WHEN HALF WORLDS MEET
by Hugh Raymond

(Author of "Power," "Rebirth of Tomorrow," etc.)



The third planet of the solar system was half Earth and half Mars. And the 
villain of the piece was the speed of light. One of the strangest stories ever 
written!


J0-AD DUG his heels into his hump-backed steed's ribs and grunted. "The moon 
used to be up there," he said morosely, pointing skyward.
"What did it look like?"
He stared at the heavens and, for an instant, his dull eyes glittered.
"Mo-Ad, there was nothing to compare with it in the sky for sheer beauty. A 
giant globe of the most delicate yellow with black markings over the surface 
that took on the semblance of a face. It was utilized mainly for romance. Lovers 
wooed each other in its glow, in cities and countries alike..."
Mo-Ad rested himself in his saddle.
"What were cities and countries?" he asked.
Jo-Ad sighed.
"The cities were great beehives of industry--that was something that meant 
producing articles in quantities," he added hastily as he saw the instant 
question form upon his son's lips, "wherein they worked and played, lived and 
died, loved and begat their children. Beehives of industry, where they made by 
the millions, in almost less time than it takes to tell, the instruments we 
produce today by hand. Giant social centers where everyone was happy, where 
everyone was warm and safe. Countries--well, they were sections of land each 
inhabited by different races of people. Races, my son, were sections of 
humanity. Some were different from others. Some had black skin, some yellow, 
some pale like ours. Some had long noses, some short. A lot of them were tall 
and a lot were runty. They were not like us." He raised his head and, shading 
his eyes, peered ahead.
"We are approaching the Cliff. You must know of that as well. And when you see 
it you will understand why our skins are pale and why the skins of the People of 
the Top are black...."
Mo-Ad broke in, eager to show his father a glimmer of the analytical 
intelligence that alone of the People of the Bottom was Jo-Ad's.
"But father, you said that no one could ever reach the country of the People of 
the Top. The Cliff is too high. How then do you know that their skins are 
black?"
Jo-Ad pulled his burnoose closer about him to protect his thin skin from the 
evening chill.

"Their bodies have been found-- torn and mangled at the bottom. Some careless 
individuals fell the awful height of the Cliff. According to the ancient 
reckoning, it is a hundred and fifty miles high. Their skins were as black as 
coal. You see, Mo-Ad, when the Top grew over the Bottom, the atmosphere poured 
down on us, leaving a thin layer on the Top and burdening our Bottom with 
billions upon billions of tons of air. That is why we are pale skinned. The sun 
must penetrate additional hundreds of miles of atmosphere. The Top people 
compensated for the loss of air by developing larger lung-capacities."
"And how do you know all these things?" asked Mo-Ad with the skepticism of the 
very young.
His father looked at him long.
"I have read the Books," he said in an awful voice. "And I know why the Top grew 
upon the Bottom and why we are pale-skinned and where the Moon went and why we 
have no industry or cities or countries. And many things more which you shall 
know."
Mo-Ad jogged along in silence for awhile. The undulating desert flowed by. Far 
ahead loomed the Cliff.
"I have heard it said," he breathed softly at length, "that once this land was 
buried beneath a bottomless ocean."
"You heard right." Jo-Ad sat up very straight and gazed sadly about the empty 
wilderness lit by the rays of the setting sun. "The ocean grew when the Top grew 
and pressed down what it grew over and the Bottom was flooded. The cities were 
drowned and almost all of the people. The machines rusted and fell apart and 
their secrets were lost. Presently, the People of the Top, who had all these 
things, bored through their planet and began draining away the ocean that buried 
the Bottom. It flowed into the empty chasms under the Top. In a little while it 
was all gone. The remnants of the people from whom we are descended came down 
from the mountains to the dry lands and grew and multiplied--but slowly. In the 
course of time some water returned--and thus our people lived." He paused and 
looked at the looming Cliff with hatred. "But enough... we are approaching the 
Cliff."
HIGH SOARED the Cliff, one hundred and fifty miles into the dense air. From 
where their camels coursed, up and down and over the sand-hills, they could see 
its curving bulk stretching away to the uttermost limits of the horizon. An 
insurmountable barrier, it reared its grim, absolutely sheer wall to invisible 
heights. The top was lost in shifting clouds that poured over the barrier and 
floated down to condense in watery vapor which buried half its height in 
impenetrable mists.
