The Lost Pleiad

by Sesh Heri

  “So Hitler never knew if you were really for him or against him,” Tesla said.

  “Yes,” Marconi said. “And that is why Hitler hates me so much. He knows that he could never read me.”

  “I have seen pictures of Miethe before,” Tesla said. “I thought he was a younger man.”

  “Those were pictures of Richard Miethe,” Marconi said, “not our Professor Miethe. Our Professor Miethe— or May— was Wilhelm Otto Miethe. A distant relative of Richard Miethe. Wilhelm Otto was the one who received the basic plans of the Bell from the Martians. He also invented the KA Projector— or Astral Projector, if you prefer— a device with which you have recently had some personal experience. Ah— they’re sending up one of their saucers after us!”

  Marconi closed a switch and moved a lever. The television screen flashed with a burst of light.

  “I budged them,” Marconi said, “but that was all. Now is the time.”

  Marconi reached into the pocket of his pajama trousers and brought out the small box he had shown Tesla earlier. He pressed a button on it with his thumb. The circle of dim light on the television screen erupted in a ball of yellow-white fire. Simultaneously, a deafening rumble shook the interior of the saucer craft. The sound rolled and thundered for twenty seconds then all was silent again.

  “Site Y is no more,” Marconi announced. “It has been destroyed along with all of Adolph Hitler’s saucers.”

  “All but one!” Kel-Kar exclaimed, pointing to the television screen in front of him. Against the yellow-white flames on the screen a black lenticular silhouette grew in size.

  “Let them try to catch us!” Marconi said. “Let them try to follow us!”

  “Where shall we go?” Alayna asked.

  “I know of a place,” Marconi said, “where we can reconstruct Mr. Tesla’s magnifying receiver without trouble from the Third Reich. It is a bit distant, but we have a chance of getting there in this craft. It is a place familiar to both you and Kel-Kar.”

  “Khahera,” Kel-Kar said.

  “Khahera,” Marconi said, “Mars.”

  “Mars,” Tesla said.

  Marconi piloted the saucer craft straight into outer space. The Nazi saucer sped upward in pursuit. Ahead of both saucers was nothing but space and two astronomical bodies— the Moon and Mars.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  To the Moon and Beyond

  “Everyone is a moon, and has a dark side which he never shows anybody.”

  – Mark Twain

  Moments after he had piloted the saucer craft into outer space Marconi said, “More saucers coming up behind us out of earth’s atmosphere.”

  The television screen in front of Marconi showed several points of light hovering above the blue limb of the Earth. The lights rapidly grew in size until they took on the shapes of saucers. In another instant, several glowing cigar shapes drifted into view on the screen.

  “Now the Majestic Seven ships,” Marconi said.

  “Germans and Americans,” Tesla said.

  “And Martians,” Kel-Kar said.

  “Martians in front of us,” Marconi said, “Germans and Americans behind.”

  “Obviously we have something they all want,” Tesla said.

  “Obviously,” Marconi said.

  “What is it?” Tesla asked.

  “A small device,” Marconi said. “I have carried it aboard on my person. It is no less than Professor Miethe’s astral projector— the KA Projector.”

  “I thought that was a box with a horn on top,” Tesla said.

  “That was only Miethe’s carnival prop,” Marconi said. “I have the real device. It is astonishingly small. Ah! The Martians, Germans, and Americans are all converging on us. Fortunately, if I speed around the Martians, they will have to fight the Americans before they can get to us.”

  Marconi took the saucer craft in a wide, rapid arc around the approaching Martian ship. In a moment he had maneuvered around the Martians and corrected his course back toward Mars. The view on the television screen now flashed white— then black— then white— then black again.

  “The Martians started firing,” Marconi said. “It’s a space war now. We have to put on all the speed we can.”

  “Craft still approaching us,” Kel-Kar said.

  “Martian?” Marconi asked.

  “German, I believe,” Kel-Kar said.

  A series of booms suddenly shook the cabin. The television screens flashed rapidly on and off.

