Asteroid Man

by R. L. Fanthorpe

  "That's what it was, was it?" said Greg. "I thought it was a couple of dime magnets out of Woolworth's." The voice failed to understand the allusion.

  "Now," it went on coldly, "after your ship crashed, you began exploring the surface of my world. You tried out some primitive type of hand weapon, I believe. I had rather absent-mindedly shut off the force field which prevents such tilings from detonating in the belief that all of your people had been killed."

  "It's not as omnipotent as it thinks," Greg decided mentally.

  "You were then pursued by my guardian of the outer surface."

  "Oh, you mean that cute little pussy cat with the big claws?" joked Greg.

  "You may call it that if you wish; you would have found out how friendly it was had you not been able to escape into the tunnel. It is a singularly savage and omnivorous beast. I designed it myself."

  "Oh! quite the little tin god, aren't we?" said Greg. "Designing living creatures just like that."

  "I design and re-design living creatures," said the voice. "It is one of my hobbies. My servants are all products of my laboratories."

  "How very nice for them," said Greg. "I must say you turned out a darn good job. I can smell them half a mile away. Let's say that was something that went wrong."

  The voice was growing really angry now. "None of my processes ever go wrong, as you will discover to your cost. Your movements were checked in my central control room from the moment you entered the passage."

  "I don't believe you," answered Greg. "If that's the case, you've been an awful long time finding me, and I even went to sleep."

  "Yes, that is true. But I knew you could not escape. My outer guardian resealed your bolt hole."

  "That wasn't the real reason it resealed it," said Greg. "It resealed it so that you didn't lose too much of your atmosphere." The voice gave a strange clucking sound, as though it were really irritated. Got him on a raw spot, thought Greg.

  The creature that confronted him obviously was even more paranoid and maniac than he had thought originally. It couldn't bear to be contradicted or proved wrong. If I make it angly, it'll make a mistake, thought Greg, and relapsed into silence.

  "I overheard your conversations with one of my other captives."

  "Oh, yes," said Greg.

  "Attractive, is she not?" the voice went on.

  Now Greg was caught on the raw. There had been a horrid undercurrent in the way the creature had uttered those words.

  "There's one question I'd like answered," said Greg, quickly changing the subject. "How is it that you overcome these language difficulties? When you spoke to that thing, you weren't using this language."

  "Oh, that's a mental process," said the voice. "I'm rather proud of it. I perfected it several centuries ago. You've probably noticed that the girl has the same ability. It is one of the little things I've taught her. You see all sounds, basically, are merely expressions of thought. Sounds are irrelevant to the higher mind. It's quite simple. If you can just direct your mental perception to the conscious thought which someone else is expressing, it will translate itself in your mind, in your ears almost, as words. Once you've done this for a few moments, you will be quite conversant with any language there is. That is the basis of my development."

  "I speak to you in your language, and to the creatures in theirs. It has become subconscious and automatic with me. I have but to listen for a few minutes, and my mind analyzes any thought language formations that you are transmitting. Once I have analyzed them, then the speech centers of my brain retranslate them into your language."

  "That's a pretty useful trick," agreed Greg.

  "It's extremely useful," said the voice. "It means that even if you knew a hundred different languages and tried to deceive me by speaking in any one of them, I should still be able to follow you absolutely perfectly."

  "Don't believe you!"

  "Try it," said the voice.

  "I'm no great shakes as a linguist, but one little party trick I used to have was counting in various languages."

  "I should think that would be adequate," said the voice. "Which language would you like me to count in for you?"

  "What about this?" said Greg. "If I begin," he started counting in French, "un, deux, trois, quatre—" The voice went on: "'Cinq, six, sept, huit, neuf, dix. That enough for you?" said the voice.

  "What about this, then?" said Greg, and began counting backwards in German, "Zehn, neun, acht."

  "Quite enough," said the voice, and went on: "Seben, sechs, funf, vier, drei, zwei, eins."

  "How's this?" said Greg. "I'll start in the middle and you finish me. We call this language Italian on earth— cinque, sei, sette."

  "Otto," said the voice, "nove, dieci. Then there is uno, due, tre, quattro, and that completes the first ten decimal numbers."

