Eric North

“ There are experiences so delicately balanced on the line dividing the physical and mental worlds, that there is no distinguishing between the reality and the dream. This nightmare impact hurled them to their feet in a clammy horror.
Not yet, however, the full of the Incredible. The cry, high-pitched by its emotional charge, had found its vibrational color complement in a stab of blinding white light; but now, as it faltered, the immeasurably lower vibrations of the threedimensional drew it into a pattern of recognizable human speech.
"Terra! . . . Terra! . . . Can you hear me. Terra? ”

“ It is a matter, Ace, of vibrations, operating on their own inherent source of power. Dr. Walstab looked around him with suddenly dreaming eyes. "The creative power, gentlemen."
Again fell a little silence, broken only by the sibilant orchestration coming from the cosmar screen. It seemed to Professor Graut that a new and strange note had joined them—a note uncomfortably suggestive of urgency, even disaster, in some cosmic pocket of space, and he frowned and stared at the pulsing visual background. ”

“ He was in a world of the mind, of the elemental. Another thought came. Rather, it was a sensation. His body was becoming heavier. His sight was a trifle blurred. He seemed to be subtly balancing between real and unreal. With understanding, sweat started on his forehead. The effect of the vibrational inoculation was evidently passing. The seven aeons were coming to an end. He must hurry . . . hurry.
He rounded a corner and halted abruptly. Before him was a wide foyer spaced with cones of gleaming metal. ”

“ But every man now recognized a slight and sinister taint.
Jaguers shrugged and turned the switch off.
He said, as he took his place at the granite desk: "It's not in the machine, whatever it is, sir. All the same. I'll make a check-up later. That new smell . . ."
"Stink," the Ace Commander said. "Maybe a dead planet some place."
He grinned.
Professor Graut said soberly: "I don't like it. Jaguers, make the check as soon as you can. No, leave the screen alive. That new sound may link with the odor. Well, now . . . time's getting on. ”

“ Fight it!" Dr. Walstab said hoarsely. "We must keep our own consciousness, whatever happens. Sit quiet. Sommers will come out of it . . . At the moment, the whole thing is being re-enacted . . . I don't doubt he's working with some sort of mind machine there . . . wherever it is, whatever it is. Easy, now. This faintness will pass."
Jaguers wiped the sweat from his face. He said nothing, but his eyes were tormented.
"A thing like that . . ." the Ace Commander was muttering. "Chris Sommers has been dead for two years . . . two years."
"Obviously not dead," Dr. Walstab said sharply. ”

“ Walstab was only half listening. This was, as he had bluntly reminded Professor Graut, a practical aspect of Terra Research which belonged solely to practical men. His absorbing interest—you could almost call it an obsession—lay with the abstract. In his classes at Solar University, before he had been specially applied for by Research, E.S.P. Seven, this unyielding attitude has earned him the class soubriquet of "Old Mind Stuff Walstab". He did not resent it. Rather, he took pride in rooting intelligent life in the soil of the mental, as opposed to the material, plane. ”

“ It will be repeated when seven eons have gone. Your vibrations will then be fixed permanently to those of this sphere."
He thought over this, staring at the twin and ghastly faces.
"I see. And . . . if I don't get this other dose?"
"There is no escape, Chris Sommers. We have a definite need of your Sphere 1 body. It is your great fortune to give yourself to the science of Sphere 2—the Second sphere . . . whose Great and Glorious God and Ruler is Elemental Pan." ”

“ A sphere, they call it. The Second Sphere . . ."
"Planet?"
"I don't think so, no. Ben, can you hear me?"
"Yes. Go on. Only tell us where, Chris. We'll have you out of it. Tell us where? WHERE?"
"I can't." Sommers' voice faded out. It came back on a desperate note. "Are you there, Ben?"
"Yes. Never mind what happened to you. Where ARE you?"
"Some . . . of laboratory . . . I got away from them . . . Look, I'm using one of their . . . No, it's no good . . . Can't get enough power . . . my voice."
"Chris! Keep going, old boy."
Suddenly, a white-lipped Dr. Walstab was at Jaguers' side. ”

“ He was not very well up in this sort of thing, but he thought he now knew the answer to some, at least, of the problems surrounding the fantastic stories of flying saucers, unidentified space ships, and so on, which suddenly appeared over Terra and as inexplicably disappeared. Sometimes only fragments of such a machine were seen . . . like an arm thrust through the dividing curtain and then withdrawn. Machines from the Second Sphere, only partly successful in the attempts to manifest in the First Sphere. ”

“ Professor Graut put in gently: "What Walstab means, I think—and I agree with him—is that there is a larger consciousness which can only be comprehended in the life to come, but which in moments of stress in human affairs does occasionally attempt to influence personal decisions."
The Commander laughed.
"I'm afraid. Professor, I have no belief in human survival. Religion! Heaven and hell, and all the rest of it! You'd think, if there were any real clues we'd have found at least one of them by this time, now that we're free to explore Space. Life everywhere . ”

“ Jaguers . . .!"
Although the throw of the Odour Switch had been instantly cut again, the dull, musty odor that had crept into the room sickened them. There was about it something tomb-like and cankerous. Ace Peters said, in a strangled voice: "It's a dead world . . . dead. This is insane. I'm with you there. Professor."
The Cosmar Screen knew a sudden agitation and Dr. Walstab cried urgently: "Blank your minds . . . throttle back your own thinking . . . Sommers is coming back to consciousness."
He was lying on a couch in a room walled about with glass, or what seemed to be glass. ”

