by Eando Binder
York answered at last "No: There is no question of right or wrong in any scale of cosmic morals. But here is one thought, Vuldane. My people have millions of years ahead of them. Their sun is stable. You, on the other hand, are a doomed race. You will live another hundred thousand years in your new system, and then again that Cepheid will explode.
Is it worth murdering my race, facing a million-year future, to save yours for one-tenth that? Can you pass into your inevitable oblivion with that on your conscience?"
"A strong point," nodded Vuldane. "Except for one thing. Our astronomers have measured all the stars. A new Cepheid is being born in a certain star group. It is beginning to pulse slowly. In the slow timescale of the cosmos, it will not be a full-fledged Cepheid for another hundred thousand years. But if we gain our new breathing spell, as outlined, that Cepheid will be ready for us. And other Cepheids are being born, our astronomers note. Through them, we also have a limitless future ahead of us!"
York deflated utterly. He could already picture, in his mind's eye, the nine planets of his sun, barren and deserted —human life gone. He looked up suddenly.
"All, you say, Vuldane. But there are more than ten billion of my race. Surely you can leave a few thousand behind, to breed our race again."
Vuldane shook his head, with a combination of pity and ruthlessness.
"No. We dare not leave any of your race. Once they grew strong again, we would only have to destroy them later. Better that your race goes into total oblivion now."
York could see that point, too. Knowing the crusade spirit of his own people, they would one day swoop down on the Korians, to right an old wrong. There would only be bitter interstellar war. The Korians, for their own sake, would have to guard against that.
And again it was not a question of right, or wrong, or cruelty, or anything in normal terms. This was something above and beyond such meaningless phrases out of Earth's old law books.
"How much time is there?" he asked dully. "How soon before your Cepheid explodes into a nova?"
"Just a short thousand years. It will take all that time to bring your people, set them all in fortresses, and help them battle the beasts. And for us to migrate when that is done. The time is short."
York drew himself up.
"Only one thing I ask, Vuldane."
"Yes?"
"Before you begin taking my people, give me a certain time to try to figure out some alternative."
Vuldane pondered. "The transference should begin immediately. However, it will take a year to complete our first fleet of ships capable of plunging through the space-time wall that separates our two universes. I give you that year, Anton York."
Suddenly he thrust out his spindly hand.
"And good luck!"
10
YORK'S ship sped through the void at a pace that left laggard light far behind. His face was grimly set as, he took a course for the planetary system of the hypno-beasts. Vuldane had readily given the data
"A year, Vera," York said desolately. "A short year in which to save the human race! I must not sleep for that year Drugs will keep me going. Somehow there must be a way."
"What do you expect to do among the Beasts?" Vera asked tonelessly.
"Anything," York stated. "Anything possible"
In a day they were there. The Cepheid sun was an exact duplicate of the one they had left. Its ten planets were large and widespread, fairly crawling with the hateful hypno-beasts. They had a semi-civilization. They bred whole races of creatures for their blood-food, for their ten planets of loathsome vampirism. Luckily they had no space ships. The whole universe—this and all others—would become theirs. They populated the ten planets simply through the accident of separate, parallel development.
York could feel the powerful beat of their hypnotic force radiating en masse from them. It dragged at his mind as gravity dragged at his ship. Recklessly he power-dived over one planet, spraying down his gamma-sonic rays, cutting a wide swath among them. The hypno-force clutched at him. Twice more he dived recklessly and barely won free the third time.
"Tony, please! It's senseless."
York nodded helplessly.
"I need a long-range projector. We'll build one. No. We'll have the Korians build us one."
The ship sped back the way it had come. Vuldane readily agreed. Almost overnight his technicians turned out a super-projector for York's ship and back he raced. With this he whipped his ship in a tight orbit around one planet and sprayed down the destroying rays in a band ten miles wide, from directly above the surface.
"If this works, Vera," said in vague hope, "we’ll have a million more made. And I'll go to Earth and get a million strong-minded men, and we'll sweep every planet clean. The Korians weren't able to get close enough to the planet." But gradually he felt the finger of hypnotic force reach for him. His telescope revealed thousands of the massed hypno-beasts below, directing a combined hypno-ray upward at him. He kept up his deadly beam even when he felt, the cloying, insidious urge to drop down and yield to the Beasts. Sweat beaded his brow. God, what frightful mental power they had!
He had not watched Vera. Suddenly he noticed her at the locked controls, unhitching them and plunging the ship down. Her movements were jerky, robotlike. She was in a hypnotized trance.
"Vera!"
York left his gun and leaped for her. She turned on him, clawing and scratching. York bit his lip and swung his fist, knocking her cold. He zoomed the ship up, barely in time. His whole body had begun stiffening at the powerful clutch of massed hypnotism, from below. He whipped the ship into free space.
"Vera, forgive me," he muttered when he brought her to with a dash of cold water. "Well, that's out. The men from Earth would have as little, or less chance than I had."
"Vuldane said they tried everything," Vera murmured hopelessly. "Theirs is the only way. Setting Earth people down there, after blasting a space with their super-science.
Letting them breed and produce immune generations. A thousand-year job, Tony—and we have only a year. It might as well be a second."
York did not give up. He thought next of a screen against the hypnotic force. Back at the Korian world, he consulted with Vuldane.
"There is no screen against their hypnosis," Vuldane stated flatly. "We have tried. You noticed that your mental telepathy barely worked through our energy wall. Yet that energy wall is absolutely transparent to their hypnotic force!"
"Still, I want to try," ground out York desperately. "I must. Give me one dome as a proving ground, and all the materials I need."
"Agreed," nodded Vuldane quickly. "I sympathize with you, York. But I have no hope for you."
York tried everything in the next few months. He had a group of chained hypno-beasts as control, and set before them shields of various composition. Metal alloys, plastics, radium-coated diamond, and then more subtle walls of electro-magnetic energy, cosmic rays, even a vacuum. In each case, stationing himself with the shield between, their hypnotic force came through undiminished.
Vuldane was right. There was no shield to that demonic mental vibration.
"Tony, please, you must rest," Vera insisted as he staggered and would have fallen except for her arm. "You haven't closed your eyes in months."
But York went on, sleepless, taxing the superb vitality of his immortal body to the utmost,
"There must be a way," he chanted steadily, as though he were a child reciting a poem.
Vuldane came to visit him at times, and even made suggestions. Admiration, for York shone from his alien eyes.
"If anything at all can make me feel a pang of regret over sacrificing your race, it is you, Anton York. A race that produces such as you deserves continuation." Then, in the next breath he added: "But my race must continue!"
"Vuldane, did you try everything?" York pleaded. "Did you try creating planetary earthquakes, floods, volcanic eruptions?"
The Korian nodded. "Naturally. We nearly disrupted one planet entirely, instituting a
planet-wide geological upheaval. For a century the planet seemed clear. Not one hypno-beast appeared. Then suddenly they cropped up again from somewhere." "An atomic fire, sweeping the whole planet's surface?" cried York. "How about that?"
"And how would you stop the atomic fire from eating inward, consuming the entire planet to ash?" "The hypnosis itself," sighed York. "That's the angle I must work from. We can't resist it or shield it. But how about a neutralizing projector?"
Fired with the new idea, York built what was essentially a scrambler, or a device that would spray out static to the hypnotic force. He was able to cast a field around his dozen control beasts and break up their flow of hypnosis into intermittent flashes. Borrowing a super-powerful generator from the Korians, York raced to the other Cepheid.
With the static machine going full blast, he was able to land on one planet. Hypno-beasts began crowding around this invasion of their world.
York sprayed his static around, neutralizing their hypnoforce. Then he swept his gun in a circle, whiffing out the monsters like a row of lighted candles.
It was as though he had touched off a hidden spring. A signal must have gone around the planet. Over the horizon marched incredible droves of them. They massed around the ship in such numbers that York's lethal ray was like a little machinegun against all the armies of Alexander, Caesar and Napoleon combined. Sheer weight of numbers would win out.
"Tony, they're getting nearer—"
"Yes, but if we had a million scramblers and a million guns, it would work!" York shouted happily. "Simple mathematics."
And then it happened. With a tortured grind, the static machine sputtered and died. Like a tidal wave, the full force of hypnotism struck them, no longer scrambled. Vera passed instantly into a trance. York, with an effort of will that seemed to tear his brain up by the roots, jerked over the engine lever. The ship darted upward at a pace that took them out of the hypnotic range in seconds.
"Just in time," York muttered. He looked over his static machine thoughtfully, incredulously. It was a fused maul. When they were back, Vuldane explained.
"We tried that too. The hypno-beasts are canny. Their technique is simple. They pour a massed hypno-force at the scrambler, overload it, and burn it out. We tried generators with world-moving power. They burned them all out. When will you begin to realize, Anton York, that this is a thousand-year job? We've planned it as such. It is not something that you can toss off overnight."
York looked stricken.
"I'm sorry," said Vuldane simply and sincerely, before leaving.
York looked at Vera. Not a shred of hope remained.
"Think of it, Vera," he said hollowly. "Our race was doomed as far back as the nineteenth century, when the Korians came to take an Earth culture back with them. Even before you and I were born, our people were doomed unknowingly. I destroyed fifty Immortals, and Mason Chard, and fought the Three Eternals, to save civilization. I was even ready to sacrifice myself. And all the time, another race in another universe had put their finger on us and marked us for oblivion. Our whole life and effort, all my superscience and guidance of Earth, has been a mockery, a cosmic joke, a jest of the gods."
Vera soothed him in ways she had learned through two thousand years of association. His weary head sought refuge in her lap. His bloodshot eyes closed for the first time in six months.
"All mockery," he said bitterly. "I've had the thought of going back to Earth and destroying it, so that oblivion for them will be quicker and more merciful. Lighting an atomic fire on all the planets— It would be swift."
