WRITING ON THE WALL

The idea struck Professor John Bickering in a telephone booth in a drug store on West Seventeenth Street. Bickering had been heading for a book shop where he bought most of his volumes on psychology, when he remembered he had left his electric razor connected to his hotel room current.

The razor was a gift from an aunt in Toledo. He hoped he could make contact with the hotel clerk before it would be ruined.

But once in the phone booth, Bickering noticed, absently at first, the markings on the wall. An instant later his call and the razor were forgotten.

The markings were familiar. He had seen them, or rather their counterparts, on the backs of old magazines, in book fly-leaves, wherever in fact some member of the American public found it necessary to pass time.

They were doodlings.

Bickering himself was often guilty of doodling. Whenever time was heavy on his hands, he found a scrap of paper and printed his name backwards. Then he enclosed the name in a neat square and topped the whole thing off with a heavy circle. But the marks on this wall were different. They looked like this:

For a long time the professor stood there in the cramped quarters of the booth, staring at the hieroglyphics. His thoughts rushed back to the recently-completed last passage of the twenty-third chapter of his new book:

It is true that instincts are but tested ideas and beliefs which have been passed germwise down through the generations and with which the progeny are endowed as soon as they become mentally conscious. The workings of the subconscious mind may be exaggerated examples of this mental heritance.

Bickering had not given any undue amount of thought to that passage when he wrote it. It but paved the way for Chapter Twenty-four which was to deal with the “subconscious mind.” But the book itself represented the professor’s greatest undertaking. Originally entitled Basic Thought Reactions to Certain Stimuli and Other Manifestations of a Psychological Nature Encountered in Certain Experiments, the name had been shortened by the publisher in the advance contract to Thought Roots.

Bickering had put his all into the writing of that book. He had intended it to make himself the Charles Fort of the psychological world, and he had hoped to capture the Trolheim Award.

The Trolheim Award was a tidy sum. It was offered to the man who contributed the most valuable and unusual developments in this branch of science. With the money he thus hoped to win, the professor had set his heart on buying a house and private laboratory offered for sale in West Eureka on Highway Number Seven at County Road H. For weeks now he had dreamed of emptying his cramped hotel quarters of all their apparatus and moving to that suburban home.

Bickering was convinced that the first twenty-three chapters of his book were not only “valuable,” but distinctly “unusual.” He had begun with the postulation that the Darwinian theory as applied to man was only partially correct; that man had not evolved entirely on this earth, but that he was undoubtedly of extra terrestrial origin; and that, therefore, the human intellect was not the result of eons of growth and development, but rather of gradual disintegration from a super-intellect of some remote age.

But Chapter Twenty-four he felt was destined to be a distinct letdown. In it he had planned to discuss the subconscious mind. As yet, however, he had not come upon a single experiment to be considered worthy of including in the book.

Now as he stood there in the telephone booth an idea suddenly struck him. Doodlings, eh? Funny, he had never thought about them before. But they were the essence of subconscious activity. And this one was the most amazing example he had ever seen.

The professor took out his notebook and carefully made a copy of the drawing on the wall. Then he opened the booth door and motioned the drug clerk.

“I don’t suppose you can tell me who drew this?”

The clerk craned his neck and looked puzzled. “You from the telephone company?” he asked.

“No, I…I’m a detective,” Bickering lied glibly. He took out a huge calabash pipe, began to fill its bowl. “I’m trying to trace someone, and I thought possibly you could…”

But the clerk could not tell. Everybody scribbled in telephone booths. The only thing he could say for certain was that the marks had not been there three weeks ago, for at that time the booth had been freshly painted.

Bickering realized that if he wanted to find the person who had made those marks—and to develop his idea for Chapter Twenty-four it was absolutely essential to find the doodler—he must find a more recent copy of them.

There was one factor in his favor. Doodlers always wrote the same words or made the same designs.

The professor made a thorough job of his search. He started on West Seventeenth Street and walked to Grant. From Grant to Aldrich, Aldrich to Oak, and Oak back to Seventeenth. At each shop and store which had a pay telephone he entered and examined the booth. He saw doodlings of a thousand different varieties, but none of the designs for which he was searching.

Then in a corner cigar-store his luck returned. The telephone booth there was occupied by a perspiring heavy-set man. While talking, he was busy scribbling on the wall.

