Synthetic Men Page 5

  Vance was shocked out of his horror. He had expected the blow, but not to be thrown out so quickly. “Two weeks!” he echoed, running his bony fingers through his hair. “Why—it’ll take me a couple of months to pack everything and move out.”

  Dyson shrugged. “That’s your problem,” he said.

  A crafty look flitted over the scientist’s lips. “You’ll be hurting more than just me if you enforce that threat,” he warned Dyson. “I’ve made a discovery this week that can restore normal hearing to thousands of deaf persons. My work in acoustics, which you have always laughed at, is becoming practical now—practical enough for a business man like yourself to appreciate. But if you make me move out that quickly, many of my things will be ruined. It takes time to pack delicate instruments such as I use. Give me—a month, at least.”

  Dyson regarded him calculatingly. He seemed to be weighing his words. Finally he replied, “All right—one month from today I’ll expect you out. I don’t for one minute think you’ve got anything that can help humanity, but even a man like you might stumble onto something sometimes. Just on the off chance that you have, I’ll give in. If you can really do what you say, my sacrifice will have been worthwhile.”

  Vance smiled his thanks—a smile that they both knew was forced. He was thinking how gullible Dyson was, for his invention was scarcely what he had represented it to be. With it, he could very easily deafen a person, even kill rats in the fraction of a second—but as for restoring hearing to anyone, that was sales talk.

  He was still smiling when his father-in-law turned and left the room. With an attempt at hostly cordiality, he followed him to the vestibule, bade him good-bye, and closed the door behind him. Then, in a flash, his face darkened and an almost animal-like snarl escaped his lips. He shook as with ague. Then he got control of himself by an effort and turned hastily to the stairs.

  CHAPTER II

  The Super-Sonic Machine

  It was like entering the cool sanctuary of a cathedral for him to go into the laboratory on the second floor. These were the only friends he owned, these shining articles of scientific equipment, these guinea pigs and rats on which he experimented. These—and his music—were his life. All of Vance’s waking moments were spent in the laboratory or at the console of the electric organ in the small room off his study. And the organ itself was very closely allied with his work.

  He rubbed his hands as he glanced over the display. In the center of the long room was his sound projector, a gleaming, cigar-shaped affair mounted almost like a cannon. Beside it, in a shallow pit in the floor, was a battery of electric power equipment guarded by a brass rail. Off to his right, at the other end of the room, was the target at which he aimed the sound waves of his experiments. It consisted of a small barrel thickly lined with glass-fiber insulation. Around the walls, and in little islands about the floor, were other groups of scientific paraphernalia.

  A look of triumph mingled with hate flitted across Vance’s sallow features as he recalled the way that rat had died in the target-barrel the other day. One shot from the high-powered sound “cannon” and it writhed for a second and then died. He had been stupefied for a while at the results. Then, on analyzing the animal’s brain, he began to understand. And it was the unbelievable condition of that dead rat’s brain that had given him the idea of doing away with Dyson.

  With his father-in-law dead, he would be rich. The only living relative of the old man, he was in line to receive everything, even if he had to sue to get it. Hence it was imperative that he do away with him immediately, before he could be put out and perhaps get word of the trouble into the papers. Things like that always looked bad in case a lawsuit was necessary.

  For a second a feeling of despair clutched at his heart. One month to build a lethal weapon out of a scientific toy! It was a task that would have defeated the average scientist at the outset. But Vance was far above the average scientist—in some ways—and he knew it could be done. He knew, too, that if he could perfect that discovery he had recently made, he could kill Dyson without leaving a scar, a bruise, a trace of poison, or any other indication of how it had been done.

  Nothing but a peculiar condition of the brain, as in the case of the rat. For the animal had looked perfectly all right until he opened the skull, and there he found the secret of its death. The brain was almost as hard as clay! Instead of the customary jelly-like consistency, the little gray mass of protoplasm was hard and almost unyielding!

  It seemed only logical, therefore, that if the sound waves could be greatly magnified, a human brain could be similarly affected.

  Suddenly he went into his workrooms and fell to work again. The belief that he was on the right track stimulated him to intense work, for the prize was indeed worth his labors.

  Until midnight Vance did not leave the laboratory. He moved about it like some weird scientist of another world, calculating furiously for hours at a time, then leaping up to make some change in his sound cannon. The shadow from his long figure fell across the floor in a grotesque pattern.

  By midnight he knew he was working on the wrong assumption. He stood wearily in the center of the big room clutching the sheaf of papers covered with his calculations in his hand, staring down at them with his head bowed. His tests had showed him far off the track. The theory he was basing his work on was that any tone, intensified sufficiently, could cause chemical changes in any body. He had doubled the intensity of his sound cannon. And even that was insufficient to kill a guinea pig!

  He could kill a rat with half the power, but the guinea pig remained untouched. Obviously he was going in the wrong direction. For at this rate it would take a force sufficient to crumble a brick wall, in order to touch the human brain!

  With a muttered oath, Vance shambled from the laboratory and went to bed.