"It goes around the world," gasped Jo-Ad, as he was jogged roughly by this 
camel, "and no one can climb it. It is too high. It is too smooth."
"But the flying birds. Could they not have scaled the Cliff ?" asked Mo-Ad 
naively.
"I have told you, my son, that all those secrets were lost when the Bottom was 
drowned."
Mo-Ad stopped his camel and slid to the ground. He set his feet firmly in the 
sandy soil. He looked inquiringly at his father who also dismounted and stood, 
lost in thought, one hand on the tether of his mount, the other cupping a weary 
chin.
"Father, where is the Moon?"
Jo-Ad lifted his head and pointed.

"Beyond the Top. During the course of ages, the uneven pull of the Top slowed 
the satellite in its orbit to a point where it hung stationary in the sky above 
the Top." He bent down and with the end of his camelwhip drew a diagram in the 
sand. What looked like two badly fitted halves fitted to each other, one greatly 
overlapping the other. A smaller full sphere hung beyond the wider half.
"This is what the three planets look like now, Mo-Ad," he said.
Mo-Ad gazed earnestly at the diagram, eager to please his father who had done 
what no other parent of his race would -- imparted precious knowledge to his 
son.
"And what is the name of the Top, father ?"
"Mars, my son."
--------
PROFESSOR CHARTERS Randolph was no snob. He did his plowing himself. The little 
college town was too poor to support him adequately and pay for the wild 
experiments his faculty colleagues frowned on. He cracked a whip in the air 
above the heads of his two blowsy horses and felt the plow-belt about his waist 
pulled forward sharply.
His action was automatic, because he really wasn't thinking of the plowing at 
all. The long furrows lengthened out behind him in mathematically straight 
lines, and occasionally he absently cracked his whip and was pulled forward when 
he got around to noticing that the plow had stopped. Randolph jerked his head up 
and mopped it with a violently red handkerchief. He looked around with a 
startled gaze and realized that he and his horses had reached the end of the 
field. Wearily he started to turn them around. Half-heartedly, he hitched up the 
belt encircling his waist, then, suddenly let it drop, stepped up to the horses, 
disconnected their reins and with a slap on the rump sent them ambling toward 
the barn. He took himself painfully toward the distant cottage settling like a 
grey brick on the brown hill-side.
His wife Martha greeted him in the front yard which crouched close to the 
country road. She waved a hand at him and wiped the sweat off her own brow with 
the other. Hard toil had changed Martha Randolph from the city stenographer who 
had fallen in love with the Professor into a tall, hard woman of the soil who 
broke her back during the day with farm chores and spent the evenings reading 
Shakespeare and holding fuming test tubes for her husband.
"Martha, I'm sick of it," he said with a droop in the corners of his mouth. He 
passed her and went on up to the porch where he doused his sweating head in a 
pail of cold water and dipped a panful of it into his mouth.
She came up behind him and, laying her cheek against his shoulder, hugged him 
fiercely.
"Go on in the house and lay down," she suggested.
He turned to her and stood arms akimbo.
"No, I'm going into the lab. When's supper? Is Charley coming over?"
She bent over the pail of fresh water and took a long drink before replying. 
When she straightened, she flashed her white teeth in the light of the sun.
"Charley'll be over after supper. We're having steak Want any beer ?
"Never mind, darling," he replied, "steak's enough. Thanks."
He turned abruptly and walked around the house to a small shed with a heavy door 
which he unlocked with a big old-fashioned key. The interior was dark. He 
carefully lit a kerosene lamp and sent some of the gloom skittering.
Well, he thought, I'm in my castle now. The farm and the back-breaking labor lay 
far behind. This was his citadel--his citadel of science, as he called it, a 
safe haven against a disintegrating world. He pulled up a chair, sat down and 
looked around, gloating.