The design was the same as had caught Bickering’s eye in the drug store.

Time seemed to drag interminably after that. But at length the man hung up the receiver, mopped his face and came out.

Bickering seized him by the arm.

“You drew that!” he announced.

The man backed away slowly.

“Don’t be frightened,” Bickering said, “I’m quite sane. I simply noticed those marks you made, and I’m wondering if you’d mind telling me why you drew them. You see, I’m a professor of psychology, and I’m writing a book called…well never mind the title. Do you always draw that when you have nothing else to do?”

“Sure.” The heavy-set man smiled. “Habit of mine. Don’t mean a thing.” He turned and headed for the door.

“Wait.” Bickering ran after him. “You don’t realize, sir, how important this is. I’m on the verge of a great scientific discovery, and I need your help. When my book is published, those drawings you made on the telephone booth wall may make you a fortune and win you undying fame. I can’t say for certain yet, but I believe your subconscious brain, alone among thousands, is capable of spanning the infinity of time and space.”

“You mean you’re not selling something?” the man asked.

Impatiently Bickering shook his head and rapidly began to touch on the high points of the theory that lay behind his book. As the man listened, a spark of interest entered his eyes. At length he nodded slowly.

“Okay. I’m Mason Felspar of the Felspar Electric Company. If you really have something, I’m the guy that can be shown. Where do you live?”

Half an hour later in the cramped laboratory of his hotel apartment, the professor motioned Felspar to a chair and took out his notebook copy of the telephone drawings. Stacked about them on shelves and tables were strange pieces of apparatus, most of them Bickering-less because you’ve written the same ones thousands time in conducting experiments.

“I’m going to analyze the marks on this drawing for you,” the professor said. “You think they’re meaningless because you’ve written the same ones thousands of times. The fact is they are a part of your subconscious brain.

“Now look closely. At the top of the drawing you drew what is obviously a star. A little lop-sided perhaps, but still a star. And moving between the two stars is a black cigar-shaped object.

“In the middle of the drawing, between the two stars, is a small ring with a tail, flanked by a curved line. At the bottom is a circle. Or let us call it a globe.”

“Just doodlings,” said Felspar. “I’ve been doing it for years.”

“Now,” continued Bickering, unmindful of interruption, “let us accept these marks for what they represent. We have then two stars, a globe, a cigar-shaped object, and a smaller globe, with a tail, or to boil it down still farther: two stars, this Earth, a projectile, and a comet. Crude as it is, the ring with the tail can only represent a comet. You even have the path of the trajectory, as shown by the curved line. Do you see?”

“I…that is…” faltered Felspar.

“Now I don’t know how much you know about the origin of man,” continued the professor. “You may possibly have read of Mu and Atlantis. You may have read your Darwin, Heckel or Lamark. But I believe the theories of those men to be full of discrepancies. It is possible that some races or all races did not develop on Earth at all, but were originally foreign to Earth and came from somewhere in extra terrestrial space. As an elementary example, that in itself would account for the many skin pigments and the great ethnological difference found today.”

Bickering paused to exhale a mouthful of tobacco smoke.

“And it is also true,” he said, “that basic thoughts and ideas are handed down through the generations, a regular part of man’s inheritance.”

“But what are you driving at?”

Bickering stiffened. “Don’t you see? I’m convinced that your drawings open the door to the past. They point conclusively to the fact that life on this Earth is not only the result of evolution but also mass migration from another planet. Looking at your drawing again.

“You have a projectile—a space ship, let us say, filled with life—leaving one planet of one star system, bound for another. Half way a comet approaches the projectile’s path and comes sufficiently close to alter the projectile’s trajectory. What is the result? The projectile misses its destination and comes to rest instead on Earth. And so powerful was the remembered thought of that occurrence it has continued down through thousands of years, through the brains of millions of men until it reached expression with you.” Felspar sat rigid in his chair. His eyes were wide open, and rivulets of perspiration were trickling down his face.

“I’m double damned,” he said slowly.

Bickering opened a drawer in his desk, took out a sheet of paper, a pencil, and a ruler.

From a cabinet at the far wall he drew forth a concave piece of aluminum studded with tiny knobs, each of which was connected by a network of tiny wires. In the center of the top surface was a single quartz ball.

