by Eando Binder
He turned his meteor-screen to full power, for its protection, and scanned the dark regions ahead. A mounting velocity that had never been matched in the Solar System before overhauled the fleeing ship in a few minutes. York smiled grimly as a black shape ahead occulted stars like an expanding balloon.
Realizing his stupidity at the last moment, Chard veered his ponderous ship into a parabola. But York's ship clung near him as though attached by a chain. When Chard, in desperation, tried again to focus the powerful force-beam on his pursuer, a hazy beam of violet stabbed from York's ship, sheering off the force-beam projector neatly. The fused beam of ultra-sound and gamma-radiation turned the metal it touched into black dust, as it had turned to black dust fifty Immortal ships more than a thousand years before.
Chard gaped at the instruments which told of destruction in the rear part of his ship and turned white. Hastily he snapped on his transmitter.
"Don't destroy me!" he pleaded. "I surrender, York!"
"Very well," said York grimly. "Let's report to the Jovian Council. Head for Ganymede. I'll follow."
Chard had no alternative. Bitterness charged his heart as he swung toward Jupiter, completely subdued. The blow to his puffed ego made tears of helpless anger well to his eyes.
If the Jovian Councillors on Ganymede had been amazed at the disappearance of their moon, they were still more astounded at its sudden, reappearance. The fears of the panic-stricken inhabitants of Ganymede were quieted. Had this all been a huge practical joke by that queer, half-mythical person who had flitted in and out of history during the past thousand years? Or did it have a deeper significance.. Many there were who did not believe in the existence of Mason Chard, explaining it as a recurrent fable dating from the time of the Immortals a thousand years before.
An attendant approached the Chief Councillor and whispered in his ear. The latter looked at the attendant as though he thought him insane, but at his earnest look nodded and sent him away. Then the Chief Councillor turned to his colleagues and raised a hand. His face was bewildered.
"Gentlemen," he said in a high-pitched voice, "we are to be honoured with the presence of the Immortal, the man who recently threatened this world with destruction! And his captor is a certain—Anton York!"
A dead silence came over the room. Every face looked incredulous. Anton York, the greatest figure in past history—the immortal who had given mankind the secret of controlled gravitation. And then, more a god than a man, had plunged into outer space, no longer concerned with the petty affairs of men. He was here?
The silence became more impressive, if that were possible, as York strode into the room, followed by his dejected looking prisoner. York stood before them, a man of thirty-five years of age, tall, strong, virile. Physically he was no different from any other man in the prime of life, but he carried an aura of super intellect that was immediately noticeable. The Councillors felt themselves shrinking mentally.
"You say you are Anton York," stammered the Chief Councillor, trying to be officious. "But what proof have you—" He broke off, staring fascinatedly into York's wisdom-filled eyes. "You are Anton York!" he whispered, in stark realization that he could be no other with eyes like that.
York told his story, in what to them was queerly archaic English. At the end he gestured to Chard. "He is your prisoner," York concluded. "His sentence will be in your hands."
Mason Chard said nothing. He seemed utterly deflated in spirit But his eyes glared at York with a world of hate toward this man from the past who had come back like a ghost to spoil his plans. York stared back dispassionately. They stood thus, eye to eye, for a long minute. Two immortals from a long-ago era, meeting in a far future to find themselves opposed in aim and purpose. All the things of their time were dead and forgotten, except as history, but here they stood, a millennium later, to find themselves natural enemies.
The Chief Councillor tried to look sternly at the Immortal, but was awed by him too. This man had eluded the forces of law and order in the Solar System for one thousand years. At last guards were called in, to conduct him to a prison for later trial.
"And now, sir," said the Chief Councillor, turning to York, "on behalf of the Supreme Council of Earth, the here-present Council of Jove, and the united peoples of the Solarian Empire, may I extend our deepest gratitude for—"
York waited patiently while the Chief Councillor, rising to the occasion, went on in this vein for several minutes. When he stopped for breath, York acknowledged the speech with a few polite words and then asked a question.
