Devil Crystals of Arret by Hal K. Wells (most important books of all time txt) 📖

Benjamin Marlowe and his young assistant, Larry Powell, opened the door of the Marlowe laboratory, then stopped aghast at the sight which greeted their startled eyes.

There on the central floor-plate directly in the focus of the big atomic projector stood the slender figure of Joan Marlowe, old Benjamin Marlowe’s niece and Larry Powell’s fiancee.

The girl had apparently only been awaiting their return to the laboratory for around her gray laboratory smock was already fastened one of their Silver Belts, and a cord was already in place running from her wrist to the main switch of the projection mechanism.

 Joan’s clear blue eyes sparkled with the thrill of high adventure as she swiftly raised a slender hand in a gesture of warning to the two men.

“Don’t try to stop me,” she warned quietly. “I can jerk the switch and be in Arret, before you’ve taken two steps. I’m going to Arret, anyway. I was only waiting for you to return to the laboratory so I’d be sure of having you here to bring me back to Earth again before I have time to get into any serious trouble over there.”

“But, Joan,” Benjamin Marlowe protested, “this is sheer madness! No one can possibly guess what terrible conditions you may confront in Arret. We’ve never dared to send a human being across the atomic barrier yet!”

“We’ve sent all kinds of animals across, though,” Joan retorted calmly, “and as long as we recalled them within the twelve-hour limit they always came back alive and unhurt. There’s no reason why a human being should not be able to make the round trip just as safely. Ever since our Silver Belts first came back with the weird plant and mineral fragments which proved that there really is such a place as Arret, I’ve been wild to see with my own eyes the incredible things that must exist there.”

Joan waved her hand in gay farewell. “Good-by, Uncle Ben and Larry! I know that you’ll drag me back just as quickly as you can possibly dash over to the recall switch, but I’ll at least have had a few precious seconds of sightseeing as Earth’s first human visitor to Arret!”

Larry Powell was already sprinting for the mechanism as Joan jerked the cord that ran to the switch, but he was barely halfway across the intervening space when the big atomic projector flared forth in a brilliant gush of roseate flame.

For a fraction of a second Joan’s slender figure was outlined in the very heart of the ruddy glow, then vanished completely. There was left only a short length of the switch cord to indicate that the girl had ever stood there.

Powell reached the mechanism and shut off the projector’s flame, then turned swiftly to the control-panel of the recall mechanism. As he closed the switch on this panel, three banks of tubes set in triangular form around the floor-plate upon which Joan had stood glowed a brilliant and blinding green.

Shielding his eyes from the glare with an upraised forearm, Powell began stepping a rheostat up to more and more power. In his anxiety, he increased the power far too quickly. There was a sudden gush of blue-white flame from the heart of the mechanism, together with the hissing crackle of fusing metal. The green light in the tubes promptly died.

Benjamin Marlowe was bending over the apparatus almost instantly. A moment later he raised a face that had suddenly gone white. There was terror in his eyes as he turned to his assistant.

“The entire second series of coils is burned out, Larry!” he gasped in consternation. “Joan is marooned over there in Arret—marooned in that grim unknown land as completely beyond our reach as though she were upon one of the moons of Mars!”

For a long moment the two men gazed at each other with horror-stricken faces, dazed and shaken. Then they quickly drew themselves together again and set about the herculean task of making the necessary repairs to the damaged mechanism in time to rescue Joan before the twelve-hour limit should doom the girl to forever remain an exile in that land of alien mystery beyond the atomic barrier.

 Their previous experiments with animals had proved that no living creature from Earth could be brought back after it had been in Arret over twelve hours. After that time the change in the atoms constituting living tissues apparently became permanently Arretian, for the Silver Belts returned without any trace of their original wearers.

The necessary repairs to the damaged coils were of such an exacting and intricate nature that any great speed was impossible. Hours passed while the two men bent to their work with grim concentration. Neither of them dared think too much of what nameless dangers might be confronting Joan during those weary hours. Their actual knowledge of Arret was so pitiably slight.

Some months ago, while they were experimenting upon apparatus for reversing the electrical charges of an atom’s electrons and protons, they had first stumbled upon the incredible fact that such a place as Arret really existed. They found that it was another world occupying the same position in space as Earth, with the fundamental difference in the two interwoven planes of existence lying in the electrical make-up of the atoms that constituted matter in each plane.

On Earth all atoms are composed of small heavy protons that are always positive in charge, and larger lighter electrons that are always negative. In Arret the protons were negative, and the electrons positive. The result was two worlds occupying the same space at the same time, yet with matter so essentially and completely different that each world was intangible to the other. They had named the unseen world Arret, the reverse of Terra.

