by Earl
Back in the other ship, Vera listened as York’s voice came from his helmet radio; a half hour later.
“Listen, Vera! This is a first-class mystery. The crew of two are dead, from excess acceleration. The air is thin, barely breathable, very impure. Their food supplies are moldy. Water, evaporated. It’s almost as though they had been holding out against terrific odds. Must have left Earth months and months ago, at their slow speed, less than light. Died trying to reach an impossible goal, light years away. Fools, they had no chance at all! Only a trans-light speed engine would do it. But why, why did they try it? What drove them to this suicidal attempt at interstellar travel?”
His voice was half angered, half sorrowful.
“Daredevils there have always been,” returned Vera. “Some, in Earth’s history, succeeded—Columbus, Byrd, Lindbergh—”
“Daredevils? Perhaps.” York was preoccupied. “Strange, though, that these men planned so poorly. And the haggard expressions on their faces, frozen in death, are those of men driven by some tremendous fanaticism. I wish I knew—”
Verda heard the soft indrawing of his breath, as he seemed to stoop, and then his voice again, excited.
“Vera, go into the lab and prepare the following injections, as I give instructions. Adrenalin—”
He went on, rapidly naming several rare compounds among his supplies, and giving the percentage of their solution.
“I’m coming across with one body,” he said then. “Also have a bottle of oxygen ready. Hurry!”
“Tony, you mean—”
“Yes, reviving a dead man? One has been dead only an hour. He’s still warm. Rigor mortis hasn’t set in. But we’ll have to hurry!”
CHAPTER II
The Dead Alive
TWENTY minutes later, Vera was handing York a hypodermic as they bent over the body of a man dead for more than an hour. Earthly science would have given the case up as hopeless. But York, with a knowledge of life forces garnished in several lifetimes of research, battled to bring back the spark of sentience. After a series of injections into the spine and heart, he waited. Powerful compounds were at work.
A fine dew of sweat beaded York’s forehead. It was a slim chance, at the most.
Vera caught her breath suddenly.
A quiver ran over the corpse. A cheek muscle twitched. A low, hesitant thumping came into being in the quiet of the cabin. A beating heart! The ribs flexed suddenly, and the lungs gasped for breath.
York clapped a breathing cone over the man’s nose and sent a stream of hissing oxygen into his lungs. The body quivered all over now, and suddenly the eyes flicked open, staring around blankly.
York took away the breathing cone, looking at the resurrected man a little proudly. He had run far into Death’s territory and retrieved one of its victims!
“Can you speak?” York queried.
The vacant eyes paused on his for a moment, but only a broken gabble came from his lips.
Vera shuddered at the weird gibbering.
“Tony, you’ve brought back his body, but not his mind! It’s horrible!”
York shuddered himself.
“But I’ve got to find out about the ship and journey,” he insisted. “I’ll try telepathy.”
His brow furrowed as he concentrated on projecting a telepathic message. Within his left ear reposed a tiny instrument that could amplify brain waves enormously, his own or those of others. Sometimes he and Vera, for long periods of time, had communicated solely by telepathy, though it was mentally tiring.
York looked up at his wife after a moment, shaking his head.
“He doesn’t respond coherently. His thought waves are completely disorganized. All I could pick out was some mysterious reference to the Three something. The. Three Eternals, it sounded like.”
Suddenly the gibbering of the resurrected man stopped. A look of sanity and awareness stole into his eyes.
“Who are you?” he asked quite clearly.
York had understood, though the man’s accent was queer, the product of a thousand years of language evolution since York had last been on Earth. He bent over the man eagerly.
“I’m Anton York,” he returned, projecting the mental thought also, lest his archaic accent were not understood.
“Anton York!” The man’s eyes widened, as a train of thought instantly followed that name.
The legendary Anton York! Two thousand years ago, in the Twentieth Century, he had been born, grown to the prime of life, and stayed there deathlessly, preserved by his father’s life elixir. He had set out to solve the secret of gravitation, in three lifetimes of research. He had succeeded, but in the meantime the secret of his father’s virus had been stolen. York had fought and defeated fifty other Immortals before Earth was safe from their would-be overlordship.
THEN he had gone out into space, he and his immortal wife, like gods.
They had returned. A thousand years before, in the Thirty-first Century, they had come back to find themselves again pitted against an Immortal who had survived York’s vengeance against dictatorship. Before this renegade scientist had been sent to the death be deserved, York had performed the greatest. man-made feats in all history.
Since the Thirty-first Century, Venus had a moon, also Mercury, and Mars had a third. York, world-mover, had done that. He had also formed rings for Jupiter, given Mercury a period of rotation, and relieved the harshness of most of the planets by suitable manipulations of heat, water, and gigantic natural forces. He had prepared the Solar System for mankind’s dominion.
Then he had gone out into space again, drawn by its grandiose lure. A thousand years again he had not been heard from.
Now he was here once more, and the eyes of the revived man showed skeptical disbelief. Many there were, among Earth’s people, who openly denied that any such man as Anton York had ever lived. It might well be, they said, an accumulative fable, involving the careers of dozens of mysterious scientists.
