by Eando Binder
Suddenly York and Vera saw in their eyes the haunting lassitude of spirit that obsessed them. They were three incredibly old men—despite their young bodies—who had tasted life to the full and could no longer wring out one drop of stimulation. Mentally, they had already died.
Anton York drew a long breath. At times he, too, even in his comparatively short two thousand years of existence, had wondered how long it would be before there would be nothing new to him---nothing further to lure his interest. Then he shook off the dull spell. One must not think of such things too much.
"From what land do you come, preceding recorded human history? He asked, anticipating the answer.
"Atlantis," was the reply from the Three Eternals. "At that time Atlantis in the Atlantic Ocean and Lemuria in the Pacific were two great continents. Their civilizations touched heights never since exceeded. But they warred incessantly, and it was to lead to their mutual destruction.
"We three had been great scientists of that time. We discovered the secret of immortality, partook of it. Also conquering gravity, as did you, we went out into space for a time. When we came back, Atlantis and Mu lay under the oceans, and new lands had risen! Atlantis, in trying to undermine Mu with giant atomic-power machines, touched off a fault in Earth's crust, leading to world-wide holocaust.
"Thus, we three found ourselves orphaned from the world we had known. Our magnificent cities and glorious monuments lay under the ocean ooze. Strangely, that is the only thing that can now stir our hearts—thought of that ancient glory. A nostalgia that has survived twenty thousand years —and has grown stronger!"
York's nerves became tense.
"Yes?" he prompted.
A slight glow came into their faces as their spokesman went on. His psychic voice vibrated strongly.
"Thus we have decided to bring up our homeland of Atlantis, from its briny grave. Resurrect it, rehabilitate it, restore some semblance of its former grandeur. A long, tedious task, perhaps, but one we will truly enjoy." A fanatic light came into his eyes. "Sentimentality is the one human emotion we have not lost. We cherish a memory. It can be moulded into reality. Atlantis must rise again!"
York and his wife looked at one another. That accounted for the bubbles over the South Atlantic. The ocean floor ooze, disturbed after long ages of quiescence, was giving up its occluded gases.
"How is it being done?" queried York, feigning deep curiosity, and nothing more.
"It is simple. We made a long study of Earth's crust, through seismological data. Any major geologic disturbance is linked to others. They form a chain. By setting them off in the proper order, any desired end result can be obtained. Exploding a certain small island in the Atlantic, we started waves of concussion in the thin, unstable crust. The slow, irresistible forces existing in the plasma layer beneath the crust were awakened. They will culminate by pushing the floor of the Atlantic and. Pacific up above water level.
"This was started ten years ago. Perhaps in another century or so, the process be completed. We are in no hurry.
Then we will begin our great reconstruction of Atlantean glory!"
"Can the process be stopped?' asked York, wondering if they would answer.
It may have been a mocking light that shone from their eyes as the reply came.
"Yes, by a suitable counter wave in the crust, to neutralize the first."
York snapped himself alert. He had heard all he wanted to hear. His telepathic radiations almost crackled as he said:
"And in the meantime, Earth's billions of people will go to their doom!"
"That is unfortunate." The Eternal shrugged. "However, some few will be chosen and saved to repopulate the new Atlantis. The rest must die simply because they will have no place in our new world. All the old lands will not sink, but for a time, as the process approaches its climax, there will be violent earthquakes and storms that will decimate most of them."
"It's the most cold-blooded scheme ever thought of by man!" raged York, his self-control breaking. "You must not go on with it!"
The Three Eternals in the visi-screen looked annoyed, then faintly amused.
"Who will stop us? You?"
"Yes!" returned York, grimly. "I give you fair warning. I have a weapon whose activity you have probably seen wielded. In ten seconds, if you do not agree to reverse your geological process, I'll use it!"
"You are brave, Anton York, but foolishly so," the answer came back imperturbably. "We have illimitable power. We three."
"One!" interposed York, in answer.
