Anton York, Immortal

by Eando Binder

  "This would be enough energy to light all of Sol City for three thousand years! It was all scattered away in a few minutes. Who or what could do that? Is Anton York out there somewhere? What is he doing? A thousand years ago he moved planets. Is he preparing some similar engineering feat, to astound mankind?'

  Vera smiled wanly. "Another chapter in the mythology of Anton York is writing itself. The truth they would not even believe!"

  Tooling their scientific knowledge, Kaligor and York worked out a large-sized brain wave concentrator. In the workshop room of York's, ship was every conceivable scientific tool. For raw material they used the molecules of the lunar terrain, shaping them into any metal, or product with applied chemical telekinesis.

  They tested the machine one day. All three of them poured a combined mental command into the receiver. With creaks and groans that they felt as vibration through the ship, a nearby lunar mountain moved back ten feet!

  "Remember that old Biblical adage, Vera?" said York, awed himself. " If ye have faith, ye can move a mountain!" York had moved much greater things at one time—whole worlds in fact. But he had used world-moving energies produced through gigantic machines. What they had done now had been done purely through mind, with the veriest of thoughts. And thoughts were limitless in scope.

  They could have commanded the mountain to dance away and plunge into space at the speed of light, had they wished. Even so, would this peat new force prevail against the ultra-scientific Eternal Three?

  They sailed to Earth, boldly now. The Three Eternals had already begun construction of a marble home, like that on Mount Olympus, on the key island in the Pacific. Their green-hulled ship came to meet them. Over the ocean waters they battled.

  The Eternals hurled their Jovian charges of energy against York's screen, rapidly wearing it down. Keeping their nerves in check, York, Vera and Kaligor stood before their brain wave projector. At Kaligor's signal, they thrust a common mental command into the receiver.

  A measurelessly powerful telekinetic beam leaped for the enemy ship. But nothing happened. Its screen did not buckle, as they had hoped.

  And the ship itself did not even budge one inch, where at least it should have been dashed away!

  "Failed, didn't it?" came the taunting telepathic voice from the Three Eternals. "We managed to deduce it was telekinetic force with which you escaped last time. We've installed a simple enough counter radiator that split your beam and caused it to flow around your ship."

  Beyond, where the split beam rejoined and angled down to the ocean's broad bosom, water churned madly. A mile-wide hole appeared, clapped together again and sent a mile-high wall of water rolling toward distant shores. Hours later, several coastal cities of mortal man would be wrecked by the greatest "tidal wave" in history.

  "And now," came the frosty announcement, "prepare for death!"

  A particularly vicious blast shook York's ship and nearly burst through his screen. York jerked his ship up and away. Flight again! But with no hope this time of escape.

  So it seemed. Hounding them, the Eternals' ship prepared to send its final barrage against York's tattered screen. In another moment—annihilation.

  But queerly, the Eternals suddenly lost the range. Their ship blundered past, almost striking them, and went on, as though searching. Soon it had lost itself in the curtain of space. York saw then that Kaligor was still standing before the telekinesis projector.

  Only now he turned away.

  "Hypnosis," he explained wearily, as though it had drained all his wind. "I hypnotized them into the belief that we had suddenly become invisible. Change course quickly, York.

  They will be back in an instant. It won't work twice." York, as once before, shifted the ship at random arcs till they were far from their original position. The Eternals did not appear. Safe, for the time being.

  They hardly spoke to one another in the next hour, as their ship cruised slowly in space. With the brain wave projector useless against the Eternals, they could think of no other weapon or force to, try.

  "But we have to do something," said York haggardly. “We can't give up. Kaligor, there anything—anything—"

  Kaligor shrugged wearily and lapsed into his escape world of dreams. York almost envied him and wished that he might dream so pleasantly. But York's dreams, lately, had been nightmares in which the Three Eternals endlessly chased him to the remotest corners of space and time.

  Vera smiled at him wanly.

  "You must rest, Tony," she admonished gently. "Let's forget about the Three Eternals for a while. Maybe our minds, fresher, will think of something later. Let's look out at the peaceful stars."

