It made my heart leap wildly. He went on:-
"There is chaos there. Smoldering revolution which at any time-to-night perhaps-may burst into conflagration and destroy this wanton ruling cla.s.s." He laughed harshly. "In Hope"s world the workers are a primitive, ignorant people. Superst.i.tious. Like the peons of Mexico, they"re all primed and ready to shout for any leader who sets himself up. My chance-our chance-"
He suddenly stopped his pacing and stood before me. "Don"t you feel the lure of it? The open road? "The road is straight before me and the Red G.o.ds call for me!" I"m going, Charlie. Going to-night-and I want you to go with me! Will you?"
Would I go? The thing leaped like a menacing shadow risen solidly to confront me. Would I go?
Suddenly there was before me the face of a girl. White. Apprehensive. It seemed almost pleading. A face beautiful, with a mouth of parted red lips. A face framed in long, pale-golden hair with big staring blue eyes. Wistful eyes, wan with starlight-eyes that seemed to plead.
I thought, "Why, this is madness!" I was not seeing this face with my eyes. There was nothing, no one here in the room with me but Derek. I knew it. The shadows about us were empty. I was conjuring the face only from Derek"s words, making real that which existed only in my imagination.
Yet I knew that in another realm, with my thoughts now bridging the gap, the girl was real. Would I go into the unknown?
The quest of the unknown. The gauntlet of the unknown flung down now before me, as it was flung down before the ancient explorers who picked up its challenge and mounted the swaying decks of their little galleons and said, "We"ll go and see what lies off there in the unknown."
That same lure was on me now. I heard my voice saying, "Why yes, I guess I"ll go, Derek."
CHAPTER III
Into the Unknown
We stood in the boarded room which was Derek"s laboratory. Our preparations had been simple: Derek had made them all in advance. There was little left to do. The laboratory was a small room of board walls, board ceiling and floor. Windowless, with a single door opening into the cellar of the apartment house.
Derek had locked the door after us as we entered. He said, "I have sent my man servant away for a week. The people in the house here think I have gone away on a vacation. No one will miss us, Charlie-not for a time, anyway."
No one would miss me, save my employers, and to them I would no doubt be small loss.
We had put out the light in Derek"s apartment and locked it carefully after us. This journey! I own that I was trembling, and frightened. Yet a strange eagerness was on me.
The cellar room was comfortably furnished. Rugs were on its floor. Whatever apparatus of a research laboratory had been here was removed now. But the evidence of it remained-Derek"s long search for this secret which now he was about to use. A row of board shelves at one side of the room showed where bottles and chemical apparatus had stood. A box of electrical tools and odds and ends of wire still lay discarded in a corner of the room. There was a tank of running water, and gas connections, where no doubt bunsen burners had been.
Derek produced his apparatus. I sat on a small low couch against the wall and watched him as he stripped himself of his clothes. Around his waist he adjusted a wide, flat, wire-woven belt. A small box was fastened to it in the middle of the back-a wide, flat thing of metal, a quarter of an inch thick, and curved to fit his body. It was a storage battery of the vibratory current he was using. From the battery, tiny threads of wire ran up his back to a wire necklace flat against his throat. Other wires extended down his arms to the wrists. Still others down his legs to the ankles. A flat electrode was connected to the top of his head like a helmet. I was reminded as he stood there, of medical charts of the human body with the arterial system outlined. But when he dressed again and put on his jaunty captain"s uniform, only the electrode clamped to his head and the thin wires dangling from it in the back were visible to disclose that there was anything unusual about him.
He said smilingly, "Don"t stare at me like that."
I took a grip on myself. This thing was frightening, now that I actually was embarked on it. Derek had explained to me briefly the workings of his apparatus. A vibratory electronic current, for which as yet he had no name, was stored in the small battery. He had said:
"There"s nothing incomprehensible about this, Charlie. It"s merely a changing of the vibration rate of the basic substance out of which our bodies are made. Vibration is the governing factor of all states of matter. In its essence what we call substance is wholly intangible. That is already proven. A vortex! A whirlpool of nothingness! It creates a pseudo-substance which is the only material in the universe. And from this, by vibration, is built the complicated structure of things as we see and feel them to be, all dependent upon vibration. Everything is altered, directly as the vibratory rate is changed. From the most tenuous gas, to fluids to solids-throughout all the different states of matter the only fundamental difference is the rate of vibration."