“Now,” he said, “I’m going to try an experiment. I’m going to put this portable thought-amplifier on your head and leave you alone for an hour. There’s nothing at all to fear. I’ve been using this thought-amplifier in my experiments for weeks, and it is…er…quite harmless. Unlike by brain-stimulator, it has no power connection but simply intensifies mildly the wave lengths of thought set up by your brain while in action. On this paper I want you to write anything and everything that comes to your head. Anything, do you understand? Try and give your subconscious brain free rein.”

Felspar nodded. The professor gently placed the aluminum disc on the man’s head and adjusted a delicate control. Then he passed through a connecting doorway leading to his sitting room and closed the door behind him.

Finally the hour was up. Bickering returned to the room to find Felspar slumped disconsolately in the chair.

“I’m afraid it didn’t work,” the heavy-set man said. “That blamed salad bowl only gave me a headache, and I couldn’t think of a thing to write except this. I…I don’t even know what it means, but the words seemed to come of their own accord off the pencil.”

Bickering seized the paper and stared aghast. Over and over again in parallel lines Felspar had written:

FIRST WARNING, CEASE ACTIVITIES AT ONCE

* * * *

Next day after an almost sleepless night Bickering came to a conclusion.

He must probe deeper into Felspar’s subconscious brain, and he must do it in such a way that the man would be unaware of what was happening. He must find other “patients” whose doodlings would be in harmony with Felspar’s. Surely in a city of this size there must be other men and women whose inherited mental whims could be of significance and value. As for Felspar’s written warning, that was a mystery which at present defied explanation.

The professor wrote ten pages of his Chapter Twenty-four describing his initial experiment with Felspar. He spent the afternoon making a tour of the city. By five o’clock he had discovered five other persons in different walks of life, each of whom was a highly specialized doodler.

“Flip” Talbot was a reporter on The Evening Standard. His subconscious markings consisted of a large round circle which Bickering accepted as the Universe. Near the center of the circle was a group of small dots which resembled the Milky Way. And off to the side was the age-old symbol of the sun, a circle bordered by many wavy lines.

The other four were of lesser importance. John Albright, a plumbing fixture salesman, drew interlocking triangles. The Halstead brothers made pyramids of squares and rectangles. And Miss Alice Reynolds, a pretty stenographer, drew a conglomeration of them all: squares, triangles, dots and circles.

By diplomatic persuasion and vague offers of potential fame Bickering succeeded in making the five agree to meet at his hotel room that evening at eight o’clock. Mason Felspar had already promised to be there.

Bickering knew of course that doodling was only done under certain conditions and that if he wanted his guests to work at the highest point of efficiency he must reproduce those conditions. He went, therefore, to the offices of the telephone company and interviewed the manager of the service department. He wanted, he said, five telephones installed on the wall of his hotel laboratory, to be ready within the hour.

The manager’s jaw dropped. “Five phones!” he gasped. “What are you going to do with five phones?”

“You needn’t mind connecting them,” Bickering said blandly. “I simply want them mounted on the wall.”

From the phone company the professor made his way to the Zephyr Music Store, where he purchased a portable electric phonograph and one record.

“We have some other nice records,” the clerk said.

Bickering shook his head. “This one is quite sufficient.”

By the time he had returned to his hotel apartment, he found the five phones in their places, mounted on the laboratory wall.

Bickering fastened a pencil on a string to each phone. Then he opened a large packing case and took out his brain-stimulator. This was the machine he had spoken of to Felspar, simply an enlarged and more powerful version of the aluminum thought-amplifier. It was a large box-like affair with three Micro-Welman tubes and a series of intricate dials and verniers on its panel.

The professor had designed both the stimulator and the amplifier for psychology experiments in Chapters Five, Seven, and Nine. Both machines had worked successfully, and he had almost, but not quite, sold them to a manufacturer for professional distribution. Bickering had made five samples of the amplifier, but unfortunately under tests they had removed all of the patients’ hair.

The stimulator also was constructed in accordance with the theory that the brain while in the process of thought sets up a vibratory field. When tuned to the proper wavelength, it received those vibrations, strengthened them, and redirected them back to the brain through the ear.

Bickering got a screwdriver and a pair of pliers and set about connecting the receivers of the five telephones to the stimulator.