York caught all this from the man’s startled mind. He smiled slowly.
“I’m Anton York, and I’m not a myth,” he said quietly. “I’ve revived you from death, to find out about this mad journey you are making. Why were you going to Alpha Centauri, without adequate preparations?”
A look of horror suddenly flooded the man’s eyes, as if just then recalling something.
“Civilization is doomed!” he said, his voice a dry croak. “There Will be holocaust, destruction, all over Earth! The Three Eternals are doing it! We found out, tried to warn Earth. No one believed—we couldn’t prove it. We hoped to reach Alpha Centauri, find planets to migrate to, save the race. Three Eternals—vicious demons—destroy civilization—doom—”
The voice became incoherent again, as though the ominous news he told had again driven his mind under.
York shook his shoulder.
“Tell me more!” he demanded. “Who are the Three Eternals? Where are they? Exactly what are they doing?”
“Three Eternals—gods of Mount Olympus—destroy all mankind—”
His voice trailed off into pure gibberish, A moment later his eyes glazed. His head dropped back and he fell into a second death, one from which even York’s super-science could never rescue him.
Anton York and his wife arose, sadly.
“Gods of Mount Olympus destroying mankind!” Vera murmured. “It must have been some hallucination of his broken mind.”
York turned a grave face.
“Maybe not, though! Civilization on Earth might really be in danger. The faster we get there and find out—”
In the following twenty-four hours that it took them to reach the Solar System, even at ten light speeds, the immortal pair were plagued by unrestful anticipation. They almost dreaded arriving now, perhaps to find some holocaust in progress on Earth, or already finished. The ship they had encountered had left Earth months before. What had happened in that time?
SOL, a comparatively mediocre yellow star in the hosts of heaven, became a sun. They swept
past the dark outer planets. It thrilled them to see the splendor of Saturn’s rings, unmatched in all the galaxy. Jupiter’s rings, mark of York’s last visit, thrilled them still more. Then past garnet Mars toward the green globe of Earth.
Familiar it all was to the two cosmic wanderers, but they hardly noticed. Earth occupied their thoughts—and the mysterious prophecy of doom on that planet. Yet nothing seemed amiss when they had dropped into the atmosphere layer.
A mile high, York halted his ship. Below them spread Sol City, the greatest metropolis of all time, with its fifty million inhabitants, the nerve center of the Solar System. It sparkled brightly in sunlight. Aircraft and space ships rose and descended from its many ports ceaselessly. It was bustling, vibrant, symbol of a busy, prosperous civilization.
There was nothing wrong here! York and Vera looked at each other in relief.
* * *
There was an interruption in the sanctorum of the Solarian Council chamber, in the capitol of Sol City. A dozen gray-bearded men, executive ruling body of the Solar. System, looked around in annoyance. Who had dared disturb them?
Through the opening door strode a tall man of erect bearing ignoring the protests of a clerk.
“We couldn’t stop him, sirs!” stammered the clerk. “Not even the guards. He has some strange power!” The clerk bolted, as though unnerved.
The intruder walked boldly up to the council table.
“I wanted to see you gentlemen,” he said calmly: “It’s urgent. When the guards resisted me, I used certain telepathic powers that I have.”
“Who are you?” demanded the president of the council, glaring.
“Anton York!”
The councilors smiled.
“Strange,” mused the president, “how parents with the family name York have always baptized their sons Anton. It’s a great name to carry through life.”
“No, I’m the real Anton York, I came out of space a few hours ago.”
The councilors looked at him narrowly. They started a little at his smoldering eyes. Insane! The asylums were filled with those who imagined they were the almost mythical Anton York as in an earlier age so many had identified themselves with Napoleon.
“Yes, of course,” said the president gently, tapping his forehead for the benefit of his colleagues, “Now you just come with us—”
York could not blame them for not believing. But as they all converged on him, with the intent of hustling him out, he set his lips a little grimly.
“Sit down, all of you!” he commanded.
The men all stopped. Their faces were puzzled. Nothing tangible opposed them, yet they could not go on. Rulers of the Solar System, they turned back and sat down, impelled by a subtle force that could not be resisted.
“My mental commands must be obeyed, though I’m sorry I had to use them with you,” York said firmly. “You must listen to me, whether you want to or not. I am the Anton York. I have the lore of the stars, and of two thousand years of time. I have some questions to ask.”
GASPING, the councilors now realized it was the truth. The stranger’s words were spoken with an archaic accent that alone tied him with a previous age. It was Anton York in person—stunning thought-returning to Earth after a thousand-year sojourn in the space that was his virtual home. The visitation was totally unexpected. They stared in awe at this immortal who had almost godlike powers at his command.
“I see you are finally convinced,” resumed York. “Now tell me, does any danger threaten civilization?”
“Danger?” The president shook his head. “We don’t know what you mean!”
Relieved, but still mystified, York recounted briefly the episode in space.
The president shook his head sadly.