The interior of the shack was rough pine, unpainted, but clean. Lined with 
shelves, it measured about fifteen by twenty feet and was connected with the 
rest of the house with a very small door at one end. The shelves were piled high 
with colored bottles of chemicals and under them, at intervals along the walls, 
big machines were set on concrete slabs sunk into the earth. Big metal working 
machinery, bought and paid for with sweat and blood and tears; machinery 
begrudged Randolph by a jealous world that took far more than it gave. He 
shrugged his shoulders in the half darkness and smiled a crooked smile. He'd 
given it more than it could have given him. Invention after invention to 
brighten the world and clean up the dirty corners. It had all been stolen, by 
crooked business men and greedy schools. The Professor was a singular man in his 
conduct toward the world. He was invariably honest and direct. So his brain work 
was stolen and he starved more often than he ate.
Between the machines, which were fed by heavy power cables leading out to the 
field where power lines their way up the mountain to the town, were piles of 
metal slabs, wires, tools, insulation and more chemicals in cans. Where the 
shadows lay, thrown by the feeble light of the kerosene lamp, they loomed dirty 
and like a shambles. He didn't care. The roughness of the assemblage of 
machinery pleased him. It owed nothing to the outside world. But it was his 
baby.
HE SAT IN the darkness for a while and then Martha called him in to supper. They 
ate slowly and meditatively and looked at each other with deep love in their 
eyes, and sopped huge chunks of bread into the gravy and ate them. As they were 
having coffee, the unlocked front door opened and Charley Small came in.
"Evenin' folks," he said Slowly and took off his cap and sat down.
He was a big, lumbering farmer, who had a brain with a razor's edge and nobody 
but the Professor to give it something to cut into. He worked during the day at 
an iceplant in the town and spent as many of his evenings as he could sitting 
with Randolph in his shack helping him fashion strange machines. He had a queer 
love for the shiny contraptions turned out by his friend. Somehow, they 
signified the outside world to him with all its splendor and glory. He was a 
poet, but only the Professor and his wife knew it.
Martha smiled up at him and pushed a chair against the supper table.
"Have some coffee," she said.
Charley sat down and took a newspaper out of the back pocket of his work 
overalls and handed it without a word to the Professor. Randolph picked it up, 
glanced briefly at the headline and threw it into a corner where reposed stacks 
of old papers. They often came in handy for kindling fires in the big brick 
stove.
"What's new?" asked Randolph as Martha got up and reached for the big coffee 
pot.
Small scratched his thick-thatched head and grunted.
"Nothin' much, Randolph."
"Get that tobacco?"
The big man hitched his pants and brought out a huge package of cut plug. 
Randolph reached for it.
"Thanks; don't know what I'd have done without it."
He pushed back his plate and leaned aside while Martha stood over them pouring 
coffee. When she'd finished, she walked over to a shabby studio couch, reclined 
on it and snapped on a small radio. Presently the strains of a symphony filled 
the confines of the small house,
They finished their coffee in silence.

"Say, Doc," began Small after a few minutes, "I got a question." From a vest 
pocket underneath the overalls he produced two small mirrors, of the variety 
sold on notion counters in five-and-dime stores, and held them up to the dim 
light.
"What are those?" asked Randolph, interested. He filled his pipe and puffed, 
looking at the two baubles suspended in the air before his eyes.
"Just an idea I got today. I was sittin' in Sloan's lunch. Sloan has two mirrors 
on opposite walls and I was sittin' between 'em. I got a look at myself down 
both mirrors-- and there I was about a million times on both sides . . ."
The Professor chuckled.
"Rather startling when you see it for the first time."
The big man scratched his head again.
"Yeah, Sorta curious There I was curving away on both sides. Say, why don't 
those images line up?"
Randolph chuckled again.
"They can't. No two mirrors can be brought exactly into line with each other. In 
the first place, no two planes are ever exactly parallel and that's what you'd 
need to start off with. Even the slightest unbalance is enough to start the 
images curving away. And they always do."
The two small mirrors still hovered in the air.
"Yeah, but suppose you could get two of them things in exact line with each 
other. What would happen?"
Randolph looked at him queerly and thought to himself for a minute. Well, what 
would happen? It had never happened before, so he supposed some result was bound 
to occur. For some reason, an irrelevant picture of an explosion filled his 
mind, then faded. It had been a random thought, nothing more. He balanced his 
pipe in his hands.
