Arthur J. Burks

“ A god had no need to make undue speed.
When I was ready, and not before. I sat down under a fig-tree and thought:
"What shall I create in this Eden?" I began to form pictures in my mind, to make mental designs of the living things I would create. I would begin small. I would, first, make a simple tree. I saw a stately palm in my mind, like no palm that ever grew on Atlantis anywhere. ”

“ I had scarcely absorbed this utterly fantastic thought than I realized something else, something that I could not have seen until I lost the outer, apparent detail of the Building of the Skull, by coming close enough to see smaller, more intimate details. Then I made my second, most amazing discovery. The Building of the Skull was walled, roofed and domed, by an infinite mosaic of tiny hexagonal doors! They were doors of a strange shining metal which something inside told me was far more precious than gold. ”

“ Keep it secret, for all our lives, and afterward, unless somewhere in the Secret Wisdom of the Sages of the Past, there is an answer to dreadful knowledge such as this, to make it safe for men to manage!"
They understood me, every one of them, for they were men of intelligence beyond their time—and why not? Three of them were obviously the Three Masters of Atlantis!
"To trace every possible knowledge of man," said Doctor A, "we must trace in detail the past of every man on earth. That we cannot do. To trace all the past of even one would take generations." ”

“ If I gave them the secret of the Screen, Atlantis would be saved, and the Masters would remain the Masters, I the precocious child. If I refused it, held it back, Atlantis would disappear beneath the waves and I would be the Master of the New World. Millions would die, but what was death save a scientific fact? ”

“ I didn't know how to explain Father Wulstan, or Anghor, but they'd have to be more reasonable than reincarnation to convince me.
"Just what," I asked, becoming more serious, "have you managed to get out of my experiences, if you must call them that, as Anghor? Before you answer, it strikes me that all Anghor's palaver about the creative power of thought is on a par with what we've seemed to prove about reincarnation, a kind of waking-sleeping nightmare! How could anybody except the gods create by the power of thought?" ”

“ The other window was my own development, kept as secret as the Mist Screen, of radar.
In this radar I could see any part of Atlantis at any time. And so, within my vessel I saw the terror strike. I studied, each in turn, the great cities of my native land. Their minarets, their spires which, before the Creeping Mist came down, were like new snow reflected in the sun. Never in the world were there beauties made by man such as were found in the cities of Atlantis. ”

“ But one thing I did know: if my metal bird did not yet possess the will to fly, if it were as man had been before God breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, so that he became a living soul, then the world was not ready for my metal bird. Yet, if the world were not ready, why had I, a priest of God, dreamed of the metal bird, and finally, made of it a thing of clay only because proper metals, proper gums for the wheels, and proper motive power, were not yet available? ”

“ We had been warned by one of the Masters, ten years before, of the Creeping Mist. By now, ten years after, it should have been called the Mounting Mist which hid the light of the sun, save as the dull glow of it came through to blister tender skin and fill the heart with growing terror.
"You are facing destruction, people of Atlantis," the Supreme Master had said, standing on a tall white pillar in the central square of Sian, "if you do not use natural laws as they were given you to use them. Disobey the laws continually, and they will destroy you, surely as the sun rises. ”

“ You are remembering."
"I'm remembering a lot I didn't bargain for," I said. "Dean Hale is Father Wulstan, or was, and Father Wulstan is now Dean Hale. Now, if you'll just tell me who Dean Hale is, I'll be satisfied!"
"Dean Hale," said Doctor A, "whoever he may turn out to be, is the total of all his past. If reincarnation is true, he has lived countless lives, many useless, many evil, many good. Thus have all men lived, if reincarnation is true. If it is, and we prove it, we as scientists are interested only in your past scientific lives." ”

“ And if you're somehow giving the world the benefit of what we're doing and believe that man can learn from the evil in his past, dredge up my disastrous lives if you wish, also."
"Maybe I can find other volunteers," said Jan Rober, grinning. "We've made a beginning, let's not stop! We've already seen from the progressive past lives of one man, how much harm a single individual can cause because he possesses too much forbidden knowledge. What a lot each one of us must have to pay for. And how much all of us together have done to unbalance the precision of the world!" ”

“ But for one deliberately to transmit thought—well, I've always believed that whoever claimed to do it was a charlatan, a blasted liar!"
"How," said Jan Rober softly, "do you know what you have always believed when you can't remember so much as one yesterday?"
"I don't know," I said desperately. "That thought came out of my very being, so I know it must be true, whoever I may have been yesterday. But remembering something out of the years since one was born, and something out of a pre-existence, are horses of different shades of falsehood. ”

“ For when I was the One Master, and all the Masters were perished, who could prevent my use of the Creative Fiat? No One, ever!
I could live as long as I wished, and people my En-Don—which men had once called Eden—with living things of my own designing and my own desires. They would be beautiful beyond all dreams. The men would be perfection, the women more perfect than perfection, but there would be one variation of the Law ”

“ With each age of progress of the human mind, Masters have warned you, as they warned the people of Mu, of Lemuria, of Pan. They made it clear to Atlanteans then exactly why Mu, Lemuria and Pan sank under the sea—and that Atlantis herself was doomed to the same fate if she did not reform, return to the proper use of natural law! Some heeded, some did not. It is ever the way. ”

“ For days after I knew the secret of how to dissipate, not once, but repeatedly, and so forever, the Creeping Mist, I struggled with my decision. If I kept my secret to myself, millions of human beings would die in the submersion. ”

