The Collected Stories

by Earl

  “And yet,” he summed it up, when done, “it’s really easier to figure this hundred-million-mile trajectory in space than if would be to aim a cannon shot on Earth for a mere thousand miles. The motions and laws of space are precise, unvarying. Those on Earth are subject to the vagaries of wind, temperature and air density. I think we’ll be able to land the asteroid squarely on the island, at a speed of a hundred miles a second.”

  It took them two weeks to push the asteroid within striking distance. Gradually its velocity had mounted. It had been aimed unerringly to reach Earth’s orbit, plunge into its atmosphere, and drop like a great bomb on the island of the Three Eternals.

  “It can’t fail!” said Kaligor confidently, rechecking York’s figures for the third time. “The Eternals will have no warning. The asteroid is too small to shine as a moving star except in the last few minutes. It will light incandescently when it strikes the atmosphere, but a few seconds later it will land. The Eternals will be ground flat into the Earth itself! And at the same time, the island will be cracked apart, reversing the rise of Atlantis. York, it is a splendid plan!”

  “I hope it works.”

  Now that the zero moment approached, York was assailed by doubts. Yet how could the Eternals survive it, this hurling of a world at them?

  CHAPTER X

  World Hurled at a World

  REACHING a point a thousand miles above Earth, York halted his ship. The asteroid plunged on. It vanished from their sight. Then, five seconds later it reappeared, glowing slightly. With each passing second, as it hurtled into the thicknesses of the atmosphere, it brightened.

  Like a glowing diamond, it plummeted for the ground—and the island. It had been aimed perfectly.

  “Here’s a little present for you, Eternals!” sang out Kaligor, moving for the ship’s telescope.

  It struck!

  Watching, they saw it shatter into a shower of sparks, from their perspective, that spattered far over the Pacific Ocean. Dense clouds of steam shot skyward. More than a quadrillion tons of rock had smashed into Earth. The impact was sufficient to affect, by a measurable split second, the rotation of the planet. Earthly astronomers would later notice that, and record the fall of the largest meteorite in history, little suspecting the man-made agency behind it.

  York drew a deep breath. That mighty mass had rocketed straight down upon the marble home of the Three Eternals. By no stretch of imagination could they have survived.

  “York!”

  Kaligor, at the telescope, had given the sharp mental cry.

  “The marble building is still intact! The asteroid struck some shell of force over it, broke on that, and the pieces simply slid off into the ocean on all sides!”

  He followed this stunning, incredible announcement with an urgent warning.

  “Quickly! Lights off, ship unpowered, minds closed! They will be after us in a moment. We’re safer here than in trying to outdistance them after detection.”

  They waited for long hours, minds locked against mental probing, realizing the Eternals would not dare leave their island unless they detected the position of their quarry.

  At last, as before, a broadcast telepathic message rustled in their minds.

  “Did you think to catch us unawares, Kaligor and Anton York?” scoffed one of the Eternal Three. “We remembered that you had learned to move worlds before, Anton York. We expected you to try this. A trigger-touch dome of force protected the island and our home. Even if you should hurl the Moon down on us, we would shunt it aside. We dealt with world-moving forces long before you! Must we repeat over and over that you are as children to us? Children who must eventually be caught and punished?”

  York went to his controls and eased the ship away from Earth, following a regular liner route so that the Eternals’ detectors would not single them out.

  “Now what’s left, Kaligor?” he asked, biting his lip. “What’s left to try—and it’ll be the last try!”

  But Kaligor was sunk in the myths of his mind, in temporary escape from the stark, pressing problem that brought haggard lines to the faces of his two companions.

  “Mirbel!” his mind was murmuring, as they had first heard it murmuring from inside the steel block. “Mirbel, is that you? And Binti! I have been to a strange dream world, called—let me think—Earth! Earth, yes. I dreamed of struggle, futile opposition to super-scientists, but that is impossible, isn’t it, Mirbel? I’m the supreme scientist in the Universe! Binti, tell me it was a dream!”

