The Space Warp Read online

  “Bunk!” Woodcroft decided, setting his square jaw. “Just something to fill the paper. The scientists have been pretty quiet lately since the talk about a World Atomic Pact. They have to do something to boost circulation!”

  Woodcroft’s remark stopped all conversation concerning the flaw—for the time being anyhow. And whilst it had been proceeding an omnipotent observer would have beheld Earth sweeping onwards in her orbit, nearer and nearer to that mystery region where lay the unknown.

  And in faraway Florida, Woodstock J. Holmes, the great financier, was becoming somewhat concerned for his eighteen stones of blubber. Warnings had been battering at him, and everybody else, for such a long time he was com­mencing to take notice. Suppose there was something in it? And, because he possessed so much money and influence, even to owning the main airline between Florida, New York, and London, he was able to pay the expense of a famous American scientist to come and talk things over with him in his hotel.

  “What I want to know, Sheldon, is: how will it affect me?” Holmes strode up and down the fan-cooled room as he talked, motioning with his fragrant cigar. “I’m too big a man to be involved in some scientific hocus-pocus which might upset my financial plans.”

  Sheldon, as cold-blooded a scientist as any alive, eyed the tycoon steadily. “Big man or otherwise, sir, I’m afraid it means trouble,” he answered. “As for your financial interests—their continuation depends on how things work out.”

  “Everything is as vague as that?”

  “I’m afraid so.”

  “What kind of scientists do you call yourselves? Before stampeding the world as you are doing you should work out some kind of preventative measure. You fellows live too much in the clouds. You forget how many interests are going to be disturbed by this—this something.”

  “We have no preventative to offer, Mr. Holmes, and warning had to be given.” Sheldon hesitated, looking puzzled. “Might I ask why you sent for me? Surely not just to repeat what has already been broadcast?”

  Holmes came to a stop in his pacing, his jowls shaking as he thumped the table beside him. “I want you to tell me where I can find sanctuary. Where is the best place to go? The Tropics, the Arctic, or what? Which spot on this planet is the safest?”

  “There will not be one. The Eskimo and the Hottentot will be equally affected. Don’t you understand, Mr. Holmes, that we just don’t know what will happen? But we do know that the entire Earth will be involved.”

  Holmes gave a grim smile. “Now you listen to me, Sheldon! Science, the treasured baby of the Government these days, must have made some kind of preparation for this potential disaster—or whatever it is. Science loves its secrets far too much to leave them open to possible destruc­tion. You and other scientists must have some spot on this Earth where you feel you can perhaps be safe. Where is that place? I have the right to know. Dammit, my own money founded the Institute of Molecular Research, anyway! Not that I know a thing about molecules, but my accountants tell me I might as well be philanthropic.”

  “All scientific formulae and other things of value have been transferred to Annex 10 in the Adirondack Moun­tains,” Sheldon answered. “Annex 10, in case you are not aware of it, is a full-sized building built as a retreat in case of war. It is overshadowed by a gigantic mountain ledge that protects it from the air, and it stands at least five hundred feet above ground level. Every scientist of importance is also there, waiting to study this space-warp phenomenon when it arrives.”

  “That’s all I wanted to know.” Holmes stubbed his cigar out in the ashtray. “I’m coming back with you. I’m as important as any scientist—in fact more so. Without my money science would be in a mess anyway.”

  “I shall have to get permission,” Sheldon said, reaching for the phone—but Holmes stopped him.

  “Permission be damned! That I shall be with you will be enough. We’ll leave right away.”

  In face of which there was, nothing Sheldon could do, but he wondered how his brother scientists would take it when the money-bags strode into their midst.

  * * * * * * *

  Meanwhile, in England, Martin Horsley had arrived at his old-world hotel in the heart of Sussex. It lay well back from the main road, screened by elm trees. The nearest habitation was five miles away, hence the hotel was useful only to those who owned their own cars. It was exclusive, hush-hush, and possessed a proprietor-manager highly skilled in the art of handling wealthy clients.

