by Earl
He turned his anger on himself. “Why didn’t I see it before this? It’s all so clear now. In the past year they carried out experimental raids, to gauge their power and readiness. I should have suspected, and prepared. Now they have struck, and the end will be soon. True scientific warfare against the world’s tremendous, but clumsy armament. The wasp against the bear. It can sting again and again, too quick and small to be crushed by might.”
Again news came over the televisor, indicating the crisis which faced the world. A hastily and secretly formed armada of the world’s best fighting craft—of every large nation—had massed and challenged The Immortals. The challenge had been promptly accepted. The incredible story told by gasping announcers was that by sheer weight of numbers the fleet had succeeded in downing three of the enemy, while they themselves were mowed to one-third their strength. The remnant had fled.
Vera was alarmed by the sickly grey color of York’s face as he heard this.
“I’m responsible,” he whispered hoarsely. “I let the dangerous secret of immortality fall into Vinson’s hands!” His whisper continued, but with a deadlier note in it: “I must act before it is too late.”
It was the climax of his super lifetime. Armed with nothing more than a few pages of diagrams and figures, York descended on Washington in his silent gravity ship and said he could fight the alien power. He was derided rather than laughed at, in that the situation was too grim for laughing.
CHAPTER V
The Destroyer
HOWEVER, the gravity ship could not be laughed at. And when a group of scientists was hurriedly assembled, they said the thing looked good on paper. At the same time the startling news came that The Immortals had been completely victorious in Europe and were now sweeping Asia. If Japan would fall, as must be, America would be next, as the last remaining power.
Faster than they had ever moved before, the wheels of industry, lashed by a frantic government, turned out the apparatus York wanted. He had them secretly move their headquarters to Pittsburgh. The terrible weapon he had kept locked in his brain for over a century took form here.
In two weeks it was nearly completed, but not before The Immortals, now dominant in the Eastern Hemisphere, swung their tiny, deadly fleet westward. At the first encounter, the pride of America’s aerial defense was annihilated by the sweeping rays of the enemy. These rays had all the potency of a two-ton bomb at close range, yet were invisible and noiseless.
“We must surrender!” This cry echoed in the hall of authority.
“Hold out!” commanded York. “Hold out, I tell you.”
They obeyed him, almost hypnotized by his blazing eyes. The Immortals, after defiance of their ultimatum, promptly began razing cities to the ground. Their supply of fuel and ammunition seemed inexhaustible. Coming from the west, San Francisco, Denver and St. Louis crumpled before the onslaught.
“Enough is enough. We must give in!” was the horrified clamor among the leaders and statesmen.
“Hold out!” screamed York. “Three more days!”
They did. In those three days Chicago, Cincinnati and Philadelphia became smoking ruins. And the invincible fleet headed for New York City!
But in those three days York became prepared. His weapon was mounted on his ship, a long snout of vitrolite pivoted on a universally jointed base. Wires led inside the ship, through hastily made rips in the hull, to the power source of the ship. By a quick change, York had fitted his anti-gravity unit to utilize Earth’s tremendous gravitational field for power for the vitrolite gun.
Then he contacted the fleet of The Immortals by radio, challenged them, called them back from their course toward New York. They might have taken it as a desperate bluff to save that great city except that York made his challenge a personal one—from himself to Dr. Vinson.
“York?” came back a voice that was recognizable as Dr. Vinson’s. “Anton York? Impossible—he—”
“I did not die, Vinson. I survived the cyanide. I’ve been wondering if you would appear on the scene. I’d almost forgotten you in the century that has gone by. But bad pennies always show up. You’ve done a lot of damage, Vinson, but you’ll do no more. I’ll meet your fleet anywhere you say for a showdown. If you don’t meet me halfway, I’ll hound you to the ends of the earth—to the ends of the Universe if I must!”
Vinson’s voice spluttered over the radio. For the first time his companions around him saw fear on their leader’s face. What man could this York be, that their hitherto confident master feared him?
THEN Vinson spoke again: “Wait, York. I don’t know what you have to give you such confidence against my fleet, but listen to reason. You’re an Immortal, as we are. You belong with us, York—as rulers of Earth. I have no grudge against you. Join up with me and that’s the end of it. Why should there be trouble between us?” York’s voice was a white-hot hiss in the microphone.
“You will rule Earth without me, or not at all. But first you must put me out of the way. Name the place!”
“Over Niagara Falls!” Vinson’s voice, previously uncertain, rang now with arrogance and assurance. “What can you do against the fleet that has whipped a world?”
It must have seemed like a battle of the gods to those fortunate eyes that saw it, especially those who had caught the exchange of words between York and Vinson.
York’s ship, a bright ball of metal and glass, dropped from the clouds several miles from the fleet of The Immortals. A group of tiny black figures could be seen around the base of the vitrolite gun, precariously hung in sprung seats. These were the gunners, iron-nerved army men who knew nothing about the weapon, but who knew that when you aimed the long snout and jerked a lever, a something was released that could destroy. Other than that they had only grim determination and courage.
