The World of Living Dead

[edit] The World of Living Dead

EDWIN LEAL stared unbelievingly at his friend and neighbor, Doctor James Parfer. His hand clutched his midriff as if he would tear that dull, but ever-present, ache from his body, and cast it away from him.

"No, Doc," he groaned tragically. "It can't be that. Me dead in three months? Perhaps you're mistaken. Can't you make another examination—"

"I'm sorry, Ed." The doctor's voice was full of compassion. "If you had only told me sooner I could have helped you. I can do nothing now. An operation would mean certain death."

"But what will I do?" Leal mumbled dully. "What will become of Lydia, my wife? I haven't any insurance. We've only been married a year. I was planning to take out ten thousand dollars' worth of insurance next month when I get a raise. Now —" his voice broke off despairingly.

The doctor stared at him with infinite pity on his seamed, kind face. It was Sunday and they were in Parfer's home, next door to Leal's little cottage. Suddenly the doctor's eyes grew thoughtful.

"Ed," Parfer asked gently, "how would you like to earn ten thousand dollars, for less than a second's work?"

Leal raised his white face.

"Ten thousand dollars?" he repeated incredulously. "You're joking."

Parfer shook his head. "No, I'm perfectly serious. Come with me; I want to show you something."

Wonder mingling with the despair that racked his heart, Leal followed the doctor out of the study, across the hall, and into a large room that had been fitted out as a laboratory.

ON a table was a cage in which a large, white Persian cat purred sleepily. Parfer took a small bottle of clear, amber fluid from a cabinet and filled a glass syringe.

"Take the cat out of the cage," he directed the wondering Leal. "That's it, just stretch it out on the table."

Leal did so, staring curiously at the hypodermic syringe of golden fluid.

"As you know, Ed," Parfer began, laying his hand on the cat's sleek side, "my hobby is experimental chemistry. Mainly by accident, I stumbled across the formula of the fluid in this syringe. Watch."

Leal's intense blue eyes followed wonderingly as Parfer injected the syringe of amber liquid subcutaneously into the cat's side. He had often come over to watch the doctor perform some experiment or other, but never before had he seen anything like this.

The cat was becoming transparent. Now, it was a shimmering, nebulous haze. Abruptly, it vanished.

Parfer removed his hand from the table. He glanced quizzically into Leal's astounded eyes.

"This fluid," he explained, "has the power to increase the vibratory rate of the molecules that, in the final analysis, comprise the bodies of all living things. The cat's body is now vibrating at such an enormously increased rate that normal eyesight cannot register an impression of it. For instance, an inadequate, but simple example of the principle is this." He picked up a tuning fork from the table, struck it with his finger. The fork vibrated, became a luminous, hardly seen blur in the air.

Leal stared about the room in dumfounded fascination. The amazing thing he had witnessed had diverted his mind from the terrible verdict that the doctor had given him such a short time ago.

"The cat," he gasped weakly. "Can it see us?"

Parfer nodded. "Yes, but not in the way you mean. You see, the animal's rate of—living, one might say, has multiplied an inestimable number of times. Billions? Trillions? Who can say? Anyway, we ourselves vibrate at such a slow comparative rate, as proven by the cat's disappearance, that to it we must appear to be lifeless statures. For instance, when the Persian disappeared, I was restraining it with my hand. To the cat it must have seemed as though I held it down upon the table for time uncountable."

Leal shook his dazed head. He peered about the room as if he thought he might see the cat lazily napping on the rug.

"How will you bring the cat, er, back?" he asked anxiously.

"I have an antidote," Parfer replied, taking a small cardboard box from a cabinet. He opened it, displayed two grayish pellets. "This is all of the formula I have made up. The chemicals it contains are rare, hard to get. However, these pills are enough for my purpose."

THE doctor opened a tin of evaporated milk, poured some in a bowl, and dropped in one of the gray pellets. It dissolved instantly, tinting the milk a dirty gray.

"For the cat," he explained, setting the bowl on the floor.

Leal stared spellbound as the milk vanished. Almost instantly, the cat materialized into view, stood licking its chops, unconcernedly.

"It has only been a few minutes, hasn't it, Ed?" the doctor mused aloud. "But to the cat, it must have been eons before the bowl reached the floor."

"I can't understand," Leal said bewilderedly. "It was only a minute or two, as you say."

Parfer nodded. "Yes, to us. It only seemed that it was an eternity to the animal. Time, after all, can only be judged by things around us. Now if everything stood still, as it did to the cat, then time itself would be at a standstill. The subject taking that fluid would be the only moving thing in the universe. Each minute would be a millennium, and each hour an eternity."

Leal sank to his knees, fondled the cat's soft fur.

