"Wanna—drink," the derelict mumbled. "Gotta—they won't give old Sammy a drink…"
Stephen's eyes again grew luminous. They seemed to bore into the watery eyes of the hobo, probing, commanding.
"Eh?" the drunkard asked blankly.
Sammy's voice died off uncertainly as he staggered erect. Stephen gripped his arm, and the two went down the street. In a dark doorway they paused.
The foggy, half-wrecked brain of the tramp was no match for Stephen's hypnotic powers. Sammy listened as the boy talked.
"You're catching a freight out of town. You're taking me with you. Do you understand?"
"Eh?" Sammy asked vaguely.
In a monotonous voice the boy repeated his commands. When the drunkard finally understood, the two headed for the railway station.
Stephen's plans were made. To all appearance, he was a mere child. He could not possibly have fulfilled his desires alone. The authorities would have returned him to his parents, or he would have been sent to a school as a public charge. What man could recognize in a young boy an already blossoming genius? Stephen's super-mentality was seriously handicapped by his immaturity.
He needed a guardian, purely nominal, to satisfy the prejudices of the world. Through Sammy he could act. Sammy would be his tongue, his hands, his legal representative. Men would be willing to deal with Sammy, where they would nave laughed at a child. But first the tramp would have to be metamorphosed into a "useful citizen."
That night they rode in a chilly boxcar, headed East. Hour after hour Stephen worked on the brain of his captive. Sammy must be his eyes, his hands, his provider.
Once Sammy had been a mechanic, he revealed under Stephen's relentless probing. The train rolled on through the darkness, the wheels beating a clicking threnody toward the East.
It was not easy, for the habits of years had weakened Sammy's body and mind. He was a convinced tramp, lazy and content to follow his wanderlust. But always Stephen drove him on, arguing, commanding, convincing. Hypnosis played a large part in the boy's ultimate success.
Sammy got a job, much against his will, and washed dishes in a cheap restaurant for a few weeks. He shaved daily and consistently drank less. Meanwhile Stephen waited, but he did not wait in idleness. He spent his days visiting automobile agencies and studying the machines. At night he crouched in a cheap tenement room, sketching and designing. Finally he spoke to Sammy.
"I want you to get another job. You will be a mechanic in an automobile factory." He watched Sammy's reaction.
"Aw, I can't, Steve," the man protested. "They wouldn't even look at me. Let's hit the road again, huh?"
"Show them these," Stephen ordered, extending a sheaf of closely written papers and drawings. "They'll give you a job."
At first the foreman told Sammy to get out, after a glance at his red-rimmed eyes and weak, worn face. But the papers were a magic password. The foreman pondered over them, bewilderedly scrutinized Sammy, and went off to confer with one of the managers.
"The man's good!" he blurted. "He doesn't look it, but he's an expert mechanic, just the kind of man we need. Look at these improvements he's worked out! This wiring change will save us thousands annually. And this gear ratio. It's new, but it might work. I think—"
"Send him in," the manager said hastily.
Thus Sammy got his job. Actually he wasn't much good, but every month or two he would show up with some new improvement, some unexpected invention, that got him raises instead of dismissal. Of course Stephen was responsible for all this. He had adopted Sammy.
Stephen saw to it that they moved to a more convenient apartment, and now he went to school. Needing surprisingly little sleep, he spent most of his time studying. There was so much to learn, and so little time! To acquire the knowledge he wanted, he needed more and more money to pay for tutoring and equipment.
The years passed with a peaceful lack of haste. Sammy drank little now, and took a great deal of interest in his work. But he was still a tramp at heart, eternally longing for the open road. Sometimes he would try to slip away, but Stephen was always too watchful.
At last the boy was ready for the next step. It was then early in 1927. After months of arduous toil, he had completed several inventions which he thought valuable. He had Sammy patent them, and then market them to the highest bidders.
The result was more money than Stephen had expected. He made Sammy resign his job, and the two of them retired to a country house. He brought along several tutors, and had a compact, modern laboratory set up. When more money was required, the boy would potter around for a while. Inevitably he emerged with a new formula that increased the already large annual income.
Tutors changed as Stephen grew older and learned more. He attended college for a year, but found he could apply his mind better at home. He needed a larger headquarters, though. So they moved to Wisconsin and bought a huge old mansion, which he had renovated.
His quest for knowledge seemed endless, yet he did not neglect his health. He went for long walks and exercised mightily. When he grew to manhood, he was a magnificent specimen, strong, well formed and handsome. But always, save for a few occasional lapses, he was coldly unemotional.
Once he had detectives locate his parents, and anonymously arranged to provide a large annual income for them. But he would not see either his father or mother.
"They would mean emotional crises," he told Sammy. "There would be unnecessary arguments. By this time they have forgotten me, anyway."
"Think so?" Sammy muttered, chewing on the stem of his ancient pipe. His nut-brown, wrinkled face looked rather puzzled under his stiff crop of white hair. "Well, I never did think you was human, Stevie."
He shook his head, put the pipe away, and pottered off in search of his rare drinks. Stephen returned to his work.
What was the purpose of these years of intensive study? He scarcely knew. His mind was a vessel to be filled with the clear, exhilarating liquor of knowledge. As Sammy's system craved alcohol, so Stephen's brain thirsted for wisdom. Study and experiment were to him a delight that approached actual ecstasy. As an athlete gets keen pleasure from the exercise of his well trained body, so Stephen exulted in the exercise of his mind.
Unimaginable eons before, in the teeming seas of a primeval world, life-forms had fed their blind hunger. That was appetite of the flesh.
Stephen's hunger was the appetite of the mind. But it also made him blind, in a different way. He was a godlike man, and he was—unhuman.
By 1941 he was the greatest scientist in the world.
CHAPTER III
The Earth-born
Before man created gods, Ardath was. In his space ship, swinging silently around the world, he slept as the ages went past. .
Sometimes he woke and searched, always in vain, for intelligent life in the land below. The road of evolution was long and bloody.
Dark weariness shrouded Ardath as he saw the vast, mindless, terrible behemoths of the oceans. Monsters wallowed into the swamps. The ground shook beneath the tread of tyrant lizards. Brontosaurs and pterodactyls lived and fed and died.
There were mammals—oehippus the fleet and three-toed, and a tiny marsupial in which the flame of intelligence glowed feebly. But the titan reptiles ruled. Mammals could not survive in this savage, thundering world.
Forests of weeds and bamboo towered in a tropical zone that stretched almost to the poles. Ardath pondered, studied for a time in his laboratory—and the Ice Age came.
Was Ardath responsible? Perhaps. His science was not Earthly, and his powers were unimaginable. The ice mountains swept down, blowing their frigid breath upon the forests and the reptile giants.
Southward the hegira fled. It was the Day of Judgment for the idiot colossi that had ruled too long.
But the mammals survived. Shuddering in the narrow equatorial belt, they starved and whimpered. But they lived, and they evolved, while Ardath slept again…
When he awoke, he found beast-men, hairy and ferocious. Th
ey dwelt in gregarious packs, ruled by an Old Man who had proved himself strongest of the band.
But always the chill winds of the icelands tore at them as they crouched in their caves.
Ardath found one, wiser than the rest, and taught him the use of fire. Then the alien man sent his ship arrowing up from Earth, while flames began to burn wanly before cave-mouths. In grunts and sign language the story was told. Ages later, man would tell the tale of Prometheus, who stole fire from the very gods of heaven.
Folk-lore is filled with the legends of men who visited the gods—the Little People or the Sky-dwellers—and returned with strange powers. Arrows and spears, the smelting of ores, the sowing and reaping of grain… How many inventions could be traced to Ardath?
But at last Ardath slept for a longer time than ever before, and then he awoke.
Dark was the city. Flambeaux were numerous as fireflies in the gloomy streets. The metropolis lay like a crouching beast on the shore, a vast conglomeration of stone, crude and colossal.
