I found Dr. Weatherby beside me, and I turned to him. I was stiff,
cramped and cold. I tried to smile. “We’re all right . . . still, Dr.
Weatherby.”
“Look,” he said. “We’re beyond them.”
A darkness loomed ahead. To the sides the brilliant star-points seemed
rushing together; clustering to form other, fewer white points. And the
whole, sweeping backward into the seething radiance which lay behind us.
Soon it was all back there, a shrinking white mist of fire; billions of
seething particles of star dust shrinking together.
“Watch it, Leonard. It is our universe. Watch it go!”
We turned to the rear window. Everywhere now was empty blackness, except
directly behind us. A silver mist hung back there in the void. It was
dwindling. Then I saw it as a tiny, flattened, lens-shaped silver disk.
But only for an instant, for it was shrinking fast.
A lens-shaped disk! A point of white fire! A single faint star—a single
entity! No . . . not a star; nothing but an electron!
For a breath I realized how near it was. A single tiny white spark,
trembling outside our window. I could have pinched it with my thumb and
finger.
It trembled, vanished into blackness.
* * * * *
A day passed, a day to us because we ate our meals, and slept. But to
the worlds, universes outside our windows, congealing behind us into
single points, winking and vanishing into an oblivion of space and time,
this day of ours was an eternity.
Our dials had long since become useless, a billion light-years from our
starting point. A billion billion, and even that dwindling with our
changing standards and viewpoint into a space we could have held in our
cupped hands. Of what use to try and measure it. Or even conceive it.
The black, empty firmament had only remained empty for a moment. Ahead
and off to the sides other luminous points showed. For hours Dr.
Weatherby and I sat together watching them.
There was a moment when a single star gleamed far ahead. But soon it was
a spiral of whirling star dust. It spread to the sides as we leapt at
it. And every myriad particle of it suddenly showed as a tiny swirling
spiral mist of yet other particles.
They spread gigantic, each of them a nebula—a universe. One of them
whirled directly through us, a white stream of tumbling radiant dust.
Behind us it shrank again to a single point. And the billion other
points shrank into one. And the one faded and was gone.
A night of this. Was our own universe an electron? I realized it could
hardly have been that. Call it an intime. If we had encountered it now,
it would have been too small for our sight. The tiniest swirling
particle flashing through us now was composed of billions of universes
as large as our own.
The night passed. We sat calmly eating our morning meal. The human mind
adjusts itself so readily! Physical hunger is more tangible than the
cosmos of the stars. Dr. Weatherby gestured toward the windows where the
points of luminous mists momentarily were very remote.
“I should say that we . . . this vehicle is larger than any intime now.
Possibly larger than electrons.
“Soon we will find ourselves among the atoms, and the molecules. There
will then be a change. Very radical.
“A little more coffee, Alice, please. Presently I am going to try and
erect our electro-telescope. Then I must get a little sleep.”
He seemed, indeed, upon the verge of exhaustion.
* * * * *
There was a slow change all that day. These glowing things we were
passing—universes, stars, or electrons or intimes, call them what you
will—they seemed now more uniform; those at a distance, more like
opaque globules, gray. And they seemed almost solid and cold. Yet it was
the illusion of distance only, for we passed through several of
them—streams of white fire mist as always before.
At noon a black void of emptiness surrounded us. It was the longest, the
most gigantic we had encountered, an hour of it.
Then again a point showed. It spread to the sides of us. But it was
different. I could not say how. It was vague, gray. It streamed past,
very distant on both sides and beneath us. At one moment I fancied it
appeared as a distant, gigantic enveloping curtain, gray and vague. But
then I thought it was a film of tiny globules, solid, entities,
unradiant.
I called Dr. Weatherby. But before he arrived, the grayness had all
slipped behind us. He saw it as a gray, formless blob. It congealed to a
point. And then it vanished.
“That was an atom, Leonard,” he said. His voice had an excitement in it.