  "We used to call this language Spanish," said Greg. "Do you know that one, too?"

  "I know all of them."

  "Uno, dos, tres, quatro."

  "Simple," said the voice. "Cinco, seis, siete, ocho, hueve, diez. Does that satisfy you?"

  "More than satisfies me," said Greg wearily. He racked his brain. "I bet you can't get this though—"

  "You're nothing if not determined," said the voice.

  "Nothing," said Greg, and meant it. "En, ett, tva, tre, fyra."

  "Ah," said the voice, for Greg was speaking in Swedish. He thought that that of all languages, would have caught this peculiar, superbly intelligent being.

  "Fern," said the asteroid man quietly, "sex, sju, atta, nio, tio."

  Greg gave it up as a bad job.

  "Are you satisfied now with my linguistic ability?" said the voice ironically.

  "I shall have to be," said Greg.

  The spaceman became suddenly aware of an intense burning curiosity building up inside him, curiosity that superimposed itself upon his fear, that superseded the fear, that drove out the fear. The curiosity suddenly forced itself to the fore of his mind and became a vitally prime instinct.

  He had to know more about the creature that controlled the asteroid. It became almost an obsession with him to discover more, to find out more. He wondered if the asteroid man's paranoia would provide him with the knowledge that he sought. If he posed his questions carefully, could be to trick the other into answering them? It was no mean accomplishment if he could pull it off. Dare he risk his own small intellect against the mighty mental powers of this strange being from God alone knows Where? Yet he knew that this instinct of his was very closely allied to even more important instincts of self-preservation. He had to find out more about the asteroid man before he could begin thinking in terms of retaliation or even escape. You can't fight an unknown enemy, no matter how great warrior you may be. It is the same in every field of human conflict, from the battle of disease to the battle of aliens from the stars. You must know with what you are dealing. You must analyze, you must focus, you must understand the enemy before you can destroy it. You must learn what makes it tick, and then you can learn what makes it stop ticking.

  "How long have you been running this asteroid?" he asked suddenly. The face hidden in the shadows behind the powerful, penetrating light beams moved a little to one side, as though the asteroid man were considering the question.

  "Why?" replied the voice monosyllabically.

  Play on the paranoia, Greg told himself. Flatter the brute. "I was just thinking what a great achievement it was to be able to move an asteroid. I wondered how long you had been able to do it, and whether you had only found out by accident."

  "Nothing is an accident," said the asteroid man. "Nothing, do you understand." He rolled the word around his tongue as though he liked the sound of it. "Nothing is an accident," repeated the asteroid man as though he enjoyed the phrase. "Everything is caused. Even in your puny type of society, there is no real accident. The difference between the puny mind and the great one is that the lesser mind does not understand the power that controls, and therefore believes in elemental forces outs
ide itself." The face shrouded in shadows leant toward Greg. He longed for a glimpse of it and yet at the same time felt afraid to see it. He wondered if there was a dual purpose behind those shadows. The asteroid man wanted him in the light, that was an obvious reason, but was there a second? Did the asteroid man wish to remain unseen because of some hideous disfigurement, or some strange difference about his profile? Greg was filled with a mixture of dread and curiosity. The creature continued to speak.

  "I'll answer those of your questions which suit me. I'll answer them because I contain some minor human foibles even yet, even after all the millennia that have passed since I shared a place in gregarious society."

  "My name is Ultimus. I am the End."

  "Did you make that up yourself?" asked Greg quietly.

  "That is of no consequence unless I will it to be so. My name is Ultimus, the End of all knowledge, the Great One, the Infinite One. Many many millennia ago, no matter how your people count time, long, long before your earth became civilized, long before your primeval ancestors had dragged themselves out of the slime, I existed."

  Greg wondered if he was lying. Oddly, irrelevantly the words of a sang ran through his mind, a song that had been known and sung in colleges and universities and jazz groups for centuries. I was a traditional song,

  "I was born ten thousand years ago,

  And there's nothing in this world that I don't know.

  I saw Peter, Paul and Moses playin' ring around the roses,

  And I'll fight the guy who says that it ain't so.

  I remember when this country had a king.

  I saw Cleopatra sell her wedding ring."

