Temporary Warp

“Space can be warped — on earth — but ——”

by Frank Belknap Long, Jr.

THE GUN was a hundred feet in length, silvery and resplendent. It stood on the summit of a little hill bright with the russet leaves of autumn. At its massive, mushroom-shaped base two men stood excitedly talking.
	Cyrus Wolfe was tall and stoop-shouldered. His darkly bearded countenance was haggard, melancholy and lean. He stood grimly regarding the great gun from beneath shaggy brows, his small, deep-set eyes dark pools of fanaticism in his young-old face.
	Cyrus Wolfe’s companion was a little man with rosy cheeks, snow-white hair and the naïve blue, eyes of an impractical theorist and visionary. He was talking loudly, earnestly, disclaiming with violent gestures all responsibility for the gun and its contents.
	He had merely speculated idly in the presence of Cyrus Wolfe. In Wolfe’s imposing presence he had merely propounded a theory, not realizing that Wolfe was wealthy enough to test idle theories concretely, and that Wolfe was a man of evil instincts. He could picture Wolfe killing every soul in the world, and remaining immune to remorse.
	Yet it had begun innocently enough. “I tell you, Wolfe,” Wolfe’s companion had said, “that space can be warped—really and truly warped. Einstein claims that all heavenly bodies warp space and that there is a terrific curvature in the region of the heaviest suns. But I tell you that right here on earth space can be warped.”
	It had all begun so suddenly, so casually. In Wolfe’s library, over cups of steaming black coffee, with Wolfe the smiling, urbane host and little Winter excited and immeasurably flattered because Wolfe appeared to be interested in what he was saying. Henry Winter taught school in a township owned by Wolfe. The township had a puppet mayor who obeyed Wolfe implicitly in everything, and aldermen and school board were under Wolfe’s thumb. Then there was the great steel foundry which belched red flames at night—a Cyclopean, mile-wide monster squatting in darkness, dominating the countryside.
	That foundry—that monster was owned by Wolfe. The sweat-begrimed men who toiled in its red-lighted vitals lived in fear of Wolfe. Wolfe was a dishonest industrialist—a merciless taskmaster who ignored the welfare of his workers. He employed an auditor who winked at crooked accounts. All his employees were in debt to him. Every one in the township owed him money. He was ruthless, cunning, cruel.
	Yet so devious is the human psyche that Cyrus Wolfe was tremendously interested in astrophysics, in relativity, in the cold, black abysses between the stars. Cyrus Wolfe liked to throw his thoughts audaciously outward toward the receding constellations, to speculate endlessly on the twin mysteries of time and space. Yet into these speculations went the same ruthlessness that characterized his commercial dealings. Cyrus Wolfe would have calmly doomed the world to prove a theory.

	WINTER had set his coffee cup down on the edge of a Chippendale serving cabinet, had excitedly paced the floor.
	“As you know,” he said, “gravity is a curvature of space. Light stars curve space slightly, but stars of great density curve it tremendously, distorting light and hence obscurely altering the whole space-time picture. We don’t know exactly what happens to space in the vicinity of stars of terrific density. The stupendous distortion may actually bring about a sort of kink in space time, and result in a reversal of entropy.”
	Wolfe stared at his pacing guest, a queer, intent look on his bearded face. “You mean, matter in the vicinity of such stars may be building up instead of breaking down?”
	Winter nodded. “Yes, something like that. Of course, we can only speculate. Many—most physicists would deny that there is any kink, but I think there is, and I think that space time is obscurely altered.”
	“And you think that such a kink could be produced artificially on earth? Despite earth’s gravity, despite——”
	“Yes, yes, I do,” interrupted Winter excitedly. “The gravity warp produced by earth is utterly negligible. But we could produce here, on a small scale, a curvature of space as startling and exceptional as the gravity fields of the heaviest stars.”
	Wolfe stared into the dark dregs of his coffee cup. “How would you set about producing such a warp,” he inquired.
	“I would bombard the atmosphere with high-voltage ions, until all its elements disintegrated. I would use the air as a target, blasting out alpha particles from all its atoms until electronic orbits of illimitable contraction appeared in the radiant ether. I would produce a field of energy heavier than the radiant force fields at the core of suns.