It was close to eight o’clock when he finished. Felspar was the first to arrive. The others followed promptly. By eight-fifteen Bickering was ready to begin his experiment.

“You are each to select a telephone,” he had told them, lift the receiver to your ear and wait. I won’t tell you whether you will hear anything or not. But while you wait, do anything you wish. Scribble, write, doodle, anything. I’ll return shortly.”

He placed one of the aluminum amplifiers on each of his guests’ heads and then started the phonograph with the record he had purchased. It was Liszt’s Liebestraum. There was an automatic repeat device, and the professor hoped the music would place his five guests in the proper mood. He switched on the brain stimulator, passed into the next room and shut the door.

But when he returned to the laboratory twenty minutes later, he found things different than he had expected.

“Flip” Talbot, the reporter, had turned the record on the other side. It was playing Classics in Swing, and Alice Reynolds, the stenographer, had pushed her amplifier rakishly far back on her head and was beating the rhythm of the music on the chair arm with the palm of her hand.

The only person who had made a mark by his telephone was Felspar. On the wall he had written in a flowing hand:

SECOND AND LAST WARNING. YOU ARE INTERFERING WITH FORCES BEYOND YOUR POWER. IF YOU VALUE YOUR LIFE YOU WILL CEASE ACTIVITIES AT ONCE.

Bickering frowned as he gnawed his pipe stem and eyed Felspar shrewdly. Was the heavy-set man pulling his leg? But no, Felspar was staring at the wall, apparently stupefied by what he had written.

The repeated warning troubled Bickering. First warning of what? Who was doing the warning? Surely not Felspar. And what was all this prattle about forces beyond his power? Apparently greater stimulus was needed to make the experiment a success.

A thought came to Bickering then, and his eyes lighted. The brain stimulator derived its power from an ordinary six-volt storage battery. But he had been talking to the hotel engineer only yesterday, and that individual had offered him the use of a small auxiliary refrigeration dynamo in the hotel engine room.

“Better not say anything about it to the manager,” the engineer had said in his friendly way. “And go easy when you make your connections. The thing sets right next to the main dynamo and the elevator motor, and there’s plenty of hot juice there.”

Bickering took out a large coil of double insulated wire, connected one end to the brain stimulator and dropped the free end out the window. Then he rode down the elevator to the basement. The engineer was not in sight. Impatiently the professor opened a basement window and caught the other end of the wire. He proceeded to connect it to the refrigeration dynamo, working with clumsy haste and paying no heed to the fact that the wire hung perilously close to a small sign which read:

DANGER. VOLTAGE.

Finished, he returned to his laboratory and switched on the brain stimulator again. The tubes glowed orange, then cherry red, and a dull drone came from the interior of the box.

The receivers of the five phones were still connected to the machine. Bickering motioned each of his guests to an instrument and sat down in a chair to await results.

Results were startling. Felspar picked up his telephone receiver and uttered a howl of pain. His face contorted into an expression of stark terror.

“Turn it off,” he yelled. “Turn it off!”

But Bickering did not turn it off. He said quietly, “Don’t be frightened. I’m simply amplifying your thought processes. Try and relax.”

A wild light leaped into Felspar’s eyes. Seizing the pencil, his hand jerked to the wall, began to move rapidly. He drew first his usual symbol: the two stars, globe, dot with a tail and cigar-shaped object. Then he began a new design.

The professor, who had stepped to his side, stared. With strangely artistic skill Felspar’s pencil was flying back and forth, forming outlines and background. As he watched, Bickering saw the picture of a city take form. A city fantastic. There were two suns in the sky. There were streets and avenues, flanked by cube-shaped buildings. And here and there were groups of strange-looking creatures, like nothing Bickering had ever seen before.

Wafer-shaped heads, curious elongated bodies, a dozen appendages in the place of arms and legs—the creatures were for the most part lying on their backs. By the drawn expression on their faces they seemed—or did Bickering imagine this?—to be dying of suffocation.

Felspar was working frantically now. Beads of perspiration were on his brow, and his eyes were glassy, with a far-away expression.

In the center of his drawing he began to sketch a high platform, raised above the city. The perspective and the detail were in perfect proportion. On the platform a strange cylindrical shape took form. There were fantastic insulators on its surface. On either side a network of wires and cables hung down. Workers clustered about it, gave the impression they were fighting against time to finish its construction. It was a weird, unreal drawing.

