The 47th Golden Age of Science Fiction

by Chester S. Geier

  Grayson threw his will into an attempt to reassemble its structure from out of the tenuous energies of the Azuran atmosphere—or ether—he wondered what it really was. At first slowly, then rapidly, the pillar grew from a slender reed into its original appearance! The energy of this world answered and obeyed his thought—or he had fooled himself into believing the pillar was still there.

  Whichever was true, Grayson knew did not matter, the essential thing was that the generally held concept was the ruling one, but that it could be overthrown by superior force of thought strongly focused. He sensed that in a way, both his views of the phenomena of this world’s immateriality were correct, and neither of them wholly correct. But he had learned.

  Grayson knew that his ascent from a world vastly different from the Azurans “lower Azura” gave him powers that no Azuran would ever understand fully.

  Half exhausted from the strenuous mental effort, weak and giddy still from the effects of the blow Marduc had struck at him, Grayson staggered into the great throne room of the Lord Nardan, Ruler of All Azura, to find there another such conference as he had first witnessed.

  ABOUT the throne were a dozen fleet officers, and among them the tall, grey-haired Istar. He could hear his mental flows, with the rush and flux of far voyages, the strident memory of pulsing energy vortices driving Azuran ships at full torsion, echoing through the mariners speech, the thought flavor so different from any but a space-man’s of long experience. He was saying:

  “Lord Nardan, beloved Ruler, there can be no victory with the Karnians in possession of the Q-Order Menta-Barrier. I have asked for the spy to be found, the leaks to be stopped. It has not been done. Now our last defense has been stolen. Today when we opened the vaults to remove the Q-Order formulas and rest the key-crystals of our projectors in the city and in the fleet we found the whole file stolen. It is doubtful if we have left enough data to reconstruct the formulas for our own use. We have not kept them from the Karnians, and we are lost before the battle begins.”

  The great figure of Nardan rose from the throne, towering a foot higher in stature than any other there. He paced across the dais, his hands clenched into fists, beating his great white fists against his temples.

  “Must we flee, then? Is it not even left us to die like men? What do you council now, the battle already lost?”

  Grayson, staggering forward, threw his own thought-flows toward the Ruler.

  “Marduc is one of your spies! Some of your so-noble and sacred immortal monitors, whom you seem to think so above you that they could have no interest in betraying you—are also Karnian agents, I saw them aiding Marduc. It may be that he has still the Q-Order formulas, since I do not believe the monitors could conceal an opaque object of that type on their persons. Search Marduc’s chambers, his person, perhaps he not yet had a chance to get them into Karnian hands.”

  The officers, grouped about the foot of the great throne, spun about as one man, to see the pale-faced, stumbling figure of Grayson staggering toward them, one hand pointing at Marduc, who was slipping aside behind the other figures as if to avoid that pointing finger.

  For a long minute not a thought disturbed the ominous atmosphere of the throne room. Then the Ruler asked, his thought weary and unbelieving, “Why do you name Marduc, stranger? On what do you base such a serious charge?”

  “Where is Sareen? She can tell you what this Marduc has done!” Grayson looked about wildly, his mind not functioning, weakness clouding his sight.

  The Ruler singled out Marduc with his great weary eyes asking a mute question. Marduc, sure that he could handle this alien, who must be near dead if Marduc knew anything of his own destructive powers, stepped forward to the first step of the dais, and in turn his finger singled out Grayson as he said:

  “What he says is the result of madness and jealousy, Lord Nardan. When Sareen chose me instead of him as her future mate, his weak alien nature succumbed to the loss, he suffered a mental breakdown. Sareen and I put him in the Mentalojuve Medical Home, and I sent Sareen to my estates upon Kadon until this affair with Karnia has blown over. Then we plan to be married.”

  “Sareen, a member of my staff, deserting me in my greatest need? I do not understand, it is not her nature to flee from danger. Are you sure you have not exceeded discretion. You did not abduct Sareen?”