	“You’d require elaborate apparatus, I suppose,” said Wolfe, his eyes becoming glittering points of flame.
	“It wouldn’t cost very much to build,” said Winter, not thinking at all of Wolfe’s bank balance, not thinking of anything but his own spun theories, which fascinated him precisely as the web of a rare spider on a dewy morning would fascinate an alert entomologist.
	“How much?” asked Wolfe.
	“Oh, two hundred thousand dollars perhaps. But there would have to be an endowment. No single man of wealth would ever want to spend that much on pure science. Why, if men of wealth were that generous we could send a rocket to the moon now. Two little millions would build a moon rocket.”
	“Yes, yes,” said Wolfe impatiently. “I know. We’ll skip that for the moment. How would you go about bombarding the atmosphere?”
	“I’d build an electric vortex gun of enormous magnitude,” said Winter. “The centrifuge in its bore would whirl a fifty-per-cent mixture of hydrogen-one and its isotype about at a terrific speed. It would build up an energy charge of millions of volts.”
	“I see,” said Wolfe. “And such a gun could be built for a quarter of a million?”
	Winter nodded.

	IT WAS on the tip of Wolfe’s tongue to say: “I’ll build it.” But he restrained himself. Wolfe was discreet. He would need plans, specifications, advice. But he would wheedle them craftily out of Winter, without paying Winter a cent. He would pretend to regard the gun solely as a fascinating problem in speculative physics.
	Winter furnished plans, specifications, advice. Eagerly, elatedly, he constructed a gun on paper, without suspecting that the workers in Wolfe’s foundry were constructing a gun with blue prints and glowing metal.
	He did not see the gun until it was finished. And even then he did not fully divine the depths of evil in Wolfe, the fanatical callousness which animated him. It was not until a clear, cold morning in mid-October—when the gun stood on a little hill, bright with the russet leaves of autumn, and pointed ominously across the quiet countryside, toward fallow fields and low stone fences and cattle grazing peacefully in purple-tinted hollows—that he awoke to the full enormity of what Wolfe proposed to do.
	He argued, pleaded. “The warp will destroy everything in its path for at least twenty miles,” he groaned. “Wolfe, think what you are doing? There are houses, villages within the zone which will be convulsed by the bombardment. The warp may even extend as far as Glendale, a town of fifteen thousand inhabitants. You can’t murder all those people, Wolfe. You can’t——”
	Wolfe smiled coldly. His eyes were luminous with the chill fanaticism of a man without scruples and without remorse, a player at the chessboard of life who has used for pawns human beings, and grown weary of removing them, one by one.
	“You’re a sentimental weakling, Winter,” he said. “Science will never advance unless it frees itself from the dominion of cravens like you. You fear the forked lightning and the blazing, noonday sun. Remember what Nietzsche said: ‘We must be ruthless and pitiless. We must make ourselves strong under heaven, if we are to advance from triumph to triumph.’”
	“But to kill thousands of human beings, women and little children, is not to advance, Wolfe. It is to revert to the savage and the beast.”
	“Sentimental rubbish, Winter,” rasped Wolfe. “Chances are, the bombardment will produce no warp at all. Chances are, your theories are the half-baked fabrications of a touched mind. But we’ll see; we’ll see.”
	Wolfe moved swiftly to the priming mechanism at the base of the enormous gun. A circular, domed mass of grid-surfaced metal mushroomed outward from the breech mount of its hundred-foot barrel, giving it the look of some colossal prehistoric monster crouching in armored menace.
	Wolfe grasped a projecting lever and drew it slowly toward his lean, taunt body until a twelve-inch metal disk near the summit of the flaring grid hood began swiftly to revolve.
	Wild despair flared in his companion’s eyes.
	“In the name of Heaven, Wolfe,” he cried, “reverse that level. Now, now, before it is too late. Your hands are still white. You are cold and inhuman, but you have never killed in wanton caprice. A man without humanity may still live in peace with himself if he restrains the worst impulses of his nature. But a murderer can only know torment and unending remorse—only the agony of cruel——”
	Cynical laughter drowned out the little man’s voice. Wolfe had thrown back his head and was gazing at the blinding sun. Straight into the sun’s great disk he stared, while laughter pealed exultantly from his distended throat.