“ I could even, if allowed by The Masters of Atlantis, my only superiors, have used the Creative Fiat used in The Beginning, and caused my thought forms, the thought forms of anyone, to live, to breathe, to be! But the Masters had taken the right to use the Creative Fiat away from everyone, including myself, because the majority of Atlanteans had misused it.
One thing I knew which stood out above all others: mankind was responsible for everything that happened to himself, even apparently natural catastrophes. The people of Atlantis, for instance, were responsible for the Creeping Mist. ”

“ To think to decelerate was to decelerate. To think speed was to gain speed—for thought was the motive power which guided the magnet by which my vessel traveled, the switch its signal to perform.
So I came to the surface of the blue sea which lay between the sunlit peaks I had chosen for myself. They still were damp as from a lengthy rain. The water had covered them, long enough to drown all living things upon them save the trees, the plants. The twin peaks were mine. Not one person lived among all the many bodies that floated in the sea about me, and doubtless in the seas beyond the peaks. ”

“ Doctor A gave me a keen glance and then shook his head.
"The crypt of Saint Dennis has been lost to the world for centuries," he said softly. "That's a proved fact. Even if the prank as you call it, was brought about, that metal bird of yours was tucked away in the crypt before fifteen hundred A.D. at which time, if records serve, the world did not use the airplane, especially the jet plane."
"Then," I said, feeling the awe my voice must have expressed, "I, whom you call Dean Hale, and Father Wulstan, are one and the same person. If true, reincarnation is a fact. ”

“ Man had never before in world's history, even in Mu, Lemuria or Pan, advanced quite so far in his use of mind. We still used words with which to express ourselves generally, though a minority of us could communicate directly from brain to brain by thought; but even the lowliest, mentally, of us, had the power to Visualize. In other words, when a man used the Atlantean word for river, he made it clear just what river he had in mind, so that his hearers would not think, one of the River Sian, one of the River Ogra, a third of the River Linu, thus receiving his thought in a blurred way. ”

“ There were four great cities in the richest valleys, beside the most beautiful lakes, and countless smaller ones, and not even the proudest local dweller could have said which city of Atlantis was the most beautiful. ”

“ How clumsily it transmits them man will know when he can do it without using telephone, wireless or radio, all of which are merely forerunners of communication by direct thought between brain and brain. No, Anghor, we Atlanteans had something, twelve thousand years ago, which man has now lost. If, through the cyclotron, we are able to regain it, or some mechanical channel of it, it may again enrich the world—if, in our opinion, the world is again ready for it, will not misuse it. ”

“ They varied in appearance as men usually do, and their ages ran from perhaps twenty-five to seventy-five, Doctor A being obviously the eldest and the dean of the Lab.
Even the fact that all were men in white did not serve to hide their differences. Their eyes were unusual, all of them. I think they held a coldness, a searching hard coldness, in common. They were men of science, by their appearance, and they were ruled by science.
Each would have given his life for science, if by so doing he did not slow the progress of science instead of advancing it. ”

“ On a televisor, produced by personal thought, beside the skull of the "speaker," appeared an exact replica, a picture, of the very stretch of the River Sian which the speaker had in mind. In effect, this was an adaptation of the Creative Fiat, but so was everything a man did with his brain or with his hands. The only difference was that the Creative Fiat was limitless, every adaptation of it limited, because man had limited himself by his doubts of his own ability. ”

“ I glanced past the chairs—nobody had yet asked me to sit down, and Marian Slade had disappeared somewhere behind me—and spotted the electric panel for the first time. But another minute passed, a minute during which the profound scrutiny of the "scientists" became deeper, more profound, before I connected the electric panel with the chairs.
Those seats arranged around the cyclotron were electric chairs! Each chair would be filled with a human being, and all could be electrocuted at one time, and if all were "vanishers," who would care? ”

“ So, we made a niche for the metal bird in solid rock, a niche which was itself a kind of chapel, just big enough to take the spread wings of the metal bird. I looked at the six vents under the clay wings, and the wheels and staves from which essential elements were missing, and wondered if ever inventive man, in all his generations, had ever left so much to faith in God, and man's future?
We blocked the small "chapel" with a rectangle of stone, and cemented it tightly. I marked the Cross and date upon it in red paint, and blessed myself and my fellow priests before we left the crypt. ”

“ From my brain alone, the scientists could recover from the Invisible Records, more of world history than could be found in books. If men had existed through endless lives, man the individual had—and I was merely one. ”

“ The metal bird did not travel with the speed of light but it did travel faster than sound, for far behind me as I flew, with my hands fast on the odd instruments which guided the bird, I heard an awesome noise. ”

“ I said, "but it just occurred to me that medical and surgical science is often hampered because it can't work with human beings, though how this occurs to me I don't know. Assembling missing persons, orphans, people in whom nobody has the slightest interest, whose eternal disappearance would cause no questioning, would be a boon to such scientists, and a source of revenue to whoever provided them with human guinea pigs." ”

“ Other engineers, working with the design, issue orders, which they have carefully thought out, to many junior foremen, who pass them on. Laborers, carpenters, cementers, plasterers, stone-and-sand workers, receive the thought-out orders, turn them over in their minds, absorb them, transmit their own personal, individual orders to their own hands and feet. The hands and feet, directed by thought, perform the myriad details of labor which result, in time, in the Grand Coulee Dam, greatest work of man existing on earth today save one—the Great Wall of China, also the result of thought. ”

“ Detective Jan Rober had arrived and made himself at home in the Lab. I grinned at him.
"Checking on your investment, I see?" I said.
"I've been getting a lot of lowdown on you, Adam," he retorted. "For a man who can't remember yesterday, you've been doing an awful lot of remembering. Also, it appears to be exact and very useful remembering. I wish somebody would explain to me just what it's all about?"
"First," I said, "would you like me at last to clear up the mystery of the murder of Marian Slade by Dean Hale?" ”