For Cartaphilus, his face worn and aged, had bowed his head as
though surrendering to forces greater than his will-to-die. And he
was droning in a drab, lack-lustre voice, "Tell the engineer to
reverse the polarity of the alternate hypatomic motors. Transmit the
counter electromotive force helically through the forward coils.
Use full power. Keep all motors running at top speed. Cut out the
intercommunicating and lighting systems; there must be no D.C. current
in operation anywhere on the ship. The cross-currents will--"
Chief Engineer Lester's face was a masque of blank dismay. He husked,
"A hysteresis bloc! It might work. Nobody ever thought of it before."
"What do you mean?" That was Cap McNeally.
"His suggestion. Heterodyning the web-coils, so we'll counter the
H-layer radiation with an alternating current of our own. It's just
about one chance in a million!"
"Then take that chance!" cried the skipper. "Try it! Do as he says.
And, for God's sake, man, _hurry_!"
Cartaphilus, his eyes drained of all expression, rose sluggishly. Once
more he spoke, faintly. "It will work," he said. "It will work, and I
have failed again. And all because I would not let Him rest...."
His voice broke in a great, wrenching sob. Then he lurched from the
control room like a broken thing.
* * * * *
I never saw him again. No one aboard the _Antigone_ ever saw him again.
For the next hour we were in a turmoil, rearranging the electrical
units of the ship as Cartaphilus had told us. We finished our task just
in time; scant seconds after we had thrown on the power we nosed into
the web-like field of force which is the H-layer.
It was a breathless moment. Despite our efforts, there was not a man of
us but expected a brief, brilliant instant of horror--then oblivion.
But we were as wrong as Cartaphilus had been right. There was a jolt
as our forcefield met that of Earth's shield; the permalloy hull of
the ship sang and hummed and glowed cherry-red under the impact of
that terrific electromotive strain, but we slipped through the barrier
with greater ease than ever had any ship using the old style shield
generators.
In our jubilation we quite forgot the mad scientist whose strange,
last-minute change of mind had saved our lives. We landed. And sometime
between the moment of landing and the moment when we remembered our
passenger, he fled. Disappeared completely from the ship and from our
lives.
Cap McNeally was nothing if not a square-shooter. He refused to take
credit for the invention that had brought us through the H-layer. The
patent rights were taken out in the name of our deranged passenger.
The "Moran H-penetrant" it is called. All spaceships used it until
just recently; until Cap Hawkins of the _Andromeda_ and the Venusian
scientist, Jar Farges, discovered Ampies could be used as H-layer
shields.
But afterward, Cap McNeally came to me, wondering.
"Why should he have wanted to die, Brait? I can't understand it. A man
like John Cartaphilus; wealthy, intelligent, respected--was he really
mad, do you think?"
I hesitated. I, too, had been wondering about that. I had gone so far
as to look up the life history of the mad scientist. I had found
several curious things. No man knew when, or where, John Cartaphilus
had been born. All agreed that he was "remarkably youthful" in
appearance. It was rumored that he had outlived a wife married in
youth; that she had been an elderly woman when she died.
I said, "I told you there had been a scandal in his life, recently,
Skipper. It concerned a friend of his, a worker in one of his shops.
"Cartaphilus was, and is, a genius, but he has a reputation for driving
his men too hard. They say that on this occasion, seeking the answer
to some problem that evaded him, he forced this assistant to labor for
weeks, begrudging him even a few hours sleep each night.
"On the eve of the solution of the problem, this worker came to him,
nervous, ragged, exhausted, begging for a brief respite. Claiming he
was sick with overwork and fatigue. But John Cartaphilus insisted,
impatiently, there was no time for rest. He ordered the man to get
about his work.
"The job was completed. But the friend died. The doctors said it
was a pure case of exhaustion. When he heard this, Cartaphilus'
brain snapped. He blamed himself for the man's death, fled Earth. He
became--or so we may believe--the wandering spaceman we found in the
asteroids."
Cap McNeally frowned.
"Do you believe that story, Brait?"
I started to say no. I started to tell the skipper something else I had
discovered while probing into the life history of John Cartaphilus.
Something that, to my mind at least, more fully explained the oddness
of our erstwhile passenger.
It was an old legend I had run across. The queer story of a man with
many names ("I have had so many names," Moran had said) who wandered
endlessly about the Earth, perhaps the universe now, simply because he
had not let another rest for a moment on his doorsill.
Sometimes this man had been known as Cartaphilus. He had also been
known as Juan Espera en Dios, as Ahasverus, and as Butta Deus. The
Parisian gazette, "Turkish Spy," had in 1644 A.D. reported his presence
in that city traveling under the name of "Paul Marrane." But men in
general knew him by a more descriptive name. The Wandering Jew. The
Eternal Jew....
But I did not tell Cap McNeally this. After all, it was a fanciful
thought. And surely Moran--or Marrane, or Cartaphilus--was mad when he
claimed to have met and talked with Simon Magnus twelve hundred years
ago?
Anyway, when we saw that ad in the classified columns of this week's
_Spaceways Weekly_, and McNeally claimed Moran would return to claim
his reward, it raised again the question in my mind.
Will he return? Or will he find, at last, whatever peace awaits him out
there? In the vast emptiness of space, where the power cannot--must
not--extend? I wonder....