With his protective screen on full power, York trained his weapon's snout at the marble building and counted tensely. The Eternal triumvirate sat there disdainfully, as though un- aware of danger. One of them idly reached over to a panel and flipped a small switch. York's clammy finger tightened at the count of nine, squeezed at ten.
The ravening burst of energy that sprang from his gun expended itself harmlessly against an invisible screen surrounding the marble temple. Beyond it, rocks and trees shrivelled into a soot-black mist that drifted upward like vagrant smoke. The weapon's force was that of subgamma and ultra-sound waves, able to shatter molecules to black shreds.
York desperately rammed on full power, never before used, and left it for a full minute. The opposing screen did not weaken in the slightest. York gasped. Even his own screen, he knew, would not have withstood that hell fury for that long. The Three Eternals, in the visi-screen, smiled scoffingly.
Sensing his own danger, York leaped for the controls. But at the same moment, some paralyzing force gripped his body, held him rigid. One of the Eternals was manipulating controls on his panel.
"Rash one!" came the telepathic taunt. "We have more command of natural forces that you could dream of! We are masters of twenty thousand years of science. Anton York, you have declared war on us. We should annihilate you on the spot, as we could easily do. But it would be beneath our dignity to destroy that which cannot harm us. Therefore, go with your life. But never again test our patience and strength!".
Anton York's ship eased off the ground, in the grip of some intangible force. Suddenly it was flung upward, as though by a Titan's hand. York and Vera were thrown into a heap in a corner of their cabin, but the paralysis left them. York grasped a hand rail, half dragged himself toward the pilot board and quickly righted the ship. Then he helped Vera to her feet.
York said nothing but his face burned with humiliation. They had been cast away as though they had been vermin. He looked down as the ship floated at even keel. The shimmering mist lay over the hollow, hiding its three eternal inhabitant. Hiding a menace supreme!
York knew it was no use to continue aggression openly. His gamma-sonic weapon—never before unsuccessful—had failed to pierce the defence of the Three Immortals. Even the furies of atomic power were a lesser force. The Three were impregnable. If York was a god in his powers, they were super-gods.
"What can we do against them?" wailed Vera. "Against twenty thousand years of science?"
York sent his ship away from Mount Olympus. He did not attempt to answer a question that had no immediate answer. But a bleak look had come into his eyes—the reflection of a super-mind wrestling with a super-problem.
5
DURING the next year, the crews and passengers of various ocean liners and huge transoceanic aircraft sighted York's globular ship, here and there. At times it hovered motionlessly over water, at other times over islands. Several times it was seen at the docks of Sol City, picking up certain apparatus that the council had had manufactured at York's orders. No one knew, not even the councillors, what the instruments were for.
Inside the ship, York laboured as only a man with a set idea can work. The instruments were ultra-divining rods. By an intricate sonic principle, they were able to make clear the structure of inner Earth, as the X-ray reveals a skeleton. York could send down a sound wave that would reflect, hours later, from the hot core of Earth.
York finally accumulated a sheaf, of papers sc
rawled with condensed mathematical equations and notes. Salted throughout the manuscript were dynamical formulae involving mountain-sized masses of land, water and air, Trembling, he fingered the pages.
"No time to make them look pretty," he murmured to Vera. "But I have it almost completely worked out. With my seismological observations of the past year to go by, the Earth as a whole has been moved into the laboratory. I have dealt with this planet as though it were a compound in a test tube, or a slide under a microscope. With these Earth dynamics, I can predict the result of any major geological phenomenon, just as the Three Eternals worked it out. Look!"
He spread out a large flat map of the world and put his pencil tip on a spot in the Atlantic Ocean.
"An island existed here ten years ago. The Three Eternals knew it to be the key to their aim. They exploded it. The tremendous ground waves this started touched off certain strains in Earth's crust. Atlantis and Mu, long buried, began rising. The other lands are slowly sinking. But I can stop it!"