"I don't know just what would happen. It's a phenomenon that has never been 
observed." He reached over and plucked the two mirrors from the big man's 
calloused hands.
"Yes," he mused, "I wonder what would happen..."
"For instance," interrupted Small, "if you could do it and I got between 'em, 
what would happen to the reflection? Would it stay there after I got out of the 
way?"
Randolph looked at the mirrors and held them up.
"No, I don't think it would. The reflection is light and light has mass. 
Astro-physicists have proven that light loses velocity every time it is 
reflected. Somewhere the reflection would stop and become mass. Natural law 
governs that."
"Well," persisted Small, "what would happen to it after it turned solid? Could 
you put your hand on it?"
The Professor looked up with a jerk. He turned wide open eyes on Small.
"I--I suppose you could. Every time the light was re-reflected from mirror to 
mirror it would lose some of its velocity and get nearer the solid state."
The other drank his coffee and lit a pipe himself.
"Suppose," he continued along his line of reasoning, "suppose you got a bit of 
sunlight in between 'em. What would you have after it stopped?"
Randolph sat up and stared.
"My god !" he ejaculated, "And they say that yokels can't think ! Charley, 
you've got an idea there. But--it's impossible! Nobody could ever get two 
mirrors in exact alignment. If they did . . . but damn it, nobody can."
Small stared moodily into the gloom.

"Well," he said, licking his lips. "It was a good idea."
THEY PLAYED cards for awhile and then went into the laboratory where the two of 
them worked over some machine's shaping odd lengths of metal and wood. Finally 
Small went home.
In bed that night, the big man's idea haunted Randolph's dreams. He awoke at 
last from a deep sleep, sweating. He'd been dreaming about mirrors. He'd been 
caught between two of them in exact alignment and hurled, spinning, into 
infinity.
"God!" he ejaculated and ran his fingers through his hair.
His wife stirred and woke up.
"What's the matter, dear ?" she asked, shifting around to face him.
He was still running his fingers through his hair.
"Martha," he said after a time, "It's coming again. An idea. Do you think we can 
go on short rations for awhile?"
She smiled sleepily and kissed him, used to his sudden notions.
"Of course, darling. I didn't marry a plow horse. I married a man. Be one. Is it 
more machines, this time?"
He nodded. "Yes," he said hoarsely.
She kissed him again.
He went down to his shack many evenings now and worked among the spinning 
machines powered by the little dynamo that hummed endlessly away, driven by the 
underground river his science had found. Charley Small helped him shape the box 
he built and the queer mirrors he carefully polished and ground, and stood over 
him with infinite patience holding the necessary tools like a nurse at an 
operating table. Gradually the machine he was building took shape.
Martha came down one evening from the upstairs bedroom whence she had retired 
after supper for a wink of sleep. It was a dark, warm night and both men were 
working in their pants and undershirts. Their bare feet made pattering noises on 
the pine floor as they moved and the room was lit up by the weird glow of a 
small metal-cutting torch wielded by her husband.
As she entered the room, the Professor swung back the visor which protected his 
eyes from the flame and stood up painfully. He arched his back. She came over 
and rubbed it for awhile. Charley looked on, one hand on the controls of the 
torch, the other tamping the ashes in his pipe. His huge eyes glittered with the 
light of discovery.
"Anywhere near finished ?" she asked.
Randolph wiped his hands with some cotton waste and lit his pipe.
"We've got something, and I don't know what we've got. Remember that centrifuge 
I built for the Polyclinic that made a dozen separate motions simultaneously ? 
Well, this is a hundred times more complicated."
She straightened her gingham dress and tucked away a wisp of hair behind her 
ear.
"What's that?" she asked, touching a smoothly rounded bump at one end of the 
metal box lying on the floor. Looking over it she noticed another at the 
opposite end.
Her husband grunted.
"That's the nub of the whole thing. It equalizes about a million different 
factors all at the same time: plane distortion, temperature warp, atmospheric 
density inside the box, impact of cosmic rays, vibrations from one end of the 
spectrum to the other and ordinary earth movements. In some ways, though, it 
isn't as important as this prism." He paused and touched an arrangement of 
polished glass directly in the center of the top of the steel box. "This 
reflects light down into the box to another prism which directs the beam toward 
one of the mirrors mounted on the inside of those bulges."