"If only it could speak, tell us of its sensations," he said, thoughtfully.

"Unfortunately, it cannot," Parfer said slowly. "But—You could."

Leal turned a puzzled face up at the doctor. Then, comprehension flashed into his eyes.

"You mean—you want me to take the injection?" he asked. "Why?"

Parfer paced the floor, excitedly.

"Haven't you grasped the potentialities of that chemical, Ed?" he demanded. "Think of the possibilities it contains. Think what it would mean to the men in our armed forces—to officers of the law if they could take that stuff and become invisible. Not only would they be invisible, they would be supermen. They could move through a world in which every other living thing was paralyzed.

"Imagine what it would mean to my profession. In emergency operations, for example, when a second means the difference between success and failure. A surgeon under the influence of this fluid could take a hundred years to operate, and to the patient it would be an infinitesimal fraction of a second."

"I see," Leal whispered, fascinated by the doctor's words. "But why do you want me to take it? Wasn't the experiment on the cat enough?"

"No. A cat's bloodstream is entirely different from a human's. The injection doesn't seem to have harmed it, but who knows what effect the fluid might have on people? It might be fatal."

Leal rose slowly to his feet.

"I see," he said. "Because I am as good as dead now, you want me to—to test the chemical. If it is a success, I live three months longer. If it isn't a success—it doesn't much matter."

Doctor Parfer nodded gravely.

"You've put it rather bluntly, Ed," he murmured huskily. "But that's it. And I will pay you the sum of ten thousand dollars. Of course, if it is necessary, I will pay it to your wife."

LEAL walked to the window. Across the intervening lawn mottled with afternoon sunshine, he could see, through the window of his own cottage, his wife, Lydia, sitting in the little living-room reading the Sunday paper. She looked tired; there were lines of weariness about her eyes and her face was pale and strained.

Why wouldn't it be, Leal asked himself bitterly. On his meager salary as a clerk, he had never been able to give her the things that would make life easier for her. She had none of the glittering kitchen appliances that all women love. She had no car for Sunday afternoon drives out to the country. No—her food, a place to sleep, and days of cooking, washing and housecleaning was all that he had given her.

And now, he thought dumbly, after a few short months, he could not even give her that. He would be dead, would leave her penniless, unless ...

He turned to the waiting doctor.

"All right, Doc," he said. "Let's get on with it."

Quietly, Doctor Parfer prepared the injection.

"Now, Ed," he said, "when I give you this stuff, I want you to take a record of every sensation you have. Physically and mentally. You will walk downtown, observe the people on the streets, the cars, everything. Try to estimate the extent to which your time is speeded up. Here, take this notebook and pencil, write down everything you feel, think, or do."

Parfer took the pillbox, containing the remaining antidote pellet, and handed it to Leal.

"You'd better keep this on your person. Above all, don't lose it. I'm afraid you'd have a long wait if I had to make more."

The pillbox was a trifle large for the pocket of Leal's cheap shirt. He wrapped the pellet securely in his handkerchief and tucked it into his pocket. Then he bared his arm for the injection. The needle went in painlessly.

"Good luck, son," Parfer muttered kindly, and pushed the plunger.

Tensely the two men watched the swelling bulge beneath Leal's skin go down, as the capillaries absorbed the golden fluid and doled it out into his bloodstream.

Leal felt nothing. He looked up at the doctor.

"Don't believe it took, Doc," he began, then cut himself off with a start. Doctor Parfer stood there, staring down at Leal's arm. On his face was an expression of tense anxiety. His hand held the hypodermic syringe, tightly. The man had turned into a frozen statue. Motionless, unmoving, he stood there, as if he had done so for all time in the past and would continue to do so for all time to come. The golden fluid in Leal had worked with incredible rapidity.

Leal tore his eyes away. Doctor Parfer's rigid, corpse-like figure was horrible in its resemblance to a lifeless model in a wax museum. Leal shuddered, backed from the room and went out of the house. He gulped deep breaths of the balmy, summer air as if he had just come from the presence of the dead.

WALKED slowly through a world of utter stillness. No sound disturbed the deaden quiet about him. He did not hear the buzz of insects, the twittering of birds, the shouts of children or any of the thousand and one sounds that should have been droning into his ears. Silence, frightening in its intensity, crashed down upon him.

With averted head he passed his own house. He had no desire to glimpse his wife as he knew she would appear to him now, an unbreathing, unmoving, unliving horror.

At the corner, he could see a bus down about in the middle of the block. The driver's hands gripped the wheel tightly. His face wore the taut look of those responsible for the safety of many people. The left front wheel of the bus was a fraction of an inch off the ground, having just run over a bump. About the whole vehicle was a suggestion of lumbering speed—but it did not move.

