by Earl
All around me was the gigantic columned interior. Evenly spaced across the floor were hundreds of rows of apparatuses something like organ consoles, in each of which sat a Martian.
Close scrutiny of one of the affairs just below me revealed it as a circular button board in the center of which sat the operator. As I watched, his long arm with its sensitive fingers flicked buttons with marvelous rapidity, causing little pilot lights to flash. About his head was a maze of wires and tubes connected to the control board by several strands of heavy wire.
But what use to describe to you something whose immensity and alien-quality you could never grasp, except that it relieves my fevered mind to tell of these common details. I will go on, as Sokon went on when I had recovered from astonishment and wonder.
Sokon returned to the previous day’s talk and picked up the thread of the story he had left unfinished. The Martians, faced with self-inflicted extinction, decided at last that it was foolish to fight among themselves when they could satiate their battle lust in a way not at all harmful to their persons. Earth had been explored and on its surface had been found a form of life with rational intelligence, inhabiting forests and caves—the Paleolithic Man.
A diabolical plan was conceived, and with a hue and a cry the Martians adopted it in boundless enthusiasm.
With their marvelous science, and their full and complete understanding of psycho-phenomena, they built psycho-transmitters capable of projecting psycho-beams all the way to Earth, which would give the Martians practical control of the activity of mankind on the young world!
CHAPTER V
The Chessboard of Mars
I CAN see you now, Fred, trembling and pale, not daring to believe. And yet, it is God’s truth!
These control boards, at each of which sits a Martian like a gloating tyrant, are psycho-transmitters which project to Earth, at the will of the operator, any sort of psycho-emotion or actual direct thought. You will understand that the Martians have refined and improved their apparatus beyond our understanding, so that they can either fasten like a leech to one certain mind of Earth, or to a group, or to a whole nation, and pour their insidious psycho-emotions forth like a foul wave of slime.
And the sole purpose and aim of each Martian is to wreak as much bloodshed and harm as he can on Earth!
So all through the ages, while aboriginal man gradually arose from ignorance and darkness to the glimmerings of intelligence, the Martians have been holding mankind back, instigating wars, tribal battles, personal fights, and internecine revolutions, satisfying their bloodthirsty, warlike natures in playing warlord to Earth! Like an evil entity in the heavens, the Martians have been strewing the pages of Earth history with blood and gore and hatred and discontent.
It has always been the wonder and surprise of most intelligent people of our time, Fred, why mankind had wars at all, why there was constant bickering and battling when things could be settled so easily in more peaceful ways. “The beast in us” it was called, but actually it was the beast being put into us! And God only knows how far ahead the world might be on the road to true civilization if it weren’t in the fatal, bloody grip of Mars.
All through the ages, then, our superficial destiny has been guided from Mars by beings who, not willing to battle themselves, have instead caused battles and bloodshed on another world. Sokon tediously traced Earth history for me, with which, naturally, all Martians are smugly familiar, and showed me all the innumerable incidents which we thought to be the course of fate and which were really the results of the Martians’ psychowaves—a vicarious means of satiating their lust for battle.
Just to give a few instances. Alexander the Great, world conquerer, was started on his bloody career by a Martian psycho-beam that from babyhood on stirred his fighting and ruling nature. The psycho-emotion goaded him and tormented him till he had to obey its call, and partly under its guidance, and partly due to the conditions under which he lived, he swept. out from Macedonia and poured blood on dozens of battlefields. Alexander’s whole army was constantly under the influence of a psycho-beam from Mars which made them so vicious and fighting mad that they swept all before them, including the Persian hosts of Darius.
Then Attila the Hun. His invasions were first conceived in a Martian brain and then forced on him so that he became one of the bloodiest and most vicious scourges in Earth’s history. His little slant-eyed troops were bathed in a psycho-beam so powerful that some of the worst atrocities of all time were the result.
THEN Napoleon, the little corporal who as a youth dreamed of a great France. His dreams were not his own—they came hurtling across millions of miles of space and were implanted in his sensitive and keen mind. He arose, lashed by the hammering psychobeams, and swept all Europe, wallowing in blood, sacrificing human lives in absolute indifference. Yet it was not Napoleon himself who cared so little for human life and suffering. It was the Martian across space who chuckled in glee when vast armies swept together and decimated one another.
Then, in the modern world that we know—the fearful carnage of the World War when mankind had advanced enough scientifically to produce terrible weapons that reminded the Martians of their own disbarred ones. In telling of this last Earth war, let me mention again the building and its psycho-controlboards.
The boards are divided among all the different nations that were formerly represented on Mars before their union. Each group, still as proud and hateful as of yore when they battled with guns instead of psycho-waves, concentrates itself on, a certain warlike project on Earth. For instance, for the World War, the Martians decided to make it a grand and glorious game between two and only two sides.
Accordingly, half the boards were then relegated to control the Allies, and the other half the Central Powers.
I will never be able to erase from my mind, Fred, the unutterable look of evil glee on Sokon’s face as he told me that never in all their fifty thousand years of playing had the Martians had so much “fun” as during the World War! It had been a grand game and had occasioned intense rivalry, and they had been sorry when it had finally ended!
