When Dr. Mark Haslam encounters Esau Jones, he's astonished to learn that Jones can perform apparent miracles. But despite his amazing gift of complete mastery of mind over matter, Jones is content to remain anonymous, living the life of a country rustic. Until, that is, the Earth faced destruction when Haslam's atomic experiment goes horribly wrong-spreading an advancing tide of dissolution...Decreation!
Release date:
March 31, 2015
Publisher:
Gateway
Print pages:
87
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To be at the top of his profession as a physical scientist at the age of thirty-five was an accomplishment which Dr. Mark Haslam owed entirely to his own efforts. From earliest youth he had allowed nothing to baulk his endeavours, with the result that he had finally gained his Ph.D., and several other degrees besides.
But gratifying though these routine accomplishments were in themselves, they ranked as nothing compared to this particular day. He was to be made President of the Bureau of Advanced Science and lecture upon his discovery of disintegration and its application to basic forces. To the layman, dry stuff indeed, but to the profession a subject of absorbing interest. In this year of grace nobody had yet found the secret of pure disintegration. It might even change the face of the world.
Dr. Mark Haslam mused on these things as he drove his powerful Jaguar down the sunny country lanes. It was June—and June at its best—with the green of the fields and hedgerows, and the blue sky streaked with ribbon-like clouds, looking as though a gigantic but lazy painter had smeared a white paint brush across it. So quiet was the car’s engine that the silver song of a lark came clearly to Mark Haslam’s ears as he drove steadily onwards.
His home was in Godalming, Surrey, and his destination was London. Behind him he had left a wife who cared little for science but everything for her husband; and ahead of him was the unparalleled honour of becoming President of the greatest natural scientific institution in the country.
Mark Haslam smiled to himself and hummed a tune. The world was bright and gay and the future brilliant. Years of mental toil were producing their dividend at last. Then the car sailed straight off the road and into the dry ditch bordering it.
He had not the slightest idea how it happened, but it seemed to him that the steering column behaved strangely, or else he took the corner too swiftly. Whatever the reason the car’s bonnet lurched downwards and, though he himself was not in the least hurt, Mark Haslam found himself well and truly “ditched”.
“Blast!” he declared frankly, and struggled awkwardly out of the up-ended car. Then, his feet sliding in the slippery grass, he stood and surveyed, hands on hips. Definitely nothing short of a breakdown crane could put him on the road again.
Muttering to himself, his immaculate suit dust and grass-stained, he scrambled up to the road and looked about him. Nothing. Just plain nothing. The hot afternoon sun, the lazy wind, that infernal lark chirruping its inside out, some confounded cattle lazing in the distance—and that was all. No garage in sight and nothing on the ribbon of road which went away over the shimmering horizon.
Nothing? Mark Haslam looked again. He narrowed his eyes, tilted his homburg hat over them, and focused into the blaze of sunlight. He had been mistaken. A solitary individual was approaching, perhaps half a mile away, and at this distance he appeared from his aimless walk and leisurely thwacking at the weeds bordering the road, to be either a rustic or a tramp.
“Not that he’ll be any good,” Mark declared irritably. “But he might know the nearest breakdown telephone.”
Whilst he waited for the languid unknown to catch up he examined the car again, finally locating the trouble. The steering wheel had become unbolted, probably through a defect in the metal. The accident could have been a lot worse. It could have happened in traffic, for instance.
So, at last, the wanderer in the sunlight came into clear view, dust curling about his heavy boots. He was wearing an old sports jacket, corduroy trousers, and had a battered haversack swinging from one shoulder. He looked around forty, with a genial, weather-beaten face very indifferently shaved, and a panama hat, much the worse for wear, on the back of his black haired head.
“In trouble?” he inquired, pausing, and his voice revealed that for all his vagabond appearance he had refinement.
“What do you think?” Mask Haslam asked acidly.
“I think you are—definitely.”
Mark Haslam’s sharply cut features revealed his annoyance as the tramp smiled blandly, surveying the up-ended car.
“Miss the edge?” the tramp asked, reflecting.
“No. Fault in the steering wheel. Where’s the nearest patrol ’phone? I need help in a hurry. I’ve got to reach London for a special convention.”
“Tonight?”
“Exactly.”
