Synthetic Men

by Ed Earl Repp

  “I’m warning you,” Vance cut in huskily, striving to control his quivering underlip, “that unless you release me right now you’ll never see the letters. Nor the picture she had taken just before she left me!”

  The elderly militarist looked at the younger man as though he would crush him right then. His eyes pinched dangerously. Then he let his hand drop. The club was held by the weakling in this battle. “All right,” he bit out. “Give them to me. Then get out and keep out of my sight, if you value your life.”

  Vance’s heart leaped. The old fool was playing right into his hands! He turned away quickly to hide the triumph in his eyes. “Wait in the study,” he growled. “I’ll be right down with them.”

  But scarcely had the door closed behind Dyson as he went into the small, walnut-paneled room than he sprang into action. He rushed down the hall to the room where the organ had been reinstalled. He closed the door behind him softly and hurried to the switchboard across from him. His hand swung a bar-like switch down and there was a loud snap from somewhere in the wall.

  Vance’s lips were half parted in a smile. The man in the study was there for good. The turning of the switch had thrown bolts into every door, locking him securely. Now he drove a huge knife-switch home. A loud humming of electric motors filled the room. For a second, nothing happened.

  In the next moment the wall between the study and the anteroom commenced to slide down through the floor. Between the two sections of paneling a thick glass shield remained. After a moment Dyson’s startled figure was seen standing in the middle of the other room staring transfixedly at the vanishing wall. He jerked around as a sound grated behind him.

  Vance had operated another motor that exposed the huge second cannon behind the organ. The long, silver snout of it moved forward toward the glass panel, turned toward Dyson slowly.

  Quickly Vance dashed to the organ and seated himself. He could see Dyson’s mouth shouting at him through the glass wall, but the words were inaudible because of mineral-wool insulation in the walls. His long, tapering fingers touched the controls.

  After a moment he commenced playing. Dyson stopped his shouting and gesticulating. He looked startled as the sounds came from the projector. The scientist’s playing grew faster. He burst into a lively number of his own composition, full of breathless runs and cadences. The militarist could be seen to stiffen and throw his shoulders back. His fine face glowed with alertness and well-being. Suddenly he did an about-face.

  “Now, march, damn you!” Vance shouted. “March, like the would-be soldier you are!” His fingers flashed over the keys in a stirring march overtoned by strange chords.

  Dyson’s figure was a pathetic sight as he marched back and forth down the room, the great sound cannon always following him like a vigilant eye. He looked like some old man playing soldier like a six-year-old boy. His erect, white head, thrown back, bobbed rhythmically. Up and down, back and forth, he led his imaginary battalions, shouting orders, executing weird maneuvers.

  Vance laughed until the tears streamed down his face. Tired of it at last, he switched to a humorous composition. On the upper manual he set the keys needed to produce the tones that would irritate the nerve centers of Dyson’s brain. Then, to the rollicking tune that swelled from the organ, the elder man commenced to laugh. He screamed with merriment. He slapped his knee and doubled over as the breath was goaded from his lungs like a depressed bellows. Finally he fell on the floor and lay there writhing in agony, but still shouting insane laughter.

  But Vance did not let him die of strangulation, which would have occurred in a few more moments. He burst into a new piece. The room commenced to vibrate slightly from the power of the sound-waves driving out of the mouth of the cannon. Even the organ bench shook a little as the floor was agitated.

  Dyson felt the tones immediately. Anger distorted his face and pulled his mouth wide open into a savage snarl. Louder and louder the music grew, while he grew more and more insane with fury and raced back and forth, pounding the wall that separated him from his murderer, not knowing why he did it. All reason was blasted from his mind by the bolt of solid sound that pounded at him from the projector which followed him everywhere.

  Vance’s foot commenced to tilt the power pedal still further. The whole house was trembling now from the deep tones. They were inaudible, and yet the whole body seemed to hear them. Dyson’s knees buckled and he went down on hands and knees, still raging, but growing weaker. His body shook as with ague.