"Has the secret of immortality been rediscovered?"
"No," replied the Councillor. "Mason Chard, the only mortal alive today, was from the original group of the 20th Century."
Within himself, York sighed in relief. His father had been fortunate to stumble on one of the greatest secrets of the Universe, the secret of immortality. Pure, blind luck it had been, probably, against all the laws of chance. Better that the secret never again be discovered. It had caused sufficient trouble at one time. It had more possibilities of harm than good, as exemplified by Dr. Vinson's disastrous scheme, and now this Mason Chard's subversive career.
York stayed with the Jovian Council, an honoured guest, to ask many more questions. He had heard the histories and doings of many queer peoples in interstellar space, but this one had the appeal of familiarity. He thrilled to the epic thousand years of mankind's advent in the Solar System.
Then, to see this great glory of man's dominance in the nine-world empire, he and Vera embarked on a tour of the planets. But they did not leave Jupiter until they had witnessed the trial of Mason Chard. The criminal seemed to have suffered a change of heart after his encounter with York. He promised that in exchange for his life, forfeit under the law, he would work as a scientist for the betterment of mankind. By a narrow margin, his request was granted. A plan was drawn up for a laboratory to be built on the sixth satellite of Jupiter, the very one he had tried to destroy, in which he would labour, under heavy guard.
"They had better make the guard strong enough," was York's private comment to his wife in their ship. "Mason Chard is not the one to be trusted. The memory, of a thousand years of absolute freedom is going to irk him considerably as his prison years go by." He shrugged. "But that is their problem. You and I, Vera, will make a tour of the Solar System, see just what the posterity of our time has done. It will be something like viewing the handiwork of our children."
Their little globular ship was seen on every one of the worlds in the next year. The two immortals, everywhere looked-upon with awe and wonder, were a little amazed themselves at the wideness of man's activity. Earth's sons were in evidence everywhere, in communities ranging from great spanned cities to little isolated outposts a million miles from nowhere, literally. No environment had proved too trying. No dangers too great No difficulties too hazardous. No other race of beings equal or superior.
With little more than his bare nerve, man had gained a toehold on a variety of misfit worlds. It was the beginning of a truly colossal undertaking—the complete annexation of all. the Solar System. On remote, frozen Pluto, a band of hardy scientists reconnoitred, for possible colonization, the wastes of that planet.
On the way back from Pluto to Earth, York became very thoughtful. "Vera," he said suddenly, "how do you suppose the colonists on Venus would like to have a moon in their skies?"
"What a crazy question!" said Vera, laughing. "Are you serious?"
"I was never more serious in my life," York objected. He went on musingly: "If Mason Chard did nothing else, he gave me a great idea. He moved a moon—a world! Man, in progressing, must either adapt to his environment, or change the environment to suit himself. Vera, Vera!" he cried. "Don't you see? Why not remake the Solar System to suit mankind?"
"But can they do it?" asked Vera, not quite grasping his meaning.
"They!" exclaimed York. "No—we! We can do it!"
Six months later York had completed his plans, stupendous plans
which he presented to the Supreme Council on Earth n a simplified form. "All I will need," he told them, "is the one ship built under my instructions, and full cooperation in certain state matters that will arise later."
The Supreme Council, the rulers of all the empire, were stunned by the magnitude of the thing. They deliberated for two months. York was asked a million and one questions by experts and technicians, who were called upon to give their opinion. York was patient until they asked him if there would be danger.
"Danger?" he snorted, eyes ablaze suddenly. "No more than in any other human endeavour. No more than the pioneers who first settle a wilderness. Or to the man who first landed on Pluto with a clumsy ship. Or to the dawn man who ventured into the next jungle. All progress is hard won. It is the human heritage. It is not a question of danger—it is a question of courage!"
