by Earl
He had hardly expected to see this much activity in a race faced with extinction. Dozens of ships were being loaded and unloaded. Figures scurried by ceaselessly.
As soon as Dave opened his hatch, he shouted aloud in pure exuberance at being back safe and sound, and with the means in his hands of saving mankind. Then he shouted above the noises to the attendants below, who didn’t seem to notice his ship was any different from the hundreds of others that came and went in the interplanetary trade routes.
“I’m Dave Standish! Don’t you know me? I’m the one who went to 61-Cygni with Dr. Roscoe. I’m back! And in my hold I have thousands of cans of red blood—life-giving blood from Rendora!
The mission was completely successful! Humanity is saved! Bring me to the officials!”
He was baffled at their lack of enthusiasm. They looked at one another strangely. Then one of them shouted back: “Come down. We will take you before the Masters.”
As Dave strode among them toward the drome’s offices, he saw the men looking at him sorrowfully, as though they pitied him for something he did not know, rather than the frightful journey he had made. Dave was mystified even when he saw the queer, large-headed man into whose presence he was ushered.
“Dave Standish!” murmured the tall, thin official. His bulging cranium and lofty brow, fully twice that of an average man’s, gave him a severely intellectual look. Dave began to feel a crushing inferiority.
“So you have returned!” went on the strange man. “Too bad!”
“What do you mean?” gasped Dave. “I have the hold of my ship filled with cans of blood from Rendora. From 61-Cygni. Surely you remember.”
“That blood is being spilled already into the ground!” announced the official. “Dave Standish, your mission was a mistake, a worthless trip. The large-headed mutation, at first thought to be an insane type, was in reality a new species of man so infinitely superior that they did seem insane! Former man, like yourself, is a comparative atavist.
“I am of the new species. We run Earth now. We outnumber former man, your fellows, five to one. They are our servants, menials, subordinates. But we treat them kindly. However, we are letting them die out. They have all been sterilized. You are among the last of former mankind.”
The large-headed man stopped suddenly. Startled, he peered closely at his listener, at his queerly distorted face—
“Rendora! Tara!”
The lips of Dave Standish moaned. Then they writhed open to issue a horrible laughter that made the large-headed man shudder and feel sick with pity.
GUYON 45X
Castor, the mad Dictator of Jupiter, had the proud “Z” of the Scientists after his name, sign that no ordinary mortal could hope to defeat his plan to conquer the Solar System. But his adversary was no ordinary mortal, for “Guyon 45X” means “Guyon Courage!”
CHAPTER ONE
Red Spot on Jupiter
GUYON WALFORD started as he saw it. “Is that—”
“Yes, a radium powered disintegrator-gun,” finished John Castor. He threw over a lever near the intersection of the two halves of the dome and silently, like the shells of a clam, they swung apart and sank in their receptacles.”
Guyon looked around. From this vantage point, every corner of this radium-impregnated valley of Jupiter could be seen.
Then he looked again at the dis-gun. It could be turned in any direction, and at any angle to the ground, on its swiveled bearings.
The whole instrument, light and compact, was portable and could be moved on its wheeled base to any side of the observation room.
“Perfect, isn’t it?” chuckled John Castor, also known in the valley as “The Master.”
“Any sign of rebellion, trouble, rioting, and I simply wheel it to the desired spot along the rampart and trip the lever. Oh, there have been riots. Once this little machine of mine whiffed a dozen discontented Mercurians and Jovians to nothingness, when they tried to wreck the tables. But they haven’t tried it since. They are properly afraid of this pet of mine!”
Guyon shuddered at the indifferent, cold-blooded tones of the man. Life meant nothing to him when it stood in his way. But just what goal did he have in mind?
“Now see over there—your ship,” pointed Castor.
Guyon saw it, at the rim of the valley, perhaps a mile away. He hoped to get its motor repaired and leave hot, uncomfortable Jupiter. Then his eyes opened wide.
“What are you doing?” he shouted, as Castor aimed the radium-gun.