  Vance’s fingers flashed over the keys in a wild song that filled the house with mad echoes, shaking the windows and rattling the doors. He threw his head back and laughed in defiance of Dyson’s attempts to break through and kill him. All the joy of triumphing over this man who had challenged him was in his eyes, and all the greed in his soul was in his saliva-gleaming lips. He looked down to the manual for a moment, then glanced back to see what effect the change of chords he had just made would produce.

  Suddenly a curse came from his lips. Dyson had staggered out of the sound beam and was showing signs of recovery. With a savage snarl Vance reached for the direction control and swung it hard over. At the same time his foot shoved the volume control farther open.

  “My God!” A start of horror racked him. The sound cannon had not moved. The vibrations must have torn the wires loose that controlled that part of its mechanism! Desperately he shoved the volume pedal wide open. The house shook violently. Abruptly, there was a shrill screech of collapsing metal.

  Too late Vance saw what he had done. The tremendous force of the sound waves had cracked the sound cannon. Before he could move to turn off the power a change came over him. It seemed as though a hot ice pick was being driven through his brain. He felt a stiffness coming over his limbs and he tried to move far enough to reach the switches, but he was powerless. Even in his ghastly predicament he was able to figure out what had happened. The beam of the music was touching and freezing his own brain. Unless he could stop it instantly he was lost!

  With a final attempt to save himself, he crashed his hands, fingers splayed, down upon the keys. There was a roar of sound from the cannon. An almost visible beam of power shot from it straight into the man at the organ.

  The organ itself leaped from the floor six inches and vibrated. Suddenly the music stopped. The death instrument had been destroyed. But Vance did not move from the bench.

  He just sat there for a long moment, and then his body seemed to coil up almost like a piece of spaghetti. He slid from the bench and lay sprawled on the floor. His face was white and ghastly. There was something in his blank look that seemed to indicate that his brain was completely destroyed. And there was something in the limp look of his arms and legs that seemed to show that he had not a whole bone in his body.

  The End

  ********************************

  Martian Terror,

  by Ed Earl Repp

  Planet Stories Spring 1940

  Novelette - 9983 words

  Lolan, the Martian Sub-Commander, had no

  choice. He sorrowed for Princess Mora's beaten,

  X-ray starved subjects. But when the desperate

  Venusians raised their empty fists, duty

  commanded him to cut loose his force-bolts.

  I

  Lolan's pen made the only sound in the stuffy barracks room. The words took shape reluctantly beneath the official army letterhead, even as his mind had fought against framing them. He sat alone at his desk, the open window behind him crowding in the dank heat of a Venusian summer night. The collar of his ornate, iridite-crusted uniform was open, but a dark ring of perspiration stained its top.

  Lolan laid the pen down and looked at what he had written. His violet-gray eyes became stony. This letter might mean demotion to the ranks, or even court-martial, but the things in him had festered there too long.

  "Herewith I tender my resignation as Sub-Commander of the Martian Army of Occupation on the planet Venus," he read. "If it is the wish
of the Council-Royal, I desire immediate transfer to some post on Mars. I can no longer blind my conscience to the brutal treatment Venusians are receiving at the hands of us, their conquerors.

  "When I accepted this post two years ago, I understood that, under Commander Arzt, I would be endeavoring to control a savage, half-wild people scarcely more intelligent than beasts. I found them gentle, intelligent, cheerful, demanding only the treatment we accord our slaves at home. But do they receive it? No! We dole them food not fit for swine. We work them fifteen hours a day in their own iridite mines, in the sulphur holes, at whatever other work is beneath a Martian soldier. Their population has been reduced twenty percent during the twenty years since Mars conquered them. Disease is prevalent in their poorer quarters—little better than the 'improved' sections—to such an extent that few officers ever venture into these pestilential streets except to put down an occasional uprising.

