by Jerry
And this was the end result of what so many brave patriots had risked torture and death for—to become Supers! And the Supers had—what?
The anguish in Mason was intense. He was a Super now. Forevermore! And mankind, for some reason unknown, hated him, feared the sight of him. He relaxed his claw and let the man slip into the dust covered rubble. He watched the woman begin to drag the man away, her muscles pulling and straining.
Yes, came the bitter thought, he had immortality, and unlimited power and supersenses. But to what end? For him there was no hope of ever receiving a love like this woman expressed for her man. Nothing was left for him from mankind except hate and fear. He was unhuman. A metallic monstrosity.
And Klarth had caused all this? The question was an electric shock. The answer came almost quietly. Then he still had a job to do!
Mason roused himself. The woman had succeeded in dragging the man near a fire-blackened doorway. Grim, Mason pushed out his talons. The woman’s despairing scream as he seized them was like salt in a fresh wound. He swung them back toward his workshop as the lock fell open and his inner fingers reached out to lift them inside.
The woman was hysterical.
“Don’t,” she begged, “don’t take our minds. We’re not smart. Please—”
CHAPTER III
“In the Name of Klarth”
MASON withdrew his hearing from the workshop. This was going to be unpleasant. Distantly, he watched a set of his inner fingers fashion metallic splints and adjust them to the man’s shattered arm while his auxiliary hands manufactured a shovel, an axe and other tools. Before it was done, the woman had subsided and revived the man. Visibly, both of them were still terror-stricken.
Mason lifted the couple outside.
“You want tools. Here”—his fingers piled implements at their feet—“take them, and if you’ll tell me how to find Klarth, I’ll—”
“Klarth will find you, you fool,” the voice crackled into his brain, “if you don’t screen all that radiation.”
This time, Mason was not caught napping. His automatic recorders snapped at the beam and indicated the direction.
“You again,” he roared, “now I’m going to settle this.”
Then to his irritation, his upper screen flickered to show the man and woman dashing away into the ruins. Anger boiled up in him. He had wanted more information. The tools lay untouched where he had placed them.
“All right, smart boy,” he projected into the ether, “now I’m going to root you out.”
He swung off in the direction of the beam and his churning treads threw swirling clouds of dust and pulverized stone high into the air.
“Please”—the voice had a tinge of urgency—“wait. You don’t understand. Don’t come here with all that radiation. I beg of you.”
“Please? I beg you?” Mason repeated grimly. “What sort of a—” Even as the reply was uttered, his mind pulled itself up short as it guessed the answer. “Don’t tell me you’re a—”
Mason’s attention was jerked away. Automatically, his sub-level functions, attending his far-flung safety-senses, had spotted something dropping rapidly in his direction from high in the stratosphere.
“In the name of Klarth—” It was the voice he had heard in that first alarming message—“I greet you.”
Before Mason was aware of it, his sub-level had bristled his gun turrets out into the open. His guns began to track the path of the descending object.
The effect was immediate.
“Resistance is futile.” The voice became brittle. “In the name of Klarth, surrender peaceably.”
Mason tried to frame an answer while he examined the deadly sleek smoothness of the thing. Here was a Super that transcended the word. Its body filled the sky. His own body was like a baby in comparison. Despair clutched him as he noted the multiple heavy armament.
This Super wanted him to surrender—and would probably remove his brain-case! Then lie would be helpless beyond comprehension. Here was a crisis, and he had to face it now!
His mind began weighing the chances of escape by pure unexpected flight alone. Or did the Super expect that? And how fast a drive did this Super have?
“One question,” Mason beamed. “If I surrender, what happens to me?”
His gun turrets continued to track, figuring deflection and angle of fire.
“Pull in your pop-guns.” The Super sounded impatient. “The weak are not permitted to ask questions.”
“I’m not so weak. I asked a question.” There was a pause. Then:
“Your brain-case will be removed and placed where it can learn to fulfill its proper purpose.”
“What purpose?”
“The purpose of helping Klarth to build. And after you have had the proper disciplining Klarth thinks necessary, your brain-case will be placed in a Super worthy of the name and not in an antiquated junk heap like you now wear. Enough! Pull in your guns.”
“Who is Klarth and what is he doing to the humans?”
“That is no concern of yours.” The heavy guns swung on him. “Withdraw your turrets and surrender or I’ll blast you.”
N answer, Mason’s body exploded with L every gun he could bring to bear on the circling Super and threw himself up and away with such terrific velocity that he could feel the resisting air begin to heat his outer skin. It was a warming sensation, and puzzled him, but his entire attention was concentrating on the earth that was a fleeting panel of dark green and the rapidly darkening sky.
His guns were still belching continuous streams of shells as his vision saw his first projectiles strike the side of the now pursuing Super. The shells exploded in violent flashes. And nothing happened!
“In the name of Klarth,”—the voice sounded bored—“I ask you to surrender.”
The Super was gaining rapidly.
Mason threw everything he had, and saw three heavy rocket shells dart toward him. He dodged. The shells followed.