  “It’s an all-out battle,” Marconi said. “The combined space fleets of America, Germany, and Mars!”

  “The one craft is still behind us, approaching closer,” Kel-Kar said.

  “Fire upon it,” Marconi said.

  Kel-Kar moved a lever and closed a switch. An instant later the cabin shook with a crackling boom.

  “Direct hit,” Kel-Kar said, “but they’re still coming at us.”

  Tesla dropped into one of the chairs.

  “Can you go no faster?” Tesla asked Marconi.

  “I am pushing the craft at its uppermost limit of acceleration,” Marconi said. “We are rapidly approaching the Moon. I must maneuver around it.”

  “Or through it,” Tesla said.

  “Ah!” Marconi said. “Of course! Through it.”

  Marconi steered the saucer craft straight toward the center of the Moon, to the region of Sinus Medii. What both Marconi and Tesla knew was that the earth-facing side of the Moon was covered in the ruins of a vast, glass canopy hung miles above the satellite’s surface by a network of metal girders. This glass canopy was millions of years old, rebuilt and repaired throughout the ages. It was now in its most recent ruined state, not yet rebuilt from the last interplanetary war of only a few thousand years ago. When the glass canopy was in a state of repair, the face of the Moon glowed with a brilliant blue from the waters under the glass covering. But when broken and destroyed, as it was now these several thousand years, the Moon’s face shown from Earth as gray-white.

  Both Marconi and Tesla knew that the Moon was off-limits to man, although skirmishes between Earth and Mars had been fought near its surface for the last fifty years. The Majestic Seven airship U.S.S. Daedalus had crashed upon the surface of the Moon in such a skirmish. The interior of the Moon was inhabited by a race of robot-like dwarfs, referred to by Majestic Seven as Archeons. Majestic Seven had been trying to negotiate with the Archeons permission to eventually land a rocket-ship on the surface of the Moon. Although a secret Moon Flight program had been in progress at Purdue University for years, the Archeons continued to deny Majestic Seven permission for a Moon landing. Still, the hope at Purdue was that someday one of their own students would become the first man to publicly land on the Moon in a rocket-ship. As far as anyone on Earth could tell, the Archeons had no direct interest in the humans on Earth and Mars.

  Now Marconi piloted the saucer craft down to the surface of the Moon, the Nazi saucer following directly behind. Marconi kept his eyes on the images flashing across the television screen in front of him. Suddenly he exclaimed, “There!”

  Marconi had found a broken opening in the crystalline expanse of the glass canopy. He piloted the saucer craft down through the opening. On the television screen the jagged opening in the glass enlarged, its edges revealing that the canopy was made up of cell-like glass components one hundred to two hundred feet across. These cellular structures enlarged on the television screen until their massive supporting girders could be seen glinting in the sunlight.

  “Let them try to catch us down in here,” Marconi said. “Let them dare it.”

  Marconi dipped and plunged the course of the saucer craft down through the maze of girders and rectangular glass cells below, massive rooms of glass one hundred, two hundred, three hundred feet across, giant glass boxes like countless aquariums fused together, reflecting sunlight back and forth within their interiors, flashing the sunlight downward toward the surface of the Moon in a prismatic array of colors. On the television screens in the cabin, th
e lights within the glass cells flashed and gleamed, turned and opened, like a giant kaleidoscope.

  “We’re down inside the Canopy of the Archeons,” Marconi said. “We’ve made it!”

  “But,” Tesla asked, “can we make it out?”

  “I see the German saucer,” Kel-Kar said, watching one of the television screens. “It has followed us down. It is weaving its way through the structures above us.”

  Suddenly the interior of the cabin shook amidst the sound of thunder.

  “They hit us with a force beam,” Marconi said. “But just a little further beyond that great tower there is a network of very fine structural members. If the Germans are unfamiliar with this region, they may not see that fine grid-work until they are right upon it.”

