by Perry Rhodan
10,000 YEARS PAST
THE SUNKEN WORLD–what was it like before it sank? One man of the future knows for he was there, in its prime and at its end. The Crystal Prince... the immortal... Time's Lonely One: Atlan!
Atlan the Arkonide, already eternal, while Rhodan and Bell, aboard the spaceship Drusus, have landed on the synthetic planet Wanderer in order to seek a boon from It, the mysterious multiplex intelligence–another 'draught' from the 'Fountain of Youth'.
When something unexpected occurs which causes Pucky to fear for the lives of Rhodan and Bell, Atlan cuts short his flashback to the ancient island, where we witness—
THE LAST DAYS OF ATLANTIS
1/ RUNAWAY REJUVENATION
A CELESTIAL ORB synthetically constructed by means of an unimaginable technology, it was a world without horizons.
Super-intelligent beings had built and established something here that forced an exclamation of wonderment and admiration from my lips during those first moments of my arrival.
Far overhead near the barely discernible defense screen, the glowing ball of an artificially created sun glided along its prescribed course. On the planet Wanderer, so named by Perry Rhodan, technological and scientific perfection reigned supreme. After having looked about in the various control rooms I realized that all the knowledge and skill of my own venerable race was meagre by comparison, having been far surpassed by what I saw here.
An apparently ancient galactic people had immortalized here what we Arkonides had only hoped to discover someday. When I thought of Arkon, my distant home, I was overcome again with sadness, and yet upon closer self-inspection I realized that my longing and nostalgia for the tri-planet world of my origin was not as burning as of yore.
Slightly more than half a mile away from my position, the gigantic steel hull of a spaceship towered into the blue sky of this synthetic world, which had been surrounded by a mighty screen of energy. It was the Drusus, a super battleship of Arkonide design but constructed on Earth.
Nothing had convinced me more of the rise of the formerly barbaric human race than this latest and most modern addition to the Terranian spacefleet. Its spherical hull was approximately one mile in diameter, exclusive of the equatorial ring bulge.
Perhaps it was this spaceship and other such examples that had allowed my longing for an eventual return to my home world to become less insistent. My long existence on the planet of humans had all but erased the impressions of my younger years. Memories of Arkon had grown dim and vague.
I squinted upward toward the synthetic sun and tried to consider by what technical wizardry the nuclear ball was being held in its circular orbit inside the bell-shaped energy field that protected Wanderer from the vacuum of space.
I thought of recent events with a shudder. Wanderer had been trapped in another time-plane by an overlapping of the two dimensions. The ruling intelligences of the alien universe had not wanted the artificial planet to escape and so it came about that the eerie collective entity of Wanderer had brought all the might of its technological powers into play. This had finally resulted in a transition-like hyperjump out of the Druuf plane of existence.
Nevertheless, Perry Rhodan and I were mutually faced with the problem of locating this world which was no longer in its normal orbital location. In doing so we had to overcome physical phenomena that were incomprehensible because any logical approach to them was mind-boggling from the start. I felt inwardly void and burned out. It had been too much to experience: what we did in that completely unstable structure of semispace between the two comprehensible dimensions. It had been a sheer accident that saved us and had served to complete those levels of energy which finally led to the stabilization of space.
My head reeled when I recalled the mathematical problems involved. After awakening from an abysmal sleep of exhaustion I found that Lt.-Col. Sikerman had already landed the Drusus, which had been waiting in the normal Einstein universe.
I glanced once more at the mountain of Arkon steel-plastic armor plate. From my position I could not take in the entire mass of the super battleship, as though I were at the foot of some cordillera whose peak lay inaccessibly remote in the distance. Yet this monstrous spaceship was astoundingly safe and reliable to fly.
The light throbbing in my chest reminded me of my biological pacer, a special cell activator about the size of an egg, which had held off the aging processes of my body for thousands of years. Ever since I had found out that Perry Rhodan and various members of his staff had received a biological treatment for cell conservation, I had been burning with curiosity. I still clearly remembered the day that had brought me the incredible gift from my unknown benefactor.
It had been long ago, almost 10,000 years by Earth chronology. During my wanderings through the various epochs of Earth's development I had almost forgotten to ponder the origin of my cell activator. But ever since I had been associated with Perry Rhodan the subject had again occupied my mind.
Curious parallels and points of coincidence in the course of events had come to indicate without any doubt that my own small apparatus could only have originated with the same mysterious being who had also given Rhodan a certain measure of immortality.
We learned just how much this 'eternal life' was to be interpreted as a relative quality when we strove desperately only a few days before to even be able to locate the synthetic planet Wanderer. It was there alone that the so-called Physiotron existed, in which the human body could receive the cell reactivation. This complex process was more simply known as a biological cell shower and in Rhodan's case each treatment remained effective for about 62 years. At the expiration of this time period, all those who had been so processed were required to find and revisit the Physiotron if they wished to avoid an immediate aging acceleration.
Rhodan managed to get there at the last permissible moment. He and Reginald Bell had entered the charging chamber's dematerializing forcefield when something happened that, for the life of me, I could not define. At any rate, rather than being a mere regenerative type process, it was exclusively the product of what had to be termed a perfected biochemical technology and which came as close as possible to the secret of life itself.
Most curious was the undeniable fact that I myself had never been forced to return to the synthetic planet at regular intervals in order to receive the cell shower. In spite of this I had not aged but had always remained at that stage of my existence which I had reached by the time I submitted to the influence of the small device within me.
Naturally I was in search of an explanation for this. I had come here in the hope that I might obtain fuller particulars from the ruler of the planet Wanderer. And in this regard the purely technical phase of it was a secondary interest. What seemed more important to me was the why?
For what reason should this mental entity have given me something that kept me forever resilient and young? When I wanted to ask these things of the entity, It had been too busy to answer. It seemed to have Its 'hands' full with the task of rescuing Wanderer from semispace. And after we had all come through that crisis,It withdrew into seclusion. The collective being remained silent, as though It had never been interested in trifling with humans and Arkonides.
The gentle throbbing in my chest became stronger. A current of invigorating impulses seemed to flood through my body. There could be only one logical explanation:
The micro-activator must be a variation of the large Physiotron. Attuned to my personal vibrations it always seemed to take over whenever my metabolism and the processes of cell division became unstable. Since I had never been dematerialized, as was the case in the large cell shower apparatus, my bio-pacer must operate on the basis of carefully programmed stimuli which guided my norm
al life processes and corrected them as was required. I had not been able to find any other explanation.
I glanced at the special automatic watch on my wrist. Engraved on the watertight cover were the words: Made on Terra. The well-known phrase had always seemed strange to me. Everything I wore had been produced on Earth—even the Arkonide Admiral epaulettes on my shoulders and the insignia of my ancestral house had been made by human hands in terrestrial factories.
With these things my long period of wandering through the earlier history of humanity had come to an end. Rhodan, whom I had looked upon as an enemy two years previously, had become a friend. Now all that remained was to solidify this relationship and to prove to him that I had given up my plans of escape. I knew now that our ancient Arkonide Empire was under the rulership of a robot brain. Of course Rhodan understood that ultimately my allegiance was more with my people than with his but this was not cause for any disharmony in our relationship.
I had lived on Earth for approximately 10,000 years. Now the time had come to visit the place of my birth again and it was a foregone conclusion that Rhodan could be helpful in this regard. So it behooved me to help the leader of the Solar Empire to the best of my knowledge and ability—that is, if he still needed them at all! The state of Terranian technology was such that I was not able to offer much more to its science, although the earlier ancestors of present-day humans had once revered me as a demigod.
I leaned my back against the seamless wall and gazed across at the distant Drusus. They had grown big and powerful, these little barbarians from the third planet of Sol. I had been a witness to their awakening, their joys and sorrows and fears, their tragic mistakes and their quiet heroism. They were now deserving of the leadership of this clear-sighted man who would guide them in the right direction.
A deep thundering sound tore me from my nostalgic reveries. Somewhere in the giant hull of the super battleship a gun turret had opened up. I saw the glistening energy beam race toward the sky. Far aloft its incandescent fire struck the impregnable energy screen of the synthetic planet and before the heated shock wave reached me I was already on the ground crawling for cover while groping for my MVR—my micro-video-receiver.
I pressed the activator button and waited for the green light. When it came on, Rhodan's face appeared simultaneously on the postage-stamp vidscreen—which meant he had deliberately placed himself before the ship's camera pickup, anticipating my response.
"Ahoy, Barbarian—what's going on?" I said into the microphone.
I could see his lips tighten in a tiny grimace. His voice emerged somewhat shrilly from the tiny speaker. "Nothing at all, Arkonide! That was the only way I could remind you that somebody's alive around here besides yourself."
For a moment I was nonplussed. Could it be that this grey-eyed Terranian had simply blasted off with a big heavy-caliber gun from the Drusus just to remind me to turn on my MVR? "That's a pretty rough way of tapping a friend on the shoulder," I reminded him reproachfully.
His laughter rattled the speaker. "That's a matter of opinion," he retorted calmly. "May I ask where you are at present? I've been calling you for the past 15 minutes."
"I've been close by, out here behind the main control room of the power plant tower, having a look at the distribution setup. Somebody around here came up with the idea of hooking up the defense screen generators with the hypersensor computers. The result is: if a hypertransition spacewarp takes place anywhere within a radius of 10 light-years, the phase distortion triggers automatic controls here, switching the field output to maximum, which is about 10 billion kilowatts."
"Come again?" Rhodan's face seemed to reflect incredulity.
"Ten billion kilowatt hours is the maximum output rate," I told him. "A nice current consumption, wouldn't you say? No, I haven't lost my mind. This planet may look like a cake dish with a cheese lid on it but it is a world of superlatives. I'm sorry your primitive intelligence isn't able to grasp it all?
We grinned at each other. Rhodan and I had developed the habit of ribbing each other once in awhile. I wasn't able to resist reminding him occasionally that his ancestors were still living in caves during the golden age of Arkonide development.
"Did you go on foot?" he asked abruptly.
