by Earl
“The next race to develop to a degree of intelligence suitable to feed my mind essence, was located right here on this body. And so on. Eight times have I fed from the evolutionized races of this solar system. The next race to feed my mentality will be your own, but that will not be till they have risen above their present crude state. Then, perhaps, I will procure three more rejuvenations—the second, fifth, and sixth planets.
“BUT, if you can understand, these are mere nibbles to my psychic appetite. Eventually I shall be forced to consume the worlds themselves. But they will supply my energies for periods of time—as you understand time—that are infinite compared to what you call ‘ages’ or ‘eons.’ After that, when I have consumed your Sun, too, I shall wander to another planetary system. I shall search for planetary systems in the future which are habited like this one. The intelligences of your races is still sweet to my taste. After all, planetary material is so bitter and has to be purified so greatly before I can absorb it.
“In duration I am eternal. I am the Spawn of Eternal Thought. I met one other such essence in my astral wanderings. But it was weaker than I. I conquered it and absorbed it. I am invincible, all-powerful, eternal.
“You are the one whose mind my will stumbled against, wandering about in the untarnished solitude of this planet system. For a time I was curious that your radiations were so strong, and so well-ordered. I thought of extinguishing you, like I did the mentality which created you back on your home planet. Instead, I have contented myself in toying with you, testing your powers. For your undeveloped state, you are strangely alert and well-mentalized. You intrigue me, puny being so grossly ugly with your little mentality. I could in an instant extinguish your tiny mind spark; I, who am a flame.
“Instead I shall let you live for a while. Let you squirm in the knowledge that at any instant I may annihilate you. And I shall let you plot in vain with your people against my downfall, for I am all-powerful, eternal, invincible.
“But go—I tire of radiating such simple thoughts. In a little while—an age from now in your simple conception—I shall arise and absorb your race’s mind essence into my own. It is a great honor. And if—— But enough. Go!”
Renolf heard the imperative command, a violent force seemed to clutch the Comet and fling it far out into space. Stunned, Renolf was barely able to whip his flagging senses alert. He jabbed weakly at the controls and managed to check the frightful acceleration. Then he slumped over the pilot board, completely enervated. The paralysis had drained his nervous system.
XII.
TWO DAYS LATER, the Comet left the Moon at a mad pace. Its course kept it out of sight of the crater Tycho till they had gone halfway to Earth. Then Renolf breathed easier. “So far so good. I don’t know what sort of chance we’ve taken, but I’ve got the information I want. I now know the limits of the energy wall that protects the alien being—our long-sought-for menace! It is a hemisphere twenty miles in diameter. I know, too, something of the nature of that screen, what its salient physical attributes are. I have even calculated, tentatively at least, what force would be necessary to disrupt it. And it is a staggering figure.
“The Spawn of Eternal Thought—as it so proudly calls itself—has shielded itself to the limit. It lies there like a diamond-shelled clam, waiting in calm tirelessness for its next period of—feeding! And we, the human race, are to be the next in its epicurean search for mental delicacies!”
Dora shuddered, as much at his look as at his words. For since the numbing revelation of Tycho’s secret, Renolf’s face had grown haggard, harried. A king might have looked like that, knowing an invincible enemy was slowly preparing to attack his kingdom and wipe it from existence.
Dora wished then, fervently, that they had never left Earth. That her father had never succeeded in making a superman. They had flitted through the solar system, reading part of its stupendous history, and had finally blundered on a secret never meant to be revealed to mankind. And knowing, what peace could there be for them? What good for the turkey to know it would end in a Thanksgiving dinner?
In answer to her thoughts, Renolf spoke: “Better that we know! Better the indomitable resistance of slave to tyrant than the unknowing bliss of herded steers.”
“But it is such a dreadful knowledge! And so—hopeless!”
“Hopeless? That I will not admit.” Dora remained silent.
“You think,” said Renolf with a stony smile, “that I have finally come to overestimate myself. I—a mere trick of superscience, as Earth knows science—facing an unthinkably superior mentality and refusing to admit preordained helplessness! The futile conceited courage of a worm before a hard-hoofed ox. Perhaps——”
Renolf suddenly broke off. His strong hand trembled suddenly as he raised it to his creased forehead. Dora read something in the gesture—something she had never seen in the super-Renolf before. And it shook her to her very soul.
“Renolf!” Her voice was anguished. “You—aren’t——”
There was a long moment of silence. In that moment a mind—hyper-human in its range, but yet human—saved itself from madness, by staring into the eyes of devotion and faith—and love—and gaining thereby a new foothold.
Renolf, breathing heavily, wrenched his eyes away from the twin pools of anguish that stared from Dora’s face. “Weakening?” he suggested. “Losing hope? No. Yet I might have—without you—precious——”
It was the first time Renolf—the superman—had broken through his reserve to reveal his secret reverence for the girl who had been his unwitting guide and check. Stunned, blasted to the core of his being, profoundly shaken by what had leered threateningly from Tycho—Renolf, superman, had expressed hope in the face of supernal peril with his mouth, the while his soul had shriveled within him.
