by Eando Binder
The Eternals paused as though to give the ironic compliment full play.
"So adept that we must now destroy you. There cannot be two masters of Earth!"
"I do not wish to master Earth!" remonstrated York. "Only save it!" He tried pleading. "Think once, what you are doing—murdering ten billion people! Even if you live to the end of eternity, your conscience could never be free of that stigma!"
"You are an idealist, Anton York," responded the implacable trio. "We are realists. The present race and civilization do not deserve continuance. They are cluttered with traditions, superstitions, periodic setbacks of their own devising. Scarcely three centuries ago, there was again a worldwide depression, accompanied by needless famine, rioting and maladjustment-of affairs. Civilization fell back as it has so many times."
"But it climbs steadily!" reminded York.
"When we have raised Atlantis and Mu," the voice went on, ignoring his remark, "we will people them with a new race, set in a super-civilization, like a precious stone glittering in a setting of purest gold."
"And in ten years there will be bickering, struggle for power, and anarchy," predicted York quickly. "You are the idealists, so divorced from your former life that you do not realize the fundamental rule of life—experience! Your new civilization, started at the topmost stage, would collapse into the hollow sands of its non-existent foundations."
For the first time, a trace of anger came from the Eternals, as though their pride had been pricked by this calm, searching analysis.
"Cease fool! You are to die. But one thing we wish to learn from you before you go—the secret of your gamma-sonic weapon. Though it did not destroy us, and though we have equal forces, we wish to add it to our knowledge!"
York's silence was stinging.
"Very well," resumed the Eternals' spokesman. "We will get it anyway. In advance, knowing your nature, we've planned how. You will be left to die, in this cavern, without your ship. Without a single implement with which to dig—, or commit suicide. You will go insane, before death by asphyxiation. In that condition, your mind will automatically throw off all its thoughts, willed and unwilled. Back in our laboratory at Mount Olympus, an instrument is set to pick up the mental record, and at our leisure we will extract from it the gamma-sonic data. Thus you will die and serve us at the same time."
There was no fiendish note in the quiet exposition of their hideous plan. It was a cold, passionless scheme, in which human feeling meant nothing. York doubted that they knew the meaning of love, anger, hate, mercy, or any emotion. Twenty thousand years of living had drained them dry of all but crystallized intellect.
A few minutes later, York and Vera stood alone in the cavern that had been formed by the two mechanical moles. Their ship was gone, disintegrated before their eyes by a cold beam which caused matter to fall into rotting grains. York and Vera had previously been carried out of the ship, under the Eternals' paralysis ray. Then the Three had released one tank of oxygen into the space, lest they die too soon. Finally, their ship had left, spraying a heat ray behind it that fused its own trail, as the Eternals had fused off the tunnel made by York's ship.
"This is our end, Tony!" whispered Vera, huddling close to him. "Dying like trapped rats, forty-five miles under Earth's surface, in a sealed pocket of rock. But we'll fool them, Tony, in one thing. We won't go insane. We'll talk over our life—two thousand years of it. It's been glorious. We'll die in peace!"
York kissed her tenderly for her bravery and they talked. They renewed stirring memories of their sojourn in space, and of their last two visitations to Earth. But within an hour their voices faltered and their nerves shrieked.
They could see each other by weird radio-active glow from the surrounding rock. It was more hellish than darkness would have been. Aching silence greeted every pause in their speech. The excessive warmth began to torture their bodies, unrelieved by a breath of current in the confined air.
They were buried alive! That corrosive thought ate into their enforced resignation.
Vera began to babble aimlessly, her eyes wild. York fought back the darkening cloud of madness. Was there no escape? They had no slightest tool, implement, or material object other than their clothing and their bodies.
No escape! They had not even a spoon with which to start digging, useless as that would have been with forty-five miles of stone to penetrate. York had the inane thought for a moment that they had fingernails, something to scratch with —madness!