“Stand back!” commanded The Master, holding him off with a pistol he had whipped out.
Guyon raged inwardly, but could do nothing. Castor calmly sighted the dis-gun, and tripped a lever. No sign of activity came from the gun’s ugly snout, but Guyon saw his ship suddenly melt into a ball of rosy mist. A breath of wind swept past the spot and dispelled the mist. Then there was nothing!
GUYON’S nerves were grated by the triumphant laugh that came from Castor. He turned in a fury, blind with rage at the wanton destruction. He started to fling himself at the green-eyed man, checked himself, and relaxed against the rampart.
“That’s better,” nodded Castor. “Guyon, it is necessary that you know what my project is, here in the Red Spot. Had you had an inkling yesterday when you arrived, and escaped, you would bring the armed forces of the Solar System on me!”
Guyon sucked in his breath sharply. “Go on,” he said hoarsely.
“I have been mining radium here in this valley of the Great Red Spot for ten years, with the help of the Mercurians.
On Mercury, thousands of warships are being secretly built for me. Each of them will be armed with a radium dis-gun. When the great day comes, and it will be soon now, my fleet will sweep into the Solar System, destroy all existing governments, and I will become absolute dictator of all the planets!”
Castor had spoken all this in one breath, as though he had learned it by heart through endless nights of repetitious thinking.
“You’re mad!” panted Guyon.
The Master bent livid eyes on him. “No, I’m supernaturally sane. While I was a common scientist, and worked peacefully in my laboratory on Earth, something kept telling me that I was meant for bigger things—that I could become the greatest figure in all history! I left my lab, knocked about the planets, found this rich radium bed—and conceived my plan.”
Guyon was tensing himself. John Castor, self-appointed Napoleon, could well bring about the ruin of civilization. In this valley there was enough radium to give him the destructive power for such a stupendous plan. He was a danger and a menace—it would be best that he die. Guyon was young and strong. Castor was old, almost senile. A little scuffle and it would be over. His muscles bunched for a spring.
“Stop!” warned Castor suddenly, seeing this and leveling his pistol. Guyon mumbled a curse and relaxed again.
The Master of the valley laughed. “You don’t think that with my plans for monarchy, I failed to make my person invulnerable? Why, even my faithful Mercurians have plotted against me, driven mad by the thought of the immense power and wealth of radium I control. Underneath my silken suit is a complete covering of very light and comfortable chain-mail, yet so strong that no bullet or sharpened weapon can pierce it. As a second precaution, I am armed with two pistols, operated by a secret catch that you would never find in a hundred years. As a third and final measure, around my chest is a belt fitted with numerous little tubes which can shoot out anesthetic gases at my will, all around me. To attack my person, Guyon, is sheer suicide, never forget that!”
Castor leered confidently at the younger man.
“And now,” he concluded, “that you know my story, you see why it is impossible for me to ever let you leave alive. You are a chemist. I can use you, in the laborious extraction of radium from its native ore. If you refuse to help, you are stupid.”
“I refuse!” snapped Guyon instantly.
John Castor laughed. “Very well,” he said. “Do as you like. My person is invulne
rable. You have no ship, nor any weapons. No one has weapons except me, in this valley. You cannot incite the Mercurians, for they hate Earthpeople. You cannot escape the Red Spot for it is 5,000 miles to the nearest border! If you run away, you will die of radium emanations, without my Protection Salt. I will let you live, Guyon, but you can do nothing against me!”
GUYON fled from the aggravation of listening to the smug laugh of the man who called himself The Master. Outside the domed building, he looked around at the scene of activity with despair.
Guyon-45X-Walford wished now that he hadn’t tried to shave time, speeding from Callisto to Ganymede, by skimming over Jupiter’s Red Spot. The stormy atmosphere had caught his space ship, flung it down. Miraculously, the landing had been gentle, at the edge of this valley. That had been but yesterday. Guyon had been astounded at first—the valley was like an industrial center, totally out of place on undeveloped Jupiter. Then he had been overjoyed, to find rescue at hand. But now he knew the truth.
