by Earl
This is perhaps unbelievable, but the city of Chicago is visible as a tiny pinpoint of light. I saw it just as that longitude of the American Continent swung past the terminator, from light to dark. Chicago, from this distance, seems to lie in a great dark hollow edged by the shimmering-white Lake Michigan. Just as it swings into its sunset, the lake becomes utterly black and the hollow blacker, and the city flames out like a tiny jewel.
Markers, who is from Chicago, looked when I pointed it out. Then he walked away and didn’t say much for the next hour. But then, nostalgia has hit us all pretty hard.
One other man-made landmark is visible, the great Chinese wall. It appears as a winding silver thread over the dark mountains of Mongolia.
Markers and I had a scare once. In the middle of the day we heard a loud explosive noise from outside. We put on heavy clothes and air-helmets and ran out. It was the electrolytic outfit, down by the pool. A leak had allowed oxygen and hydrogen to accumulate in an explosive mixture. A spark had set it off. Much of the glass tubing had been shattered.
Having just sent the two expeditions out with all our surplus oxygen, we were faced with an immediate shortage of that gas for ourselves. We set to work like demons. Markers, an all-round expert in any laboratory, blew the necessary tubing and I helped as much as I could in setting it in place. It was an all day job. For the last three hours, we breathed and lived in Martian air, having run out of oxygen.
Both of us came down with heavy bronchial colds that night. We drank boiling-hot—138 degrees on Mars—water and wrapped ourselves up with blankets to bring on a sweat. A week later, when Parletti’s party returned, we were still weak and feverish. Parletti, changing from geologist to doctor in a second, nursed us out of it.
That was how close, at times, we played the game with death.
EIGHT hundred and first day.
As a brief summary of what the two search parties found in their constant exploration, I’ll mention first the strange desert crypt that Atwell, Dordeaux and Greaves came across to the east.
It was a pyramid so similar to those of ancient Egypt that they thought they were having halucinations. Dordeaux fell to his knees in the sand and almost fainted. The whole thing was a puzzle. The inscriptions around the base were unlike those of the Egyptians, but had a haunting familiarity.
There was no way to enter it. Dordeaux would just as soon have begun hacking away with his pick, but Atwell emphatically vetoed the idea. Pictures were taken of the inscriptions for analysis on Earth. Dordeaux raves—it is the only word—about a Martian visitation of Earth, only ten thousand years ago. It remains a mystery. Perhaps it will be cleared up in the future by other explorers with the necessary equipment to enter the crypt—if it is one.
If that is startling, what about the other party finding in the ruins of a canal city a perfect representation of Neanderthal Man of Earth? It cannot be of the Martian race, for they are insectal. Does it mean that Mars once had a humanlike race, which vied with the intelligent insects who built the canal system? Or that the Martians had visited Earth before the dawn of our history?
Swinerton, as anthropologist, has complete pictures of and voluminous notes of this find. He is saving them for leisurely examination on Earth.
* * * * *
Eight hundred and second day.
The most important find of all, of course, was Parletti’s, just over two months ago. His spade turned up a rich ore of selenium, fifty miles from camp. All other pursuits were immediately abandoned. Greaves made his analyses, and with the collaboration of Markers, and the whole-hearted help of the rest of us, set up a plant to manufacture fuel.
His method was simply chlorination of the ore, producing selenium tetrachloride, a heavy liquid that could be separated from the by-products mechanically. Chlorine came from electrolysis of brine; the brine from our salt pool. The tetrachloride was treated with water, producing selenium oxychloride, which is perhaps the most active liquid known next to the fluorine compounds. And the fuel whose powerful explosions bring life to rocket engines.
We have been working like slaves. Parletti was stationed at the ore deposit, to dig up the hard, rocklike material as fast as he could. Atwell and myself, the two heaviest men, made the treks back and forth, dragging the ore along in a huge canvas toboggan.
At the camp, Swinerton pounds the ore with a large mallet, making it finegrained. Greaves then gets it and damps it into his chlorination vat. Markers tends the electrolytic outfit that produces chlorine.
How fortunate that Mars is a dry world without clouds or rain. One day without the energy of the sun to give us electrical power and we would be lost!
Greaves’ complicated chemical manipulations finally produce the fuming yellow liquid that Dordeaux carefully pours into valveless oxygen tanks and stores in the ship.
For six weeks now we have been working eighteen hours a day at this project. We have made a gallon of fuel a day. Just today Parletti limped into camp, cold and aching from his labors, and announced that the selenium deposit had run out. The remaining ore was poor and useless for our purpose.
Make it or break it, we will have to get along on what fuel we have. It is barely enough. Markers computes, to get us away from Mars and set us on a slow crawl toward Earth’s orbit.
Markers has a strange gleam in his eyes, and has had for days. Atwell is watching him carefully. I didn’t think Markers was the type to break down, but it looks that way.
EIGHT hundred and third day. Markers speaking! We will cross during this opposition! By some cosmic chance, the asteroid Anteros will pass no more than five million miles back of Mars ten days from now. We can build up a speed of five miles a second and meet it. Allowing it to sweep by our ship close enough, we will be caught in its gravitational field and take up an orbit—providing our ship stands the strain.