  LOSING patience at last, York prodded the bemused Muan.

  “Wake up, Kaligor! This is no time to dream. In the name of the Universe, stop mumbling and talking to those two. They’re phantoms, figments, myths, dummies—do you understand?”

  York was immediately sorry for his outburst. But Kaligor came awake.

  “Phantoms! Figments!” he echoed. “Myths, dummies! Yes, you’re right.” Suddenly his telepathic contact broke, became a rush of jumbled thought. For a moment York thought he had again dropped into his enchanted spell, but his telepathic voice resumed, now clear, strong.

  “Anton York,” he said, “what is most important in all this—ourselves or the civilization we are trying to save?”

  “Civilization!” returned York without hesitation. “They are our people—yours and mine. They advance, slowly but surely.” Firmly he repeated: “The civilization—for what it is to become. It must be preserved, even at the cost of our lives!”

  York felt a strange embarrassment, with the last word, as though he had thrown it before the robot’s face.

  “I cannot die,” said Kaligor evenly. “No, but I can sacrifice to an equal extent.”

  “What are you driving at?” York demanded.

  “There is only one way to achieve that aim for which we would both make the final sacrifice,” continued Kaligor. “By decoying the Three Eternals away from the island long enough to blow it up!”

  Kaligor went on, and suddenly it was all starkly clear to York. . . .

  A year went by, a year in which York, Vera and Kaligor labored over intricate mechanisms.

  Then, one day, they faced the Eternals once again at their island. Kaligor sat hunched at the controls of the ship. His telepathic radiation issued from a human brain,. clothed in an unhuman shell. Their fleshly bodies offering sharp contrast York and Vera stood back of him, almost woodenly tense, as their plan was started.

  “We have a new weapon,” boasted Kaligor to the enemy. “One that will not fail, Eternals. Death comes to you—”

  Kaligor jerked a lever and a queer reddish beam sprang toward the enemy ship. It spangled against their screen, spread like red paint, but nothing else happened.

  “A puny force, no better than your others!” chorused the Eternals triumphantly. “Now you, Kaligor and Anton York, will greet that most final master—Death!”

  Again York’s screen blazed to near extinction, as the Eternals threw their heaviest beams against it. And York’s ship fled for the fourth time, as though this were some play that must be enacted over and over again for all eternity.

  Inside the ship, Kaligor manipulated the controls with his flexible, tentacular fingers. He drove the ship away at its utmost acceleration, arrowing into the open void. The more tender forms of York and Vera flattened against one wall, their eyes closing. Kaligor glanced at them and nodded in satisfaction. It would take the Eternals some time to catch up, at this superpace.

  On and on the chase went, at rates unknown and impossible to ordinary space ships that mankind knew. Mars flashed by, then the asteroids, Jupiter, and finally Pluto, and the two ships catapulted out into the outer immensity, exceeding the speed of light. This was the final pursuit. It could end in only one way.

  MALIGOR felt the mental probe of the Three Eternals, playing over the unconscious forms of York and Vera, as though wondering what had happened to them. Even, for a moment, their visual teleray flicked about. Both probes left finally, and the chase went on. Kaligor, though he could not g
rin physically, was certainly grinning within his human mind.

  Inevitably, the green-hulled ship crawled closer, closer. Finally, within range, it began to batter at the screen again. Kaligor watched the needle spin to the danger mark—and pass it. The screen was down!

  Flame leaped into the ship, searing, scorching. Metal glowed and melted. The two mortal bodies of York and Vera, still unmoving, unconscious, were touched by naked fire and then they began to dance and writhe. But only for a moment. Soon they were gone, consumed.

  “The final sacrifice!” murmured Kaligor, watching the ship bum away around him.

  Everything was consumed around Kaligor. But his body could not be consumed, He was out in space, free, the ship and all it had contained disintegrated to the last atom. A multitude of fiery stars decorated all space, watching indifferently this battle between super-beings.

