by Earl
“It was never known. Not one glimpse of those mysterious people is recorded. Life has gone on, as it must. We have almost come to forget how it all started. All _ we concern ourselves with is the survival against the Beasts.”
York bit his lip. The mystery was still unexplained. The dome builders had not vouched one item of information to their bell jar specimens. Nor, probably, to any of the other kidnaped beings in all the other domes.
Rage shook Anton York. It was coldblooded, autocratic, cruel if not actually vicious—this experimentation with generations upon generations of poor, marooned groups of beings. Something must be done!
CHAPTER VI
Other Eyes Watching
IN THE following days, York found out all he could ever find out, under the dome itself. The village of the Free Ones housed about six thousand people. Their fields and hunting ground occupied a little more than half of the total space under the dome. Beyond a narrow river that bisected the area was the territory in control of the hypn-beasts and their mental slaves. It was understood that the slaves numbered about four thousand. But their life-span was short, for the Beasts bred them as food.
In all, then, there were ten thousand human beings under the dome, in this isolated bit of Earth. That meant over three hundred persons per square mile, more crowded than Europe had been before the scientific era of soilless crops! Under those circumstances, waging a grim battle against the Beasts constantly, science had not had a chance to advance. The few deposits of metal ores and important minerals had long since been worked out. Metal was hoarded like gold.
fork’s observations included the river. Watering the territory, it sprang from undergound, near one dome wall, and vanished underground again at the opposite side. A thousand feet above, under the center of the dome, he could vaguely see the giant, gleaming apparatus that duplicated sunlight in regular twenty-four hour periods. At times it puffed out clouds, showers and even fogs. Outside the dome was a hydrocarbon atmosphere, a climate ranging from Uranian cold to Mercurian heat under a variable Cepheid sun. In here was a bit of Ireland or California.
The builders had done a perfect job. But why? The question rang like a gong in York’s mind. And gradually he came to have the feeling of being watched. He sensed eyes above that looked down, coldly and scientifically, watching over all and recording the pulse of life beneath. It was a maddening sensation.
York felt like screaming at times, though for two thousand years he had learned to control his emotions with almost godlike equanimity. The other people had come to accept dome life as normal, natural, and all else as illusion or legend.
York temporarily shelved the matter of the grand purpose behind all this. The immediate problem was the hypno-beasts. If he could do something against them, he would perhaps be foiling in some small way the scheme of the master-scientists.
ONE horrible thought lurked in his mind.
Suppose the dome builders were propagating the hypno-beasts for the eventual purpose of dominating the universe with them?
“We hope to conquer the Beasts in due time,” Robar informed him. “In each generation a higher percentage of the children are almost completely immune to the Beasts’ hypnotic powers. For the first thousand years, the village of Free Ones was small and barely escaped extinction hundreds of times. But in the past thousand years our numbers have increased. Today we outnumber the slave group. In another few centuries—”
“Too long to wait,” York interrupted. “The hypno-beasts are semi-intelligent, but not scientific. Science can destroy them. How do your guns operate?”
Examination proved that the rifles were models of the flint-lock muskets of the nineteenth century. The bullets were of hard wood, to conserve metal. The propellant was powdered charcoal. Because of the peculiar laws of this universe, the mere firing of a pinch of charcoal had the power of guncotton, as York’s rocket had worked with slow-burning phosphorus.
“There’s some all-embracing equation behind it all,” York told himself. “If I could only find it, I’d have the power to wipe out the Beasts, blast down the dome, and face the master race—”
A horn sounded, on this third day. It was the alarm of attack. Instantly the village mobilized. Men marched to the river, York with them. The enemy troops had crossed in wooden boats and now lay scattered behind bushes and low hills. The Free Ones took to cover and it settled down to sniping.
York, with a rifle resting in a tree crotch, could not bring himself to fire at the figures he sighted now and then. They were human, after all, even if bent on killing their own kind under the command of the hypno-beasts. The Beasts were there, across the river, directing their forces by long-range hypnosis. York could feel the subtle pull of it.
The sniping dragged on for hours, till the Free Ones flanked and drove the attackers back. They did a revolting thing. Hoisting their dead to their shoulders, they deposited them on the other bank, at the feet of the Beasts, who then fed. That seemed to be the sole purpose of the attack, unless it was revenge for the beast killed by York.
The opposing forces left the river bank and vanished toward their village. The short battle was over. York watched as the Free Ones went among their dead and cut them in ribbons so that all the blood drained into the ground. The grisly business was done stoically. In the curious economy of the little patch of Earth, it served to foil any chance of the Beasts feeding on them, and it also fertilized the ground.
BACK in the village, York found the girl Leela standing among the wounded. She bravely choked back tears as she stared down at her lover’s white face.
“He will live,” she whispered. “But he will never walk again. He was paralyzed by a a shot in the spine. Oh, Anton York, can’t you help me?”
She was suddenly weeping against his shoulder. York patted her soothingly, and then set his lips.
“Do you want to take a chance?” he asked her. “A chance that he will be whole again—or die?”
“I trust you, Anton York,” the girl said instantly.
