_Last Chance_
Through the door swarmed Kingallis and four of his henchmen. They
paused to get their bearing and then they plunged forward, shouting.
Rhine made ineffective gestures against them--pure instinct, for her
senses were shocked by their abrupt appearance.
Carroll cursed. His sense of timing told him that there was no second
to waste, yet his right arm hung useless and he was reeling weakly from
the shock. They did not fire again as they came swarming across the
floor, but their interception of his move was as effective. Kingallis,
with an angry shout, caught Carroll and hurled him away from the panel.
[Illustration: Kingallis caught Carroll and hurled him away from the
panel.]
Two of the others took Rhine by the arms and drew her back out of the
way.
"Now!" snarled Kingallis, with sheer animal tones in his voice. "We'll
see about this!"
He waved the other two aside and back and then stepped forward to slap
Carroll across the face. The blow, meant as an insult strong enough to
arouse fighting instinct, was strong enough to stagger Carroll.
"Weakling," scoffed Kingallis. He back-handed the staggering physicist
again and again, driving Carroll against the far wall of the laboratory.
"Come on and fight," sneered Kingallis.
Rhine shrieked in mad anger. "Fight?" she shrilled, "after you've shot
him?"
Kingallis kicked Carroll in the abdomen. "Coward!" screamed
Rhinegallis. With a superhuman strength born of sheer madness, Rhine
hurled herself out of the hands of her captors and raced across the
floor. Her fingernails came down across her brother's face drawing a
torrent of blood from torn eyelids. At the same time she kneed him in
the stomach. Her blow was more effective than Kingallis's had been on
Carroll. He stumbled back writhing in pain.
But only for a moment--he straightened and cursed blackly, stepped
forward and slapped Rhine across the face, hurling her back into the
hands of the others by the force of the blow. Then he turned quickly
for Carroll had recovered.
But instead of going to Rhine's rescue Carroll turned and raced madly
across the floor. He hurled his good shoulder against the master
switch, driving it home.
Relays slapped home--
And light itself was tortured. The very walls of the laboratory seemed
to shake and waver because of the mighty electrostatic stresses set up
in the continuum of space. The square, precision-machined equipment
warped into non-mechanical distortions.
Vastnesses of energy flowed in a mad vortex. Steep gradients of
electrostatic charge flowed back and forth like the surface of a stormy
sea, and corona discharge hissed and trickled out of all sharp corners.
The nerves tingled and muscles twitched; normal senses produced
abnormal stimuli. In one man's hand one of the weapons discharged into
the floor and he tried to hurl it from him with a cry of pain. He could
not open his clenched hand.
Twitching with every erratic reversal of the charged field that
surrounded the area, James Forrest Carroll painfully pulled himself
to his feet and looked across the shimmering room. Pride and
self-confidence added to his will-power. He stood there as his tingling
brain considered the facts of the matter.
Regardless of what happened now--regardless of himself or of
anybody--he had won this battle. He laughed and in the tortured
continuum of the place his laugh sounded like a mad cackle.
Fear was painfully slow in coming to the faces of Kingallis and his
cohorts. Then it came--fear and the realization of danger. King gave an
angry, wordless cry and tried to cross the laboratory floor. He could
not quite make it.
* * * * *
Carroll turned his back on them and watched the viewplate on the far
wall. It was wavering and distorted but it showed the sky and the
sphere of negative mass.
Out in the parabolic reflector, the tiny compressed sphere of energy
disappeared into a hole of blackness, from which expanded an exploding
shell of sheer light-energy. Against the reflector it poured in a
howling torrent and into the sky it went--and disappeared.
Faster than the light it created it went, on and out into space.
Gone--unseen--undetectable--save for the black circle on the wall of
Carroll's laboratory.
There it was evident as a column, a cylinder that blazed like the
fury it was. How long it lasted is beyond guesswork. Its duration
was several seconds in the making, its velocity the speed of light
multiplied by an unknown quantity that registered in the thousands.
It was--the Lawson Radiation--the Lawson Radiation multiplied
and increased as the light from the sun is greater than the pale
ineffective illumination coming from a Will O' the Wisp.
It only took seconds, while the continuum heaved and strained to
regain its equilibrium and the sensitive nervous systems of those in
the laboratory tingled and screamed to the dictates of flowing energy.
Seconds only it took for that flying column of energy to reach the
black circle that was the negative mass that menaced Terra.
[Illustration: It took only seconds for the flying column of energy to
reach the black circle of the negative mass that menaced Terra.]
Yes, seconds only, it took. The negative mass that menaced Sol could
not have been far away.
Then cylinder and sphere met in a singular lack of display. The
cylinder, narrow but shining, bored into the sphere, dark and menacing.
Perceptibly, the sphere slowed, dragged, came to a halt--then
accelerated in the reverse direction.
In milliseconds the celestial body of negative mass had been stopped
and re-started on its return trip. It accelerated swiftly, the
acceleration-factor itself rising as the energy from the column became
the energy of motion of the negative mass.
A negative mass--similar to a negative energy-level--demands energy
before it can be stable. Its demands were satisfied and then satiated.
It raced into unthinkable velocities before the column of energy was
all used up and still the column poured into the negative mass.
It could not have been accomplished against a positive mass but the
negative mass possessed negative inertia. The harder it was driven, the
less energy it took to drive it harder.
Across space it went, becoming a pinpoint in Carroll's artificial
viewplate. The stars of the galaxy behind it shone brightly--all but
the one directly in line with the flight of the negative mass.
Then, as the spacial stresses diminished and a man could think again in
that area, there was a tiny flash on the viewplate.
And James Forrest Carroll laughed. "Finis!" he roared.