Anteros has an extremely eccentric orbit, more so than even Eros. Some decades ago, I forget just when, it passed within a million miles of Earth, nearer than any celestial body except the moon. My calculations show that it will repeat this maneuver at this opposition, passing within one and a half million miles of Earth.
Riding the asteroid from Mars to Earth, we will have fuel enough to escape Anteros at the proper moment and fall to Earth’s moon. If we have fuel enough, we will attempt a landing on Earth itself, although since Anteros will pass in front of Earth in its orbit, Earth will bear down on us at its orbital speed of fifteen miles a second.
However, the moon will be receding at the time, lessening the speed of her approach to our ship to nine miles a second. We can more easily take up an orbit around the moon, without danger of being burned up in an atmosphere such as Earth has.
Captain Atwell speaking! We will ride the asteroid Anteros as Markers has explained. It is perhaps a dangerous experiment, but a lesser evil than drifting in space for a year, and that is a lesser danger, in turn, than staying on Mars. We will be circling the moon, if all goes well, forty days from now. We will contact you at that time by etherline and plan a landing at some known Lunar location, where we will wait for a rescue ship.
Gillway speaking. Markers had that plan in his mind for months, ever since he caught Anteros in his telescope and plotted its course. He exploded the news like a bombshell this morning. We all became madmen for hours. Then we set about seriously to plan our strange trip via asteroid.
We will leave tomorrow morning. I will not be able to broadcast again until we have safely hooked our ship in an orbit around Anteros, ten days from now, as all available battery power will be needed for the gyroscope.
Au revoir. Mars Expedition signing off at Mars.
* * * * *
Eight hundred and thirteenth day.
We have succeeded! We are circling Anteros! The ship is bearing up nicely. All else is well. Markers says the worst is yet to come. The landing on the moon or on Earth itself will be hazardous. But we have something of a fuel reserve and plenty of hope and courage.
Will not broadcast
again until near Earth, a month from now, as the sunpower mirror has gone dead and my batteries are low.
Mars Expedition Number One signing off.
LIFE ETERNAL
Anton York, Nomad of the Cosmos, Pits the Wisdom of Ten Centuries Against the Immortal Renegade Who Can Move a World
CHAPTER I
An Immortal Plans
MASON CHARD laughed.
For a year now he had been cruising aimlessly in the interplanetary depths of the Solar System. His beryllium-hulled space ship was motivated by the controlled interplay of the gravitational stresses filling the void. His power plant greedily absorbed solar radiation and rammed it through whirling quartz coils which cut the force-lines of gravitation, producing reactive motion. The same titanic energies which swung the ponderous planets in their eternal orbits were used, in part, to propel the tiny ship. It was super-power, limitless. And eternal, in the sense that gravitation was eternal.
Eternal!
Mason Chard liked that word. For, barring violent death, Mason Chard himself was eternal! In his veins flowed blood enriched with a self-renewing enzyme that was the antithesis of death and decay. His body cells were doubly endowed with radiogens, the tiny batteries of life which sucked energy from the cosmic rays, from the universe at large.
Mason Chard could not die from “disease” or “age” until the Universe had run down to the point where cosmic radiation was halved. That would be millions of years in the future!
The Immortal laughed again. His ruminations covered, in reverse order, the most eventful thousand years in human history. Just the year before. Earth’s vigorous race had established an outpost on far Pluto, thus completing a phase in its empire building. Previous to that there had been interplanetary wars, heroic pioneering, and dauntless feats of exploration. The parade of a thousand years, glorious and packed with drama, marched through Mason Chard’s mind. The laughs that punctuated his ponderings were for those times he, Chard, had interfered with the course of history.
There was the time, for instance, he had led the insurrection of the native Callistans against the domineering Earthmen, purely for the diversion of espousing a lost cause. At another time it had been his whim to destroy three successive rescue ships on their way to a marooned group of explorers in the wilds of Titan, so that he could watch brave men die.
Chard had had to amuse himself in those endless centuries to escape the dreary cycles of ennui. He had long felt himself above the ties of race and allegiance. Roaming the interplanetary void at will, a mysterious and half-mythical anarchist, he had often dammed the progress of mankind’s growing dominion in the Solar System. Along with the ties of blood and tradition, Chard had thrown conscience into the discard. It had not caused him one twinge to see thousands of space ship crews annihilated in the intra-world war he had personally embroiled, five centuries before, between Venus and Earth. He had watched the holocaust through his vision screen, grimly amused.
Mason Chard had never taken the trouble to analyze himself. If he had, he would have realized himself to be a colossal ego, inflated by the drug of immortality. He would have recoiled from the picture of a cold, heartless, scheming scoundrel, clothed in a super-vanity. Yet perhaps only one little thing made him this, rather than an honored, inspired, immortal leader—
His chuckle was just a bit bitter as reminiscences took him back to that time almost a thousand years ago when he had run afoul of Earth law. Realizing his immortality, he had started an abortive drive for world domination. He had not planned thoroughly and had been captured. Fortunate that capital punishment, even for treason, was outlawed in that day, he had been exiled to a lonely asteroid. His sentence had been 199 years. There, for seventy-five years, he was made to attend the warning light beacon that warded off space liners. A supply ship had come once a year.