“So that was the ultimate fate of those two!” he murmured, and went on in explanation. “They were two flyers who told a wild story. They claimed they had been to Mount Olympus and had found the mythological gods of Greece, or at least three of them, called the Three Eternals. Furthermore, they were evil beings and planned destruction of civilization, by causing some harebrained geological upheaval.
“They were so insistent that we sent ships to Mount Olympus, but of course nothing was found there. They claimed to have been in a great marble building. Obviously insane, they were sent to an asylum. They escaped three months ago, and we heard no more of them till today, from you. Their mad flight to Alpha Centauri to search for worlds to migrate to, proves their insanity. They insisted the three evil gods would not rest till all mankind were annihilated!”
CHAPTER III
A Thousand Years of Progress
IT was a strange story the councilor in Sol City related, and later, when York recounted it to Vera, he was still thoughtful.
“Hallucination, after all!” Vera said with a note of finality. “But, Tony, you still look a little worried.”
“I am,” he admitted. “What do, you say, Vera, that we take a trip around this Forty-first Century world, just to see that everything is all right?”
Vera nodded enthusiastically.
“Let’s! After a thousand years of absence, it will be intriguing to look over this old Earth of ours.”
In their space ship, upheld and motivated by the subtle warpings of gravitation, they soared over the world of mortal men.
Civilization had taken great strides forward, particularly in technology and industry. All the great cities of the Thirty-first Century had grown greater still. The somewhat makeshift space ship dromes of that earlier time in interplanetary expansion had been replaced by magnificent structures. With remarkable speed and efficiency, ships could be unloaded, restocked, refueled and overhauled. Interplanetary trade flourished.
The population of this age had reached a new peak. No less than ten billion human beings scurried over Earth’s surface, and at least another billion were spread among the other planets.
The food problem had been solved by weather control, the manufacture of artificial staples from mineral matter, and the conversion of all desert lands into vast gardens. The great Sahara was no longer a desert, as York and his wife had known it. Irrigation through a tremendous canal from the Mediterranean had transformed it into one giant wheat field.
To supply his ever-growing demand for metals, mankind had finally tapped the vast ocean reservoir. Hundreds of electrical plants, on important coasts, powered by the eternal tides, extracted salt products. Ocean water poured in one end, to come out at the other almost chemically pure. Every element known, in varying amounts, then reposed in the caked residues in their plants. It was simply a matter of the application of Forty-first Century chemistry to separate these materials.
The wealth of products thus made available could not be measured in antiquated terms of dollars and cents. Of radium alone, least abundant of the ocean solutes, there was extracted a full ton each year. Gold, now a useful metal for its resistance to corrosion, coated everything metallic that people wore or used daily.
The high economic standard resulting from this material wealth had also allowed cultural expansion. Even the most backward of races and groups had access to literature, art, music and facilities for scientific research. Travel was within the means of most, and the preserved wilds of central South America, North America’s West, and parts of Asia and Africa were constantly frequented by tourists.
“And this is the civilization supposedly marked for destruction!” York mused. “Who would even contemplate such a thing? Who would have the power? I’m just about convinced, now, that those two poor devils were hopelessly insane.” He brightened. “Now we can take another trip around the world, and really enjoy it!”
IT was while they were leisurely crossing the South Atlantic one day that York suddenly halted their slow passage and lowered the ship toward water. In the bright sunlight, the smoothly rolling waves made a fascinating picture. But York stared as though he had never seen such a sight before. Finally he took out a pair of binoculars and trained them below.
�
�That’s water, Tony!” laughed Vera, “Dihydrogen oxide—remember?”
“But you never saw water quite like that before,” returned York Seriously. “Look for yourself.”
After a moment, Vera looked up from the glasses.
“Why, it looks as if countless little seeds are floating—”
“Those aren’t seeds, but bubbles!” interposed York. “Millions upon millions of tiny bubbles coming up from the ocean floor. Let’s find out how far their range is.”
He was already at the controls, sending the ship parallel to the ocean level. A mile away he stopped, looked, nodded.
“Still there!”
A mile further he went, again nodded. Next time he went five miles, then ten, a hundred, a thousand, and still found bubbles. His face grew solemn.
The next day he sent their ship scudding in straight lines north and south, and east and west, and in six other radial directions over the South Atlantic. He stopped every hundred miles while Vera reported with the binoculars. They mapped the area infused with bubbles as roughly three thousand miles long and two thousand miles wide, set squarely between Central America and Africa. It included all the Sargasso Sea.
“What does it mean?” asked Vera when her patience at her husband’s moody silence had run out. “Why should this vast area of ocean surface be filled with bubbles? Where do they come from?”
“They can only come from below, from—” York paused, snapped on his radio. “Anton York calling the central radio exchange,” he barked.
“Y-yes sir,” came a half-frightened voice a moment later, awed by the distinguished caller. “What is it, sir?”
“Connect me with your main oceanology station in the Atlantic, please.”
When the station at Cape Verde had answered and the director was called, York queried him.
“Yes,” came the reply, “we’ve noticed those bubbles all right. They’ve been coming up for the past ten years! Their origin is beyond our best guesses. We’ve sent diving bells down a mile, our limit, without any clue. The bubbles must come from below that.”
