by Earl
Not many weeks later the biochemist’s face was bright with triumph. Together with York he watched the healthy antics of a guinea-pig into whose veins the day before had been injected an overdose of bubonic plague germs.
“That little animal is germ-proof!” announced Vinson excitedly. “It has passed the last test. It is immune to any but violent death. We have the same serum now that your father developed.”
York turned swiftly.
“My father! How did you know? What—”
The biologist smiled thinly.
“Why beat around the bush, York? Your father developed this serum and tried it on you. It was dangerous, because the serum was fatal half the time. Yet he took the chance, knowing that if you survived, you would be immune to disease.” His face changed subtly. “And immortal!”
“Damn you!” cursed York, stepping forward.
“Wait, York. I haven’t been spying around. The thing staged me in the face. You, who should be as old as I am, fifty-five, look like thirty-five. Then, I can show you a fruit fly that has lived twice its normal span and will continue to live—who knows—through all eternity. It astounded me until I reasoned it out.”
York relaxed. After all, it was too tremendous a secret to conceal from the man who had worked with his father’s notes. He stared at the biochemist uncertainly. What would this mean? Dr. Vinson laughed shortly.
“You are an immortal, York. And you love your wife. You want her by your side in the long future that beckons. Hence, my work here—to manufacture the Elixir, for her. Well, let me warn you—there is an even chance that your wife will not gain immortality, but death!”
“I’m going to take the chance,” York said. “Prepare a suitable dose for injection. In case of death—”
HE made a resigned gesture. “Vinson,” he continued, solemnly, “you and I share a great secret. The Fountain of Youth! An age-old dream come true. After my wife has been inoculated, we’ll have to discuss—many things. This Elixir can be a great gift to civilization, to mankind. In my own case it will allow me to finish my researches, to solve the secret of gravitation, which I could not do in one lifetime. But certain problems would arise if the Elixir were given to the world. You can guess them.”
Vinson did not answer. His small eyes blazed with the dawning gleam of some staggering idea. York noticed the sudden stiffening of his body, spoke sharply.
“Well?” It was a challenge.
The biochemist’s dry lips parted but no sound came. Then with an effort he gasped: “Death! If your wife dies, think of the responsibility, the guilt!” If York had not been so preoccupied with his own problems, he would have demanded the truth. For Vinson had not spoken what was crawling in his mind—something of far greater significance than the mere fate of one woman.
“The responsibility is all mine,” snapped York. “I have her full consent to this. We have also made out a legal document absolving me from all blame in case of her death under the serum. According to law, this is not contestable in court any more, so long as the parties concerned are mentally sound. You are not an accessory to a crime in any sense, for there is no crime. When can you have the stuff ready?”
“In about three days,” answered Vinson, voice curiously hushed. His face looked fevered; his hand trembled. “You see, I want to do my best with the serum for your wife. Purify it as much as possibly. Increase the odds in our favor.”
York put a hand to the biochemist’s shoulder.
“Come, don’t take it so hard,” he said, vaguely aware that the man was more than normally moved.
Vinson smiled weakly. York left, to tell Vera of the near approach of the great moment when they would look down the interminable hall of the future together. When the door had closed behind him, the biochemist’s face gave way to pent-up emotions he no longer had to hide. A twisted smile came over the thin lips that hissed, “Fool!” in the direction of the vanished York.
If there is some repetitious twist to the workings of fate, certainly it became manifest in the events that occurred three nights later. For in broad detail it was the ancient story of eternal love, of Romeo and Juliet, re-enacted.
Tall, handsome, physically perfect, Anton York stood over the body of his wife, his face marked with grief. She lay on a couch, her beautiful face molded in the peaceful lines of death. Dr. Vinson stood to one side, like a dumfounded Belthasar, breathing hard. He stared mutely from the hypodermic in his hand to the pair before him.
Just a few minutes before, with York holding his wife’s hand, he had injected the serum into her arm. The reaction had been sudden and startling. Her breathing had grown hard, her eyes had flown wide. With a little half sob and half smile to her husband, she had fallen back on the couch. Then a few racking gasps, after which an ominous stillness had come over her relaxed form.
VINSON dropped the hypodermic and stepped beside the couch. He leaned over to listen for heart beats. Then he looked up.
“Dead!” he whispered huskily. “The odds were not quite even, for her!” York’s face was a blur of overwhelming, repressed despair. Though Vinson had repeatedly warned him that this could be the result, he had not been prepared for it. He dashed from the room suddenly, without a word.
Alone with the body, Vinson stared at the sweet face somewhat fearfully. It shook his resolve to try the Elixir himself, which was necessary for the furtherance of certain plans he had made. Immortality or death! Was it worth the risk?
York suddenly burst into the room, face pale and desperate. Ignoring the biochemist, he dropped to his knees beside the couch. For a long moment he gazed at the face so dear to him. Then, with a swift motion he brought one hand up toward his mouth. Vinson caught the glint of glass, uttered a strangled cry.
But it was already done. York gave him a wan smile.
“Cyanide,” he whispered. “That is a better Elixir for eternal life.” A minute later he slumped across the body of his wife, pale blue around the lips.