	“‘Thus spake Zarathustra,’” he quoted. “‘There shall come one remorseless, a superman, who shall slay without pity in the pride of his young manhood. Knowing neither good nor evil, he shall make himself invincible under the sun.’”
	A violent trembling seized Winter’s fragile body. He turned about until he was staring directly at the muzzle of the great gun. For terror-fraught, dragging seconds an ominous stillness seemed to envelop the peaceful countryside. The long stone fences, which divided the brown fields into checkerboard squares, cast lengthening shadows on the pasture lands beyond. The drowsy cattle were bathed in liquid amber.
	Then, suddenly, the great gun spoke. The ground trembled and the long, gleaming cylinder recoiled with a blast like thunder. A cry of terror ripped from Winter’s lips as the concussion lifted him into the air and hurled him with violence to the earth.
	By some freak of leverage, Wolfe resisted the appulse of the mammoth weapon’s recoil. He remained on his feet beside the grid hood, his pupils dilating in incredulous terror as he watched a mile-high curtain of radiant force move slowly across the sun-drenched countryside, distorting and flattening everything in its path.

	IN A DARK, secluded corner of Glendale’s most popular restaurant young William Lake sat listening to an eight-piece orchestra playing Chopin’s “Allegro.” His hand rested palm downward on the table before him. Nestling between his fingers was the slim, white hand of the loveliest woman in Glendale.
	William Lake had never been so happy. His unbelievable good fortune filled him with such incredible joy that he could scarcely speak. The slim, lovely girl who was sitting beside him, the blue-eyed, golden-haired girl whose slender fingers he was clasping tightly, had promised to be his wife.
	She was dressed entirely in white. A radiance suffused her lovely countenance, shone in her clear, blue eyes.
	William Lake was an attorney at law. He had passed his bar examinations at the age of twenty-one. He was now twenty-three. He had eight clients and his income averaged thirty dollars a week. But Helen Hunter was a modern young woman. Helen Hunter had a job of her own and she was firmly convinced that two could manage as skillfully as one.
	Only one thing troubled her, clouding her almost perfect happiness. “Dearest,” she murmured. “Women age so much more rapidly than men. When you are still middle-aged, I shall be—an old hag. Oh, I know that sounds ugly, but we must face it, Will. I am five years older than you.”
	“In fifty years you will still be young and radiant to me,” he murmured. “Oh, my dear, as long as I live there will never be any one but you for me.”
	Helen Hunter smiled and nestled closer, resting her head on Lake’s shoulder.
	Suddenly Helen said, “I feel dizzy, Will. My head is buzzing. It must be very warm in here.”
	A look of concern came into Lake’s face. He turned slightly and looked down in tender solicitude at the woman by his side. As his eyes focused on the upturned oval of her face, his cheeks drained pale and a startled cry burst from his lips.
	Helen Hunter had vanished. The woman beside him was not—could not be Helen Hunter. A face shriveled and seamed and horrible rested upon his shoulder—the face of a woman so incredibly old that all expression had vanished from her features. Only her eyes were alive and tortured, faded blue pools in the awful desolation of her time-ravaged countenance. Only her eyes spoke to him—the eyes of Helen Hunter, the eyes of the woman he loved.
	Blind terror engulfed William Lake. He cried out again and half rose from the table.
	In frantic dismay the withered crone’s clawlike hands went out and fastened on his wrists. Her toothless gums jabbered, “What is the matter, Will? Why do you look at me like that?”
	Slowly, as he returned her agonized stare, the awful truth dawned upon him. The ghastly apparition who was clinging to him in senile despair was still Helen Hunter. He was gazing into the tormented eyes of a woman who had aged seventy years in a few seconds.
	Fighting down his horror and revulsion, he drew her gently into his arms and kissed her wrinkled forehead.
	“I will wake; I must wake,” he muttered. “I have been caught up in some horrible dream. Helen, Helen, bear with me until this illusion passes, this madness ends. Your sweet face is hidden. I cannot see you as you are. But we are together still. No blackness, no horror can destroy our love.”

