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Suddenly images of Mark Grayson began to flash from him

As the closest friend of the late Dr. Mark Grayson, I feel that I am called upon to relate the full details of his amazing experiment. I cannot stand idly by and hear him referred to as a lunatic who finally made a mysterious exit from his prison cell, because I knew him to be one of the most brilliant, though maybe misguided, scientists of our time.

From early college days when we had used to room together he had always been interested in interatomic physics, with particular leanings towards Schrodinger, and Heinsberg with his Principle of Indeterminacy. What exactly he gleaned from the treatises and theories of these two great scientific thinkers I did not discover until later years—and then I did it with a vengeance!

After college was over our ways perforce parted and I heard nothing of Mark for many years. I married, settled down to quite a thriving practice as attorney in New York. Then one day I found that he was in the news—and none too pleasantly either. Apparently he had been ridiculed by the Association of Science for setting forth some new theory connected with the electron. In the report I read of the meeting it was pretty clear that Mark had had the worst of it and as a gesture of protest had resigned his position as Professor of Interatomic Physics to the Association.

Just about like old Mark! Ridicule was the one thing he had never been able to stand, and evidently he had not altered his views much in the passing years. Hearing about him, though, brought old memories back to me and so I wrote him a letter, asking the newspaper to forward it to him. I made a point of sympathizing with him but I also admitted that owing to my limited scientific knowledge I had no idea whether he had been right or wrong. Back came his answer very shortly—his address showed he was living now on Long Island—and it was typical of him:

When I showed the wife the letter she decided to pay a visit to her sister, and it being a fairly quiet period in the city I took time out and went over to Long Island to see what exactly Mark was getting at.

Obviously he had made plenty of money, anyhow. His home was a truly beautiful place, and adequately staffed by a very immobile manservant and an even more immobile housekeeper. I found later that they were husband and wife, and deaf-mutes. Evidently Mark was taking no chances on his secrets traveling elsewhere.

Mark himself was well enough. He was three years my senior, but work and worry had made him look a good deal more than that. His wild, disorderly hair was streaked prematurely with gray, his small, energetic form was even thinner than when he had been a youth—but there was no doubt that the creative fires of energy still burned within him. He moved and talked swiftly. His quick blue eyes darted inquiry and challenge alternately. He was what the novelists would call a restless, highly intellectual soul with no time for trifles and even less for derision.

I arrived in mid-afternoon and until eight in the evening we exchanged notes of the passed years and recalled the happy things we had done. No word about science escaped his lips. He had remained a bachelor, I think, because his work had kept him too preoccupied to admit of him even looking at a woman, let alone marrying one.

Then, suddenly, without any inducement on my part, he came to the matter I was wondering about. It was after dinner, when I had my pipe going comfortably and he sat chewing a short cigar.

“What do you know about the electron, Arthur?” he asked me, standing with his back to the library fire. “You are an attorney and an intelligent man. I ask you because I don’t want to waste time explaining something you may know already.”

“Always in a hurry, aren’t you?” I smiled. “Well, all I know about an electron is that it is—I think—the smallest particle of electricity.”

“The deplorable uselessness of education!” he groaned, raising his hands deprecatingly. “Obviously I shall have to start from the beginning if you are ever to understand what I am getting at. Just come along with me, Arthur, and I’ll open your eyes.”

Rather amused at his general air of impatience, I followed him out of the room to his private laboratory, and then stood for a moment or two looking round on instruments and apparatus I could never hope to understand. He perched himself on a stool, and now he was amidst these weird creations of his genius he looked really at home.

“An electron has so far only been a theory—or better still a probability,” he said, his eyes fixed on me. “No, no, don’t put your pipe out! There are no explosives in here, and you’ll need it to help you think.”

I relighted it and squatted down on an empty crate opposite him.

“One of the big stumbling blocks to scientific progress has been the inability of man to say that the electron is either here or there,” he went on. “Until I studied the problem we knew that the electron, while obeying the mathematical laws of waves and ripples, was also a particle. But it could not be placed. It existed somewhere within a wave group, but that wave group was indefinite in extent. It had no sharp limitation. It just trailed off into surrounding space, even into other dimensions. For all we knew it might extend into infinity. So far all we have known is that the electron exists, but that its exact position is purely a probability in the equation of waves.”

