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Ebook has 106 lines and 8458 words, and 3 pages

EYES THAT WATCH

by RAYMOND Z. GALLUN

He, Sam Conway, was back from Mars now. Back from red, ferric deserts no Earthly boot had ever touched before. Back from bitter cold and aching dryness. Back from dazzling yellow hazes of dust and suspended ice crystals. No more need to wear oxygen armor in a thin, ozone-tainted atmosphere now. Back from solitude, and the endless fight to keep alive out there. Back from the enigma of Martian civilization's extinction, uncounted ages ago.... Back, back, back....

Home, now! From the window Sam Conway could see a row of maples, orange and golden in the autumn warmth. Kids were playing football in the street. Sam's oxy-hydrogen rocket ship, blued and battered and burnt, was suspended for all time from massive girders in the Smithsonian Institution. But even that was far away from Bryton, here. It should have been finished, now--the adventure. Sam Conway should have relaxed. Even Ellen Varney was beside him now. That should have helped. It did, a little. Yet only for moments at a time.

Those twenty months of exploration on another world, had become like a phantom in Sam's thoughts. Faded, distant, contrasting; yet starkly vivid too. Every hour had been a struggle. Extracting food substances from the tissues and juices of strange plants. Roasting native potassium chlorate in a small sun-furnace to extract oxygen from it, and compressing the precious gas into steel flasks. All this had been necessary, the dying Martian atmosphere contained only a low percentage of oxygen.

It had been a strange hand-to-mouth existence out there--a kind of game in which a fellow tried always to keep one small jump ahead of Death.

And there was more. Climbing the steep wall of an ancient artificial gorge not far from the south polar cap; gripping at odd prickly vines to keep from falling into the hardy thickets below, where tough-shelled worms crawled sluggishly, he had found something in a small, sand-drifted cell that was part of a ruin. Something that meant power.

What kind of power? All kinds, perhaps. Scientific learning greater than that of Earth. Power like that of gold and jewels, but far exceeding it. Power to wreck and to create, power to destroy worlds. Power, maybe, to sway minds. Sam still could not guess how far it might extend, or how deep--

No the adventure was not over, yet. It was just beginning. It wasn't just nostalgia that tied the consciousness of Sam Conway to a planet, millions of miles away, whose people had perished in a strange travail ages ago--a catastrophe whose marks lay in fused, glassy ruins, and in machines melted and rusted beyond recognition.

Sam had that secret of power hidden away now in a little aluminum box that had once contained concentrated food rations. And having that secret--though it thrilled him--still made him wish nervously that he also had eyes in the back of his head....

Ellen Varney's slim fingers tightened on his arm.

"Sam!" she said almost sharply. "You're dreaming again. What is it?"

He looked at her almost furtively, conscious of the familiar room around him, the old bookcase, the piano with a shaft of sunlight touching it gently; the radio and television cabinet. The colonial rag rugs, bright colored and homey....

Sam wondered wistfully if sometime soon his power would enable him to preserve in timeless youth the fragile beauty of Ellen Varney. Dark wavy hair, and an earnest face whose wisdom one could never forget. Maybe now even immortality would be possible.

Sam was nervous. Haste and preoccupation pressed him. But he put on a good show for the girl's sake. The lines of worry dissolved around his grey, deep-set eyes. He ran stubby fingers through his stiff mop of ash-blond hair, and the tightness of his lips and jaw relaxed into a sheepish grin.

"Sure I'm dreamin', Honey," he chuckled. "What man in my shoes wouldn't? Three years back I was nobody, working my way as a student engineer. Then Joe Nichols and his experts found out that my reflexes were better than those of anybody they'd tested. And that my brains and my emotional stability were okay. So pretty soon I was flying out there toward Mars--all for the glory of giving the Joe Nichols Food Products a publicity splurge. And now--well don't get the wrong idea of how I feel about it, Ellen--they've made a big-shot out of me. The newspapers, the radio, the scientists. I've got a lot to do. I--you know!"

Ellen Varney was perhaps sure she did know. She smiled faintly, like the Mona Lisa smiling at the na?vet? of men, and their little-boy vanities. But there was a shadow of worry in her eyes, too.

"You won't stay here for supper, then, with the folks and me, Sam," she said wistfully. "Like old times...."