Finding it impossible to work directly upon most forms of matter, the experimenters had finally evolved a silver alloy that served as a medium both for sending objects into Arret and then bringing them back to Earth. By focussing the flame of the projection apparatus upon a Silver Belt of this alloy, the electrical charges of the Belt’s atoms were reversed, automatically causing the Belt to vanish from Earth and materialize in Arret. At the same time the atoms of any object within the Belt’s immediate radius were similarly transformed, and that object was taken into Arret with the Belt.

The recall mechanism functioned by broadcasting a power wave that again reversed the atomic charge of the Belt and its contained object back to that of Earth. At the same time the recall wave exerted an attractive force that drew the atoms back to a central point in the laboratory, where they were re-materialized upon the same floor-plate from which they had originally been sent.

The twelve-hour time limit was half up when Benjamin Marlowe and Larry Powell finally straightened up wearily from their work over the recall mechanism, their repairs completed. It had been one o’clock in the afternoon when Joan Marlowe vanished from Earth in the roseate flare of the projector. It was now nearly seven o’clock.

With nerves tense from anxiety, the two men crossed over to the control-panel of the recall apparatus. This time they donned goggles of dark glass to shield their eyes from the blinding green glare. Marlowe threw the main switch, and the banked tubes came to life in a flood of vivid emerald light.

Marlowe began stepping the rheostat up gradually to more power, advancing it with cautious slowness to avoid any chance of a repetition of the previous accident. The green radiance streaming from the tubes in every direction began to throb with an electric force that the two men could feel pulsing through their own bodies.

 There was a click as the rheostat struck the last notch. The green radiance was now a searing flame that half-blinded them even through the thick dark glass of their protective goggles, while the vibrant force of the green rays was sweeping through their bodies with a tingling shock that nearly took their breath away.

Tensely the two men stared at the metal floor-plate in the center of the area bounded by the flaming green tubes. Just over the plate the green radiance seemed to be thickening and swirling oddly. The swirling eddy became a small dense cloud of darker green light. Then abruptly, like the fade-in on a moving picture screen, from the cloud over the plate the misty outlines of an object swiftly cleared and solidified into a bizarre something at whose unfamiliar aspect both Marlowe and Powell gasped in amazement.

Marlowe snapped the switch off, and the green radiance vanished. Stripping the dark goggles from their eyes, the two men hurried over for a closer view of the thing that rested quiescent and apparently lifeless there on the metal floor-plate.

It was shaped like a huge egg, a little over a yard long, and was apparently composed of a solid lump of some unknown crystalline substance that closely resembled very clear, pale amber. Embedded in the heart of the strange egg were clearly visible objects which caused Marlowe and Powell to gasp in mingled horror and amazement.

Chief among the things imprisoned in that amber shroud was the Silver Belt that Joan had worn, but the Belt was now looped over the bony shoulder of a skeleton that by no possible stretch of the imagination could ever have been that of a creature of this Earth.

The skeleton was still perfectly articulated, and gleamed through the crystalline amber as though its bony surfaces were encrusted with diamond dust. The bones were apparently those of a creature that in life had been half dwarf-ape and half giant rat.

The beast had stood a little under a yard in height. The legs were short, powerful, and bowed. The long arms ended in claw-like travesties of hands. The skull was relatively small, with a sharply sloping forehead and projecting squirrel-like teeth that were markedly rodent.

Around the skeleton’s neck there was a wide band of some strange gray metal, with its smooth outer surface roughly scratched in characters that resembled primitive hieroglyphics.

Marlowe’s face was white with grief as he turned to Powell. “Joan must be dead, Larry,” he said sadly. “Otherwise, she would surely never have allowed her Silver Belt to pass into the possession of—this! She knew that the Belt represented her only hope of ever being brought back to this world.”

For a moment Powell stared intently into the heart of the crystalline egg without answering. Then suddenly he straightened up with marked excitement upon his face.

“There’s a small sheet of paper entwined in the coils of that Belt!” he exclaimed. “It may be a message from Joan!”

Swiftly the two men lifted the amber egg up to the top of a workbench. Powell took a small hammer to test the hardness of the strange translucent substance.

He struck it a sharp rap, then recoiled in surprise at the effect of his blow, for the entire egg instantly shattered with a tinkling crash like the bursting of a huge glass bubble. So complete was the disintegration of the egg and the skeleton within it that all that remained of either  was a heap of diamond and amber dust. The only things left intact were the Silver Belt and the metal collar.

Powell snatched up the Belt and extracted the small piece of paper that had been firmly tucked into its coils. Hurriedly written in pencil upon the paper was a message in a handwriting familiar to both Powell and Marlowe: