The Collected Stories

by Earl

  “ZlkZee!” he screamed, running forward.

  The spider-man was among the last 25 who marched to the magnet. He stepped under it just before MacLean arrived. A surge of power, as the great magnet drew psychons from his mind. Then only a body lay on the floor, the limbs stiffening in almost instant death.

  ZlkZee had given his pitiful few psychons.

  MacLean stared down with queerly bright eyes.

  “Shake, pal!” he whispered.

  Kaine could almost hear the spider-man’s ever-ready reply: “Which one, monster?”

  Kaine turned away. “Come on, Lon—Lon!”

  A hum of invisible forces. A body. Stiffening lips that would never again say: “Eh, Terry lad?”

  KAINE stumbled away. It was all a blur now, a terrible ache. Kylar was shaking his shoulder.

  “Dr. Zoll just stepped out again. He’s working. He must give us that formula. He must!”

  Kaine looked around. There were only the three of them left. All the personnel of the place had joined the parade of death unflinchingly.

  There were only the three of them, one a super-mind. Dr. Zoll was busy with his hands, swiftly setting up a strange apparatus. Faster and faster he worked, till his movements were almost a blurr to the two watchers. His fingers worked with the rapidity of a super-mind that needed only seconds for what might ordinarily have taken hours and days of concentrated thought and study.

  “They’re here!” Kylar screeched suddenly. “The Tharkyans!”

  Outside, beyond the rock wall that hid them, they heard low, whining thumps. Dis-bolts were being hurled against the cliff, to batter down this last remaining partition.

  Kaine grasped Dr. Zoll’s arm.

  “The formula,” he demanded. “Can you give us that formula in the next five minutes?”

  The ape-scientist made no answer. His movements doubled their speed.

  The ground under them trembled, as great masses of rock outside broke loose and thundered down under the hammering of the Tharkyan dis-cannon.

  Suddenly, a hollow boom sounded. One dis-bolt had worked through. A second rammed in, screeching over their heads and cracking into the wall beyond.

  “A few more shots and the roof will collapse!” Kylar moaned. “Bury us under tons of rock. If Dr. Zoll doesn’t give me that formula to transmit within a minute—”

  The ape-man abruptly stopped working. His hairy face was infinitely tired—but triumphant.

  “You have it?” Kylar cried eagerly. “Give me the formula.”

  Dr. Zoll shook his head. “No time to set it down. It would take an hour. And no other scientist in the galaxy would understand it!”

  Kaine’s shoulders sagged. Dr. Zoll had succeeded, but too late. His triumph was purely the triumph of scientific discovery. He would probably die happy, under the Tharkyan guns, knowing he had done a great piece of research.

  Research that would be buried forever and uselessly under a crumbling mountain! Supreme jest of the gods!

  Tharkyans appeared now, in the gap they had blasted through the rock wall. Dozens of them ran up, with hand-guns ready. Spying the three men, they spread in a semi-circle, converging slowly. Guns raised, aimed. In another second, their blasting bolts would wipe out the last of the Legion of Freedom.

  Kylar straightened his old body, waiting calmly for death.

  Kaine visioned Veloa’s lovely face. He would go out with that comforting picture in his mind.

  XVI

  DR. ZOLL, however, seemed unperturbed. Carelessly, one hairy paw flipped over a stud. From the mouth of his apparatus flowed a queer silvery light. It seemed to lazily drift toward the Tharkyans, like vagrant smoke.

  Kaine started violently. What was happening?

  The Tharkyans were shrinking visibly.

  Kaine’s scalp prickled. He felt weirdly as though he had seen an eternity sweep by, and an infinity loom before his reeling mind.

  The Tharkyans vanished into specks that were lost in an appalling abyss. The silvery light crawled further. It laved through the rock aperture, out over the other Tharkyans. They all dwindled and vanished. Their ships shrank to toys and then into microscopic invisibility. Surrounding trees and rocks within range suffered the same strange fate.

  Kaine shook his head, clearing his eyes. Nothing remained of the enemy, or the space they had landed in. Only a flat lifeless stretch of bed-rock, down to which the silver ray had eaten.

  “Saved!” Kylar breathed. “How was it done, Dr. Zoll?”

  “This apparatus—or gun—shoots out infinitrons and eternitrons,” the ape-scientist murmured dreamily. “It shoved them into infinity and eternity. I can explain it no more clearly.”

  “The weapon!” Kaine whispered. “The weapon we need to defeat Tharkya! How soon can more be made?”

  “More?” Dr. Zoll seemed astonished. “You need only one. Mount it on your ship. Go to Tharkya. Keep it radiating about you. No enemy can come within range of their weapons, without first slipping into an infinite pit, for the rest of eternity!”

  “Just one?” Kaine cried. “But Dr. Zoll—”

  He stopped with a gasp.

  The ape-scientist’s face twisted loosely. A foolish, vapid grin came over it.

  “Two plus two makes five. Ha, that is the great secret of the universe. Let’s dance!”

  Dr. Zoll began cavorting madly. Kaine and Kylar watched in horror. Suddenly the ape-man stopped in mid-stride. His hairy paws tore at his head in agony. Something seemed to snap inside, like a bursting bomb. Soundlessly, the ape-scientist sank to the floor.

  “Dead!” Kylar shuddered. “He gave his life too. He died mad. His brain burned out under the burden of a thousand others. He was a super-mind only for a day!”

  “But he left a super-weapon,” Kaine murmured. “Come, we’ll mount it, and go to Tharkya.”

  THE stars watched in astonishment.

  A lone ship arrowed through the void. Openly, it aimed for Tharkya. Patrol ships hounded toward it, to blast the defiant attacker. But they never reached within gun-range. At some moment long before, they vanished from the known universe, as a queer silvery light bathed them.

  Majestically, the little ship went on. Within, Kaine and Kylar felt almost like gods. At their fingertips reposed more frightful power than any being in the galaxy had ever before known to exist. Kaine did it with almost sadistic finesse. He circled the ship around Tharkya first, ripping aside the Dark Nebula veil behind which it hid. Tharkya lay exposed to the glaring eyes of the billions of suns of the galaxy, like some evil flower.

  Then he lowered the ship, skimming over the giant planet’s surface. Where his super-ray touched, the things of Tharkya puffed away. Hours he circled over the planet, cutting wide swaths in their magnificent city, as they so often had cut paths of ruin over other worlds.

  Patrol ships swarmed around by the thousands—only to vanish under the silvery scythe. Nothing could stop the vengeance of the lone ship.

  “Half of Tharkya is gone,” Kylar said at last, in awe. “Their power is already broken. Shall we be merciful and let the rest live—”

  “No!” Kaine burst in savagely. “No mercy for the Tharkyans, who took untold billions of lives, in their million years of rule. The penalty is complete extermination. No mercy, for the monsters who took Veloa’s poor, frail body and . . . but enough of this playing!”

  Lips set in a dead, grim smile, Kaine sent the ship over the energon-vault, then down. The super-ray ate away the bastions as if they were paper. A great hole yawned. Down below lay crystallized energy, gathered for an age.

  Infinitrons and eternitrons met energons.

  Two of the mightiest forces in the universe.

  The explosion that followed seemed to rock the stars!

  One moment Tharkya lay underneath them, huge and solid. The next moment it was debris. Pieces of it were to land as meteorites on other worlds, for the next thousand years. One great chunk, a century later, was to inadvertently fall upon a busy world and
destroy it.

  Tharkya was no more. The colossus had fallen.

  Kaine gazed at Thark, the sun robbed of its planet. The explosion had not harmed their ship. Flying matter that would have crushed any other ship was warded off by the super-ray.

  “It’s over!” Kyler whispered. “A million years of overlordship is ended. And we did it!”

  “Yes, we did it,” Kaine said quietly. He half turned, as though including two others who were not there to share this final triumph in the flesh.

  He broke from a trance, then, to stride purposefully to the super-ray projector. Carefully shutting it off, he pulled wires loose, then smashed it with a wrench. He eyed Kylar meaningly. It was too appallingly a powerful force to be left in existence. Whoever possessed it was king of the universe. There would be no more king of the universe.

  Kylar turned his white-haired, noble head up to the stars.

  “There will never again be rule by force!” he said solemnly. “I will form the InterGalactic Democracy of Worlds immediately. Take me to Dymoor!”

