Read Ebook: The ghost planet by Leinster Murray

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Ebook has 305 lines and 15550 words, and 7 pages

on the Eastern coast. At that time Tom Drake worked obliviously in McGuire's laboratory. He did not even hear the spot news announcement. The dawn traveled westward and the cities woke in their turn. Buffalo woke, and Cleveland, and Detroit and Chicago.

The dawn went on toward the Rockies. It crossed them. And Tom, in Pasadena, blinked wearily at the new-risen sun in the Pacific time-zone when the globes took their first specific overt action against a human being.

It was in Cleveland at a quarter to nine, local time. The morning rush to work was in full swing. Away downtown, where Euclid Avenue runs into Lincoln Square, the sidewalks were crammed with workbound pedestrians. It was an extraordinarily bright and sunshiny morning for the city of Cleveland.

The air was utterly clear and the look of things was normal in every possible way. Hurrying, crowding people--stenographers, bookkeepers, minor executives--salesgirls, porters, typists, clerks. The sidewalks were crowded and the pavements between were jammed with traffic.

Even the walkways around the very ugly Lincoln Monument were filled with people using them as short cuts across the square. Everything was exactly as it had been ten thousand mornings before and could reasonably be expected to be for ten thousand mornings after.

But suddenly, above the noise of feet on concrete walks and the sounds of traffic in the streets, there came a high shrill scream.

Other figures shrank away from him, clearing a space and staring at him. There was absolutely nothing that they could see at first to account for the pudgy man's panic. He screamed again and again and a policeman shouldered through the crowd toward him.

Then the crowd noticed that his screams grew thinner. Standing there before them in a ten-foot cleared space, the little man's shrieking grew muted as if far away. His mouth was open and his body was rigid in a paralyzed horror. But his voice grew thinner.

Perhaps, at this time, some of those about him began to notice that the clarity of the morning air had faded a little. The sky was not quite so blue and the sunlight was dimmer. But they noticed first that his body began to grow translucent. His screams had only the volume of whispers then, but they were high pitched and penetrating.

They saw Mr. Handmetter become more and more translucent and then become transparent--still making the faintest of shrill screams--and finally he faded into nothingness in the deep shadow which had fallen imperceptibly upon the square as he vanished.

When he had gone--then quite all of the square and blocks of Euclid Avenue itself and other blocks of other streets opening into the square became like madhouses. Those who had known only of something strange occurring in the square and had been craning their necks saw more than they had bargained for.

They saw a great, thousand-foot globe acquire the seeming of substance, bit by bit. At the beginning it was so thin and so tenuous that none really saw it. But as the substance of Mr. Handmetter diminished the substance of the wraith increased.

It became misty even in the sunlight. It grew smoky. Partitions and floors appeared within it. Shapes moved, dimly seen through its spherical walls. It grew more and more opaque--and it was an alien Thing, not wholly real but certainly not imagined.

Then the wave of panic broke in the Square. Men fled from the shadow of the thing of smoke. And, like a flood of pure terror, others turned and fled until all downtown Cleveland became a bedlam of screaming, fleeing humanity.

It was a catastrophe of major proportions in dead and injured in the crush. But actually, nothing whatever had happened save that a mist-globe had settled down in Lincoln Square, and one single human being--Mr. Handmetter--had turned slowly to mist as he screamed his horror and the mist-globe increased in thickness as he vanished.

It was a thousand feet in diameter and it had, at the end, just as much of substantiality as a globe of smoke containing a hundred and fifty pounds of substance might have had.

But then it rose sedately from the square--the ugly Lincoln Monument withdrawing from its substance as the globe arose--and ascended swiftly and diminished to the size of a tennis ball, then to the size of a marble, then to a spot and a speck and a mote--and then vanished utterly.

Mr. Handmetter, of course, vanished with it.

Out near Pasadena Lan Hardy smiled brightly at Kit across the breakfast table. It was one hour later by actual time, and one hour earlier by local clocks. Tom came in from the lab, McGuire following him. They sat down at the table. Tom looked discouraged. McGuire drank his coffee without a word.

"Father," said Kit. "What do you think of that Cleveland affair?"

McGuire nodded at Tom.

"It knocked my ideas all out," said Tom. "I should've known it in advance, though. But now I know that what I was trying to make wouldn't work even in theory."

Lan said cheerily, "Why didn't you ask me to help, Tom?"