The grant was given. The parts for the great ship were manufactured at various centers of industry on Earth and shipped to the assembly ground York had been granted, near Sol City, the capital of the Solarian Empire. Under his watchful eye, it grew as a zeppelin-shaped craft a mile in length. Its interior was a maze of machinery patterned after York's superscience. Only he understood their full possibilities.
Five years later it was launched, manned by a thousand picked spacemen and technicians. It rose into the sky like a mammoth cigar and lumbered off into space. As it left Earth, its great bulk delayed the next eclipse of the moon a hundredth of a second—the only man-made thing ever to do this!
4
York, alone with Vera in his private cabin which was perched like a conning tower above the nose, took pride in giving the orders that were to make a vision in his mind become reality. The Gargantuan ship eased past the orbit of Mars and approached the asteroids. Soon it passed asteroids which were far smaller and lighter than itself. Finally, the Cometoid, as it was named, hove to before Ceres, the largest of the asteroids, some 480 miles in diameter. A small colony of miners had already been safely taken away by another ship, leaving it deserted of human life.
The thoughtful-eyed man at the nose of the ship barked commands. A microphone carried his voice to all parts of the ship. A thousand men jumped to their duties. The ship's stern lined itself with Ceres. An invisible bond sprang from ship to asteroid. The ship moved, towing the miniature world with it. The space-tug pointed for Venus and gathered speed.
Ceres, carted those 250,000,000 miles, was installed in an orbit close enough to Venus to allow its brilliant reflection to shine through the misty atmosphere. Thus Venus was given a moon to the delight of its warmth-loving inhabitants. The success of the macro-cosmic engineering feat gave York the same sublime feeling he had had a thousand years before, when he had first realized he was immortal. It was the beginning of a revamping of the Solar System. The astro-engineers of the Cometoid piloted their ship back to the asteroid belt and picked Pallas away. This 300-mile planetoid was given to Mars as a moon, to supplement its two tiny, inconspicuous ones.
Then something else was tried. York, long a lover of the majestic beauties of deep space, knew the value of beauty in man’s life. The brilliant spectacle of Halley's Comet—faithfully returning every seventy-six years for untold centuries —inspired the next Herculean task. If a comet was such an entrancing panorama when it passed close to Earth or any other planet, why not make this spectacle grander and oftener?
No sooner said than done—with York and his science. Calculations of almost infinite intricacy gave the elements of an orbit that would bring the next comet closely, but neatly, by Earth, Venus and Mars. It was not much of a trick, comparatively speaking, to fasten the end of a force-beam to the comet's nucleus and drag it into its new track around the Sun.
The first one, unfortunately, was lost in the Sun, but the next eight were more carefully warped into their new grooves of motion. After that, all the peoples of the inner planets—which held the bulk of the Empire's population—were to be treated to brilliant cometary displays at least once a year.
The Empire applauded this miraculous bit of Universe-building and waited avidly for the next. York next directed his wonder-ship out toward Jupiter. This great planet's nearest satellite, a small one, was evacuated by its small population and dragged to within two diameters of the primary.
There was some doubt over the issue but finally the giant planet's gravitational stress obeyed the immutable laws of space and ripped the body to shreds, slowly scattering them in ring formation above its equator. Thus Jupiter had the same halo of glory Saturn had enjoyed for countless ages.
York's next undertaking was to give Mercury a period of rotation. Burying the end of a force-beam deep within Mercury, as an unshakable anchorage, York diverted the tremendous gravitational stress of the nearby Sun to one side of the planet. York's ship acted only as the medium of transfer of energy, not as the actual mover. Like the copper wire leading electricity to the motor, York's engines tapped the cosmic tanks and poured their world-moving powers into the field of operation.
Slowly but certainly the surface of Mercury began to rotate under. the Sun's rays. Two years of this finally gave the Sun's first planet a day and night of forty hours each. With the more equal distribution of sun-heat and space-cold on its two formerly unmoving hemispheres, the entire planet was made habitable, instead of just the narrow twilight, zone. It went into the annals of the Empire's history as a unique experiment in world-moving.