She considered this for awhile.
"Didn't you tell me that the interior prism was the last stumbling block? You 
had to get it out of the way without destroying the reflection."
He puffed on his pipe. His eyes lit up with deep satisfaction.
"That's easy--now." He walked to a cabinet and brought out a violin. 
Caressingly, he ran his fingers down the polished surface.
"At the precise instant when the beam flashes down through the prisms and into 
the mirrors, I play a certain note on this violin and the interior prism 
shatters. The note is attuned to its structure and to none other. A neat bit of 
reasoning. I wonder if it will work."
She smiled, patted him on his shoulder and left.
FOR A WHILE he stood silent, then lifted the instrument, placed its chin-rest 
against his throat and played. Charley remained motionless, squatting near the 
floor, bathed, like a devil out of hell, in the glow of the torch still spitting 
noisily on a metal grid.
Randolph put down the violin abruptly.
"Let's see if it works," he said softly.

They played with it for a while until their supply of prisms ran out and then 
opened the box. On the dark metal floor, between the poised mirrors, lay several 
microscopic lumps of matter that had not been there when they locked the top 
earlier in the evening.
Randolph shut off the flashlight that had been shining into the primary prism 
and rolled it into a tool box. He moved to a wooden bench and sat down. 
Nervously he relit his pipe which had gone out and set his face firmly between 
his hands, elbows planted on the top of the table before him.
"Charley," he called softly, inclining his head.
The big man shuffled over and leaned heavily on the table, the muscles on his 
brawny arms standing out like linked walnuts.
"Yeah, it worked. What are you going to do now?"
The Professor looked up at him.
"Charley, I'm going to materialize ment, uncomprehending. Then, the untutored 
brain, keen, penetrating, direct, suddenly understood. But Small, although a 
grown man, was still emotionally a child. He ran out, holding his head in his 
hands.
The next morning Randolph had the thing out in the big pasture. It was a strange 
sight, the bronzed body bent slightly over the huge box supported on an old 
table, his arms holding lightly the body and bow of a violin. He opened the 
shutter of the prism, aimed it at the sun and drew the bow across the strings of 
the instrument. There was a tearing noise and a faint tinkle and suddenly it was 
all over.
Randolph quickly unscrewed the top of the box and looked within. Suspended in 
the center, directly between the two mirrors, an infinitely tiny, bisected ball 
of pure light spun and hummed. He'd gotten more than his sunbeam. He'd gotten a 
tiny half sun.
As he watched, the tiny dot began to grow. In half an hour it was double its 
original size and getting bigger every minute.
Randolph, paralyzed, stared at the growing dot with undisguised terror. He 
realized, with awful clarity, that he had stumbled upon something entirely new, 
and that a whole set of laws governing its action and reaction was coming into 
being. He fled to the house, frantically grabbed pencil and paper and busied 
himself for an hour with calculations.
Martha came home from town as he rushed out wildly waving a sheaf of papers. He 
was shouting incomprehensibly, something about the dot growing until it burned 
the earth to a cinder. The calmed him down as only she knew how and presently he 
light, why not bury the thing? It can't grow if it can't feed." Her voice was 
calm, reassuring.
"The thing will grow on any sort of impact vibration whatsoever. These figures 
prove it. What about cosmic rays? They penetrate many feet of lead. We'd go 
bankrupt buying a box big enough to hold it."
She shook her head.
"You told me once that a certain amount of ground depth was the equivalent of 
the quantity of lead necessary to stop the rays. Why don't you throw it down the 
crack in the rock on the other side of the pasture?"
He looked at her wildly.
"Darling, of course !" he shouted and danced a jig.
She stood for this a while, then drew him away to the box. Peering over the 
edge, she glimpsed the evilly glowing whirling dot and shuddered.
"The box is too heavy," she cried, "And that crevice is over half a mile away."
He considered a moment, then brought his fist down on the edge of the table on 
which the machine rested.
"Martha, empty the fish-bowl and bring it back here, quick. Just the fish, not 
the water!"