“That was our first sight of anything of the new realm large enough to
have an identity. Substance, Leonard! The substance of which our
universe, our earth, is so infinitesimal a part. Everything we see now
will be identical with it. The atoms! We are emerging!”
* * * * *
They aroused me from sleep some hours later, calling me excitedly. I
found them all in the instrument room crowded around Dolores who was
sitting on the couch, her hands pressed against her forehead. Jim cried;
“She’s getting thought-waves, Len! Some one is communicating with her!”
Dr. Weatherby was murmuring, “What is it, Dolores? Do you get it clearer
now?”
“Yes. Someone is thinking: _We can see you! We see you coming!_”
“Yes, Dolores. What else?”
“That’s all. _We’re watching! We see you coming!_”
Jim murmured in a low voice, “The man on the cliff! The young man and
the girl in distress!”
Dolores shook her head. “No. This is someone else. Closer. Stronger. The
thoughts are very strong.”
“Can’t you see anything, Dolores?” Dr. Weatherby touched her, shook her
gently. “Try, child. Tell them to think about themselves.”
“I see—” she stopped, then stammered; “I see . . . a light. A very big
light. There are people—”
“Men?”
“Yes. Men. Three or four of them. Sitting near a light. It shines so
white. It hurts.” But she put her hand, not to her eyes but to her
temple. “I’m thinking to them, _Why can’t I see you? I want to see you!_
Wait. Now, I understand. He, someone thinks at me, _Try your telescope!
Haven’t you a telescope? Soon you will see us. We have seen you for a
very long time._”
Alice blurted out, “How long, Dolores? Ask them that.”
“No,” commanded Dr. Weatherby. “That’s absurd. Dolores—”
But her hands had dropped from her forehead. “It’s gone. I’m tired. My
head is tired.”
Jim drew me to the window. “Look there! I was on watch. When this began
appearing I called everybody. But then suddenly Dolores began getting
the thoughts.”
* * * * *
The scene outside was wholly changed. Beneath us, to the sides and
ahead, a grayness stretched, a continuous solid grayness. Elusive,
formless, colorless; I could not guess how distant it might be save that
it stretched beyond the limits of my vision. But ahead and above us, the
scene was not gray. A vague, luminous quality tinged the blackness up
there. Luminous, as though a vague light were reflected.
There was no visible movement anywhere. But presently, as one staring at
a great motionless cloud will see its shape is changing, I began to see
changes. The flat gray solidity was not flat, but hugely convex. And it
was slowly turning. Huge convolutions of it were, slowly as a cloud
bank, taking new forms. And all of it was slowly moving backward.
Then we came to the end of it. Black emptiness ahead. Behind us was a
gray-massed, globular cloud. Then another, its twin fellow, came rolling
up beneath us in front, spread to the sides, shrank again behind us.
“Molecules,” said Dr. Weatherby. “See how they’re dwindling!”
I saw presently, swarms of them, always smaller. And ahead of us they
seemed congealed into a gray solidity—a substance, it was passing
beneath us, and to the sides.
Again quite unexpectedly, my viewpoint changed. I saw our vehicle
plunging upward, its pointed bow held upward at an angle. A solidity was
around us; to the sides, gray, smooth curtains; overhead a glow of white
in a dead black void.
A black void? My heart leaped. That was not blackness up there above our
bow! It was blue! Color! The first sight of color. A blue vista of
distance, with light up there. Light and air!
Beside us the smooth gray walls were smooth no longer. Huge jagged rocks
and boulders, a precipice! We seemed in some immense canyon, slowly
floating upward. But it was a dwindling canyon. And then abruptly we
emerged from it.
I saw its walls close together beneath us. An area of gray was down
there; gray with a white light on it. The light made sharp inky shadows
on a tumbling naked waste of rock.