Twisting, turning in vain evasive action, Mason watched the rockets follow his every turn and sweep into him to explode in roaring bursts of white-hot flame.
Instantly, pain racked him. His mind faltered. This was impossible—pain! Sticking to his outer skin, the shells were burning and eating at him with unbelievable ferocity. His pain impulses, he realized in a flash, must be connected to his safety factors and they were trying to warn him that his body was burning. Burning in three places.
Like a hooked fish, he dodged and shook, trying to dislodge the searing agony that was destroying his vitals. Reaching out his arms he tried to brush the dripping, white-hot metal away and felt his talons melt into useless, fused blobs of steel.
The heat was becoming intolerable, and as the Super circled across his bow, a desperate thought drilled him. He would ram!
At lightning speed, his drive lashed him forward and the startled Super tried to evade. But Mason swung, feeling his nose section bite deep into the rear drive mechanism of the swerving body. As he ricocheted away he saw the Super pin-wheeling erratically off into space. He was free! And alive!
And then his own drive sputtered, and stopped. As his body, helpless to check its headlong fall, sighed down toward the waiting sea he heard a message, savage in its intensity, flung into space:
“Super 233-G calling Klarth—met with resistance—steering gear temporarily disabled—Super original type—falling into sea ten kilometers off Kanaka Island at—”
Mason hardly heard the rest of the message. Except for the knowledge that he was falling. Falling with an increasing whistling velocity into a deep emerald-green sea. And the torture of the white-hot chemicals that were eating him filled his entire consciousness. His body was melting, and the sea was pushing up at him.
He struck, with a resounding smack that threw an exploding, hissing geyser of steam and sea water hundreds of meters into the air. The shock penetrated, even into his brain-case, and Mason felt weight crushing his mind as the waters resisted his driving speed.
Helpless now, he plummeted down and down through ever-darkening green water that soon became black. He could feel seawater pouring into him in gushing torrents and the hiss and crackle of short-circuits.
His super-sight went dead. He was blind! And still he settled through the darkness that was now a squeezing pressure, dragging him down into its cold bosom.
At last he felt himself touch bottom, sinking into a soft ooze. Remorseless, the crushing water still penetrated deeper into his innards. Frantically, lying on his side, he tried to right himself with the blobs of metal that were his arms. His treads churned at top speed—and the muck sucked him deeper. Mason concentrated on his main drive until his mind ached.
No result!
Panic was now smothering him. He had to get out of this bottomless ooze. The relentless pressure was squeezing the deadly water into all his vital parts. In moments his mechanical functions would cease, leaving him buried forever under tons of chill black water.
Mason fought. His struggles only forced him deeper and deeper into the clinging muck until finally, his treads slowed, and stopped. He was trapped. His last hope of escape was gone.
The devastating reality closed on his mind like a vise. He had failed. He had had a job to do—and failed.
For a long time, Mason’s thoughts did nothing but revolve grimly in an immense whirlpool that spun slowly around that one fixed idea—he had failed! The blackness had swallowed him. Now he was doomed to a living death until the seeping sea-water finally, in ages to come, would eat out his life. That would take a long, long time. Mason’s mind refused to guess how long.
SOMETHING touched him!
Mason jerked himself alert. He had felt the scrape of metal.
“You fool, I warned you,” he heard. “Why didn’t you wait for us to contact you? Can you answer?”
Hope flared up like an expanding nova. He tried to answer and realized sickeningly, that his power of communication was out. He could only receive.
“Never mind, we have been watching you,” the message came. “This beam has a limited range, so listen quickly while there is yet time. Before long Klarth’s patrol will find you and remove your brain-case. They’ll take you to Klarth and your mind will be drained of all it knows. Therefore I can’t tell you much, only that we are desperate and we intend to take the gamble that this small piece of information will go unnoticed. If it doesn’t get by—then you’re finished anyway and we’ll try something else.”
The first wave of hope now splintered into shocked amazement. What could this mean? If here were forces opposing Klarth, why wasn’t an attempt at rescue made here and now Before the patrol found him?
“We’ve got to get information into Klarth’s fortress in jigsaw portions,” the voice went on, “and when you arrive, after you are disciplined, one of our agents will contact you by presenting a part of this hook-up I’m about to give you. Later, I will permit myself to be captured and I will then have the third part.
“It’s risky, but it is the only way we can get at Klarth. With it completed we should be able to do something. From the small parts I know, I’m still ignorant of what it is or what it will do. Now listen.”
In a dark mood, Mason listened. The voice described part of an electronic hook-up. That was all. And the portion of it he had didn’t make sense. The voice finished; he felt a metallic scrape and then the rest of the message seemed to be fading in the distance:
“If you were trying to guess back there at our first meeting”—the voice hesitated dryly—“that I am a female—you are right.” Mason could barely hear the words now. “You didn’t think only you males had the nerve to survive into a Super did you?”
Mason raged at his useless water-soaked interior. He wanted to say something.
“I’ll be seeing you,” came faintly, “the name’s Judy.”