  Contrary to the usual practice of the scientist, he was out of bed at eight o’clock the next morning, and hard at work by eight-thirty.

  Hoping that it might have been his machinery, and not his calculations, which were wrong, he took his sound projector apart and gave it a thorough overhauling. It was simple in construction though complex in operation. It appeared exactly like a cigar with a large marble affixed to the rear end, and pivoted through the middle on an axis. The part of it where the axis passed through was open on the top, for the entrance of sound waves. These waves, of supersonic, or inaudible, frequency, were projected down into it from an amplifier on the ceiling; then, as they passed into its interior, a powerful arrangement of electron multipliers and cathode tubes, augmented by a device of Vance’s own invention for condensing the molecules of air in the super-sonic waves, met the sound waves with a terrific drive of power. The result caused the harmless stream of inaudible sounds to be hurled from the open end of the sound cannon in an almost solid bolt of sound.

  When these projectiles struck a rat, the animal was instantly killed. But even a double charge of power was insufficient to kill a guinea pig. That was wrong, Vance knew. And yet when the machine was reassembled and tried once more, it still held true.

  In despair he plunged into his calculations again and sought for some solution to the problem. No philanthropic scientist battling to give humanity a cure for some disease ever labored any harder than did Vance, whose sole aim was to kill a man. He worked without eating until ten o’clock that night. His face grew more sallow than ever and became stubbled with a growth of blond beard. Finally, when his hands shook so that he could no longer write, he flung the papers to the floor and left the laboratory.

  In despair he sought the consolation of music. He made his way wearily to his little conservatory off the study and flipped the switch that started the generators in the small electric organ. He sat down and adjusted the stops and draw-bars. Fatigue flowed through his body like an electric current, leaving him almost limp from his long hours of labor.

  His fingers touched lightly over the keys. Almost instantly the fatigue left him like a garment sliding from his shoulders. Hi
s playing became animated. The strains of a movement from Tchaikovsky’s Fifth Symphony filled the room with sonorous power. Vance’s long figure swayed gracefully at the console as though wafted this way and that by the force of the composition.

  The song ended, and he drifted immediately into the sad measures of Valse Triste. The sweet, melancholy tones of the organ swelled and fell in slow cadences, swaying Vance’s emotions with every changing mood. The avaricious mask that covered his finer features seemed to slide off as the beauty of the music touched his soul. For a moment his pale blue eyes were dark with passion that belied his character, covered by the husk of greed, and his lips were half parted in ecstasy as he gazed upward at the sound-window above him. His hands seemed acting without any directing impulses from his brain. Over the shining ivories they drifted gracefully, reaching now and then to adjust a stop or change the position of a draw-bar.

  And then, as though a malignant force had seized him, Vance’s thin body lurched from the seat. He stood erect, trembling, the music dying with a burst of sound. Gone was the ecstatic, godlike expression of his face; in its place was a malicious visage that was sharp with cunning and cruel in its implication of danger. His lips gleamed with saliva.

  “Why not?” Vance muttered to himself. “Why not!”

  For his mind had not been idle while he sat at the console. It had been in an inactive state, resembling sleep, and yet as ready to register any stray thought that presented itself as a photographic plate is able to seize a nebulous ray of light in the very instant it is made manifest. And the very sweetness of the music had given him the answer to the problem before him…

  While he sat half-dreaming at the organ, the scientist’s keenly analytic mind had been considering, unconscious even to himself, a number of facts that seemed somehow to fall together. The failure of a mighty surge of power to affect a guinea pig—a stray sentence he had been impressed by in a work on acoustics—the effect of the music on his emotion. Taken separately, the facts seemed disjointed. Considered together, his shrewd brain had acted as a catalyst to fuse the mass of facts into a homogeneous group of facts that led him definitely nearer the solution.

  Eager to fix the facts in his mind before he could lose the thread, he rushed upstairs, seized a pencil and a pad of paper, and commenced scribbling every thought that came into his head.

  His notes made, Vance’s fingers dropped the pencil and he stood up, paced back and forth through the laboratory. He stopped at the sound cannon and stared at it owlishly. Suddenly he swore and struck it with his foot. “Useless!” he muttered. “It must be completely done over. It’s got to be stronger, bigger—more deadly. Then we’ll see whether or not I am the fool Dyson takes me for!”

  CHAPTER III

  The Machine Completed

  It took two weeks for the scientist to decide exactly what must be done and then to do it. For three days he sat almost incessantly at the organ, playing every different type of music in existence. He analyzed the effects of martial music, of dreamy lullabies, of sad compositions, of humorous pieces. And from them he isolated the elements that gave them the power they had.

  When at last the new apparatus was finished, Vance regarded it with rightful pride. It was twice as long as the former sound-focusing machine, for he had employed Poisson’s theory that “if the wave of sound be confined in a tube with a smooth interior, it may be conveyed to great distances without sensible loss of intensity”. Thus, by projecting the sound waves from a smooth tube with great force, they were carried along for a time almost as though they were still confined within the pipe.