She left at high speed and returned in a few minutes. Seizing the huge object, 
he turned it over, and with a hiss the ball of fire fell into the large bowl of 
water. Without wasting an instant he cupped a hand over one end and dashed madly 
for the other end of the field.
He returned in about an hour to find his wife screwing on the top of the box.
"Is it safe?" she asked anxiously, wiping a smear of grease from her hands.
He looked at her with a relieved expression on his face.
"Safe. Buried a thousand feet down."
They walked arm in arm toward the house.
OR A WHILE the box was forgotten, but little by little the desire to explore its 
possibilities grew back in Randolph's mind. He spent long hours of the evenings 
poring over calculations, working out its mathematics. Finally he decided to 
have a go at it again. This time there would be no danger, he promised himself.
He went to see Saunders, the president of the town's small bank.
Saunders was sitting at his desk as he walked in. He blinked his small piggish 
eyes rapidly and fiddled with the gold watch chain strung from the pockets of 
his vest.
"Afternoon, Professor," he said evenly in his clipped mid-western accent. "They 
told me you'd phoned about a loan."
Randolph sat down.
"Yes. I'm conducting some new experiments..."
Saunders smiled primly and looked over the top of his pince nez.
"Yes, yes. Of course. I know of your work. Some very valuable things you turned 
out for the clinic. Pity you didn't patent them."
As the bank president had been one of the cabal who had swindled him out of the 
proceeds of his clinical researches, Randolph tried to let this pass with as 
much aplomb as was possible considering the circumstances.
"I want fifty thousand dollars," he said flatly, without further pause.
Saunders blinked his eyes twice when he heard this. The pince nez came off and 
fell with a clank into his lap.
"Wha--wha--what's that ? Fifty thousand dollars?"
The Professor nodded grimly.
Saunders raised his hands in horror.
"What could you do with so much money?" he asked in a strained falsetto.
"I said that I was conducting some new experiments," replied Randolph firmly.
"Of what nature?"
"I cannot explain that until I've some concrete results to offer. But I need 
enough money to buy immense quantities of lead. Once that is accomplished I feel 
that anyone financially connected with the experiment would be in on a 
goldmine."
"You mean that literally ?"
The Professor's face lost its serious mien.
"Yes, I do," he said, smiling. "A goldmine. Quite literally."
Saunders opened his eyes as wide as they could go and pressed a stud on his 
desk. Within a minute his secretary walked in. The bank president looked up at 
her with an amused smile playing about his thin lips.
"Please show the Professor out," he snapped, losing his smile almost 
immediately, "I'm afraid he's slightly touched."
Randolph stared at him for a moment, then began to laugh. He waved the 
astonished secretary aside and walked out.
THERE WERE no experiments for a time after that, and the box lay untouched in a 
corner of the shack because it represented a trillion tons of unexploded 
trinitrotoluene. He looked at it during the long autumn evenings, and sometimes 
his wife came in and stood by his side and regarded the box anxiously. The 
bolted top imprisoned a devil and her supple hands caressed away at such times 
his desire to let it loose.
But it could not remain the same always. His machines were silent, and Charley 
came over oftener now and helped him stare at the bulky object. Finally flesh 
and blood collapsed. Caution flew out of the window.
He bought a telescope and rigged it up to focus on small objects such as clay 
pigeons and dolls bought in the five-and-dime store in the nearby town and he 
found that when his prisms shattered, a small, almost microscopic, replica lay 
amid their powdered ruins. Complex physical laws governed the various reactions. 
All the replicas grew slowly, in proportion to the amount of light used in 
reflecting them, but faster when more vibrations were allowed to drench them. In 
some unknown fashion the scanning telescope became almost a living thing, 
automatically adjusting the rate of expansion in accordance with the light used 
and the size of the original object. Thus, when one day he trained the refractor 
on the top of a nearby mountain, the resulting bisected image grew much more 
rapidly than usual until it threatened to bulge the sides of the reproducing 
machine. With infinite labor he carted the expanding mass with the generous help 
of Charley Small to the crevice and buried it safely. Small objects when 
reproduced reacted differently. Their rate of growth was slower. And there 
seemed to be a limit. The magical power of the simple telescope astounded him. 