But now it would be different. Dora’s loyalty, more powerful than her utter despair, must be matched by the best effort of which he was capable. Renolf faced Earthward with a new determination.
A GROUP of ten earnest-faced men stared aghast at the tall, youthful figure standing before them. A youthful figure, but in its face an untold wisdom. They were the Supreme Council of Earth, the body the Benefactor had formed to guide humanity to a better life. Sage men, learned and highly intellectual. The Benefactor, a ten-brain unit, had given impetus to the rise of the new order.
These men, a ten-brain group almost as efficient, were carrying it along. They had been chosen carefully. There was not a Judas among them. Wielding a great power, the Supreme Council had, in the four months past, carried along the Benefactor’s beneficent work. It had several times faced minor crises, and ridden over them. But now a greater, and far different, crisis stared them in the face.
Renolf had recounted to them what he had found on the Moon. Realizing he must tell the whole story or nothing, he had recapitulated the entire journey he and Dora had made to the planets. His simple eloquence left no room for doubt. Unwilling belief struggled over face after face. A cosmic voyage in search of a stupendous secret. Its amazing climax there at Tycho. And the man who spoke was none other than the Benefactor—a name already half mythical. Incredible as the story was, his word could be only truth.
Finished, Renolf took a deep breath. The councilors looked at one another in stupefied horror. There was a tense silence. Then the chief councilor found his voice. “What you have told us is hard to credit. Yet we have no choice but to believe. Of course, this is not as great a shock as it might have been, in that three years ago—just after you had begun to institute the New Order—you intimated that Earth might be in danger of invasion from otherworldly races.
“At that time we were more or less skeptical; remained so, in fact, until this day. And when you put through the plans of building a city in the Sahara whose sole industry was to be the manufacture of superpowerful, long range weapons, we were still skeptical. Invasion from space! Preposterous!”
The speaker paused, and his face grew suddenly haggard. “But now, knowing the truth, our only
consolation—a pitiful and selfish one at best—is that the doom will not come for a long time.”
“But come it will,” said Renolf with conviction.
THE CHIEF COUNCILOR spoke again, showing his agitation in fluttery movements of his hands. “And, knowing the truth, it is enough to destroy our initiative. Why did you tell us? It were better kept a secret! What incentive have we now to carry on the New Order? All our work will go for nothing—with an inevitable doom over the human race, despite its remoteness!” There was again a silence, and the councilors looked at Renolf in silent accusation. He had poisoned their minds, telling them the truth. It would throttle their very spirits.
But Renolf’s voice boomed out vigorously in the midst of the depressed silence. “We are not going to lose courage and hope. Nor are we going to rest in inactive consolation that after all it won’t affect us, or our children, or even our children’s children. Our duty is to fight the doom!”
“Fight it! How?” wailed the chief councilor. “As you have intimated, the being is a vortex of pure thought energy. Wise beyond human understanding; powerful beyond human thought. What can we do against such an omnipotence?”
Renolf shook his head. “No, not an omnipotence. I have told you that the alien being is a frightful superpower. A bodyless, intangible vortex of distilled thought, surrounded at will by an impenetrable hemisphere of energy. In short, impregnable to any human weapon.
“But now let me modify this. Instead let me say that the enemy is a decadent being, long past its prime! This is a deduction of my own too vague to clarify. The fact that it consumed matter to feed its alien energies proves it to be not entirely thought energy. It must have some connection to the material universe, however slight.
“Furthermore, after it had so indifferently flung our ship away, as a mammoth might flick away an ant, I returned. What chances I took, I don’t know. But I crept, in the midnight of lunar darkness, to the edge of its hemispherical shield. There I made certain tests of that invisible screen.
“It is not actually an impregnable screen. But it would take a force comparable to planetary momentum to pierce it. Yet I believe I have such a force at my disposal! My space ship is run by intra-atomic power! And you men know what intra-atomic power means. I have made tentative calculations. If a thousand tons of sand is instantaneously disintegrated and projected as a beam, that force may not only pierce the alien being’s invisible armor, but crush it flat in one stroke!
“And if my deductions are correct—that the being is material in some small way, and that it is decadent, and therefore unwary—we can grind it into the rock of the Moon and utterly destroy it!”
The faces of the ten men eagerly listening to him were swept with something of stirring hope.
“But it will not be an easy task,” went on Renolf. “I have used atomic power, but only in a trifling way. The problem of disintegrating and using the latent atomic energy of a thousand tons of sand is no mean one. In fact, before I could even think of attempting to solve its technicalities, I would have to have the help of perhaps a hundred brains highly competent in science and mechanics.”
“We hereby pledge our support,” said the chief councilor eagerly. “We will issue any mandates necessary to conscript labor and material—and the specialized men you just asked for—for the project.”
Renolf’s eyes suddenly glistened strangely. “What I am about to say may shock you more than anything. I said I would need a hundred brains—and that is exactly what I mean. Not men, but their cranial organs!”
