by Eando Binder
York nodded. His eyes were misty as he scanned the infinite ahead.
"Yet it is all so petty, so small. There is a more supreme drama for us to witness out there. The sublime evolutions of suns and nebulae and the meta-galaxy itself. The riddle of eternity and infinity!"
Already their mental perspective had begun expanding to include the grandeur ahead. Earth and the Solar System receded to a sub-atomic mote in the incredible vastness of the void. A god and his mate were swallowed in its endless depths.
THE THREE ETERNALS
1
ON MOUNT OLYMPUS, as all know who have read Greek mythology, live the gods. Jove, Mercury, Apollo, Bacchus, Neptune—their names are legion.
But there are not many gods, in a riotous confusion. There are but three. Immortal, and wise with the passing of time, these Three Eternals have looked over Earth and its folk at times, sometimes amused, sometimes angered, most often unconcerned.
They looked out upon the world of the Forty-first Century and were again unconcerned, though its inhabitants were doomed, unknown to themselves.
"Ah, these mortals and their absurd little civilization!" said one. "It is about time they and all they represent go into limbo—at our hand."
"It is dull waiting," yawned the second. "I wish —I actually wish—they knew of it, and challenged us. I would even wish a champion to appear for them. Anton York, for instance, who was greatest of them all."
"Anton York!" The third laughed. "He is far out in space. And if he were here, what could he do against us? Nothing!"
They smiled at one another, secure in that knowledge, and went back to their intricate game of four-dimensional chess, developed to help pass the slow crawl of time in their immortal lives....
Out in the vast, uncharted depths of interstellar space, a small globular ship plunged Earthward at a speed greater than light.
Within it, Anton York and his immortal mate grew hourly more eager. They were returning for a visit to the world of their birth, after a long absence. Like gods they had gone where they willed, viewing strange worlds, queer civilizations, taking deep pleasure in watching part of the majestic sweep of cosmic history.
Earth's individual history had faded in their minds, overlaid by countless other events, but now nostalgia tingled through their veins. Near-gods they might be, but even gods must have a place called "home."
"I can hardly wait to get back!" said Vera York, with all the enthusiasm of an American waiting to see the Statue of Liberty after a year in Europe. "Why have we stayed away so long Tony?"
"How long has it been?" Anton York asked, vaguely.
"A thousand years!" Vera had checked the time-charts, amazed herself.
"That long?" York shook his head. "Time does fly, as an old proverb says. Yet, what is time to us? We will live, Vera, till half the Universe has run down into cosmic rays. Millions of years, at the least!"
It was bare truth. They were thirty-five years old—in appearance. In their bloodstreams flowed an elixir of self-renewing enzymes that constantly rebuilt radiogens, the tiny batteries of cell life. The boundless energy of all-pervading cosmic rays fed these radiogens, supplying the undying fires of youth to their bodies. Old age and disease could not touch them. The finger of Death could only mark them by violent means, if Fate so willed.
Vera shivered slightly.
"Millions of years!" she echoed. "Sometimes it isn't good to think of that." Her eyes, a little haunted, sparkled suddenly. "The first thing I'm going to do, when we arrive on Earth, is to take a swim in some cool mountain lake, surrounded by green trees. There will be birds singing, and soft warm breezes whispering through the leaves, and white clouds sailing on high—" She choked a little "Oh, Tony, I'm just beginning to realize how much I miss those simple things!"
York nodded. In all their galactic roaming, there had been no world quite like Earth. No spot in the Universe quite so dear in their memories.
"We'll undoubtedly find a great civilization there on Earth," mused York, more practical-minded. "When we left, in the Thirty-first Century, mankind was already beginning to make the most of its nine-world empire. We'll find humanity in its happiest and mightiest phase since the first dawn man built the first fire and found that Nature could be his ally. Mankind deserves it too, Vera, for all of its previous bickerings, maladjustments, and crimes against itself. Civilization went through its adolescence in the Twentieth Century, when we were born. Now it must be approaching maturity."