The ship of Ardath hung far above the city, unseen in the darkness of the night. Ardath himself was busy in his laboratory, working on a curiously constructed device that measured the frequency and strength of mentality. Thought created electrical energy, and Ardath's machine registered the power of that energy. Delicately he sent an invisible narrow-wave beam down into the city far beneath.
On a gauge a needle crept up, halted, dipped, and mounted again. Ardath reset a dial. Intelligent beings dwelt on Earth now, but their intelligence was far inferior to Ardath's. He was searching for a higher level.
The needle was inactive as Ardath swept the city with his ray. Useless! The pointer did not even quiver. The mental giant Ardath sought was not here, though this was the greatest metropolis of the primeval world.
But suddenly the needle jerked slightly. Ardath halted the ray and turned to a television screen. Using the beam as a carrier, he focused upon a scene that sprang into instant visibility.
He saw a throne of black stone upon which a woman sat. Tall and majestic, an Amazon of forty or more, she had lean, rugged features, and wore plain garments of leather.
Guards flanked her, gigantic, stolid, armed with spears. Before the throne a man stood, and it was at this man that Ardath stared.
For months the Kyrian's ship had scoured the skies, searching jungles and deserts. Few cities existed. On the northern steppes, shaggy beast-men still dwelt in caves, fighting the mammoth. But the half-men and the hairy elephants were rapidly degenerating. In mountain lakes were villages built on stilts and piers sunken into the mud, but these clans were barbarous. Only on this island were there civilization and intelligence, though lamentably lower than Ardath's own level.
The man from space watched the wisest human on this primitive Earth.
In chains the Earthman stood before the black stone. He was huge, massively thewed, with a bronzed, hairy skin showing through the rags he wore. His face resembled that of a beast, ferocious with hatred. Amber cat's-eyes glared from beneath the beetling brows. The jutting jaw was hidden by a wiry beard that tangled around the nose that was little more than a snout.
Yet in that brute body, Ardath knew, dwelt amazing intelligence. Shrewdness and cunning were well masked by the hideous face and form.
What of the queen? Curious to know, Ardath tested her with his ray. She, too, was more intelligent than most of the savages.
"These two are enemies," Ardath thought. "And I imagine that the man faces danger or death. Well, what is that to me? I cannot live in a time where all are barbarians. It is best that I sleep again."
Yet he hesitated, one hand resting lightly on the controls that would send the ship racing up into space. The barren loneliness of the void, the slow centuries of his dark vigil, crept with icy tentacles into his mind. He thought of the equally long, miserably lonely future.
"Suppose I sleep again and wake in a dead world? It could happen, for my own home planet was destroyed. How could I face another search through space? Theron and the rest had each other…"
He turned back again to watch the two people on the screen.
"They are intelligent, after a fashion, and they would be companions. If I took them with me, and we woke in a lifeless time, they could bring forth a new race which I could train eugenically into the right pattern."
The decision was made. Ardath would sleep again in his ship—but this time not alone.
He glanced at the screen, and his eyes widened. A new factor had entered the problem. Hastily he turned to a complicated machine at his side…
As Thordred the Usurper stood before the throne of his queen, his savage face was immobile. Weaponless, fettered, he nevertheless glared with implacable fury at the woman who had spoiled his plans.
Zana met his gaze coldly. Her harsh features were darkly somber.
"Well?" she asked. "Have you anything to say to me?"
"Nothing," Thordred grunted. "I have failed. That is all."
The huge, almost empty throne room echoed his words eerily.
"Aye, you have failed," the queen said. "And there is but one fate for losers who revolt. You tried to force me from my throne, and instead you stand in chains before me. You have lost, so you must die."
Thordred's grin mocked her calm decision.
"And a woman continues to rule our land. Never in history has this shame been put upon us. Always we have been ruled by men—warriors!"
"You call me weakling!" Zana snarled at him. "By all the gods, you are rash, Thordred. You know well that I've never shirked battle, and that my sword has been swift to slay. I am strong as a man and more cunning than you."
"Yet you are a woman," Thordred taunted recklessly. "Kill me, if you wish, but you cannot deny your sex."
A shadow darkened Zana's face as she glared venomously at her mocker.
"Aye, I shall kill you," she said. "So slowly that you will beg for a merciful death. Then the vultures will pick your carcass clean on the Mountain of the Gods."
Thordred suddenly shouted with laughter.
"Save your words, wench. It is just like a woman to threaten with words. A man's vengeance is with a spear, swift and sudden."
He paused, and a curious light grew in his amber eyes. His great body tensed as Thordred listened.
In the distance, a tumult grew louder and louder, like the beating of the sea. Suddenly it was thundering through the throne room.
Zana sprang to her feet, her lips parted in astonishment.
The vast doors at the end of the room burst inward. Through the portal poured a yelling mob.
"Thordred!" they roared. "Ho, Thordred!"
The giant grinned victoriously at Zana.
"Some are still faithful to me, it seems. They would rather see a man on the throne—"
A blistering curse burst from Zana's lips. She snatched a spear from a guard and savagely drove its point at the prisoner. But Thordred sprang aside, laughing, the muscles rolling effortlessly under his tawny skin.
He set his foot on the links of the chain that bound his wrists. His body arched like a bow. The metal snapped asunder, and Thordred the Usurper was free!
The guards near the throne leaped at him. He ducked under a swift spear at the same instant that his fist smashed a face into a bloody ruin. And then the mob surrounded him, lifted him, bore him back.
"Slay him!" Zana shrilled. "Slay him!"
The mob swept back, out of the hall, through the great doors and into the street.
But now Zana's cried brought a response. Armed soldiers rushed in through a dozen portals. They raced after the escaping prisoner, with Zana fearlessly leading them.
It was sunset. The western sky flamed blood-red. Down the street the crowd seethed, to halt in an open plaza. Grimly menacing, they turned at bay, Thordred at their head. He towered above the others with his chains dangling from his wrists and ankles.
Zana's men formed into a sizeable army, filling the street from side to side.
Arro
ws flew, hissing at the angry, triumphant mob. Over the city the low, thunderous muttering grew louder.
"Revolt! Revolt!"
It was civil war.
But the conflict was not yet in contact. A space still lay between the two forces. Only spears and arrows had crossed it.
"Charge!" Zana shouted. "Slay them all!"
Grinning, Thordred raised high his lance and shook it defiantly.
The queen's soldiers drew erect, and like a thundercloud they began to move. Abruptly they were sweeping forward, irresistible, a tidal wave bristling with steel barbs. The pounding of then- shod feet hammered loud on the stones. In the forefront raced Zana, her harsh face twisted with fury.
Thordred let fly his spear. It missed its mark. At the last moment the giant had hesitated, and his gaze went up to the western sky. His jaw dropped in awe. For the first time, Thordred was afraid. A scream rose, thin and wailing.
"Demons!" someone cried. "Demons!"
The soldiers slowed involuntarily in their charge, then one by one they halted. Struck motionless with fearful wonder, every man stood gaping toward the west.
Against the blood-red sunset loomed actual demons!
Giants, scores of feet tall, they were. Titans whose heads towered above the city's walls. A whole army of the monsters loomed black against the scarlet sky. These were not men! Shaggy, hump-shouldered, dreadful beings more human than apes but unmistakably beasts, they came thundering down upon the city. The frightful masks twisted in ferocious hunger. They swept forward—
No one noticed that their advance made not the slightest sound. Panic struck the mobs. Both sides dropped then-weapons to flee.
From the sky a great, shining globe dropped. It hovered above the plaza. Two beams of light flashed down from it. One struck Thordred, bathing him in crawling radiance. The other caught Zana.
The man and the woman alike were held motionless. Frozen, paralyzed, they were swept up, lifted into the air. When they reached the huge globe, they seemed to disappear.
The sphere then rose, dwindled quickly to a speck and was gone.
Surprisingly the giants had also vanished.
The Creature from Beyond Infinity Page 2