Nothing moved. The realization burned into Leal's brain with brutal, clawing fingers. The sun did not move. Except when he breathed it in, the air did not move. Nothing moved in the world but him.

Across the street a woman was watering the flowers in her yard. The breeze had billowed her blue cotton dress out to one side of her, baring slim legs to the sun. Her hand held the hose lightly. The crystal water, making a long, diffusing curve from the nozzle to the ground, was an immobile stream of glittering ice, despite the warm sunshine that bathed the scene in its golden glow.

Stumbling on down the street, Leal passed many waxen statues, some walking, some riding in their cars, some idling. But all unmoving. He found himself thinking of a fairy story his mother had read to him as a child about a beautiful princess who pricked her finger with a magic needle and fell into eternal sleep, along with everyone else in her palace in the midst of what they were doing.

These people were like that, he thought. No matter what they had been doing when Parfer had pricked his arm and injected that magic fluid, they were still doing now. Thus would they continue to do until he relieved them from their paralysis by swallowing the magic pellet.

He shook himself angrily. He was being silly. In reality, he knew, the period of time that had passed since he left the doctor's laboratory was so slight that no normal mind in the world could comprehend or grasp it. But to him time was a rushing, fleeting thing. It had been long minutes since he had started on his journey through this world of living dead.

He left the tree-shaded street and took a short-cut through a park that would bring him out a couple of blocks from the business district. In the center of the park was a small cement pool. About four feet deep in its deepest part, it was used by the children of the neighborhood for swimming and wading.

A GIRL stood on the bank, staring down into the water. One hand hovered in midair as if she had been raising it to her mouth when paralysis had overtaken her. Something about the frozen expression on the face of that frozen statue made Leal stop.

Curiously, he stared into her unseeing eyes. They were wide, unnaturally wide. There was as much white at top and bottom of the irises as there was at the sides. Her mouth was slightly open, her lips writhed back from parted teeth. It was a screaming face that he gazed into, a silent, masklike, screaming face.

Leal's breath hissed through his teeth. She was screaming. To the deaden world about him, this slender, golden haired girl was a living, vibrating, terrified being.

"What is it?" he gasped, forgetting that to her he was nothing. His eyes strained into the greenish water of the pool, toward which she seemed to be staring. He dropped to his knees. On the mossy bottom of the pool he saw the body of a child. The tot's face was contorted with strangulation, its chubby hands were claws that groped futilely up toward the sunshine.

Leal forgot that it could only have been a fraction of a second since the child had fallen into the water, that it would only be another fraction of a second before its mother recovered from the horror that gripped her, and plunged into the shallow water to the tot's rescue. To him, minutes had passed.

Every instinct in him shouted in stentorian voices:

The child's drowning! Get it out! Save it!

Without hesitating he jumped into the water. He held his breath, ducked and seized the cold, rigid body in his arms. He straightened, heaved the tot over the concrete rim to the ground, and pulled himself from the pool.

The child lay supine on the grass, still in the contorted position in which it had been when Leal grabbed it in his arms. It was a little boy, about three years old. He looked like a manikin, molded from pink-tinted clay.

The mother still stood staring into the pool. She had not moved. Her agonized face still screamed in silent horror. Her hand still faltered to the mouth that it did not reach. Leal stood with water streaming down his face and body, forming a glistening pool at his feet.

The thought that he was the only living thing in his world seized him with icy dread. He felt as he would if he were to wake up on a marble slab in a morgue, surrounded by many, yet alone.

SHAKING the water from his eyes he hurried on. Presently he was threading his way through the thick throngs of dead in the shopping district. He sat down on the curb, took out his notebook and with great care not to tear the wet soggy paper, wrote an account of his actions so far. He stood up with a sigh. An overpowering desire to get back to Parfer's laboratory and take the antidote that would end his aloneness stabbed through him like a physical hurt. He ran his hand across his eyes. Tiny drops of water adhered to the back of his hand, spattered to the concrete as he flicked it away.

Suddenly he froze. For an instant he was one with the frozen others about him. His eyes burned in paralyzed intensity at the little wet splotches that the drops of water had made at his feet. He gaped down at his sodden clothes. Water had collected in a shining little pool at his feet.

His stunned eyes flicked about him. The cars in the street, the Sunday afternoon strollers in positions of hurrying to and fro were still and unmoving.

But the water was imbued with life. Even as he pulled the handkerchief in which he had wrapped the antidote from his pocket he knew what he would find. In dumb apathy he unfolded it and gaped woodenly at the nothingness within. The gray pellet had vanished. The water in the pool had dissolved it as quickly as the other had dissolved in the bowl of milk in Parfer's laboratory.