  Strange, irrelevant words reminded Greg of other days, long dead days of carefree student happiness, days of roistering with the boys. Days when beer had flowed like water. Days around an electric organ, thumping out time with glasses. Days in which nothing mattered but bonhomie and camaraderie. Days in which passing an astro-physics degree seemed remote futures away—part of another life. A life that for him was dead but not forgotten. He wondered if the asteroid man could be as old as he thought he was. It was in the cards that it was just part of the creature's paranoia to claim infinite age; on the other hand, it might be a simple statement of fact. The asteroid man was speaking again.

  "Long, long centuries ago as you reckon time, I was a member of a highly technological community; a community so far advanced in comparison of the achievements of your tiny planet that you would have been as dust beneath our feet, you would have been as inconsiderable as insects, as plankton swimming in the sea. We had machines about which you could know nothing. The children in our primary schools could have taught your wisest sages far more than they could ever have dreamed. But there was something wrong with our society, something devastatingly wrong." The asteroid man's voice had lost something of its silky, deadly calm. It had become charged with what must have been the equivalent of emotion in the alien's weird mind.

  "Yes", it repeated, "something was badly wrong. It treated its greatest sons as though they were criminals. It couldn't realize the truth when the truth was presented to it!" Greg knew that this was the paranoia coming out. He played on it.

  "And what was the truth?" he asked eagerly. Got to keep him talking; it's coming out now.

  "I was the truth," said the asteroid man. "I was the greatest intelligence that that supreme society had ever thrown up. I held in my mind the universe as men could hold a drop of water in the palms of their hands. I understood all mysteries and all knowledge. I knew the answer to all things, and there was only one obvious place for me to fill, in my society—"

  "Its supreme leader," said Greg with a note of sincerity which he found difficult to put into his voice.

  "Of course," said the asteroid man. "How strange that a primitive savage such as you should have grasped so deep and important a fundamental issue, which those who lived on my world were unable to appreciate. Strange how the simple, savage mind, the primitive, undeveloped mind like yours, can come direct to a point of truth which has defeated the greatest scientific and philosophical minds of a superior society. Very strange." It was mastering its emotion now, and the voice had turned back to the silky monotone. In his mind's eye Greg could see the steel claw wrapped in the thin velvet glove.

  "And so," went on the asteroid man, "because they would not recognize and accept me as their rightful lord and master, I had to fight against my own people. I worked my way up from the bottom. I became first a departmental chief, then a senior administrator and, when the time was ripe, I struck! History hung in my hands, but I was betrayed, betrayed by the very people upon whom I had relied. They had been against me all the time. They, who I thought were my loyal servants and subjects, had been working for the other government departments; they had been keeping a track on my every move, playing with me as a fisherman plays with a powerful pike. At the last minute I recognized their treachery for the baseness that it was. And recognizing it as I did in the nick of time, I rose against them and escaped their net." He looked across at Greg's pinioned form. "Nets are difficult things to escape from, aren't they?"

  "They certainly are," replied the space man with grim humor. "I take my hat off to you for inventing this one. There isn't a creature in the galaxy could burst is way out of this."

  "Thank you," said the asteroid man. "You flatter my ingenuity. Not that it needs any flattery—but you do flatter it." There was a note of passion in his voice again. The head was moving jerkily from side to side in the shadows as it spoke.

  "Yes, I escaped from their toils and their net. The pike bit through the line before it could be landed, and then—"

  "And then?" asked Greg.

  "What I had been attempting to do by stealth I attempted to do by open warfare. I retreated to my satellite hideout, a satellite that I had been secretly preparing, and I blessed the day on which I had decided to tell nobody, so that none but I was aware of it. There I waged a deadly war against them. Alas, their technology is as strong as my own. If there had only been six men with me, equipped with satellites like this one, we could have destroyed even that technological society. But I failed—for the time being at any rate. One day I shall go back and shall destroy them. They captured me with their vast armies, millions to one—with their unlimited power sources, their unlimited power reserves. I could fight them as man to man, I could give them blow for blow, but I hadn't any supply lines. There was no one to bring me any ammunition. They had millions of troop carriers. There was no one to supply me with electric power, there was no one to help me maintain my war machine, and so my one-man battle collapsed. They starved me out, they laid siege to me, they dragged me—me," he repeated in a terrible voice, "who should have been their rightful leader—before a court of men with human minds. Lesser by their puerile standards. I, who should have been their god, was judged like a common criminal."

