The John Russell Fearn Science Fiction Megapack

by John Russell Fearn

  “Action stations!” he said curtly. “You have your orders. Advance. Ex­pect no mercy, and give none!”

  Immediately teleplates flashed into action, most of the scenes being transmit­ted from the fighter and bomber squad­rons who were to launch the attack on the various defenceless centres—

  But something was wrong! Not one ’plane was moving in any sector, nor was a single land tractor advancing! The machines began to disgorge worried crews as they attempted to discover what was wrong.

  “What the devil’s the matter with you?” Stanley Lang roared. “Get moving, damn you! Do you want to blow our whole schedule to pieces—?”

  “Look!” interrupted one of the intelli­gence officers tensely, pointing to the screen nearest him. “What’s that—?”

  Stanley Lang twisted round and his face went livid in a mixture of fear and amazement. The screen—in fact several of the screens, located in various centres—were picturing darting hordes of machines, grey, incredibly fast, some of them spouting forth blue and yellow rays.

  “They’re—they’re spaceships!” breathed, Tsu-Li, the Asiatic traitor, staring incredulously.

  “Spaceships? Don’t be a damn fool, man! That isn’t even possible—”

  “Oh yes it is, Lang!”

  The group twirled round. So intent had the men been on watching the screens, and on the sudden hitch in operations, they had not heard the door open gently. Now they stood staring at a massive robot, slowly advancing towards them. The guards were trying to stop the intru­sion, but with one shake of his arm Ralph sent them spinning against the wall.

  “Is this-—your robot?” asked Calmere, the European, a bit anxiously.

  “Yes. My robot.” Stanley Lang was staring fixedly. The rest of the men had their hands on their weapons, though what use they would be against this thing of solid metal they had no idea.

  “Get out of here!” Stanley Lang ordered at last, his voice hoarse with fury. “Go on! I order you to get out! Go!”

  He stared in dumbfounded amazement as Ralph came on, stopping at last a foot or two from him.

  “I take no more orders from you, Stan­ley Lang. You take them from me—and my friends.”

  “Friends? What friends?”

  As Ralph didn’t answer Tsu-Li gave a splutter of protest.

  “This is impossible, Lang! The robot does not obey blindly as you led us to believe. It reasons! It’s dangerous! What use could such a creature ever be to us? My God, if a whole flock of them started to reason…”

  The thought was too much for Tsu-Li. He cast a hurried look at the screens, then dashed for the door. Ralph made no attempt to stop him. Calmere went next a sudden dive. The intelligence officers began to back away, leaving Stanley Lang by the switchboard, his cold, merciless eyes staring into Ralph’s lenses.

  “You’ve failed,” Ralph said slowly, at length. “And you can thank only one thing for it—the fact that you made me a robot. I’m not going to explain the de­tails. I can have scientific secrets the same as you can… I’ll tell you only one thing—Mars is the cause of your failure.”

  “Those—spaceships?” Stanley Lang hazarded, his eyes wandering beyond Ralph for a moment to the instrument bench.

  “Exactly. There are nearly two thou­sand Martian spaceships guarding Earth at this moment—spaceships armed with scientific devices more devastating than anything even you could ever devise—spaceships controlled by indestructible robots, masters of a science two thousand years or more ahead of ours, who have decided through my help to enter into scientific alliance with Earth and destroy avaricious, ruthless barbarians like you… You have seen how it can be done. Every one of your points of poten­tial attack is known: everyone is covered with a core of neutralising energy which had completely jammed all the electrical apparatus on those war engines you were intending to use. Other ships, invisible to you, directed me to your headquarters here and destroyed the guard before any resistance could be made—”

  Stanley Lang dived suddenly for the bench and whipped up a long surgical knife from its case. Being the creator of this robot he knew exactly where the vulnerable points lay. With all the power of his arm he drove the glittering blade into the faint line of cleavage where lay the top of the skull, and behind it the brain. There was the sharp rasp of steel upon steel, then Ralph reeled giddily for a moment as an anguishing pain shot through him. It was only transitory but he knew a vital injury of some sort had been delivered.

  Yanking up his arm, he snapped the blade in two and the handle with its broken shaft fell to the floor. Then he dived forward with his pincered hands. Against them Stanley Lang stood no chance.

  The steel clamped about his throat, constricted… He fought for air, his fea­tures purpling. Slowly he sank to his knees… Ralph held on as long as he could, then the damage to his brain overwhelmed him. He went down into dark­ness beside the fallen scientist.

  * * * *

  Ralph was surprised at the ease of his movements when he recovered con­sciousness. Slowly he opened his eyes, stared about him into the inscrutable faces of robots. They had just finished a surgical operation of some kind.

