Page:Weird Tales v02n04 (1923-11).djvu/10

Rh all assumption. That our sun is traveling in a straight line may be a fact, but as a matter of fact it's only an assumption. Maybe, for all we know, his journey is a circle, or an ellipse, or a parabola-"

"Or a corkscrew," smiled Henry Quainfan.

"Or a fishhook," said St. Cloud.

"Pigs," Henry Quainfan told him, "fly through the air with their tails forward."

"If my aunt," said St. Cloud, "had been a man, she'd be my uncle."

"You simps," I put in, "remind me of Simpkins."

"Who was who?" Henry asked.

"The farmer who had half a sectionful of noise but a thimbleful of wool."

"That," St. Cloud told him, "was when Simpkins sheared his pig."

Henry Quainfan laughed.

"And the same day he put a hat on a hen. But we agree famously; it's some thing."

"But that it's from Canopus to Vega -nothing but assumption!" St. Cloud persisted.

"Have it your way!" Henry Quainfan laughed. "When it comes to the teachings of science, Morgan St. Cloud is sometimes as hopeless as Rider Farnermain on man's place in the Universe. As to the voyage that our sun with his planets is making through space, I admit that we are not absolutely sure that the course is a straight one. But the evidence we have teaches us that it is so. But straight or crooked, ellipse, parabola, corkscrew or fishhook-there is the terrible mystery of it all! Where was the sun when the first life stirred and moved on this planet of ours; to what. part of the Universe will he have flown when that last miserable human awaits the end of humanity and all of humanity's hopes and dreams?"

Said I: "And in this epic of the worlds-terrible, I admit, and in the light of science more terrible even than it ever was in the imaginations of the ancients-but amidst all this play and interplay of forces stupendous and cosmic, amidst all this mysterious power and starry beauty, yet man, man with his godlike intellect, which is even unlocking the mysteries of star and nebula-yet man, you say, dies as the beasts that perish, is no more to the Almighty Creator than is the ape or the wolf?"

"Of course he is not," said Henry Quainfan. "Or the sparrow that falls- or the kangaroo that hops."

"Then why are we here? love and suffer and dream Why do we and die, if eternal blackness is the end of it all? What is it all about?"

"That," returned Henry Quainfan, "is the very thing I want you anthropocentricists to tell me. But I know you won't, and for a good reason; you can't. You can talk about dreams, and you ask what it's all about if man hasn't got a soul that lives when he dies; but that is not an answer to anything.

"And as for that mysterious power and starry beauty you make so much of, how often does your noble man-this being with the godlike intellect-how often does he even think of that? He (and he's male and female) is thinking of other things as your wolf or ape thinks of other things; of bottles asparkle with booze, for instance, of the belly and the loins."

I winced (mentally) as that blow struck. That is the way with your materialist; he rains upon you stones fished out of the muck of the physical puddle, while you (for of course the flower's perfume and beauty are lost on him) can only fling at him the rose petals of faith and the spirit.

"We could talk about man's place in the Universe for the rest of our lives!" I told him. "But we shall never know the answer till we die."

"But I don't want to wait till I die; I think I can get an answer now," said Henry Quainfan. "At any rate, I purpose to try. And that brings me to the little journey I hinted about to you, Morgan."

"Lord!" exclaimed St. Cloud. "Must be some journey if it is going to solve the mystery of life and death!"

"Oh, not that!" Henry Quainfan said. "But I believe that it will shed a dazzling light on man's place în Creation. If Rider will come along, I think he will find man-man, that noble creature with the godlike intellect-I think, Rider, that you will find him tumbled into the dust from his throne."

"Has it got anything to do with this gull and eagle business?" I asked him.

Henry Quainfan laughed.

"That was nothing," he said. "There will be danger of course, maybe death and perhaps worse than death even. But there will be nothing to fear from that."

"" asked St. Cloud.

"Venus!" said Henry Quainfan.

With a sudden movement Morgan St. Cloud straightened up in his chair. "What's that?"

"Venus," Henry Quainfan told him.

"You mean Venus the planet?"

"Foolish question number one!"

"What other Venus is there?"

Morgan St. Cloud laughed.

"What's the idea, Henry?" he wanted to know.

"But I'm speaking in all seriousness," Henry told him. "I said Venus, and I didn't mean Timbuctoo-Venus the planet, probably the loveliest of all the worlds that go round our sun. Yes, even more wonderful, perhaps, than our own wonderful world-which Rider thinks is the king-pin of Creation."

"Do you mean to tell me," I asked him, that you have conquered gravitation?"

"Just that. I've discovered a negative gravity. And not only that: I can turn it off and on, so to speak-the same as you do the water in your tap."

I stared at him.

"It will have to soak in, I suppose," said I. "For this is coming big."

"You know, I marvel now," said Morgan St. Cloud, "that I didn't know it. Once I was blind, but now I can see. It's always like that. I thought of this, too, but of course it was only to dismiss it from my mind as one of the wildest of fancies-something like that fourth dimension stuff. Gravitation conquered, Jerusalem, how could I imagine that that interplanetary travel-great Jupiter was possible?"

"Physicists-that is, some of them Quainfan said, "possible if man could only find out how. To the layman, however, it has always been a wild dreamwilder even than his wildest fiction, which after all is pretty tame stuff. The talking-machine, the X-ray, the submarine and the airplane-all those things were dreams until men found out how. They were never impossible."

He turned to me, and there was a smile in those gray eyes of his.

"So don't be too sure. Rider, don't be too sure that the great mystery will never be solved - the mystery, that is, of life and death."

"But-"

"Well?" he queried.

"How on earth can this mad journey shed any light on those things - on the mystery of life and death and our place mystery of life and death and our place in God's Creation?"

"What we find at the end of it," returned Henry Quainfan, "will answer that."

 "But-" began St. Cloud.

Henry looked at him inquiringly. "But again, Morgan," he suggested.