Like the buzzing of angry hornets, Vinson’s fleet dashed for the lone ship. York’s ship, high over Lake Erie, hovered like a poised eagle. The long, slender vitrolite tube swung toward the oncoming ships. Something blue and pulsating sprang from it, projected a streamer of violet across the intervening space of two miles.
What inconceivable force it was, no one was ever to know. York could have described it briefly as a combination of atom-tuned sound vibrations and electron-tuned gamma vibrations, both together able to rip matter to ultra-shreds, without revealing its secret. For it was a type of wave existing in the audio-ether transition stage between the known and the unknown in catalogued science.
But the effect was not so mysterious. A dozen of the enemy craft sagged strangely, burst into little bubbles of vapor, and changed to clouds of black dust that fell slowly toward the water below. The rest of the fleet, as one, swept up and to one side, away from this frightful weapon. Yet before they had completed the retreat, twelve more of their ships had become puff-balls of black soot.
York smiled grimly. He had purposely made the focus of the gun’s beam very wide. Each time it belched forth its Titanic charge, a ransom in power went with it. But Earth could afford it, with its almost unlimited gravitational stresses that fed the weapon.
The range of The Immortals’ weapons was known to be just as great, but they had not thought to use them on this lone ship three miles away. Now, however, the air droned with the concussion of atmospheric rents made by invisible streamers of their ray-forces. Their rays were amplified cathode radiations, million-watt bundles of electrons at half the speed of light.
YORK was not caught napping. His ship had already moved upward, at right angles to their position, presenting a target moving at a sped of five hundred miles an hour. It was cruel for the men exposed to the air around the vitrolite gun, but necessary. York flung his ship up into the clouds.
The Immortals seemed nonplussed. They scattered widely and massed their beams upward, on the blind chance of scoring a hit. When York’s ship did appear, far on the other side of his former positon, it was heralded by the destruction of eight more of Vinson’s fleet. Most of his ships were already destroyed and the fight had ha
rdly begun!
Under this scene, the waters of Lake Erie boiled and rose in great clouds of steam. Niagara Falls, though York tried to avoid it, took most of one of his gun’s charges, and became in one minute an unrecognizable jumble of churning waters and puffs of black vapor. Grim reminder for all time of this battle of the gods.
The Immortals fled, ingloriously, scattering wide. The swift, sweeping sword of destruction from York’s ship picked them off one by one. There was no limit to its range. It hounded the last one down after a brief chase. And the menace of the Immortals was over!
The world had to content itself with honoring three of the five men who had handled the vitrolite gun, and burying the other two, dead from their ordeal. York, after landing them, had promptly departed, without a word to anyone.
Without waiting for thanks and praises. Like a god he had come and like a god he left.
AND like a god he went out into the void not long afterward, with his wife, leaving behind him the legacy of space travel. The secret of the superweapon went with him. The secret of immortality was no longer his to give away. Earth had had a god, one who had nearly destroyed it, and then saved it. One who had shown the way to other worlds. One who had exhibited an awesome weapon to warn mankind what its warfare could lead to. One about whom many legends were to be woven, true and false.
But now the god was gone—forever. Once given a taste of the supreme freedom of the void, he could not return to the pettiness of Earth. Nor did he care to interfere in any way, altruistic or otherwise, in its normal course of affairs.
On and on he went, he and his immortal companion. Their understanding and wisdom grew to cosmic heights. They visited many worlds, many suns. Time meant nothing. They discovered the secret of voluntary suspended animation, requiring no food or air. They became truly gods.
Somewhere in the dim future ages he must die, this man-made god. Sometime when the scales of Time have sufficiently lowered the amount of cosmic radiation which gives the god life.
VISION OF THE HYDRA
Ten Minds Are Housed Within a Single Skull Performing Miracles Beyond Imagination!
What does it profit a man if he gain
the whole world and lose his own soul?
THESE words occur to me as I prepare to write this story. For in a sense, Dr. Alanson Willenborg did achieve the former and suffer the latter. You must have heard of him; his name has frequently been linked with Freud’s. His intellectual talents became apparent even in his first year at college, when he wrote a theme paper that threw his professors into a turmoil. By his senior year he was recognized as the soon-to-be Einstein of psychology.
His graduating thesis flung wide the doors to what he called “cosmic psychology,” and he was promptly tendered—or begged into—the chair of Professor of Psychology at Midwestern.
For six years his brilliance stood prominent, resulting in a ten-volume work on mental phenomena from which he made a small fortune. Then, against all inducement, he retired from academic pursuit. He was thirty years old at the time.
The psychiatric world had waited with bated breath for him to elaborate on his theories of “cosmic psychology,” but he left them hanging in mid-air. It left a furor that died away only gradually.
THE maid left to announce me, and I stared around appreciatively at the elegant arrangements of this lounge in Dr. Willenborg’s Oak Park home. I caught the feminine touch in the soft-hued draperies and woodland pastels, and knew that Jondra, his wife, had been the decorator.
Jondra! I almost ran out then in a small panic, but already I heard her soft footsteps.
“Why—Charles!”