  Ralph jerked himself up, astonished to discover he had a flesh and blood body. And it looked like the body of— He snatched at the mirror one of the robots held out to him, then stared into the feat-tures of Stanley Lang in the polished glass!

  “What in hell—” he whispered—then his eyes sought the robots again.

  “You are—Martians?” he asked slowly.

  “Yes,” one of them responded, in a tone that betrayed his mechanical control and lack of knowledge of the language. “We saw in our screens what had hap­pened to you, so came immediately to your aid. We knew you wanted a flesh and blood body again so we gave you the only one handy. It was dead, yes, but devoid of injury. Death had merely come from asphyxiation. The body of your enemy, yes, but your brain ruling it His we destroyed. And your brain we healed of its injury.”

  Ralph was silent, reflecting on the in­credible Nemesis which had overtaken Stanley Lang. There were other things to face too.

  “How am I ever to convince people that I am not Stanley Lang?”

  “That will hardly be necessary, will it? Nobody knew what Lang was really aim­ing at. He was simply known as a brilliant scientist, so far as the world is concerned. He can still be that, with you in his body. All the credit, power, and position which he owned can be yours. More! You will become the great Lang, collaborator with other worlds, for, for that purpose we saved you, so that our contact should not be broken.”

  “And Enid?” Ralph muttered.

  At that a figure came from behind the robots.

  “Enid!” Ralph gasped, staring at her. “How on earth—”

  “They found me, brought me here,” she said quickly, looking at the Martians. “Knowing what they intended doing, and knowing too that we love each other, they made me watch their work so I could know what was going on…”

  “But dearest, I have the body of Stanley Lang. You married him…”

  “I know,” she said quietly. “At the Bureau of Marriages—but there is no law against a private ceremony as well, and that is what we’re going to have. To all the world I’m still the wife of Stanley Lang—but to ourselves…to ourselves, I’m the wife of Ralph Marson…”

  SECOND GENESIS

  There is no bar to the immense powers of science, but when a man, however benevolent, tries to play God he must take the consequences.

  Valno emerged from the darkness of the photo­graphic room. His ugly face was frowning. Ugly, that is, from Earthly standards: by his own race of Ixonians he was considered fairly handsome. “Well, was I right?”

  Valno looked up. In the midst of the complex equipment of the huge observatory stood Jus, the chief astronomer. He looked at his ruler anxiously.

  “Quite right,” Valno conceded. “It is almost unbelievable that a distant star should break away from a point of the cosmos and move towards this Syst
em of ours—but there it is, We must take immediate steps to protect ourselves.”

  In these few words Valno expressed the cold fatalism of his race—their calculating, scientific knowledge; their almost complete lack of fear, destroyed through years of refinement.

  “It won’t be simple to protect ourselves,” Jus commented. “That runaway is a high-temperature star measuring over a million miles in diameter. In fact, it’s almost the twin of our own sun. There lies danger. Nothing we can devise in time can prevent this invader passing close to our sun, close enough to disrupt portions of his mass. Even create another Solar System,” lie finished, pondering.

  “Another one?” Valno’s expression changed. “But we—”

  Jus smiled slightly. “We know science, yes, but even yet we do not thoroughly understand Nature. At any moment Nature may decide to create another Solar System and wipe out an old one—ours. We live in a System of five worlds, our own planet being the second nearest to the sun. Of these five worlds only ours has life which may reasonably be called intelligent. Our sun at present is only eighty million miles from us. But beyond the area of our System is empty space extending for untold light-years, clear to the First and Second Galaxies. Do you not see that this invader, which will prob­ably miss the orbits of the three outer worlds, will smash this one and the one nearest the sun into dust?”

  Valno nodded broodingly. “Yes, and such an event is even more likely in view of the fact that our world is the heaviest of all, has a diameter of over eight thousand miles and materials of extreme density. Between our world and the sun many things may happen.”

  “Will happen,” the astronomer corrected gravely.

  Valno moved slowly. “How long have we?”

  “A year; perhaps a trifle more. A year isn’t going to be long enough to save us.”

  “I disagree. In a year we can do much. From the com-putators we can find out how our System will react, which portions of our world will come into the danger area, the stresses and strains—everything.”

  “True, but what good will that do us? Even a child can see that diis invader will upset our sun. How do you propose to go on living during and after such a catastrophe?”

  After a brief reflection Valno said: “Seventy-five per cent of stars, runaway and otherwise, possess certain radiations and emanations which affect different forms of life. We proved long ago that our own life came into being through active radiations at the birth of our System. Here again the same thing may happen on worlds as yet unborn. If such a thing does come to pass and we can survive this disaster, we may have the opportunity to watch an evolution. That will be of profound interest.”

  “Admitted,” Jus said dryly. “But you still evade the vital issue. How do we survive?”