His eyes shone as he went on.
"And, fully matured, mankind will one day inherit the stars! It will be destined to replace so many of the worn-out, decadent civilizations that fell by the wayside throughout the cosmos. But only when they are ready for it. As we have done in advance, the ships of Earthmen will seek far worlds and—"
"Tony, look! The bolide chart!"
Startled at his wife's sharp interruption, York turned to look.
The bolide chart was a luminous screen whose milky surface showed any and all material bodies within range. Nothing larger than a grain of sand could escape the supersensitive instrument which recorded every tiniest ripple in the ubiquitous ether. With its train of mechanisms, the chart instantly recorded distance, speed, direction, size, shape, colour and electrical charge of any passing object within the relatively close radius of a billion miles.
It was one of the precautions York had taken, with his scientific genius, to avoid accidents in treacherous space, so that their immortality was further safeguarded.
He watched the little black dot streaking across the lighted screen. At their tremendous speed, the passing object would be gone in seconds.
"No danger of collision with it," he said, integrating the data in his head. "It has a speed, relative to space, of a hundred thousand miles a second. Size, twice as large as our ship. Shape, quite uniform, elongated. Colour, silvery. Direction, toward Alpha Centauri, from about Sol's position. Electrical charge---"
The dot slipped off the edge of the screen, beyond range. "It's gone," said Vera. "First bit of matter we've passed in empty space, in days. Data sounded like a space ship, but of course it was only a lonely, wandering meteor of space.
Maybe the next record will be that of the planet Pluto, within the Solar System. We're close now!"
York was strangely reflective.
"Yes, we're close—within a few trillions of miles. And therefore, it could be . . . Vera, I think it was a space ship! I barely caught its electrical charge record; and it seemed to be inordinately high—like that of a power-plant of some sort. Meteors don't have power-plants. If it was a space ship, does it mean that Earthmen have already achieved interstellar engines! And were they heading for Alpha Centauri, the nearest star to Sol? And what for?."
"We'll find out when we arrive at Earth," began Vera, but her immortal husband interrupted.
"We'll find out now!"
York snapped on his radio, twirling the dials of his transmitter. Underneath the cabin floor a great generator hummed to life. A million kilowatts of electrical power, drawn from the eternal shower of cosmic rays, surged through the radio's diamond-walled tubes.
The stentorian radio voice that burst from the antennae of his ship was borne by sufficient energy to be heard with the weakest of receptors within a light year. On Earth, that amount of power would have heated all metals within a mile ten degrees above their surroundings.
"Anton York calling the space ship heading for Alpha Centauri!"
After he had called over and over, without an answer, he frowned in perplexity and reached for the engine controls.
"I've got to find out about that ship," he muttered. "The fact that it doesn't answer is—ominous!"
With his inertia-suspension field on full power, York slowed his ship from its translight speed to zero in short hours, and shot back along the course of the mysterious ship. It was odd to find a ship out here in the depths between stars. He overhauled it in another few hours. They stared as it bulked huge against the
backdrop of flaming stars.
It was unlighted, dark, but York's detectors showed that its power-plant was warping space and accelerating constantly. He tried his radio again, with no result. Then he sent a rocket signal over its bow, and when that failed, gave a baffled grunt.
"One of two things," he conjectured. "Its occupants are up to no good, or it's a derelict. We'll find out quick enough." "Careful, Tony," warned his wife.
In a space suit, presently, York cautiously maneuvered himself toward the strange ship with his reaction pistols. Vera was covering him with their guns. But no sign of hostility came from the accelerating ship; no sign of life at all.
Finding a hatch with the usual outside emergency lever, York entered the ship. A hand flash lighted the way as he went down a darkened companionway into the main cabin. He gasped as his cone of light revealed the figures of two men lying unconscious against the back wall, as though they had been thrown there violently.
Unconscious? York had only to notice their utter stillness to realize they were dead!