He operated. Centuries before, against the day when some physical accident might try to rob him of Vera, York had studied surgical technique and become adept. With a skill that no Earthly surgeon had ever approached, he removed the bullet with a sharp knife. Antiseptic herbs that the people cultivated protected the wound. The young man passed into a restful sleep from which he would awake fully restored.
York waved aside the girl’s gratitude and shook a fist up toward the peak of the dome. Within him, rage had become a tidal force. They were playing at being gods up above, the merciless dome builders, unmoved by these tragedies.
They must be out to conquer the universe, breeding the horrible hypno-beasts as their scavenging horde! And it must be stopped.
But how? York, super-scientist of Earth’s Universe, would have tried. But York, scienceless orphan in a new, unknown universe, was practically helpless.
A YEAR passed. York spent most of his time with endless computations. For a blackboard he used a patch of sand and a stick. Again and again he laboriously worked out equations for the new universe’s master laws, only to find, by simple tests, that they were wrong. All the while he had the feeling of being watched. And to worry him further, what had become of Vera? Had she run out of food or air supplies? Had she been captured?
One day she seemed near him. He shrugged off the hallucination, but suddenly jumped up. It was her mental voice crying, faint and far away. York followed it like a radio beam and came to a portion of the dome wall where it was strongest.
“Vera!” he telepathed. Most of his mental vibration surged back from the wall, but some leaked through. “Vera, are you there? We’re taking a chance, contacting like this.” Then he became tenderly eager. “Are you all right, my darling of the ages?”
“Yes, Tony. I can See you. You look thin and haggard. I had to come. I’ve been distilling the planet air, and eating the pulp of the twenty-two day plants. I’m all right.”
York briefly recounted his yea
r of separation from her.
“I’m all right, too, but I have to solve the master laws of this universe.”
“Tony, that’s why I came. I’ve been working on computations, also. It came to me suddenly. Entropy, Tony—This universe has a lower entropy. Exactly one point, one-six-four. I measured it.”
It struck fire in York’s mind.
“That’s it, Vera! Good girl. But now, go quickly before the dome people detect you. I’ll work out the laws. I’ll wipe out the hypno-beasts, and then break out of the dome, one way or another.”
“Be careful, dear.” With that, Vera’s mental voice moved away.
York returned to the village, his brain buzzing. Entropy, of course! Not only slower light, slower sound and “longer” space, but also a slower entropy—slower dissipation of energy in this universe. It accounted for the relatively high potential energy in slow-burning fuels. This universe had not run down as much as Earth’s Universe.
With this vital clue, York’s equations began to take life. Formulas dovetailed, and the ubiquitous zero did not always crop up to mock him. In another month, he had calculated the elements of a ray weapon, freed of the clumsiness of propellant guns.
He called Robar and the Congress to session. The men looked at him a little strangely.
“What is it, Anton York?” Robar asked. “We are not sure if you are a madman or not. For a year you have spent your time hunched over a plot of sand, making marks with a stick. What have you been trying to do?”
“Discover science for you.”
“Science? We do not even know the word.”
YORK began at the beginning. “After the time of your forefathers, science arose on the Original World. Machines were made that do all things. Also weapons of war. Weapons, for instance, that blast things to bits. I am going to make one. I will need help and metals. Most of your rifles will have to be melted.”
Robar looked dubious. “It will be dangerous partially to disarm ourselves. And how do we know that you are not merely a madman?”
The gods must be laughing at the irony, York thought. But he could not blame them. They knew nothing of him, or even of science. York picked up a little quartzite pebble that he saw on the floor.
“If I make this stone shine in the dark,” he demanded, “will you agree?”
They nodded. York went out and returned with the radium capsule of his suit’s heating coil. Radium and radioactivity were two things not greatly changed by the new universe’s laws. Holding the radium point near the stone, it shone fluorescently in the dark. The councillors exclaimed in wonder. The project began.
York met and conquered what seemed insuperable difficulties in the next six months. Metals had different melting points in this universe, glass had altered properties, and electricity had new values for its ohm, ampere and volt. But at last he had a workable radium battery that shot its current through a series of interlaced coils behind a convex mirror of polished steel. The whole was mounted on a large-wheeled base.
It was heavy and clumsy, and so crudely worked that even an artisan of the late Stone Age might have laughed. But it held a giant of power.
At the final test, York clapped together the contact handles of his switch. Electricity pulsed through the coils. A field of strain surrounded a metal bar. Its end, at the focus, became a diamond of incandescence—and atomic disintegration. An energy ray of neutrons hissed from the cathode mirror. It stabbed invisibly for a lone tree which had been picked out as the target. The tree cracked in half, its mid-portion blasted to atoms.
The villagers cried aloud in fear and wonder, and their faces plainly said, “Witchcraft!” York wondered what they would say if they knew he had once, in his own Universe, moved the planet Mercury. Yet York himself was stirred by the simple blasting of the tree. It marked the first step in his conquest of the new universe’s laws of science and power. Back in his ship’s lab, if he could get there, he would be in a position to wield powerful forces—defy the dome builders!
But first, the hypno-beasts. . . .
