The Creator and Other Stories Page 4

  While Scott made the final tests of our machine I walked into the laboratory. The Creator was at work at his accustomed place. Since our arrival he had paid little attention to us. Now that we were about to leave he made no expression of regret, no sign of farewell.

  I approached him, wondering if I should bid him farewell. I had grown to respect him. I wanted to say goodbye, and yet…

  Then I caught the faintest of his thoughts and I stiffened. Instantly and unconsciously my mind thrust out probing fingers and grasped the predominant idea in the Creator's mind.

  '… Destroy the mass of created matter — the universe which I created… create matter… destroy it. It is a laboratory product. Test my destructive…'

  'Why, you damn murderer,' I screamed, and threw myself at him.

  Light fingers flicked out at me, whipped around my body, snapped me into the air and heaved me across the laboratory. I struck on the smooth floor and skidded across it to bring up with a crash against the wall.

  I shook my head to clear it and struggled to my feet. We must fight the Creator! Must save our world from destruction by the very creature who had created it!

  I came to my feet with my muscles bunched, crouched in a fighting posture.

  But the Creator had not moved. He stood in the same position and a rod of purple light extended between him and the queer machine of the walking-stick man. The rod of light seemed to be holding him there, frozen, immovable. Beside the machine stood the walking-stick-man, his hand on the lever, a mad glare in his eyes.

  Scott was slapping the gangling fellow on his slender back.

  'You've got the goods, old man,' he was shouting. 'That's one trick old frozen face didn't learn from you.'

  A thunderous tumult beat through my head. The machine of the walking-stick-man was not a transmission machine at all. It was a weapon — a weapon that could freeze the Creator into rigid lines.

  Weird colors flowed through the Creator. Dead silences lay over the room. The machine of the walking-stick-man was silent, with no noise to hint of the great power it must have been developing. The purple rod did not waver. It was just a rigid rod of purple which had struck and stiffened the Creator.

  I screamed at Scott: 'Quick! The universe! He is going to destroy it!'

  Scott leaped forward. Together we raced toward the table where the mass of created matter lay in its receptacle. Behind us padded the elephant-men.

  As we reached the table, I felt a sinuous trunk wrap about me. With a flip I was hurled to the tabletop. It was but a step to the dish containing the universe. I snatched it up, dish and all, and handed it down to Scott. I let myself over the table edge, hung by my hands for an instant, and dropped. I raced after the others toward the workshop.

  As we gained the room, the walking-stick-man made an adjustment on his machine. The purple rod faded away. The Creator, a towering cone of light, tottered for a moment and then glided swiftly for the doorway.

  Instantly a sheet of purple radiance filled the opening. The Creator struck against it and was hurled back.

  The radiance was swiftly arching overhead and curving beneath us, cutting through the floor, walls, and ceiling.

  'He's enclosing us in a globe of that stuff,' cried Scott. 'It must be an energy screen of some sort, but I can't imagine what. Can you?'

  'I don't care what it is, just so it works,' I panted, anxiously.

  Through the steady purple light I could see the Creator. Repeatedly he hurled himself against the screen and each time he was hurled back.

  'We're moving,' announced Scott.

  The great purple globe was ascending, carrying in its interior we five universe-men, our machines, and fragments of the room in which we but recently had stood. It was cutting through the building like the flame of a torch through soft steel. We burst free of the building into the brilliant blue sunlight of that weird world.

  Beneath us lay the building, a marvel of outre architecture, but with a huge circular shaft cut through it — the path of the purple globe. All about the building lay a forest of red and yellow vegetation, shaped as no vegetation of Earth is shaped, bent into hundreds of strange and alien forms.

  Swiftly the globe sprang upward to hang in the air some distance above the building. As far as the eye could see stretched the painted forest. The laboratory we had just quit was the only sign of habitation. No roads, no lakes, no rivers, no distant mountain — nothing relieved the level plain of red and yellow stretching away to faint horizons.

  Was the Creator, I wondered, the sole denizen of this land? Was he the last survivor of a mystic race? Had there ever been a race at all? Might not the Creator be a laboratory product, even as the things he created were laboratory products? But if so, who or what had set to work the agents which resulted in that uncanny cone of energy?

  My reflections were cut short as the walking-stick-man reached out his skinny hand for the mass of matter which Scott still held. As I watched him breathlessly, he laid it gently on a part of the floor which still remained in the globe and pulled a sliding rod from the side of the machine. A faint purple radiance sprang from the point of the rod, bathing the universe. The radiant purple surrounded the mass, grew thicker and thicker, seeming to congeal into layer after layer until the mass of matter lay sealed in a thick shell of the queer stuff. When I touched it, it did not appear to be hard or brittle. It was smooth and slimy to the touch, but I could not dent it with my fingers.

  'He's building up the shell of the globe in just the same way,' Scott said. The machine seems to be projecting that purple stuff to the outside of the shell, where it is congealed into layers.'

  I noted that what he said was true. The shell of the globe had taken on a thickness that could be perceived, although the increased thickness did not seem to interfere with our vision.

  Looking down at the laboratory, I could see some strange mechanism mounted on the roof of the building. Beside the massive mechanism stood the Creator.