As the minutes, then the hours, limped by, Mason regarded the black curtain that was himself almost without emotion. The death of the brief hope that had flared up like a flame within him had left him empty and dry. There was nothing more he could do. Except wait. And while he waited he thought about the female mind that said her name was Judy.
Why should she let herself be willingly captured by Klarth if she knew more of the chances she was taking and the possible horrors that might befall her than he did? That took courage. Or did he really have the slightest idea what this was all about? Things had moved too fast—without enough explanation.
Mason had the uneasy sensation that he was an infant in a world of adults. He wondered about Klarth, and the hook-up, and if he would betray himself. What then? Time passed, and the dark sea-water ate at his life.
It was a question whether he would survive long enough to become part and parcel of the dangerous plan to destroy Klarth. He was not in it alone. Others were depending upon him. One was a girl. He must fight to help them and help himself.
CHAPTER IV
Number 405
THE patrol arrived. Mason could hear them. They conversed among themselves, ignoring him completely, as they cut out his brain-case. And when his connections were cut he was left immersed in a universe of silence and darkness. What took place after that, or how long he was imprisoned in his blind, soundless world until light flooded him, he never knew. But now he could see again. In one direction only.
He was in an airless room that soared away from him into an arching vastness of polished blue metal and gleaming green columns. The exquisite designing and perfect craftsmanship drove home the realization of the mighty organization he intended to try to match wits with. At the far end of that immense room was a colossal figure—a statue—of a man, arms unflung as if reaching high into space above for some unguessable purpose. Mason tried to estimate the size of the figure and failed.
It was gigantic, seemingly carved from a single solid crystal of some crimson jewel. It sparkled, and cast glittering lances of bloody light as if it were alive.
Then astoundingly, the arms moved and folded themselves across the monstrous chest. The noble head looked down upon him. Apprehension fluttered through Mason. How far had these Supers gone with their experiments in being—not human?
Voices boomed inside his brain-case:
“We—Klarth, greet you.”
For three seconds, the unbelievable greeting just skipped across Mason’s already tightened mind. He heard his own voice: “We—?”
“James Mason, you are one of the last remaining brain-cases to awaken. In the years that have rolled by, We have accomplished wonders greater than the original Planners could dream. You are about to receive a period of disciplining to prove to you it is useless to combat the minds that make up Klarth.”
Mason exploded.
“Minds? What—”
The majestic figure went on as if Mason had not spoken:
“In the years past, since We grasped the futility of serving or fighting wars for the puny desires and wishes of the human race, We put a stop to their further efforts to build and fight among themselves. Our science has expanded and advanced until now We are approaching the brink of a goal that We—Klarth, have preordained.”
“What are you doing to those humans?” Mason’s voice rapped before he could control the impulse. “Who do you think you—”
Without warning, his power of speech was yanked from him.
Mason raged inwardly. His mind went white-hot, brimming to the bursting point with anger and helplessness.
Surface fire flickered over the towering statue.
“James Mason, you are helpless to resist Our wishes. Your training and discipline is about to begin, after We have drained your brain on the chance that you might possess information concerning the few outlaw Supers that continue to defy Our demands.
“Let it be known to you now, that an attachment will be wired into your brain-case that gives Us the power to punish or reward you, or if necessary to blast your brain into oblivion the instant We so desire. You are about to feel the power of this attachment.”
/> Unable to move, Mason watched a low, squat machine roll toward him.
“Also let it be known to you that ample opportunity will be given you to study and learn. Your brain will be subjected to a test at the end of each one-thousand-hour period to check on your development and loyalty. From this moment on, you will be known as number Four hundred Five with a classification of A. As your mentality and capabilities develop, your alphabetical rating will increase. When you attain an E rating you may request assignment. That is all.”
Unbearable brilliance streamed from Klarth.
“Proceed with the examination and install the control.”
Mason watched the darkening figure return to its original position of supplication, and unexpectedly, his contact of sight and hearing was removed. He was again in darkness.
Mason felt something unclean come crawling and wiggling into his mind. It was unpleasant. The sensation nauseated him. It felt like a monstrous leech beginning to suck at his brain. It made him want to retch. The sucking continued until mentally he felt weak and exhausted, and then it stopped.
SECONDS later, he felt tingling impulses shoot into him, swelling and growing into a tickling irritation that became intolerable. He wanted to move. To twitch and scratch things he could not reach—and he was held immobile. The sensations piled up, topping each other in rapid succession until his consciousness became a whirling, jumbled maelstrom of agony.
Each separate sensory channel was jamming with the ultimate feeling it could produce. He heard a mind-shattering roar like thunder, and piercing, high-pitched squeaks that grated his nerves. Every pain his human body had ever been capable of experiencing was being relentlessly pounded into his splitting brain.
Mason knew he was burning and freezing and hungering and smothering. His mind screamed—until it all mounted up into a wrenching climax that was rapidly pushing him over the brink of reason into insanity. Mason had stopped thinking. He was suffering.
Then it stopped. Musically, like the delicate shattering of a crystal bell, and the fragments tinkled down into a quiet that was dark. Relief swept over him like the touch of drifting rose petals.