A thousand miles across the forest, forced to be a giant tribesman from the sheer necessity of living, Ladima Petlo forgot all the refinements of Martian civilization, sank swiftly into the strain of the savages with whom he hunted and slew—a mighty warrior indeed. One of the women he chose as his mate and it somewhat eased the dull ache in his heart for Esonia. Only one thing he never forgot—vengeance! And he died, thinking of vengeance whilst the daughter-child his wife had borne him grew slowly to savage womanhood.
The link so perfectly forged by Viranicus Petlo was broken. He, too, had died on Mars with the belief that all was well. On Venus, two thousand sluglike beings fought steadily with the encroachment of lofty, vicious plants that steeped the dense atmosphere in a gradual preponderance of carbon dioxide. Kil-Dio was thinking of preparing a migration for his descendants, just as Petlo had foreseen he would.
Kil-Dio saw to it that each newbom child was raised in a vast nursery, with a gravitational force fixed to that of the fourth world. Some day, he realized, these successors would have to migrate to that planet. Not the third. That might mean war. But its atmosphere and seas by that time would be well worth having. He had succeeded once; his descendants could do likewise. Anxiously, Kil-Dio wondered how many generations would pass before the descendants were adaptable enough to live a natural existence—
And on Earth, a boy who was a true Martian grew slowly to manhood, all unaware that somewhere in the savage tribes there roamed his half-sister, actually a half-breed, yet with the heritage of Mars as strongly developed in her mind as it was in his. They never met, these two.
When the time came, they mated Earthlings, became parents, but of necessity their children were removed half-breeds, dimly aware of some strange heritage, the government of unknown mental urges, of vengeance, of a plan to be fulfilled—
Matehood—offspring— Down through the centuries, and either by chance or inscrutable design, each child was, all unknown to its parents, a half-breed.
Age upon age. Generation upon generation. The Earth changed and Man changed. But down through the ages the memory of a great purpose still hovered. Down the corridor of Time there echoed the remembrance of a plan to be fulfilled…
* * * *
James Langton was born in 1996, of perfectly normal parents who had never excelled themselves in any particular way. His father was an engineer, and his mother, before her marriage, an office secretary. Both of them were killed in a stratoplane smash when James reached the age of twelve.
But he did not go to a recognized institution. Instead, his adaptability with radio, astronomy, biology and kindred sciences was so developed that he obtained a highly remunerative position as the world’s youngest technical adviser on all matters scientific.
He was a phenomenon, a genius, and knew it—but at twelve years of age he was not at all sure how he’d achieved that condition. So with characteristic thoroughness he set himself to find out the meaning for his knowledge, and why he was haunted by the ever growing conviction that he had a purpose to fulfill, some task to perform.
While he studied, he grew—with startling speed. At eighteen, he was seven feet tall, a massive blond-headed figure of a man, genial, thoughtful, only just on the fringes of discovery. The solution of the secret of his birth and strange abilities still eluded him.
To better pursue his astronomical studies—or so he believed—he gained an honorary position at the great Central California Observatory where a new 400-inch telescope had been erected and with it, brooding and silent, he searched the void night after night, studying moonless Venus and dehydrated Mars, trying to bring into his mind the reason for a purpose—something for which he waited.
He prospered with the years. At thirty he had made enough money to retire and study things out. Through ten more years, little by little, he pierced together his strange memories, the memories of a world lashed by tempests and flood, of a tube of force and bong oceans, of gouging canals, of buried machinery— Hazy, indefinite things at first, but gradually they grew in clarity under the perpetual concentration of his extraordinary mind.
Section by section he began to understand his heritage, realized by careful analysis the strange state from which he had been born.
Either nature, unwilling to let a plan go to waste, had stepped in and played a hand, or else the unseen Deity that rules all things had seen fit to produce James Langton. Whatever it was, Langton traced his memory and heritage through the soberly logical fields of biology.
