Kingallis caught Carroll and hurled him away from the panel.
Kingallis caught Carroll and hurled him away from the panel.
Kingallis caught Carroll and hurled him away from the panel.
Two of the others took Rhine by the arms and drew her back out of the way.
"Now!" snarled Kingallis, with sheer animal tones in his voice. "We'll see about this!"
He waved the other two aside and back and then stepped forward to slap Carroll across the face. The blow, meant as an insult strong enough to arouse fighting instinct, was strong enough to stagger Carroll.
"Weakling," scoffed Kingallis. He back-handed the staggering physicist again and again, driving Carroll against the far wall of the laboratory.
"Come on and fight," sneered Kingallis.
Rhine shrieked in mad anger. "Fight?" she shrilled, "after you've shot him?"
Kingallis kicked Carroll in the abdomen. "Coward!" screamed Rhinegallis. With a superhuman strength born of sheer madness, Rhine hurled herself out of the hands of her captors and raced across the floor. Her fingernails came down across her brother's face drawing a torrent of blood from torn eyelids. At the same time she kneed him in the stomach. Her blow was more effective than Kingallis's had been on Carroll. He stumbled back writhing in pain.
But only for a moment—he straightened and cursed blackly, stepped forward and slapped Rhine across the face, hurling her back into the hands of the others by the force of the blow. Then he turned quickly for Carroll had recovered.
But instead of going to Rhine's rescue Carroll turned and raced madly across the floor. He hurled his good shoulder against the master switch, driving it home.
Relays slapped home—
And light itself was tortured. The very walls of the laboratory seemed to shake and waver because of the mighty electrostatic stresses set up in the continuum of space. The square, precision-machined equipment warped into non-mechanical distortions.
Vastnesses of energy flowed in a mad vortex. Steep gradients of electrostatic charge flowed back and forth like the surface of a stormy sea, and corona discharge hissed and trickled out of all sharp corners.
The nerves tingled and muscles twitched; normal senses produced abnormal stimuli. In one man's hand one of the weapons discharged into the floor and he tried to hurl it from him with a cry of pain. He could not open his clenched hand.
Twitching with every erratic reversal of the charged field that surrounded the area, James Forrest Carroll painfully pulled himself to his feet and looked across the shimmering room. Pride and self-confidence added to his will-power. He stood there as his tingling brain considered the facts of the matter.
Regardless of what happened now—regardless of himself or of anybody—he had won this battle. He laughed and in the tortured continuum of the place his laugh sounded like a mad cackle.
Fear was painfully slow in coming to the faces of Kingallis and his cohorts. Then it came—fear and the realization of danger. King gave an angry, wordless cry and tried to cross the laboratory floor. He could not quite make it.
Carroll turned his back on them and watched the viewplate on the far wall. It was wavering and distorted but it showed the sky and the sphere of negative mass.
Out in the parabolic reflector, the tiny compressed sphere of energy disappeared into a hole of blackness, from which expanded an exploding shell of sheer light-energy. Against the reflector it poured in a howling torrent and into the sky it went—and disappeared.
Faster than the light it created it went, on and out into space. Gone—unseen—undetectable—save for the black circle on the wall of Carroll's laboratory.
There it was evident as a column, a cylinder that blazed like the fury it was. How long it lasted is beyond guesswork. Its duration was several seconds in the making, its velocity the speed of light multiplied by an unknown quantity that registered in the thousands.
It was—the Lawson Radiation—the Lawson Radiation multiplied and increased as the light from the sun is greater than the pale ineffective illumination coming from a Will O' the Wisp.
It only took seconds, while the continuum heaved and strained to regain its equilibrium and the sensitive nervous systems of those in the laboratory tingled and screamed to the dictates of flowing energy. Seconds only it took for that flying column of energy to reach the black circle that was the negative mass that menaced Terra.
It took only seconds for the flying column of energy to reach the black circle of the negative mass that menaced Terra.
It took only seconds for the flying column of energy to reach the black circle of the negative mass that menaced Terra.
It took only seconds for the flying column of energy to reach the black circle of the negative mass that menaced Terra.
Yes, seconds only, it took. The negative mass that menaced Sol could not have been far away.
Then cylinder and sphere met in a singular lack of display. The cylinder, narrow but shining, bored into the sphere, dark and menacing. Perceptibly, the sphere slowed, dragged, came to a halt—then accelerated in the reverse direction.
In milliseconds the celestial body of negative mass had been stopped and re-started on its return trip. It accelerated swiftly, the acceleration-factor itself rising as the energy from the column became the energy of motion of the negative mass.
A negative mass—similar to a negative energy-level—demands energy before it can be stable. Its demands were satisfied and then satiated. It raced into unthinkable velocities before the column of energy was all used up and still the column poured into the negative mass.
It could not have been accomplished against a positive mass but the negative mass possessed negative inertia. The harder it was driven, the less energy it took to drive it harder.
Across space it went, becoming a pinpoint in Carroll's artificial viewplate. The stars of the galaxy behind it shone brightly—all but the one directly in line with the flight of the negative mass.
Then, as the spacial stresses diminished and a man could think again in that area, there was a tiny flash on the viewplate.
And James Forrest Carroll laughed. "Finis!" he roared.
King shook himself. "You madman! You destroying fiend—get him!"