His pipe cold, the professor paced to the brain stimulator and turned the power rheostat another notch. “Felspar,” he said, “what are you drawing?”

Without hesitation the heavy-set man wrote:

“The city of Calthedra of the planet Lyra of the system, Aritorius.”

Professor Bickering gulped. “What is happening on that planet?” he demanded.

“The citizens are building a titanic air preserve. The oxygen atmosphere of the planet is disappearing due to the rapid recession of the two suns. With this machine the citizens hope to capture the atmosphere of some other planet and transport it to their own.”

“When is this happening?”

Like a man in a trance Felspar wrote the answer: “Now!”

Icy fear seemed to chill Bickering’s spine. He had hoped to penetrate by way of the subconscious brain the mysteries of the past. But in some inexplicable way he was not doing that at all. He was delving into the secrets of time and space at the present instant. He was seeing across thousands of light years to another world.

What was the answer? Was it cosmic telepathy? Had he, by amplifying the thought vibrations of Felspar’s brain, produced a wave-length which could annihilate time and distance and receive similar vibrations across almost infinite space?

One thing was certain. When he had transferred this to the written page, his book, his Chapter Twenty-four would be a masterpiece. Unquestionably the Trolheim Award would be his.

Not until then did Bickering become aware of the other occupants of the room. John Albright and the Halstead brothers were simply standing by as onlookers. But Alice Reynolds and “Flip” Talbot were sketching on the wall beside their phones.

The reporter’s writings were as yet indistinguishable, but the stenographer’s, the professor saw to his amazement, included the likeness of a huge cannon mounted on a rectangular base. Shooting from the muzzle of that gun was a cigar-shaped object. A projectile!

Hands trembling, Bickering turned the power of his brain stimulator to its last notch.

He saw then that “Flip” Talbot was writing a series of statements in column form. They read:

The chemical content of the atmosphere of the planet Earth is, with the exception of a deficiency of coronium, similar to that of Lyra.

It is absolutely vital to all Lyranians that our atmosphere be replenished. Because of the cosmic recession of our two suns, heat on Lyra is diminishing, vegetation is dying, and as a result oxygen and nitrogen are escaping.

Migration from Lyra to Earth is at the present time impossible. Both the size and expense of such an undertaking make it impractical. Also, as our astronomers have proved, the nearby double nebula will produce a new sun within a comparatively short period of time. This new sun will amply replace the two that are now receding into space.

In our dying moments we are making a last and final attempt to capture that which is essential to our life. We are shooting a projectile to Earth. This projectile the moment it lands will automatically begin the process of capturing the Earth’s atmosphere, breaking it down into its component atomic parts and storing it under pressure.

As the need demands, that atomic matter will be hurled into the fourth dimensional continuum and transported through a disruption of the spacetime coordinates back to Lyra. In short, the projectile, once it is on Earth, will serve as a branch power station, replenishing our atmosphere. It will arrive…

Bickering leaped to the reporter’s side and gripped his arm.

“Will arrive when?” he shouted. “When?”

There was a blank stare in Talbot’s eyes as his pencil moved over the wall:

First January, 1944, 11 P.M, T Earth time!

With a wild cry Bickering glanced at the clock. It was ten o’clock. In one hour the greatest event in the history of mankind would occur. In one hour the first projectile from an outer planet would reach this Earth. And he—John Bickering—was the first person to be aware of its passage.

He had been wrong in his analyzation of Felspar’s first drawing. No comet would change the trajectory of projectile from an outer planet would reach this Earth, was not any comet. This event was not one which had happened in ages past. It was happening now. Felspar’s first drawing had been a blind. Apparently the citizens of the planet Lyra could not prevent the transmission of their secret by way of his subconscious drawings, but they had changed the details so as to give a completely wrong impression.

The professor raced across the room to the one “good” telephone.

“I’m going to call the newspapers,” he cried. “It’s the story of the age.”

But he got only half way. Felspar who had been standing motionless, suddenly lifted one arm above him.

“Stop!” he cried.

Bickering turned. There was a quality and a tone to Felspar’s voice that was altogether foreign. The man’s face was crimson now; his breathing was coming in short gasps.

