Consternation reigned in Elsnore village when the
Nameless Thing was discovered in Farmer Burns' corn-patch. When the rumor began
to gain credence that it was some sort of meteor from inter-stellar space,
reporters, scientists and college professors flocked to the scene, desirous of
prying off particles for analysis. But they soon discovered that the Thing was
no ordinary meteor, for it glowed at night with a peculiar luminescence. They
also observed that it was practically weightless, since it had embedded itself
in the soft sand scarcely more than a few inches.
By the time the first group of newspapermen and
scientists had reached the farm, another phenomenon was plainly observable. The
Thing was growing!
Farmer Burns, with an eye to profit, had already built
a picket fence around his starry visitor and was charging admission. He also
flatly refused to permit the chipping off of specimens or even the touching of
the object. His attitude was severely criticized, but he stubbornly clung to
the theory that possession is nine points in law.
It was Professor Ralston of Princewell who, on the
third day after the fall of the meteor, remarked upon its growth. His
colleagues crowded around him as he pointed out this peculiarity, and soon they
discovered another factor—pulsation!
Larger than a small balloon, and gradually, almost
imperceptibly expanding, with its viscid transparency shot through with
opalescent lights, the Thing lay there in the deepening twilight and palpably
shivered. As darkness descended, a sort of hellish radiance began to ooze from
it. I say hellish, because there is no other word to describe that spectral,
sulphurous emanation.
As the hangers-on around the pickets shudderingly
shrank away from the weird light that was streaming out to them and tinting
their faces with a ghastly, greenish pallor, Farmer Burns' small boy, moved by
some imp of perversity, did a characteristically childish thing. He picked up a
good-sized stone and flung it straight at the nameless mass!
Instead of veering off and falling to the ground
as from an impact with metal, the stone sank right through the surface of the
Thing as into a pool of protoplastic slime. When it reached the central core of
the object, a more abundant life suddenly leaped and pulsed from center to
circumference. Visible waves of sentient color circled round the solid stone.
Stabbing swords of light leaped forth from them, piercing the stone, crumbling
it, absorbing it. When it was gone, only a red spot, like a bloodshot eye,
throbbed eerily where it had been.
Before the now thoroughly mystified crowd had time
to remark upon this inexplicable disintegration, a more horrible manifestation
occurred. The Thing, as though thoroughly awakened and vitalized by its unusual
fare, was putting forth a tentacle. Right from the top of the shivering globe
it pushed, sluggishly weaving and prescient of doom. Wavering, it hung for a
moment, turning, twisting, groping. Finally it shot straight outward swift as a
rattler's strike!
Before the closely packed crowd could give room
for escape, it had circled the neck of the nearest bystander, Bill Jones, a
cattleman, and jerked him, writhing and screaming, into the reddish core.
Stupefied with soul-chilling terror, with their mass-consciousness practically
annihilated before a deed with which their minds could make no association, the
crowd could only gasp in sobbing unison and await the outcome.
The absorption of the stone had taught them what
to expect, and for a moment it seemed that their worst anticipations were to be
realised. The sluggish currents circled through the Thing, swirling the
victim's body to the center. The giant tentacle drew back into the globe and
became itself a current. The concentric circles merged—tightened—became one
gleaming cord that encircled the helpless prey. From the inner circumference of
this cord shot forth, not the swords of light that had powdered the stone to
atoms, but myriads of radiant tentacles that gripped and cupped the body in a
thousand places.
Suddenly the tentacles withdrew themselves, all
save the ones that grasped the head. These seemed to tighten their pressure—to
swell and pulse with a grayish substance that was flowing from the cups into
the cord and from the cord into the body of the mass. Yes, it was a grayish
something, a smokelike Essence that was being drawn from the cranial cavity.
Bill Jones was no longer screaming and gibbering, but was stiff with the
rigidity of stone. Notwithstanding, there was no visible mark upon his body;
his flesh seemed unharmed.
Swiftly came the awful climax. The waving
tentacles withdrew themselves, the body of Bill Jones lost its rigidity, a
heaving motion from the center of the Thing propelled its cargo to the
surface—and Bill Jones stepped out!
Yes, he stepped out and stood for a moment staring
straight ahead, staring at nothing, glassily. Every person in the shivering,
paralysed group knew instinctively that something unthinkable had happened to
him. Something had transpired, something hitherto possible only in the abysmal
spaces of the Other Side of Things. Finally he turned and faced the nameless
object, raising his arm stiffly, automatically, as in a military salute. Then
he turned and walked jerkily, mindlessly, round and round the globe like a
wooden soldier marching. Meanwhile the Thing lay quiescent—gorged!
Professor Ralston was the first to find his voice.
In fact, Professor Ralston was always finding his voice in the most unexpected
places. But this time it had caught a chill. It was trembling.