The laboratory echoed and re-echoed with the wild thunder of released energy. Rhine dropped beside Carroll. Her right hand flicked up to a switch on the panel, and out of thin air there appeared a tenuous inverted bowl of light. Flying bits of metal as well as the bursts of released energy deflected from the inverted bowl.
Painfully, Carroll stood up and advanced across the floor towards Kingallis and his cohorts. He walked through a veritable tornado of sheer death, and Rhinegallis followed him because to get outside of his protecting shield was to die.
They looked at him as they would have viewed a specter, for he advanced through their hail of death unharmed. In fright they herded back, their weapons lowered helplessly.
Cornered and helpless against the teleport they waited, shivering in fright.
"You said once," snarled Carroll, "that the universe was not large enough for your kind and mine. As I have destroyed your world so I'll destroy you!"
He lunged forward, and they turned and rushed madly into the teleport. Carroll shook his head.
"They—?" asked Rhine, shakily.
"The spacial stress is still present," he quavered. "They were teleported into the nearest and strongest field." He turned and stumbled across the floor to the controls and shut off the gigantic reflector. The rumblings started as a final landslide tumbled down the declivity into the bowl. The screams of King and his cohorts were lost in the thunder of avalanche.
James Forrest Carroll sat in the easy chair in Pollard's office and smiled tolerantly at the psychologist.
"Sure, sure," he said easily. "All in my mind."
Pollard grunted. "Well, it is."
"Baloney. I suppose Kingallis didn't come to prevent me from destroying his world?"
"He came—"
"Knowing," said Carroll, "that if he stopped me he and his kind could go on with their mad plan for conquest. May I ask about this?" he held up his injured arm.
"When I last saw Kingston Galloway—" started Majors.
"You call him Kingston Galloway," laughed Carroll. "But I know he is Kingallis. Now go ahead."
"He and his bunch were carrying pistols."
"He shot at me with some sort of energy weapon. This is a burn, not a bullet-hole!"
Majors shook his head. "Not a chance. Admitting that what you sent out was an energy-beam, it is still impossible to believe that a hand-sized energy weapon is practical."
"Granted," said Carroll. "But then there's this evidence. Explain this, will you? I don't mind getting my arm burned badly if it will only make you believe."
Doctor Pollard shook his head with a smile. "Stigmata," he said. "The 'Bleeding Madonna' who exhibits wounds and bleeding from hands, feet, sides and forehead on Good Friday. A sheer mental phenomenon—psychosomatica. This is the same. You are so convinced as to the positiveness of these aliens that your mind produced this burn as evidence."
"Brother, this ain't no mental mirage," snapped Carroll.
"No one said it was. But the power of the human mind is such that the cellular structure of the body will exhibit burn-trauma when the mind believes it so. So one of them creased your arm and you reacted as though it were the burn your mind believed it to be.
"We've been through all this before. It's just cause and effect and result. This time it is only the latter that counts. You've destroyed the menace that drove you insane."
"Look," said Carroll, "I've been through it."
"And nothing you've turned up with can be construed as any evidence beyond the manufacture of your own mind. And nothing that you will ever find—"
Carroll nodded angrily. "I've got a couple of projects yet. One is the hand-held weapon—just to prove to the bright boys who think this bum wing is thought-up—that such is possible. The other may bring proof, but it may take some time.
"I've still got me a job. I'm going to develop the faster-than-light space drive and go out looking for aliens. They had interstellar travel. They all couldn't have been destroyed."
"Forget it, Carroll."
"Forget it?" exploded the physicist. "Forget it when I've a whole world of physics waiting for me to develop? Not on your life!"
He stood up and grinned at them boyishly. Then he left and as the door closed Majors looked askance at Pollard.
Pollard smiled. "He'll forget it," he said. "The aliens will become dimmer and dimmer in his memory until they are gone. But right now we have a fairly stable James Forrest Carroll on our hands. And, Majors, the final therapy is out there waiting for him. Fine girl."
"Rhine," said Carroll softly as the door closed behind him. "Rhine."
"I'm—waiting," she replied. "But why not call me Rita. Everybody else does."
"I know," he said, looking at her pointedly. "But I'm amused, sort of."
"Why?"
"Because the one thing that permitted you to gain access to our research was the thing that licked your pals."
"And?" she asked, puzzled.
"People too often try to divorce the mind from the body," he told her. "It can't be done."
"I don't follow."
"Infants are all brought into this world alike from a mental standpoint. Yet within a few short months each is a separate identity with a different personality, no matter how similar the environment and heredity. This is because the mind of man is but the accumulated result of what his sensory channels bring it.
"An alien you were once, Rhine. But from the instant that you took over that very nice Terran body your mind began to receive information and experiences through the sensory channels of a Terran body.
"Every item, every experience, brought to your mind through Terran channels forced your mind to interpret it in terms of Terran nervous stimuli. Therefore, from the second instant after taking over, you began to change subtly to the Terran."
"Go on—tell me the rest," she said with a smile.
"Day by day, week by week, you will become more and more Terran. Eventually, your alien experiences will fade and you will be as one of us and no longer alien."
"You know," she said shyly, "someday I intend to present you with a little alien."
"That'll be interesting," he chuckled. "You are becoming more and more Terran even now."
"But not," she said with absolute finality, "until we have paid a visit to the clergy!"
"See what I mean?"
She laughed—very humanlike.