  They turned out the cabin lights and sat arm in arm before a wide port, gazing out at the star-powdered vault of the firmament. They talked over their many wanderings in space, trying to forget the maddening menace behind them. Venus gleamed brilliantly among the stars.

  "Remember bringing an asteroid to Venus, as its new moon?" murmured Vera. "How happy we were in that accomplishment. So many Earth settlers sighed for moonlight, through the long Venusian nights."

  She felt her husband start slightly.

  "Vera!" he whispered tensely. "You've given me an idea. Suppose we towed away another asteroid, took it to Earth. Suppose we gave it a tremendous velocity, and aimed it for the key island. Even the Eternals wouldn't be able to stop trillions of tons of hard rock plunging down without warning upon their heads!"

  York woke Kaligor, after much mental shouting, and outlined the plan to him. "Good!" agreed the Muan.

  Once more hope went with them as they maneuvered far from Earth's vicinity, out to the barren asteroids. After some search, they singled out a dense little body roughly five miles in diameter. Their ship was no more than a grain of sand beside it, but before long they were nudging it out of its age-old orbit, with the illimitable forces of their telekinetic projector.

  Hour by hour it gained velocity, in the long stretch of space toward Earth.

  York spent brain-numbing hours over the equations of its course. He had to hit precisely one certain spot on Earth, the while it inexorably continued to revolve and rotate. It took timing to seven decimal places. It was super-ballistics, with the asteroid in the role of a gigantic shell shot from a mythical cannon against a target that moved in the four dimensions of space time.

  "And yet," he summed it up, when done, "it's really easier to figure this hundred-million-mile trajectory in space than it would be to aim a cannon shot on Earth for a mere thousand miles. The motions and laws of space are precise, unvarying. Those on Earth are subject to the vagaries of wind, temperature and air density. I think we'll be able to land the asteroid squarely on the island, at a speed of a hundred miles a second."

  It took them two weeks to push the asteroid within striking distance. Gradually its velocity had mounted. It had been aimed unerringly to reach Earth's orbit, plunge into its atmosphere, and drop like a great bomb on the island of the Three Eternals.

  "It can't fail!" said Kaligor confidently, rechecking York's figures for the third time. "The Eternals will have no warning. The, asteroid is too small to shine as a moving star except in the last few minutes. It will light incandescently when it strikes the atmosphere, but a few seconds later it will land. The Eternal, will be ground flat into the Earth itself! And at the same time, the island will be cracked apart, reversing the rise of Atlantis. York, it is a splendid plan!"

  "I hope it works."

  Now that the zero moment approached, York was assailed by doubts. Yet how could the Eternals survive it, this hurling of a world at them?

  10

  Reaching a point a -thousand miles above Earth, York halted his ship. The asteroid plunged on. It vanished from their sight. Then, five seconds later it reappeared, glowing slightly. With each passing second, as it hurtled into the thicknesses of the atmosphere, it brightened.

  Like a glowing diamond, it plummeted for the ground-- and the island. It been aimed perfectly.

 
"Here's a little present for you, Eternals!" sang out Kaligor, moving for the ship's telescope.

  It struck!

  Watching, they saw it shatter into a shower of sparks, from their perspective, that spattered far over the Pacific Ocean. Dense clouds of steam shot skyward. More than a quadrillion tons of rock had smashed into Earth, the impact was sufficient to affect, by a measurable, split second, the rotation of the planet. Earthly astronomers would later notice that, and record the fall of the largest meteorite in history, little suspecting the man-made agency behind it.

  York drew a deep breath. That mighty mass had rocketed straight down upon the marble home of the Three Eternals. By no stretch of imagination could they have survived.

  "York!"

  Kaligor, at the telescope, had given the sharp mental cry. "The marble building is still intact! The asteroid struck some shell of force over, it, broke on that, and the pieces simply slid off into the ocean on all sides!"

  He followed this stunning, incredible announcement with an urgent warning.