  'Maybe it's a weapon of some sort,' suggested Scott.

  Hardly had he spoken when a huge column of crimson light leaped forth from the machine. I threw up my hands to protect my eyes from the glare of the fiery column. For an instant the globe was bathed in the red glow, then a huge globule of red collected on its surface and leaped away, straight for the laboratory, leaving behind a trail of crimson.

  The globe trembled at the force of the explosion as the ball of light struck. Where the laboratory had stood was merely a great hole, blasted to the primal rock beneath. The vegetation for great distances on either side was sifting ash. The Creator had disappeared. The colorful world beneath stretched empty to the horizon. The men of the universe had proven to be stronger than their Creator!

  'If there's any more Creators around these parts,' said Scott, smiling feebly, 'they won't dare train another gun on this thing in the next million years. It gives them exactly what was meant for the other fellow; it crams their poison right down their own throats. Pete, that mass of matter, whether or not it is the universe, is saved. All hell couldn't get at it here.'

  The walking-stick-man, his mummylike face impassive as ever, locked the controls of the machine. It was, I saw, still operating, was still building up the shell of the globe. Second by second the globe was adding to its fortress — light strength. My mind reeled as I thought of it continuing thus throughout eternity.

  The elephant-men were climbing into their machines.

  Scott smiled wanly.

  'The play is over,' he said. 'The curtain is down. It's time for us to go.'

  He stepped to the side of the walking-stick man.

  'I wish you would use our machine.' he said, evidently forgetting our friend could understand no word he spoke. 'You threw away your chance back there when you built this contraption instead of a transmitter. Our machine will take you wherever you wish to go.'

  He pointed to the machine and to the universe, then tapped his head. With the strange being at his side, he walked to our machin
e, pointed out the controls, explained its uses in pantomime.

  'I don't know if he understands,' said Scott, 'but I did the best I could.'

  As I walked past the walking-stick-man to step into the time-power machine, I believe I detected a faint flicker of a smile on his face. Of that, however, I can never be sure.

  MAROONED IN TIME

  I know how the mistake was made. I was excited when I stepped into the machine. My mind was filled with the many strange happenings I had witnessed. I thought along space directional lines, but I forgot to reckon the factor of time.

  I thought of the Earth, but I did not consider time. I willed myself to be back on Earth, but I forgot to will myself in any particular time era. Consequently when Scott shoved over the lever, I was shot to Earth, but the time element was confused.

  I realize that life in the superuniverse of the Creator, being billions of times larger than life upon the Earth, was correspondingly slower. Every second in the superuniverse was equal to years of Earth-time. My life in the Creator's universe had equalled millions of years of Terran existence.

  I believe that my body was projected along a straight line and not along the curve which was necessary to place me back in the twentieth century.

  This is theory, of course. There might have been some fault in the machine. The purple globe might have exerted some influence to distort our calculations.

  Be that as it may, I reached a dying planet. It has been given to me, a man of the twentieth century, to live out the last years of my life on my home planet some millions of years later than the date of my birth. I, a resident of a comparatively young dynasty in the history of the Earth, now am tribal chieftain and demigod of the last race, a race that is dying even as the planet is dying.

  As I sit before my cave or huddle with the rest of my clan around a feeble fire, I often wonder if Scott Marston was returned to Earth in his proper time. Or is he, too, a castaway in some strange time? Does he still live? Did he ever reach the Earth? I often feel that he may even now be searching through the vast corridors of time and the deserts of space for me, his onetime partner in the wildest venture ever attempted by man.

  And often, too, I wonder if the walking-stick-man used our time-power machine to return to his native planet. Or is he a prisoner in his own trap, caught within the scope of the great purple globe? And I wonder how large the globe has grown.

  I realize now that our effort to save the universe was unnecessary so far as the Earth was concerned, for the Earth, moving at its greater time-speed, would already have plunged into extinction in the flaming furnace of the sun before the Creator could carry out his destructive plans.

  But what of those other worlds? What of those other planets which must surely swim around strange suns in the gulf of space? What of the planets and races yet unborn?

  What of the populations that may exist on the solar systems of island universes far removed from our own?

  They are saved, saved for all time; for the purple globe will guard the handiwork of the Creator through eternity.

  Shotgun Cure

  The clinics were set up and in the morning they'd start on Operation Kelly — and that was something, wasn't it, that they should call it Kelly!

  He sat in the battered rocking chair on the sagging porch and said it once again and rolled it on his tongue, but the taste of it was not so sharp nor sweet as it once had been, when that great London doctor had risen in the United Nations to suggest it could be called nothing else but Kelly.

  Although, when one came to think of it, there was a deal of happenstance. It needn't have been Kelly. It could have been just anyone at all with an M.D. to his name. It could as well have been Cohen or Johnson or Radzonovich or any other of them — any one of all the doctors in the world.

  He rocked gently in the creaking chair while the floor boards of the porch groaned in sympathy, and in the gathering dusk were the sounds, as well, of children at the day's-end play, treasuring those last seconds before they had to go inside and soon thereafter to bed.