  "Because I feel that to continue in this post would demean—"

  Lolan scowled at the unfinished sentence. He went to the window and stood staring out, his eyes not seeing the low clouds brushing the barracks roofs, nor the jagged tracery of lights a half-mile below, where Areeba sprawled in miserable squalor over the foothills. Before him was the vision of a girl's sober face—the face of a Venusian, high-caste woman. Princess Mora ... princess only in name, but beloved of her people—and of Lolan.

  But for her, that letter would have been written and handed in a year ago. But somehow the young Martian could not leave Venus while she and her father, old ex-Emperor Atarkus, were still here and under continual threat of death. There could never be any more intimate relation between them than that of master and slave—yet Lolan kept a forlorn flame of hope guttering in his heart.

  There were two good reasons why he was a fool to let Mora be a factor in his staying on Venus. In the first place, inter-marriage was strictly forbidden by Arzt, high commander of the army. Second—and more important to Lolan—biology entered in. Years ago, a few Martian soldiers had taken native wives, with tragic results. Although the two races were almost alike in appearance, except for the deeper coloring of the invaders, the children resulting from such unions were ugly, half-witted little monsters. Fortunately, none of them lived for more than a few years.

  Lolan's lean young features hardened. Why fight it any longer? He couldn't have Mora, couldn't help her people without being a traitor to his own race. With an oath he pivoted from the window.

  It was then that he saw the indicator on his tele-screen flashing angrily. Quick strides carried him there, a flip of the thumb made the silver screen a window to the outside world. The brutal face of Irak, Captain of the Secret Service, took shape.

  "—repeating:" came the tail end of his announcement. "Two minutes ago the house in which Ars Lugo is hiding was entered by two persons. I am in an upstairs room across the street. I could not be sure of their identity, but I believe we are on the verge of breaking the secret of the recent revolution rumors. Haste is imperative if we are to trap them together...."

  Excitement tingled through Lolan. Ars Lugo, a condemned revolutionary lately escaped from the Sulphur Holes, had contacted friends. Arzt had been right in deliberately letting him escape and tracking him to a hideout. "Rotten meat draws flies quickly," was his way of putting it. Now the flies had been drawn. But an unknown terror kept Lolan from even guessing at their identities—swiftly he hurried from the room as somewhere the officers' alarm began chiming.

  A small, silent gravity-repulsion ship set eight men in the uniform of high Martian officers down a few blocks from the slum in which Captain Irak was tensely waiting for them. Lolan emerged with set face. Around him on the flat roof of the building where they had landed were grouped the others.

  The voice of Arzt came harshly through the quiet. He was a short, immensely powerful man, with reddish features stamped with the cast of brutality. There was a slovenliness to him, a brutal arrogance that was betrayed by every ugly twist of his mouth as he spoke.

  "Lolan, you'll give the order," he snapped. "These filthy revolutionists won't be looking for trouble if you handle it right. We'll have them before they know what's happened. I told you Ars Lugo would get in touch with his cronies as soon as he thought he wasn't being watched. Come on!"

  They left the ship on the roof and groped down an outside stairway to the narrow street. A light fog hung yellowish in the streets. For a moment after their feet touched the slimy cobblestones, the eight Martians huddled together by a single impulse—revulsion at the sordidness of the lower-class quarter.

  Sickly gleams kindled on their uniforms where stray beams from dingy windows found them. The stench of rotting offal insulted their nostrils, mingled with the musty, revolting odors peculiar to the south side of Areeba, principal city of Venus. A place of drunken, tottering buildings and vice and sickness that festered like a raw sore, the south side was the abode of the diseased, the degenerate, the lawless.

  With a muttered curse, Lolan swung down the street. It didn't have to be like this. It was commanders like Arzt who let the Venusians suffer for their own enrichment. Inwardly, a resolution was taking possession of the young officer that this was his last duty on Venus. Tomorrow ... his letter of resignation would be handed in.

  In a dark alley across the street from a crumbling, one-story hovel, he slipped into the shadows. His eyes were riveted to the yellow cracks of light opposite him, where bolted shutters guarded some furtive scene within that house. Then he was moving swiftly backwards as two forms reeled from the fog. His eyes narrowed to careful slits that raked the pair.

