The Circle of Zero Read online

  CHAPTER III

  Nightmare or Truth?

  'Look here,' I said at a later time to de Neant. 'If the past and future are the same thing, then the future's as unchangeable as the past. How, then, can we expect to change it by recovering our money?'

  'Change it?' he snorted. 'How do you know we're changing it? How do you know that this same thing wasn't done by that Jack Anders and de Neant back on the other side of eternity? I say it was!'

  I subsided, and the weird business went on. My memories — if they were memories — were becoming clearer now. Often and often I saw things out of my own immediate past of twenty-seven years, though of course de Neant assured me that these were visions from the past of that other self on the far side of time.

  I saw other things too, incidents that I couldn't place in my experience, though I couldn't be quite sure they didn't belong there. I might have forgotten, you see, since they were of no particular importance. I recounted everything dutifully to the old man immediately upon awakening and sometimes that was difficult — like trying to find words for a half-remembered dream.

  There were other memories as well — bizarre, outlandish dreams that had little parallel in human history. These were always vague and sometimes very horrible and only their inchoate and formless character kept them from being utterly nerve-racking and terrifying.

  At one time, I recall, I was gazing through a little crystalline window into a red fog through which moved indescribable faces — not human, not even associable with anything I had ever seen. On another occasion I was wandering, clad in furs, across a cold grey desert and at my side was a woman who was not quite Yvonne.

  I remember calling her Pyroniva, and knowing that the name meant 'Snowy-fire'. And here and there in the air about us floated fungoid things, bobbing around like potatoes in a water-bucket. And once we stood very quiet while a menacing form that was only remotely like the small fungi droned purposefully far overhead, toward some unknown objective.

  At still another time I was peering, fascinated, into a spinning pool of mercury, watching an image therein of two wild winged figures playing in a roseate glade — not at all human in form but transcendently beautiful, bright and iridescent.

  I felt a strange kinship between these two creatures and myself and Yvonne but I had no inkling of what they were, nor upon what world, nor at what time in eternity, nor even of what nature was the room that held the spinning pool that pictured them.

  Old Aurore de Neant listened carefully to the wild word-pictures I drew.

  'Fascinating!' he muttered. 'Glimpses of an infinitely distant future caught from a ten-fold infinitely remote past. These things you describe are not earthly; it means that somewhere, sometime, men are actually to burst the prison of space and visit other worlds. Some day…'

  'If these glimpses aren't simply nightmares,' I said.

  They're not nightmares,' he snapped, 'but they might as well be for all the value they are to us.' I could see him struggle to calm himself. 'Our money is still gone. We must try, keep trying for years, for centuries, until we get the black grain of sand, because black sand is a sign of gold-bearing ore…' He paused. 'What am I talking about?' he said querously.

  Well, we kept trying. Interspersed with the wild, all but indescribable visions came others almost rational. The thing became a fascinating game. I was neglecting my business — though that was small loss — to chase dreams with old Professor Aurore de Neant.

  I spent evenings, afternoons and finally mornings, too, living in the slumber of the lethargic state or telling the old man what fantastic things I had dreamed — or, as he said, remembered. Reality became dim to me. I was living in an outlandish world of fancy and only the dark, tragic eyes of Yvonne tugged at me, pulled me back into the daylight world of sanity.

  I have mentioned more nearly rational visions. I recall one a city — but what a city! Sky-piercing, white and beautiful and the people of it were grave with the wisdom of gods, pale and lovely people, but solemn, wistful, sad. There was the aura of brilliance and wickedness that hovers about all great cities, that was born, I suppose, in Babylon and will remain until great cities are no more.

  But that was something else, something intangible. I don't know exactly what to call it but perhaps the word decadence is as close as any word we have. As I stood at the base of a colossal structure there was the whir of quiet machinery but it seemed to me, nevertheless, that the city was dying.

  It might have been the moss that grew green on the north walls of the buildings. It might have been the grass that pierced here and there through the cracks of the marble pavements. Or it might have been only the grave and sad demeanor of the pale inhabitants. There was something that hinted of a doomed city and a dying race.

