Arthur Zagat - The Golden Age of Science Fiction Volume IX

Doctor Spechaug’s eyes flashed up the narrow street.

“Let’s go!” he said to Edith Bailey. “They’ll see running they’ve never seen before. They can’t touch us.”

They ran. They heard the sharp crack of rifles. They saw the dust spurting up. Doctor Spechaug heard himself howling as he became aware of peculiar stings in his body. Queer, painless, deeply penetrating sensations that made themselves felt all over his body—as though he was awakening from a long paralysis.

Then the mad yelling faded rapidly behind them. They were running, streaking out of the town with inhuman speed. They struck out in long easy strides across the meadow toward the dense woods that brooded beyond the college.

Her voice gasped exultingly. “They couldn’t hurt us! They couldn’t! They tried!”

He nodded, straining eagerly toward he knew not what, nosing into the fresh wind. How swiftly and gracefully they could run. Soon they lost themselves in the thick dark forest. Shadows hid them.

Days later the moon was full. It edged over the low hill flanking Glen Oaks on the east. June bugs buzzed ponderously like armor-plated dragons toward the lights glowing faintly from the town. Frogs croaked from the swampy meadows and the creek.

They came up slowly to stand silhouetted against the glowing moon, nosing hungrily into the steady, aromatic breeze blowing from the Conway farm below.

They glided effortlessly down, then across the sharp-bladed marsh grass, leaping high with each bound. As they came disdainfully close to the silent farm house, a column of pale light from a coal oil lamp came through the living room window and haloed a neglected flower bed. Sorrow and fear clung to the house.

The shivering shadow of a gaunt woman was etched against the half drawn shade. The two standing outside the window called. The woman’s shadow trembled.

Then a long rigid finger of steel projected itself beneath the partially raised window. The rifle cracked almost against the faces of the two. He screamed hideously as his companion dropped without a sound, twitching, twitching—he screamed again and began dragging himself away toward the sheltering forest. Intently and desperately the rifle cracked again.

He gave up then.

He sprawled out flatly on the cool, damp, moon-bathed path. His hot tongue lapped feverishly at the wet grass. He felt the persistent impact of the rifle’s breath against him, and now there was a wave of pain. The full moon was fading into black mental clouds as he feebly attempted to lift his bleeding head.

He thought with agonized irony:

“Provincial fools. Stupid, superstitious idiots… and that damned Mrs. Conway—the most stupid of all. Only she would have thought to load her dead husband’s rifle with silver bullets! Damned peasants—”

Total darkness blotted out futile revery.

“This,” said the Franciscan, “is my Automaton, who at the proper time will speak, answer whatsoever question I may ask, and reveal all secret knowledge to me.” He smiled as he laid his hand affectionately on the iron skull that topped the pedestal.

The youth gazed open-mouthed, first at the head and then at the Friar. “But it’s iron!” he whispered. “The head is iron, good father.”

“Iron without, skill within, my son,” said Roger Bacon. “It will speak, at the proper time and in its own manner, for so have I made it. A clever man can twist the devil’s arts to God’s ends, thereby cheating the fiend—Sst! There sounds vespers! Plena gratia, ave Virgo—”

But it did not speak. Long hours, long weeks, the doctor mirabilis watched his creation, but iron lips were silent and the iron eyes dull, and no voice but the great man’s own sounded in his monkish cell, nor was there ever an answer to all the questions that he asked—until one day when he sat surveying his work, composing a letter to Duns Scotus in distant Cologne—one day—

“Time is!” said the image, and smiled benignly.

The Friar looked up. “Time is, indeed,” he echoed. “Time it is that you give utterance, and to some assertion less obvious than that time is. For of course time is, else there were nothing at all. Without time—”

“Time was!” rumbled the image, still smiling, but sternly at the statue of Draco.

“Indeed time was,” said the Monk. “Time was, is, and will be, for time is that medium in which events occur. Matter exists in space, but events—”

The image smiled no longer. “Time is past!” it roared in tones deep as the cathedral bell outside, and burst into ten thousand pieces.

“There,” said old Haskel van Manderpootz, shutting the book, “is my classical authority in this experiment. This story, overlaid as it is with mediæval myth and legend, proves that Roger Bacon himself attempted the experiment—and failed.” He shook a long finger at me. “Yet do not get the impression, Dixon, that Friar Bacon was not a great man. He was—extremely great, in fact; he lighted the torch that his namesake Francis Bacon took up four centuries later, and that now van Manderpootz rekindles.”

I stared in silence.

“Indeed,” resumed the Professor, “Roger Bacon might almost be called a thirteenth century van Manderpootz, or van Manderpootz a twenty-first century Roger Bacon. His Opus Majus, Opus Minus, and Opus Tertium—”

“What,” I interrupted impatiently, “has all this to do with—that?” I indicated the clumsy metal robot standing in the corner of the laboratory.

“Don’t interrupt!” snapped van Manderpootz. “I’ll—”

At this point I fell out of my chair. The mass of metal had ejaculated something like “A-a-gh-rasp” and had lunged a single pace toward the window, arms upraised. “What the devil!” I sputtered as the thing dropped its arms and returned stolidly to its place.

“A car must have passed in the alley,” said van Manderpootz indifferently. “Now as I was saying, Roger Bacon—”

I ceased to listen. When van Manderpootz is determined to finish a statement, interruptions are worse than futile. As an ex-student of his, I know. So I permitted my thoughts to drift to certain personal problems of my own, particularly Tips Alva, who was the most pressing problem of the moment. Yes, I mean Tips Alva the ‘vision dancer, the little blonde imp who entertains on the Yerba Mate hour for that Brazilian company. Chorus girls, dancers, and television stars are a weakness of mine; maybe it indicates that there’s a latent artistic soul in me. Maybe.

I’m Dixon Wells, you know, scion of the N. J. Wells Corporation, Engineers Extraordinary. I’m supposed to be an engineer myself; I say supposed, because in the seven years since my graduation, my father hasn’t given me much opportunity to prove it. He has a strong sense of value of time, and I’m cursed with the unenviable quality of being late to anything and for everything. He even asserts that the occasional designs I submit are late Jacobean, but that isn’t fair. They’re Post-Romanesque.

Old N. J. also objects to my penchant for ladies of the stage and ’vision screen, and periodically threatens to cut my allowance, though that’s supposed to be a salary. It’s inconvenient to be so dependent, and sometimes I regret that unfortunate market crash of 2009 that wiped out my own money, although it did keep me from marrying Whimsy White, and van Manderpootz, through his subjunctivisor, succeeded in proving that that would have been a catastrophe. But it turned out nearly as much of a disaster anyway, as far as my feelings were concerned. It took me months to forget Joanna Caldwell and her silvery eyes. Just another instance when I was a little late.