Back in the other ship, Vera listened as York's voice came from his helmet radio, a half hour later.
"Listen, Vera! This is a first-class mystery. The crew of two are dead, from excess acceleration. The air is thin, barely breathable, very impure. Their food supplies are mouldy. Water, evaporated. It's almost as though they had been holding out against terrific odds. Must have left Earth months and months ago, at their slow speed, less than light. Died trying to reach an impossible goal, light years away. Fools, they had no chance at all! Only a translight speed engine would do it. What drove them to this suicidal attempt at interstellar travel?"
His voice was half angered, half sorrowful.
"Daredevils there have always been," returned Vera. "Some, in Earth's history succeeded—Columbus, Byrd, Lindbergh”
"Daredevils? Perhaps" York was preoccupied. "Strange, though that these men planned so poorly. And the haggard expressions on their faces, frozen in death, are those of men driven by some tremendous fanaticism. I wish I knew—"
Vera heard the soft indrawing of his breath, as he seemed to stoop, and then his voice again, excited.
"Vera, go into the lab and prepare the following injections, as I give instructions. Adrenalin—"
He went on, rapidly naming several rare compounds among his supplies, and giving the percentage of their solution.
"I'm coming across with one body," he said then. "Also have a bottle of oxygen ready. Hurry!"
"Tony, you mean—"
"Yes, reviving a dead man! One has been dead only an hour. He's still warm. Rigor mortis hasn't set in. But we'll have to hurry!"
2
TWENTY minutes later, Vera was handing York a hypodermic as they bent over the body of a man dead for more than an hour. Earthly science would have given the case up as hopeless. But York, with a knowledge of life forces garnished in several lifetimes of research, battled to bring back the spark of sentience. After a series of injections into the spine and heart, he waited. Powerful compounds were at work.
A fine dew of sweat beaded York's forehead. It was a slim chance, at the most.
Vera caught her breath suddenly.
A quiver ran over the corpse. A cheek muscle twitched. A low, hesitant thumping came into being in the quiet of the cabin. A beating heart! The ribs flexed suddenly, and the lungs gasped for breath.
York clapped a breathing cone over the man's nose and sent a stream of hissing oxygen into his lungs. The body quivered all over now, and suddenly the eyes flicked open, staring around blankly.
York took away the breathing cone, looking at the resurrected man a little proudly. He had run far into Death's territory and retrieved one of its victims!
"Can you speak?" York queried.
The vacant eyes paused on his for a moment, but only a broken gabble came from his lips.
Vera shuddered at the weird gibbering.
"Tony, you've brought back his body, but not his mind! It's horrible!"
York shuddered himself.
"But I've got to find out about the ship and journey," he insisted. "I'll try telepathy."
His brow furrowed as he concentrated on projecting a telepathic message. Within his left ear reposed a tiny instrument that could amplify brain waves enormously, his own or those of others. Sometimes he and Vera, for long periods of time, had communicated solely by telepathy, though it was mentally tiring.
York looked up at his wife after a moment, shaking his head.
"He doesn't respond coherently. His thought waves are completely disorganized. All I could pick out was some mysterious reference to the Three something. The Three Eternals, it sounded like."
Suddenly the gibbering of the resurrected man stopped. A look of sanity and awareness stole into his eyes.
"Who are you?" he asked quite clearly.
York had understood, though the man's accent was queer, the product of a thousand years of language evolution since York had last been on Earth. He bent over the man eagerly.
"I'm Anton York," he returned, projecting the mental thought also, lest his archaic accent were not understood.
"Anton York!" The man's eyes widened, as a train of thought instantly followed that name.
The legendary Anton York! Two thousand years ago, in the Twentieth Century, he had been born, grown to the prime of life, and stayed there deathlessly; preserved by his father's life elixir. He had set out to solve the secret of gravitation, in three lifetimes of research. He had succeeded, but in the meantime the secret of his father's virus had been stolen.
York had fought and defeated fifty other Immortals before Earth was safe from their would-be overlordship.
