Read Ebook: Loss and Gain: The Story of a Convert by Newman John Henry

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Ebook has 1722 lines and 109053 words, and 35 pages

A man of multi-millions and international importance makes many friends, and inevitably many enemies. Seldom can he know what people really think of him. His enemies exaggerate the worst, and his friends mostly fawn. Blaine's personal reputation, by hearsay, had reached me, of course. I had no expectation of liking him, and, very frankly, I didn't. I found him a big man, as tall as myself, heavy, portly from easy living. But I must say his appearance was impressive--a big mane of shaggy hair, a rather handsome, large-featured face, keen dark eyes under heavy brows, a jutting chin.

He was playing chess with a fellow club member and I sat down to watch. I know something about chess and I think his playing very well displayed his character. He won, with skill of aggressive attack. But there was about it something you didn't like. His incisive moving of his men, as though there could be no doubt that it was the correct move; and his whole attitude made you hope it wasn't. It was a quite informal game. Once Blaine made an obvious, rather silly mistake, exposing a piece. His opponent offered to have him take it back. He didn't; he pretended it was what he wanted to do, taking the loss rather than admit his error.

Then he was finished and turned to me. I was there to interview him for the Editor of a booklet being issued by the Royal Astronomical Society of London. It seems that the Society was issuing a booklet with little character sketches of the people from whom they had obtained donations--sort of a tribute of thanks. I was commissioned to write the one on Blaine.

"Did they tell you how much I gave them?" he demanded of me now.

I shook my head.

"No," I said.

His smile was ironic. "I gave them a hundred pounds. What they wanted, and expected, was ten thousand. So now you'll write something very nice about me which they hope will flatter me so I'll give them more. Don't bother, young man."

Blaine was a bachelor. My first impression of him was that he was doing some woman a favor by keeping himself in that category.

So much for J. Walter Blaine.

It was the next night that the weird thing struck at me. I was walking along the edge of the park, alone on my way to the mid-town office of Amalgamated Newscasters. The street was fairly brightly lighted. I recall that there chanced to be no pedestrians near me, just an empty length of grey-white stone pavement in front of me, with the park on one side. And quite suddenly it was as though I had stepped through a black door into nothingness! I could have been stricken blind, yet it was not that, for in another split-second I could see a dim, red radiance and hear voices. Then I could see the shapes of people--three men and a woman--stumbling like myself on a strange earthy ground here in the red darkness.

"Look! Here comes another one of us!" It was a terrified man's voice, vaguely familiar.

And then there was Shorty's voice! "Bob! Bob Rance!" I could feel him gripping me and there was the vague outline of his frightened white face at my shoulder. "Bob! Tell us--what's happened to all of us?"

And Vivian cried: "Hang onto him! There he goes!" I was trying to speak but my tongue was thick, my throat dry and congested.

Things were dim and hazy in my mind; and I could feel the cool blankness stealing through my muscles. The touch of hands on my arms faded, until at last there was no more sensation. I made one last great effort to bring myself out of the fog.

Then I felt myself falling into a soundless blackness.

I think I did not quite lose consciousness. I was aware that I had fallen to the earthy ground, with Shorty and Vivian bending over me. My head was roaring; I was bathed in cold sweat. Then I began to feel better, trying to sit up, with Shorty's arm holding me.

"You're all right now, Bob? Can't you speak?"

"Yes. I--guess so."

Whatever had happened which had brought me here when an instant ago, it seemed, I was walking alone by the park, none of us could imagine. The identical experience had happened to Shorty, to Vivian La Marr; and to Peter Mack, and J. Walter Blaine.

"But--where are we?" I demanded, when in another moment I was strong enough to struggle upright in the crimson glowing darkness.

"Damned if we know," Shorty said. It seemed a sort of underground grotto. I could begin to make out its rocky walls and ceiling now, with that glow like a crimson phosphorescence streaming from them. One by one my companions had found themselves here. Blaine was the first. Then at intervals it seemed as though the wall across the grotto had opened and Shorty, Vivian and Mack came stumbling in, standing an instant, dazed, and then falling, as I had fallen, almost in a normal faint.

"No way of getting out of this damned place," Shorty was saying. "The rock-wall over there moves like a door, but we haven't been able to open it."

How much time had passed since we were stricken with this weird thing, none of us could guess. Suddenly I was startled. My clothes were too big for me. My body felt thin; I had lost twenty or thirty pounds. And in the dim crimson glow now I could see Mack, Vivian and Blaine fairly well. All of them thinner than I remembered them, with faces drawn and haggard and big glowing smouldering eyes. And we men had a growth of beard.

Weeks could have passed! Vivian laughed lugubriously as she met my startled stare. "De-glamorized," she said. "I feel like a lost alley cat." She was clad in a thin, summer street dress. Her lush lissome curves were gone so that it hung drably on her. The vivid artificial blonde hair was darkish at the roots; it fell in a tangled mass to her shoulders. Her makeup was gone; her lips pallid. "We're all about starved to death, if you ask me," she added.

"He brought us food a while ago," Blaine put in.

"Try to eat it," Mack said. "There's some of it over by the wall. If that's what we've been living on, no wonder we're starved."

"He? Food?" I stammered.

Since Blaine had found himself here, what seemed like perhaps twelve hours had passed. Our captor had come twice. They had only seen him dimly.

"But he's human--semi-human, anyway," Shorty said. "And he seems to talk English a little."

"Look!" Vivian suddenly murmured. "Here he comes again."

The red glow across the cave for an instant brightened. It seemed as though a rock had slid aside and closed again. A dim upright shape moved toward us; stopped and stood regarding us with eyes that gleamed green, smouldering in the dimness.

"The Great Mind--ready--see you soon," the figure's weird, guttural voice said.