"Gentlemen," he began, looking down
academically upon the motley crowd as though doubting the aptitude of his
salutation. "Fellow-citizens," he corrected, "the phenomenon we
have just witnessed is, to the lay mind, inexplicable. To me—and to my
honorable colleagues (added as an afterthought) it is quite clear. Quite clear,
indeed. We have before us a specimen, a perfect specimen, I might say, of a—of
a—"
He stammered in the presence of the unnamable. His
hesitancy caused the rapt attention of the throng that was waiting breathlessly
for an explanation, to flicker back to the inexplicable. In the fraction of a
second that their gaze had been diverted from the Thing to the professor, the
object had shot forth another tentacle, gripping him round the neck and choking
off his sentence with a horrid rasp that sounded like a death rattle.
Needless to say, the revolting process that had
turned Bill Jones from a human being into a mindless automaton was repeated
with Professor Ralston. It happened as before, too rapidly for intervention,
too suddenly for the minds of the onlookers to shake off the paralysis of an
unprecedented nightmare. But when the victim was thrown to the surface, when he
stepped out, drained of the grayish smokelike essence, a tentacle still gripped
his neck and another rested directly on top of his head. This latter tentacle,
instead of absorbing from him, visibly poured into him what resembled a
threadlike stream of violet light.
Facing the cowering audience with eyes staring
glassily, still in the grip of the unknowable, Professor Ralston did an
unbelievable thing. He resumed his lecture at the exact point of interruption!
But he spoke with the tonelessness of a machine, a machine that pulsed to the
will of a dictator, inhuman and inexorable!
"What you see before you," the Voice
continued—the Voice that no longer echoed the thoughts of the
professor—"is what you would call an amoeba, a giant amoeba. It is I—this
amoeba, who am addressing you—children of an alien universe. It is I, who
through this captured instrument of expression, whose queer language you can
understand, am explaining my presence on your planet. I pour my thoughts into
this specialised brain-box which I have previously drained of its meager
thought-content." (Here the "honorable colleagues" nudged each
other gleefully.) "I have so drained it for the purpose of analysis and
that the flow of my own ideas may pass from my mind to yours unimpeded by any
distortion that might otherwise be caused by their conflict with the thoughts
of this individual.
"First I absorbed the brain-content of this
being whom you call Bill Jones, but I found his mental instrument unavailable.
It was technically untrained in the use of your words that would best convey my
meaning. He possesses more of what you would call 'innate intelligence,' but he
has not perfected the mechanical brain through whose operation this innate
intelligence can be transmitted to others and, applied for practical advantage.
Now this creature that I am using is, as you might
say, full of sound without meaning. His brain is a lumber-room in which he has
hoarded a conglomeration of clever and appropriate word-forms with which to
disguise the paucity of his ideas, with which to express nothing! Yet the very
abundance of the material in his storeroom furnishes a discriminating mind with
excellent tools for the transportation of its ideas into other minds.
"Know, then, that I am not here by accident.
I am a Space Wanderer, an explorer from a super-universe whose evolution has
proceeded without variation along the line of your amoeba. Your evolution, as I
perceive from an analysis of the brain-content of your professor, began its
unfoldment in somewhat the same manner as our own. But in your smaller system,
less perfectly adjusted than our own to the cosmic mechanism, a series of
cataclysms occurred. In fact, your planetary system was itself the result of a
catastrophe, or of what might have been a catastrophe, had the two great suns
collided whose near approach caused the wrenching off of your planets. From
this colossal accident, rare, indeed, in the annals of the stars, an endless
chain of accidents was born, a chain of which this specimen, this professor,
and the species that he represents, is one of the weakest links.
"Your infinite variety of species is directly
due to the variety of adaptations necessitated by this train of accidents. In
the super-universe from which I come, such derangements of the celestial
machinery simply do not happen. For this reason, our evolution has unfolded harmoniously
along one line of development, whereas yours has branched out into diversified
and grotesque expressions of the Life-Principle. Your so-called highest
manifestation of this principle, namely, your own species, is characterized by
a great number of specialized organs. Through this very specialization of
functions, however, you have forfeited your individual immortality, and it has
come about that only your life-stream is immortal. The primal cell is
inherently immortal, but death follows in the wake of specialization.
We, the beings of this amoeba universe, are
individually immortal. We have no highly specialized organs to break down under
the stress of environment. When we want an organ, we create it. When it has
served its purpose, we withdraw it into ourselves. We reach out our tentacles
and draw to ourselves whatsoever we desire. Should a tentacle be destroyed, we
can put forth another.
"Our universe is beautiful beyond the dreams
of your most inspired poets. Whereas your landscapes, though lovely, are
stationary, unchangeable except through herculean efforts, ours are Protean,
eternally changing. With our own substance, we build our minarets of light,
piercing the aura of infinity. At the bidding of our wills we create, preserve,
destroy—only to build again more gloriously.