  “Thus you have finally been defeated, Kaligor!” came the telepathic voice from the victorious Three Eternals. “Anton York and his mate are no more. And you—you will float through space, at your present velocity, for all eternity! It is a better end for you than what we had planned!”

  But no answer came from Kaligor, to his ancient enemies. Instead, they barely detected a faint rumble.

  “Binti! Mirbel! How good to see you again! I have just awakened from that dream. That dream of—what is it?—Earth! Binti, Mirbel, you are real. Not those others. They called you phantoms, Mirbel, and you, sweet Binti. They said you were just myths, figments of a dream I had spun in a long sleep. What was that other word? Yes, dummies. They called you dummies, and somehow, in that other dream of Earth, it was very significant, that word. Very significant, but I can’t remember—I can’t remember Binti Mirbel I will stay with you now—”

  “Dummies!”

  One of the Three Eternals roared that to the others.

  “Did you hear? I see it all now. We’ve been decoyed, lured away, while back on Earth—”

  York, back on Earth, turned away from the mind concentrator with which he had been projecting his thoughts out into space. Impinging on a delicate relay within the cleverly wrought dummy of himself aboard Kaligor’s ship, his mind had been there—as far as the Three Eternals’ mental probe had determined. Vera’s too. Now there was no reaction from the dummy-relay, proving the Eternals had finally caught up with Kaligor, after a long three-hour chase.

  “It worked, Vera!” York cried. “The Eternals have been decoyed at least beyond Pluto, thinking all the time that you and I were with Kaligor, when they were only lifelike dummies. Organic robots, really, since they held our thoughts. And pretty cleverly made—artificial protoplasm, exact duplicates of us, in case the Eternals used a visual check-up. Most important of all, the mental-relays within the dummies’ skull-cases.”

  HE laughed almost gaily. “The Three Eternals were fooled by one of the simplest, oldest tricks in the Universe!” Vera was less jubilant, more solemn. “Kaligor thought of it,” she murmured. “His dream world was of some use after all. And now just think, Tony”—her voice became soft, pitying—“he must float on and on, in boundless space, never to know death. His sacrifice has been more, much more, than ours will be! And yet, perhaps, he would have it so. He will continue creating his mental universe, which he loves, and in which he—belongs. He will live in it! Perhaps—who really knows?—it is as real as ours, to us. Life is all in the mind—” Her voice trailed away moodily.

  York nodded, subdued. Then he stirred himself and piloted his ship up and out of the dense island jungle in which it was hidden. It was his own ship. The one Kaligor had piloted away had been an outward duplicate, built secretly in Sol City’s great factories.

  “We have about three hours,” said York, “before the Eternals come back. Three hours for which Kaligor traded an eternity of helpless drifting.”

  A few minutes later their ship hovered over the atoll marked for demolition, so that a geological process started years before might be reversed. York set his gamma-sonic weapon for instantaneous decomposition of the entire island to a depth of five miles. His generators were loaded to the full.

  His lips pursed in anticipation as he depressed the button. Once again his unobtrusive violet ray shot forth from its gravity-fed power coils. Hissingly it struck the island, and the marble home of the absent Three Eternals, boring down at the speed of light.

  Layers of matter peeled away and vanished in puffs of soot. Before he ocean waters roared in to fill the breech, the five-mile pit had been formed.

  York flung his ship up at full speed as a spume of water spurted from the impact of walls of water crashing together with the force of solid steel. Down below, in the invisible depths of Earth that they had so recently quitted, a Titanic ground vibration had spawned. Like a match it would touch off the gunpowder of subsea plasma. There would be a clashing of Gargantuan forces, one started years before by the Eternals. For awhile the Behemoth of an earthquake would reign widely, on Earth’s surface. But then it would be over, and Earth would be quiet. . . .

  Three hours later, York found confirmation of his success. The bubbles arising from the Pacific floor had lessened by half. Mu was halting its slow upward climb. And in the Atlantic, a continent buried for twenty thousand years in its watery grave also ceased to seek an unnatural resurrection.

  “It is done!” breathed York, with quiet pride.

  Vera’s face _ strained for the past days, grew yet more haggard.