  GRAYSON, seeing the man’s plan clearly now, summoned a strength from his last reserves, and almost staggered the tall figure of the Ruler with the fierceness of his thought-flow.

  “The man is a liar and a traitor,” Grayson cried, “He has abducted the innocent Sareen, who despises him. He struck me with the aid of two of the monitors, whom you trust so much. He has a peculiar mental power he never learned among Azurans, with which he struck me. And do you know why? Because he overheard Sareen and I discussing the fact that everything pointed to Marduc as the spy, and that we should delay no longer in calling the facts to your attention. That is why I have been sick, and why Sareen no longer serves Azura, which she loves far more than Marduc, I assure you.”

  Marduc, to stop the flow of Grayson’s all too-revealing words, struck at him suddenly with the black force of his eyes. But there were no rosy invisibles at his side to weaken and hold Grayson’s mind from retaliation. Grayson was ready, and parried the flow with a return thrust of the golden energy he had discovered in himself earlier. Marduc staggered aside, and Grayson was forced to stop his attack to keep from destroying those figures between him and his enemy.

  Marduc, shielding himself with the bodies of those about the throne, turned to Lord Nardan, shouting:

  “This alien is your spy who was sent to get the Q-Order formulas. Do not listen to his counter-accusations. You all know me too well to listen to such charges!”

  The Ruler, bending his eyes in sharp regard upon Marduc, saw the fear and the weakness in him, and smelled very plainly that all was not as it should be. Marduc was too vehement, too afraid, too utterly wrong in appearance and bearing. Besides, they had lost such things long before Grayson came among them.

  But Grayson did not wait. His new senses told him what to do as if he had done the same thing a thousand times before. With every atom of his will he directed Marduc to become visible instead of opaque to the eyes in the throne room, even as Grayson saw the evil soul of him. With his new learned power he stripped off the cloak of accepted solidity of Marduc’s figure, and a shimmering greyness was seen where Marduc had stood, a greyness rent here and there, so that the fiery core showed through.

  As the Azuran illusion of solidity fell away from about the force vortices that were his true body, their minds saw quite clearly the repellant core of him writhing and twisting to hide itself from their eyes behind the hard drawn curtains of grey neutral mist-force. Every man in the room drew away from the pillar of infectious evil that the noble-seeming figure of Marduc had suddenly become.

  “See for yourselves, warriors of Azura, the inner secrets of your comrade in arms! He is a traitor by nature and a traitor in fact!”

  “Strange power,” murmured Nardan, striding down the steps to stand by Grayson’s side and see more closely just how the deed of stripping off the visible solidity and revealing the underlying forces was done. He looked into Grayson’s eyes, and put his hand up to his own head, drawing back. He stood in deep thought, then repeated:

  “Strange powers you demonstrate, Paul Grayson, alien to our Azuran life. How do we know, since you have such powers, what other secrets you may not have kept from us? How do we know that Marduc, heretofore out trusted friend and warrior, is not painted by your powerful alien will in these evil colors that you show us for the first time? I do not understand . . .” The big ruler stood in deep thought, as if remembering something long ago learned, and since forgotten.

  “But I seem to remember a time when I too had such powers. Too long have I relied upon the invisible others to do my own work. This reliance upon the unseen can betray a man, or a nation.”

  Istar, his eyes flashin
g between the eerie sight of the transparent body of Marduc and the glowing alien eyes of Grayson sending out such power as no man of Azura possessed, to cause the miracle of Marduc’s revealment, suddenly sent out his own thought to Grayson.

  “Friend, I think it is clear you have solved one of our worst dilemmas. I see well now, much that was hidden to me before you came among us. I do not understand this, but I see it now. Relax! Conserve your mental energies, we will have a vast need of them before many hours are sped, the Karnians are almost upon us.”

  CHAPTER FIVE

  “O God of men, why hold concealed Your light?

  When shall Your sun erase this blot of night?

  Can You not spare us but one flash, one beam?

  Must we believe that You are in our plight?”