The gray area was shrinking to a blob, a blob of gray shining in a
brilliant light. Directly beneath us, stretching to the horizon on both
sides, lay an undulating white level surface. The single blob of gray
was down there on it. And off in the distance, where the surface seemed
abruptly to end, gigantic blurs loomed into the blue sky.
Dr. Weatherby was calling me to the tower. I found him trembling with
eagerness. “Leonard, I have the electro-telescope working. Look through
it.”
I gazed first through the front and overhead tower windows. The white
disk filled a perceptible area of the sky. But it was not like a sun; it
seemed rather a smooth, flat disk with light behind it, a white disk
with a dark narrow rim. Clear, cloudless sky was everywhere else. And
very far away, behind and above the white disk, I saw a gigantic,
formless, colorless shape towering into the blue of distance.
“Look through the telescope, Leonard.”
I gazed upward through the electro-telescope. Its condensing lens
narrowed the whole gigantic scene into a small circular field of vision.
I gasped. Wonderment, awe swept over me. The blue sky was the open space
of a tremendously large room: I saw plainly its ceiling, floor and
distant walls.
The giant shape was a man. He was bending forward over a table—the
table was under me. The man’s hunched shoulders and peering face were
above me.
For an instant my mind failed to grasp it all. I swung the telescope
field downward, sidewise, and up again. And then at last I understood.
This was a room, with men grouped at this nearer end of it around the
table—men of human form, intent faces framed with long, white hair.
The undulating surface over which our vehicle was floating, was a slide
of what seemed glass, a clear glass slide with a speck of gray rock
lying in its center. And the white disk over us in the sky was the
lower, small lens of the microscope through which these men were
examining us!
VI
THE NEW REALM
Twenty days! So full of strange impressions I scarcely know how to
recount them. Yet, after such a trip, they were days of almost
normality.
Our vehicle beneath that microscope had grown rapidly in size. And with
our expanding visual viewpoint, and the nearness of solid, motionless
objects, its velocity seemed infinitely small. It barely floated past
the microscope, settling to the floor of that huge room; and with a
normal proportionate size, the Beta ray shut off, it came to rest.
They crowded around us—old men, loosely robed, and with flowing white
hair, seamed, sooth, hairless faces, stern, but kindly, and eyes very
bright and intelligent.
They crowded around us, at first timid, then friendly, talking together
excitedly in a strange, liquid tongue.
Dr. Weatherby tried to greet them and to shake hands. They understood
neither his words, nor the gesture. But in a moment they comprehended.
And shook hands, all of them with each of us, very solemnly.
The room had oval openings for windows; light was outside but it seemed
rather dim. Presently one of the men tried to herd us along the wall of
the room.
“No!” said Dr. Weatherby. “Don’t go! We must stay in the vehicle!”
But when we turned toward it the men resisted us with a sudden stubborn
force.
“Don’t!” I shouted. “Jim, stop that! We’d better go with them.” The old
men seemed to have gone into a sudden panic of violence. They were
pushing, shoving us. They obviously had little strength, but the
commotion would draw others from outside.
We yielded, and they herded us down the long room. A panel slid aside.
We crossed a long, narrow viaduct, a metallic bridge with high parapet
sides. We seemed to be a hundred feet in the air.
I caught a vista of low-roofed buildings: verdure—giant flowers on the
roofs, streets down there, and off in the distance a line of hills.
The air was soft and pleasant. Overhead was a blue sky, with gay white
masses of clouds. There seemed to be no sun. The light was stronger than
twilight, but flat, shadowless.
At the opposite end of the viaduct the ground seemed rising like a hill.
A small mound-shaped building was there: a house with a convex roof
which had a leveled platform on one end, a platform banked with vivid
flowers.
It seemed a two-storied building, built of smooth, dull-gray blocks.
Balconies girdled it. There were windows, and a large, lower doorway,
with a broad flight of circular stairs leading up the hill to it.
Our viaduct led us into the second floor of the house. We entered on a
large room, an oval, two-storied room so that we found ourselves up on a
sort of second-story platform, midway from floor to ceiling.
