and place infinitely far removed from Judith, from me, from this day and age altogether! I’ve planned an elaborate reward for you for the way you’ve taken Judy from me.”
“From you?” The good humour in Peter’s face changed into stern lines. “What the hell am I supposed to have done?”
“You know perfectly well! You’ve loved Judith ever since we were at school together. You never quite got over her choosing me instead of you. You’ve done your best to take her for yourself, thinking I was too busy to notice. But I wasn’t as busy as that, I was preparing my revenge all the time!”
Michael nodded at the machinery, and Peter gave a quick glance about him.
Was Michael joking, or was he mad? Certainly this equipment was obviously too costly to be prompted by a joke. Therefore....
“Lie down on that table!” Michael snapped.
“Not if I know it!” Peter retorted, clenching his powerful fists. Then regardless of the automatic he flung himself suddenly forward, aiming straight for Michael’s jaw.
Michael sidestepped. His gun did not fire. Instead it jerked up, then down viciously. Peter went crashing into darkness from a savage blow across the base of the skull.
He returned to his senses with an aching head to find himself securely strapped down upon the long table. He tried to move, but his arms were pinned to his sides whilst thick leather thongs stretched across his throat, ankles, and waist.
With difficulty he turned his head. Michael was standing a yard or two away, grinning faintly, hands in coat pockets.
“Better?” he inquired laconically.
“What the devil’s the idea of all this?” Peter demanded. “For Heaven’s sake, man, explain yourself and get me off this damned table!”
Michael shook his head and lounged forward. He stood looking down at Peter’s drawn face pensively.
“That’s the last thing I intend doing,” he said. “You’re a prisoner, Peter, and you’re going to remain one for such a long time that I shudder to think of it, Anyway, I’ll tell you my plan for revenge. It’s a scientific one, because as a physicist I think in terms of science. What do you know about entropy? Or maybe you just don’t know anything.”
Peter remained silent, bewildered by his friend’s madness.
“For your information then,” Michael continued. “It’s the increasing disorder of the Universe, the process by which the Universe moves gradually to dynamic equilibrium, that being a state where everything is balanced and all exchanges of energy are complete.”
“What of it?” Peter asked.
“I decided when your love for Judy first became clear to me, to try to create artificially a state of non-entropy, a state where nothing ever happens. I found this old mineshaft and decided it was the ideal place for my purpose. I could work alone undisturbed. In this space, Peter, I intend to create what I call an entropy-sphere, the walls of which have attained complete equilibrium and whose vibrations extend inwards to everything inside the sphere. Including you! By that, I mean that everything inside the sphere will achieve equilibrium almost instantly instead of after tens of thousands of years. Do you understand?”
Peter struggled savagely against the straps. “You mean that everything inside the globe will be plunged into a state of timelessness? A perpetual Now?” he ventured, as the terrible thought occurred to him.
“You’re smarter than I thought,” Michael said grudgingly. “Yes, that’s exactly what I do mean. At your feet is one magnet and at your head another. Between them they will build up the hemispheres of the entropy-sphere, and for you inside it, time will cease to be. Release may never come to you. If it does, it will be only through the work of scientists far cleverer than me. You see, I can lock the door, but I can’t unlock it. Years, centuries, ages, may pass before you’re found!”
“Man alive, you’re stark crazy!” Peter shouted frantically, as Michael went over to the switchboard. “You can’t do this thing! I shall be missed and the Police will start teaching for me until I am found.”
“I doubt it,” Michael grinned. “And even if you were found you’d be untouchable.”
“Michael, wait! You’ve got everything so....”
Michael flung a switch on the board in the corner of the cave and watched with detached scientific curiosity as a perfectly transparent bubble of elemental force came into being from a point just above Peter’s chest. It expanded at high speed, cutting Peter’s words off in mid-sentence and then engulfing him and the table.
It spread wider and wider....
Michael cut the power and peered through the curved wall of force upon the scene within. The lights in the cavern roof, outside the bubble’s influence, cast a brief dying radiance within the sphere—brief because time and light and everything else were fact ceasing in there. Peter lay with his mouth open, halfway through his sentence, his eyes fixed towards the switchboard. His wristwatch had stopped at 12:20. The second-hand no longer moved.
Entropy was fast becoming fixed within the sphere. The energies from Peter and the table and the other articles about him and upon him were being impelled back and forward with ever increasing speed between the boundaries of the sphere’s walls, and so were heading towards the final state where no further exchange of energies would be possible.
Light rays ceased to shine in the sphere. It became like a polished ball of black glass. For a long moment Michael stood gazing at this incredible thing of non-time, this fragment which represented the Universe as it must one day become, knowing that it would remain thus for untold ages until the scientific key was found to open it.
He left the cave quietly, closed the ancient door, and then went halfway up the narrow passage. Here he paused beside an electric plunger. It was wired to the switchboard in the entropy-cave. Though, as far as he knew, no human agency could reverse the non-time state he had created, he decided to destroy the evidence of his handiwork. Grimly, he slammed the plunger home.
The passage reeled and gulped under the force of the explosion. Smoke and flame gushed from the entropy-cave as the door was blasted violently open. Overhead something cracked mightily; in sudden panic Michael glanced upwards in the light of his torch, and covered his face with his arms.
The walls, the roof, the entire rotten old mine succumbed to the shock, and with a thunderous crash the whole structure collapsed.
The mystery of the disappearance of Michael Blane and Peter Curzon found its way to the front pages of the press, but the only clue discovered by the police was the car outside the old mine entrance. For a week digging was attempted but was finally abandoned....
More than a century passed before miners, searching for the new and valuable mineral moxonite, blunted their atomic drills on something of incredible hardness.
They dug down deeply and finally came to an impenetrable curved surface, which, glowed faintly in the darkness, yet peculiarly enough was not transparent to light, nor yet reflected it. The interior of the sphere was as remote from the baffled miners as the interior of a distant star of a far corner of the Universe.
They found the sphere impossible to break into so, instead, the rock was smashed from around it and it was hauled to London where the best scientific brains of the day could work on it. But though the year 2148 was famed for its brilliant scientists, none was clever enough to find a way through entropy in its final state of equilibrium.
Because, paradoxically, the globe looked transparent and yet could not be seen into, it had become something of a legend, something to enshrine with each generation.
From the laboratories of the scientists it was transferred to the London Museum, where it remained a mighty heritage of a past age which might one day be explained, and till then was known as the Ebon Sphere of Surrey.
CHAPTER TWO
TWENTY-EIGHTH