  Hafiz

  GRAYSON stood beside Istar upon the great bridge of the flagship in which he had been interviewed before, upon his first arrival among the Azurans. For an hour they had sped outward from Azura, and in that time Grayson had been earnestly explaining to Istar his discoveries of the immaterial nature of their world, and illusory thought-mold which their minds held around the possibilities of their life like a strait-jacket. He was half-convinced, but could not conceive how to put Grayson’s theory to work in the coming battle.

  About them was arranged the speeding fleet of Azura, mighty in appearance, but Grayson had seen the strength of the Karnians before, and knew that it would be much augmented this time by new forces brought from other parts of space. The officers of the fleet were gloomy and despondent, the Q-Order formulas had not been found in Marduc’s quarters, though they had found evidences of his plan to flee the city before the fleet took off for battle, and other incriminating evidence which clinched the case against him. But they all felt they were speeding toward certain extinction. Grayson was in a fever of deep mental effort, trying to get it through their heads that their limitations were self imposed, that they could of their massed will construct such weapons as would wipe out the Karnians if only they could understand their hidden strength.

  Finally Istar turned to Grayson. He said:

  “Stranger, you have proved a friend, and I think you may be right in your discovery of our nature. But we cannot throw off the mental habits of a lifetime in one short hour of time! There is no hope of victory for us unless you yourself with your alien powers of mind discover it for us. Perhaps if one of our officers explained our weapons and our secrets to you, worked with you, you might deduce or discover further uses for your new powers, some way to use your mind augmented by our mechanisms, immaterial as they seem to you—they yet have power. For you know they are not really immaterial, they are just to your thinking less solid and of different substances than your own world matter. Now go, and make the effort, I must concentrate upon maneuvers.”

  Grayson went down into the lower aisles and chambers of the ship, escorted by an officer strange to him, who had been ordered to explain and to help Grayson in anyway he could. He felt very discouraged, for he could not conceive how even his newfound secret of their substance could be used as a weapon in the coming struggle. He was weary, he felt already defeated, and he could do nothing without Sareen beside him.

  But as the officer, a young appearing man named Satpor, explained the workings of the menta-ray cannon, Grayson saw an opportunity.

  “The pattern of the ray is impressed upon the crystal, which retains such mental projection implicitly. Then the crystal is inserted here into the breech of the gun, the menta-ray energies pour through it, and are concentrated by the windings of the magnetic bore of the gun into a beam. The wide end of the cannon barrel contains an adjustable focusing device, which widens or narrows the beam, bringing it to a sharp, hard focus at any distance desired.”

  As Satpor talked, he took the cannon apart before Grayson’s eyes, showing him part by part. As he began to replace the parts, Grayson picked up the menta-crystal, the key and heart of the device, and examined it. Throwing his vision into the strange range of penetrative perception, he looked into the crystal, and saw there the pulsing, seemingly alive force-pattern, a glowing, reddish assembly of little force-votices. Reaching toward it with his mental powers, he made an effort to rearrange the little vortices, feeling with his sensitivities for a pattern of destruction, and sending into the crystal his own intent to destroy the Karnian fleet by convincing them of their own immateriality. This was his theory, and this crystal and projector might do the job he had before thought of doing only with his limited personal power.

  But there was no target on which to try his newly designed beam.

  EVEN AS they stood there examining the open breech of the rather simple ray-cannon mechanism, a cry rang from the ships communicator system, a thought-flow from Istar—

  “The enemy is sighted! Battle stations, Formation P; Take evasive action until further orders!”

  Satpor gave a curse. “Already we must flee, before we have even fired a shot! It is shameful that we should have been betrayed. But what chance have we got?”

  Over the ray-cannon was a great view-port, which was in truth a, screen which magnified the light that struck it from the distance. It was a kind of telescope, and it was synchronized to sight the cannon, with crosshairs across the pearly crystal lens, wide as a port-hole.

  The crew, who had sprang to put the cannon in readiness, were stopped by Grayson’s upheld hand.