Sitting at his calculations he concluded that he had stumbled across natural 
laws unknown previously, operating logically with rigid mathematical precision.
Many strange reproductions followed the first few simple things. The side of a 
horse, a frothy section of cloud that inundated the shack and only ceased 
growing when the ground had absorbed it completely, a clock with hands but only 
a solid mass where the works should have been. The matter composing the objects 
seemed totally different from any earthly composition. It seemed a sort of 
rubbery soil that varied in composition, texture and strength; it duplicated the 
matter of the object, but only in a thin shell.

Presently the crevice filled up. He spent days blasting out another.
THE CROWNING experiment was undertaken on a snowy winter's night in January of 
the following year. Ensconced on a tall chair beside the box, which was mounted 
on its table in the pasture, and attended by the faithful Small, he opened the 
shutter of the device after focusing the telescope apparatus on Venus and then 
calmly drew the bow of his violin across the taut strings.
Venus lay within the reproducer, a small, solid half sphere that grew as they 
watched it in the pale starlight. Randolph risked for a few moments the faint 
light of a flashlight shining on the planet. It lay fuming quietly on the 
bottom, a circular disc, growing, heaving, outlines of mountains and continents 
appearing. Finally they smashed it to powder with a pickaxe and dumped it down 
the new hole in the rock.
With money saved from lowered food expenditures and articles written at a 
constant stream for wellknown scientific journals which snapped them up because 
he was a genius and they knew it, he built large but flimsy lead boxes which 
held the halved reproductions of many commonplace objects and some which he 
never permitted Martha to see. He kept them for a while, made voluminous noted 
then disposed of them in the usual way.
When Spring came he understood the process thoroughly.
"Stated simply," he said to Charley as they leaned against a fence watching a 
nearby stream liberate itself from the winter ice, "it's like this: The light is 
reflected between the two mirrors and, losing velocity, becomes mass, retaining 
its inertia. Just pure mass--matter, peculiar matter. And it grows. Slower or 
faster in proportion to the size of the object reproduced. It feeds on vibration 
because--well, because it's matter that's been born suddenly and knows it's 
alive. Not really alive, Charley, more like a stretched rubber band that is 
released and flies past its limit of elasticity. It's based on a physics that 
seems to operate through the fourth dimension and onto our space. I say the 
fourth dimension because I don't know where it comes from and that's as handy an 
explanation as any."
Small scratched his head.
"Can it make money?" he asked naively.
Randolph laughed.
"I told Saunders it could. Yes, with that machine I could reproduce enough gold, 
by simply focusing the telescope on a treasury Eagle, to buy the continent. And 
that's precisely why I won't. We'd inevitably overproduce and ruin the market 
and probably the whole economic system.
"I'm just a damn fool, Charley," he continued, "I've got a God in a box and I 
can't even ask him for a bent penny."
ON A BRILLIANTLY sun-lit day in July, a lead box containing an image of the 
planet Mars cracked from the pressure of the growing half-sphere within and 
began to expand over the floor of the shack. It grew unhindered because the 
Professor and his wife were in town buying household goods and nobody was there 
to stop it.
Charley saw it as he approached the shack on Sunday. He saw the cottage suddenly 
pushed up in the air from beneath and suddenly a great hollow half-globe of 
rusty-red with many strange markings and convolutions on its surface began to 
spread out and grow larger and bulkier on the flat Illinois farm.
By morning it had covered the town and the residents of the whole county were 
fleeing. Randolph and his wife drove the car until there was no gasoline left in 
the tanks, then stole some and continued to flee toward the west.
In a month the state was overwhelmed, and the next three months saw the enormous 
mass of expanding matter pushing out over the Atlantic. Beneath it, from 
California to New York and from Maine to Mexico, the American continent lay 
crushed, pulverized. The expanding juggernaut had obliterated the highest 
development of a culture fifty centuries old.
RANDOLPH and his wife managed to reach the coast and take passage on a steamer 
that sailed south until it reached a tiny collection of islands near the center 
of the Pacific. There it landed. And the Professor began to write a diary in 
which he analyzed the Martian destroyer.