The only light spots in that dreary, bitter incarceration were those times the officials had been amazed at his longevity, not knowing he was immortal. He had been a man in the prime of life at the start of his sentence. He was still a man in the prime of life seventy-five years later. He might have waited to serve out his 199 year sentence, to confound them utterly, but before that a pirate of space landed to destroy the beacon in some deep-laid plot. Chard gratefully joined the pirate crew, became their leader in a few years, and later betrayed them.
Thus had his career begun. Then Chard’s reflections went back to the stirring events of the middle Twentieth Century. He had been thirty-five then—really thirty-five—occupied as a research scientist. Dr. Charles Vinson, his former instructor, had called him to a secret conference with a half hundred others, unfolding a breath-taking scheme. He had inoculated them all with the Elixir of Youth, whose formula he had stolen from Anton York, and as immortals they had begun the subjugation of Earth. Anton York himself had defeated the plan, destroying the Immortal fleet.
Of the Immortals, only Mason Chard was left. He had been left in charge of their secret underground headquarters in Tibet and had thus escaped York’s vengeance. For years he had remained in hiding, waiting until Anton York had left the Solar System, plunging out amid the stars like a god whose duties were done. Chard, keeping his identity secret, had watched Earth, equipped with the legacy of space travel York had left, attempt the conquest of the Solar System.
And then had come his lone and foolish attempt to win the rule of Earth. Reaching again this point in his review of the past, Chard laughed once more, this time harshly.
“A thousand years I’ve fooled around and played with fate,” he muttered to himself, staring out at the dome of stars. “But I have learned much. I am prepared now to accomplish the aim that Vinson tried and failed, and I later, and before us, men like Napoleon, Attila the Hun, and Alexander the Great. I am going to conquer the world. Not the world they knew, but the world of today—the entire Solar System!”
His cold, cruel eyes blazed with sudden fire.
“I have the power to do it. And more important, I know the method. It must be done through fear! Fear is the common weakness of all humanity, excepting myself. I have learned to laugh at fear. But these mortals, they know fear. It can strike them powerless, tie their hands and wits. I will conjure up a fear that will strike in every heart in the Solar System. I will play up this fear, feed it, until they grovel at my feet. I will become emperor of nine worlds!”
In the melodramatic ecstasy of the moment. Mason Chard flung a clenched fist toward the watching stars, pledging himself.
“One against six billions—and I will win!” he boasted. Once again his super-ego had found something on which to feed itself.
CHAPTER II
Nomads of the Cosmos
SOMEWHERE, far out in interim stellar space, Anton York, a manmade god, roamed the uncharted deeps of the void. Immortal and wise beyond human understanding, he plunged on in a timeless lethargy, taking pleasure in observing the slow majesty of the cosmos. The stars surrounded him like silver studs in the celestial vault. With him was his immortal mate, Vera York.
Their earth-born love had transformed itself into a spiritual bond that made them almost one. They did not need food or air; their bodies were in a state of suspended animation. They lived only in the mind, exchanging thoughts by telepathy. Their ship drew illimitable power from the vast storehouse of energy with which space was crammed—the cosmic rays. Subtle warpings of the gravitational lines of giant, distant suns gave the ship lightning motion. Unbound by the blind rules of Earthly science, they bad often, and at will, exceeded the speed of light. On and on they had gone, nomads of the cosmos.
At times they had slowed and visited other planetary systems, had held concourse with alien races. Life exhibited itself to them in a hundred strange, incredible ways. Minds existed in the Universe whose thought processes were unfathomably queer. Never had they felt any kinship with other intelligences. And never, in all their Brobdingnagian journeying, had they found any planet system quite like the Sun’s, nor any world quite like Earth.
Suddenly they knew what it was. Immortal they might be subhuman and superhuman, children of space itself, but they could not deny what it was—nostalgia! They had lived in space five times as long as on their birth-world, yet on the way back they knew they were heading—home! A warm pulse-beat rose in their brains as they neared the little yellow-white star buried near the hub of the gigantic pinwheel of the Milky Way Galaxy.
When the Sun had begun to enlarge among the stars, Anton York willed himself out of his hypnotic state of bodily suspension. Mind-controlled relays turned on the various mechanisms that supplied heat, air, and artificial gravity. His lungs took in a deep, shuddering breath, the first in several years. His heart suddenly began rumbling in his chest. Congealed blood, bearing the Elixir-enzyme, began to circulate to body cells whose radiogens drew life-energy from the cosmic rays.
His wife, Vera, joined him a moment later. They embraced, and drank the thrill of corporeal existence. Their ship was once again a living room, after being a cold, preserved coffin for the years of their swift journey through remotest space.
York consulted his instruments and made rapid mental calculations.
“We’ve been gone from the Solar System just one thousand and one years, Earth scale,” he announced. “When we left here we were thirty-five years old, physically. And that’s exactly how old we are on our return—physically. Of course mentally, spiritually, we’re much, much older. We’ve lived some, haven’t we, Vera?”