  A strange thing happened when I tried to describe this particular memory to old de Neant. I stumbled over the details, of course — these visions from the unplumbed depths of eternity were curiously hard to fix between the rigid walls of words. They tended to grow vague, to elude the waking memory. Thus, in this description I had forgotten the name of the city.

  'It was called,' I said hesitatingly, Termis or Termoplia, or…'

  'Termopolis!' cried de Neant impatiently. 'City of the End!'

  I stared amazed. 'That's it! But how did you know?' In the sleep of lethargy, I was sure, one never speaks.

  A queer, cunning look flashed in his pale eyes. 'I knew,' he muttered. 'I knew.' He would say no more.

  But I think I saw that city once again. It was when I wandered over a brown and treeless plain, not like that cold grey desert but apparently an arid and barren region of the earth. Dim on the western horizon was the circle of a great cool reddish sun. It had always been there, I remembered, and knew with some other part of my mind that the vast brake of the tides had at last slowed the earth's rotation to a stop, that day and night no longer chased each other around the planet.

  The air was biting cold and my companions and I — there were half a dozen of us — moved in a huddled group as if to lend each other warmth from our half-naked bodies. We were all of us thin-legged, skinny creatures with oddly deep chests and enormous, luminous eyes, and the one nearest me was again a woman who had something of Yvonne in her but very little. And I was not quite Jack Anders, either. But some remote fragment of me survived in that barbaric brain.

  Beyond a hill was the surge of an oily sea. We crept circling about the mound and suddenly I perceived that sometime in the infinite past that hill had been a city. A few Gargantuan blocks of stone lay crumbling on it and one lonely fragment of a ruined wall rose gauntly to four or five times a man's height. It was at this spectral remnant that the leader of our miserable crew gestured then spoke in sombre tones — not English words but I understood.

  'The Gods,' he said — 'the Gods who piled stones upon stones are dead and harm us not who pass the place of their dwelling.'

  I knew what that was meant to be. It was an incantation, a ritual — to protect us from the spirits that lurked among the ruins — the ruins, I believe, of a city built by our own ancestors thousands of generations before.

  As we passed the wall I looked back at a flicker of movement and saw something hideously like a black rubber doormat flop itself around the angle of the wall. I drew closer to the woman beside me and we crept on down to the sea for water — yes, water, for with the cessation of the planet's rotation rainfall had vanished also, and all life huddled near the edge of the undying sea and learned to drink its bitter brine.

  I didn't glance again at the hill which had been Termopolis, the City of the End. But I knew that some chance-born fragment of Jack Anders had been — or will be (what difference, if time is a circle?) — witness of an age close to the day of humanity's doom.

  It was early in December that I had the first memory of something that might have been suggestive of success. It was a simple and very sweet memory, just Yvonne and I in a garden that I knew was the inner grounds on one of the New Orleans' old h
omes — one of those built in the Continental fashion about a court.

  We sat on a stone bench beneath the oleanders and I slipped my arm very tenderly about her and murmured, 'Are you happy, Yvonne?'

  She looked at me with those tragic eyes of hers and smiled, and then answered, 'As happy as I have ever been.'

  And I kissed her.

  That was all, but it was important. It was vastly important because it was definitely not a memory out of my own personal past. You see, I had never sat beside Yvonne in a garden sweet with oleanders in the Old Town of New Orleans and I had never kissed her until we met in New York.

  Aurore de Neant was elated when I described this vision.

  'You see!' he gloated. 'There is evidence. You have remembered the future! Not your own future, of course, but that of another ghostly Jack Anders, who died trillions and quadrillions of years ago.'

  'But it doesn't help us, does it?' I asked.

  'Oh, it will come now! You wait. The thing we want will come.'

  And it did, within a week. This memory was curiously bright and clear, and familiar in every detail. I remember the day. It was the eighth of December, 1929, and I had wandered aimlessly about in search of business during the morning. In the grip of that fascination I mentioned I drifted to de Neant's apartment after lunch. Yvonne left us to ourselves, as was her custom, and we began.