Low couches were here, a row of them with sliding panels of what might
have been paper dividing them. The platform, this second story, was some
thirty feet, broadly oval. It had a low, encircling railing; a spiral
staircase led downward to the main floor of the apartment.
I saw furniture down there of strange, unnatural design, a metallic
floor splashed with vivid mosaic pattern, a large gray frame, ornately
carved, with a great number of long strips stretched across it, strings
of different length. It seemed not unlike an enormous harp lying
horizontal.
Narrow windows, draped with dark gauze, were up near the ceiling. They
admitted a dim light. This whole interior was dim, cool and silent. A
peace, a restfulness pervaded it. And our captors—if captors they
were—seemed more like proud hosts. They were all smiling.
But when they left a moment later, I fancied that they barred the door
after them.
“Well,” said Jim. “I can’t say but that this is very nice. Let’s look
things over and then go to bed. I’m tired out, I can tell you that. Say,
Dolores, it just occurred to me—these fellows can’t understand a word
we say. But you were thinking thoughts to them a while ago, and you
understood each other. Why don’t you try that now?”
It had occurred to me also. Why had these people understood Dolores’
thoughts, when her words were incomprehensible? Were thoughts, then, the
universal language? Tiny vibrations which each human brain amplified,
transformed into its own version of what we call words? It seemed so.
Dolores was clinging closely to Alice’s hand. In these unfamiliar
surroundings she was at a loss to move alone.
“I did,” she answered Jim. “I tried . . . but there was so much noise.
They could not hear me.”
“Try now,” said Dr. Weatherby.
“I will. I am.” She stood motionless, hands to her forehead.
There was a long silence. Then she said, “I think . . . yes, someone
thought to me, _The Man of Language will come to you_.”
“Is that all, Dolores?”
“Yes. That’s all. It’s gone.”
“The Man of Language!” Jim exclaimed. “An interpreter! Dolores, what
about that young man and girl who were in distress? They were out here,
weren’t they?”
“I don’t know. I never get their thoughts now.”
“Try.”
“I have tried. They may get mine. I can’t say. But they never answer.”
They brought us food, meals at intervals, strange food which now I shall
not attempt to describe. But we found it palatable; soon we grew to like
it.
Then a man came, whom afterward we learned to call the Man of Language.
He wore a single garment, a queerly flaring robe, beneath which his
naked legs showed.
His face was smooth, hairless. But the hair on his head was luxuriant.
His head, upon a stringy neck, was large, with a queer distended look,
and with veins bulging upon his forehead.
Yet withal, he was not grotesque. A dignity sat upon him. His dark eyes
were extraordinarily brilliant and restless. His smile of thin, pale
lips was kindly, friendly. He shook hands with each of us. But he did
not speak at first. He sat among us, with those restless eyes regarding,
observing our every detail.
We soon found he knew no word of our language. He had come to learn it,
to have us teach it to him. We were made aware, later, that all these
people, compared to ourselves, had memories extraordinarily retentive.
But this man, he called himself Ren, was even for them, exceptional. His
vocation was to learn, and to remember.
He began with simple objects: eyes, nose, and mouth. Hands, a table, a
bed. As though he were a child, we pointed out our eyes, and named them;
one eye, two eyes, a finger, two, three, four fingers.
It seemed like a game. When we told him once, it was never forgotten.
But it was a game which to us, even under such conditions, soon became
irksome. We were impatient. There was so much we wanted to know. And
though we never tried to leave this building in which we were housed, it
was obvious we were virtual prisoners.
Ren came after every time of sleep. He stayed hours; his patience, his
persistence were inexhaustable. We took turns with him, each of us for
an hour or two at a time. Occasionally Dolores would try to make
something clear by thinking it. It helped. But he did not like it. It
was necessary for him virtually to go into a trance before he could
receive Dolores’ thoughts.