Through generations the Martian recessive unit had lain dormant. And the genes, hypothetical submicroscopic bodies located in the chromosomes, are the unit factors of heredity. A change in the genes leads to the inheritance of new characteristics, better known as mutations.
In such a manner as two perfectly normal parents might give birth to an albino child, so, evidently, had Langton’s own parents both possessed, by chance, the recessive Martian unit—far-flung throwback to the days of Ladima and Esonia. The final combination had at last brought into being what the long-dead Víranicus Petlo had hoped for—a true Martian. Now Langton understood; it was so clear. His racial memory, his desire for a world apart from Earth. His incessant studying of the void—he had a purpose!
VI
One night he startled the chief astronomer at the Central California Observatory with a dry comment.
“Did it ever occur to you, my friend, that there might be a lot of Martian blood on Earth? That it might be the reason for a great deal of vindictiveness, revenge—even war? Perhaps Mars is called the God of War for a reason not entirely mythological.”
Ward Dent, the astronomer, was not impressed. He was a businesslike, bald-headed individual, entirely concerned with facts and figures.
“How do you figure that out, anyhow?” he asked bluntly.
Langton shrugged his vast shoulders and smiled mysteriously. “Just a theory. If we suppose that somewhere in the past the Martians sent some of their people to Earth, is it not possible that their children might have their parents’ ambitions in an unresolved form? If those ambitions were hate and vengeance, they might veer off into such channels as pettiness and vindictiveness, for no apparent reason. Normally, you know, a living creature isn’t vicious or vindictive because it wants to be. It is an evil force matured through generations and nobody knows how it started. Animals, patterning much of their ways from the stronger minds of humans, are affected in the same way.”
“May be something in it,” Dent admitted, then he pursued the topic no further. He felt, as did many other people, that because the gigantic Langton was a genius, he might also be mad.
Langton sat for a while staring into the telescopic mirror, then he asked quietly, “Have you ever tried to conjecture if there is life on Venus?”
Dent looked up irritably from his notes. “Of course—but it’s quite unlikely. There’s no oxygen or water vapor for one thing. There might, though, be some sort of life we don’t understand.”
“Suppose that the atmosphere of Venus is so dense that we can’t penetrate beyond a few layers and the oxygen and water vapor are at the lower levels?”
“Possible,” the astronomer shrugged. “Damned hot planet, though! Turns once in 720 hours. We used to think it turned one face to the Sun until we found that a thermopile directed at the supposed night side registered an appreciable amount of heat. That obviously couldn’t be the case with a planet turning one face perpetually to the Sun. Pity of it is there’s no moon. It would help a lot. Every other planet has one, save Mercury, of course. His went in the Sun long ago.”
Langton slowly nodded his yellow head. “Venus probably had a moon once, but the Martians destroyed it,” he murmured dreamily, and with that he turned back to the mirror, unaware of Dent’s startled expression—
Then suddenly Langton stiffened and became earnest in his attention. For a moment the immense polished surface revealed something on the edge of Venus that was not entirely normal—a faintly gleaming speck that distinctly c
aught the strong flash of sunlight for an instant, and then was gone.
Langton sighed deeply. He knew his years of vigilant watching were finished. Gravely he bade the astronomer goodnight and went majestically out—
* * * *
A week later startling news burst over the world. It was disseminated from every quarter by the news broadcasters. Stratoplanes bulleted to all compass points with newspapers hot from the presses; international television hookups radiated stills from the California Observatory showing the amazing proof of the fact that something was visible near the Ismenius Lacus Oasis, on Mar—something bright and glittering that held out a prospect of active life, or else in the nature of a signal.
Earthlings were interested, but only a few were really eager—mainly those who made science their hobby. The only man who could have explained it all, James Langton, was nowhere to be found. His home was temporarily dosed and he had left no forwarding address. Some said he was alone in an isolated laboratory somewhere in the upper Adirondacks.