  “Get me the enemy fleet in this sight-device,” ordered Grayson, and Satpor nodded to the men to obey. One of them turned the controls beneath the disk of crystal, and upon it came into view a line of dots, dim and wavering in the distance. But swiftly they grew larger and more solid upon the view-port. They were approaching at top speed.

  “If we’re going to take evasive action, we’d better start taking it,” murmured Satpor, as if to himself. But Grayson had inserted the menta-crystal in the breech, and was swinging the gun into position. The crosshairs centered on the distant enemy, and Grayson cried—“Fire” because he did not know how the thing was done. Satpor pressed a lever, even as the great ship began to swing about on a new course. Out from the barrel an amazing beam, purple and sparkling with golden whorls, and in an instant the beam cut off, was to be seen only as a lance of force, speeding toward the distant fleet. The ship had been swinging, the beam fanned out as it fled, so that it became a wide fan of force taking in the whole center of the distant fleet, obscuring the enemy as it spread wider.

  “If that had been a Q-Order beam,” murmured Satpor, “instead of the old pattern for which they have the barrier formula, it would have done some damage.”

  Grayson watched intently, hoping that his change in the pattern of the menta-crystal might have resulted in something for which the enemy was not prepared.

  Suddenly from the communicators roared the voice of. Istar—“Who fired that beam without orders? Report at once to the bridge!”

  Satpor smiled at Grayson, who had jumped at the sudden vehemence and volume of the order. “Looks like we’ve exceeded our discretion . . .”

  In silence the two men made their way back to the bridge where Istar bent over an array of great view crystals, watching both his own array of ships and the enemies’ approach. He turned on Grayson fiercely.

  “What the Karnian idiots are up to I don’t know, but what the name of Baal did you throw at them, you . . . you phenomena!” Istar grinned.

  Grayson bent over the score of great view crystals with Istar. The enemy fleet was now engaged in a weird maneuver, each ship describing a sharp circle and starting off at a tangent to the circle on a new course. But in the center of the line were three large, lazily coiling puffs of dust, that Grayson knew with elation must be Karnian ships that had exploded when struck by his beam.

  Satpor looked at the three puffs of doom with ill-disguised wonder. Then he eyed Grayson curiously, a little awed. Then he turned to Istar.

  “Commander, if you will give me this man, I will punish him by making him do the same to
each of our guns aboard ship. He had that crystal in his hands, looked at it, put it back and ordered us to fire. You swung the ship—and the beam struck three instead of one—and all of them, at that distance—are destroyed. It is impossible, they are not in effective range!”

  “What did you do, Wizard?” bellowed Istar, staggering Grayson with the force of his thought.

  “I merely rearranged the pattern I saw in the crystal,” weakly answered Grayson. “Just experimenting, as you told me to do.”

  “YOU’VE DONE enough. We’ve got them, if you can do the same to each of our weapons. They can’t figure that out, it isn’t on paper. You know, you wonderful fool, that we can’t even see into those crystals, and that they have to be charged with those patterns by a series of impregnations with powerful beams from thought-augmentors, in our laboratories on Azura. The men who do that work are trained from childhood in the art, and yet you do it with a flick of an eyelash, unaided by mechanical means. You are impossible! We’re running away, do you hear? You get busy, Satpor, and as soon as he finishes with our guns, you will board the next ship.”

  As they started to leave the room, Istar gave a cry.

  “Come back here! I’m not letting Grayson out of my sight. I’ve had enough treachery for one war, Satpor. I don’t trust even you. You bring the crystals, and I’ll have another return them. And I’ll detail a dozen men to guard you while you do the job.”

  The sweat sprang suddenly out upon Satpor’s forehead as Istar gave these orders. Grayson wondered at his sudden show of strain. Was the man a spy, or only hated to be suspected of the shame of treason?

  As he left, Grayson murmured—“He didn’t like your suspicion, Great Istar.”

  “I noticed that, too. Is it any wonder I’m suspicious?”