“You’re going pretty deep, Mark,” I said, pondering. “But go on—I’ll try and follow you.”

“You recall that I used to study Heinsberg a lot? He outlined the Principle of Indeterminacy—that it is impossible to know both the position and velocity of an electron at a chosen moment. Measure one and the other changes immediately. Since both factors are necessary to an absolute deduction it looked as if Man would never be able to metaphorically put his finger on the electron’s position. Of course, approximate deductions could be made by the very reason of the electron’s area of waves being so inconceivably small. But science does not like things to approximate, Arthur. It demands incontestable fact.”

Mark paused for a moment, drawing at his cigar. Then he gave a rather cynical grin.

“I found out how to extend the area of an electron wave,” he commented. “Instead of allowing the waves to be infinitesimal and shading off into space or other dimensions, I devised electrical equipment reacting directly on the subatomic waves of matter. The result is that I can extend the wave area of an electron indefinitely, and more than that! The strain produced by extending these waves produces a definite reaction in one exact part of the extended wave. In that exact part we find—the electron! I believe, had I decided to finish the subatomic microscope I had in mind, it would have been possible to view the electron as one would a planet through a telescope. But I am not going on with that idea—not now.”

A hard note had crept into his voice and I glanced at him in surprise.

“But why not?” I exclaimed. “It would surely be the greatest achievement of your career?”

“You remember how I was treated by the Association?” he asked bitterly. “Their attitude is why I have called an end to my experiment. The Association was of the opinion that my discovery was absurd—that years of experiment had served to turn my head! Far from them agreeing to look into my findings, or perhaps helping me to finish off the finer details of the discovery, they laughed me to scorn. Prejudice still exists, Arthur, even in these days. For that very reason I am going to have my revenge on them—on everybody, on this whole stupid planet! You can’t laugh at science and get away with it.”

The change in his manner rather startled me for a moment. I had always known him to be a pretty erratic sort of fellow, with perhaps a good share of that curious vindictiveness that sometimes goes alongside great genius, but here something ugly was cropping up. It was in every line of his bearing.

“What more details could be needed to such an experiment?” I asked quietly, trying to keep him on the straight track.

“Plenty! You see, I was handicapped at the Association because I was not able to give a concrete demonstration of my theory. To have done that would have produced unpredictable results. You see, Arthur, this extension of electronic wavelength automatically crushes—or at least telescopes—the wavelengths of the electrons, immediately surrounding them, and the effect would be progressive. It would be rather like a railway siding. You have seen how a truck is shunted, and how perhaps a hundred trucks all jolt after the first one has been shoved by the locomotive? That is the same effect in principle.

“To extend one area will mean a progressive jolting of electronic waves in all directions from the source of the disturbance. Now, an electron wave has a range which may pass into infinity—which means, into the greater macrocosm of our universe. It also operates, as Schrodinger told us, in three dimensions. But two electrons operate in six dimensions, three in nine, and so forth. Can you for a moment grasp the bewildering complexity of one electron with its wavelength held out in indefinite stress for maximum distance? An area would be disturbed all around it and the very structure of space and matter would be shifted!”

“In that case,” I said, looking at him fixedly and thinking hard, “it might mean the end of the world!”

“It would!” he said, grinning. “Or at least it would, if I know my scientific facts. What’s needed is careful experiment to render such a possibility impossible. I have not enlarged an electron wave yet, but I know I could do it. It might take me many years to find a way of isolating this freak wave to prevent a wholesale disturbance, but for this the Association is not prepared to wait. They wanted results immediately. Because I had to refrain from giving them, I—well, I walked out.”

“Then you are going to complete the problem on your own?” I asked.

He stubbed out his cigar, and got off the stool. Coming over to me he regarded me steadily.

“No, I am not!” His voice was deadly quiet. “I realise that if science in this day and age cannot credit the word of one of its most famous members, it is time that such science and the devotees of it be destroyed! I am going to extend the area of an electron wave and consequences be hanged!”