One look at her tender blue eyes, her golden auburn hair and I knew that I had not stopped loving her, even though I hadn’t seen her for five years. I don’t know what silly things I said in greeting, nor what she answered, but I felt the old pain of lost happiness. Alanson and I, roommates for two years, had both courted Jondra, and he had won. Yet there had been a time when Jondra had seemed to favor me. Bittersweet memory!
I stiffened, aware that these wretched memories were showing in my face and embarrassing her, and forced myself to seem light-hearted.
“Jondra—how’s Alanson, the old champion soda-destroyer?”
A minute later, as if glad to end the brief tête-à-tête, Jondra led the way to his study, leaving me at the door with a strange, haunted smile that was later to have great significance.
Alanson Willenborg was the same as when I had known him in college—tall and athletic, cold and suave. His face was the same unsmiling, grave face of the scholar and thinker. It did not change in the slightest as he shook my hand, and his eyes reflected those hidden flames that indelibly stamped him as the genius.
I did not feel the awkwardness in his presence that I had with her. Somehow, the human things didn’t matter with him. I could just feel that his reasoning on the subject would be—“I wanted Jondra. You wanted Jondra. I got her. That’s that.”
After he had greeted me and motioned me to a chair, he sat down at a horseshoe-shaped desk and began tapping at a shorthand machine. And now, how can I tell the rest without sounding incoherent? For he then extended his left hand toward another shorthand machine and began manipulating that! And if I had not been too awed to notice at the moment, I would have heard the soft drone of a phonograph’s voice coming from a receiver hung from the low ceiling just beside his left ear.
“Don’t think I’m neglecting you,” said Willenborg, just as a deep flush burned over my face. “On the contrary, my right ear and a good share of my mind are at your service!”
I started to my feet, angry at his insinuation—how could I know it wasn’t that?
“If you’re so busy, Dr. Willenborg,” I sputtered indignantly, “I wouldn’t want to intrude. I—”
“Sit down, Charlie old boy. And the name’s Lanny!”
HE gave me one of his rare, disarming smiles that for a moment melted the intellectual mask on his face.
“You think,” he went on as I sank back, “that I’m giving you an insultingly small part of my attention. As a matter of fact—if you can believe me—I’m more attentive than anyone else in the world could be!”
I knew I looked foolish.
“Really, Dr. Wi—Lanny, I—I—”
“Listen,” explained the man I had known for years and yet had never known, “with my left and right hands I am writing two separate treatises in shorthand, one on symptomatic paranoia, the other on specific shell-shock. The bifold speaker next to my left ear is delivering two separate discourses on hypnotism and hallucination. Yet”—his lips smiled ever so slightly—“I could discuss with you, with ease, the internal traumatic effects of hysteria, or any other technical topic!”
Well, there you have it. Yes, impossible—but he was doing it; that was proven later. At the moment I didn’t believe him either; conjectured he was playing some elaborate trick on me.
“Look here, Lanny,” I stammered. “I’ve heard of gifted persons writing a letter and talking over the telephone at the same time, but—”
“Child’s play!” interrupted Willenborg. “Psychologists have long suspected that there is it great deal of latent power in every brain, and that the average person uses only one-tenth of it. Scientists, scholars, thinkers of one kind or other use perhaps twice or three times as much, but that is still a small part of the total potentiality of the mind. Applying myself to this problem of psychogenesis, I’ve succeeded in training myself to use fully one-half of my brain capacity!”
A half wit! This queer, irrelevant play of words flashed across my mind, and I had to strangle an involuntary chuckle. For an instant it looked ridiculous—his two hands flying steadily over the complicated keyboards of the shorthand machines, the voices that came to me as soft hisses pouring into his left ear. And yet—
“You see, Charlie,” he spoke again, as easily as if doing nothing else but that, “the human brain is not a unit organ at all. It is actually composed of me
ntal segments, each of which alone can motivate the individual from birth to death. People that rise above the average are those who have learned—unconsciously indeed—to use two segments. Exceptional figures in human life use perhaps three. Geniuses use four.”
“Einstein,” I ventured, “used five?” Willenborg visibly sneered.
“Only one person in the world ever used five out of a possible ten parts of his brain. And that—”
“Is you!” I cut in blandly. I arose with studied indifference. “I have an appointment—”
I walked out. Why? You would have done the same, driven by an overwhelming sense of inferiority in the presence of Dr. Alanson Willenborg. As I stepped down the hall, wrapped in the remnants of my pride, I told myself I would never see him again.
I hoped, though, to see Jondra once again—I even looked around for her hopefully in the luxurious lounge. But the maid—undoubtedly sent by the doctor—politely led me to the front door.
The cool night wind lashed my flushed face. I tried to force Jondra out of my mind.
IT was inevitable that I should go back to that brownstone house set back in a small grove of tall oaks. It was a week later, and in that interval I had attended the Midwest Conference of Physicians, and several other less formal gatherings of medicos in Chicago. At the same time I had made casual inquiries about Dr. Willenborg among the psychiatrists.
“A loss to science.”
“Unsocial chap, but a genius.”
“What has he been doing in the past two years since retiring from the chair?” These were some of the reports to my anxious queries. You see, for a young surgeon in the East, I had been quite out of touch with things in the psychiatric field. And I had been trying to forget Jondra.