Sam couldn't think of anything nicer. But the pull of something else was much more strong.

"No, Honey," he said. "I--"

"Don't stumble, Sam," the girl returned. "Tomorrow night, then?"

"Maybe. I hope...."

He kissed her. A moment later he was out in the golden afternoon. He avoided the kids playing football out there in the street just as he used to play. He would have liked to talk to them. But--not now.

He climbed into his car. There he sat quietly for a moment, thinking. The autumn shadows, cast by the houses and trees, were long and blue. They reminded him of the shadows on Mars; and he felt a slight, not unpleasant, chill of loneliness and mystery plucking at his nerves. The sound of the wind wasn't so very different here either! Only out there it was shriller and much fainter and more sad, in the thin air, and through the muffling fabric of his oxygen suit.

Not so long ago Sam had seen those Martian winds shredding plumes of rusty red dust from the desert. He'd seen them blow balled masses of dried, prickly vegetation, like tumbleweeds, across the undulating red plain, and into the deep machine-dug gorges, all but waterless now, that on Earth were called the "canals."

He'd seen those dried bundles of weeds collected in rows against the granite masonry of walls that were cold and crumbled in their ancientness but which looked fused along their low crests, like old lava, telling a story of violent and enigmatic calamity.

Thus Sam Conway's reveries became unpleasant once more. He wanted to hurry again. He started the car, and drove swiftly out of the village. The tires crunched in dead leaves as he swung into the driveway that led down by the lake. Premonition must have been working in him, accentuating his caution and his haste.

There was a fair-sized brick building there, an old garage. He unlocked the heavy door and went inside. The large main room of the structure was to be his laboratory; the office, his living quarters.

He surveyed the dingy interior critically. Everything, so far as he could see, was exactly as he had left it except for a small smear of ash on the floor in the office room. Driveway ash. Part of a man's footprint. His own? With the panic of a disturbed miser, Sam Conway thought back carefully. It could be his own footprint; but he couldn't remember--couldn't be sure!

His heart began to throb in mounting anxiety at the thought that the lair of his secret might have been entered during his absence. He pulled the shades carefully. Then he clawed his way through the clutter of paraphernalia in the little room--mostly boxes of new laboratory equipment, as yet unpacked. And a few glass jars containing plant samples, and specimens of odd Martian fauna--souvenirs he hadn't been required to turn over to the scientists.

He was sweating profusely from panic when he reached the carefully fitted mopboard in the corner after pulling aside a small desk. He pressed part of the wooden ornamentation, and a section of the mopboard turned on hinges. Feverishly he drew his precious aluminum box from the hiding place he had contrived, and unfastened its lid. From within came a reassuring, cryptic gleam; and Sam Conway almost wilted with relief.

But he wasn't satisfied yet. His fear of possible burglary wasn't the result of miserliness alone. He was afraid to have so gigantic a secret as he possessed get beyond himself--yet. And he was well aware that man would kill to own what he owned--and distrusted, withholding it from Nichols and his scientists.

Carefully he put the aluminum container back, and searched the premises. The windows. The doors. Everything. But he found no telltale marks of intrusion. The footprints, then, in the office room must have been his own. But he'd bar the windows tomorrow. He'd put alarms on the entrances, and he'd find a safer place for his aluminum box.

Now he prepared to work, getting his notebooks ready, putting a little collapsible table in the center of the office room, securing the heavy wood shutters of the windows, turning on the lights, and taking the aluminum box, which was his storehouse of miracles, once more from hiding.

As he sat down at the table, he placed a loaded pistol within easy reach at his elbow. Thus prepared, he lifted his treasure from its homely metal container, and set it lovingly before him. A cube, perhaps four inches square. Like glass. Almost crystal in its transparency, except for a dim misting of pearl. Crowning the cube was a metal pyramid, much tarnished with age, and a dial. That was all. But Sam's gaze was almost gloating, as his mind filled with mighty visions of his own future. He was no different from any other man in this respect, for the touch of power was on him.

He turned the dial of the Martian apparatus. Within the cube spots of fire began to move, around and around a glowing center that was composed of myriad parts. It was all like a three-dimensional cinema--illustrating, in this instance, some mystery of the atom--its revolving planetary electrons, its nucleus of neutrons, positrons....