	FIFTEEN MILES AWAY two men were struggling savagely at the base of the largest steel gun ever cast. Below the hill, where they clawed and tore at one another, the landscape that had once stretched peacefully to the far horizon was terrifyingly convulsed. The level pasture lands had buckled into overlapping folds. Like the waves of a frozen sea they hung incredibly suspended between earth and sky, and upon them crawled huge, disklike objects that had once been cattle.
	The outlines of the bombarded animals were still nebulously bovine. Their bodies were wavering, circular smudges of brownish hue, but they moved on attenuated legs and with long necks out-thrust over the overlapping fields. An alien geometry held this fearfully altered world in thrall.
	The distorted cattle were moving in concentric spirals, backward and forward simultaneously—moving at right angles to the contorted fields and yet unmistakably across them. The hills had repudiated mathematics. They were no longer stably orientated in space. They wavered and coalesced and caved in upon themselves, dissolving in incredible spirals, buckling into alignments alien to three-dimensional physics.
	Beside the great gun, Henry Winter was gouging Wolfe’s flesh with his finger nails. In despairing desperation, the mild little dreamer was fighting to save fifteen thousand souls.
	Wolfe gave ground slowly before the little man’s savage onslaught. A grim urgency gripped Winter as he drove the other from the gun. He was fiercely determined to reverse the lever, to stop the still-whirring disk in the grid hood. He must prevent, at all cost, another blast from the automatically recharging breech chambers at the base of the terrible weapon.
	Wolfe’s eyes were venomously aglow. Snarling like an enraged beast, he directed fierce blows at the little man’s head and shoulders—blows which the latter cleverly evaded. Winter’s smallness was an asset. He dodged and ducked and weaved about agilely. He squirmed in under Wolfe’s guard and inflicted merciless punishment. His hands raked clawlike across his antagonist’s unprotected face. For thirty feet the struggling twain reeled and tottered backward across the summit of the hill.
	Then Winter swung about. He leaped out of range of Wolfe’s flailing arms and raced madly back to the great gun. Swiftly, he clambered over its massive base, tugged and jerked at the lever which controlled the priming mechanism.
	A despairing cry burst from his lips. The lever had jammed. Stubbornly, it resisted the pressure of his fingers. For an instant he continued to frantically tug at it, his breath coming in labored gasps. Then Wolfe was upon him. They fought again beneath the grid hood, their bodies violently intertwining above projecting knobs of metal.
	It happened suddenly—the reversal of the great weapon, the sudden shifting of its range. Wolfe’s thrashing limbs collided with another lever a few inches beneath the breech mount, pushed it sharply sideways. Instantly, there arose a loud, vibrant thrumming which drowned out the fainter hum of the revolving wheel in the grid hood.
	Slowly, the long barrel began to turn. The distorted and convulsed fields passed out of range of its sinister trajectory before the two men realized what was happening. Locked in a fierce, muscular impasse, they were too agitated to realize that the metal beneath them was steadily moving.
	It was not until the gun was pointing directly across another stretch of countryside, a bleak, denuded vista covered with stubble grass and stretching away to smoke-enveloped horizons, that they awoke to the horror of their predicament. But it was too late. The great gun spoke again before they could descend from its base, spoke in accents that shook the earth, hurled Winter and his companion forty feet through the air, and reverberated through the massive stone walls of Wolfe’s iron foundry seven miles away. Directly in the path of the space-warping force curtain was the great, sprawling beast which belched fire at night.

	“APE” JEPSON was built to endure. He had a square, massive face, huge hands and feet. His body was barrel-shaped, incredibly thickset. His voice snarled or roared in his throat. His eyes were deep-set, small and unintelligent. His face was almost apelike in its primitiveness. Across his low forehead dark, oily strands of hair straggled repellently. His thick lips were set in a perpetual sneer.
	He was holding a white-hot bar of metal in tongs so huge that they would have weighed to earth a man of normal physique. He was standing on a projecting ledge of metal, gazing downward into a forty-foot cauldron seethingly aglow. Far beneath him little men in black, with glare-protected eyes, swarmed like ants over Cyclopean, red-lighted annealing ovens, blows and mandrils.