  This was, as I said, a sharply outlined memory — or dream. I was leaning over my desk in the company's office, that too-seldom visited office. One of the other salesmen — Summers was his name — was leaning over my shoulder.

  We were engaged in the quite customary pastime of scanning the final market reports in the evening paper. The print stood out, clear as reality itself. I glanced without surprise at the dateline. It was Thursday, April 27th, 1930 — almost five months in the future!

  Not that I realised that during the vision, of course. The day was merely the present to me. I was simply looking over the list of the day's trading. Figures — familiar names. Telephone 210¾ — US Steel — 161; Paramount, 68½.

  I jabbed a finger at Steel. 'I bought that at 72,' I said over my shoulder to Summers. 'I sold out everything today. Every stock I own. I'm getting out before there's a secondary crash.'

  'Lucky stiff!' he murmured. 'Buy at the December lows and sell out now! Wish I'd had money to do it.' He paused, 'What you gonna do? Stay with the company?'

  'No, I've enough to live on. I'm going to stick it in Governments and paid-up insurance and live on the income. I've had enough of gambling.'

  'You lucky stiff!' he said again. 'I'm sick of the Street too. Staying in New York?'

  'For a while. Just till I get my stuff invested properly; Yvonne and I are going to New Orleans for the winter.' I paused. 'She's had a tough time of it. I'm glad we're where we are.'

  'Who wouldn't be?' asked Summers, and then again, 'You lucky stiff!'

  De Neant was frantically excited when I described this to him.

  That's it!' he screamed. 'We buy! We buy tomorrow! We sell on the twenty-seventh of May and then — New Orleans!'

  Of course I was nearly equally enthusiastic. 'By heaven!' I said. 'It's worth the risk! We'll do it!' And then a sudden hopeless thought. 'Do it? Do it with what? I have less than a hundred dollars to my name. And you…'

  The old man groaned. 'I have nothing,' he said in abrupt gloom. 'Only the annuity we live on. One can't borrow on that.' Again a gleam of hope. 'The banks. We'll borrow from them!'

  I had to laugh, although it was a bitter laugh. 'What bank would lend us money on a story like this? They wouldn't lend Rockefeller himself money to play this sick market, not without security. We're sunk, that's all.'

  I looked at his pale, worried eyes. 'Sunk,' he echoed dully. Then again that wild gleam. 'Not sunk!' he yelled. 'How can we be? We did do it! You remembered our doing it! We must have found the way!'

  I gazed speechless. Suddenly a queer, mad thought flashed over me. This other Jack Anders, this ghost of quadrillions of centuries past — or future — he too must be watching, or had watched, or yet would watch, me — the Jack Anders of this cycle of eternity.

  He must be watching as anxiously as I to discover the means. Each of us watching the other — neither of us knowing the answer. The blind leading the blind! I laughed at the irony.

  But old de Neant was not laughing. The strangest expression I have ever seen in a man's eyes was in his as he repeated very softly, 'We must have found the way because it was done. At least you and Yvonne found the way.'

  'Then all of us must,' I answered sourly.

  'Yes. Oh, yes. Listen to me, Jack. I am an old man, old Aurore de Neant. I am old Dawn of Nothingness and my mind is cracking. Don't shake your head!' he snapped. 'I am not mad. I am simply misunderstood. None of you understand.

  'Why, I have a theory that trees, grass and people do not grow taller at all. They grow by pushing the earth away from them, which is why you keep hearing that the earth is getting smaller every day. But you don't understand — Yvonne doesn't understand.'

  The girl must have been listening. Without my seeing her, she had slipped into the room and put her arms gently about her father's shoulders, while she gazed across at me with anxious eyes.

  CHAPTER IV

  The Bitter Fruit

  There was one more vision, irrelevant in a way, yet vitally important in another way. It was the next evening. An early December snowfall was dropping its silent white beyond the windows and the ill-heated apartment of the de Neants was draughty and chill.