Then York revealed for the first time that he had atomic power available on his ship—the form of energy that had stubbornly defied man's efforts to pry it loose from its matrix of matter. He must be truly a god, he who had that!
York embarked on the second part of his super project of interplanetary landscaping. Much of Mercury's surface was given a baptism of supernal fire. Atomic-powered pulveriser-beams transformed its hitherto drab, uninspiring harshness of rock areas into a garden bed of nutritious soil. Hardy plant forms were later to be sown abundantly, to soften the bleakness of the vast calcite plains.
Moving to Venus, York clarified its smoky atmosphere by chemically stripping from it millions of tons of water vapour, carbon dioxide, and the granite dust that arose from its violent wind storms. This took five years, positioned high in the atmosphere, spraying waste products out into space at a speed which insured their departure forever.
Mars was next carefully surveyed, for the purpose of filling its long empty sea bottoms. By repair and extension of its monumental canal system, some polar water had been forced equator ward by the colonists. But only a faint trickle had got into the sea bottom. Warning everyone away from the polar regions, York swung a tremendous heat ray down on the age-old ice.
With a master's touch, he produced a head of water that snaked over the flat lands and eventually poured into those ancient hollows that may once have floated a lost civilization's ships, millions of years before. The process, repeated at the other pole, filled the sea bottoms to great depths and duplicated on a miniature scale the oceans of Earth.
All these feats on a planetary scale were measured in years. At times the Cometoid had to be grounded for repairs, refuelling, restocking with supplies and men. For men died in this service, with the passing years, and had to be re placed with younger, fresher forces. But York and Vera, eternally young, knew nothing of the passage of time except as a mathematics of the mortal mind. To them, the rebuilding of the Solar System filled the space of a day in their long, long lives.
York turned the Cometoid's blunt prow toward the major planets again. Jupiter's poisonous atmosphere was swept clean of its venomous gases by a series of enormous suction machines, like vacuum cleaners, which converted the obnoxious molecules into solid precipitates that fell to the ground. Because the Jovian planet was such a huge one and its atmosphere so extensive, this cleansing took ten years. But for future ages, people would be able to wander freely over its tremendous surface in their levitation shoes.
Io, Jupiter's moon, was scoured sweet from its deadly, tenacious fungi by a ton
gue of protonic flame.
Saturn's ammoniated atmosphere was suitably neutralized by a two-year belching forth of hydrogen-chloride gas from leviathan gas chambers. York's chemical stores were all produced by transmutation of nearby and often surrounding raw products.
The bitter coldness of Uranus' frosty surface was relieved by deep and wide shafts that brought up the planet's internal heat. York dug the shafts by means of a pillar of livid atomic energy that disintegrated matter at almost the solar rate.
Neptune offered the tricky problem of being completely covered with a hundred-foot layer of solidified and liquefied gases. This had not prevented daring souls from living in this inimical environment in completely self-sufficient arks that floated over these bitter seas. York did not pass the challenge. After all the residents had been warned away, he dropped innumerable bombs of atomic flame deep in the frigid, fluid wastes.
For two years Neptune was a flame in the heavens to rival the Sun as the brilliant atom-fire burned its way through all the surface sea, dissipating most of it into space. The planet's true surface was revealed for the first time in incalculable ages, to become the dwelling grounds in the future of Earth's ever pressing hordes.
York carried his mighty tools lastly to remote Pluto, some four billion miles from the Sun. Perhaps in the future, man, who could carry his air and heat with him, might find reason to inhabit this dark and cold planet. Here he chiselled down and smoothed over a surface that had been violently tossed into jagged upheaval by the long-ago interaction of its molten mass and the sudden chill of space.
When this was done, York raised the Cometoid above Pluto and contemplated his work, here and in the rest of the Solar System. He felt a deep glow of pride. Then he swung his eyes out beyond Pluto, out toward the distant immensity of interstellar space. Into his eyes came a strange look-- a yearning for the greater freedom of the macrovoid.