  Marconi piloted the saucer craft toward a glittering tower several miles away. The tower was so tall it extended miles up from the surface of the Moon and attached at its summit to the girders of the over-arching glass canopy. As Marconi brought the saucer closer, the television screen revealed the ruined state of the tower. It now stood as a twisted, broken finger, pointing up to the airless sky where the over-arching glass canopy glittered with the sheen of black patent leather shoes. Marconi flew the saucer up around the tower in a rising spiral.

  The German saucer fired a force-beam at the spiraling saucer, but only struck the tower, shattering a protruding section of its wall. A thousand tons of glass and metal spewed off the tower and plummeted to the surface of the Moon several miles below.

  Marconi had brought the saucer craft up to the pinnacle of the tower. Then Marconi saw the first flash of danger on the television screen: a fine mesh of support members appearing like so many wires in a broken fence.

  “We’re entering the fine structure,” Marconi said. “Hold on.”

  Marconi took the saucer craft through an arcade of almost invisible support members. The members diminished in size from several feet in diameter to almost thick wires. Marconi kept watching the flashing passage of these varying structures on his television screen.

  “Any moment, “Marconi gasped, “we crash— or they do.”

  A terrific boom shook the interior of the cabin. Simultaneously the television screens flashed white. An instant later the white light on Marconi’s screen was replaced with a view of the Nazi saucer, bent and crumpled, tumbling and spinning downward toward the surface of the Moon.

  Marconi slowed the saucer craft, and then piloted it straight down in a falling leaf trajectory. When he got the saucer craft within two hundred feet of the Moon’s surface, he arrested their descent and flew in a circle. Suddenly, on Marconi’s television screen, the Nazi saucer came into view where it lay crumpled on the Moon’s surface.

  “Something coming from above,” Kel-Kar said, watching his television screen that showed two white spheres approaching.

  “Archeons,” Tesla said. “They want us to leave. That is all.”

  “We will oblige them,” Marconi said, and he took the saucer craft straight up past the two spheres, past the glass structures of the Moon’s vast, ruined canopy, and on up into interplanetary space.

  “The spheres have not followed us,” Kel-Kar said.

  “They wouldn’t,” Tesla replied.

  Now Marconi piloted the saucer craft beyond the Moon. He glanced at a star map on his right, set a straight-line course for Mars by turning a few dials, and closed a switch at the top of the control board that engaged the superluminal engine.

  “We will reach Mars in about fifteen minutes,” Marconi announced. “No more hours long voyages like the old days.”

  “That is all assuming that this vehicle will perform as claimed,” Tesla said.

  “I am more concerned about anyone following us,” Marconi said.

  “No one behind,” Kel-Kar said.

  “No one,” Marconi said. “That means that everyone back there in the vicinity of Earth is otherwise engaged. The Americans and Germans and Martians must now be involved in a space battle.”

  “Everyone is fighting everyone else,” Tesla said, “except for that Nazi saucer that tried to shoot us down.”

  “Yes,” Marconi said, “they surely suspected that I have Professor Miethe’s KA Projector— or at least the plans for it.”

  “How could they know?” Tesla asked.

  “I think that Professor Miethe’s assistant Lazlo may have discovered that I took the Professor’s property and told the Nazis,” Marconi said.

  “Why do you think that?” Tesla asked.

  “Just before we left Site Y, Lazlo tried to shoot me,” Marconi said. “Instead, I shot him.”

  “So now you have the KA Projector,” Tesla said.

  “I do,” Marconi said.

  “How could you have gotten it aboard?” Tesla asked.

  “The actual KA projector is astonishingly small,” Marconi said. “One can hold it in the palm of one’s hand. It is a bit heavy for its size, though.”

  “And you have it on your person,” Tesla said.

  Marconi reached up and unbuttoned the breast pocket flap of his pajamas and removed a rectangular box four inches in length by three inches in width by a half inch in thickness and molded of pure gold. He handed the gold box to Tesla who held it in the palm of his hand.