  THREE days later, the ship descended over the other-Earth. The great news was still ringing through a stunned, wildly joyous galaxy. A flock of Dymooran craft, waiting, rose to greet them. A week of holiday had been proclaimed from one end of the Milky Way to the other. Air-sirens screamed and a vast procession escorted them to the port. Stepping out, they faced a cheering sea of faces.

  “Terry, smile!” Kylar was shaking his arm. “This is for you as well as for me. How can you be so sober in this moment of glory?”

  “Veloa!” Terry groaned. “I destroyed Tharkya. But before that, Tharkya destroyed her!”

  Kylar stared in surprise.

  “Didn’t you know?” he gasped, shaking his head with a strange, soft smile. “I thought you knew of our Dymooran medical arts. I thought you knew that all this while Veloa was under treatment.”

  “Treatment?” Kaine echoed vaguely.

  “Certainly. Bion treatment. It—”

  Kylar broke off, pointing. “But look, here comes Veloa!”

  She was pressing through the crowd, escorted by Dr. Voro and Korio. With an eager gasp, she reached him.

  Kaine stared. She was dressed in a light summer costume, revealing much of her body. It was the body he had first seen—lithe, slender, graceful. There was not a mark of other things!

  Kaine closed his eyes, groaning a little. It must be an illusion. His tortured mind had gone under, visioning things that couldn’t be. Certainly this was a miracle beyond all telling. And miracles weren’t scientific.

  “Miracle?” Dr. Voro scoffed, and Kaine realized he had been mumbling aloud. “What’s miraculous about it? Neutrons are the units of matter. Electrons of electricity. Photons of light, spacions of space, chronons of time, energons of energy. Psychons of thought, as you’ve recently discovered. It’s been known for a long time that there are also units of life—bions! Not a miracle, but a good job, if I say so myself. It was simply a matter of rebuilding tissue with those building blocks of bions and—”

  Kaine didn’t hear any more. The roars of the crowd faded to another realm, too. He heard only Veloa’s softly chiming voice.

  “Terry! I’ve come to you at last, the way I wanted. I didn’t want you to know till it was done.” She screamed a little. “Terry—not in front of all these people. . . .”

  But Terry chose not to hear that either.

  1942

  VIA JUPITER

  Hardship and Disaster Stalk Brave Men of Science on a Bitter Outpost of Ganymede! Locked in Jupiter’s Gravity, the Secret of the Martian Pyramid Baits a Deadly Trap!

  CHAPTER I

  Trouble in the Asteroids

  HELLO, Earth!

  Jupiter Expedition Number One reporting, via etherline code radio. Operator Gillway at the keys, with very numb fingers. We are far from the sun, in a sector of space that hardly knows the word heat. Ninety-second day since leaving Earth.

  We landed an hour ago—on Ganymede, of course, largest moon of Jupiter. We could not think of landing on Jupiter itself. Its crushing gravity would have pulled our ship down like a stone. Perhaps in the future, powerful enough engines will be made for a try. But at least we are in the Jovian system, to observe at close quarters the wonders of this faraway planet.

  It has been a tremendous journey—three months in space, 400 million miles, eight times as far as the Mars hop. Even that swing around the sun, from the Venus Expedition back to Earth, was only 200 million. All these three months, the sun has steadily dwindled. It’s little more than a very bright star to us now.

  We had some excitement, going through the asteroids. In the future, spaceships may be able to carry enough fuel to arch over the Asteroid Belt, but we had to drill right through and take our chances. It was easy enough, with the staff of experts on Earth, to plot a course that would avoid all known asteroids.

  But all aren’t known! Some five thousand have been observed telescopically from Earth. Markers estimates, from the number we passed per cubic mile, that there must be a total of at least fifty thousand!

  One day alone, we skittered by one hundred thirty asteroids, ranging from the size of a house up. Cold, airless, bleak little worldlets, like a toy universe. They flashed ahead and behind briefly, like stars playing a game of hide-and-seek with us. They would momentarily loom from the side ports, as we plunged past, spinning on their separate axes, sparkling in the sun like big gems.

  Colorful, yes. So we thought the first few days, till one zoomed by so closely that our rocket blast actually touched it with spreading flame. We gasped, and felt sick at the thought of colliding head-on with one of the wandering nomads of the void.

