“Very well, then!” the heedless Halpin went on. “I want to know! That is my wish—to know. All my life I have been a student, seeking, seeking—and learning nothing. And now—I want to know the why of things, the cause, the reason, and the end to which we travel. Tell me the place of man in this universe, and the place of this universe in the cosmos!”
The thing, the Jinni, or whatever it was, bowed again. Why was it that Halpin could not see its mockery! It clasped those amazingly human hands together, it drew them apart, and from fingertips to fingertips leaped a maze of sparks. In that maze of brilliant filaments a form began to take shape, became rectangular, took on solidity and became a little window. A silvery, latticed window whose panes were seemingly transparent, but which looked out upon—from where Denning stood, it seemed nothing but blackness. The creature’s head made a gesture and it spoke a single word—the only word which it spoke that Denning recognized.
“Look!” it said, and obeying, Halpin stepped forward and looked through that window.
Denning says that Halpin stared while you might have counted ten. Then he drew back a step or two, stumbled against the couch and sat down. “Oh!” he said softly—very softly, and then: “Oh, I see!” Denning says he said it like a little child that had just had some problem explained by a doting parent. And he made no attempt to rise, no comment, nor any further word of any kind.
And the Jinni, the Elder One, demon or angel or whatever it was, bowed again and turned around—and was gone! Then, suddenly, somehow or other, Denning’s trance of fright was over, and he rushed to the light switch and flooded the room with light. An empty jar lay upon the floor, and upon the couch sat one who stared and stared into vacancy with a look of unutterable despair on his face.
* * *
Little more need be said. Denning called his wife, gave her a brief and distorted tale which he later amplified for the police, and spent the rest of the night trying to rouse Halpin. When morning came, he sent for a doctor and had Halpin removed to his own home. From there Halpin was taken to the state asylum for the insane where he still is. He sits constantly in meditation, unless one tries to arouse him, and then he turns on them a sad, pitying smile and returns to his musings.
And except for that sad, pitying smile, his only look is one of unutterable despair.
THE EARTH-BRAIN
BY EDMOND HAMILTON
LANDON I HAD NOT SEEN FOR TWO YEARS BEFORE THAT DAY when New York knew fear. That day is remembered yet, with its sudden and unexpected earth-tremor that shook the island shortly after noon, swaying proud towers and shaking windows to fragments and loosing a storm of panic-stricken cries that could not drown the long, grinding roll of the shifting earth beneath.
I was in the midtown section that noon, and had been struggling through the hurrying crowds when the shock and quivering of the ground turned them suddenly into a white-faced, hoarse-voiced and terror-smitten mob. For five minutes they and all New York’s millions tasted fear as the streets quivered beneath them. Then the tremor subsided and I saw Landon.
He was standing almost against me in the throng and his face was so strange that for a moment it held me without recognition. For Landon’s face was a mask of fear, not the panic that was passing from those about me but a fear beyond fear, a deep and alien dread. His dark eyes looked out of that white and twisted face as though into vistas of hell. And then I recognised him.
“Clark Landon!” I cried. “Why didn’t you let me know you were back? I didn’t even know you were in the country!”
His dark eyes surveyed me with a fixedness that chilled me. “I landed only two hours ago, Morris,” he said. “Two hours ago, and you see what has happened already.”
“What’s the matter, Landon?” I asked anxiously. “This earth-tremor hasn’t upset you? I shouldn’t think it would bother you after the polar quake you went through—I read about it at the time.”
“Yes, that polar quake,” he said softly. “You read that Travis and Skeel were killed in that but I wasn’t? I wasn’t killed, no; but I’ve been in all the quakes that have been racking earth since then, in Norway and Russia and Egypt, in Italy and England and now here in New York.”
I was amazed. “Why, one would think earthquakes are following you!” I exclaimed. “But they say all these tremors and quakes are due to the big polar cataclysm you went through—they say it touched off things in some way and so caused the quakes that have been going on all over earth ever since that one.”
“Ever since that one,” Landon repeated slowly. “Yes, they’ve been going on ever since that one.”
He was looking beyond me, lost in a strange abstraction. By then the streets about us were near normal, the city’s millions losing their brief panic and taking up again the swift routine that even a near-earthquake could not disturb for long. Hurrying passers-by were already shouldering against the two of us.
“Look here, Landon,” I said, “You don’t look half well at the moment. My rooms are only a few blocks from here—come up and sit a while and you’ll feel better.”
“I’m afraid it will take more than that to make me feel better, Morris,” he said.
Yet he came, and when we were seated at a window of my apartment with the mill-race of a cross-town street’s traffic below, he seemed to relax a little. Sitting opposite him, I strove to analyse the strange dread that still seemed holding him, but was unable to do more than to say to myself that that dread was real and that Landon had apparently changed completely.
The Clark Landon I had known had hardly known the meaning of fear, a lithe dark fellow to whom danger spelled delight. His twin and equal interests had been geology and adventure. His inherited money had enabled him to combine the two in expeditions in which he and his inseparable comrades in science and adventure, David Travis and Herbert Skeel, had investigated the world’s far corners.
Landon and Travis and Skeel had departed over two years before, on another such expedition, one intended to take them into the north polar region. Landon had announced their purpose as the investigation of certain geological oddities believed existent not far from the pole, but all knew that it was the lure of a new adventure that drew him and his companions as much as any hope of adding to geological knowledge.
The three had sailed in a special ice-breaking schooner Landon had chartered, which had taken them as far as the northern shores of Grant Land. From there Landon and Travis and Skeel had started north with two dog-sledges and two Eskimos, believing that with their equipment they could reach their objectives a few hundred miles south of the pole, and return without difficulty.
Ten days after Landon and his party started north from the ship there occurred that terrific earthquake that shook the whole polar region with unprecedented violence, and was registered by the world’s seismographs as centring not far south of the pole itself. The waiting schooner was almost destroyed, but escaped the shifting ice and continued to wait, though with scant hope, for the party.
That first awful quake was followed in the next two weeks by a succession of less violent upheavals and tremors, trending southward. Then Landon and one of the Eskimos reappeared. The latter died the next day. Landon himself was far gone but was revived and could tell those on the ship that the great quake had indeed centred where they had been and that Travis and Skeel and the other Eskimo had perished in it. He was brought back to strength during the voyage south, and after a few narrow escapes from glacial fragments the ship reached Halifax.
While Landon was at Halifax had come the sudden quake that destroyed half of the city, though he had escaped. In the succeeding two years Landon himself was forgotten, but the great polar quake he had gone through was often referred to, for earth had been torn ever since by a succession of violent quakes and upheavals. They seemed to progress from one locality to another, from Newfoundland to Norway, to Russia and Egypt and Italy and England. It was the theory of many scientists that these succeeding quakes were caused by a series of faults in earth’s structure, that had been touched off by the great polar quake Landon had gone through.