The strange tone of his voice was a bit disconcerting. He must have been able to see me completely on his large viewscreen.
"Alright," he continued, "I'll send over an air glider from the Drusus. If you'll come over to the Physiotron chamber immediately, Your Eminence, I'll be much obliged."
"To the cell shower? Why?" I asked, almost breathless.
"I'm dispatching the glider," he answered evasively. "See you!"
The tiny viewscreen on my wrist communicator darkened. Rhodan had disappeared.
For some moments I lay there on the ground and stared unseeingly at the Drusus. Perry had acted very strangely. Something had happened—I could feel it!
I began to feel nervous. I thought of the bewildering effects of semispace and of Perry Rhodan who had entered the cell shower converter during an unstable axis shift. There had been no time to wait any longer. Without question, if we hadn't risked the cell-charging process, Rhodan would be a feeble and senile old man by now.
I waited impatiently for the disc-shaped antigrav glider, whose pilot would no doubt be able to enlighten me as to what was going on. However, I saw nothing moving on the steel face of the super battleship's hull. At this short distance I would have been able to see the bright spot of light resulting from opening an airlock.
I got up slowly and began to dust off my Terranian uniform as a matter of habit but it took a few seconds for me to realize that there was no such thing as dust on Wanderer, at least not in the vicinity of the few cities that It had built, more or less as a caprice. It was no great technical problem to maintain a dust-free environment. The tiny particles could be made to hold an electrical charge and then remotely controlled magnetic fields could sweep them up.
I waited tensely a few more moments until out of the corner of an eye I suddenly perceived a shimmering apparition. Not 10 yards away a small figure had materialized.
I was always somewhat at a loss when confronted by the paraphysical problem of teleportation. The ancient Arkonides had already known the principle of moving material objects by means of mental power but we had never been able to accomplish the feat ourselves. However, among Rhodan's mutants this complicated and mathematically ultra-dimensional form of paramechanics appeared to have developed into a sport. I had come to know three teleporters, one of whom was a non-human, and all of them shared a sort of fiendish delight in taking these so-called 'jumps' through nothingness. If one knew how to effectively apply such forces of the mind, it became a convenient mode of locomotion or transference. As for myself, I'd never be able to get the hang of it!
With affected indifference I turned to look at the little three-foot creature who, like myself, had not been born on Earth. Rhodan had aptly dubbed him 'Pucky' because of the mischievous sprightliness in his big, shining eyes. He differed, however, from Shakespeare's immortalized imp in that he was a combination of a giant mouse and a beaver with a furry, spoon-shaped tail. The intelligent little fellow stood on two short legs which were encased in an elegant pair of custom-made hip-boots. In addition, Pucky wore the pale green space uniform of the Solar Empire. Gleaming on his left shoulder was the insignia of a lieutenant in the secret Mutant Corps.
This comical-appearing character was nonetheless a sly one, obviously loaded with guile clear up to his floppy ears. Ever since I had come to know him, from the time of my flight to Venus, we had enjoyed a curious sort of friendship which mostly found its expression in cryptic remarks and subtle arguments.
"Hello, tattletale," I greeted him. "Would you perhaps be the 'glider' Perry promised me?"
The long mouse muzzle opened. I looked with fascination at Pucky's single, large, incisor tooth, which he was fond of displaying at every opportunity. The non-Earthling's shrill laug
hter was painful to my ears but when it stopped suddenly I was startled. Since the time on Venus when I had thrown a piece of rotted wood at his head, I knew that he normally laughed long and heartily. The members of his race had an insatiable appetite for play. Laughing and fooling around were all a part of this characteristic.
The mouse-beaver made a grandiose gesture with his hands. "I am the glider," he announced. "Give me your hand, spy!"
I frowned slightly as I watched the easygoing little fellow waddle toward me. To him I was still an Arkonide spy. When he was next to me I bent down and took hold of his arm without a word. He was light in weight, perhaps too much so for his height. Probably the creatures from the planet Vagabond possessed very delicate skeletons, which was certainly offset by the power of their brains.
Pucky's large eyes were fixed upon my face. His incisor tooth had disappeared inside his mouth. We looked at each other for several moments in silence, during which I sensed that he was trembling with an inner turmoil. He did not attempt to probe my mind by means of his telepathic gift. I had become accustomed for some years now to shield my brain behind a closed screen.
"What's the matter?" I asked. "You seem to be acting a bit strangely. Since when have you been satisfied to merely call me a spy? You usually have a few rascally comments to make, on top of your normal insults. So...?"
I saw him clench his little fists momentarily and then he grasped my arm with both hands. "Do you know how the cell shower works? I mean—can you calculate its effects or maybe redesign it?"
His voice was shriller than usual. He spoke swiftly and with a surprising earnestness. The pressure of his little hands increased. The mouse-beaver was very deeply disturbed.
"Well, the technical concept is fairly understandable," I replied cautiously. "But just knowing the function of a decomposition field is still a long way from comprehending the resulting biochemical processes. After all, I..."
"Hold on tight," he interrupted me. "We'll jump together. You have to get to the shower chamber. Oh gosh, I can hardly concentrate!"