CHAPTER I
Transmutation
Carrying the coffee-pot, the Belgian shuffled out of the room. The door thumped behind him. Miller met Slade’s inquiring stare and shrugged.
“So he’s crazy,” Miller said.
Slade drew down the corners of his thin mouth. “Maybe he is. But I’ve got other sources of information, remember. I’m sure there’s—something—up on Peak Seven Hundred. Something plenty valuable. You’re going to find it for me.” His teeth clicked on the last word.
“Am I?” Miller said sourly.
“Suit yourself. Anytime you feel like it you can go back to the States.” There was a threat in the way he said it.
Miller said, “Sure. And then you send a few telegrams . . . It was a sweet little frame you fixed up on me. A murder rap—”
“Well,” Slade interrupted, “that happened to be a frame. I’ve got to protect myself, though, in case you ever want to turn State’s evidence.”
“I’ve done your dirty work for ten years,” Miller growled. “It’s too late now to try crossing you up. But we’re both guilty of one particular murder, Slade. A guy named Miller who was an honest lawyer, ten years ago. I feel sorry for the poor sucker.”
Slade’s strong, implacable face turned away from him.
“The man with the gun has the advantage. Up on Peak Seven Hundred there’s the biggest gun in the world—I think. Something’s sending out terrific power-radiations. I’m no scientist, but I’ve got men working for me who are. If I can get that—weapon—from the Peak, I can write my own ticket.”
Miller looked at him curiously. He had to admit Slade’s strength, his powerful will. Head of a slightly criminal and completely unscrupulous political empire for a decade now, Slade was growing restive, reaching out for new worlds to conquer.
Word of this power-source on the peak in Alaska had sounded fantastic even back in the States but it seemed to fascinate Slade, who could afford to indulge his whims. And he could afford to trust Miller—to a certain extent. Miller was in Slade’s hands and knew it.
They both looked up as the Belgian came back into the room, carrying a fresh bottle of whiskey. Van Hornung was drunk and well aware of his own drunkenness. He peered at them from under the huge fur cap he wore even indoors.
“Could man be drunk forever with liquor, love and fights—” he murmured, hooking out a chair with his foot. “Ah well, it doesn’t matter now. Have another drink, gentlemen.”
Miller glanced at Slade, then leaned forward across the table.
“About Peak Seven Hundred, now,” he said. “I wish you’d—”
The Belgian slapped a fat hand on the table. “You ask me about Seven Hundred. Very well, then—listen. I would not tell you before—I did not wish you to die. Now I am drunker and, I think, wiser. It does not matter whether a man lives or dies.
“For twenty years I have been neither alive nor dead. I have not thought nor felt emotion nor lived like a man. I have eaten and drunk and tried to forget. If you wish to go to the Peak I’ll tell you the way. It’s all quite futile, you see.”
He drank. Miller and Slade exchanged glances in silence.
“If you go,” Van Hornung said, “you will leave your soul behind you—as I did. We are not the dominant race, you see. We try to achieve the summits but we forget that there may already be dwellers on the peaks. Oh yes, I will tell you the way to the Peak if you like. But if you live you will not care about anything any more.”
Miller glanced again at Slade, who gestured impatiently.
“I’ll take a chance on that,” Miller said to the Belgian. “Tell me the way.”
In the dim twilight of the arctic noon Miller followed his Innuit guides up the snowy foothills toward Seven Hundred. For many days they had traveled, deeper and deeper into this dry, sub-zero silence, muffled in snow. The guides were nervous. They knew their arctic gods, animistic, watchful, resented intrusion into sacred areas like Peak Seven Hundred. In their fur-hooded Esquimaux faces oriental eyes watched Miller mistrustfully.
He was carrying his gun now. Two of the Innuits had deserted already, in the depths of the long nights. These two remained and hated him, and went on only because their fear of his gun was greater—so far—than their fear of the gods on Seven Hundred.
The Peak lifted great sheer cliffs almost overhead. There was no visible way of scaling it. But the Innuits were hurrying ahead as if they had already sighted a clearly marked trail. Miller quickened his steps, a vague uneasiness beginning to stir in his mind.
Then the foremost Esquimau dropped to his knees and began to scrabble in the snow. Miller shouted, hearing his own voice come back thin and hollow from the answering peaks. But when he reached the two, one of them looked up over his furclad shoulder and smiled a grim smile. In his native tongue he spoke one of the strange compound words that can convey a whole sentence.
“Ariartokasuaromarotit-tog,” he said. “Thou too wilt soon go quickly away.” There was threat and warning and satisfaction in the way he said it. His fur mitten patted something in the snow.