  They had not seen him, nor, apparently, the other hidden Martians they had just passed. Their bellies were so full of cheap Martian gyla that all they could see was the heaving stones under their feet. Lolan's slim, dark fingers fell from the sadon pistol at his side. The fog swallowed the derelicts.

  Ragged nerves leaping, Lolan strode across the street, knocked softly at the door. Frightened gasps found their way through the portal. Someone gruffed:

  "Who is it? What do you want?"

  Lolan pressed his lips against a crack in the door. "Lugo—you've got to get out! They know you're here! I heard two of them talking. Let me in, will you! I can't stand here shouting."

  A bolt scraped in its bed and the door inched back the width of a man's black eye. From both sides of Lolan, burly, powerful shapes lunged at the door. The man behind it cried out a single shrill warning as he was hurled to the floor.

  Six Martian officers clanked inside. Arzt loomed up with Captain Irak, gripped Lolan's arm. "Good work!" he grunted. "Now we'll have these dirty Venusian rebels where we want them, eh?"

  Hard-jawed, Lolan made no answer but strode in. One glimpse of the room's interior sent shock through his vitals like a sword. A single, whispered word parted his bloodless lips: "Mora!"

  The girl across the room glanced at him in hurt surprise. Quickly she looked away. She stood erect and pale under the soldiers' eager glances. She was tall, for a Venusian, with slim, strong limbs and golden hair lying soft about her shoulders. Her garments were of the roughest cloth, but dignity and courage were in the flash of her eyes and the spots of color in her cheeks.

  During those first moments Lolan was conscious only of a growing ache in his throat. He wanted to ask Mora and her father, standing there beside her, why they had come here, since they knew it meant death to consort with revolutionists. But he sensed that their kind of courage would laugh at the question. In Lolan's breast, a cold, dead thing had taken the place of his heart.

  The ex-emperor stood fierce and tall, a shaggy-headed man of sixty-five. He was a living skeleton dressed in hanging garments. Most of the life in him seemed to be concentrated in his blazing eyes. There was force in his countenance, but his voice came in the cracked accents of an old man.

  "What's the meaning of this? Can't a man and his daughter call on their friends without being watched like criminals?"

  Arzt swaggered close, his
stubby legs moving stiffly. "Not when they'd like to see a revolution as much as you two!" he taunted. "You admit conspiracy with this rebel?"

  Ars Lugo stood between two hulking officers, scowling at the Commander. "Conspiracy!" he spat. "Don't hang that crime on them. I was out of food and money and knew they could help me a little. I sent for them."

  Arzt smashed a thick palm across the man's face. Contempt twisted his ill-formed features. He jerked a thumb at the well-like hole, guarded by a low rim, in a far corner, where refuse was thrown in such cheap hovels as this. "Another of your filthy lies and you'll go down the sewer. In the underground rivers you'll have plenty of time to think up better ones. Now, you two—" He grinned wickedly at Mora and Atarkus. "There's a little matter of a map I've heard rumors of. Who's got it—one of you, or Lugo?"

  "You talk like a fool!" raged Atarkus. "We've got no map, you vile butcher."

  Arzt's struggle for self-control was evident in the working of his jaw muscles. Presently he relaxed. He drew on his feeble powers of sarcasm. "The matter has been brought to my attention," he purred gutturally, "that one of your esteemed countrymen, a garbage-boy in the barracks, has been making a map of the buildings. I had the extremely painful duty—painful to him—of cutting his body here and there and pouring in burning sulphur; but the lad would not talk. But since he carried no papers, I judge he passed them on earlier. Now, you bag of bones—" he roared suddenly, "where is that map?"

  "You are screaming into the wrong hole to get an echo," Mora replied coldly. "We know nothing."

  "Nothing, eh?" A small knife flashed into Arzt's fingers. He caught Atarkus in a vicious hug and placed the blade just under his ear. "Then remember it, before your father strangles on his own blood!"