"I was doing it by ear," said Tom morosely. "Trying to work out a theory that would work by finding out what didn't."

McGuire said abruptly, "You had some good ideas, though."

"What were you trying to do?" asked Kit.

"Trying to make a ghost," said Tom, sourly. "That Cleveland business shows it can't be done without ghost material to swap. But it's perfectly obvious once you see it! I made a fool of myself!"

Lan Hardy attacked his breakfast with a hearty appetite. He smiled sentimentally at Kit from time to time.

"This young man," said McGuire, almost grimly, "has an idea that fits the pieces together better than anything else that's been suggested to my knowledge. There are stars which shine and are quite actual but with no greater densities than the vacuums in vision-screen tubes.

"They are matter as compared to the emptiness of interstellar space, but a star shouldn't exist with no greater density than that. There've always been mathematical difficulties in computing their constants. So Tom suggests that they're actually ghost stars--stars of which the planets will be ghosts like the one between Earth and Mars."

"That's the idea you sprang last night," said Lan, smiling. "A beautiful way to dodge a lot of problems."

McGuire looked detachedly at Lan. He said, "His suggestion is that there may be two parallel universes with one or more dimensions in common. It's been postulated before. Some oddities in electronic behavior call for more than three dimensions in the greater cosmos of which our cosmos is a part.

"Tom suggests that a sun in that other cosmos may, because of the dimensions common to both, be on the borderline of existence in this. Conversely, a solid sun in this universe may be a ghostly apparition in that.

"Like a cork floating on water. To a fish it is perceptible but hardly significant because it only touches the water and is not in it. The ghost planet and the ghost-globes are detectable in this cosmos, because they touch it. They aren't real in it because they aren't in it. They're ghosts to us. And"--McGuire said abruptly--"that would mean that we are ghosts to them."

"The cork," said Tom, tiredly, "could become real to a fish if it tried to pull something out of the water. As it pulled something into the air some of it would be pulled into the water. They pulled a man into their cosmos. So some of their globe was pulled into ours."

"But--but--" Kit said uneasily. "Why'd they do it?"

"Tom's idea, and mine," said McGuire, "is to ask them, since the Government says I'm crazy. Tom encountered one of their globes three months ago near Mars. Maybe the ghost planet was on the way and that was an advance scout.

"Or maybe it was an exploring vessel and the ghost planet came when it reported a civilization here. Maybe it came to be a base for a really thorough examination of our solar system and our civilization for whatever it is that they want."

"But what is it?" demanded Kit.

Her father shrugged. "They haven't found it, certainly. Today they took that poor devil from Cleveland. Maybe they mean to ask him where it is."

"Took him--"

"Tom spent all night," said McGuire, "trying to work out a gadget to put some matter from this cosmos into that or into the borderline state at any rate. If we could do that we could communicate with them or, if necessary, even fight them."

Tom said gloomily, "But it can't be done--obviously. I see now. The amount of energy and matter in any cosmos is fixed by definition. It can't be varied. So to put something from this cosmos into another, whether it's energy or matter, an exactly equivalent amount of matter must pass from that cosmos into this. It has to be--"

He stopped short, his mouth open as if in amazement.

"That's it!" He swung to McGuire. "Of course! Can you get hold of a space-ship? Any size! Anything! We can do it."

But Lan leaned forward gracefully. "Look, Tom. You're suggesting that by pulling a part of another cosmos into this, you can pull a part of this cosmos into that. You spoke of an analogy to pulling a cork down into water by making it pull a fish out of water. But don't you see that on an atomic or molecular scale such an arrangement would be unstable? They'd tend to pop back into their own space."

Tom shrugged. He was about to say that the ghost-ship had managed it in Cleveland.

But Lan went on gently, "Really, Tom, before you demand that Mr. McGuire get hold of space-ships and such things--don't you think you should--well--consider the facts? After all, Mr. McGuire has so much more experience than you have and is so much better qualified in every way, that--well--your theories are interesting enough--"

McGuire said sharply, "Your friend has some theories, at any rate. Have you any to offer?"

"Kit asked me to come here, sir," said Lan brightly, "to do technical work. Lab work. I've been ready to get to work at any instant, sir. But I wouldn't presume to make suggestions."

McGuire stared at him. Then he said shortly, "Let Kit brief you, then, and see if you can come up with some contributions to equal your friend's. This isn't a ceremony. It's an emergency, with a pack of politicians too busy thinking of politics to see what they're up against!"

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