentially different types of mechanisms by three entirely different types of beings. Yet each machine was designed to accomplish the same result and each of the beings was striving for the same goal!

  Unable to assist Scott in his building of the time-power machine, I spent the greater part of my waking hours in roaming about the laboratory, in watching the Creator at work. Occasionally I talked to him. At times he explained to me what he was doing, but I am afraid I understood little of what he told me.

  One day he allowed me to look through a microscope at a part of the matter he had told us contained our universe.

  I was unprepared for what I saw. As I peered into the complicated machine, I saw protons, electrons! Judged by earthly standards, they were grouped peculiarly, but their formation corresponded almost exactly to our planetary system. I sensed that certain properties in that master-microscope created an optical illusion by grouping them more closely than were their actual corresponding distances. The distance between them had been foreshortened to allow an entire group to be within a field of vision.

  But this was impossible! The very lenses through which I was looking were themselves formed of electrons and protons! How could they have any magnifying power?

  The Creator read my thoughts and tried to explain, but explanation was merely a blur of distances, a mass of tlandish mathematical equations and a pyramiding of °tupendous formulas dealing with the properties of light. I alized that, with the Creator, the Einstein equations were flementary, that the most intricate mathematics conceived by man were as rudimentary to him as simple addition.

  He must have realized it, too, for after that he did not attempt to explain anything to me. He made it plain, however, that I was welcome to visit him at his work, and as time passed, he came to take my presence as a matter of course. At times he seemed to forget I was about.

  The work on the time-power machine was progressing steadily under Scott's skillful hands. I could see that the other two machines were nearing completion, but that my friend was working with greater speed. I calculated that all three of the machines would be completed at practically the same time.

  T don't like this place,' Scott confided to me. T want to get the machine built and get out of here as soon as I can. The Creator is a being entirely different from us. His thought processes and emotional reflexes can bear little resemblance to ours. He is further advanced along the scale of life than we. I am not fool enough to believe he accepts us as his equals. He claims he created us. Whether he did or not, and I can't bring myself to believe that he did, he nevertheless believes he did. That makes us his property — in his own belief, at least — to do with as he wishes. I'm getting out of here before something happens.'

  One of the elephant-men, who had been working with his partner, approached us as we talked. He tapped me gently with his trunk and then stood stupidly staring at us.

  'Funny,' said Scott. That fellow has been bothering me all day. He's got something he wants to tell us, but he doesn't seem to be able to get it across.'

  Patiently I attempted an elementary language, but the elephant-man merely stared, unmoved, apparently not understanding.

  The following day I secured from the Creator a supply of synthetic paper and a sort of black crayon. With these I approached the elephant-men and drew simple pictures, but again I failed. The strange creatures merely stared. Pictures and diagrams meant nothing to them.

  The walking-stick-man, however, watched us from across the room and after the elephant-men had turned away to their work, he walked over to where I stood and held out his hands for the tablet and crayon. I gave them to him. He studied my sketches for a moment, ripped off the sheet and rapidly wielded the crayon. He handed back the tablet. On the sheet were a number of hieroglyphics. I could not make head or tail of them. For a long time the two of us labored over the tablet. We covered the floor with sheets covered with our scribbling pictures, and diagrams. We quit in despair after advancing no further than recognizing the symbols for the cardinal numbers.

  It was apparent that not only the elephant-men but the walking-stick-man as well wished to communicate something to us. Scott and I discussed it often, racking our brains for some means to establish communication with our brothers in exile.

  CREATION — AND DESTRUCTION

  It was shortly after this I made the discovery that I was able to read the unprojected thoughts of the Creator. I imagine that this was made possible by the fact that our host paid little attention to me as he went about his work. Busy with his tasks, his thoughts must have seeped out as he mulled over the problems confronting him. It must have been through this thought seepage that I caught the first of his unprojected brain-images.

  At first I received just faint impressions, sort of half-thoughts. Realizing what was occurring, I concentrated upon his thoughts, endeavoring to bore into his brain, to probe out those other thoughts which lay beneath the surface. If it had not been for the intensive mind training which I had imposed upon myself prior to the attempt to project my body through the time-power machine, I am certain I would have failed. Without this training, I doubt if I would have been able to read his thoughts unbidden in the first place — certainly I could not have prevented him from learning that I had.

  Recalling Scott's suspicions, I realized that my suddenly discovered ability might be used to our advantage.
I also realized that this ability would be worthless should the Creator learn of it. In such case, he would be alert and would close his thought processes to me. My hope lay in keeping any suspicion disarmed. Therefore I must not only read his mind but must also keep a portion of mine closed to him.

  Patch by patch I pieced his thoughts together like a jigsaw puzzle.

  He was studying the destruction of matter, seeking a method of completely annihilating it. Having discovered a means of creating matter, he was now experimenting with its destruction.

  I did not share my secret with Scott, for I feared that he would unconsciously betray it to the Creator.

  As days passed, I learned that the Creator was considering the destruction of matter without the use of heat. I knew that, even on Earth, it was generally conceded a temperature of 4 trillion degrees Fahrenheit would absolutely annihilate matter. I had believed the Creator had found some manner in which he could control such an excessive temperature. But to attempt to destroy matter without using heat at all — ! I believe that it was not until then that I fully realized the great chasm of intelligence that lay between myself and this creature of light.

  I have no idea how long we remained in the world of the Creator before Scott announced that the machine in which we expected to return to our universe was ready for a few tests. Time had the illusive quality in this queer place of slithering along without noticeably passing. Although I did not think of it at the time, I cannot recollect now that the Creator employed any means of measuring time. Perhaps time, so far as he was concerned, had become an unnecessary equation. Perhaps he was eternal and time held no significance for him in his eternity.

  The elephant-men and the walking-stick-man had already completed their machines, but they seemed to be waiting for us. Was it a gesture of respect? We did not know at the time.