  "Then?" asked Greg.

  "Ah, then," said the asteroid man. "Ah, then. Yes, yes, what did they do then? You may wonder why I lurk in the shadows. Once I looked very much as you look now, apart from minor physiological differences. I could have passed as one of your people. But they put the sign of the criminal upon me. They jeered at my asteroid war. Do you know what they did then? For they felt that they were ethical and enlightened in their own strange way, savages though they were, compared to me. They'd set me adrift, not in an asteroid like the one from which I made war—a technological masterpiece—but they set me adrift with the barest necessities of life and the scars of the criminal upon me, upon a chunk of rock, an ordinary asteroid. I had nothing but my brain and my bare hands and a supply of air and chemical equipment for replacing and recharging it. That and a very limited supply of water. A quantity of concentrated food, a space suit, and a lump of bare barren rock. They mocked me as they set me adrift. They said they hoped his majesty would be comfortable on his new world."

  Greg found himself thinking of the exiled Napoleon on Elba. Now he knew what accounted for the awful
bitterness of this asteroid man—a great brain twisted by paranoia—abandoned on a lifeless rock. Not an island with friendly seas to beat against the rocky coast, could bring him whispers of the world beyond. Not an island where the sound of wind could almost bring him the sound of men's voices. Not on an island beneath the same sun that shone down on the living teeming worlds of human society, but upon an asteroid! A lonely, desolate asteroid, winging relentlessly, remorselessly through space. Going on forever amidst space and the dark nothingness between the stars.

  "There was only one thing on my side," said the silky voice. "Only one thing—and that was Time. I had all the time in the world. I had already discovered one secret about which they knew nothing, and which no one could take from me. I, Ultimus, had discovered the elixir of life. No one knew, for they did not live enough to see that I was not aging as they aged. The elixir, I had already drunk of it before they marooned me, before they exiled me, and I knew that I could wait for a million years—for a million, million years till their puny world had turned to dust and they along with it. I knew that they would never get that elixir. Only a mind as great as my own could have torn that dreadful secret from the elements."

  "And so there I was, a lonely mortal on my tiny barren world. It was my home, my prison, my castle, my fortress, my universe. It was my bread; it was my drink. There was something else that they couldn't really know—a man with infinite time at his disposal has infinite patience. All progress is evolution. Technology breeds technology. Development is the mother of development, and invention is the ancestor of invention. Once you've got the first single machine, then like an avalanche going down a hill, that machine grows and enables you to develop other machines. It will scarcely seem possible to a savage mind like yours; if you had been marooned on this asteroid in the dim and distant past, you would have given yourself up for dead. You would have allowed the weight of circumstances to crush your mind out of existence. But I did not do that, for I am Ultimus, I am the Great One, I am the asteroid man. Step by step, inch by inch, making first one primitive tool and then another, improving and developing year by year and century by century, slowly, so painfully slowly at first that I couldn't measure my own progress, and then gradually faster and faster like a snowball rolling down a snowy mountainside, I developed more and greater technological achievements, until I had once more developed for myself upon this asteroid the same standard of living that I would have enjoyed back upon my home world. Those who sentenced me to this living death were dead themselves, and I had inherited that standard of life which they denied to me. The wheel had swung full circle. The balance had tipped. I was drifting alone in space, the ageless, blue-back mystery of space. Between the stars, between the very galaxies, I floated from constellation to constellation on my tiny rocky kingdom. On this asteroid, as on many others, you will find the duplication of all the chemical elements; you will find that the proportions vary from the preponderance of that which is of no use and the paucity of things which you need. But here I had enough to work with. Step by step I rebuilt my world. Take the most complex reaction, take the most intricate biochemical development and, given the hundred basic elements, you can reproduce it if you only have the skill. And so I built it all up from nothingness. I literally created a world out of bare rock, my brain, my bare hands, my courage, and my will power. I, Ultimus the asteroid man, did all this!"