Dr. Vinson gaped at the double tragedy. For a moment he was weak with horror of death. But presently he straightened up, smiled.
“Perhaps it is better this way,” he mused. “York might have resisted my plans. He is—was—the altruistic sort. He would not have approved, I’m sure. And I had determined anyway that nothing was to stand in my way.”
He laughed shortly. “The fool! With the greatest gift mankind ever had in his hand, he thought only of making his wife immortal. I suppose later he would have envisioned centuries of research for himself—to benefit mankind. He could not think of the important thing—power! The power of immortality! But I think of it. Yes. First, I’ll purify the Elixir further—give myself a greater chance to survive it. Then—”
He broke from a trance, whirled about.
“Got to get out,” he told himself. “I must not be connected with this affair. I must be left alone—to think, to plan, to build.” He rolled the phrase on his tongue, eyes gleaming with a fanatic fire. “I’ll change my name. Get all my money together and leave the country perhaps. Build in secret. This marks a new phase in my life, and in the history of the world!”
He turned once more to the still forms on the couch. With the sense of melodrama still upon him, he whispered: “We shall either meet again soon, in eternal death, or never in an eternity!”
CHAPTER IV
The Immortals
DR. VINSON left and made his way to the laboratory in which he had duplicated the Elixir. Here he heaped all of Matthew York’s notes on the floor, set fire to them. In his brain was locked the great secret of the serum. On sudden thought he took a gallon jar of alcohol and rolled it toward the burning papers. He watched until the heat cracked the glass and sprayed liquid fire over the floor. The flames licked at the wooden workbenches, grew to a vigorous blaze.
Vinson turned away with a dark smile shadowing his face.
“From these ashes will spring my immortal empire!” he cried aloud. Then he left the place.
The eager flames beca
me a yellow holocaust in the big building that housed the laboratory and home of Anton York. But fate had not played out its re-enactment of history’s Romeo and Juliet. In the room where a double tragedy had seemed to occur, there was a stir of life.
Vera opened her eyes and struggled to sit up on the couch. Her husband’s body slid away, fell to the floor gently. Her horrified eyes saw this and with a scream of terror she-fell back again, pale as death.
But it was not the dagger-death of Juliet. She had only fainted. When York opened his eyes a moment later, his mind was an aching blank. A rush of memory brought him to his feet with a groan. He stood there a moment, trying to fathom his escape from death. He could not know that the same superelectrical quality of his flesh which resisted disease and supplied the energy of youth was also able to fight the fatal fire of life-poisons with its own youth-fires.
A thick cry of unbelief escaped him as he saw that his wife was breathing. There were two fevered spots of red on her marble cheeks. Death had passed them both by! Again it was an enigma to him that the powerful serum, producing a temporary coma, like that before death, had finally eased its stricture of the heart and lungs and allowed life to continue in her body.
A curl of smoke under the door warned York of the danger. He swung it open and as quickly closed it as a cloud of smoke swept into the room. He picked up his wife in strong arms and ran from the building. There was a faint dismay in his heart over the loss of the laboratory, but a far greater joy that they were alive. And alive as immortals, both of them!
A month later, in a hospital, York’s tired eyes lit up happily.
“The danger is over, Vera,” he told her. “You went through the same period of illness that I did when my father gave me the serum as a child. It’s like the fevers that follow vaccination. But it’s over now, and you and I together can look down the centuries!”
Three months after this, in a hotel, Vera asked about Vinson.
“Dr. Vinson disappeared in the fire,” York told his wife, “and I’m worried about him. I can’t rest until I know where he is. He alone has my father’s secret—the original notes were destroyed together with all copies. What is he doing with the Elixir? I can’t help feeling concerned, because he is not the man to use such a thing wisely.”
A YEAR later, he said resignedly: “I guess there’s no use to hunt him further. I’ve employed the most expert detectives, but they’ve found no trace. Wherever Vinson has gone, he’s covered his trail completely. And that’s ominous. Again, he may have tried the serum and died from it. I wish I could hope that.”
Two years later, York proudly surveyed his new laboratories, located in a remote part of the mountains. It was made possible by one of his inventions. A large industrial concern had patented his super-magnet, a by-product of his pervious researches in gravitational phenomena.
“Here,” he predicted, “I shall solve the secret of gravitation.”
Five years later he had come to the conclusion that gravitation exhibited lines of force, much like a magnet. “What is wrong with the analogy of converting kinetic motion into electricity by cutting the lines of magnetic force?” he asked himself. “If the field of gravitational force is similarly cut—yes, but with what?”
Ten years later, he frowned at a new snag in his researches.
Ten years after that, with careful planning, he and Vera changed their names, to circumvent explaining their permanent youth.
A decade later they had achieved a harmony of continued existence, and mortality seemed a dream in their past.
Time swept by. Its rolling pace did not change the couple in their mountain laboratory-home. They were still thirty-five in appearance and vigor. They lived in a state of detachment from the rest of the world. From the sidelines, they watched the kaleidoscopic march of events, the unfurling of history. Strikes, famines, elections, social changes, shifting national boundaries, new inventions—their televisor kept them informed.
