The Greatest Sci-Fi Books of Erle Cox. Erle Cox

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СКАЧАТЬ empty, and was lighted from above by tiny clusters of globes. "Looks fairly safe," he said, and, stepping carefully, he walked slowly down the passage. In a few minutes he saw ahead of him the break of another doorway, and when he reached it he found it similar to the one he had just left. Again, as he walked towards it, came the noiseless movement as it disappeared. From the distance he had walked Dundas estimated that here was the entrance to the adjoining gallery, and the first glance showed that he was right. He had become so used to the absolutely unexpected that by now he would have been surprised to come across anything normal, but the sight that met his eyes brought him to a breathless full stop. "I think I'll pass this." Even from where he stood he could see enough to tell him that to enter the new gallery would test his nerves to the uttermost. In shape and size it was identical with the one he had just left, but beyond that and the matter of lighting, they were as far apart as the Poles. In the one, beauty beyond conception, in the other horrors that were grim and revolting beyond the distorted images of a nightmare. Alan felt a sensation of physical sickness as his fascinated eyes took in the scene before him. It was as if the door had opened on a vast human slaughter-house. Everywhere his eyes fell they fell on severed limbs and tortured forms, arranged in attitudes grotesque and horrible. Instead of a wealth of beauty and encased art, his eyes encountered repulsive fragments of humanity. In the distance, at the far end, he could catch the glitter of steel and glass, and in the balconies above he could see cabinets whose contents sent shivers of repulsion through him. It was some time before his shrinking senses realised the meaning of the sight. To the trained eye it would have been at once apparent, but to Dundas, who had never before encountered such an exhibition, the shock at first deprived him of his reasoning powers. "It's beastly, and it's hideous, but I might have expected to find a biological section in this bazaar. My aunt! How would Dick Barry revel in this butcher's shop. I suppose this would send his soul into drivelling ecstasies. I guess I'm not likely to find any traps here. There can be nothing about the place to keep off visitors that would be any worse than the place itself." Muttering to himself, he stepped forward. "I might as well look round."

      A medical man would have found nothing in the gallery that would have repelled him, and would doubtless have found in the modelled horrors matters of intense interest; but to Alan, who was as unused as the average layman to coming into contact with vividly realistic representations of the internal economy of humanity, the experience was both grisly and disgusting. In spite, however, of his physical distaste of the investigation, he forced himself to go through with it. Modelled dissections of every conceivable and inconceivable kind were arrayed through the length of the gallery, and after a little while, even from his elementary knowledge of such matters, Dundas saw that the whole arrangement had been made in a carefully ordered system. He found that each model was accompanied by a cabinet, and the contents of the cabinets held him for uncounted minutes as he went through them. In each one in a special compartment he found a flat metal case fastened with an easily opened clasp. Each of the cases contained a single remarkable book–a book about eighteen inches long and twelve inches wide, that opened along its width, and not its length. Alan had given up guessing as futile, but the material from which the volumes were made caused him as much curiosity as their contents. The leaves were as thin as tissue, but perfectly opaque, and with a beautiful glossy surface. After a timid experimental attempt, he found that all the strength of his fingers was insufficient to tear or damage them in the slightest. They were not paper, certainly, and Dundas, after comparing them mentally with other material he knew of, put the question out of his mind with a shrug of his shoulders.

      Their contents were as remarkable as the books themselves. Each opened page bore on one side a diagram, and on the other a closely printed array of characters, evidently an explanation of the diagram. All the illustrations bore on the model connected with the cabinet. They were done in colours, and even to the inexperienced eye showed exquisite care in every detail. Alan skimmed through gruesome volumes with wondering eyes, picking up here and there traces of the wonderful system with which the arrangement of the models and the illustrations had been made. The remainder of the contents of the cabinets was beyond his ken. He found flasks hermetically sealed full of fluids, coloured and colourless, and jars holding chemicals, some of which he recognised, and others the identity of which he could not even guess at. There were strange knives and stranger instruments, and time went on. He stood for a long time lost in admiration before a series of life-sized human figures of colourless glass. In one the entire nervous system was shown in thin white lines. In another the whole circulatory system down to the tiny capillary vessels was traced in red and blue. He saw the human digestive arrangements completely shown in a third, and he told himself that if ever Doctor Richard Barry, his especial pal, gained entrance to that gallery, he foresaw that nothing short of dynamite would ever get him out again.

      It was when he had arrived at the other end of the gallery in front of the great closed doors that he came on another mystery that racked his brains. Set fairly in the middle before the doors was a replica of the seated statue in the vestibule, and in front of it was a small circular table. The table was covered with a glass dome set in a rim of metal, and under the glass rested an instrument similar to the one the statue held in its hands. It was a circlet of metal, apparently made to fit the human head, and attached to it on either side were wires, the other ends of which were attached to a small cylindrical box some four inches in length and an inch in diameter. One end of the cylinder was metal-covered, the other was filled with some transparent substance that appeared to be a lens, and that was all he could make of the device after a long and careful examination. He attempted to raise the glass dome in order to inspect the instrument more closely, but it resisted his efforts. Whatever its use, simple as it appeared to be, Alan came to the conclusion that it must be of prime importance in the gallery, both from the position in which it was placed and from its association with the statue. As it was evidently not meant to be interfered with by inexperienced hands, Dundas desisted from his attempts. He felt that by tampering with the exhibits, a novice might do irreparable damage, and he left the solution of the problem to wiser heads.

      Throughout his wanderings he had pursued the policy of touching nothing without replacing it exactly where he had found it, and in many instances he restrained his curiosity to handle unknown objects from fear of disastrous consequences. Afterwards he made his way to the balconies. His visit was short and somewhat startling. Science is no respecter of conventions, and Alan was still able to blush, and after a brief and breathless inspection of its astonishing exhibits he fled below to the milder atmosphere of diseased and dissected humanity. On the foot of the stairs he paused and addressed a figure of a gentleman who had discarded his skin and was dressed somewhat unattractively in his muscles.

      "By gad, sir! If I had a maiden aunt, I'm blessed if I'd take her up there with me. It's no place for innocence like mine."

      He paused a while, and then made his way to the great doors in search of an exit, but try as he would they defied every effort to open them, and after wasting an hour in fruitless search he wandered back to the rear doorway.

      Standing in the curved corridor outside the entrance to the biological gallery, Alan paused some time to consider his position. Before him, in the direction in which he had come, the corridor curved away out of sight. Mentally reviewing his exploration up to date, he came to the conclusion that the six galleries all radiated from the central vestibule, and were connected at their further end by the passage he was then in, estimating the length of each gallery at two hundred feet, and the vestibule at sixty in diameter, it meant that the passage would form a circle of about four hundred and sixty feet in diameter or roughly fourteen hundred feet round. The calculation brought the magnitude of the subterranean building home to him with renewed force. Before going any further he paced slowly back to the entrance of the art gallery, and walked past it in order to find if the corridor was continued further in that direction. Sixty feet beyond he found himself faced by a blind wall that showed no sign of break or opening. Dundas looked the wall over, and accepted the situation philosophically. Evidently it was intended that he should continue on in the direction from which he had started. Then he retraced his steps past the medical gallery, prepared for further discoveries. As he expected, he came on a third entrance equi-distant from the other two, and exactly similar.

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