  "Quickly! lights off, ship unpowered, minds closed! They will be after us in a moment. We're safer here than in trying to outdistance them after detection."

  They waited for long hours, minds locked against mental probing, realizing the. Eternals would not dare leave their island unless they detected the position of their quarry.

  At last, as before, a broadcast telepathic message rustled in their minds.

  "Did you think to catch us unawares, Kaligor and Anton York?" scoffed one of the Eternal Three. "We remembered that you had learned to move worlds before, Anton York. We expected you to try this. A trigger-touch dome of force protected the island and our home. Even if you should hurl the Moon down on us, we would shunt it aside. We dealt with world-moving forces long before you!. Must we repeat over and over that you are as children to us? Children who must eventually be caught and punished?"

  York went to his controls and eased the ship away from Earth, following a regular liner route so that the eternals' detectors would not single them out.

  "Now what's left, Kaligor?" he asked, biting his lip. "What's left to try—and it'll be the last try!"

  But Kaligor was sunk in the myths of his mind, in temporary escape from the stark, pressing problem that brought haggard lines to the faces of his two companions.

  "Mirbel!" his mind was murmuring, as they had first heard it murmuring from inside the steel block- "Mirbel, is that you? And Binti?. I have been to a strange dream world, called—let me think--Earth! Earth, yes. I dreamed of struggle, futile opposition to super-scientists. But that is impossible, isn't it, Mirbel? I'm the supreme scientist in the Universe! Binti, tell me it sufficient!"

  Losing patience at last, York prodded the bemused Muan.

  "Wake up, Kaligor! This is no time to dream. In the name of the Universe, stop mumbling and talking to those two. They're, figments, myths, dummies—do you understand?"

  York was immediately sorry for his outburst. But Kaligor came awake.

  "Phantoms! Figments!" he echoed. "Myths, dummies! Yes, you're right."

  Suddenly his telepathic contact broke, became a rush of jumbled thought. For a moment York thought he had again dropped into his enchanted spell, but his telepathic voice returned, now clear, strong.

  "Anton York" he said, "what is most important in all this—ourselves or the civilization we are trying to save?"

  "Civilization!" returned York without hesitation. "They are our people--yours and mine. They advance, slowly but surely." Firmly he repeated: "The civilization—for what it is to become. It must be preserved, even at the cost of our lives!"

  York felt a strange embarrassment, with the last word, as though he had thrown it before the robot's face.

  "I cannot die," said Kaligor evenly. "No, but I can sacrifice to an equal extent."

  "What are you driving at?" York demanded.

  "There is only one way to achieve that aim for which we would both make the final sacrifice," continued Kaligor. "By decoying the Three Eternals away from the island long enough to blow it up!"

  Kaligor went on, and suddenly it was all starkly clear to York.

  A year went by, a year in which York, Vera and Kaligor laboured over intricate mechanisms.

  Then, one day, they faced the Eternals once again at their island. Kaligor sat hunched at the controls of the ship. His telepathic radiation issued from a human brain, clothed in an inhuman shell. Their fleshly bodies offering sharp contrast York and Vera stood back of him, almost woodenly tense, as their plan was started.

  "We have a new weapon," boasted Kaligor to the enemy. "One that will not fail, Eternals. Death comes to you—"

  Kaligor jerked a lever and a queer reddish beam sprang toward the enemy ship. It spangled against their screen, spread like red paint, but nothing else happened.

  "A puny force, no better than your others!" chorused the Eternals triumphantly. "Now you, Kaligor and Anton York will greet that most final master—Death!"

  Again York's screen blazed to near extinction, as the Eternals threw their heaviest beams against it. And York's ship fled for the fourth time, as though this were some play that must be enacted over and over again for all eternity.

  Inside the ship, Kaligor manipulated the controls with his flexible, tentacular fingers. He drove the ship away at its utmost acceleration, arrowing into the open void. The more tender forms of York and Vera flattened against one wall, their eyes closing. Kaligor glanced at them and nodded in satisfaction. It would take the Eternals some time to catch up, at this superpace.

