The greatest adventure · OmniClassics

The Greatest Adventure By JOHN TAINE ACE BOOKS, INC. 23 West 47th Street, New York 36, N. Y. THE GREATEST ADVENTURE Copyright, 1929, by E.P. Dutton & Co., Inc. An Ace Book, by arrangement with the author. All Rights Reserved Printed in U.S.A. JOHN TAINE is the nom de plume of the prominent research mathematician, Dr. Eric Temple Bell. Under his own name he has had published numerous popular books on mathematics and science. Under his pen-name he is the author of fifteen published science-fiction novels. Dr. Bell was born in Peterhead, Scotland, in 1883. After attending various schools in England, he came to the United States (of which he is a naturalized citizen) in 1902, graduating from Stanford University in 1904. He took his master's degree at the University of Washington, and attained his doctorate in mathematics at Columbia University in 1912. Since 1926 he has been Professor of Mathematics at the California Institute of Technology. * * * * * THEY RIPPED THE VEIL OFF THE PAST Dr. Eric Lane's party of five crept across the frozen Antarctic seeking the discovery of the ages. For that explorer-archeologist was following the startling account of a sea captain who had fished a lifeless organism from the nearby waters--a devilish monstrosity which fit no pattern of nature's. Dr. Lane knew when he saw it that the creature had been manufactured. But how could that be? Had there once been intelligences on Earth so much higher than our own that they could create new life-forms? But for all his excitement, what Dr. Lane was expecting to find were fossils, and maybe some ruins. He did not suspect--until too late--that he was opening a Pandora's box of living horrors. * * * * * 1 BIRD OR REPTILE? Undoubtedly Dr. Eric Lane was a man to be envied. With ordinary luck he might yet look forward to thirty-five years of the keenest pleasure a highly intelligent and healthy man can experience, the discovery of natural laws and their application to the good of his fellow men. Although today was his fortieth birthday he felt not a day over eighteen. He smiled as the thought occurred to him, for it reminded him of his daughter Edith. She was just the age that he felt. "We're a pair of kids," he laughed, looking fondly at the white and gold porcelain image of a sleepy tomcat, which she had deposited on his worktable as a birthday offering. Their appreciation of cats was but one among scores of likings which they shared in perfect understanding. Edith's gift of sympathy no doubt was responsible for her father's continued widowerhood. Not once in the ten years since his wife's death had Dr. Lane thought of marrying. His wife had been like Edith, quick to understand when he left the thought but half expressed, and tactfully willing to let him think in silence for days when the mood was on him. Her early death had broken him for a year or two, but with Edith and his work to live for he had gradually taken a grip on himself and set his face to the future. "I wonder what she is doing," he mused, dwelling affectionately on the sleepy cat of her offering. As if in answer to his unspoken thought the study door opened noiselessly two inches. An appraising brown eye took in the situation. "Come in," he called. "I'm not working. Your precious cat makes me long to sleep." Edith entered. "Have you everything you want?" she asked, ready to withdraw at the slightest symptom of work on her father's part. "Everything," he replied with a smile, "but you. Come in and stay a bit. Birthdays come only once a year." Edith joined him by the worktable with its litter of microscopes and queer looking specimens pallid in their neatly stoppered alcohol jars. "Do you know," he said, "it sometimes scares me a little?" "What scares you, dear?" she queried, for once at a loss. "Why, that I do have everything I want." "Well, why shouldn't you? Surely you have earned it." "So have thousands of other men. Yet they have nothing while I have everything." "Oh," she laughed, "it isn't so bad as all that. You are not a billionaire. Nor do you want the whole earth as some of the others do, and cry when they can't get it." "Still," he persisted, "there are thousands of men as able as I am who slave all their lives and have nothing but a bare living to show for all their labor." He strolled over to the French windows and stood gazing absently at the clear spring beauty of San Francisco Bay and the tawny Marin hills on the farther shore. With all the world to choose from he had selected this spot as his abiding place, high upon Telegraph Hill overlooking San Francisco and the whole sublime sweep of the harbor. Often he would stand at this window for an hour at a time, lost in thought, only half consciously watching the swift white ferry boats rounding Goat Island with the clock-like precision of mechanical toys. In all weathers the colorful panorama of bay, city and steep hills had a stimulating yet soothing effect on his mind. Although much of his work with the strangely diseased things of the sea was not beautiful, the ever changing beauty of his outlook seemed to infuse him with inexhaustible energy for the repellent drudgery which is the necessary foundation of any scientific advance. The warm spring breeze rustling the leaves of the young eucalyptus by the open window brought him back to the present and his surroundings. "Yes," he continued, "there is young Drake, for instance, twenty-nine and as poor as a crow. When I was his age I had been a millionaire several times over for almost six years. Yet Drake has a fundamentally better mind than I have. He simply did not have my chance. That is