I got up quickly and caught at his arm.

“But you just said it would be dangerous!” I protested.

“That it would, perhaps, destroy the world?” he went on. “Yes, that’s exactly what I believe it will do. But don’t you see, I will have proved that I am right! I’ll have proved I can extend the wave of an electron. If it does not destroy the world it will mean that the area is there ready to view once a subatomic microscope is prepared. I shall have provided the proof. If it does destroy the world—well, I’d sooner lose a mighty discovery and my own life in a cataclysm than have a lot of fools grinning at me!”

“Look here, Mark, you can’t do this!” I said firmly, holding on to him. “You are only looking at it from your own viewpoint. You are bitter and vindictive, like you used to be at school when old Haldane said you dreamed too much. I steered you right then, and I’m going to now. You can’t do this thing!”

Mark stared at me a moment. His face hardened, became ruthless.

“I can—and I’m going to,” he answered steadily. “I asked you to come here so that you can be a witness to my actions. I shall need proof if my experiment is successful and the world still stays in place afterwards. . . . I’m not mad, you know,” he added seriously.

No, he was not mad—not in the accepted sense, anyway. But he was consumed with mortified rage that anybody should dare to question his genius. Amazing though it was, it seemed I had on my hands the unenviable job of trying to save a whole universe from his too clever hands.

I released him and stood trying to think things out, my mind running round the idea of physical violence. He left me and walked across to a complicated switchboard controlling many massive and unfamiliar instruments.

“This is my electron-wave extender,” he said. “It reacts on the subatomic waves. The energy it generates strikes into the densest part of the electron waves. By this means they do not shade off into infinity but are built up in intensity until they have the same strength as the source. Since electrons are everywhere, be it matter or space, it simply does not signify where I apply the energy. But for the sake of accuracy it might as well be a fixed point.”

He turned aside and picked up a small sealed ampule. It looked to be empty. Gently he set it down on the big circular plate immediately within the range of his queerly fashioned projectors.

“This ampule is filled with hydrogen gas,” he explained. “If you remember your physics you will recall that it is the least dense substance in our material Periodic Table, and therefore the easiest one to deal with in the search for an electron—granting there ever is a search later on.”

He began to fiddle with switches and controls, and all of a sudden it occurred to me what he was planning to do while I simply stood and watched. I acted instantly! Lunging at him, I caught his arm just as he threw the master switch. He staggered backwards and fell, half sprawling, across the flat metal plate where he had laid his ampule of hydrogen. For a second or two he just lay there, dazed, then I hauled him up again, pushed him into a chair and snapped off the master switch I had seen him operate.

“You are not going to do this thing,” I declared grimly. “Not even if I have to beat the daylights out of you to make you see reason. Later on you’ll thank me, too.”

He sat there looking at me, glowering in fact—then gradually the light died out of his eyes and he got to his feet.

“I wonder if you realize something?” he said slowly. “I fell on that plate right in the area of that energy of mine! It hit me—all over! What I had intended for the hydrogen-sample reacted on me instead. I wonder what will happen?” he finished, pondering.

“Nothing,” I assured him. “You weren’t under the influence long enough for anything to happen.”

He did not say anything for a moment, then he gave a little shrug.

“Just chance that it happened that way,” he shrugged. “It might prove to be interesting, later on.”

I could plainly see that whatever danger there might be did not distress him in the least. He was true scientist enough to be always interested in the unusual, even if he was the victim.

“Let’s get back to the library,” I urged him. “You need to rest up a bit. Too much work and too much ridicule haven’t done you any good, you know.”

He smiled and then nodded, but though he said nothing I could tell that some deep thought or other was back of his mind. . .

The following day, much to my annoyance, I received an urgent telephone call from home requesting my presence at the office right away for an important legal case—so, just as I had been getting interested I was forced to take my leave of Mark and plunge forthwith into the intricacies of a criminal action.

He parted from me cordially enough, but I noticed an enigmatic smile about his lips as he shook hands. It was the smile of a man who knows something tremendous and won’t speak about it. Then, back in New York, with all the curriculum of legal work around me, I soon forgot all about Mark and his amazing doings.