Think of it, Fred! All Earth, every section and corner of it, constantly under the evil influence which darts from Mars at instantaneous velocity and submerges it in psycho-waves which have as much to do with the destiny of Earth’s peoples as their own hampered efforts to rise above brutality and bloodshed and suffering!
The chief occupation of the Martians in the past ages of their civilization had been warfare. Now their chief occupation is playing on this gigantic chessboard of Mars, moving humans in paths of fate like the chess player moves his pawns and pieces!
And, Fred, the Martians had so much enjoyment out of the last World War, that they have again decided to play such a two-sided game. Japan is to be the nucleus of one warrior group, and Russia the nucleus of the other. They plan, so Sokon tells me, to draw into this war all the nations of Earth in a grand melee which they intend to make a dozen times more horrible than the last holocaust!
Furthermore, Sokon informed me that the projector set up on that Kurile island, which we first thought to be the work of an Earth madman, is part of a secret plot of his to beat the other side. One of the “rules” of the game is that neither side shall set up concentration projectors on Earth itself, as this would give too much of an advantage to incite Earth all at once and destroy it completely. Sokon and several of his arch-plotters secretly went to Earth a year ago and set up the projector. This will incite the Japanese much faster than the enemy and cause them to arm more quickly and fight more viciously.
THIS reveals to me the true decadence and evil of the Martian nature in general. Whatever was the initial cause, the Martians grew up with a far greater heritage of warlikeness than—I am sure—ever reposed in Earth-people’s basically gentle natures.
God, Fred! How long will my mind remain coherent when every second the thought beats a frenzied rhythm of hopelessness that Earth will never be free of the bloody Martian clutch till so
me far distant future when the two worlds may battle for supremacy.
If only there is something I could do! If only there is some way I could destroy them!
Good-by, Fred! Perhaps good-by for good, Sokon is waiting for my reeling mind to break down. He does this now and then with Earthmen, delighting to watch them fall to pieces when knowing the truth. If there is anything more I might want to transmit, wait for me a full Earth day. If I do not call by then, you will know that I am dead.
In a silence that seemed to echo with the satanic leers of other-world demons, Fred Bilte moved about the laboratory with a sort of aimless purpose. He rummaged in the cabinet, taking from it papers covered with scrawled formulae. Hours later he took the sizeable batch he had collected and burned them wholesale on the tile floor, opening a window to let the acrid smoke out. He stared until the last flame went out. The secret of psycho-detection would not leave the laboratory.
Then he went to his couch. His eyes glinting with a bleakness like that of frigid space itself, he stretched himself out stiffly. His face was like a graven wax mask. He waited, not caring to sleep. He refused entrance to the manservant with a tray of food, and in the early hours of July 21st the professor’s voice came again:
Fred! Fred! Are you there? Pray God you are. He had not tortured me enough, Sokon, so he again dragged me to the chessboard of human life not many hours after the first time, and went into vivid detail more horrible than I dare to relate to you, Fred.
Suddenly an enormous thought struck me. A mad thought. Yet it may have been a sublime thought. I will soon know.
Sokon, whom I will curse in my dying breath above all other Martians as the master fiend of them all, took me into the section whose psycho-boards are on the enemy side—Russia’s side, you know, in this titanic Earth war they are instigating. One of that side’s members threw a taunt to Sokon, which he returned with interest. The taunting grew and became a quarrel between the two Martians.
I merely stood by, seeing a plain example before my eyes of how warlike and hot-headed Martians are when even in their game they will come to blows.
It was then the thought struck me. I obeyed my sudden inclination to carry it through and dashed away from the two bickering Martians, and ran further into the section whose members are opposed to Sokon in the war game they are playing.
I BETRAYED Sokon at the top of my voice and told his opponents of the illegal projector which had been set up on Earth. Head after head stirred from the boards and jerked up. Dozens of pairs of eyes within range of my voice heard and grew wrathful.
Then Sokon came bearing down on me, having heard a little and surmised the rest. He fastened his baleful, speckled eyes on me, and my voice died in my throat. I made a brief prayer and waited for death.
But it did not come! No, it did not come, Fred!
I opened my eyes a moment later to find a dozen Martians, all enemies to Sokon, protecting me-from him. Furthermore, they were demanding something from him and I could easily guess what.
I know little or nothing of just what was done then. I was led by the hand to a little cupola of transparent material which overhangs the entire interior of the building. In it are strange instruments that I can guess are deadly weapons. This cupola, I surmise, is a sort of policing center to insure peace in the assembly. The guns are on pivots and can rake any part of the building.
I am here in that cupola above the chessboards now, Fred. I have not been fed for several hours. My throat is parched and dry. I am numb from mental agony. Yet a faint spark of hope has been born within me. Not hope for myself, no. What does my single life mean? But hope for Earth!
Perhaps the investigation will result in removal of the projector on Earth.