In a strange eight-fingered hand, which left the rest of its eon-dead owner's anatomy unpictured, a metal pointer was lifted, indicating this and that. It was like being in school on old Mars, whose people had been extinct for untold millions of years.... Maybe this apparatus, which held, in pictured, illustrated form, all the scientific lore of another time and world, had been a kind of school book.

The atomic structure views were replaced at last by pictures of machines and apparatus--and that was a little better. Before his eyes Sam saw complicated pieces of apparatus taken apart and reassembled. He saw complicated processes actually carried out step by step.

Sam Conway's concentration was like a frozen hypnosis, and his brain was quick. But in the corners of the room there were faint shadows, and he was conscious of them. Still he took notes, and made drawings feverishly until the strain began to tell. Of course he could always refer back to the machine, repeating the views if necessary.

It was a month before he began to build. And then his first effort was only to produce a furnace and an alloy; the latter a product of the former. It was harder and more flexible than any steel yet produced. And it was worth money, providing the means to carry on his study and his work.

Work.... Sam seldom saw Ellen Varney now. He saw little of anybody. He told lies to be alone, and to continue his solitary efforts. His sense of struggle was like being on Mars again fighting for life, plodding through a thin feathery fall of snow there, in the dazing cold, close to the polar regions. And he dreamed of gigantic altruisms--the remaking of civilization.

In four months after his beginning, he had achieved things. Under a beam of specialized vibrations he saw a mouse do amazing tricks, its brain stimulated temporarily to an intelligence far beyond normal. It was awesome, and frightening too, watching that tiny animal turn--without error, and after it had been shown how only once--the complicated combination lock of a small door beyond which lay food.

Sam thrilled to the spectacle of the rodent laboring so keenly with its teeth and forepaws. What if the same waves were applied to the brain of a man? He would have tried those waves on himself, but his enthusiasm changed to dread when, with the removal of the beam, the mouse shuddered into a convulsion and died, its nervous system exhausted.

Biology revealed further mysteries and possibilities. In a glass flask, packed in a radioactive compound, and filled with water to which food substances had been added, Sam grew huge amoebae, whose ancestors had been microscopic. But these creatures were translucent globules, almost a quarter-inch in diameter. Somewhere here, perhaps, lay hidden the secret of life itself. But the amoebae died of a strange disease, the germs of which were perhaps generated out of those same life processes.... To be sure of safety, Sam poured sulphuric acid into the culture flask.

He changed his direction now, back to the atom. Eight weeks more, and he was ready for another test. The main room of the old garage was crowded with apparatus. Then, one night, Sam closed a switch cautiously.

The result was not much different than the shorting of a high-tension electric current across a broad arc. A snap. An avalanche of rattling blue flame, whose glare made everything look sharp and unreal. Then wires glowed to white heat and crumpled. A huge vacuum tube exploded into an incandescent puff of metallic vapors, superheated. The current was dead now--cut off. The experiment was a failure.

There were perhaps ten seconds like this--a sort of unsuspected bang--like that of a rifle cartridge whose defective primer cap fails to ignite the powder immediately when the firing pin strikes it. The garage interior was still illuminated, for the lights were on a different circuit. Smoke was blue along the raftered roof, and the red glow had faded from heated metal.

Then, at a moment beyond all expectation, a searing glare leaped out from between two close-pressed copper electrodes which had been the center of Sam's experiment. A wave of rays and heat, and stunning electrical emanations. Sam Conway's mind was far too slow for him to grasp just what happened. He only remembered a little when, battered and scorched, he picked himself up from the concrete pavement after a minute or more.

The points of the electrodes were shattered, but they still glared, incandescent, providing the only light now, for the light bulbs were shattered. Staring from aching, ray-reddened eyes, Sam saw only that glow, for he was temporarily all but blinded. But there were little pits in that hot copper--pits out of which the metal must have literally exploded.

He wasn't afraid right away. Not until his brain recalled did he realize. That bang, after his apparatus had burnt itself out, then that flash, or whatever you wanted to call it, was atoms breaking down more violently than they had ever done in the crude experimental atomic engines so far developed on earth.

Now there was another flash from one of those electrodes--just a tiny, incredibly brilliant speck--like a spark that flares and dies, failing to ignite tinder. Almost though. Almost an inconceivable conflagration, that might have spread and spread, from one atom to others.

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