"But why—how?" Leal's haunted eyes blazed the question to the unheeding world around him.

He remembered how the bowl of milk had vanished as the invisible cat lapped it up. Did that not prove that the molecular vibration of the cat's body had transferred to the fluid with which it came in contact? How else could the cat have swallowed it? Swallowing entails mobility of the fluids swallowed. Still, regardless of the cause, the antidote was gone.

Like a blow the full realization of what this meant struck him with all its terrible import. He was trapped in this world of living dead!

"No!" he shouted, springing to his feet. "I'll get back! I won't be like this. Parfer will help me. He'll make more antidote."

His voice died away. The memory of the scene in Parfer's laboratory flooded his tortured mind. Parfer had been a statue. A living, dead statue. Thus would he be now. Thus would he be a year from now. Thus would he be a hundred years from now.

NUMBLY he gazed at the unheeding world about him. Loneliness welled up in him, lay an unbearable weight, in his breast. An impelling urge sent him stumbling blindly toward his home. He was drawn there as a hurt child is drawn to its mother. He had to see Lydia. Even though she would be a ghastly travesty of a living woman, he had to see her, touch her, be near her. . . .

He entered his home. Lydia was still sitting near the window. She was reading a serial in the paper. She seemed to be fascinated by the story. A faint smile quirked the corners of her mouth. The little crinkles, that he knew so well, were about her eyes. She was the final masterpiece of the wax-modeler's art.

But to Leal she was dead. She was not living.

"Lydia!" he shouted despairingly. "Look at me, darling, please look at me."

He might as well have pleaded for a cube of ice to give him warmth.

Hopelessly he leaned forward and kissed his wife's waxen cheek. It was cold, with the horrible coldness of the unliving. And what made it more horrible, he thought dumbly, was the fact that in reality she was a warm-blooded, vital, throbbing woman.

It was he who was inhuman. It was he that kept the people about him in their state of death-like immobility. How many hours had passed since he had admitted that golden fluid into his body? One? Two? No, not any.

"No time has passed," he groaned aloud. "When I took the injection, Lydia was sitting there exactly as she is now. To her it has only been an incalculable fraction of a second since I entered the room. To me, it's been long, weary minutes. I could stand here for a century, and she would never flick an eyelash."

Motionless he stood a long time thinking. As long as he lived, others would be dead. But with his death, the frozen world about him would spring to life. The cars would whir along the streets. The hustle and bustle of the city would resume. The dead would live again.

Leal gave his wife a last despairing look and turned to go back to the wading pool that would free him from his torment. He shuddered as he remembered a drowned person he had once seen—the protruding eyes, the mottled face, and bursting veins. He gritted his teeth. Death would be a matter of seconds. Life would be all eternity.

He paused at the street. The thought struck him that he could at least fulfill his obligation to Doctor Parfer. He entered Parfer's house, made his way to the laboratory. Parfer still stood there, frozen in the same posture that he had held, when Leal left him.

Leal got dry paper and pencil, sat down at the table and wrote a full account of everything that had befallen him. He explained his resolve to end his life. He asked Parfer to tell Lydia what had happened and pay her the ten thousand dollars. When he had finished he tucked the folded paper into the doctor's breast pocket, pressed the cold, corpse-like hand, and shuffled heavily out of the house.

NOT wishing to pass his own house again, because he could not bear to see the memory-haunted cottage on his errand of death, he turned the opposite way. He intended to go partly around the block and enter the street that would take him to the pool and oblivion.

As he turned the corner, he glimpsed, further down the street, a tableau that brought an involuntary exclamation of horror to his lips.

An old woman had started to cross the intersection against the red light. Her faded old eyes had failed to discern in time a huge truck that had been lumbering toward the crossing, trying to beat the signal.

Her eyes were wide with terror and her hand reached out in futile entreaty for the truck to stop its plummeting charge. The bumper was inches from her frail body. Leal could see the horrified driver, frozen in his desperate efforts to stop before his truck crushed her life away beneath the wheels.

Leal knew that the moment he died the truck would leap forward. There would be a brief, rending wail, the hoarse shouts of the spectators and the old woman would be a broken, mangled thing on the pavement.

Into his mind flashed the thought that as long as he remained alive, there was no life—neither was there death. He remembered the drowning child he had pulled from the wading pool. How many other tragedies were being enacted at this very moment. About the city? About the whole world?

Would it not be selfish of him to relieve his own agony by suicide? Until the malignant terror that was eating his life away had brought his life to an end, could he not make his way through an unknowing and unheeding world, preventing accidents, averting impending tragedies?

His decision reached, with a deep sigh of finality Leal started toward the old lady.

He did not hurry, for he knew that even if he took half of eternity to reach her, he would still have the other half to spare.