I moved forward, unsteadily on my feet. "I want to talk to you," I said. I could see him now, quite plainly. A man? I suppose you could call him that. He was about five feet tall, squat and square, with high square shoulders, a rectangular torso and two legs which seemed encased in a flexible metal grey fabric. His head was round, set upon a triangular neck with its apex under his chin--a bullet head, hairless, with a weird, box-like face, square-chinned and broad square nose. His two arms, long and powerful-looking, dangled at his sides.

This, we were soon to learn, was a Radak. I recall my first clear impression that there was about him a queer sense of power. And something else, mysterious, yet even more apparent. An automaton-like quality. It was as though here were an individual who was only acting his role as a tiny part of some great, organized thing. A cog in a machine. The German Nazis of my father's boyhood, must have been like that. And here with these Radaks of the Crimson Comet it seemed intensified to be almost gruesome. You could not tell why, but you could sense it. Human individuals who lived only to do what they were told. A great mental force dominating them from birth to death, so that they thought what they were told to think; only did what they were told to do.

This Radak answered our questions now; he seemed willing enough to talk, though in many ways his knowledge of our language, newly absorbed by his weird brain, was inadequate. I think it best to summarize briefly here, the total of what we learned and saw of the strange little world and its people. In actuality we were destined to see very little. Doomed little world! And since its death now, as you all know, most of its secrets will forever remain a mystery.

It was some five hundred Earth-miles in diameter, doubtless of immense density because we were not aware of much change of gravitational force. Of its past history, no one knows much. Somewhere out in Interplanetary Space it must once have had a normal orbit. I shall explain more of that later.

Two human races were here now. The Radaks--there were perhaps something like a thousand or two of them--were the rulers. The others were the Lei--a primitive, gentle people, no more than slaves to the dominating Radaks. Nature always had been cruel, uncompromising, here on Zelos. Both Radaks and Lei lived always in great underground caverns with which this section of the surface was honeycombed. Above them, on the outer surface, weird storms and erratic extremes of heat and cold were prevalent. And out there strange monsters roamed--the Deathless Things, as they were called, since it was impossible to kill them. Creatures of indescribable horrible quality who seemed unwilling to come into the confines of the underground corridors and grottos, so that all the humans were of necessity driven here, eking out a drab and grim existence.

How the strange science of the Radaks developed will forever remain a mystery. Perhaps it was brought here from some other planet. Despite the science, life here was primitive--a struggle for the bare necessities. Queerly enough, the Radak science seemed not concerned with better living. They had a few small space-fliers--the secret of interplanetary travel was known to them. Perhaps only recently--that seems rather certain. Beyond that, there was nothing save the weird, mysterious mechanisms by which at last they had been able to control the space-movements of their tiny world. It was all here, in what they called the "Great Cavern of Machines." Shorty and I were there for a brief time--an unforgettable time of horror.

"The Great Mind will see us soon?" I was saying now to this Radak who stood stiff and stolid beside me. "Who--what is that?"

We were soon to see. Another Radak appeared, motioning us imperiously to follow him. Neither of these fellows seemed to have any weapons on them, though of course there was no way of telling. Shorty nudged me, muttering something about starting a fight.

"You're crazy," I whispered. "We'd be killed."

"The Great Mind--want see you now," one of the Radaks said. He led us, and we followed him, with the other Radak behind us, out into a dim rock-corridor gleaming with that same crimson phosphorescence.

The banker, Blaine, pushed past me. "I'll attend to this," he said. "This Ruler, whoever he is, he can be bought. I'll get him to take us back to Earth--promise him riches--"

The ragged, cadaverous Mack gave Blaine a glance of contempt. "I guess it's strange to you, not being able to buy everything with your money, isn't it?" he commented.

A distant murmur of voices sounded ahead of us now, and we could see where the light-glow widened as the corridor emerged into another grotto. More Radaks were around us now, herding us with their stiff, jerky movements, jabbering with their strange guttural voices. The murmur ahead of us grew louder; then we emerged from the tunnel.

It was at first almost like being above ground--a huge grotto with red-glowing ceiling high up, dim in the crimson haze. To the sides the precipitous rock-walls widened rapidly out. Ahead of us, down a ragged, undulating slope, there was only a red haze of distance. There seemed to be distant fields, with things growing in them. There was a spindly blue and red stalk-like vegetation growing like trees perhaps to a height of a hundred feet. And off to the left, under the trees, there were mound-shaped little buildings.

We were on a broad level space at the top of the slope. A hundred or more Radaks were here, some crowding at us, but most standing stiff, gazing at us with gleaming, animal-like eyes. And now I saw Radak women and children among them--the women broader-hipped, narrower shouldered. But they were all cast in the same mold--even the children stood at attention, like rows of little statues waiting for something to move them, with only their eyes in motion.

Most of the murmuring voices were further down the slope. A crowd of figures milled about, down there, trying to see us better. A thousand perhaps. The Lei, the slaves of this little world. Certainly they seemed far more human than the Radaks--slim and slight, and some of them as tall as Shorty. They were dressed in simple flowing fabric garments. A bronzed-skinned people, the women with long-flowing hair.

"You come--this way," the Radak said. "Now--you stand still--the Great Mind speak to you."

Then he spoke, slowly with a measured, sonorous voice of weird sepulchral tone. And what he said--it was as though here we faced a mental power too great to resist; as though there could be no question but that his thoughts must be our thoughts. I felt it with a sudden strange shudder--a radiance of thought from him, beating down, destroying whatever was within me of independent individualism. And the realization swept me; if I yielded to this radiance--these thought-waves, whatever they might be, then all that was Robert Rance would be gone. I would be nothing but an automaton.

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