Balefires Read online

  Due to my slow progress the road seemed much longer than it probably was, and I began to wonder whether I had made the correct turn after all, despite the mailbox. It would have been quite impractical to try to turn around since the road itself was far too narrow and was hemmed in by the high bank and, on the left, a drainage ditch, but the feeling of portentousness that had been with me ever since I had received Denkirch's invitation was growing steadily and beginning to take on a distinctly sinister cast. The car's jouncings and scrapings were an almost welcome diversion from the formless depression that was settling over my mind, a depression not wholly to be explained by my worry that I had taken the wrong turn or even by the funereal scenery. However, just as I had decided to return to the highway even if I had to back out to avoid being lost at night amid a maze of unfamiliar country roads, I came to the top of a gently rising hill and saw what had to be Denkirch's house only a half mile beyond.

  That it had to be my friend's house was quite clear from the forest of antennas sprouting from and around it. The area around the house had probably been thickly wooded before Denkirch had bought the farm; now almost a score of thick stumps ringed the worn but otherwise normal looking two-story house, the boles having been dragged into a great pile in a nearby field where, presumably, they could no longer interfere with the antennas which had usurped the grounds. Indeed, the antennas were all that kept the house from seeming as deserted as the pastures around it. The roof of the house sagged and the white paint had cracked and blistered in those places in which it had not peeled off completely. The barn and sheds had been pulled down or had simply collapsed by themselves, and the grass on the lawn was high and weed-choked,

  The antennas, seeming to have a life of their own, presided over this slowly decaying ruin: a horizontal grid on the roof, a ten-foot dish just west of the house, and at least a score of poles and beams and coils mounted on stumps, chimney, roof, and sidewalls-some static and some in constant jerky motion, spinning or nodding like crows on a fence. But the lowering ruler of the scene was a great, copper-mesh cone whose wide mouth opened to the sky more than twenty feet above the ground. As I watched, it caught a last ray from the setting sun and, its color deepened like that of the sumac, loomed over the house like a monster cobra. For a moment I felt a twinge of inexplicable panic which, although it quickly passed, still further heightened my feeling of black foreboding.

  I stopped in front of the house where, in fact, the road ended. It was a warm August evening, just at that time when normally everything seems to be at its most serene; but tonight there was a sinister difference. Perhaps it was the low hum of the antenna rotors, so out of place among the cicadas and lonely bird calls. Even the stars seemed evil, although they were unusually splendid against the dark blue evening sky. They glared back as I glanced at them, and I quickly looked down again to see Denkirch just opening the screen door of the porch.

  "I was afraid you'd broken down on this miserable road," he said as we shook hands, and I too had been worried by the thought. But somehow the weeds and rocks were at least natural, while the antennas, especially the cone, had a very strange aura about them that increased my nervousness even more.

  Denkirch apologized for the appearance of the house and the unburnt pile of trees."I've been meaning to get someone in to really clean up the place, but I just haven't gotten around to it," he said. "Besides, I have trouble getting any kind of help out here. I even have to pick up my own groceries in Merriam."

  "Is the place supposed to be haunted?" I asked, gazing through the screen at the dark-muffled ruins of the farmyard.

  "No, nothing like that. The farm just ran down as its last owner grew older, and by the time he died the buildings were even more worthless than the land, which never had been good. No," he repeated, "the problem is me and my gear. The townsfolk seem to be afraid of it. I suppose some ignorant fool has been spreading the story that I have everything here from an atomic pile to a death ray. But let's not stand here talking-come in and see the shop."

  I watched Denkirch himself with as much interest as I did the tremendous mass of instrumentation and printed material which he showed me. He had changed a great deal since I had last seen him. He had been thin and active; now he was cadaverous and jumpy. Worse and yet more subtle was the change in his attitude toward his project, his deep interest having become a burning fanaticism that would carry through at any cost. All these things could be easily explained as normal results of overwork which would pass with the completion of the experiment, but deep within me I knew that Denkirch, too, felt the shadowy terror that slowly approached.

  The conversion of the ramshackle farm into a modern experimental station must have been a tremendous job in itself. More fascinating to me than the instruments was the room filled with thousands of books, mostly technical handbooks and circuit diagrams, but a surprising number of very ancient manuscripts or facsimiles of manuscripts in languages I could not identify, much less read. These were the pre-scientific works dealing with spiritual escape from the temporal shell which Denkirch had considered most accurate and informative.

  "There's a tendency among moderns who use the ancient texts at all, "he said, "to abide by them strictly, muttering the precise gibberish and using all manner of abominations in the ritual, usually something pertaining to a corpse. Now this is both foolish, since the true spells were a form of self-hypnosis, most unlikely to work identically on two different people, and dangerous as well-or at least liable to be disconcerting-because it just might work. These works tell of a great number of seers who went into trances but instead of awakening with wonderful stories of far-distant places, just didn't awaken at all. Still, their mishaps gave me the clue I needed and now I can proceed with electronic help where a direct attempt was so often final."

