P. Schuyler Miller

“ Dampier was hopping from one foot to the other like a hen on ice. "No, no, no, Monsieur!" he cried. "You have not heard all! You must lend another ear! There is no substance that will reflect all things; that is true. Only a fool would believe it. But what of a wall that has no substance—that has no existence in what we call reality but that is as fixed and unshakable as the roots of the universe—a wall, a discontinuity of Space itself?"
Bill stopped halfway up the stairs. "Say that again," he demanded.
The little Frenchman's hands went winging out in hopeless resignation. ”

“ Monsieur Crandall recognized in me that Pierre Dampier who vanished from the world of science five years ago. It was Wilhelm Nebel who made me to flee like the wild goose. Nebel—the chief of munitions, the millionaire, the so great diplomat, whose hands reach out to every country, regardless of boundaries or the hatred of races. Even in France I was not safe! The finger of Nebel was in the pie of our government. He twisted it—poof! Spies of the police investigate me. They ask questions. They give me the degrees. But I tell them nothing. They can find nothing. ”

“ Bill Porter's scribbled notes stop there. In the split millionth of a second before the twist of Nebel's fingers could throw the balanced sphere over the boundary to completion, his body shorted the power that fed the great machine. It was in time! Momentum of growth, gained in that instant of which Dampier had told me, swept Nebel and his gunmen to their death, and as the zone collapsed the incalculable energies trapped in it burst forth in a holocaust of atomic flame. ”

“ Pierre Dampier is forgotten. But not by the accursed Nebel!
"Here in America is a free country where only the dogs, the automobiles, the husbands must have licenses. There are no foolish papers to carry about, no questions to answer to the police. I can hide like a rat in the mousecheese, and be safe. But not from this son-of-an-unpardonableness Nebel! His men are everywhere. He sees everything. Only here I can protect myself. Here I can kill before I am killed! ”

“ It was not the thing itself we saw, but the things reflected in it—a little, twisted, shining world swimming in the heart of that ball of distorted space. Peering closer, I saw that the coils which shaped it were glowing with an eerie, frosty white light. I stared, fascinated, and by what? By a half-invisible bubble, like an indoor baseball, conjured up by some legerdemain to make fools of us! It was nonsense! I jerked my eyes away—and saw them.
Three men with guns stood on the little stair, watching us. They were gentlemen, polished, clever gentlemen adroit at the art of death. ”

“ I couldn't do much but stand and watch Dampier as he bustled about, tuning up his crazy-looking machine. He talked a blue streak as he worked, but most of it went right over my head. I'm no Bill Porter. I did begin to see why Nebel, if he was behind the world's armaments racket as Dampier claimed, might be pretty anxious to get hold of such a thing before the little Frenchman began peddling it to his best customers. In the right hands it might make war very unfashionable.
Imagine an invaded nation squatting down behind a perfectly reflecting wall. They can't see out, but nothing can get in. ”

“ A millionth of a second—less perhaps—but in it chance, and whatever power it is that rules chance, had checked the thing whose illimitable growth would have swept our universe before it in an avalanche of destruction. ”

“ Once the zone is complete it is a bubble—a nothingness—entirely apart from our Space and Time. The forces build up very rapidly, exponentially, but until the very instant of completion, even if it is one little billionth of a second before that moment, the zone will collapse if the power which builds it is shut off. Never in practice would one go so far. Long before it is complete, such a zone will repel all things that can be directed against it, while the balance of power still remains in the hands of him who has created it. ”

“ Electrical and magnetic apparatus would be subject to strange disturbances. And gravitation—how would it affect that? Would every outside object be attracted to the mirror, or would it be repelled by a kind of negative gravity, lifting it into space, to the moon, the planets, to the very stars? I wish now that I'd known at least a fraction of what Bill did, and had been able to read what he read in these few sheets of neatly written paper. I can only guess, from what Dampier said and from what I saw. What his zone really was—what it could do—I do not know. ”

“ No metal can reflect all wavelengths. No substance can resist a force greater than those which created it and hold it together. As for magnetism, gravitation, they're space-warp forces. Things can't stop them. Sorry we're not in the market for Sunday features today, and I rather doubt that Herr Nebel is. You've got brains—I'll grant you that. You have some energy source in the handle of that little gun of yours that would turn industry up on its tail overnight. I haven't the slightest doubt in the world that you may have blasted the atom wide open and made it sit up and beg. ”

“ There is no way of disproving that we may not in turn be the images of some greater universe than ours, outside of the Einsteinian boundaries of our Space and Time.
"Jeans, and others, have postulated that the size of such a closed universe must depend upon the number of physical particles included in it, and that it will expand, as our universe is expanding, until that size is reached. Dampier's closed zone, containing the same number of image-particles as our own outside universe, must expand to the same size, and at a vastly greater rate. ”

“ Enemy shells bounce off into the enemy lines. Death rays flash back into the faces of those who sent them. Radio is garbled by all kinds of curious echoes and reflections, making communication impossible. ”

“ That's no weapon—or defense either, unless you're figuring on Nebel's crowd developing a death-ray or something like that for the next war."
Dampier chuckled. It was about as self-satisfied a chuckle as I've heard. "Death-rays—maybe. I do not care. Bullets, shells, bombs, I tell you nothing, nothing can break through the barrier of total reflection! And it is a weapon as well, to turn the enemy's own strength against him."
Bill was sitting up straight in his chair. ”

“ At the end he had added five neat equations, and below them the remaining space was filled with his closely written lines.
"These added equations prove Dampier's analysis to be incomplete," he had written. "Such a totally reflecting zone has every characteristic of the closed, intangible boundary of the Einsteinian universe. It may be considered the boundary of such a universe in miniature, containing every force and body of the greater outside universe which it reflects. Neither is more real, in the physical sense, than the other. ”

“ It may be that the cosmic atom, postulated by Abbe Lemaitre, from which our universe was born, was the creation of some Dampier of a super-universe, who failed to check its growth, and that its swelling bubble is crushing the mighty cosmos of which it is the ultimate image, as Dampier's completed zone would crush our own. ”

“ All light that falls on it at the proper angle is diverted, turned back. Walls of steel and concrete, such as I have here about me, will repel the bullets of powerful rifles, the shells of small guns, like the little balls of ping-pong. ”

“ But there's no substance, known or unknown, that will do what you claim, and there never will be. If you have no objections, Monsieur, we will be on our way, and in exactly one hour I will call the police. ”