Miller bent to look. An iridescent pathway lay there, curving up around a boulder and out of sight, rough crystal surfaces that caught the light with red and blue shadows. Here in the white, silent world of the high peaks it looked very beautiful and strange. Miller knelt and ran a gloved hand over it, feeling even through the leather a slight tingling. . . .
“Erubescite!” he murmured to himself, and smiled. It meant copper, perhaps gold. And it was an old vein. The color spoke of long exposure. There was nothing strange about finding a vein of erubescite in the mountains—the interpenetrating cubes twinned on an octahedral plane were common enough in certain mining regions. Still, the regularity of the thing was odd. And that curious tingling. . . .
It looked like a path.
The Innuits were watching him expectantly. Moving with caution, Miller stepped forward and set his foot on the path. It was uneven, difficult to balance on. He took two or three steps along the iridescent purple slope, and then. . . .
And then he was moving smoothly upward, involuntarily, irresistibly. There was a strange feeling in his feet and up the long muscles at the back of his legs. And the mountain was sliding away below him. Peaks, snow-slopes, fur-clad men all slipped quietly off down the mountainside, while at Miller’s feet a curving ribbon of iridescence lengthened away.
“I’m dreaming!” was his first thought. And his head spun with the strange new motion so that he staggered—and could not fall. That tingling up his legs was more than a nervous reaction, it was a permeation of the tissues.
“Transmutation!” he thought wildly, and clutched in desperation at the slipping fabric of his own reason. “The road’s moving,” he told himself as calmly as he could. “I’m fixed to it somehow. Transmutation? Why did I think of transmutation? I can’t move my feet or legs—they feel like stone—like the substance of the road.”
The changing of one element into another—lead into gold, flesh into stone . . . The Innuits had known. Far away he could see the diminishing dots that were his guides slide around a curve and vanish. He gestured helplessly, finding even his arms growing heavy, as if that strange atomic transmutation were spreading higher and higher through his body.
Powerless, one with the sliding path, he surrendered himself without a struggle to that mounting glide. Something stronger than himself had him in a grip that seemed purposeful. He could only wait and . . . it was growing difficult to think. Perhaps the change was reaching to his brain by now. He couldn’t tell.
He only knew that for a timeless period thereafter he did not think any more about anything. . . .
Thin laughter echoed through his mind. A man’s voice said, “But I am bored, Tsi. Besides, he won’t be hurt—much. Or if he is, what does it matter?”
Miller was floating in a dark void. There was a strangeness about the voice he could not analyze. He heard a woman answer and in her tone was a curious likeness to the man’s.
“Don’t, Brann,” she said. “You can find other—amusements.”
The high laughter came again. “But he’s still new. It should be interesting.”
“Brann, please let him go.”
“Be silent, Tsi. I’m master here. Is he awake yet?”
A pause. “No, not yet. Not for a while yet.”
“I can wait.” The man sighed. “I’ve preparations to make, anyhow. Let’s go, Tsi.”
There was a long, long pause. The voices were still.
Miller knew he was floating in nothingness. He tried to move and could not. Inertia still gripped his body but his brain was free and functioning with a clarity that surprised him. It was almost as if that strange transmutation had changed his very brain-tissues to something new and marvelous.
“Transmutation,” he thought. “Lead into gold—flesh into stone—that’s what I was thinking about when—when I stopped thinking. When that sort of change happens, it means the nuclear charge in the atoms of one substance or the other has to change too. The tingling when I touched the road—was that when it happened?”
But he paused there, knowing there was no answer. For when had a man ever before felt the shifting from flesh to crystal take place in his own body?
If it had happened that way, then it must have been a force like the coulomb forces themselves that welded him into one with the moving road—the all but irresistible forces that hold the electrons in their orbits and rivet all creation into a whole.
And now—what?
“There are two methods of transmutation,” he told himself clearly, lying there in the dark and groping for some answer to the thing that was happening to him.
“Rationalize it,” his mind seemed to say, “or you’ll go mad with sheer uncertainty. Reason it out from what you know. A chemical element is determined by the number of electrons around the nucleus—change that and you change the element. But the nucleus, in turn, determines by its charge the number of electrons it can control. If the nuclear charge is changed, then this—this crystalline state—is permanent.
“But if it isn’t, then that must mean there’s constant bombardment that knocks off or adds electrons to whatever touches that road. The change wouldn’t be permanent because the original charge of the nucleus remains constant. After awhile the extra electrons would be dropped, or others captured to restore the balance, and I’d be normal again. That must be the way of it,” he told himself, “because Van Hornung came this way. And he went back again—normal. Or was he really normal?”
The question echoed without answer in his brain. Miller lay quiet a moment longer and then began to try once more to stir his inert body. This time, a very little, he felt muscles move. . . .
What seemed a long while later, he found he could open his eyes. Very cautiously he looked around.