  The other rooms were filled with equipment which, although impressive to me, did not hold the marvels that it doubtless would have had for another engineer. Quite a lot of the instrumentation was search radar, fairly basic and only unusual in its almost completely automatic functioning. It not only ran itself but could even check itself in case of failure, making an operator necessary only to replace the faulty parts. Denkirch had found that iron tended to distort some of his instruments, and the radar was to give warning if a plane were close overhead (the house was not far from the Chicago-St. Louis air route) so that he would not attempt to return then. At the time I did not understand just what Denkirch meant, but, as with other things, I soon learned.

  Even with a similar high degree of automation, the remaining instruments-everything from a radio-telescope to devices for registering the precise rotational speed of the Earth at any given instant-seemed to be more than one man could reasonably handle, and I asked Denkirch why he did not have at least a lab assistant.

  "I did," he said with a frown, "two of them, as a matter of fact. They had been students of mine at MIT and should have been perfect for the job, but I guess neither one of them liked the country. Two weeks after they had helped me to set up here they said that they couldn't take the atmosphere any longer and left." Then he shivered slightly, and when he spoke again his eyes shone with something of the fear that he must have been feeling for the last six months, perhaps even longer. "You know, Johnnie," he said, "I can't really blame them. I suppose it's the isolation of this god-forsaken place. Do you feel it too?"

  I admitted I did feel somewhat uneasy, but as I spoke the blackness I had pushed to the back of my mind flooded over me again, an inky coldness of fear that was all the worse for being unreasonable. How even Denkirch's rigid will had kept him from insanity for all the time he must have been subjected to the same thing, I do not know.

  Finally, having toured the whole of the upper floors, Denkirch led me down a steep flight of steps to what had been the cellar and was now, he said, the heart of his project. At the bottom he flipped a bank of light switches and I saw that a large diesel generator stood near the stairs, while the rest of the cellar was separated by a recen
t-looking partition with a curtained doorway towards which Denkirch motioned me. When I entered, shoving aside the curtains, a terribly familiar sheen of copper met me. Another cone, a duplicate of the one outside, hung from its apex within.

  Taking a closer look as Denkirch entered behind me, I saw the considerable amount of labor that had been expended to mount the great antenna. Both upper floors had been pierced on account of its height and the well closed in, explaining why I had seen no indication of it upstairs. The delicate copper cobwebbing was streaked with the shadows of the aluminum framework by which it was supported, and at the point at which it was attached some twenty feet above my head a large crystal glittered in the fluorescent light. It was truly awe-inspiring, yet still a sense of active malignity hung over it.

  Another disquieting object intruded on my awareness when I glanced down from the cone, for directly beneath it and completely covered by its wide opening was a normal single bed and mattress, but one equipped with wide canvas straps and with its legs bolted to the floor. On three sides of the bed and underneath it were instrument racks, and on one of them rested a large helmet to which were attached dozens of leads.

  Denkirch then gave me my first real knowledge of what he intended to do and how he would accomplish it as he explained the various pieces of apparatus. He began by plugging a set of earphones into the panel at the head of the bed and telling me to put them on. As I did so, he seated himself at an instrument consol along one wall and set several switches on it. The lights dimmed slightly as the surrounding machinery began to hum, and then a faint crackling began to come through the earphones. After a minute or so individual words stood out from the buzz in the background, and then a sudden, constant stream of names and occupations poured out, one after another without pause or stop. Some were in languages that I knew and some I could not even guess at, but all were delivered in the same flat, expressionless monotone of a congregation reading a unison prayer. "Maria Varrones, dependiente… Daniel Mulvihill, solicitor… Hauptmann Gerhard Kleppe, Leibstandarte Adolph Hitler…"

  "What is this?" I gasped as I took off the earphones. "They sound like talking corpses."

  "The minds of the dead," Denkirch corrected me, "not their bodies. And they're not even dead in the usual sense, of course. I always told you that the human mind was too wonderful an instrument to be thrown away after one using, Johnnie. There's my proof, out among the stars."

  Then he went on to tell me the whole story, the story of the masterpiece of the most talented man of our generation. First he read everything he could on earlier attempts to penetrate the afterlife; the Elijahs and Bridey Murphies, the Cagliostros and Buddhas, and many explorers more ancient and terrible than they, hinted at on little-known parchments and inscriptions which must in themselves have raised a dark shadow over Denkirch's mind. This prodigious labor was followed by yet a greater one, the correlation of this data and the elimination of the less promising areas of endeavor.

  In the end Denkirch had come to startling yet well-buttressed conclusions regarding human minds and bodies. As he had believed from the start, the mind did have an eternal existence apart from that of any one body, but it became clear that at no time could the mind be totally free; in other words, if it left one body it would be forced to instantly enter another.

  I did not then understand why my palms began to sweat at those words; now it is only too clear what my subconscious mind realized and my conscious did not, but I merely wiped my hands on my thighs as I listened.