York's pencil moved to the Pacific, circling a dozen tiny atolls among the Polynesian group.
"The key lies somewhere here," he explained. "The antidote to their poison. The explosion of one of these islands will send out ground waves setting off related, but opposing strains. There will be a cancellation of effects. In a decade or less, Earth will quiet down with no more than a few coasts undermined. Atlantis and Mu will not rise!"
"All humanity, now and in the future, will owe you its life!" cried Vera, happy in his success. Suddenly a deep horror flooded her eyes. "But the Three Eternals will destroy you—us--for it, Tony! What is to prevent them? Can they destroy us, Tony, or—"
To Vera it was a strange thought that anyone or anything could destroy them. For had they not lived two thousand years?
York nodded sombrely. "They can!" He clamped his teeth together firmly. "But first we'll finish our job, and then think of that. I still have to determine exactly which island to demolish."
A few hours later their ship hovered over Southern Pacific waters. Only a few uninhabited islands speckled the vast, reaches of ocean. York carried on his sub-surface probings, but finally gave a baffled grunt.
"I've narrowed the field down to three of these islands," he mused, "but I can't seem to go any further with the data, from here. I have to be dead sure I explode the right island. If I hit the wrong one, the result might be just as catastrophic as what the Three Eternals started."
He thought a moment. "Vera, there's only one way. These measurements involve the strains within Earth's crust. I must map the strains at first hand. I must go down there, in person. Down miles and miles below the ocean, to where the greater ocean of subsea plasma fumes." His brow wrinkled thoughtfully, as the mind behind already began shaping a machine unknown to Earthly science: "No mines or man-made submarines go down that far, of course. I'll have an Earth-boring ship made—a mechanical mole.
Vera was quick to sense something, in her husband's words. "You're using too many 'I's' Tony. You're not going down without me!"
"It's liable to be very dangerous, Vera. World-shattering forces lie down there." Seeing the set of her, jaw, he tried a humorous tack. "Why don't you visit your aunt for a few weeks?"
But instead of smiling, her eyes became a little sad. She had no aunt, or relatives at all from that long-gone day of their birth. Neither had York.
"We even have no descendants," she murmured, for that had been the price of immortality. "No one on this Earth we can remotely call kin. Tony, don't you see? If I stayed up here and you, going below, never came back, I'd be more lonely than the loneliest meteor in space!"
Within another year, the precision factories of the Forty-first Century industry had turned out the parts from York's blueprints. Time, of which they had a plethora, meant nothing to the eternal pair as they superintended the construction.
The mechanical mole took shape as a segmented cylinder of fused, transparent diamond—York's secret—buttressed with steel of colossal strength. Its front end held the fan-wise jets of York's gamma-sonic force, for converting solid matter to impalpable dust. The technicians who assembled the machine understood little of what they made, further than that it could possibly plow through anything short of neutronium.
The completed vehicle was shipped to one of the Polynesian Islands, via barge dragged by the world's largest freight ship, and here York dismissed all attendants. Alone with Vera, he drew a breath.
"I've been wondering all this time if the Three Eternals would find out and interfere in some way," he confided, "despite the secrecy with which it was done."
Vera shuddered, as she always did at mention of the Three. "They're like three vultures, waiting, waiting—"
York waved a hand. "Take a last look at the Sun, dear. We may not see it again for weeks!"
Then he led the way into the craft, sealing its pneumatic hatch. An hour later, after carefully checking the supplies of tanked air, food, water, and his many instruments, he started the motor.
The titanic energies of gravity warped into his coils, spraying disintegrative forces from the under nose jets, The nose of the ship dived into the pit formed and like a great worm, it bored downward, roaring powerfully. In seconds, the segmented tail of the ship had vanished beneath the surface. When it had penetrated through top soil and loose ground, it struck bed-rock and there the rate of boring settled to an average of eight hundred feet an hour.