	Ape Jepson raised the tongs and brandished them proudly, his great biceps swelling.
	“See you,” he said. “This is a man’s work. It is a man’s work I do. I do not sit and read from crazy books like you. You are so weak, like a baby.”
	The man addressed raised his eyes and smiled tolerantly through thick-lensed spectacles. He was in all respects the exact opposite of Ape Jepson. He had a thin, scholarly face, a thin, frail body. His eyes were as blue as the summer skies—a light, cold blue. In his white, uncalloused hands he was holding a small book.
	He was leaning against a rail which terminated at the ledge on which Jepson was standing. Thomas Wilder knew steel. He had forgotten more about steel than Jepson would ever know. Despite his physical frailness and myopic vision, he was the ablest supervisor in Cyrus Wolfe’s foundry.
	“Do you know, Ape,” he said, “the more I study you, the less I admire brawn for its own sake. You are sheer, unadulterated brawn. And because of that you are not even dominant, not even manly. You are just a lumbering lump of subservient flesh. My brains rule you, guide you, control you.”
	Ape Jepson looked bewildered. He shuffled his feet and chewed at his thick underlip. “What kind of talk is that?” he muttered. “I am master here. If you want to cast iron, you got to lift it like I do. It is a man’s work.”
	“Ape,” said Wilder, “you remind me of certain animals that walked the earth millions of years ago. Did you ever hear of dinosaurs, Ape? They were larger and stronger than twenty elephants, but in their big heads they had tiny, pea-sized brains. They could have lifted steel, too, Ape.”
	“Foolish, crazy talk,” muttered Jepson thickly. “There ain’t no animals lived that long ago.”
	He drew himself up again, spat contemptuously. He raised the tongs he was holding, swung the glowing metal in a wide arc—swung it but did not hurl it.
	A cry of unearthly terror bubbled from his thick lips, as he arrested his arm in mid-air. Out of the floor of the great foundry far below there had loomed a colossal shape which filled all the space where the cauldron had been and all the space where little men in black with glare protectors on their heat-blistered faces had climbed over the enormous annealing furnaces.
	The shape was moving and alive. It was a vast, leathery bulk which glistened in the lurid light of roaring blast furnaces, that shook the foundry with its lumbering tread. It was reptilian in contour, with an enormous, lizardlike head, a wide, flaring neck and little, dark eyes malignantly agleam. Its sinisterly gleaming jaws were rimmed with long, sharp teeth which glittered more sanguineously than the lizard flesh on its quivering flanks. Slowly, awfully it upreared until its teeth-studded jaws were within a few inches of Ape Jepson’s horror-frozen form.
	Wilder was horror-frozen, too. His spine congealed as he clutched the rail before him and stared down at the slowly uprearing monster. “An allosaurus,” he cried, his voice vibrant with consternation. “A carnivorous dinosaur of the Jurassic Age—the most frightful engine of destruction that ever walked the earth!”
	The name meant nothing to Ape Jepson. He had eyes only for the great, leathery face so near to him, the glittering, tooth-rimmed jaws that yawned to engulf him. He screamed and hurled the glowing ingot straight at the huge beast’s wide, flaring neck.
	With a sibilant hiss, the white-hot bar of metal whirled through the air, thudded against quivering, reptilian flesh. A roar of pain and rage welled from the great saurian’s throat. In blind agony, it turned about and moved swayingly from the ledge which supported Jepson and his companion. An acrid odor of burning flesh surged sickeningly on the tainted air.

	WITH a painful effort, Cyrus Wolfe arose to a sitting posture and stared dazedly about him. Forty feet away the great gun stood immobile, its contents expelled, slumberous now under the clear autumn skies. But below the hill chaos and horror reigned.
	To the west stretched the pasture lands that had repudiated mathematics. Still in the throes of unnatural convulsions, they wavered and receded terrifyingly, while the flattened, disklike cattle moved erratically across them.