CHAPTER VII
Escape from the Dome
M-DAY reigned in the village. Every able-bodied male flocked to the banner. This was not to be a war, but a crusade against the hated Beasts. Once and for all, under this dome, they would be exterminated. As York led his two thousand grim, determined men, he had the curious thought that in any Earthly war they would be worth ten thousand other fighters. For in their breasts beat the tidal wave of hate nurtured for twenty centuries.
They crossed the river, most of them swimming, holding their rifles high. York’s machine was pulled across on a raft. On the opposite shore, in enemy territory, sentry lines retreated till reinforcement came. In a pitched battle, York’s yelling men smashed through. They took prisoners wherever possible. For when the Beasts were gone, these poor mental slaves would again be free, normal humans.
The army marched on the Beast village. It was a sprawling, filthy mass of hovels, but suitably protected by a high wooden wall manned by riflemen. The approach was an open field. York’s men could employ no strategy except to scatter and crawl forward from clump to clump of grass. Bullets whined, picking them off.
York gave his instructions to Darrill, Leela’s young man, who was commander.
“Get your men as close to the wall as you can, without too much loss of life. Give me time to set up my machine and aim. Then rush in and mop up. Kill all the Beasts you can.”
Darrill nodded and his men crawled forward, like the plainsmen of old stalking the wily Indian. York went over his machine’s parts carefully, then aimed it for the nearest part of the city wall. He pressed the contact switch. His first blast went high, thundering harmlessly against the dome wall beyond.
His second struck. A ten-foot portion of the stockade burst into flying splinters. Two men, slaves of the Beasts, went with it as mere splinters of flesh. Again and again York knifed his switch, hurling detonations of neutrons, raking the village wall. It became a saw-edged ruin.
The village beyond was exposed to attack!
Now Robar’s forces arose and charged. The Beasts, in their quasi-human cunning, rallied their slave-men to the breaches. They poured a withering fire at the attackers. York hated to do it, but he swept his supermachine-gun across the defenders’ ranks. Slave-men and Beasts fell in bloody tangles.
Robar’s forces reached the village, stormed in, and began mopping up. Since most of them were at least partially immune to the hypnosis, by heredity, they promised to make it short work.
York stood tensely. Why hadn’t the dome builders interfered? He had half expected it. He was prepared to swing the snout of his super-gun up, if they appeared, and blast venomously at them. If they had some weapon ready at the dome’s peak, and fired down, York would blast down the dome even if that meant a choking death.
IT was a grim moment, for that was York’s first challenge to the dome builders. But not a sign came from the mysterious watchers.
The Beasts in the village did not accept extermination so easily, however. York had not noticed what went on at the back of the village, where a stretch of concealing forest grew to the wall edge. He was suddenly aware of danger to himself. A force of hypno-beasts and about fifty Slave-men were creeping up at his side.
Alone with his machine, York was surrounded. The men, at their masters’ commands, raised their rifles. A fusillade of bullets would riddle York and shatter his machine. Whatever the outcome of the village battle, York would meet his end.
Death and Anton York stood face to face.
Was this the way in which the dome-scientists were retaliating? Were they controlling the Beasts as they controlled the slave-men, giving them the mental command to kill York?
York first darted his hand for the switch. At least he would take with him some of the enemy. A second thought clutched him. He had easily snapped, at first try, the hypnotic-power of the hypno-beast he had once met. Suppose he hurled the full power of his mentality at them now?
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br /> In his two thousand years of life, York had come to learn something of the limitless depths of power within the mind. He had at times used hypnosis himself, and telekinesis. He rang out a call now tip the cosmic fed radiogens of his brain. A field of force radiated from him. His mental force met and challenged the combined mental force of the five hypno-beasts.
A strange, silent battle was being fought there. . . .
One lone man stood rigid, surrounded by five repulsive, rigid Beasts. No physical movement betrayed the fact that between them had sprung mental forces of tremendous magnitude. The slave-men cowered, mere brawling pawns in this psychic war. Whichever won, York or the Beasts, would command the slave-men to kill the other.
Perhaps a second passed, perhaps ten minutes. York felt the growing strain. Sweat ran down his face. His brain seemed to be burning alive as his immortality radiogens poured their energy into the field of mental force. He could not stand it much longer. His brain would burn out like an overloaded generator.
THE ending was curiously undramatic.
One of the Beasts seemed to sigh suddenly. It toppled over, head drooping on its serpentine neck, Medusa eyes closing. It was through, burned out! Another followed, then two more.
The last held out. Its eyes locked with York’s. York, reeling, called forth one more surge of mind energy.
The last beast toppled. With a snap, the spell broke.
“Shoot the Beasts,” York commanded mentally.
Obediently the slave-men poured bullets into the fallen bodies. They jerked convulsively and died. York slipped to the ground, drained of energy, and fell into a state that was more a coma than sleep.
When he came to, young Darrill was splashing water in his face.
“Anton York,” he cried joyfully. “The village is ours! We killed many of the Beasts. But about half escaped, running to the woods.”
York pulled himself together.
“No time to lose,” he said. “Organize a Beast-hunt. String your immune ones in a wide line had drive the Beasts into the open, past my machine. Every last one must he exterminated.”