Gradually Ren was talking to us, broken sentences at first, then with a
flow surprisingly voluble. He used queerly precise phrases, occasionally
a sentence inverted; and with a strange accent of pronunciation
indescribable.
We had tried to question him when first he could talk. But he avoided
telling us anything we wanted to know, save that once, at Dr.
Weatherby’s insistence, he assured us that our vehicle was safe. And
that the small fragment of rock beneath the microscope—that tiny gray
speck which held our universes, our earth—was under guard so that no
harm could come to it.
This was a city, the capital, the head city of a nation. Its people had
lived here on this globe since the dawn of their history, ascended from
the beasts which even now roamed the air, the caves, forests, and the
sea.
Ren smiled at us. “You too,” he said. “I can realize you are of an
origin the same.”
He did indeed think we were of a human type very primitive. The men of
science who had seen us coming out of infinite smallness beneath their
microscope, had remarked on it.
The small protuberance in the corner of our eyes, the remains of the
beasts’ third eyelid, the shape of our heads, our almost pointed ears—I
noticed that his own were very nearly circular—our harsh voices, our
thick, stocky, muscular bodies were indications that they remarked on.
We discussed it. But Jim interrupted. “How did your men of science know
that we were coming out of that piece of gray rock?”
It had been partly by chance. The fragment of rock had been a portion of
the interior wall of a room wherein scientific experiments were being
made. Ren used our words, “Experiments in physics and chemistry.”
One of the scientists had found himself receiving strange thought-waves.
Ren described them. They were Dolores’ thoughts. The scientist traced
them with measuring instruments to the wall of the room, but could be no
more exact than that.
Then, later, from a tiny protuberance of the wall, a glow was observed.
It proved to be a sudden radio-activity; this protuberance of gray stone
had become radiant. Electrons were streaming off from it. The scientists
chipped it off the huge block of stone of which it was so small a part,
and put it under a microscope. It was violently radio-active. And from
it they observed a stream of red.
“Our Beta ray,” Dr. Weatherby exclaimed. “Our voyage, the disturbance we
set up made the substance give off its electrons.”
“Yes,” nodded Ren. “They think so. They examined it beneath the lens,
and after a little while they saw you.”
Alice said, “My sister was getting thoughts from here.” She told him
about the mysterious young man and girl, threatened by some unknown
danger, a strange cliff, the young couple at bay upon a ledge, the
valley beneath them filled with a nameless horror.
* * * * *
Ren’s face clouded. “Yes. We have had thoughts from them. But now the
thoughts have stopped. Those two are the children of our ruler. You
would call him our king? They are the young prince and his sister, the
princess.
“A year ago they both disappeared. A year, that is ten times daylight
and darkness. We did not know why they went, or where. Run away, or
perhaps stolen from us, for our king is very old and of health quite
bad. Soon the prince will be king.
“But they disappeared. There is a very . . . a horrible savage people in
the forests beyond the great caves. You spoke it truly, my lady Alice.
They are a nameless horror; we do not often speak of things like that.
We fear our prince and princess may be there.
“And here at home there is a growing trouble as well. Our women, the
young girls particularly, are very restless and aggrieved. They do not
like their lot in life. Some already are in rebellion.
“On the great island is a colony of virgins, where no man may go. We
thought . . . we hope that perhaps the virgins had stolen our prince and
princess, to hold them as hostages that we may be forced to yield to the
virgins’ cause.”
“The prince and the princess stolen,” Jim exclaimed, “and you’ve done
nothing about it?”
Ren smiled gently. “We have done a great deal, but to no purpose has it
been as yet. We got the prince’s thoughts. He was asking us for help.
But he would not say what threatened, and he could not say where he was,
for he did not know. And then the thoughts suddenly stopped.
“Oh yes, we have searched. The island of the virgins was invaded. But
the virgins—indeed no woman of our nation—will admit knowing anything
of our prince. We have organized an army. All the nearer forests have
been searched. And now we are getting ready to invade the caves. But it
is not easy to get men for our army. That nameless horror—”
His voice held an intonation almost gruesome. He changed the subject
abruptly.