For a week anyway—then one evening I was working late in my office when I saw somebody standing before me at the desk. For a second or two I questioned the credibility of it because I had locked the door to insure privacy and the window was thirty-five stories up. Yet there he was—Mark Grayson, smiling cynically, his hair disordered, and his body having a curiously transparent quality.

“Mark!” I ejaculated, astounded, getting up and stretching out my hand in greeting. “How are you? How did you get in?”

Then, in a flash he was gone! I blinked, rubbed my eyes, then went over to the switch and put the lights on. So far I had only had the desk lamp in action. He had disappeared all right.

I was not exactly frightened, just puzzled. I am not a believer in ghosts, but I do think there is something to premonition and prevision. Suppose he had died at the self-same moment and that I had had a pre-death visitation? Immediately I reached for the telephone. His voice answered me promptly enough.

“You saw me?” he repeated, as I explained matters. “Well, maybe you need your eyes tested. Or else. . .” He stopped and I guessed he was thinking hard. “Sort of transparent?” he asked pensively.

“Seemed so—like a fairly solid ghost. I could just see the wall through you—or it, or whatever it was.”

“Mighty interesting, because at the exact time you’ve mentioned I was thinking about you,” he said. “I must study this over carefully. It may be the first reaction of that accidental fall I had into the midst of that energy machine of mine.”

“You are feeling well?” I asked anxiously.

“Never better. And I’m not going to destroy the world, so don’t you worry. Your common-sense lecture did me good. I mean to find a way to produce electronic isolation. See you again.”

I rang off, sat thinking for a moment or two, then shrugged my shoulders. If there was a scientific explanation for it I certainly did not know what it was. . .

As it transpired, though, this was only the beginning. Two more days went by, then the newspapers published a full column on Mark Grayson. When I read it I found it had been culled from the experiences of quite a lot of different people in widely separated parts of the country. Each person interviewed reported having seen a vaguely transparent figure resembling Mark Grayson. Sometimes he had been observed within five minutes, in places as much as two hundred miles apart. Some witnesses, though perhaps they were drawing on their imaginations, declared that he had merged into two and even three persons, all identical. This had happened while the witnesses were watching him.

To me, especially, it was puzzling, and I wished my legal work over so that I could pay him another visit. The first moment I was free, I hurried to Long Island and found him, apparently not disturbed, though he did not look as well as he had on my earlier trip.

“Glad you’ve come,” he said, in that offhand way he had, when we were in his laboratory. “These happenings are rather alarming if you don’t understand them. As it happens I do, partly. You know, I’ve been having the devil of a time with newspaper men. They have been here pestering me. It appears that I am rapidly becoming a public nuisance. All I can do is deny everything, and that does not improve my case very much. If I am not careful I’m likely to find myself in an ugly mess.”

“But how in the world do you account for these appearances of yourself in so many widely differing places?” I demanded. “You could never have been to such places. Time and distance would not permit it!”

“I think I have unlocked a door of science which I never intended to touch,” he said, thinking. “And it may mean the end of me. It’s likely the extension of an electronic wavelength reacts differently in living organism to what it does in inert matter. A piece of iron, for instance, would transmit disturbance to all surrounding matter and bring about a general cataclysm, but organic, or living matter, is different. The effect is transmitted through that body until it is dissipated!

“Mind force enters into it, too. Living matter is at the behest of the mind, as we know, but so far only the living body itself has responded to the mind. In my case it is different. By accidentally falling into the area of that energy transmission I enlarged the wavelength of a whole mass of my electrons indefinitely, displaced the energy thereof, if you will. The result is that confusion has entered into my matter make up. The displacement of the wavelengths has produced an emittence of energy; and each time the energy passes away it has to resolve itself. That is electric law. The resolution takes the form of a complete image of me, a thin, attenuated image which travels immediately to the spot I happen to be thinking of at the time, or somewhere in the immediate vicinity. Mind is at the back of it all the time because mind is at the back of the parent body.

“But there is a price for it, Arthur. With each emittence of energy, as more electrons extend their wavelengths and pass away from my physical make-up, I lose substance and weight. Mind I cannot lose, because that is an eternal quality.”