That there is an investigation in progress, I know. One of the fellows up here in the cupola—there are dozens of them, equally divided in allegiance—casually told me that as soon as the right part of Earth’s surface turns in the direction of Mars, their powerful telescopes will examine the Kurile Islands for that outlawed projector. I asked what would be the result when it was found. He made a shrugging gesture, but I noticed that his hand unconsciously caressed the gun near him.
There is nothing more to say, Fred, except that there is unrest in the very atmosphere around here. I can almost feel the hatred and suspicion welling up between the two sides. What the outcome of my action in betraying Sokon will be, I don’t know. But almost all my suffering at that devil’s hands is repaid at the thought that at least I’ve put him in a troublesome predicament.
The voice ceased. Later it burst forth again, trembling with excitement:
A message, Fred! A message corroborating my story—the telescopes saw the projector! Also they saw something more—a space ship landing beside it and blowing it to drifting dust. Sokon had sent a space ship post haste to Earth to destroy the incriminating evidence of his treachery, but too late!
I hardly know what to say about things here now. Excitement is running high. Many Martians have left their boards and are gathering in little groups. There is much shouting back and forth. The very air is electrified with wrath and hatred. Sokon is down there conferring with his henchmen. His opponents are glaring angrily in his direction, for he has been a leader of the other side.
THE fellows up in this gun-cage are very nervous and fidgety. They have in their hands the power, probably to wipe out all below them. The sympathizers of Sokon in the cupola are sitting at their guns. The others are watching the scene below. They should be—
Something’s beginning now!
A group from Sokon’s, opposition is running at him, shouting. Sokon faces about in fear—it is the beginning of a mob riot! They near him . . . several Martians tumble in the rush . . . God! . . . Sokon gunners just shot down a livid bolt of something that whiffed a dozen’Martians to dust! Now the opposing gunners retaliate with a bolt to the other side!
It is a battle royal now!
Without restraint the gunners are shooting down rioting Martians! Hundreds have been converted to puffs of vapor. Good! Good! This in a small measure repays Earth for the sacrifice of her murdered people. This thing is getting bigger and bigger perhaps it will become . . .”
Yes! Part of the roof has been disintegrated. At its edges appear Martians from the city with weapons that they rapidly install like machine-guns . . . the disintegrating bolts are becoming thick . . . the battling and rioting is turning into an actual war. I can see centuries of repression swelling into a terrific bloodlust.
I see a giant airship . . . it hovers above the roof . . . the roof puffs away . . . a searing ray springs from the ship . . . it is sweeping in circles and in its path nothing remains . death for the Martians my heart sings!
The gunners here are busy wiping out their fellowmen in absolute war-madness. It is awful, that look in their eyes! Now is my chance. I am stealing over to the giant chessboard psycho-transmitter. A few twists of several different levers, and I am ready to start.
I’m wiping out the entire bloody planet, Fred . . . I’m concentrating on the thought that every Martian kill his neighbor, kill himself . . . Never before have the psycho-waves been used at such short range The psychotransmitter is now focused to envelop all Mars with its waves of hate . . . I’m not leaving this machine until I have destroyed every Martian, one by one.
CONQUEST OF LIFE
A Race of Scientifically Created Supermen Searches for an Elixir of Immortality
CHAPTER I
A God is Born
THE latter half of the 19th Century was a period of scientific giants—Ramsay, Bequerel, Roentgen, Einstein and others—but history does not mention Matthew York.
While the chemists outdid nature with synthetic products, while the physicists toyed with the amazing electron and the mathematicians groped into eternal secrets of the cosmos, Matthew York searched for a great scientific arcanum.
A brain highly stimulated by chronic hyperthyroidism pushed his investigations ahead in leaps and bounds, but i
t also burned him out before his time. Long years of intensive search and labor eventually crystallized into results.
Like a pilgrim who at last nears his Mecca, Matthew York knew, at the end, that his fingertips were at the door beyond which lay the secret. He knew at the same time, with resigned bitterness, that he would not live to open the door more than a crack.
“Give me ten more years!” he moaned to the Universe at large. “Ten paltry years, and I will give you back a thousand!”
But that was not to be, and Matthew York, like Columbus, was to die unknowing that he had reached the shores of a new land, though he had seen them in the distance.
AT twenty-five, Anton York, the son of Matthew York, was tall, physically perfect, mentally alert, with a budding scientific career already launched. At thirty he was healthier, if possible, and deep in the intricacies of electromagnetic waves applied to destruction. He sought a weapon so deadly that its use would teach the utter futility of war.
For Anton York had been in the World War. His grim experiences in that inferno of hate had left festering scars on his sensitive mind. He searched with all the passion of a fanatic for a Jovian weapon that would either end civilization or bring it everlasting peace.
Gradually it became apparent to him that he must be singularly blessed with physical good health. At times he wondered vaguely about it. It was hardly natural. Long hours in the laboratory, weeks of intensive, mind-shattering labor failed to weaken his superb vitality.
At thirty-five he reached his prime, with not a day’s sickness behind him since childhood. Is was as though some diligent guardian angel kept him free of the diseases that exacted their toll of all others around him. His researches had resulted in the development of a fused beam of ultra-sound and gamma-rays—the long-sought goal.