"No, Tony. That would be pure spite against the Korians. Whatever they've been forced to do, they are a highly civilized, deserving race."
"Fire!" York jerked erect, repeating his own word. A dawning look came over his face. "Fighting fire with fire! Vera, maybe that's the answer. Instead of fighting them with our weapons, why not fight them with theirs?"
Sleep forgotten, hope reborn, York became twice the dynamo of activity he had been before.
"Time is short—six months. I have to measure the wave-length of the hypno-force, and then duplicate it."
Six months. Six months in which York explored the psycho-magnetic scale. Earth's scientists had taken two centuries to piece out the electro-magnetic scale. York condensed the same amount of research into a six-month snap of the fingers.
In the electro-magnetic scale were the octaves of radio waves, infra-red, visible light, ultra-violet, X-rays, gamma rays and cosmic rays.
In the psycho-magnetic range, York found the octaves of telepathy, clairvoyance, sixth-sense, hunch, hallucination, dreams. Far down the scale, like the elusive cosmic rays, he found the hypnotic range.
These super-penetrative radiations of hypnotism he measured with all the accuracy of an astrophysicist studying a spectrograph. They were so incredibly fine that York hazily understood them to slip through the interstices of the ether itself, as cosmic rays slipped through the planetary atoms.
"Now I know exactly what the hypno-source is," York stated. "Vuldane, did you try to build a projector?" For the first time, Vuldane shook his head. "This is a great achievement, York. But I'm afraid you can't build a projector. Not a mechanical one. Evolution produced the projector—an organic brain—after millions of years. You won't duplicate that in the time left, even the full thousand years."
York saw the logic of it. Then a strange look came into his eye.
"No. But I already have the projector." He tapped his own forehead. "All I have to do is find the way to increase its powers to equal the brain projectors of the hypno-beasts!"
"Good luck," said Vuldane again.
His sympathetic smile, as he left, told of no hope for the outcome.
Precious time slipped by
York worked entirely from the biological angle. With a super X-ray, he went minutely over the brain of one of the captive hypno-beasts, studying its cells, analysing it completely. When at last he had the answer, he had withdrawn a precious hormone from it. But would it work?
Vera volunteered to be the guinea pig. Anton looked at her for a long moment. "It might mean death," he said grimly.
Vera was adamant, and Anton relented. He injected a few drops of the new hormone into the base of Vera's neck, and watched for the results with eyes that burned with hope and dread. Vera went into a coma. Her skin became cold. Her heart stopped. York stood quietly, fighting for control.
An hour later, death drew back. Vera's super-vitality rallied and life returned. She sat up, smiling. York said nothing. Words meant nothing now. Silently he led her to the test chamber, before a group of starved hypno-beasts. He locked her in. They surrounded her, eyeing her and closing in. Vera went rigid. Their eager tentacles stretched for her soft white neck.
York turned away, shuddering. Failure, after all!
Suddenly, within the chamber, the situation changed. As though an invisible blast had blown them back, the hypno-beasts fell away from Vera.
She stood up, her eyes blazing. One by one the Beasts rolled over and went rigid, in complete hypnosis.
Vuldane, when they faced him, was sceptical.
"I can't do anything about it, York. I can't recall the ships sent to bring the first of your people. We have little time as it is to start our grand plan. I can't take a chance on your hypothetical anti-hypnosis hormone."
"Make this test," York demanded. "Send a shipful of your men to the Beast system, after they have been given my hormone injection. Command them to land among the thickest of the Beast communities and stay for ten hours. If they don't come back, I won't be able to fight your plan."
Vuldane agreed. York injected the men, rescuing them from the deathlike effects by, heroic doses of drugs. The ship left.
Waiting for its return was a refinement of torture that ground York's nerves to shreds. The hours stumbled by like his entire lifetime.
"Tony—look!"
The ship appeared. The Korians leaped out, eagerly telling their story of withstanding
mass hypnotism for ten hours, and hypnotizing a ring of Beasts in turn.
Vuldane turned to York.
"You have saved your people, Anton York. It is a monumental achievement I will recall the first fleet immediately. All the culture races will be returned to their worlds. I cannot express my joy and relief that we are not forced to sacrifice your race. You may go back to your people now, and tell them they are saved."
York shook his head. A strange look rested in his eyes, for this was the strangest thing of all the past episode.
"No. It is a story they would hardly believe. The only evidence for it would be the banishment of a thousand-people from Fort Mojave in eighteen-eighty-eight. That trifling event has long been forgotten and most likely unrecorded. Humanity was saved without knowing it was doomed. That will have to remain my secret."
Vera nodded. It was a chapter of the mythology of Anton York that would never be written for the eyes of the Earth. It was the secret of Anton York.
Epilogue
Back on Earth, before the two colossi of diamond on Mount Everest, the yearly commemoration ceremony paeaned to its sad denouement
"Anton York, benefactor of humanity, is dead!"
THE END