  Grumbling and grousing, as pale as death and about as substantial, Martin Horsley alighted from his Rolls limousine and tugged a plaid blanket irritably about his bony shoulders. “Took you long enough to get here!” he reprimanded the poker-faced chauffeur. “I’m about frozen!”

  “Sorry, sir,” the chauffeur apologised, and wondered how any man could be frozen in midsummer.

  “You will be, Dawson—you will be! I don’t forget things like this. Bah! Nobody cares a hang how much I suffer.”

  “No, sir.”

  “Eh?” Horsley aimed beady eyes and the chauffeur coughed.

  “I mean yessir. Sorry, sir.”

  “Fetch the luggage and stop muttering.”

  The chauffeur obeyed, but he went on muttering—under his breath. Stumping his heavy stick on the gravel of the driveway Horsley advanced to the hotel, passed under its ancient archway, and so into the main hall where the proprietor was washing his hands with invisible soap.

  “Delighted to see you again, Mr. Horsley. Delighted! How are you?”

  “Rotten—and stop blabbering. What rooms did you reserve for me?”

  “Same as before, Mr. Horsley. I think you—”

  “They won’t do. There are bats in this place and I can hear them at night. Change the rooms.”

  “But, sir, I—”

  “Change ’em!” Horsley nearly shouted, and the pro­prietor fled behind his reception desk to make hasty altera­tions in his allocations. Finally he smiled.

  “I have just the right place, Mr. Horsley, if you’ll come with me. You’ll like it. Overlooking the countryside. As you say, most of the upper rooms do carry the sound of bats at night. They’re in the old disused belfry on the top of this building. It used to be a church, you know.”

  “I didn’t know and I don’t care. Show me the room.”

  Still growling and grumbling Horsley crept up the stairs and into the room the proprietor indicated. No man—not even Horsley—in his right senses could have found fault with its clean freshness and country-aired linen.

  “Not bad,” he grunted. “And what provisions have you made for this nonsense which is supposed to happen later his afternoon?”

  “Provision?” The proprietor looked vague.

  “From the look on your face, man, I begin to wonder if you know what I’m talking about!”

  “Oh, yes, sir, I know. This strange business in space. The newspapers are calling it an ‘ether-warp’. Most unusual, I suppose. Certainly I haven’t made any particular provision. I don’t see how one can. I don’t even know what ether is.”

  “I do. I’ve had it numberless times with these blasted operations of mine. So you’ve made no preparation. Not much use me coming here, was it? I came specially to get away from this ether-thing.”

  “I’m sure you’ll be as safe here as anywhere, sir,” the proprietor said, hopefully if not convincingly.

  “I’d better be. Otherwise I’ll hold you responsible! And where’s Dawson with the luggage?”

  “Right here, sir,” the chauffeur answered, coming in with the first consignment.

  * * * * * * *

  At about this time in the depths of the African jungle Henry Brand, an illegal trader in protected animal species, was turning a possible cosmic disaster to his own unscrupulous uses. At the moment he was seated in his bungalow, his base of operations, with his black head boy at the other side of the crude table. And M’Bonga was looking startled, the whites of his eyes dilated against the shiny coal-black of his skin.

  “I
don’t believe you can’t get near the animals,” M’Bonga,” Brand said deliberately, pointing a finger at him.

  “It’s true, bwana. This strange weather is affecting them. They hide from us—”

  “If you and those lazy devils out there don’t start getting results, I’m going to use white man’s magic and do things to the sunlight that will make your ears drop off!”

  “Bwana do—do things to—that?” asked M’Bonga, glancing through the crude glassless window towards the hot stillness of the forest, the sun glinting occasionally amidst the foliage.

  “Correct,” Brand agreed solemnly, and swallowed some whiskey. “You and the rest of those boys have been too lazy lately. It’s over a week since you’ve brought me any animals, and my buyers are getting impatient. If you don’t start getting results I’ll frighten the lives out of you.”