Swirls of black soot shot back from the rock-eating noses so that they saw little of their course into Earth's skin. It was a bumpy ride, and vibration shook them so violently that they clamped their teeth tight to keep them from rattling like castanets. Each hour York stopped the ship and let their aching bodies recuperate somewhat.
Down and down the mechanical mole drilled, meeting no material obstacle that its blasting rays could not whiff to unresistant dust. Once their rate slowed by half, as they went through a hard-grained granitic stratum, packed densely by the crushing weight overhead.
York did not fear collapse of the tunnel about them. The braced diamond-walls of the ship would have survived the weight of Mount Everest, balanced on its tip, on each square inch of surface.
A week later, York stopped the ship when his gravity instruments read twenty-five miles below Earth's sea level. For three days he and Vera rested their bruised bodies and jangled nerves.
"Well," said York then, "here we are, twenty-five miles down, deeper than man has ever been before, within the Earth he lives upon, like"—he thought of an appropriate metaphor —"like bacteria swarming about a marble."
With Vera's skilled help, York made tests of temperature, pressure, density of the solid rock about them, with instruments that extended out of walled pockets in the hull. Most important of all, he measured the strain imposed by the mighty masses of rock above, and the pressing hot core of Earth below. The figures represented leashed forces whose unbinding would have buckled Earth's crust like a toasted apple skin.
"They are ordinarily in balance, these brute forces, said York. "The Three Eternals have unsettled them to the extent of raising two continents and lowering the rest. We have to restore the balance."
A week later, he again started the motor and drilled downward.
"My answer doesn't lie here," he decided. "We'll have to penetrate almost fifty miles down, right through the crust to the barysphere. It is semi-fluid and hot. We'll have to be very careful."
Vera knew without saying that, they were risking their lives. But so they had many times before, out in space. They were calm in the thought that if they went, they would go together. York was glad now that Vera had insisted on coming along.
At a depth under Earth of forty-five miles, York again halted. Strangely, the temperature was not much greater here than it had been at twenty-five miles. In fact, not much more than man's deepest mines.
"Earth's skin, is a good conductor of heat," York explained for his own satisfaction. "And brings most of it directly to the surface, which a
ccounts for volcanic action, hot springs, and the non-freezing of the sunless ocean bottoms."
Slowly he dictated a mass of measurement data to Vera, using his instruments. Hourly, he became more excited. Finally, a day later, he was jubilant.
"I have it now, Vera!" he cried. "The plasma stresses have a node, a point of concentration, right here! It runs as a straight line up to the island next to the one we bored down into. When we destroy that island, counter waves in the crust will cancel those started by the Three Eternals and then—"
"Tony!" It was a sharp cry from Vera. "Tony, I feel strange! I feel as though someone were near us—telepathy--"
"Nonsense!" snapped York, slightly annoyed. "Who could be forty-five miles under the surface?" He started. "Except the Three—"
"Eternal Three!" came the distinct telepathic message, mockingly.
And at that moment, one entire side of the tunnel in which their ship rested dissolved away. A craft lay revealed beyond. It was segmented, like theirs, but larger and with a hull of some clear, greenish material through which were plainly visible the three leadenly-calm, almost unhuman features of the three dwellers of Mount Olympus!.
6
YORK felt the alarmed pumping of Vera's heart, her body pressed against his, and his own pulse raced. Fool that he hadn't thought of bringing down a weapon with him! But even that, he reflected with sagging spirit, would not have helped, against the impregnable Three.
"Anton York," came the telepathic voice, heavy with threat from the other Earth-boring ship, "you have signed your own death warrant. We have been picking up your conscious thoughts, with certain long-range psychic instruments, ever since you left us, at Mount Olympus. We detected that you were trying to upset our plans. We did not think you would succeed in finding the necessary data. But when you dived underneath the Earth, we followed in the mechanical mole ship we used for our measurements twelve years ago. As a scientist you are seemingly a little more adept than we thought."