"The ocean level is rising," he wrote, "and soon even these high islands will be 
inundated. The enormous mass of Mars has filled up the ocean beds and will 
continue to grow until it reaches its theoretical limit of expansion. That limit 
is almost precisely half way around the Earth. From where I sit I can see the 
approaching wall--it must be fifty miles high--which signals the final 
destruction of life on this part of the globe. The Moon, sun and stars are no 
longer visible because of the weather. I do not think any life surviving in 
these latitudes will ever see the Moon again. The added weight on one half of 
the planet will exert a tremendous pull and slowly bring it to a standstill, 
much closer to the Mars half of earth. The people up there--millions must have 
'climbed aboard'--will be lighter because the Moon's pull will offset the 
combined gravitation of Earth and its Martian cap. The people down here will not 
be lighter or heavier--for they will be dead. I have murdered more than half a 
world. Maybe I'm the Devil. Maybe I'm just Science gone haywire."
And on another page.
"Today is the last day. I've rigged up a steel container and I'll put these 
papers in it and throw it into the dead volcano. I don't know why. They're 
Science and death. It can be of no use to any future civilization. But somehow I 
feel that it must go on. I feel no regrets. Mainly because the world was 
destroyed not by its evil but by its best. The end is clean. The end is 
Science."
MO-AD STEPPED back from the diagram and thoughtfully erased it with his foot. He 
glanced timidly at the Top and regarded for a long moment its lacy crown of 
swirling vapor.
"Is there no way to mount the barrier?" he asked, finally.
His father's face was grim.
"There is no need for us now to conquer the Cliff, Mo-Ad. Shortly we shall 
return to our home in the South and I shall create from the Books--with your 
help, my dear son --a machine that will rescue our people from this dry 
half-world of hunger and death. Come."
For many days and nights, the two traveled toward their home and came at last to 
the small village of tents that was the mightiest metropolis of the Bottom. They 
were welcomed joyously by the small population and feasted for several days.
At the end of a week, Jo-Ad drew Mo-Ad away from his studies and showed him 
several old notebooks. On the cover of one, old, threadbare, worm-eaten, was 
written in rust-brown ink the words, "Diary of Charters Randolph." Two others, 
in the same condition of decay and decrepitude, were printed books. There were 
also several tightly-rolled parchment scrolls of a peculiar blue sheen with 
white lines upon them.
Mo-Ad read the Diary through. It was written in an ancient form of his tongue, 
but the surpassing intelligence inherited from his father, the sole intellectual 
genius of the Bottom, stood him in good stead. When he was thoroughly acquainted 
with the story, Jo-Ad began work.
Out of the poor materials dug from the earth by the tribe, he fashioned with 
infinite labor a small mirror-lined box surmounted with an intricate prism 
arrangement of smaller mirrors which were polished with great pains by Mo-Ad. 
Presently the apparatus, at the end of six months, stood complete in the sandy 
open circle surrounded by the city of tents.
In the deep blackness of one starry night, Jo-Ad gathered the members of his 
tribe together and explained that they were to go forth in the morning upon a 
great adventure. He bade them pack their goods upon all the available camels. 
Then, with Mo-Ad, he went to the Box.
For a while he did nothing but stand silently in the darkness staring at the 
sky. Mo-Ad, by his side, grew restless.
"Look, my son," cried Jo-Ad suddenly, pointing to a dim red star slowly rising 
from the horizon. "That is the planet Mars. It was the old God of War. He was a 
powerful God, but ever stronger was Jupiter, the mightiest of them all. Observe, 
Mo-Ad, the great blue planet far above. That is the planet Jupiter. And 
tomorrow, the King of the Gods will resume his sway."
He drew from beneath his garments a simple one-stringed musical instrument, 
stepped to the small, crude telescope connected to the prisms and sighted along 
its length, bringing the barrel into line with the blue planet. With a free hand 
he opened the shutter. Then, raising his instrument he poised himself in the 
cold desert air and drew a short bow across the single string.
"Now," he breathed. And as the squeaky note died away, a faint tinkle sounded on 
the air.
Jo-Ad dropped the crude violin and with his son's aid unscrewed the top of the 
Box. He peered into its depths once, and heaved a deep sigh of satisfaction.
"We shall wait, Mo-Ad, for the rising of the sun," he said.


THE END