"One thing I have," he remembered, without the slightest surge of hope. "The brain-wave instrument within my left ear, with which I commanded the councillors, The Three Eternals missed it, or disdained it. But what good is it? I can command minds with it, but stone is mindless."
And soon they, too, would be as mindless as their prisoning walls.
"I can hear your thoughts," Vera mumbled, laughing hysterically. "You won't give up, Tony, but how foolish. You're trying to think a way out—think a way out—think a way out—"
Her voice began to repeat like a cracked phonograph record, as her mind teetered.
"Think a way out!" echoed York, his mind clicking. Suddenly he grabbed Vera, shaking her violently. "Vera, maybe that's it!. My brain-wave concentrator projects telekinetic forces. With it, I made other minds cause their bodies to act, move. Perhaps, without the relay minds between, I can use telekinesis to make movement—even of stone!"
"Move stone?" Vera said sepulchrally, in a moment of calm. "But that would take energy, much more than to cause mobile human machines to move, as with the councillors. Energy, lots of it, to move tons of stone over which are tons more—" Her voice broke. "Tony, why do we even think of it? False hopes are just added torture."
"Energy," mumbled York defeatedly. "More energy than our bodies contain, if we could use even that."
He ground the thought of telekinesis out of his mind and joined in Vera's resignation.
"Die in peace—we must," Vera murmured, straining against another attack of hysteria.
"It's a little ironic, isn't it?" mused York. "Two thousand years of science at my fingertips, gathered in thirty lifetimes of thought and research. And yet, without tools, I'm as helpless as any single-lived man would be, in this same dilemma. A thousand years ago, in a great ship, I moved planets. Today, stripped of implements, I'm no better than a worm."
Something probed into his mind. He had felt it many times before in the past years, without realising it had been--, the Three Eternals, spying out his thoughts.
"Still sane?" came the cold, blunt psychic voice of one of the Eternals, rather faintly. "You have remarkable fortitude, Anton York. But you will succumb, even as we might, be it admitted. We are halfway to the surface. When we reach it, you will be babbling, spilling your mind into our recorders." The voice clicked off.
Vera shrieked. She had heard too.
"Don't, Vera!" soothed York. "Don't you see? They did that to drive us to insanity more quickly. Let's remember our resolve—to die in peace.'
"If we only could!" she moaned. "But it's such torture. And my skin, itching—that radioactive emanation—"
York felt it too, a bothersome tingling on his skin, to add to their discomfort. It was caused by radium in the rock.
York leaped up.
"Radium—energy!" he cried. "Energy for the telekinesis! There it is, all around us! Vera, I'm going to try it. My brain wave should be able to utilize this energy as well as that of a human body."
He offered up a prayer to all the gods in the Universe that he was right.
Vera, sobered by hope, watched him. York stood, facing one wall, his face drawn into a pucker of fierce concentration. The same intangible force with which he had impelled the councillors to sit down and listen to him now, sprang against the rock. York had never fully tested the mental ray's possibilities. Could he command matter to fall away before him?
New beads of sweat joined those from the heat, on his brow. Nothing visible, nothing of which he even knew the formu
la, hurtled against adamant rock. Radioactive energy lay pulsing there. Could he tap it, mould it to his use, with nothing more than pure mentality?
Aching minutes passed, then slowly the rock began to slough away into a depression. There was a rustle, as of billions of crystals rubbing against one another, changing position.
Matter obediently aligned itself in a circular wall forming a tunnel.
York walked forward, step by step, like a god before whom nothing could stand. Foot by foot, the tunnel shaped itself.
"Follow me!" York said to Vera, in clipped phrases, without turning his head. "It's working—mind over matter - telekinesis, energized by radium."
York fashioned his mind-wrought tunnel on the steepest upgrade they could climb. It was no use to bore to the ship's tunnel, as that rose almost perpendicularly. He would have to push on at a slant, through perhaps a hundred miles of rock, before reaching the Sun. A problem arose--that of thinning air, as the tunnel extended. York stopped to command oxygen to spring out of the rock. It did, in gusty abundance.