In truth he was working on the final details of a remote-control radio instrument that was surpassingly clever in its efficiency, using for power the energy of a near by waterfall. He had started it on an impulse two years before. Now he knew he had to finish it. The memory of past ages burning vivid in his mind aided him in knowing something nobody else comprehended.
The adapted Venusians, last of their race, had forsaken the spore-smothered, toxic surface of their own world and moved to Mars. Ere long, they would set to work to upset this thriving world of Earth, as they had the red planet, steal clean air and the waters of its seas, unless—
James Langton smiled quietly as he worked on through the night and all the next day—until the following midnight. Then he was finished; his calculations complete.
Untired, strangely, subtly different from an Earthling, he surveyed the huge mass of the ultra short-wave transmitter, checked his figures for the last time, and closed the switches. He listened complacently to the droning of a powerful engine, pictured the radio waves leaping to the aerials on the mountainside above him, spreading out their energy through space, their frequency identical to that planned by one Veranicus Petlo untold ages before.
At the speed of light they spanned the gulf of forty million miles—unseen messengers of destruction. They passed undetected across rust-smothered deserts, went through the south pole icecap, reacted on their destination—a complicated mass of machinery still in fair condition, deep within a power room under the ice.
A long sealed bolt slid back, released a flooding cataract that boomed through a long vent and out through sluices. A massive turbine reacted instantly, spun its huge shaft and rotated the dynamo. The armature spun swiftly between its magnets, building up horsepower upon horsepower. Electrical energy surged to the copper electrode, as yet only a quarter eroded, and dispelled itself into the water, instantly slammed across the network of canals, even through the very thin air itself, to the negative north pole, which was partaking of the whole negative preponderance of Mars itself.
The canals, the air, became living fire, flaming energy. Five hundred Venusians, the last of their race, were instantly incinerated before they even realized what was upon them.
For sixty minutes the canals were deadly lines of force—then the sluice vent automatically closed, flooded the power room and, after a deeply sullen explosion, left only a dreary copper rod embedded lopsided in the ice.
Langton cut the power of his machine and flicked on the televisor. As he had expected, an anxious-faced announcer was already shouting hoarsely the news he had received from the Observatory.
“—and the canals of Mars, if canals they be, flamed blue for exactly an hour. The air, too, became blue, but now it is normal again. Can it mean a signal? The silver white substance is still visible near the Ismenius Lacus. Can it be life of—?”
Langton switched off and smiled faintly. “Silver white now—soon only rust,” he murmured pensively. “Rust is the only thing the Red Planet has left—
“But there will be no theft of air and water from Earth. No more men from Venus, because they must have been the last—”
Rising to his feet he went to the door, opened it, and drew a deep breath of the sweet mountain air, stood bareheaded gazing toward a red star low down on the horizon. In that moment he was lost in memories, dim and cloudy, of a man who had been his remote ancestor—
One Viranicus Petlo. But now Viranicus Petlo was avenged—
HE CONQUERED VENUS
Mark Tyme conquered the cannibalistic natives and deadly jungles of Venus, but the ‘civilized’ Earth conquered Mark Tyme!
The world was on its toes. People in every country were listening to their radios or watching their televisors as stratosphere commentators kept a keen look-out for the ovoid expected from the deeps of space. Newspapers splashed inch-high headlines—
MARK TYME RETURNS!
Captain Mark Tyme, Earth explorer, was returning from Venus after a five-year conquest. The first man to go into space and return in one piece. And what a piece! There had been endless photographs of the redoubtable captain, complete with bullet head shaven all over, pillar of a neck, and hairy forest of chest.
For five days now he had been expected, but to the people of 1980 five days was a drop in the bucket. It seemed like five minutes. Then at 2.30 in the afternoon of August 6th the world was alerted. Mark Tyme’s ship had been sighted!
Television cameras swung to the ready and upon millions of screens there appeared a battered, sunlit silvery object like a cheap aluminium cigar case careering through the void.