HE held up a hand as some of the men half arose in bewildered astonishment. “The secret of my superhuman powers is a secret I cannot give away, even to you whom I have chosen as the most enlightened and trustworthy on this Earth. I can only reveal that my hyperhuman knowledge—which more than once must have irked your curiosity—is not a natural, birth-endowed lore, but a product of science. I am a laboratory-created superman. And I can be made into an ultra-superman with your cooperation—a hundredfold mind capable, I believe, of offering a chance to destroy the alien enemy at Tycho.
“I leave the decision to you councilors. I shall neither command nor cajole. It is in your hands. I, the Benefactor, promised never again to force myself on human affairs. I will not break that promise now. It is possible, of course, to let the matter drop—to hope that mankind, knowing its doom, may find a way to vanquish the sinister alien power lying in wait on the Moon. However, I offer here and now to take up the task and finish it in one bold stroke—but I must be given my hundred brains!”
The chief councilor, incapable of being further surprised, spoke quickly: “How much chance is there of your scheme working? Perhaps it would be suicide to strike and fail—the alien power might then arise in wrath and destroy the Earth!”
Renolf shrugged. “I can give you the mechanical chances of success—after I have worked out the problem—but even then I could not figure the chances of fate. No one can tie down the future and say this and this will happen without fail. Be assured that I would not tackle the project at all had I not a great deal of faith in its outcome. But I see indecision in every face, and I can’t blame you. If you wish, I shall leave now and let you come to your choice after due deliberation.”
The chief councilor nodded. “Yes, that would be best. But do not leave. Step into the next room for only an hour. We have always found quick decisions as worthy as long-fought-out ones.” His eyes glowed strangely as he conducted Renolf to the door to the next room.
An hour later Renolf was called in again. The ten councilors stared at him gravely, hopefully, and the chief arose to speak:
“It is the wish of the Supreme Council, here met, that you, known to Earth as the Benefactor, once again give to humanity your magnanimous and inestimable aid. We pledge to further you in your plans to the full extent of our ability!”
Renolf bowed his acknowledgment of their faith and respect. “But the real purpose of the project must be kept secret,” he admonished quickly. “I told my story to you men because I know you to have the expansive type of mind capable of sustaining the shock of the stark truth. But the masses of Earth—they would fall into a panic. The project must be named something else, something Earthly. Perhaps, after we have succeeded—or failed, as there is no absolute assurance of success—the world may be told——”
XIII.
DORA, her smooth brow furrowed in deep lines that had never been there before, faced her husband. Her eyes were deep pools of wisdom, and her piquant features were drawn into lines of concentration and power. Almost forbidding in aspect, she parted her tightly drawn lips, and spoke: “I am ready!” and her voice was strangely deep.
“Oh, I hate to do this,” cried Vincent. “To subject you to the strain of regulating and controlling the powerful surges of ten brains. And you a woman, the one I love——”
“Vincent, I am ready,” intoned the girl calmly. “We have already discussed the matter and come to this decision. With the hundred-brain unit, your thought processes are incredibly rapid, and your patience incredibly short. My wearing the ten-brain head-band affords just the medium of contact you need with this work which we are undertaking.”
“Of course, you are right,” said Vincent. “I worked a month without an intermediary, and it has become impossibly difficult to transmit my ultrasuperthought. Now for a test. I shall take a dozen vector equations, run them through at a good speed, and give you the elements of the curve in one-two-three order. You must repeat it within ten seconds!”
Renolf now picked up a leather head-band around which were placed six small receptor boxes. Snugly fitting it to his forehead, he snapped one by one the catch switches. As though some internal upheaval were taking place, his face convulsed and changed till it became a livid picture of powerful thought. A hundred masterful brains pulsed and throbbed in his skull.
Suddenly, with oddly luminous eyes staring at nothing, he ground out through clenched teeth the equations of complicated mathematical
vectors—twelve of them. After a moment of thought, he spat out harshly the elements of their combined curve product.
Dora, almost as quickly as he, repeated the result, her voice a blur of speed, for ten seconds was not a long time in which to reel off such an equation. She looked up then.
“It will do,” snapped Renolf—the ultra-super-Renolf. “Now I shall be able to work twice as fast with some one to follow me, although I still have to hold myself in check. Come, let’s tackle first that tantalum-radium interlacement for the ionic grids.”
Renolf stepped to a towering apparatus and tripped a lever which sent leaping power into a bank of giant tubes. Through a double eyepiece he then observed the alternate swing and pivoting of five separate potential dials. Now and then he would bark a series of orders, and Dora at a control board would send flying fingers over buttons and switches.
His orders were not in words, but in technical formulae. Formerly ten men had been needed to carry them out—but never as efficiently as he wished. They had always been in one another’s way. Now the girl, working easily and surely, carried out his commands without an instant’s delay.
An hour later Renolf snapped off the switches, jerked off his headband, and stood panting and sweating. Dora also removed her headband and they stood facing one another.
“Great!” exploded Vincent. “I accomplished more in that hour than ever before in ten. And it was your idea, you darling genius!”
“Don’t give me credit,” said Dora. “It was simple enough to figure out. You were wearing yourself down, forging ahead like a Titan, and half your results went for nothing because the technicians thought you were talking in Martian.”
