Read Ebook: Eyes That Watch by Gallun Raymond Z Forte John R John Robert Illustrator

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Ebook has 106 lines and 8458 words, and 3 pages

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.

Sam's sore eyes could see the broken roof now, and the springtime stars shining calmly through its splintered rifts. The sky itself was dimly luminous as with diffused light. Suddenly he was afraid of those stars, for they were like watching eyes; watching and inscrutable. And there was ozone--triatomic oxygen--metallically tanging in the atmosphere, mingled with the odor of burnt insulation. Sam wanted to leave the building, to go out into the night and cool his dizzied senses and his blistered body. Yet he had to keep guard to be sure to note anything further that might happen, for he knew what had just taken place.

Yes, he knew all right! Nature had been probed in its darkest lair by a clumsy hand. Nature had growled back threateningly. It had almost bitten. Almost...? Sam Conway's ribs seemed to shrink about his wildly pounding heart.

He leaned against the cracked brick wall, trembling. In memory he was on Mars again seeing those ruined buildings, sheered off, buried by the dust--smelling the metallic reek of ozone that had seeped back through the breath-vent of his oxygen helmet. Even as here, now. Ozone built up from the commoner form of oxygen by electrical discharges!

And by swift suggestion, Sam's thoughts went beyond Mars itself. Outside of the Martian orbit was the Path of Minor Planets--the asteroids. Broken up fragments. Perhaps a single world, once, that had been caught in catastrophe....

There was more, too. What were the rings of Saturn? What cataclysmic circumstance had made them? Atlantis and Mu, the lost continents. Why had they sunk beneath the sea, taking with them their splendid civilizations? And there were the novae far out in interstellar space; normal stars suddenly blazing forth in spectacular ruin. Yes there must be many other inhabited worlds in the universe, other folk, studying, learning to control and curb matter and energy. Sometimes knowledge must get dangerously ahead of itself, lacking a sound foundation of understanding. And then?

There was silence outside the building. So the crunch of hurrying footsteps in the cinders of the driveway penetrated easily to Sam's eardrums and excited nerves. A loud knock sounded at the outside door of Sam's sleeping room.

He staggered back from his ruined laboratory. From a small chemical cabinet he procured a flashlight. And he drew the pistol he always carried now, from his pocket, before he unfastened the heavy bar of the door.

It was Ellen Varney out there in the dark. Sam hadn't seen her in almost a week. He had never permitted her to come here when he was busy. To the rear, down the driveway, the headlamps of the girl's car made a white lantern-glimmer through the bushes.

For one frightening instant Ellen saw the pistol muzzle levelled toward her before Sam was able to recognize her and lower the weapon. But she didn't ask the reason for the gun at all.

The girl's tense fears, strong enough to make her come here, after midnight, to his laboratory, emphasized Sam's own private anxieties.

"I haven't been doing much, Honey," he told her hesitantly, and not too convincingly. "You'd better just run along home to bed. Research causes accidents once in a while. I'll get everything straightened out all right."

But in the reflected rays of the flashlight, the girl's face and eyes were determined.

"I won't go, Sam," she said very definitely, "until I find out that everything is all right. First place, you're hurt, and I'd be stubborn for your sake. But there's more. That glow in the sky. That smell of ozone--not only here, but everywhere here.... What does it all mean, Sam?"

The breeze outside bore a slight yet unmistakable pungence of ozone too. It was just as Ellen had said. The gas was not only in the lab. It was here, too, as though all the atmosphere in the neighborhood had been affected by some electrical process.

"Listen!" Ellen said suddenly.

Sam strained his ears. At first he could detect nothing at all. Then he noticed a dim, lonely humming, that seemed to emanate from the ground, and from the bricks of the laboratory.

The sound seemed to be getting gradually louder. It made Sam shudder with the mystery of hidden things. And he began to feel, too, a sharp ache in his muscles, quite distinct from the soreness of his minor injury.

Sam grasped Ellen by the arm. "Come inside, Ellen," he said. "I've got to make a few tests."

He did this very quickly, working in the beam of his flashlight, which the girl held for him. Meanwhile he made a complete confession, telling her what he'd found on Mars and what he'd been doing.

He found now that he couldn't keep an electroscope charged. This meant that the air was ionized--that it would promptly conduct away any electrical charge that the instrument might hold. And atmospheric ionization meant, or could mean, the presence of radioactivity--of atomic disturbances.

He tried exposing a bit of photographic film in the dark. In the developing fluids it turned entirely black. There were strong invisible rays then, to affect it; rays coming from the walls, the ground, the very air itself perhaps. Rays probably from bursting atoms. The sound--the humming--must be some incidental phenomenon of their breakdown.

Dully Sam felt of the walls. Their temperature was already higher than that of the air and they vibrated distinctly with that steady hum. Sam's whole body felt hot, as though a strange flame was blazing in his own flesh.

The flashlight lay on the table shedding its white beam. Sam saw that Ellen's face was pale and her eyes glassy.

Sam had not the faintest idea of what he might do to check what he had started. "Get out of here, Ellen," he growled thickly. "Beat it! I've gone and tried to play God. And now hell's broken loose! Tell everybody to scram away from here!"

Very unsteadily the girl arose from the chair where she had seated herself. "I don't want to go, Sam," she stammered. "I can't leave you now."

He had to stumble forward then, to catch her before she fell. Her face was hot and damp with a weird fever. Her body had been affected too, by coming into the zone of influence. Sam Conway winced with an awful anguish as he picked Ellen up and tried to carry her toward the open door, and the safer night air outside.

It was only then that he realized how weak and sick he was himself. Strange rays were tearing at his nerves and brain. His very flesh was slowly--very slowly--giving up its atomic power, in a gradual radioactive decay!