  M’Bonga hesitated, not quite sure what to make of the situation. He was fairly educated and, within limits, loyal, but he had within him the profoundly superstitious fear of his ancestors and the thought of the white man doing something to the lord of day genuinely frightened him. Then he remembered something and half turned as he was about to leave the bungalow.

  “Bwana blot out sun?” he asked, with strong memories of a solar eclipse he had witnessed.

  “No, my friend. I’ll make it three, four, twenty times brighter, and shrivel your souls to Hades!”

  M’Bonga bolted, genuinely scared, to get some action out of his boys. Brand grinned and glanced towards the silent radio. He was much too obtuse to realise that the radio warnings were serious, yet, surprisingly enough, he had spoken a great truth to M’Bonga when he had said what he would do to the sun.

  CHAPTER TWO

  WORLD ON A GRIDDLE

  Between Macclesfield and Leek a somewhat ancient tourer was snorting its way. Samuel Baines sat at the wheel, his round face wreathed in a satisfied smile, a Panama hat of doubtful age pushed onto the back of his greying head. Beside him, likewise smiling, sat his wife Claire. All the noise came from the rear of the tourer where Bertie and Gwen were doing their best to out-shout each other. And, on the ancient rack at the back, was strapped the luggage. In a word, Samuel Baines, insurance clerk, had made up his mind to take his holiday with the family as arranged. As yet it was only ten-thirty in the morning. By mid-afternoon they would be domiciled in the rooms they had booked in Derby; afterwards they could—and would—roam at will. As for the radio warning they had forgotten all about it. It was a perfect summer day with a fleece or two of cloud here and there and a soft southerly breeze. Stay put indeed!

  Then the argument of the two children at the back brought the matter into focus again. It gradually dawned on Samuel Baines what they were talking about.

  “I tell you it isn’t the same ether you get stuck on your face!” Bertie insisted.

  “I say it is!” Gwen retorted. “Can’t be two sorts of ether. Doesn’t make sense. My schoolteacher says that—”

  “Bertie’s right, Gwen,” Samuel Baines cut in. “There’s the ether you use for making people unconscious, and the ether our world is floating in.”

  Silence for a moment, except for the convulsive efforts of the car. Baines hoped no more questions would be asked because he was not sanguine of his scientific ability to answer them.

  “How do you know our world floats in it?” Gwen asked suspiciously.

  “Well—er—I don’t really; but scientists say it is so.”

  “And if something goes wrong with it everything else goes wrong, too?” Gwen persisted.

  “Not everything else,” her father answered, doing his best to think fast. “Just those things that rely on ether for their—their power of transmission. For instance, if a liner sails from England to New York, it does so by using the ocean as the medium on which to sail. But a storm at sea can agitate the ocean so much that the liner may miss its destination entirely, even turn completely around, or generally behave in a manner it wouldn’t in the ordinary way.”

  Samuel Baines blew out his cheeks and wondered how he had ever managed to think thus far.

  “Then in this case,” his wife said, who had hidden depths of understanding which often surprised him, “things which use ether to float on may do as the liner would at sea, eh?”

  “That’s it!” Samuel Baines agreed. “Light and heat are the main things which travel on ether. So if something goes wrong with the ether for awhile, something will also go wrong with every sort of radiation which travels on it!”

  “Which makes me right,” Bertie decided.

  “Right!” his sister hooted, swinging on him. “Why, that’s what I said!”

  “It wasn’t!”

  “Was!”

  And with the vision of another endless juvenile argument looming Samuel Baines sighed to himself and drove on steadily through the hot sunlight.

  * * * * * * *

  Also in the sunlight, but many miles from Samuel Baines and his family, was Douglas Taylor, the radio-engineer. The firm of radio manufacturers by whom he was employed were more or less compelled to obey the Government’s injunction to ‘stay put’, and though it meant telling every employee to go home, it was perhaps the safest. If anything happened to anybody it would not be the responsibility of the firm. So, at a loose end after having reported for work in the usual way, Douglas Taylor gravitated, as he usually did, towards his Nissen hut where he spent his spare hours experimenting with the possibility of receiving radio communication from an extra-terrestrial source. That there were professional scientists engaged on the same work in America and other countries, all using vastly superior apparatus, did not faze him in the least. It was simply something that he enjoyed, a hobby verging on an obsession.