“Stop,” he repeated. “You are to make no move to warn the people of your race of the projectile’s arrival. You are to keep the facts you have learned in this room to yourself.”

“Are you mad?” Bickering demanded. And then like a flash of light he understood.

The race of that other planet whose movements he had tuned in were aware of his activities. They were acting through Felspar’s brain to prevent information of their plans being broadcast. Felspar was but a robot responding to their command. He had no conscious knowledge of what he was doing.

Why? Because they knew there was not sufficient atmosphere on Earth for two planets. Once the projectile had landed and begun its operations, the population of Earth would be doomed.

Unmindful of Felspar, Bickering gave a mighty leap toward the phone.

But Felspar, equally agile in spite of his bulk, darted to the laboratory table and scooped up a bottle of acid. Poising it over his head he emitted a wild shout.

“We all die together, Bickering…you, myself, and the others,” he cried. “They whose thoughts you have been reading have willed it so!”

Bickering could see the man’s facial muscles contract as he made ready to hurl the acid. And then…

Then the door of the elevator somewhere on the floors below changed harshly. Through the silence the cage began to drone up the shaft.

Simultaneously the brain stimulator machine on the table erupted into life. Bickering remembered with a start the hotel engineer’s warning about the refrigeration dynamo’s proximity to the main dynamo and the elevator motor. He remembered too that in his haste he had made haywire connections. The filaments of the three Micro-Welman tubes lit up like incandescents. The panel began to vibrate violently, and the dials whirled of their own accord.

The elevator reached the floor level of the outer corridor. Suddenly an arc of purplish fire shot from the brain stimulator. There was a terrific roar as the box flew into a thousand fragments. Bickering felt himself hurled across the room and bludgeoned against the far wall. A cloud of fallen plaster and debris rose up in a choking cloud, and a blaze of colored lights whirled in his vision. Then blackness, and he knew no more…

Hours later when Bickering opened his eyes, the white walls of a hospital were about him, and the familiar figure of Mason Felspar stood beside the bed.

“What…what happened?” the professor asked weakly.

“Plenty,” Replied Felspar. “But you’re supposed to lie quiet and not talk and…”

“Tell me!” demanded Bickering.

“Well—” the heavy-set man touched gingerly a bulky bandage on his forehead—“I don’t know exactly. I brought you here and signed you in under another name. You see the hotel manager is madder than a wet hen. The last I saw of him, he was standing on the sidewalk, looking up at a big hole in the hotel wall and wringing his hands.”

“I don’t care about the hotel manager,” cried the professor. “What happened?”

Felspar shrugged. “All I can say is that I wasn’t responsible for what I did or wrote there in your room. Once you had that salad-bowl on my head and turned on that machine, another power seemed to be in control of my thoughts. Talbot and the girl, Reynolds, said the same. By a miracle none of us was hurt, but the hotel is a wreck. If you want to get all the dope, why don’t you turn on your radio? It’s just about time for the noon news broadcast.”

Bickering reached across the table beside his bed and turned the switch of the radio there. A man’s voice was talking:

“…and at a late hour authorities were still mystified as to the cause of the explosion at the Sheridan Hotel… Continuing our survey of world news: …Washington, D.C., the U.S. Navy Department reported today that Allied battleships operating in the Caribbean Sea sighted and sank what appeared to be a Nazi super-submarine of enormous size.

“The mystery U-boat was discovered near Belize, British Honduras, and was apparently having engine trouble, since it made no attempt to submerge. No member of the craft’s crew was in evidence at any time, but when Allied warships approached hidden weapons firing what was described as ‘a powerful electric bolt’ attempted to bombard them.

“A communique from the Nazi capital disclaims any knowledge of such a super-sub, and stories told by witnesses at Belize of seeing a great crimson streak in the sky and observing a black cigar-shaped object fall into the sea have been discredited… This concludes the news broadcast for today. Goodbye until tomorrow.”

Bickering looked across the bed and rubbed his jaw with his unbandaged hand.

“So it was true,” he said slowly. “Do you realize, Felspar, what this means? It means that complete destruction, complete spatial doom was saved us by a hairsbreadth.”

Felspar swallowed hard and said nothing.

“And yet I wonder,” Bickering continued, “I wonder if it matters so much. After all, man has been spared annihilation from without, but now he’s left to fight and kill himself off by wars of his own making.”