He stumbled at his first step and fell crashing to the floor. Paralysis rushed over him, and that droning sound was like a death-dirge in his ears. He tried to drag Ellen's unconscious form toward the door, but the effort was useless. He couldn't even crawl. He just lay there, panting torturedly, his hot brain working in a chaos of fever. He understood now.

The death of Mars all over again. The fused walls. The melted machines. The ozone in the air. A slow, creeping smouldering destruction had burnt itself out at last; perhaps when a new balance had been reached in the atoms of the Martian crust. A crust. A cancerous disease moving in an irregular path, depleting air and water. But there still must be a tiny part of the old process of atomic breakdown continuing on Mars today, maintaining, by electrical disturbances, the ozone in the air.

And he, Sam Conway, had started that same creeping horror here on Earth. It would go along now, spreading and spreading. The walls around him would soon be melting. And there was nothing a man could do to stop it. Not even the science of Mars had been able to save the world that had given it birth. Only in scattered places where the erratic horror had not reached, perhaps in deep crevices in the rocks, had a few plants and low animals been able to survive for a new beginning after most of the fires had died.

Sam Conway cursed himself for his eagerness and lust for power. He'd been like an old gold miner, he thought savagely, ready almost to kill his own brother to preserve his secret until he could use it for himself. There were too many men like that. And now Ellen and all the rest of the world had to suffer.

Mu. Atlantis. The asteroids that had perhaps once been a plant, destroyed, maybe, by a much more violent form of atomic breakdown. But who knew just what accidents might have caused these respective catastrophes? Science must sometimes get ahead of itself, without even outside influence. There was always a risk.

Sam's mind began to fade out, toward the nothingness of oblivion.

Then the real miracle began to happen. The violence of it jarred his brain swiftly back toward a semblance of awareness. Suddenly everything around him was spouting blue electric flame. The table, the chairs, the walls, even the grass and trees beyond the open doorway rippled with a sort of aura. The phenomenon lasted for only two seconds. It snapped and growled like the first dash of some gigantic code signal. Then it broke off. Then it began again.

Once more it stopped. And started.

Sam, even had his mind been clear, could not have guessed how widespread the phenomenon was. He could not have known that, within a twenty mile radius fuses were blowing out, transformers were smoking in their oil-baths and generators were groaning under a terrific overload, as though their armatures had been gripped by an invisible colossus.

But Sam could guess some of the might of the new phenomenon. His body convulsed like the body of a condemned culprit in an electric chair as shocks ripped through him. He could not imagine the origin of what was happening now, unless the forces he had unleashed had entered a new phase of destruction.

Yet this did not seem to be true, for after the first spurt of unknown power had passed, that sonorous hum of doom had been completely strangled. Before the second spurt stopped there was a violent ripping explosion and the tinkling of broken window panes in the adjoining laboratory room. And that constricting paralysis and heat were gone from Sam's body. There were five bursts of strange energy, in all. Then it was over.

Prodded by sheer startlement Sam got to his feet and found that, in spite of weakness, he could stand. His brain was clearer, too. Ellen Varney, unconscious before, was trying to rise. He helped her up and supported her against him.

They stared out of the doorway at the sky. The auroral glow was gone. But they saw, for just an instant, a huge phosphorescent shape, hanging high against the stars. It was a little like a colossal image of a man, but it couldn't have been solid. It was like the aurora itself--as tenuous, as luminous--a kind of gigantic photograph projected in the air. The arm of the vapory figure extended; then the whole image vanished, as if at a speed far exceeding that of light, to some colossal distance.

Sam didn't even speak of the being right away. He helped the girl out of the building into the open.

"Wait here for a few seconds, Ellen," he said in a tone that trembled with awe.

Then he stumbled back into the old garage. All electrical devices were dead, even his flashlight. He had to find his way to the laboratory by burning matches. Every bit of apparatus was in fused ruins now, faintly reddened with heat. But there was no ominous hum in the hot, black stillness. Something deadly had been burned out of diseased substances by counter fire. Even Sam's own flesh had submitted to a curative force.

He found his way to one corner of the room, where, beneath a heavy block of concrete, he had prepared a new hiding place for his aluminum box, and the Martian demonstration apparatus it contained. Tugging the block of concrete free, he looked below it, lighting another match. Somehow the lid of the box had been blown off. Within, the Martian machine was the same as before, except that the crystal cube was no longer clear. Instead it was blackened all the way through, like a black diamond. And there were cracks in it that destroyed its usefulness forever. It, too, had been touched by those counter waves of energy. Touching the cube with his fingers, Sam found that it was hot.

He left the thing in its hole and returned to Ellen, his mind full of colossal realizations.

The girl's voice quavered with awe as she spoke there under the quiet stars.

"We had help, didn't we, Sam?" she stammered, remembering the cloud in the sky, and what Sam had told her about his work. "Somebody from another world. But who? Where...?"

"I don't know, Honey," Sam answered raggedly. "It wasn't Martian help. As far as I know, all Martians are dead. Besides, I've seen their bones. Manlike, but very slender. The being--pictured in the sky was heavily built."

Sam nodded significantly toward the sky.

"Lots of planets up there," he continued. "In other solar systems. Lots of different kinds of beings. I suppose some of those races, on planets of the older stars, have really grown up mentally and scientifically, till they know all about time and space and dimensions and energy, and how to handle and conquer them. And I suppose that somehow they keep careful watch across the awful distance because they've learned by experience that it may be safer. It's not just to save the necks of lesser beings but to guard themselves, too. I was messing around with something pretty big, Ellen. You can't tell how far a danger may sometimes go. A whole universe may be thrown into chaos--"

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