"Chemical telekinesis!" he said to Vera. "Even the electrons and protons shape new atoms, under this mental force. Vera, this is a true miracle of science!"
He went on, shaping his tunnel. The lack of radium in certain strata, later, did not stop York, for his mind had subtly found the way to extract even the locked energy in non-radioactive rock. In foresight, he made the tunnel oval-shaped, distributing the tremendous pressures in the rock around Nature's sturdiest geometrical design. The unbolstered cavern held, for the same reason that a fragile-shelled egg can resist terrific pressure.
Back of them, a while later, they heard a sudden rumble, as their former prison space collapsed. York stopped, facing Vera.
"Quick!" he said, in inspiration. "Will your broadcast thoughts blank. Let the Three Eternals think we died!"
For an hour they remained quiet. They could feel the strange mental probe darting about their closed minds—the Three Eternals trying to discover some mental sign of life from their recent prisoners. York cautioned Vera to hold out, even when the tunnel back of them progressively collapsed.
At last the psychic finger left. The Eternals were convinced of their deaths!
7
HOPEFUL now of true escape, York forged ahead. His mental chisel, powered by mighty demons of energy, forced the creaking, groaning rock aside, against blind, brute gravity. When his mind began to reel, drained of energy he transferred his brain wave concentrator into Vera's ear. Her progress in forming the tunnel was little slower than his.
Later, when food and water became necessity, York commanded these. Water dripped from the rock overhead, into their mouths. Food, though a more stubborn problem, was solved when York dug up from memory the exact chemical formulae of starches, proteins and sugars, which he had determined as an esoteric research, centuries before. At command, the pliant rock molecules gathered into globules of the nutritious compounds and fell into their hands.
"It's so incredible!" murmured Vera, munching, as though unable to believe all this had happened.
"The tool of mentality!" responded York. "I've hit upon it by accident. It is probably the ultimate in forces, if it is fully developed."
Some hours later, when they had progressed miles, York almost fell forward on his face. His tunnel had broken through into a large chamber. They stepped forward and saw, in the weird glow of radioactive walls, a gigantic ovoid cavern, its walls and ceiling braced with ten-foot-square ribs of metal.
"Man-made!" whispered Vera in awe, her voice reverberating back in amplified echoes. She sniffed. ”breathable air, but musty. The place seems old-terribly old!"
"I think I know what this must be!" cried York, eyes lighting. "Remember the Three Eternals' story—Mantis undermining Mu, in their war? This must have been an underground' headquarters, from which the Atlantides drilled upward for their frightful task!"
Though they had seen many strange things, in the worlds of space, none struck them with more eerie wonder than this relic of an ancient folly on their own world.
Nothing remained in the chamber of twenty thousand years before save the metal ribbing which had withstood subterranean pressurcollapsed.ge. Two great metal doors once leading the away in and out, still held, though by now masses of rock must press against them. The Atlantides had built well.
Yes, one thing remained, they saw. An enormous square block of metal squatted in the exact center of the floor, of no discernible purpose. York and Vera walked past it, on their way to start their new tunnel in the opposite wall.
Vera stopped abruptly, her face shocked. Slowly she turned this way and that, finally fastening her eyes on the metal block as though hypnotized.
"Tony, I heard a telepathic voice—from within this metal block!"
York, at first sceptical, turned back, knowing his wife was more sensitive to faint impulses than he was. Standing close to the side of the block, concentrating, they seemed to hear a dim voice. It was an inarticulate psychic mumble, exactly as, though someone were day-dreaming.
"Someone is in there!" gasped York, walking around the block to find it solid metal on all sides, and at the top.
Finally he stood back, on straddled legs, and fixed his eyes on the metal. A depression formed, matter sloughed away, as his telekinetic beam ate inward. It was York, the scientist who did this„ unable to pass by the mystery of a mind voice from within a metal block.