Wearily—though an anti-gravity belt kept his weight normal—he trudged to the hut that was to be his home. It was the end of another short Jovian day. Already the blackness of night was descending. Before he reached the door, a flood of powerful radium-lights burst into life, lighting up the valley from end to end. The progress and industry of the community went on without interruption.
Stella-16S-Brinkley and her brother Cleve-21T, whom he had met the day before, were eating when Guyon came in. He accepted their invitation silently and ate with them.
Finally Cleve broke the silence. His voice was toneless, weary.
“Did The Master tell you—everything?”
“Yes, too much,” nodded Guyon. “Asked me to help as a chemist. I refused.” He looked at them suddenly. “And you two—you actually do work here? Actually help Castor in—”
“Hold on, Guyon!” exclaimed Cleve, flushing. “Wait till you’ve been here as long as we have! We refused, too, cursed him, denounced him. He laughed and told us we could do as we wished. But you don’t know yet, Guyon, the torture of doing nothing in this ultra-tropical world of monotony. We couldn’t go anywhere without inviting death, and there is nothing to keep one occupied. You just sit and think and think and—it is the way to madness! Several weeks of that hell of idleness and we gave in. At least our work keeps our minds off the hopelessness of our situation.”
“I’m sorry,” said Guyon simply. “I didn’t think of it that way. How long have you been here?”
“We landed about two months ago, earth time,” supplied Stella. “A countless nightmare of Jovian days and nights.” Guyon looked at her sympathetically. A young and pretty girl forced to live in this brew-pot of evil—it was unthinkably cruel. She was a strange picture of beauty trying to overcome the handicaps of dulled eyes, pale cheeks and wasted flesh, occasioned by the trials of a hard world.
“Curiosity was our downfall,” went on the girl in the same toneless voice her brother had used. “Going from Io to Callisto during their conjunction, our course took us over the Red Spot. We wanted to take a closer look at the colored effects around it—and our motors failed. Almost the next thing we knew we were on the ground, miraculously alive after a twisting plunge through the upper air storms. We thought we were saved when we found this valley—” Her voice trailed away to bitterness.
Guyon related his equalling gruelling experience. “I think,” he finished, “that the radium emanation from the Red Spot accounts for the failure of our motors.”
Cleve nodded. “The excess radiation that streams upward from the Spot burns out the reactor-screens. Perhaps dozens, or even hundreds of ships in the past have been similarly brought down into the Spot. But none of the passengers lived to tell the tale, except us. Some twice-occurring freak of fortune saved our two ships—only to have them destroyed by Castor in front of our eyes. If he hadn’t destroyed my ship, I could have repaired it. But he took that last hope away.”
Guyon. looked all around him, then spoke in a whisper. “Wouldn’t it be possible to steal a ship? There must be some space ships here.”
Cleve shook his head. “We thought of that too. Only The Master has a ship, in his steel hangar, and only he knows how to open it.”
There was silence for a while. Then Guyon spoke again. “Sounds like checkmate. But I won’t admit it—yet.”
“Of course not, with an “X” in your name,” said Stella. A smile warmed her pale face like the rising sun of Earth. Guyon smiled back, but more grimly.
“It might be well for Castor,” he said slowly, “to remember that ‘X’ too. People of the ‘X’ class have had a lot to do with the destinies of the different worlds of the system.”
“That’s true,” agreed Cleve. “But Castor himself is ‘8Z’—scientific genius that is often associated with ‘X’ and even ‘Y’ qualities.”
“Whatever his classification,” returned Guyon, “he’s a menace, an insane threat to civilization. I defied him to his face, and I won’t rest till I’ve done what I can against him.”
Stella and Cleve looked at each other and Guyon read the despair that passed between them.
“Even in the face of the seemingly impossible,” he added.
“Count us in,” cried Stella quickly. “We have little hope, but more courage. And Guyon, your coming has about saved me from—oh, I don’t know what!” And she burst out crying.