Londoners gathered themselves for a supreme effort. Massed in tens of thousands throughout the city they scanned the blue heaven. The mayor and civic dignitaries stood in an expectant, perspiring group on the bannered rostrum in the city centre—actually the main airport—where the captain had radioed that he intended to land.
When the ship did at last appear on flame-spouting jets it shot over the main marquee, igniting it in the process, and finally landed a mile away. The mayor sucked his teeth in annoyance at finding himself so far away from the point of welcome.
People, police, a couple of fire engines to deal with the marquee, and the mayor with his dignitaries, all swept in the direction of the grounded machine—to make the discovery upon arriving at their destination that the machine’s door had not yet opened. Which seemed to indicate that Mark Tyme was not going to be done out of his publicity by a premature appearance.
The mayor took up his position and with perspiration dripping from the end of his nose studied his speech. Then, the airlock opened and the great man appeared. He was over six feet tall and broad-shouldered, burned nearly ebony from the radiations of space and ultra-violet of Venus. He stood surveying the people.
His faded topee was cocked on one side. From under its brim stared two marble-like blue eyes, startlingly bright against the inky skin. He wore khaki shorts and open-necked shirt, and three belts. One for ray guns—of which there were six; one for gun charges—of which there were hundreds; and one to keep up his pants.
A lone voice cried out: “Three cheers for Mark Tyme!”
The captain shook hands with himself over his head and then released the bellowing words destined to go down to posterity:
“Hi ya!”
Microphones were superfluous as far as this conqueror was concerned. He could be heard half-a-mile away.
“Thanks one and all for turning up to meet me and my boys!” He jerked his thumb to sun-blackened companions behind him. “We’ve been to Venus and brought back plenty—”
“A moment,” the mayor edged in thinly. “May I make a speech of welcome?”
“No need for ’em!” the captain roared. “I’m just a plain man with no time for speechifying…”
“Hmm, I see. Well—er—” The mayor mopped his dripping face. “Cars are waiting, captain, to take you to the administration building. Will you come along, or—”
&n
bsp; “Sure I’ll come. Okay, boys—” Tyme glanced back into the ship. “Bring the specimen cases.”
The crowd watched with interest as the captain’s three comrades emerged with heavy packing cases on their shoulders. They descended to the grass, then Tyme locked the airlock’s combination switches from outside and turned to head the procession through the crowd. To the rear stumbled the mayor and his men, striving to keep pace with the giant strides…
With complete disregard for upholstery Tyme had the cases dumped in the last of the six waiting cars. Then he took up his position in the first one. He remained standing, hands on his hips, gazing about him. He was still standing and shaking hands over his head when the Administration Building was reached. Here were gathered the Upper Ten and their lackeys, all giving frozen smiles and jerking their necks in tight collars.
Beyond his historic “Hi ya!” Tyme took no notice of anybody and thereby ruined months of careful rehearsal. Clanking like an armoured knight he took the granite steps four at a time and bounced like a track runner when he came into the entrance hall. Here he gave the impression of being a heavyweight about to have a world-title fight. Five minutes were lost whilst he sparred with the atmosphere.
“I’m feeling mighty fit,” he told the mayor presently; then catching sight of the coldly watching men and women he asked: “Who the hell’s this bunch?”
“The reception party, captain. Your rooms arc ready for yourself and your associates. Later, the banquet—”
“How much later? I’m darned hungry!”
“In about two hours.” The mayor was wincing.
“Oh, well, have to do.” Tyme glared around on the people, rubbed the end of his pug nose, then jerked his head. “All right, boys, up the stairs!”
“Captain, a few words—” the mayor pleaded.
“Out in the spaces men don’t talk!” Tyme boomed. “They look at stars, not faces. They look on the big things, not on people who smirk and smile with hate in their hearts. You people are here because it’s right procedure, not because you like me. You think I’m a vulgar barbarian, and maybe you’re right. But I conquered Venus, didn’t I? And that’s more than any of you lilywhites could do! Right, boys—up the stairs!”
The John Russell Fearn Science Fiction Megapack Page 5