  The hut stood in a field off the main road leading into the Peak District, a field raised high above the others and barren of any pasture. Fortunately the owner was a kindly, rusticated farmer who did not in the least object to the young man’s ‘crazy’ hobby even though he did secretly wonder at the bristling festoons of wires and complex dish-like aerials, which sprouted from the hut’s roof.

  Douglas Taylor stayed long enough to collect some lunch and a thermos flask full of tea at his rooms, and then he set off. He reached his hut around noon and, to his surprise, had hardly entered it before he was joined by his friend and fellow enthusiast, Gordon Briggs. Briggs followed the occupation of motor mechanic, but his heart was in science and his lively imagination was fired by the thought of possible communication with an alien civilization.

  “Never expected to see you, Gordon,” Douglas smiled, holding out his cigarette packet. “Did the garage pack it up?”

  “Uh-huh. The boss got the idea that since we’ve such a lot of inflammable stuff about the place we’d better shut and go home. I had a hunch you might have been told to do the same thing, so here I am. No effort for me to detour to here since the garage is only about a mile away down the road.”

  Douglas nodded, lit his cigarette, then rid himself of his haversack. Gordon looked about him upon the familiar array of gadgets and radio apparatus, and finally towards the powerful generator which took its power from a main overhead feed-line, by special permission of the Electricity Authority. Finally he asked a question: “Do you think there’s anything in this warning business, Doug? You’re a better scientist than I am.”

  “It’s my belief the warning is perfectly genuine,” Douglas answered seriously. “Something is due to happen to this old world of ours which never happened before—or if it did we have no record of it. Come to think of it, some of the Biblical references might be meant to record such a happening. However, be that as it may, I have the uncomfortable feeling we are not going to enjoy ourselves after four o’clock this afternoon.”

  Gordon was silent for a moment, tall, pale-faced, red-haired. Usually he smiled his way through life but this time he looked almost melancholy. He glanced through the window of the hut onto the perfect summer morning outside. “Hard to believe anything can change
that!” he exclaimed.

  Douglas only half smiled to himself. Ever since being a boy he had, from the sheer love of it, spent his time studying scientific books, beginning with an old volume that had belonged to his grandfather, Eddington’s New Pathways in Science, and because of that he knew just how much relies on the continuity of the fabric of space-time. His conception came close to reeling when he tried to imagine what might happen with that essential medium disturbed. As the scientists had said, the results would certainly be unpredictable. It was beyond human ingenuity to forecast just what would happen.

  “Come to think of it,” Gordon said, sitting on an old office chair, “aren’t we rather wasting our time trying to pick up radio signals from space, in view of what’s going to happen? If space itself goes cockeyed what hope have we of trying to establish a contact? We’ve failed even when space is normal, so we certainly won’t succeed when it’s cockeyed!”

  “That,” Doug said deliberately, “is the point, old man. Because we don’t know how space will react I’m pinning my hopes on the fact that its very craziness may give us a chance. The agitation in it may even make us able to bridge the gulf, where normally we can’t. As to wasting our time—well, is there anything else we can do? The only alternative is to sit down and bite our nails while something happens, and that certainly won’t do for me!”

  “Okay, I asked for that. I’m wondering, though, if the solar systems around other stars will be as much involved in this spatial disturbance as ours will be?”

  “It seems logical to assume so. The astronomers don’t seem to know the full extent of the flaw so it’s hard to say how far-reaching it will be.”

  “Suppose—” Gordon hesitated over the thought in his mind. “Suppose it proves to be infinite in extent? I mean, what if Earth goes swirling onwards into an ever-widening flaw that has no end? What will happen to us?”

  Douglas turned his thumbs down significantly and then settled in front of the radio receiver, and made sure that the recording apparatus was operational.