I was bewildered by what he had told me.

“I don’t half grasp all this,” I said. “Where is it going to end?”

“I don’t know,” he muttered. “I believe it has only just begun. A series of thinly spaced electron setups part from me at intervals and become ghosts of Mark Grayson. There are tens of thousands of Mark Graysons remaining in my make up yet. As I told you, one electron takes three dimensions; two, six; three, nine—and so on progressively. In time I imagine that my images will not only be hurtling to different parts of the earth but into other spaces, dimensions, times, and worlds. In other words I am being radiated into infinity and multiple-infinity. Maybe it is a just judgment for the plan I had to destroy the world and perhaps the universe.”

“But for me it would never have happened,” I protested. “I pushed you onto that plate!”

“And by so doing you perhaps saved the world.” He shrugged. “What’s the difference? It happened, and I’m prepared to abide by it.”

That was how the matter stood with him. There was not much I could do about it, anyway, not being a particularly good scientist. But the interest of this amazing phenomenon had gripped me so hard that I sent over a call to the wife and told her I was stopping with Grayson for a day or two as he was not very well. By this decision I entered into the most astonishing few days any man ever lived.

At intervals—intervals which increased in frequency as time passed—I actually saw this parting of electronic energy from Mark Grayson. It was rather like one of those trick shots in a movie where a dreamer gets out of himself and walks about.

Suddenly, even while talking to me, or having a meal, or seated in a chair, an image of Mark would flash out from him in a hazy glow, go right through wall, floor, or ceiling and vanish. All he did was smile wryly, recall exactly what he had been thinking about at that moment, and sure enough the image was later reported to have been seen in that exact spot.

At first this used to happen at intervals of three hours. Then as the weird progressive change built up within him, as the energy he had absorbed extended more and more multi-thousands of electron wavelengths inside him, it happened more repeatedly, until in two more days as many as twelve images parted from him in thirty minutes. In some cases they were in triplicate. I completely lost count of how many Mark Graysons went out, but we learned plenty from the radio and newspapers. Some of the reports were pathetic, some startling, and others downright ludicrous.

In a far Western state a woman dying of cancer had been praying for a vision to restore her. At that identical time some quirk of Grayson’s mind had sent an image right into her bedroom, a place he had merely envisaged in thought. The woman had seen the vision and been instantly cured.

In another case a famous banker had demanded action by the police because Mark had appeared through the closed doors of a secret conference and heard all the details of a great international finance deal. In yet another instance an image had appeared in England where a high-pressure estate agent had been trying to sell a castle to a wealthy traveler. The traveler had refused to buy because there was no sign of the reputed ghost. A Mark Grayson transparency glimpsed in the aged cloisters had made that agent a richer man.

Silly, trivial things, but they give an idea of what distances the parting electrons of Mark Grayson traveled, distances no longer trammeled to the ordinary limits of an electron wavelength. Then, always the true scientist, he began to see that undisciplined journeying by his images are useless. He might as well do something with them. For, as he told me, he knew what they saw and felt by reason of the mind reaction they carried. Because of this, he gradually became less sure of himself. As the images increased to the multiples he inevitably received multiple impressions, was in some cases aware of being in half a dozen places at once.

But he was determined to make something of his doom, for that was inevitably what was coming. As he got to the place where the images were so numerous they were not confined to three dimensions but to six, nine, twelve, and multiples of three for every electron, he went literally a-roaming, and each time he told me what he had seen and done. I can only report this as he explained it.

He passed into the sixth dimension and found it populated as freely as our own three, but by beings who were purely mathematical because of their environment. He wandered into the sealed underworld of Mars and found it truly dead, walked the plains of steaming Venus, wandered across blazing and frozen Mercury. He had in fact the supreme chance of all creation, the ability to roam as an actual thought-projected image into all the places locked so far to science.

He told me of his journeyings through the hottest suns, of his visits to the centers of blazing Sirius and Antares. Then some whim changed his course. He had all Time open to him, too, as more and more electrons swept him into the multiple dimensions demanded of them.