I understood the basic principle of this that he was explaining-that now when this electronic current which he had captured and controlled was applied to our physical body, the vibration rate of every smallest and most minute particle of our physical being was altered. There is so little in the vast scale of natural phenomena of which our human senses are cognisant! Our eyes see the colors of the spectrum, from red to violet. But a vast invisible world of color lies below the red of the rainbow! Physicists call it the infra-red. And beyond the violet, another realm-the ultra-violet. With sound it is the same. Our audible range of sound is very small. There are sounds with too slow a vibratory rate for us to hear, and others too rapid. The differing vibratory rate from most tenuous gas to most substantial solid is all that we can perceive in this physical world of ours. Yet of the whole, it is so very little! This other realm to which we were now going lay in the higher, more rapid vibratory scale. To us, by comparison, a more tenuous world, a shadow realm.
I listened to Derek"s words, but my mind was on the practicality of what lay ahead. An explorer, standing upon his ship, may watch his men bending the sails, raising the anchor, but his mind flings out to the journey"s end....
We were soon ready. Derek wore his jaunty uniform, I wore my ordinary business suit. A magnetic field would be about us, so that in the transition anything in fairly close contact with our bodies was affected by the current.
Derek said, "I will go first, Charlie."
"But, Derek-" A fear, greater than the trembling I had felt before, leaped at me. Left here alone, with no one on whom to depend!
He spoke with careful casualness, but his eyes were burning me. "Just sit there, and watch. When I am gone, turn on the current as I showed you and come after me. I"ll wait for you."
"Where?" I stammered.
He smiled faintly. "Here. Right here. I"m not going away! Not going to move. I"ll be here on the couch waiting for you."
Terrifying words! He had lowered the couch, bending out its short legs until the frame of it rested on the board floor. He drew a chair up before it and seated me. He sat down on the couch.
He said, "Oh, one other thing. Just before you start, put out the light. We can"t tell how long it will be before we return."
Terrifying words!
His right hand was on his left wrist where the tiny switch was placed. He smiled again. "Good luck to us, Charlie!"
Good luck to us! The open road, the unknown!
I sat there staring. He was partly in shadow. The room was very silent. Derek lay propped up on one elbow. His hand threw the tiny switch.
There was a breathless moment. Derek"s face was set and white, but no whiter than my own, I was sure. His eyes were fixed on me. I saw him suddenly quiver and twitch a little.
I murmured, "Derek-"
At once he spoke, to rea.s.sure me. "I"m all right, Charlie. That was just the first feel of it."
There was a faint quivering throb in the room, like a tiny distant dynamo throbbing. The current was surging over Derek; his legs twitched.
A moment. The faint throbbing intensified. No louder, but rapid, infinitely more rapid. A tiny throb, an aerial whine, faint as the whirring wings of a humming bird. It went up the scale, ascending in pitch, until presently it was screaming with an aerial microscopic voice.
But there seemed no change in Derek. His uniform was glowing a trifle, that was all. His face was composed now; he smiled, but did not speak. His eyes roved away from me, as though now he were seeing things that I could not see.
Another moment. No change.
Why, what was this? I blinked, gasped. There was a change! My gaze was fastened upon Derek"s white face. White? It was more than white now! A silver sheen seemed to be coming to his skin!
I think no more than a minute had pa.s.sed. His face was glowing, shimmering. A transparent look was coming to it, a thinness, a sudden unsubstantiality! He dropped his elbow and lay on the couch, stretched at full length at my feet. His eyes were staring.
And suddenly I realized that the face that held those staring eyes was erased! A shimmering apparition of Derek was stretched here before me. I could see through it now! Beneath the shimmering, blurred outlines of his body I could see the solid folds of the couch cover. A ghost of Derek here. An apparition-fading-dissipating!
A gossamer outline of him, imponderable, intangible.
I leaped to my feet, staring down over him.
"Derek!"
The shape of him did not move. Every instant it was more vaporous, more unreal.
I thought, "He"s gone!"
No! He was still there. A white mist of his form on the couch. Melting, dissipating in the light like a fog before sunshine. A wisp of it left, like a breath, and then there was nothing.