Suddenly there was no more reaction. His mental ray had struck something it could not penetrate, halfway in. Then they heard strange stirrings, and the psychic mumble clicked off. A dim form crept out of the opening York had made. Vera trembled and slipped her hand in. his. What unbelievable thing, imprisoned in metal, had survived-how long—and was coming out?
"A robot!" breathed York, when it stood clear.
It was obviously built in the image of man, but grotesquely disproportioned. Its body, though metallic-looking, Seemed to be as flexible as rubber. Its faceless head bore two gleaming eye mirrors over which shutters blinked rapidly, as though even the dim glow of the cavern blinded it after total darkness.
It looked around slowly, with a queer air of bewilderment. Finally it’s eyes turned to them.
"No, not entirely a robot," it telepathized clearly, but haltingly. "I have a human brain within my skull-case. My name is Kaligor. Now tell me, what—what world is this?" "Earth!" returned York, surprised. "What else could it be? You are from Atlantis, or perhaps Mu, Kaligor?"
"Atlantis? Mu?" The telepathic voice was uncertain. "Yes, Mu of course. Now I remember! You must forgive my slowness. I have been buried in that block of metal for a long time—since the sinking of Atlantis and Mu. How long is that?"
"Twenty thousand years!" breathed York.
"Only twenty thousand years?' The man-robot seemed astonished. "I had thought it to be much longer—almost eternity!"
York and Vera looked at each other. Before, after only one hour, they had felt themselves going mad. How had this mind, human though metal-housed, survived two hundred centuries.
Kaligor caught their amazement -
"It is a long, queer story," he vouched. "I nearly did go mad, in the first few hours. Then I took hold of myself and saw that I could save sanity only by rigid mental discipline. There was only one answer—escape fantasies of my own devising. I must have some one thing, a complicated path, along which my thoughts could wind slowly. In those twenty thousand years I have devised, mentally, an entire new Universe! In a framework of six-dimensional geometry!"
He paused, then went on. "I meticulously thought out each separate sun, its weight, size, brilliance, spectrum, and so on. Finishing this, possibly within a century, I took one particular sun, pictured a mythical system of planets around it, and worked out all the elaborate details of their orbits, satellites, eclipses, and such. Still I found I must go on!"
"You hoped for rescue all that time!" cried York. "For twenty thousand years?"
Surely, in all eternity,
there had never been a longer wait!
"I've been justified, haven't I?" returned the robot-mind, with grim lightness. "Since you stand before me, my rescuers! Ah, but how slow-footed was time! I dared not stop building my fantasy world. At that moment, I would go insane, realizing my hopeless predicament. To get into greater detail, consuming more time, I peopled one of the worlds with intelligent beings, far different from humans. I devised their complete biological background, to the last cell.
"Sometimes, for what must have been days, I would wrestle with one single problem—for instance, the number of blood vessels in an inner organ. These intelligent beings, though their appearance would strike you with horror, are almost as real to me as you two now! In fact—"
He broke off, began again, his telepathic voice only now beginning to smooth its first halting pace.
I had these imaginary beings—Wolkians, I called them--—war with one another., explore their world, trade and all the other activities of a busy civilization. But still time hung endlessly before me—perhaps all eternity! So I conjured up single characters, in my dream world, and followed their lives from birth to death. I sketched out thereafter dozens of individual histories in complete detail. Some of my creations I grew to hate, some to love. There was brave Mirbel, and lovely Binti, for whom he fought—"
Kaligor's psychic voice trailed away into an inarticulate mumble again. He started suddenly.
"But you would not understand," he resumed, "how real these children of my brain are to me. On and on I spun my, formless dream, to keep that crushing thought of my rockbound prison, from my conscious thoughts. I have lived a thousand lives, adventures, dreams. I am even now half wondering if this may not be part of my dream!"
"No, this is real." York smiled, but at the same time realizing a character in Kaligor's dream might say the same
And in that way had Kaligor kept from going mad.
He shook himself suddenly, as though throwing off the last shreds of his age-long dream.