  “It is done!” she repeated, but with a deeper meaning. Suddenly she was in his arms, sobbing. “Is there no escape, Tony?”

  “I’m afraid not,” returned York, gently. “The Three Eternals will seek their vengeance. They are powerful beyond measure, as we know. It would do little good to try to hide, in space. Their long-range instruments would search us out, even light years away. Kaligor made his sacrifice. We must make ours, as we agreed.” He raised his head. “But Earth is saved. Earth gave us life. Kaligor too. We must think of it that way, my darling of the ages!”

  Vera dashed the tears from her eyes, bravely.

  “We have lived a full life, Tony dearest. Love, understanding, and wisdom beyond the lot of ordinary humans have been ours. We have touched the stars for a brief moment, reveled for a bit of eternity. Dreamed a beautiful dream of immortality, like Kaligor. But we could not escape the laws of Fate, as we did the laws of life. It is over and I am content!”

  They kissed, and clung to one another tightly, in their last embrace. Like gods they had lived, but unlike gods, they must die. The finger of a greater destiny had so decreed.

  Not long after, the powerful telepathic voice of the Three Eternals beat in upon their minds. Their ship appeared, dropping from the sky vulturously. Bluntly, seeing the key-island destroyed, they promised swift death. York spun his ship away, as though trying to escape the inevitable. The large ovoid ship of the Three followed inexorably.

  Pursued and pursuing, they shot far into space, out among the emptiness they both knew so well. When they had gone so far that York knew Earth could not be harmed by what was to come, he stopped. Grimly, he set his giant gravity coils, loaded to capacity with world-moving power. Then he smiled as he took Vera in his arms to await the end calmly.

  Unknowing of his voluntary sacrifice, the Three Eternals rammed toward his ship enough power to grind it to sub-atomic shreds. It was like the lighting of a bomb. York’s ship released its groaning load of energy in one colossal charge. The ether itself writhed.

  Both ships vanished! Back on Earth, every electrical instrument burned out entirely from the mighty reaction waves that had resulted.

  They were gone, the gods that Earth knew. Greek mythology and the mythology of Anton York would carry on the legends of their exploits, in distorted form. But the gods themselves were one with infinity. But there would be no mythology of Kaligor, the Eternal Dreamer. Indestructible, falling perhaps eventually into the hot core of some sun, his dream would go on on

  1940

  ADAM LINK IN BUS
INESS

  Adam Link finds out that human hearts are not machines and discovers for the first time the real meaning of human love.

  CHAPTER I

  Pardon . . . Or Death?

  I AM a robot, a contrivance of wheels and wires, but I have also that human attribute of “emotion.” This is proven—to me at least—by one thing.

  When my reprieve came, I fainted. I had been marching down the jail hall in that “last, long mile,” between guards. Ahead of me waited the electric chair, for the “murder” of my creator, Dr. Link. I saw, through the open door, the solemn group of witnesses, and the electrical machine in which I would sit, in another moment, and have my brain burned to blankness by surging, searing energy. My metal face shows no emotion. But within, my thoughts were sad, bitter. I had been ordered by man to get out of his world.

  And then, suddenly, shouts in back. People running up. A court official in the lead was yelling for the governor, who had come from the state capital to witness this unprecedented execution of a created being, an intelligent robot.

  And then I saw a face I knew—that of the young reporter who had defended me in his editorials, and shaken hands with me after my sentence, in sympathy. He was flushed, panting. My gaze swerved and I was startled to see several other faces I knew.

  The governor came hurrying out of the death-chamber.

  “What is the meaning of this?” he demanded.

  The young reporter stepped forward boldly. “I’m Jack Hall, sir, of the Evening Post,” he said clearly, in the hushed silence. “The state has convicted an innocent—man! Adam Link is not the murderer of Dr. Charles Link. I demand that you listen to me!”

  He was being unnecessarily dramatic, but quite forgivably, I decided later. He signaled to a young man and woman, standing arm in arm, staring at me in eager fascination.