  On and on the chase went, at rates unknown and impossible to ordinary space ships that mankind knew. Mars flashed by, then the asteroids, Jupiter, and finally Pluto, and the two ships catapulted out into the outer immensity, exceeding the speed of light. This was the final pursuit. It could end in only one way.

  Kaligor felt the mental probe of the Three Eternals, playing over the unconscious forms of York and Vera, as though wondering what had happened to them. Even, for a moment, their visual teleray flicked about. Both probes left finally, and the chase went on Kaligor, though he could not grin physically, was certainly grinning within his human mind.

  Inevitably, the green-hulled ship crawled closer, closer. Finally, within range, it began to batter at the screen again. Kaligor watched the needle spin to the danger mark—and pass it. The screen was down!

  Flame leaped into the ship, searing, scorching. Metal glowed and melted. The two mortal bodies of York and Vera, still unmoving, unconscious, were touched by naked fire and then they began to dance and writhe. But only for a moment. Soon they were gone, consumed.

  "The final sacrifice!' murmured Kaligor, watching the ship burn away around him.

  Everything was consumed around Kaligor. But his body could not be consumed. He was out in space, free, the ship and all it had contained disintegrated to the last atom. A multitude of fiery stars decorated all space, watching indifferently this battle between superbeings.

  "Thus you have finally been defeated, Kaligor!" came the telepathic voice from the victorious Three Eternals. "Anton York and his mate are no more and you—you will float through space, at your present velocity, for all eternity! It is a better end for you than what we had planned!"

  But no answer came from Kaligor, to his ancient enemies. Instead, they barely detected a faint rumble.

  "Binti, ! Mirbel!. How good to see you again! 'I have just awakened from that dream. That dream of—what is it?— Earth! Binti, Mirbel, you are real. Not those others. They called you phantoms, Mirbel, and you, sweet Binti. They said you were just myths, figments of a dream I had spun in a long sleep. What was that other word? Yes, utmost. They called you dummies, and somehow, in that other dream of Earth, it was very significant, that word. Very significant, but I can't remember—I can't remember . . Binti . . . Mirbel . . . I will stay with you now-

  "Dummies!" One of the Three Eternals roared that to the others. "Did you hear? I see it all now. We've been decoye
d, lured away, while back on Earth—"

  York back on Earth, turned away from the mind concentrator with which he had been projecting his thoughts out into space. Impinging on a delicate relay within the cleverly wrought dummy of himself aboard Kaligor's ship, his mind had been there, as far as the Three Eternals' mental probe had determined. Vera's too. Now there was no reaction from the dummy-relay, proving the Eternals had finally caught up with Kaligor, after a long three-hour chase.

  "It worked, Vera!" York cried “The Eternals have been decoyed at least beyond Pluto, thinking all the time that you and I were with Kaligor, when they were only life-like dummies. Organic robots, really, since they held our thoughts. And pretty cleverly made—artificial protoplasm, exact duplicates of us, in- case the Eternals used a visual check-up. Most important of all, the mental-relays within the dummies' skull-cases."

  He laughed almost gaily. "The Three Eternals were fooled by one of the simplest, oldest tricks in the Universe!"

  Vera was less jubilant, more solemn. "Kaligor thought of it," she murmured. "His dream world was of some use after all. And now just think, Tony"--her voice became soft, pitying—"he must float on and on, in boundless space, never to know death. His sacrifice has been more, much more, than ours will be! And yet, perhaps, he would have it so. He will continue' creating his mental universe, which he loves, and in which he—belongs. He will live in it! Perhaps who really knows?—it is as real as ours, to us. Life is all in the mind—" Her voice trailed away moodily.

  York nodded, subdued. Then he stirred himself and piloted his ship up and out of the dense island jungle in which it was hidden. It was his own ship. The one Kaligor had piloted away had been an outward duplicate, built secretly in Sol City's great factories.

  "We have about three hours," said York, "before the Eternals come back. Three hours for which Kaligor traded an eternity of helpless drifting."