  The obvious inference to be drawn from the situation Denkirch had just explained was that minds were transferred from the dead to the newborn-reincarnation or transmigration of souls. This was seductively simple but could not be applied to the human race alone since births and deaths would almost never balance precisely. An excess of minds might possibly be accommodated by housing two or more in one body, and this was the probable explanation of the trance visions of some of the greater wizards. They had simply suppressed the original mind of another body and looked through its eyes for a time, and the body's normal owner shortly drove the intruder back. Still, the large surplus of births over deaths meant that at least some minds had to be created afresh with their bodies, and the great rarity of provable cases of reincarnation-in human bodies, at least-indicated that this was true in all but a handful of cases. Where then did the minds of most dead men go? To the stars, Denkirch decided, and set about to prove it.

  His first attempts were based on radio-telescopes and were complete failures. Then he began to work from the opposite end, modifying an encephalograph, and with this relatively crude instrument he caught the first hints of those terrible whispers from the stars, and that night he held all the knowledge of this primal mystery that he later only reinforced. All, that is, but its underlying meaning.

  Later improvements had followed, far simpler than that final result that hung above the bed on which I sat, but just as effective for listening to the minds of our ancestors. Denkirch had earlier noted that different historical periods were grouped in recognizable parts of the sky, although there was considerable overlapping. Meaningful names were rare, of course, but many occupations gave keys to determine their dating. For instance, an auto mechanic had to be fairly recent, and a private of the Iron Brigade was just as useful as Abraham Lincoln. In general the most recent names were clustered on or in the direction of Deneb in Orion, while those of the period around World War One could be expected to be heard when the antenna was directed toward the Pleiades, and so on. It seemed probable that with the death of each occupied body, the human mind marched one more step in a slow, majestic procession around the universe.

  This knowledge, this proof of his contentions, was soon not enough for Denkirch. He had a list of names, but what he now wanted was first-hand knowledge of the universe.

  I can still remember how Denkirch looked that night as he talked, unconsciously pacing the room and waving his arms, the glitter in his eyes far brighter than that the soft fluorescents could give them. "Johnnie, you used to tell me that death would be oblivion. Now I can prove to you that it's not oblivion, it's the universe in all its wonder and glory! Think of it, Johnnie-thundering nitrogen cataracts under a pale green sun. Night in the dazzling center of a globular cluster! What have you ever wanted to see? You will-just wait for it. And now with this"-he waved toward the great cone waiting silently above me-"we won't even have to wait."

  With that last sentence-his declaration of triumph-my spirits, which had been caught up despite themselves by his wild enthusiasm, sagged again into blind despair. I knew there was something wrong. Not in the theories, for they had been confirmed by the instruments; not in the instruments, for Denkirch was far too logical even in his fanaticism to accept his results without duplicating them in numerous cross-checks; still, somewhere…

  "Do you mean the cones are matter transmitters?" I asked as the full significance of Denkirch's words sank in.

  "Well, not transmitters, at least," he answered, "and I only designed them to receive minds, but I dare say they'd work quite well for matter too, if it could somehow be sent to them. Basically, though, they're designed to do a job similar to that of my earlier passive receivers and they will do everything the earlier ones would, as you heard. They go just one step farther. Not throwing a body across the universe, but pulling a mind back, and that's all that's necessary."

  As Denkirch went on to explain his masterpiece I felt the same awe at its magnitude of conception as I had when he recounted the steps leading up to it, but under the soft cushion of marvel lay the same rending claws of fear, and my stomach knotted as I listened.

  The difference between the cones and their forerunners lay in their ability to actively snatch a mind back from wherever it had gone when it left its original body. Lack of this feature, Denkirch thought, had prematurely exiled many ancient mystics to far worlds. If they, by sheer force of will, directed their spirits to another already occupied body, they would quickly be forced back i
nto their own again. If instead they freed their minds without giving them any basic direction, as was probably the more common occurrence, they would be pulled irresistibly to Deneb just as though their bodies had died, unable to return without the same spiritual discipline by means of which they had come and which the alien environment might well make impossible until after their terran bodies had slipped into a mindless death.

  The cones, keyed to Denkirch's mind when it was released from his body (also an electronic process, since Denkirch was a scientist rather than a mystic), would pull it back from Deneb when they were activated. Between the time his mind was severed from his brain by what he described as an interference field and the time I turned on the cones, Denkirch would have as much freedom on some strange planet as his new-born body would give him; freedom to run or burrow or fly or perhaps just to sit and absorb the newness of his surroundings.

  At this point he stopped pacing and returned to the control consol, motioning me to join him. Most of its eight-foot length was covered with dials, but to one end a helmet much like the one on the bed was connected. There were only two other things built into the three feet of the consol nearest the helmet, a large three-position switch and a small red indicator light similar to the generator lights of most new cars.

  "You'll wear this helmet," Denkirch said. "With it on you'll be in perfect contact with all my senses as long as the switch is in the second position. That is, as long as I'm on Deneb everything I experience in any way will be as clear to you as if it were you who were undergoing it. The only difference is that you won't be able to control the new body, as I will. In ten minutes or so-you'll be able to use your own eyes when they're open, though things may look like a double exposure-make sure the red light isn't on and pull the switch to the third position to turn on the cones. The light is connected to the radar, and if it's on, a plane is nearly overhead. Just wait till it blinks out before pulling the switch."