	To the east stretched another world convulsed. The stubble fields had heaved up into great, overlapping tiers that stretched skyward at incredible tangents and pulsed with a pale-violet light. As Wolfe stared, horror-stricken, he perceived that the world to the east was more aggressive than the world of unnaturally contorted pasture lands and long stone fences.
	It did not merely hover in multidimensional fluidity a hundred feet from the muzzle of the great gun. It moved slowly in Wolfe’s direction, the glimmering tiers seeming to retreat as they advanced.
	But advance they did, slowly, relentlessly, nearer and nearer to where Wolfe sat with a broken ankle and wildly staring eyes. Wolfe was staring with a freezing sense of terror surging up in his breast at an incredible object which was moving toward him across the tiers. It was vaguely like the disk-shaped cows in the convoluted pasture lands, but larger, more ponderous.
	Its body was a huge, circular smudge from which a long, tapering cone projected waveringly backward into space. It moved on stumpy, wavering legs, backward and forward simultaneously, and its vast neck was outthrust for one hundred feet beyond the quivering circle of its incredibly flattened body.
	It seemed to be fleeing as though in panic, down and across the tiers, moving swiftly nearer to Wolfe with every yard traversed. And, suddenly, it was upon him, its vast, impossible body descending vertically, crushing him swiftly and terribly to earth.
	The next instant it was gone. The air about it seemed to swirl in upon it, to swallow it up. Where its great bulk had been there yawned only a quivering void.
	It was some minutes before consciousness returned to Henry Winter. The recoil of the great gun had hurled him so violently to earth that his entire body was a mass of bruises. His legs tingled and his head throbbed and ached. But, resolutely, he struggled to his feet and stared about him—stared in stunned incredulity at a normal world.
	To the west of the hill stretched unmoving brown fields bisected by long, stone fences. In purple hollows contented cattle grazed. A drowsiness enveloped the autumn landscape, a pervasive peace. To the east peace reigned, too. The mellow rays of the slowly westering sun relieved the somberness of stubble fields which stretched away to smoke-wrapped horizons. Nowhere was there a hint of distortion or abnormality. Nature had resumed her three-dimensional sway.
	There was only one repellent note: crushed and incredibly mangled, the unmoving body of Cyrus Wolfe gleamed gruesomely in the warm autumn sunlight forty feet from the great gun that had warped space.

	WINTER tried his best to explain what had happened to the reporters who clustered about him the following morning. He sat propped in bed and returned their incredulous stares unwaveringly.
	“I know it seems unbelievable, gentlemen,” he said. “And I cannot, of course, blame you for thinking me a little touched. But this is what really happened. Space time was warped slightly. The Einsteinian space-time continuum buckled into shallow folds and then straightened out again. The warp was merely superficial.
	“Because it was superficial, only a little of the past, a little of the future broke through. The folds of the warp distorted space time evanescently, erratically skirting the vast gulf where the past lies buried and lightly tapping the vast stores of the future.
	“It is a truism of modern speculative physics that the past and the future exist simultaneously and coextensively in higher dimensions of space. De Sitter has speculated as to the possibility of seeing an event before it happens. It is quite possible, gentlemen. Events of the far future already exist in space time.
	“You tell me that a woman in Glendale became incredibly old in a few seconds and then returned to glowing youth and beauty in her lover’s arms.”
	He smiled a little. “I’m glad that happened, gentlemen. I mean, I’m glad she became young again. Apparently the warp was very feeble when it reached Glendale. A thin thread of force warped space very slightly where the woman was sitting, so slightly that it missed her companion completely.
	“She became an old woman for an instant, was projected forward in time. Her surroundings remained stable because the warp was so slight that it only enveloped her body. Then the warp straightened out and she became young again.
	“You tell me that two men saw an incredible beast in Wolfe’s foundry. They swear it looked like a dinosaur. I think it was a dinosaur, gentlemen. It broke through when the warp tapped the past.”
	“And what killed Wolfe?” exclaimed one of the skeptical reporters belligerently. “What trampled Wolfe to death? Was that a dinosaur?”
	Winter smiled wanly. “I think perhaps it was the same dinosaur,” he murmured. “But, of course, we’ll never know for certain.”