“ Jaguers shook his head.
"No. I've seen a man disintegrate. He fell to bits, as you might say, all in one piece. But with Chris it was a piece at a time. We were nowhere near the gravity tug- line, either, so it wasn't that."
"I'm only learning on your side of the fence," Dr. Walstab said. "When you say gravity tug-line, Jaguers . . ."
The Ace Commander interrupted. "We don't know much about it. In theory, it's the dividing line between solar pull and galactic pull. If you don't take it at the right speed and inclination, you're for it. ”

“ Tell him to launch his minnows as soon as you flash him."
Dr. Walstab had joined Jaguers at tire cosmar screen. He was talking, eyes burning with urgency.
"Can you hear me, Sommers? Now, listen . . . your vibrations are automatically lowering themselves, but you've got somehow to help them. Can you get over to the window . . . the space you burst in the wall? Good. Do that. Lie flat. Breathe as slowly as you can. Keep drawing in your diaphragm and then releasing it. That will help to slow up your heart and lower the vibrations. Stop thinking. ”

“ In Elemental, this Second Sphere, all vibrations are enormously speeded up. I say, ALL . . . which includes even Time itself. Two years of our own time could conceivably be matched by only two days of Elemental time; possibly as little as two hours. Since Chris has, by our reckoning, been in the Second Sphere for two years already, and has not—so far as we can yet gather—received his second and final vibrational inoculation, it follows that the seven aeons are not yet up. ”

“ I think . . . coming after me . . . seems like something's rousing . . ."
"Chris!" Jaguers shouted.
Ace Peters said: "He's gone." He looked like a man in a dream.
"Well," Dr. Walstab said, in an exhausted voice, "we've done all that it's possible to do. Now we can only wait. Whatever comes will be in seconds . . . Wait . . ."
Report from Challenge Queen was coming in. They listened greedily.
"Have checked our position with that of Vibrant and correct within one point of arc. Ether clear. Very little star swell. Ship now hovering with launching flaps down. Nothing sighted." ”

“ How can we get to him, if we don't rightly know where he is? Elemental? The Elementals? Where is Elemental? The navigating charts don't list the name. Maybe some asteroid . . ."
Walstab shook his head.
"We'll begin there, Ace. If you know anything of what we call occultism, you'll know that there is a great body of evidence to prove the intrusion into our system of a class of beings of a low state of spiritual development, but not necessarily of intellectual development, known to us as elementals."
"Poltergeists?" Jaguers said.
"Including Poltergeists," Walstab agreed. ”

“ Walstab told them, "I.G. is a machine for picking up mind pictures. It is compounded—I am speaking quite roughly—of ores ranging from uranium, kasolite, curite, and so on, to the black Australian davidite. All ores give out rays. If you like, wavelengths. By compounding certain such rays, after some years of careful experiment, I have—I hope and believe—found a wavelength that is not, frankly speaking, of tiie physical and three-dimensional, but enters into the economy of the mind itself. ”

“ If the account given by Chris is correct, this plane is called the Second Sphere, or Elemental; a sphere next to, and larger than our own Solar or First Sphere, and corresponding to its space surface in location though not in substance. There are thought to be a number of such spheres, each one wrapped successively about its fellow, and rising in outward order and development. There is also some evidence suggesting that it is to Elemental, or the Second Sphere, that certain patently undeveloped souls in Earth life are sent after death ”

“ Recognizably men, but men deformed and physically distorted to nightmarish proportions. Their thin, hairless faces were paper-white and ageless, and their bodies were sunk into long tunics of an indeterminate green. ”

“ His mind went back to the lectures of his graduation days at Solar University, and the post course in astral photism; how each vibrational light world co-existed with those immediately below and above it, so that although they were fused each had its independent practical world. In three-dimensional Terra, for example, you could thrust out an arm into apparent space, yet that arm could actually be penetrating a solidity—say, a battleship sailing on an ocean—in a four dimensional set up. Everything was a matter of vibrations ”

“ Walstab said thoughtfully. "You think E.S.P.—my E.S.P. can touch more deeply than even the cosmic rays?"
"Because, impinging from without our cosmic pattern, instead of from within, as I have said, they are not subject to three dimensional restrictions. Exactly. I'm afraid you don't look very sympathetic, Jaguers?"
"Not in my line of country, sir. I believe in things I can see, hear and touch. Results . . . I mean, of course, proved results. I don't see how it's possible to prove telepathy."
"Can you define that?" Graut challenged. ”

“ The rounded arc of the continuous wall was completely bare, save for a large oblong cosmar screen set in part relief immediately in front of the desk. To one side of the screen, was the thin metal arm of the pantagraph that plotted a continuous graph of the activities passing over the glowing inter-stellar background, on an adjacent inwinding belt of white parchment. The belt was automatically fed into a slot in the wall immediately below a red desk marked; Visual Records—I.S.O.7.
"What is gravity?" Graut repeated. "Is it terra pull or cosmic push? Actually, we don't know. ”

“ Miracles of a like kind, do not happen twice."
"So what?" he demanded.
Even now, he could not quite bring himself to believe he was not dreaming all this. It was too utterly fantastic. Some corner of interstellar space, perhaps—maybe one of the many unchartered dark stars known to be in the Jupiter satellite belt. Yes, he could understand that. But all this talk of spheres and vibrations . . . where did that get him? He managed a grin, as he recalled how hotted-up most of them had been at the bit of a party held in the Vibrant's Spacelectricians' Mess the evening before. Some party. ”

“ Professor Grant was speaking to Cartography.
"Jupiter VIII, second arc of sector. Thank you, Sidbee. Flash Challenge Queen telling her to proceed there at once and to clear all space stations, pending further instructions. Note for Operation Elemental: all minnows to be overhauled and in readiness for instant launching. Good."
He turned to Dr. Walstab. He said: "I'm doing what I can, but I say frankly I don't see how we're to get Sommers, so to speak, into the open. ”