  “It is heavy,” Tesla said.

  “Yes,” Marconi said. “It contains some heavy elements inside its gold case. You will notice the arrangement of little numbered and lettered buttons upon its surface. That is for entering data into its computer.”

  “Where is the computer located?” Tesla asked.

  “Inside that gold case,” Marconi said.

  “Inside this?” Tesla said, scrutinizing the gold case resting on his palm.

  “I know,” Marconi said. “It is incredible, yet true. Miethe created an intricate information processing system with switches smaller than the head of a pin. One enters the place and time of birth of the subject to be spatially displaced— teleported— using numbers derived from Earth’s lines of latitude and longitude and Gregorian time system. Also, one enters the subject’s full name converted to the number system of the Roman Alphabet gematria. Then one merely presses this button at the bottom of the box. The subject whose data correlates with the data entered will be instantly displaced.”

  “Where?” Tesla asked.

  “Ah, yes!” Marconi said. “Where, indeed! The subject is displaced to wherever the subject desires to go at the instant the button on the bottom is pushed. You see, this device operates on the principle of desire, appetite, what the ancient Egyptians called KA— the desire energy of the astral body. Miethe discovered the principle of KA control on an expedition to Egypt mounted by the Thule Society in 1916. Miethe discovered an ancient scroll from the House of Life that described how the Atlantean kings controlled the KA. It was complete with formulae. It only had to be translated. When it was, it was discovered that the scroll begins a dissertation of sorts on the behavior of ants and asserts that ants are capable of instantaneous displacement under certain conditions. The KA of the ant is much more closely bonded with its physical body than it is with other beings on Earth. The scroll said that this was why ants were so strong relative to their body size. The KA is more closely intertwined with the ant’s nervous system and its voluntary muscles. The scroll then went on to describe how the KA of a human being could be made to bond more closely to the voluntary muscles by subjecting the human to a sudden pulse of a gravitational wave modulated as an imploding torsion field and spinning in a resonant frequency with the individual human’s personal frequency— the personal frequency being established by the time and place of birth. Such a field could be propagated toward a specific person by the excitation of certain heavy elements. The gravitational field thus produced would pass through an electromagnetic grating field which would create the specific modulation required.”

  “Then this would be an individual’s own personal Table of Destiny,” Tesla said.

  “Yes,” Marconi said. �
��So now you know why everyone was so interested in Professor Miethe’s work with KA engineering. It is a first step in reconstructing the Table of Destinies.”

  “Miethe was spying on you,” Tesla said, “and you, all the while, were spying on Miethe.”

  “Everyone was spying on everyone else,” Marconi said, “as they always have. But I was waiting for the day when I could escape it all— the Germans, the Italians, the Americans, the British— escape them all for a better life, a better place.”

  “Outside this solar system?” Tesla asked.

  “Eventually,” Marconi said. “That was our long-range plan for Site Y, for all of us to migrate to a new world out there…somewhere. However, there were a number of contingency plans, and this, our situation now, was one of them— the most desperate of the plans, unfortunately. I knew that it was always possible for Hitler to strike Site Y with his saucers. It was all a question of his timing and strategy. I knew that Hitler was closely following my actions through the agency of Professor Miethe. I only hoped that we could complete the large interstellar ship before Hitler attacked. Now that plan is finished.”

  “And this KA Projector,” Tesla asked, “how did you come to steal it from Miethe?”

  “I sensed that Miethe was about to do something dangerous,” Marconi said, “and he did. He took photographs of your plans for the magnifying receiver and then called down Hitler’s saucers upon us. So last night, I took the KA Projector from the place where I knew that Miethe had been secreting it.”

  “You have been watching him closely,” Tesla said.

  “I couldn’t watch him close enough,” Marconi said.

  “The KA Projector must be destroyed,” Tesla said.

  “It will be,” Marconi said, taking the KA Projector from Tesla’s hand and slipping it back into the breast pocket of his pajamas. He closed the pocket flap and buttoned it.