“Our king, very shortly now he will want to see you. He feels, perhaps,
you can aid us. You men, of strength, and these two young women—they
might perhaps be of assistance in dealing with our virgins. But you will
have to be examined, your minds gauged, so we may know if your oath of
allegiance is honorable.”
“By the infernal, mine will be!” Jim exclaimed. “I’ll go with your army
to the caves, nameless horror, or not.”
* * * * *
Jim, with Ren, later joined me. And then Dr. Weatherby approached.
“Where are the girls?” he asked.
They were in another part of the building. I noticed Dr. Weatherby
gazing downstairs with a furtive air, as though he had come here to join
us, knowing the girls were not here, and not wanting them around.
Jim was saying, “You think, Ren, that tomorrow—I mean after our next
sleep—that the king will want to see us?”
“Yes,” answered Ren. “Perhaps tomorrow.”
“When we’ve taken the oath,” Jim added, “they’ll let us out of here,
won’t they. If we’re going to join your army.”
Dr. Weatherby sat down among us. He said to Ren, “You spoke of your king
being in ill-health. Do you have much sickness, much disease, here?”
“No,” replied the old man. “Our climate is healthy. Our people have
always been so. There is very little—”
“I mean . . . perhaps you have doctors, men of medicine, who are quite
skillful?”
“Yes. There are such. In the past they have been very learned. The
records of our history—”
“And surgeons, perhaps, very skillful surgeons?” Dr. Weatherby was
leaning forward; his hands, locked in his lap, were trembling.
Ren said abruptly, “What do you mean?”
“I mean . . . my granddaughter, Dolores, she is blind.”
The man nodded gravely. “That is so. It is very sorrowful. I have seen
others here. It is a terrible affliction.”
“But your surgeons, Ren. I have dared hope that she might be cured.”
There was a moment of breathless silence. A pity for Dr. Weatherby swept
me. Ren would shake his head: he would say, “No, she cannot.”
But he said, “Why, it could of course be done.”
“There is the question of an eye available.”
“You mean you wonder about a transfer. It is strange, but even though we
are so different,” Ren said, “our eyes are identical in structure.”
Dr. Weatherby went into further details concerning the complications of
Dolores’ blindness, but Ren shrugged away its import. “It can be done,”
he repeated. “And there is a man who will give us the missing link.
Loro, a criminal who must die. He is repentant now. At his trials he
pleaded that he might live long enough to expiate his crimes.
“Loro will volunteer. I know it.”
VII
THE SACRIFICE
“Are you sure she will see when they take the bandages off?”
“I think she will, Alice. They say she will.”
“But we don’t know. I wish she’d awaken. We can take the bandage off
then, can’t we?”
“Yes. Dr. Weatherby will do it.”
Alice tip-toed across the room and back. “She’s still asleep. I wish
she’d awaken. Will it have to be as dim as this in here?”
“Yes, I think so. Dimmer, maybe. They’re afraid of the first light for
her.”
The intricate, deeply involved operation had evidently created a
widespread interest throughout the city. Surgeons had come, examined
Dolores, held innumerable conferences, examined Loro, whose eyes, as
they had suspected, could be used with perfect satisfaction. They
anticipated there would be no difficulties. This was their decision
after their final conference: they were capable of giving sight to
Dolores.
We had not yet been out for our audience with the king. Nothing more had
been said concerning it; the operation had become all-absorbing to
everyone. The city quite obviously was in an excitement over it, an
excitement only surpassed by our own publicly unexplained presence.
They had taken little Dolores up to our roof-top, where, from below, a
curious throng gazed up at her. And then taken Loro. I heard the wild
cheering.
I had wondered why they would not take one eye only, that each might
see. But they had told me that it was impossible. In this instance, a
lone one transplanted could not survive. There were technical, deeply
medical reasons for this. I did not pry into these.