Guyon thrilled at the compliment.
TALKING it over with his two companions, Guyon decided to accept Castor’s offer of work, more to give an air of complete resignation than anything else. It was a bitter dose and he left the presence of The Master with cold rage in his breast, almost berserk at the scathing laugh that ended the short conference. Castor derived an unholy glee from this submission.
The Master arranged for Stella to show the new recruit the general scope of the enterprise. They visited first the huge chemical factory. It contained hundreds of vats, oxidizing towers, giant distilleries, heating ovens, crystallizing pans, and other paraphernalia of the chemical industry. It rivaled in extent some of the largest establishments on the civilized worlds. Every chemical reagent needed in the intricate process of radium extraction was produced here.
“Where do they get their raw material?” asked Guyon.
“Right here on Jupiter,” answered Stella. “There seems to be every kind of natural deposit here in the Spot that they need. Of course, that’s not strange—the total area of the Spot alone is many times greater than the total land surface of Earth.
“The processes used are all modern, modified as conditions demand, or as Castor himself alters them. In the many years he has been here, he has used much of his time eliminating lengthy routine. He is working toward a goal, and time is an important element in his plans.”
Guyon soon grew sick of the sight of Mercurians, who overran the valley. They were green of skin, eight feet tall, thin and cadaverous, dragging a long tail useful on Mercury mountainous surface. They were a bisexual race, and clannish to a greater degree than any other race in the Solar System.
Taciturn, ugly, and totally lacking in human attributes, they quickly repelled Guyon’s sensibilities.
“Seems Castor could at least have chosen a better class of helpers than these damned green-skins,” he growled.
“That’s where he showed wisdom,” contradicted the girl. “The Mercurians, because of their clannishness, the antipathy toward all other races, are ideal for the purpose of universal conquest. Castor knows that once he leads the way, they will finish the job for him—thoroughly.”
“But some day he may find them turning against him,” predicted Guyon savagely.
“Not till the conquest of the Solar System would be over,” said Stella, still taking the practical attitude. “They know they need his organizing genius. After that—well, Castor will have other plans to keep himself in power. He thinks of—everything.”
From here Stella took him to the far end of the valley. It was a long walk and Guyon drank of
ten of the canteen that one carried around to renew the standard of bodily moisture that was so seriously disturbed by the sweat-draining atmosphere.
“These damned Mercurians look too comfortable to please me,” grunted Guyon enviously.
“They’re practically at home here,” said the girl. “With the gravi-belts to ease Jupiter-weight, they have no trouble with gravity. And as for heat, the Twilight Zone of their world is just as hot, so they’re in their glory here.”
When they had to cross the tracks of the miniature train system, Stella always looked carefully both ways for approaching trains. Powered by the silent radium motors, they made no noise except for a subdued clank of wheel on rail. Power was cheap here in the Red Spot. Everything glowed from the wealth of radium in the loam. And radium was power.
They stopped before the shallow holes that marked the locations of mines. Not much could be seen, but trainload after trainload of loam rumbled away, headed for the open-air laboratory, nearby.
“The rate of production,” informed Stella, “is about a pound of radium metal per month, Earth measure.”
Guyon turned unbelieving eyes on the girl. “Why, that’s more than the production in the rich Martian beds.”
Stella nodded. “Can you wonder now that Castor is so sure of himself?” Guyon felt suddenly afraid. More than ever before he saw the scope of Castor’s project. He had been mining for ten years. With that immense power, and with his cunning genius, the renegade scientist had things all his own way. The System would be helpless before such might, such limitless power resource.
How queer it was. Up above, out in space, were the many worlds, thriving, happy communities. The 25th Century was an era of great advancement, universal peace, widespread contentment. Yet in the very center of that great and fruitful empire was a cancerous sore, a neglected boil that might soon burst and spatter its insidious poison, drenching those other worlds. Beneath the eternal red pall that overhung the radium beds was being hatched a spawn of evil and ruthlessness. And the worst of it was that nothing was known of it!