Then he had gone out into space, he and his immortal wife, like gods.
They had returned. A thousand years before, in the Thirty-first Century, they had come back to find themselves again pitted against an Immortal who had survived York's vengeance against dictatorship. Before this renegade scientist had been sent to the death he deserved, York had performed the greatest man-made feats in all history.
Since the Thirty-first Century, Venus had a moon, also Mercury, and Mars had a third. York, world-mover, had done that, he had also formed rings for Jupiter, given Mercury a period of rotation, and relieved the harshness of most of the planets by suitable manipulations of heat, water, and gigantic natural form. He had prepared the Solar System for mankind's dominion.
Then he had gone out into space again, drawn by its grandiose lure. A thousand years again he had not been heard from.
Now he was here once more, and the eyes of the revived man showed sceptical disbelief. Many there were, among Earth's people, who openly denied that any such man as Anton York had ever lived. It might well be, they said, an accumulative fable, involving the careers of dozens of mysterious scientists.
York caught all this from the man's startled mind. He smiled slowly.
"I'm Anton York and I'm not a myth," he said quietly. "I've revived you from death, to find out about this mad journey you are making. Why were you going to Alpha Centauri, without adequate preparations?"
A look of horror suddenly flooded the man's eyes, as if just their recalling something.
"Civilization is doomed!" he said, his voice a dry croak. "There will be holocaust, destruction, all over Earth!. The Three Eternals are doing it! We found out, tried to warn Earth. No one believed—we couldn't prove it. We hoped to reach Alpha Centauri, find planets to migrate to, save the race. Three Eternals—vicious demons—destroy civilization—doom—"
The voice became incoherent again, as though the ominous news he told had again driven his mind under. York shook his shoulder.
"Tell me more!" he demanded: "Who are the Three Eternals? Where are they? Exactly what are they doing?"
"Three Eternals—gods of Mount Olympus—destroy all mankind—"
His voice trailed off into pure gibberish. A moment later his eyes glazed. His head dropped back and he fell into a second death, one from w
hich even York's super-science could never rescue him.
Anton York and his wife arose, sadly.
"Gods of Mount Olympus destroying mankind!" Vera murmured. "It must have been some hallucination of his broken mind."
York turned a grave face.
"Maybe not though! Civilization on Earth might really be in danger. The faster we get there and find out—"
In the following twenty-four hours that it took them to reach the Solar System, even at ten light speeds, the immortal pair were plagued by unrestful anticipation. They almost dreaded arriving now, perhaps to find some holocaust in progress on Earth, or already finished. The ship they had encountered had left Earth months before. What had happened in that time?
Sol, a comparatively mediocre yellow star in the hosts of heaven, became a sun. They swept past the dark outer planets. It thrilled them to see the splendour of Saturn's rings, unmatched in all the galaxy. Jupiter's rings, mark of York's last visit, thrilled them still more. Then past garnet Mars toward the green globe of Earth.
Familiar it all was to the two cosmic wanderers, but they hardly noticed. Earth occupied their thoughts—and the mysterious prophecy of doom on that planet. Yet nothing seemed amiss when they had dropped into the atmosphere layer.
A mile high, York halted his ship. Below them spread Sol City, the greatest metropolis of all time, with its fifty million inhabitants, the nerve center of the Solar System. It sparkled brightly in sunlight. Aircraft and space ships rose and descended from its many ports ceaselessly. It was bustling, vibrant, symbol of a busy, prosperous civilization.
There was nothing wrong here! York and Vera looked at each other in relief.
There was an interruption in the sanctorum of the Solarian Council chamber, in the capitol of Sol City. A dozen gray-bearded men, executive ruling body of the Solar System, looked around in annoyance. Who had dared disturb them?
Through the opening door, strode a tall man of erect bearing ignoring the protests of a clerk.
"We couldn't stop him, sirs!" stammered the clerk. "Not even the guards. He has some strange power!" The clerk bolted, as though unnerved.