Then they brought Dolores back. Her eyes were bandaged.
Hours passed. The healing fluid they said was very swift. When Dolores
awoke we could remove the bandages. Alice and I sat together.
Dr. Weatherby entered with Jim. Behind them, lingering near the doorway,
was the chief surgeon who had performed the operation. He said softly,
“You can awaken her. A little less light. Then you can take the bandages
off.”
We awakened her gently. She sat up weakly, in bewilderment. “Oh, the
bandage, yes, I remember now. They told me it was over. I was all right.
And then I went to sleep.”
We gathered around her. A flat gray twilight was in the room. Dolores
sat in the bed. Her long, dark tresses fell forward over her white
shoulders.
My breath came fast. To see the light, form, color, the world, for the
first time!
Very slowly, gently, Dr. Weatherby unwound the bandages. They dropped
from his trembling hands to the bed.
“Now, Dolores, open your eyes, just a little.”
The dark lashes on her cheeks fluttered up, and closed instantly against
the light. She could see!
Her eyes opened again, timidly, fearfully. But they stayed open,
glorious dark eyes, luminous, eyes that were seeing! Eyes with light in
them.
They opened very wide. Surprised, wondering!
“I see! I see!” There were no words to express her emotion. Just
surprise and awe surging in her voice, stamped on her face. “I see! Jim,
is that you, Jim? Why, that’s Jim I see!” Her hand went to her eyes as
though to clear a blurring vision. “That . . . must be Jim. Come here,
Jim. I want to see you closer.”
He fell on his knees beside the bed, and her hands went to his
shoulders, his face, his hair.
“Jim, it _is_ you! It looks like you!”
* * * * *
“When do you suppose this king will see us, Len?” Jim asked. “How is
Loro?”
“Oh, you weren’t here when Ren told us. More to it than he said, of
course but that’s none of our business and we’re not going to make it
our business. It was the end for Loro. It must have been planned that
way.”
“I surmised as much. It’s pretty tough. At least he carried out his last
wish and was able to make atonement for his crime by giving Dolores her
sight. Now to our problem: I wish the king would see us. What did Ren
say about that?”
I understood that our audience would be at any time. Ren was to let us
know. Dolores had again fallen asleep. From where Jim and I sat I could
see her bed, with Dr. Weatherby sitting there beside her.
Jim said, “When we once see the king and get out of here, things will
look different. Why’s the old doc sitting there so long? He acted queer
to me, Len. Did you see his face when he knew that Dolores was cured?”
I never answered the question. We heard a sound from in there, a choking
cry, and saw Dr. Weatherby with a hand clutching his throat.
“Len, what the infernal—”
We rushed in. Dr. Weatherby sat looking at us. He had torn the collar of
his robe with convulsive fingers. He stared at us. His hands were
groping for the sides of his chair. “Len! I can’t . . . can’t get up!”
Before we could reach him, his great head sagged to the high hunched
shoulders. He twitched a little, then slumped inert.
I swung on Jim. “Go pound on the door! Tell them to let you out! Get
Ren! Tell Ren to bring a doctor, someone to help us!”
“He’s . . . dead?”
“No! Unconscious. He may be dying. Get help.”
* * * * *
They believed that Dr. Weatherby was dying. He lay in a room off our
main apartment now, still unconscious, lying with closed eyes,
motionless save for the tiny stirring of his breath.
It was, by earthly standards of day and night, now late afternoon, a
soft, pale daylight. After another time of sleep the long night would be
upon us.
They could not say how long Dr. Weatherby would live. There seemed
nothing to do for him. The shock of his joy over Dolores, the let-down
of the tension under which he had been laboring, had brought a collapse.
In hushed tones, with the awe of death upon us, we sat talking. We were
on the upper half-story of the apartment off which the small bedrooms
opened. I heard the sound of the door downstairs, and heard Ren’s voice.
“How is he?”