all." "But suppose he had been given your chance," Edith protested, "could he have taken it?" "No," her father replied thoughtfully. "There's not a grain of business sense in him. Still, for all that, I maintain that his head is better than mine." "Then why doesn't he use it?" There was just a tinge of scorn in Edith's retort. Her father glanced up at her face in surprise. "I thought you and Drake were great pals," he said. "We are," she admitted readily enough. "But the sheer futility of his everlasting inscriptions rather gets on my nerves. I do wish he would turn his brains to something less trivial." "How do you know his work is so useless?" the Doctor parried. "Oh, if you are going to begin one of your scientific attacks on me," she laughed, "I'll retire at once to my humble corner. I'm routed. But can't you see," she protested earnestly, "that all his deciphering of outlandish inscriptions cannot make an atom of difference, one way or the other, to human beings today? What does it matter how a half-civilized race, extinct centuries ago, predicted eclipses of the moon? And who on earth cares whether they counted by twenties instead of by tens as we do? Will it make life more endurable for any human being to know how those dead and forgotten people disposed of their corpses?" "Perhaps," the Doctor hazarded with a smile, "you would prefer to see our young friend Drake turning his unique talents to the unsolved problem of infant colics?" "It would be more useful," she flashed. "But consider," her father demurred, "what would become of the Mexican and Guatemalan inscriptions in the meantime. Who would ever read them, fully and satisfactorily? If Drake can't do it, nobody can. After his brilliant success with the Bolivian puzzles he is almost certain to make short work of the rest." "Yes," Edith admitted. "And if he does, what then?" "Why, my dear, he will have saved numberless future generations of young Drakes from wasting their lives on a useless piece of tomfoolery." She laughed. "I knew when we began that you would corner me. Still, I'm morally right, because you slipped out by the back door. That isn't what you really think of Drake's work." "It isn't, angel child," he admitted. "You must look at life in a broader way. The conquest of disease and the discovery of the origin of life are not even half the problem. As the old fellows used to say, the whole is one, and you can't change the smallest part in any place without altering the entire fabric everywhere. Drake's Bolivian hieroglyphics are just as vital a part of science as are the obscure fish parasites that I mess with in the hope of learning something about cancer. And I shouldn't wonder," he concluded half seriously, "if some day Drake's work gives us a clue to the central problem." "And shows us what life is?" she laughed. "When it does, I'll eat that." She pointed to a particularly loathsome reptile in a glass jar. It was one of the Doctor's favorites, as the tumor to which it had succumbed appeared to be something unique in the history of disease. "You will eat it without salt or pepper?" he stipulated. "Absolutely," she agreed. "Very well then. We shall see." Edith turned to go. "Shall I send up anyone who comes with a real specimen?" "Only if it looks pretty good." "Pretty bad, you mean. All right, I'll inspect the horror and use my judgment." With a last smile she was gone as noiselessly as she had come. She had her work, and the Doctor his. Her morning would be begun in a short conference with the Chinese servants, short because both she and they were efficient and wasted no words. Then she might work for an hour or two among her flowers in the English garden which was her pride, before settling down to the serious business of the day. This consisted of systematic reading directed by her father. At her own request he had mapped out a course of study and experiment which would enable her to understand something of what he was attempting to do. For two hours every evening a young doctor just from the University eked out his meagre practice helping her over the rough places in the day's work. In this way she made rapid and substantial progress. She never bothered her father with difficulties that any competent teacher could set right. During the sunny part of the day she studied under the pepper trees by the gate, to be ready to receive and pay the Italian and Japanese fishermen who brought the curiosities of their catches to her father. All up and down the Pacific Coast, and even to Hawaii and far-off Japan, Dr. Lane of San Francisco was a celebrity among the fishermen and sailors. They knew him only distantly and impersonally as a deluded crank eager to pay one dollar apiece for curiously diseased and otherwise unsaleable fish. For weird monstrosities from the deep-sea levels he had been known to give as high as ten dollars each. What he did with all these abominations they never inquired. Sufficient unto their ignorance was the price thereof. Occasionally some ambitious sailor would offer Edith his ingenious masterpiece of months of painstaking work in the forecastle. This usually took the form of a fantastic kelp and cocoanut mermaid, or an elaborately contrived sea-serpent of fish bladders and sea-weeds. One such offering convinced him that he had been wasting his time. Edith recognized the subtle distinction between abandoned nature and the highest art at the first glance. If the fraud was sufficiently horrible and otherwise pleasing she would buy it for her own collection, intending, as she told her father when he protested at her growing collection of freaks, some day to write a monograph on marine diseases