  Captain Atwell thereafter instituted a three-shift watch. In each watch, three men kept vigil. Two changed off at the telescope, peering ahead for unknown asteroids on our course. The third sat at the rocket controls, ready on instant’s notice to apply off-side blasts.

  It was well we did. Karsen suddenly tensed at the telescope, one day, during watch. Then he screamed, staggering back, and Parletti jumped to the telescope.

  “Asteroid ahead!” he yelled. “Shift right—God!—hurry—”

  At the controls, Tarnay promptly rammed over the off-side throttle. The rocket blasts shot the ship off obliquely, in a side-slip. The asteroid, a jagged lump of space-frozen rock a mile in diameter, lumbered past our nose with feet to spare.

  ALL this was told to the rest of us by the three on watch, Parletti, Tarnay and Karsen. We had been asleep. We rushed from the bunkroom, rubbing our eyes, but only saw the asteroid as a dwindling body behind us. Captain Atwell gave Parletti and Tarnay a nod.

  “Good work, men,” he said. Then he slowly fastened his eyes on Karsen. “Was it you who screamed, Karsen? If Parletti hadn’t been so quick—”

  He left the thought unfinished. Karsen, in a panic, had failed to give the rocketman the proper information in time, and had nearly brought about our doom. It had to be split-second teamwork, with asteroid and ship moving miles a second.

  Atwell finished tersely. “You are relieved from further watch, Karsen.” We all gave Karsen a rather pitying look. We could see she took it hard. She bit her lips and—oh, yes, it just occurs to me that I haven’t explained about Karsen being a woman. We’ve taken it for granted, since we discovered that fact three months ago, at the start.

  I’ll resume later, about her. There is one more thing I want to mention about the asteroids.

  Halloway says the asteroids are definitely linked with the mystery of the pyramids, but would not clarify himself. The statement excited us all. More than anything, on this expedition, we would like to come back with that enigma solved.

  We’ve been reviewing what we know about the pyramids.

  On the first of all expeditions into space, Mars Expedition Number One, there was found a pyramid. A pyramid so like the Egyptian pyramids of Earth that we could hardly believe our eyes. It meant either the Egyptians had been on Mars, or the ancient Martian
s had been on Earth. The latter is more plausible.

  Then, the expeditions to Venus and Mercury found similar pyramids, and it was obvious that the extinct Martians had been to those planets. And possibly to Jupiter and the rest!

  As for the reason why such structures should be on various worlds—that’s anybody’s guess, so far. Had the Martians built them only as time-lasting record crypts? Perhaps. But we feel, somehow, that they have a greater significance. That they represent a mighty achievement by the Martians, involving all or most of the planets.

  And so, on this expedition to Jupiter, we hope to find another link in the chain—and perhaps the key to the “Secret of the Pyramids.” Well, time will tell.

  To get back to Karsen.

  First of all, Halloway, as you know, was the only official replacement among the ten men who had been to Mercury and back on our previous expedition. Robertson died on Earth, ironically, after braving the dangers of Mercury. Halloway replaced him, as official archeologist. His father, on Earth, has done monumental work in translating many of the pyramid records, and we think he deserves the honor of having his son along on this trip. Pyramids should be on Jupiter too.

  Thus, young Halloway replaced the deceased Robertson. They left the other nine supposedly intact. Captain Atwell, Parletti, Markers and myself, veterans of all the previous expeditions into space—to Mars, Venus and Mercury. Von Zell, Ling, Tarnay, Swinerton, of the Mercury Expedition—and Lon Karsen.

  But we have with us Lonna Karsen, sister of Lon Karsen! We wonder if you have discovered that on Earth.

  WE found it out the third day from Earth. We had noticed that Karsen’s voice seemed strained in a higher pitch, and he rarely spoke. Seemed to want to keep out of our way. We were too interested in the thrill of heading for Jupiter to take much notice at the time. Not even that Karsen mysteriously had two hands again, after having lost one on Venus! Sometimes those small things escape you.

  The third day, on Ganymede, the cat jumped out of the bag. Or rather, the mouse ran from the larder. There was a feminine scream, and then we stared open-mouthed. Karsen was standing on a bunk, tugging at her space-jumpers, forgetting it was not a skirt. Tugging with two hands!