“In that case, Dr. Haslam, I’d better see what I can do. The nearest patrol ’phone is three miles back—quite a way in this heat, and the nearest garage is a good deal further than that.”
The tramp eased his haversack from his shoulder and then plunged his hands in the pocket of his corduroys, still studying the Jaguar as he did so. Mark Haslam looked at him curiously.
“You know my name, apparently,” he said.
“Uh-huh. Seen you in the magazines occasionally. Go easy with that disintegration idea, though. It could be dangerous.”
“Thanks for the warning.” Haslam’s voice was sardonic. That a no-account tramp should dare to criticise such a marvel as disintegration was nothing less than blasphemy.
Still the tramp stared at the Jaguar, a curiously abstracted look in his eyes. Finally Mark Haslam could tolerate it no longer.
“Look, there isn’t much use in your just standing there, is there? I’d better get on my way to——”
Haslam stopped, and if somebody had put ten thousand volts through him he could not have had a bigger shock. For right before his starting eyes the Jaguar pulled itself backwards out of the ditch on to the road, as though some super-driver, quite invisible, were in control. It was not that the motor was running even though the wheels distinctly moved. The whole thing was, in truth, a complete miracle in broad daylight.
“I used the wrong formula to begin with,” the tramp apologized, grinning again. “Seems it needed B formula to work this one. I thought C or D would have done it. Never mind, I got it. You’ll find the steering is okay now.”
Haslam gulped. “Will—will I?” he asked faintly.
“Surely. Try it.”
Utterly stupefied, he opened the side door and tested the steering wheel. It was perfectly in order. Everything was in order, as though he’d never driven into the ditch. Yet he had, for the gouge marks from the wheels were still there.
“Who the—what are you?” Mark Haslam gasped, turning sharply.
The tramp shrugged, returning his haversack to his shoulder.
“Just a wanderer, Dr. Haslam. Can’t stay long in one place. Gets irksome. I like the fresh air, the wind, and the good clean earth.”
“But dammit, man, you’re a magician!”
“Me? Not a bit of it. All a matter of control. Anyway, glad I put you right. See you again someday, maybe. And remember to go easy with that disintegration of yours. I still say it’s dangerous.”
Utterly petrified, Haslam watched his benefactor turn on his heel and continued his ambling, slip-shod walk up the road, his hand thwacking the weeds as he went. He was singing now in a rich baritone, something about, “The kiss of the sun for pardon, the song of the birds for mirth; you’re nearer God’s heart in a garden than anywhere else on earth.”
“Hey!” Mark Haslam yelled suddenly, coming back to life, and forgetting all about his professional dignity he chased down the road. The tramp paused, waiting for him to catch up.
“I didn’t miss anything, did I?” he asked thinking.
“Miss anything! I want to know what you did—how you did it! It was a complete infraction of all known laws! I ought to know—as a physicist.”
“I suppose you ought,” the tramp agreed, and the sunlight showed that he had humorously twinkling grey eyes. There was about him an inexplicable air of happiness as though nothing in the world mattered.
For the moment Mark Haslam had forgotten that he had an appointment in London. He had forgotten that he was a professional man at the highest peak conversing with a tramp in a dusty country lane. Only one thing mattered: the miracle of the ditched car.
“What’s your name?” he asked abruptly.
“Esau Jones.”
“Esau Jones.”
“Sounds Biblical.”
“So I’ve been told. Just happened that my mother and father were very God-fearing folk. They had high hopes for me, bless ’em, so Esau I became. Welsh folk they were, and——”
“What,” Mark Haslam interrupted, “did you do to make my car come back on the road?”
“Well now, that would take some explaining.”
“Are you telling me!”
“And you have an appointment. Why don’t you accept the thing for what it was and let it go at that? I got you out of a mess, and I was glad to do it.”
“Which means,” Haslam asked, “that you don’t want to explain it?”
“No, it isn’t that. It’s——” Esau Jones scratched his whiskery chin. “It’s just that I don’t think you’d grasp it if I did.”
“I am a physicist of the highest possible scientific attainment. I defy you to put forward a theory which I can’t understand.”
Esau Jones smiled good-humouredly. “All right, Dr. Haslam, if that’s how you want it. How about joining me in some tea and sandwiches whilst we talk it over?”
“I assume you mean from your haversack?”
Esau Jones laughed. “No. I would not dream of asking a man of your position to indul. . .
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