  The cannon was now twelve feet long, a gleaming silver cylinder about a foot thick. The rear end of it was a sphere three feet thick, in which all the apparatus was carried. He had carried his small electric organ up to the laboratory and hooked it up with the projector, so that every conceivable sound he might require was at his finger-tips. The controls of the projector were even mounted on the upper end of the manuals, within easy reach.

  Seated at the organ, he could command a wide view through the big windows fronting the street. From here he could see children returning home from school, laborers going to work, and off across the sloping valley the business district of the city.

  Only one thing remained to be done—the machine must be tested before he could put it in operation. Just how to test it he was uncertain for a time. Then his eyes caught a flash of color on the street below, and he smiled bleakly as he realized the perfect chance for a test had come. Five school children were walking past the house, engaged in animated talk and kicking at rocks and anything else that presented itself. Hurriedly, Vance went to the organ and slid onto the seat.

  His long fingers trembled a little as he flipped the generator switch and selected his tones. It was no matter of guesswork with him. He knew exactly which notes he needed to produce his effects.

  Another switch caused the great cylinder to revolve slowly on its axis and then to point down at the boys on the sidewalk. A low humming arose as the ultra-powerful electron magnifiers and cathode tubes went into action.

  Now he struck a chord, using only five tones. A weird, sonorous sound rolled from the sound cannon. The entire room seemed to tremble slightly as the lowest tone, a frequency of only eight vibrations per second, or half as many as are necessary for the human ear to detect, rolled its silent thunder through the atmosphere. To the boys on the street, the sound must have seemed like nothing more destructive than a vacuum cleaner running somewhere and a truck rumbling by down the block. But suddenly it happened.

  One second the five small boys had been talking and laughing in the good humor common to boys just let out of school, and the next they were like angry animals. With one accord they turned on each other and fell to pummeling with flying fists and screaming with insane rage. Two of them fell to the pavement and rolled, kicking and squirming, into the street. The other three formed a milling huddle of enraged, shrill voices and struggling bodies.

  In the next moment the fighting stopped. The youngsters looked foolish, and then, abruptly, they broke into gales of laughter. Their boyish cries of merriment filled the street with sound— and yet there was no sound of genuine amusement in it. It was as though they were being forced to laugh by some power greater than they were. The laughter became shrill and forced, but the boys continued to scream their amusement until several were lying on the ground contorted with delighted gasps, clutching their sides.

  The ray of intense sound had changed to a higher pitch. The low rumble had ceased. For Vance, sitting erect and stiff on the bench, had flicked two new stops and struck a new chord. His pale face was lighted up with intense enjoyment. The pale eyes burned with an unholy fire as he watched the proof of his success. He was playing on the helpless victims’ emotions as he played on the organ. A mere flick of his finger would change them into savage animals again, seeking to tear each others’ eyes out.

  A queer breathlessness caught him as he realized that only a forward tipping of his foot, resting on the volume pedal, would kill every one of them. He had struck the proper sound frequency to reach their brains directly, with no regard for tympanum or ear fluid. Now, if he increased the power to the terrific intensity required, their brains would be destroyed as the rat’s was!

  Elation filled him at that thought. Dyson’s days were marked. His life was to be the price of trying to throw him out of his home. He was going to meet a death no mortal ever had—a death by music, but an unholy music that would make a fiend of him, or a Pan, and whose sweetest tones would be as deadly as the venom of a cobra.

  With a sudden whim, Vance raised his hand and pressed in two draw-bars, then adjusted a third. He reached out and twisted the switch that operated the projector. The gleaming tube swung about to follow the boys. A movement of his foot, and the new sound-bolt struck the children. The laughter ceased. In its wake came a sound of soft sobbing.

  The essence of sadness was being instilled in their brains. Tears of sor
row took the place of the tears of joy of a moment before. Small shoulders shook with racking sobs.

  Finally, convinced of his success, Vance shut off the motors. A smile of derision touched his lips as he watched the boys awake. Shame-faced expressions came over their tear- and dirt-streaked countenances. Bewildered by something they could not understand, they shuffled off down the street in silence.

  Vance turned away. He regarded the instrument-filled laboratory with complete satisfaction. Another week and the plan would be ready. For he was not quite prepared for Dyson yet. A few changes in the study downstairs, and then the organ would be ready to play its song of Death, for an audience of one…

  CHAPTER IV

  The Melody of Death

  He was alone, in the laboratory, when the doorbell rang a week later. Vance’s whole body trembled with expectation. With an effort he controlled himself and hurried to let Dyson in.

  His father-in-law had got his telegram, he decided. That, in itself, had been a master stroke. A curt note to the elderly man saying he had found a number of letters and things belonging to Ellen, and that he would destroy them unless called for by Friday, had turned the trick.

  When he opened the door he was perfectly calm—outwardly, at least. He nodded curtly, “Come in. I see you got my wire.”

  Dyson’s face was dark with fury as he reached forward and seized the scientist by the throat. “I got it, Vance,” he breathed, “and I’ve come here to take those letters and then give you a beating you’ll never get over. I knew you were worthless, but…”