He walked in the Cretaceous and Carboniferous Periods, saw the beginning and end of the world, established facts of history which I wrote down and stated vital facts of the future which only the passage of time can prove to lesser mortals. He saw ahead of us not peace and content but a world of struggle and dreadful turmoil until Man should really come to understand that all life, intelligence, power, and conception are mental and not physical.

Plainly, Mark Grayson, unlimited in number of images and unlimited by any mortal or material barrier, was for three brief weeks a god. Then he tired of his wanderings and the vast things he had learned. The terrific strain on his mental and physical makeup broke him down. Unutterably weary, for his bodily energy had decreased with every set of electrons to pass from it, he finally ceased his mental roaming and let the images go whither chance willed. In consequence they appeared here, there, and everywhere without direction. Sometimes in the city, sometimes in the country, sometimes for good, sometimes for ill—until the very complexity of his appearances and the secrets he supposedly learned caused big shots to add their complaints to that of banker Joseph Runthorne and finally the police came to investigate. I was present when they arrived. I tried in vain to convince them that my friend was ill and could not be disturbed.

He was sitting in the laboratory when they arrested him—a pale, white-haired man now, lines of weariness traced on his face.

“Do you deny, Dr. Grayson, that you have been projecting images of yourself here, there, and about?” asked the officer in charge. “Do you assert you haven’t been using these images for the learning of secrets and the—er—violation of personal privacy?”

Grayson smiled wanly. “I admit the first and deny the second. Not that it matters. I have seen the beginning and end of the world, the beginning and end of space.”

It was a pity he said this for it sounded crazy. It was on this ground that he was brought up for trial. I was present too, of course, as chief witness and I employed a brother lawyer of outstanding skill to defend him. But unfortunately Mark prejudiced his chances by his technical explanations.

To me, knowing him as he had been, it was quite clear that the mass of knowledge he had amassed and the energy he was still losing had caused him to lose his grip on his mind. He sounded—and maybe he was—crazy. Certainly the regular glowings of light about him which pronounced the departure of more images did a great deal to get him convicted as a criminal lunatic. He was removed to prison to await confinement in an institution for the criminally insane.

I was allowed to see him for a few minutes, and found him quite rational again. I took good care to keep my distance in the cell though, for now the glow was almost continuous. He looked as if he were painted in phosphorescence.

“I’ve not far to go, Arthur,” he said soberly, as I sat looking at him. “The energy which began in leaps has increased to a positive continuous discharge. Life energy—electronic energy—is flowing out of me like water down a sluice. In a myriad directions, in a myriad dimensions and spaces, images of me must be flashing, appearing, disappearing, shading off into infinite dimensions we cannot even guess at. See—look here!”

He laid his hand on the bunk and for the first time I saw that it was translucent. He was becoming as transparent as glass.

“When the last scrap of energy has exhausted itself, it will be the end of Mark Grayson, and thank God for it!” he said. “You have been my true friend, so do me a favor. Tell all you know about me to the Science Association. Hand them the notes you have made. They will perhaps believe. Tell them to destroy that machine of mine. Things like this are not for Man to understand until he has learned a lot more science.”

With this, I had to leave for my time was up. Then, four days later, I read this in the paper under big headlines:

Needless to say, the police never found him, and they never will. Obviously his last scrap of energy had gone and he is at last untrammeled—or at least his great mind is.

For myself, I put his case before the association and they have promised to examine my notes, of which this is a short history, written to disprove him the lunatic he was thought to be. I say that he was a genius, but before his time. As to whether my act of knocking him on that plate saved the world or not I leave you, and science, to judge.

Not that the last of his images has even now been seen. Electronic radiations still reproduce—or at least rebound—from the subetherial waves of matter, and only last night while out with my wife we both saw a hazy image of Mark for a moment on the other side of the street, which immediately vanished. They have been reported from other parts of the world, too.

Until the last state of unbalance is overcome the world will be forced to remember Mark Grayson, and for my part I want to see that the world shall never forget him.

Mis-spelled words and printer errors have been fixed.

Inconsistency in hyphenation has been retained.

[The end of Mark Grayson Unlimited by Polton Cross [John Russell Fearn]]