York’s experiments took him into a field wholly untouched—the phenomena of the gravitational lines of force. A field as untouched as the electromagnetic scale before Newton and his successors explored it. It had taken over two centuries, and a host of diligent savants, to understand radio waves and cosmic radiation, the limits of that field. York labored to explore his field alone, and in less than two centuries.
In a way, York was equal to a line of scientists following one goal. Each time he reached some hiatus and had to branch away. He was like a new worker taking up the work another had left in death. And he had the advantage of always being in perfect condition, physically and mentally.
Thus it was, that a task that normally would have required all of a thousand years of science fell before his irresistible onslaught. He called his wife in excitedly one day.
“I’ve cut the force-lines of gravitation,” he sang triumphantly. “I use light-beams, curved ones, for the energy source. I feed them into the quartz coils, like electricity in a helix of copper wire, to create a magnetic field. A magnetic field is used in opposition to another magnetic field to produce kinetic motion. My quartz field produces a gravitational field, in opposition to Earth’s gravity, to produce kinetic motion. Unlimited kinetic motion-direct from Earth’s gravitational field!”
YORK’S voice became a paean of enthusiasm.
“It is the answer to space travel, if I can refine my apparatus to the point where a single beam of direct sunlight will actuate my quartz rotors. I must also make a sun-charging battery to spin the rotors, so that a ship in space will need only the perpetual sunlight to motivate it. Vera, I am close!” Close, yet it took another quarter century to achieve it. It was almost a hundred after the inoculation of Vera that York gave his ship its first tryout. It was a ten-foot globe of light metal, set with several thick quartz port-windows. Two large convex mirrors at the top were arranged to feed sunlight to knobs of sensitive selenium. Some miracle of York’s science compelled the sun’s radiant energy to pour into the ship like water into a funnel.
It handled awkwardly at first, until York got the feel of changing his artificial gravity fields. Then he was able to whisk the heavy globular ship about with flashing speed. It looked like a bright steel bomb from some giant cannon.
He leaped out of its hatchway, panting, after landing.
“I can’t tell you how excited I am over this,” he told his wife. “Think of it. We can stock the ship with necessities and go out into space, explore the other planets!”
They made a trip to the moon and back that same year. From this experience York was able to refine his apparatus still more. They made a trip to Mars and to Venus. He began planning a trip to another star. This would require a larger ship for supplies and motors to be run by starlight and tenuous mid-void gravitational forces, and he began its construction. If his gift of immortality had made him feel like a god, this ability to explore the ether was still more of a god-given attribute.
He opened his eyes one day to realize he had been drunk with these things, as he had been with the first realization of immortality. Earnestly, then, he sat down to write out the complete plans for his anti-gravity unit. He would send this to every scientific institution of the world.
It was just before he had finished the long and complicated paper that Vera called his attention to startling news over the radio. All during the past year there had been mysterious invasions in outlying sections of the world. Mysterious, but unimportant in that they involved obscure regions. The invaders had always come in small, swift ships, equipped with incredibly destructive weapons. Many garbled reports had been received from places invaded, but no one seemed to know just who or what was responsible.
But this night, the news was alarming.
“Rome has just undergone a terrific bombing by a mysterious fleet of small, fast aircraft,” an excited announcer told the world. “They may be the same ones that have been terrorizing Earth in the past year. All the world is aroused. What nation has done this cowardly thing, attacking w
ithout warning?”
York’s eyes reflected again the emotions that had haunted him in the World War.
War! That most senseless of human atrocities.
“Haven’t they had enough of it?” he cried. “They fought like beasts for a decade just thirty years ago. I was tempted then to reveal my superweapon and let them butcher one another to nothingness. I am tempted now.”
THE next day Berlin was bombed.
And in the following days, Paris, London, and Moscow. The world gasped. What mad nation was challenging all Europe? Tokyo was bombed, and then Washington. What power was challenging the whole world? A new note of terror arose when a gigantic fleet, composed of mixed Italian and German aircraft, was annihilated by fifty small ships of the invaders. The enemy seemed to have some long-range weapon that made victory ridiculously easy.
York waited for the unknown power to declare itself. Then he would act. After the succession of bombings, which had not been very destructive and had evidently been an exhibition of power, there was a lull of a day, then news that set the world on fire.
“The enemy had finally announced itself,” blared the televisor. “This afternoon a powerful radio message was picked up at many official stations. The invaders that have bombed the world’s most important cities call themselves The Immortals. They demand a parley of all important nations, at which The Immortals are to be accepted as the sole government on earth. In plain words, The Immortals, whoever they are, demand world dominion. This, or the threat of continuous bombing and destruction by their invincible fleet of fifty ships!”
Then York knew. He and Vera looked at one another.
“Dr. Vinson!” gasped York. “Dr. Vinson and a band of ruthless demons bent on conquering Earth. For a hundred years he planned this. I did not think he would go to such lengths. In some hidden spot he and his crew, all immortals, must have labored for this day. Undoubtedly they are all scientists and technicians. Men who in a century’s time could do miracles in discovery. Vastly improved ships, superweapons, carefully laid plans. They played for big stakes and made preparations in a big way.”