"We draw our sustenance from the primates, as
do your plants, and we constantly replace the electronic base of these primates
with our own emanations, in much the same manner as your nitrogenous plants
revitalize your soil.
"While we create and withdraw organs at will,
we have nothing to correspond to your five senses. We derive knowledge through
one sense only, or, shall I say, a super-sense? We see and hear and touch and
taste and smell and feel and know, not through any one organ, but through our
whole structure. The homogeneous force of our omni-substance subjects the
plural world to the processing of a powerful unity.
We can dissolve our bodies at will, retaining only
the permanent atom of our being, the seed of life dropped on the soil of our
planet by Infinite Intelligence. We can propel this indestructible seed on
light rays through the depths of space. We can visit the farthest universe with
the velocity of light, since light is our conveyance. In reaching your little
world, I have consumed a million years, for my world is a million light-years
distant: yet to my race a million years is as one of your days.
"On arrival at any given destination, we can
build our bodies from the elements of the foreign planet. We attain our
knowledge of conditions on any given planet by absorbing the thought-content of
the brains of a few representative members of its dominant race. Every
well-balanced mind contains the experience of the race, the essence of the
wisdom that the race-soul has gained during its residence in matter. We make
this knowledge a part of our own thought-content, and thus the Universe lies
like an open book before us.
"At the end of a given experiment in thought
absorption, we return the borrowed mind-stuff to the brain of its possessor. We
reward our subject for his momentary discomfiture by pouring into his body our
splendid vitality. This lengthens his life expectancy immeasurably, by
literally burning from his system the germs of actual or incipient ills that
contaminate the blood-stream.
This, I believe, will conclude my explanation, an
explanation to which you, as a race in whom intelligence is beginning to dawn,
are entitled. But you have a long road to travel yet. Your thought-channels are
pitifully blocked and criss-crossed with nonsensical and inhibitory complexes
that stand in the way of true progress. But you will work this out, for the Divine
Spark that pulses through us of the Larger Universe, pulses also through you.
That spark, once lighted, can never be extinguished, can never be swallowed up
again in the primeval slime.
"There is nothing more that I can learn from
you—nothing that I can teach you at this stage of your evolution. I have but
one message to give you, one thought to leave with you—forge on! You are on the
path, the stars are over you, their light is flashing into your souls the
slogan of the Federated Suns beyond the frontiers of your little warring
worlds. Forge on!"
The Voice died out like the chiming of a great
bell receding into immeasurable distance. The supercilious tones of the
professor had yielded to the sweetness and the light of the Greater Mind whose
instrument he had momentarily become. It was charged at the last with a golden
resonance that seemed to echo down vast spaceless corridors beyond the
furthermost outposts of time.
As the Voice faded out into a sacramental silence,
the strangely assorted throng, moved by a common impulse, lowered their heads
as though in prayer. The great globe pulsed and shimmered throughout its
sentient depths like a sea of liquid jewels. Then the tentacle that grasped the
professor drew him back toward the scintillating nucleus. Simultaneously
another arm reached out and grasped Bill Jones, who, during the strange
lecture, had ceased his wooden soldier marching and had stood stiffly at
attention.
The bodies of both men within the nucleus were
encircled once more by the single current. From it again put forth the
tentacles, cupping their heads, but the smokelike essence flowed back to them
this time, and with it flowed a tiny threadlike stream of violet light. Then
came the heaving motion when the shimmering currents caught the two men and
tossed them forth unharmed but visibly dowered with the radiance of more
abundant life. Their faces were positively glowing and their eyes were
illuminated by a light that was surely not of earth.
Then, before the very eyes of the marveling
people, the great globe began to dwindle. The jeweled lights intensified,
concentrated, merged, until at last remained only a single spot no larger than
a pin-head, but whose radiance was, notwithstanding, searing, excruciating.
Then the spot leaped up—up into the heavens, whirling, dipping and circling as
in a gesture of farewell, and finally soaring into invisibility with the
blinding speed of light.
The whole wildly improbable occurrence might have
been dismissed as a queer case of mass delusion, for such cases are not unknown
to history, had it not been followed by a convincing aftermath.
The culmination of a series of startling
coincidences, both ridiculous and tragic, at last brought men face to face with
an incontestable fact: namely, that Bill Jones had emerged from his fiery
baptism endowed with the thought-expressing facilities of Professor Ralston,
while the professor was forced to struggle along with the meager educational
appliances of Bill Jones!
In this ironic manner the Space-Wanderer had left
unquestionable proof of his visit by rendering a tribute to "innate
intelligence" and playing a Jovian Jest upon an educated fool—a neat
transposition.
A Columbus from a vaster, kindlier universe had
paused for a moment to learn the story of our pigmy system. He had brought us a
message from the outermost citadels of life and had flashed out again on his
aeonic voyage from everlasting unto everlasting.
