A. Merritt's Fantasy Magazine, February 1950 — page 74: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

74 A. MERRITT’S FANTASY mechanism out of order for an hour or so.” “Heard and seen?” said I “Yes, heard, perhaps, by some funny electrical device. But don’t tell me that they can see in the dark!” He smiled again. “The equivalent of seeing,” said he. “They could count your heart-beat and your respiration.” “How the devil could they?” said I. “It would take me the entire hour to explain that device alone,” said he. “Shall I use the time that way?” I shrugged my shoulders. “Go back to the beginning and tell me what happened to tees the laboratory, first of all,” said I. HE SIGHED and closed his eyes. And then he settled down in his chair, op- posite me, and said, “I’ll go back to that. Back to that night when I thought that I was about to make a discovery that would stop the pulse of the world.” He laughed a little. “Were you wrong?” “I was a young fool,” said he. “I thought, for one thing, that the whole miracle of life was about to lie in the palm of my hand.” “Were you wrong?” “Yes,” he said, solemnly, “and I’ve an idea that ten thousand years from now, science will still be just as far as ever from the true solution!” “I saw you chucking thunder and lightning around,”’ said I. “That’s what I’d managed to devise,” said he. ‘Such a war machine as, I sup- pose, the world never had seen before. Even these cunning devils up here never had even conceived of the like. And that was all that they needed before they started out to conquer the world!” I swallowed hard. “At the trial today,” I suggested, “you were simply trying to pull the wool over their eyes—make them think that you were seeing everything as they wanted you to see it?” “That’s what I was trying to do,” said he, “and that’s what I managed, I think. Now to go back to the laboratory... . I was working with a tube of radioactive gas and a certain solid compound which in turn was capable of acting upon the gas Poke “Quit it, Cleve,” said I. “Get down to the blood and bones of the thing, will your” “That compound and the gas—they are the blood and bones of the thing, I’m afraid,’’ said he. “But I’ll simply say that when the gas and the solid combined, they produced an explosion of power—be- cause the power bound up in the atom was suddenly dispersed. The thunderbolt, as you call it, was one form in which that energy could be directed. But there were other ways, too.” “I wondered,” said I, “how long a great city would last if it were bombarded the way you blasted the side of that cliff of solid rock!” “The greatest city in the world,” said he, “even Manhattan, all steel and con- crete, would be blasted off the face of the earth in five minutes!” I opened my eyes. I was dead silent, be- cause I could see that he was not lying. He meant what he said! He went on, with a sort of savage pleas- ure that I could understand, “I could have flown an airplane over the sea and blown the Alps as flat as the sea, and blown up another set of Alps in the central plain of France. I could have split the Rocky Mountains in two—”’ He paused. “T’ll let the boasting go, from now on,” said he. “But I haven't been exaggerating.” Then he went on, “But I ’ll go back to the time when I was working there at my tubes. I come to the moment when I felt something in the air that was neither sound nor heat nor light—it was simply a tremor in my own nerves! I turned around, and there I saw—” He paused and put a hand across his eyes. “I saw sections of the steel wall being cut away in great sweeps. They fell outward with- out a sound, and the agency that cut through them did so without noise. Noth- ing could be seen. “I started for the door to get help—to get you—but at the same moment. I was turned into stone.” “Look here, old man,” said I, “T’il be- lieve anything and everything, only don’t tell me—”’ He smiled—a mere twitch of the lips without mirth. “Simply a little wireless device for passing through me a tension of electricity GOMIIGooOO S C@ iin