  There was the scent of lilacs in the coolness of the air and at the corner of the garden he could faintly see the white flush of an early-blooming bridal wreath — the one that Martha Anderson had given him and Janet so many years ago, when they first had come to live in this very house.

  A neighbor came tramping down the walk and he could not make him out in the deepening dusk, but the man called out to him.

  'Good evening, Doc,' he said.

  'Good evening, Hiram,' said old Doc Kelly, knowing who it was by the voice of him.

  The neighbor went on, tramping down the walk.

  Old Doc kept up his gentle rocking with his hands folded on his pudgy stomach and from inside the house he could hear the bustling in the kitchen as Janet cleared up after supper. In a little while, perhaps, she'd come out and sit with him and they'd talk together, low-voiced and casually, as befitted an old couple very much in love.

  Although, by rights, he shouldn't stay out here on the porch. There was the medical journal waiting for him on the study desk and he should be reading it. There was so much new stuff these days that a man should keep up with — although, perhaps, the way things were turning out it wouldn't really matter if a man kept up or not.

  Maybe in the years to come there'd be precious little a man would need to keep up with.

  Of course, there'd always be need of doctors. There'd always be damn fools smashing up their cars and shooting one another and getting fishhooks in their hands and falling out of trees. And there'd always be the babies.

  He rocked gently to and fro and thought of all the babies and how some of them had grown until they were men and women now and had babies of their own. And he thought of Martha Anderson, Janet's closest friend, and he thought of old Con Gilbert, as ornery an old shikepoke as ever walked the earth, and tight with money, too. He chuckled a bit wryly, thinking of all the money Con Gilbert finally owed him, never having paid a bill in his entire life.

  But that was the way it went. There were some who paid and others who made no pretense of paying, and that was why he and Janet lived in this old house and he drove a five-year car and Janet had worn the selfsame dress to church the blessed winter long.

  Although it made no difference, really, once one considered it. For the important pay was not in cash.

  There were those who paid and those who didn't pay. And there were those who lived and the other ones who died, no matter what you did. There was hope for some and the ones who had no hope — and some of these you told and there were others that you didn't.

  But it was different now.

  And it all had started right here in this little town of Millville — not much more than a year ago.

  Sitting in the dark, with the lilac scent and the white blush of the bridal wreath and the muted sounds of children clasping to themselves the last minutes of their play, he remembered it.

  It was almost 8:30 and he could hear Martha Anderson in the outer office talking to Miss Lane and she, he knew, had been the last of them.

  He took off his white jacket, folding it absent-mindedly, fogged with weariness, and laid it across the examination table.

  Janet would be waiting supper, but she'd never say a word, for she never had. All these many years she had never said a word of reproach to him, although there had been at times a sense of disapproval at his easy-going ways, at his keeping on with patients who didn't even thank him, much less pay their bills. And a sense of disapproval, too, at the hours he kept, at his willingness to go out of nights when he could just as well have let a call go till his regular morning rounds.

  She would be waiting supper and she would know that Martha had been in to see him and she'd ask him how she was, and what was he to tell her?

  He heard Martha going out and the sharp click of Miss Lane's heels across the outer office. He moved slowly to the basin and turned on the tap, picking up the soap.

  He heard the door creak open and did not turn his
head. 'Doctor,' said Miss Lane, 'Martha thinks she's fine. She says you're helping her. Do you think…'

  'What would you do,' he asked.

  'I don't know,' she said.

  Would you operate, knowing it was hopeless? Would you send her to a specialist, knowing that he couldn't help her, knowing she can't pay him and that she'll worry about not paying? Would you tell her that she has, perhaps, six months to live and take from her the little happiness and hope she still has left to her?'

  'I am sorry, doctor.'

  'No need to be. I've faced it many times. No case is the same. Each one calls for a decision of its own. It's been a long, hard day…'

  'Doctor, there's another one out there.'

  'Another patient?'

  'A man. He just came in. His name is Harry Herman.'

  'Herman? I don't know any Hermans.'

  'He's a stranger,' said Miss Lane. 'Maybe he just moved into town.'

  'If he'd moved in,' said Doc, 'I'd have heard of it. I hear everything.'

  'Maybe he's just passing through. Maybe he got sick driving on the road.'

  'Well, send him in,' said Doc, reaching for a towel. 'I'll have a look at him.'

  The nurse turned to the door.

  'And Miss Lane.'

  'Yes?'

  'You may as well go home. There's no use sticking round. It's been a real bad day.'

  And it had been, at that, he thought. A fracture, a burn, a cut, a dropsy, a menopause, a pregnancy, two pelvics, a scattering of colds, a feeding schedule, two teethings, a suspicious lung, a possible gallstone, a cirrhosis of the liver and Martha Anderson. And now, last of all, this man named Harry Herman — no name that he knew and when one came to think of it, a rather funny name.

  And he was a funny man. Just a bit too tall and willowy to be quite believable, ears too tight against his skull, lips so thin they seemed no lips at all.

  'Doctor?' he asked, standing in the doorway.

  'Yes,' said Doc, picking up his jacket and shrugging into it. 'Yes, I am the doctor. Come on in. What can I do for you?'