  I saw Yvonne shiver as she greeted me and again as she left the room. I noticed that old de Neant followed her to the door with his thin arms about her and that he returned with very worried eyes.

  'She is New Orleans born,' he murmured. 'This dreadful Arctic climate will destroy her. We must find a way at once.'

  That vision was a sombre one. I stood on a cold, wet, snowy ground — just myself and Yvonne and one who stood beside an open grave. Behind us stretched rows of crosses and white tomb stones, but in our corner the place was ragged, untended, unconsecrated. The priest was saying, 'And these are things that only God understands.'

  I slipped a comforting arm about Yvonne. She raised her dark, tragic eyes and whispered, 'It was yesterday, Jack — just yesterday — that he said to me, "Next winter you shall spend in New Orleans, Yvonne." Just yesterday!'

  I tried a wretched smile, but I could only stare mournfully at her forlorn face, watching a tear that rolled slowly down her right cheek, hung glistening there a moment, then was joined by another to splash unregarded on the black bosom of her dress.

  That was all but how could I describe that vision to old de Neant? I tried to evade. He kept insisting.

  'There wasn't any hint of the way,' I told him. Useless — at last I had to tell anyway.

  He was very silent for a full minute. 'Jack,' he said finally, 'do you know when I said that to her about New Orleans? This morning when we watched the snow. This morning!'

  I didn't know what to do. Suddenly this whole concept of remembering the future seemed mad, insane. In all my memories there had been not a single spark of real proof, not a single hint of prophecy.

  So I did nothing at all but simply gazed silently as old Aurore de Neant walked out of the room. And when, two hours later, while Yvonne and I talked, he finished writing a certain letter and then shot himself through the heart — why, that proved nothing either.

  It was the following day that Yvonne and I, his only mourners, followed old Dawn of Nothingness to his suicide's grave. I stood beside her and tried as best I could to console her, and roused myself from a dark reverie to hear her words.

  'It was yesterday, Jack — just yesterday — that he said to me, "Next winter you shall spend in New Orleans, Yvonne". Just yesterday!'

  I watched the tear that rolled slowly down her right cheek hung glistening there a moment, then was joined by another to splash on the black bosom of her dress.

  But it
was later, during the evening, that the most ironic revelation of all occurred. I was gloomily blaming myself for the weakness of indulging old de Neant in the mad experiment that had led, in a way, to his death.

  It was as if Yvonne read my thoughts, for she said suddenly:

  'He was breaking, Jack. His mind was going. I heard all those strange things he kept murmuring to you.'

  'What?'

  'I listened, of course, behind the door there. I never left him alone. I heard him whisper the queerest things — faces in a red fog, words about a cold grey desert, the name Pyronive, the word Termopolis. He leaned over you as you sat with closed eyes and he whispered, whispered all the time.'

  Irony of ironies! It was old de Neant's mad mind that had suggested the visions! He had described them to me as I sat in the sleep of lethargy!

  Later we found the letter he had written and again I was deeply moved. The old man had carried a little insurance. Just a week before he had borrowed on one of the policies to pay the premiums on it and the others. But the letter — well, he had made me beneficiary of half the amount! And the instructions were —

  'You, Jack Anders, will take both your money and Yvonne's and carry out the plan as you know I wish.'

  Lunacy! De Neant had found the way to provide the money but — I couldn't gamble Yvonne's last dollar on the scheme of a disordered mind.

  'What will we do?' I asked her. 'Of course the money's all yours. I won't touch it.'

  'Mine?' she echoed. 'Why, no. We'll do as he wished. Do you think I'd not respect his last request?'

  Well, we did. I took those miserable few thousands and spread them around in that sick December market. You remember what happened, how during the spring the prices skyrocketed as if they were heading back toward 1929, when actually the depression was just gathering breath.

  I rode that market like a circus performer. I took profits and pyramided them back and, on April 27th, with our money multiplied fifty times, I sold out and watched the market slide back.