King shook himself. "You madman! You destroying fiend--get him!"
The laboratory echoed and re-echoed with the wild thunder of released
energy. Rhine dropped beside Carroll. Her right hand flicked up to
a switch on the panel, and out of thin air there appeared a tenuous
inverted bowl of light. Flying bits of metal as well as the bursts of
released energy deflected from the inverted bowl.
Painfully, Carroll stood up and advanced across the floor towards
Kingallis and his cohorts. He walked through a veritable tornado of
sheer death, and Rhinegallis followed him because to get outside of his
protecting shield was to die.
They looked at him as they would have viewed a specter, for he advanced
through their hail of death unharmed. In fright they herded back, their
weapons lowered helplessly.
Cornered and helpless against the teleport they waited, shivering in
fright.
"You said once," snarled Carroll, "that the universe was not large
enough for your kind and mine. As I have destroyed your world so I'll
destroy you!"
He lunged forward, and they turned and rushed madly into the teleport.
Carroll shook his head.
"They--?" asked Rhine, shakily.
"The spacial stress is still present," he quavered. "They were
teleported into the nearest and strongest field." He turned and
stumbled across the floor to the controls and shut off the gigantic
reflector. The rumblings started as a final landslide tumbled down the
declivity into the bowl. The screams of King and his cohorts were lost
in the thunder of avalanche.
* * * * *
James Forrest Carroll sat in the easy chair in Pollard's office and
smiled tolerantly at the psychologist.
"Sure, sure," he said easily. "All in my mind."
Pollard grunted. "Well, it is."
"Baloney. I suppose Kingallis didn't come to prevent me from destroying
his world?"
"He came--"
"Knowing," said Carroll, "that if he stopped me he and his kind could
go on with their mad plan for conquest. May I ask about this?" he held
up his injured arm.
"When I last saw Kingston Galloway--" started Majors.
"You call him Kingston Galloway," laughed Carroll. "But I know he is
Kingallis. Now go ahead."
"He and his bunch were carrying pistols."
"He shot at me with some sort of energy weapon. This is a burn, not a
bullet-hole!"
Majors shook his head. "Not a chance. Admitting that what you sent out
was an energy-beam, it is still impossible to believe that a hand-sized
energy weapon is practical."
"Granted," said Carroll. "But then there's this evidence. Explain this,
will you? I don't mind getting my arm burned badly if it will only make
you believe."
Doctor Pollard shook his head with a smile. "Stigmata," he said.
"The 'Bleeding Madonna' who exhibits wounds and bleeding from
hands, feet, sides and forehead on Good Friday. A sheer mental
phenomenon--psychosomatica. This is the same. You are so convinced as
to the positiveness of these aliens that your mind produced this burn
as evidence."
"Brother, this ain't no mental mirage," snapped Carroll.
"No one said it was. But the power of the human mind is such that the
cellular structure of the body will exhibit burn-trauma when the mind
believes it so. So one of them creased your arm and you reacted as
though it were the burn your mind believed it to be.
"We've been through all this before. It's just cause and effect and
result. This time it is only the latter that counts. You've destroyed
the menace that drove you insane."
"Look," said Carroll, "I've been through it."
"And nothing you've turned up with can be construed as any evidence
beyond the manufacture of your own mind. And nothing that you will ever
find--"
* * * * *
Carroll nodded angrily. "I've got a couple of projects yet. One is the
hand-held weapon--just to prove to the bright boys who think this bum
wing is thought-up--that such is possible. The other may bring proof,
but it may take some time.
"I've still got me a job. I'm going to develop the faster-than-light
space drive and go out looking for aliens. They had interstellar
travel. They all couldn't have been destroyed."
"Forget it, Carroll."
"Forget it?" exploded the physicist. "Forget it when I've a whole world
of physics waiting for me to develop? Not on your life!"
He stood up and grinned at them boyishly. Then he left and as the door
closed Majors looked askance at Pollard.
Pollard smiled. "He'll forget it," he said. "The aliens will become
dimmer and dimmer in his memory until they are gone. But right now we
have a fairly stable James Forrest Carroll on our hands. And, Majors,
the final therapy is out there waiting for him. Fine girl."
"Rhine," said Carroll softly as the door closed behind him. "Rhine."
"I'm--waiting," she replied. "But why not call me Rita. Everybody else
does."
"I know," he said, looking at her pointedly. "But I'm amused, sort of."
"Why?"
"Because the one thing that permitted you to gain access to our
research was the thing that licked your pals."
"And?" she asked, puzzled.
"People too often try to divorce the mind from the body," he told her.
"It can't be done."
"I don't follow."
"Infants are all brought into this world alike from a mental
standpoint. Yet within a few short months each is a separate identity
with a different personality, no matter how similar the environment and
heredity. This is because the mind of man is but the accumulated result
of what his sensory channels bring it.
"An alien you were once, Rhine. But from the instant that you took over
that very nice Terran body your mind began to receive information and
experiences through the sensory channels of a Terran body.
"Every item, every experience, brought to your mind through Terran
channels forced your mind to interpret it in terms of Terran nervous
stimuli. Therefore, from the second instant after taking over, you
began to change subtly to the Terran."
"Go on--tell me the rest," she said with a smile.
"Day by day, week by week, you will become more and more Terran.
Eventually, your alien experiences will fade and you will be as one of
us and no longer alien."
"You know," she said shyly, "someday I intend to present you with a
little alien."
"That'll be interesting," he chuckled. "You are becoming more and more
Terran even now."
"But not," she said with absolute finality, "until we have paid a visit
to the clergy!"
"See what I mean?"
She laughed--very humanlike.