  “There will be a way. Whilst I devise a plan I want you to find out what dominating life-radiations this invader possesses, then we can determine if there is a chance of future life on unknown worlds to come. I’m going to the Computing Room: give orders that I am not to be disturbed.”

  The astronomer nodded, but there was profound doubt on his face as his ruler went on his way.

  * * * *

  Once within the Computing Room Valno locked himself in. Seating himself in a specially designed chair he fingered the banks of switches on all sides of him. Here indeed was the Brain of Ixonia. Machinery of bewildering complexity all of it operating from the basis of pure mathematics, built up flawless prognoses of future time with an accuracy forbidden to a human brain.

  Actually, the machinery forecasted Time, patterning the future as far ahead as desired. The Ixonians had proved that Nature is not a random concourse of atoms flung hither and yon—but an ordered pattern, a mosaic, every molecule fitting into its predestined place. Thereby, mathematically, the change of even one molecule must have predictable consequences.

  Valno thrust a switch. Floodlights expired. He moved switches—then from his almost horizontal position in the chair he was able to watch on the huge screen the composite impressions of all the calculating projections focussed into a moving whole. He saw the glowing, bright invader from the depths of space. Then the machinery, working from this fact basis, passed its computations on to a multiplier, which in turn mingled with the mixing device for sorting out the correct path amidst myriads of predictions.

  Valno watched fixedly. The invader came sweeping inwards in a gigantic arc, speeded up by the machines. The whole Ixonian System of five planets came into view swinging majestically around their blue-white sun. Perturbations began. The pressure waves set Ixonia and his neighbours reeling. Asta, nearest the sun, split into fragments. Fissures of titanic size began to disembowel Ixonia. Impassively, Valno took note of these happenings; then he watched in alarmed amazement as the invading sun, by far heavier than the normal one, took that body in its terrific onward rush and tore it away into space.

  It travelled a distance of four thousand million miles before it finally broke loose, but in doing so it ruptured and gave forth spouting filaments of searing matter which painted the cosmos in ribbons of blinding flame.

  The view switched back to Ixonia as Valno shifted a button. The planet had split in two. One half, glowing red, had shrunk amazingly. In its close approach to the invader its satellite electrons had been stripped off by the terrific heat, condensing it by nearly a thousand miles of diameter—but the original weight was still there, packed into a dense mass which would rapidly cool with the removal of the luminary.

  The remaining half of Ixonia, some four thousand miles across, had escaped condensation and was reeling in a wild orbit held in the field of the remaining three scorched, but otherwise unharmed, planets.

  “Worlds—to come,” Valno muttered. “Eight of them—four small and four large, then one small one again of con­siderable weight. Half of our own Ixonia. And Asta!” He smiled wryly. “Asta reduced to a far-flung group of asteroids between inner and outer worlds. So that is our destiny.”

  Finally he switched off and sat thinking, presently voicing his thoughts aloud.

  “It is possible that this invader is the self-same star that brought our system into being. On its second visit it will bring this new system into life. What is to prevent it coming again and again, wreaking havoc over time? Yes, an inter­loper which must be tamed!”

  Rising, he went across to a smaller calculator and set a cos­mic scale chart in position. Linking the machine to its huge brothers, he switched on the power and watched intently as the tracery needle gave an exact predicted path of the interloper through space. The needle moved through an arc, zig-zagging at the moment of its conflict with the sun; then it passed on into the depths of space. Moving practically unimpeded through the void, its path taking it beyond the huge gravita­tional fields of the greater stars, the voyager pursued a com­paratively straight path. A straight path, and yet of necessity a circle, bringing it back in time in a huge circular orbit that fell only a little short of the total circumference of die Universe—back to its starting point.

  “The paths cross!” Valno exclaimed, “Three thousand million years in the future. Exactly the same time since our System came into being. The genesis of life does repeat, again and again.”

  He paused at a rattling at the door. Touching a switch he released the lock, and Jus came in, metallic record sheets in his hand.

  “The calculations on the invader’s radiations,” he said, putting them down. “They react on only one composition—carbon.”

  Valno nodded quickly. “I’ll go into them later. I too have been busy—” and he explained to the astronomer what he had been doing. When he had finished, Jus was looking serious.

  “Then this interloper will reappear at intervals, always with the same train of disaster?”

  “Unless we trap him, my friend! Three thousand million years in the future he will come again. This time we are too late, but on the next occasion—”

  “But how—?”

  “I must think it out. I must determine at what po
int this world of ours is going to break. One portion of it will be of considerable size, a dense asteroid about three thousand miles in diameter. It will form the outermost of a System of Worlds as yet unborn. If the point of fracture can be deter­mined—”

  He went to work with the calculators, and in fifteen minutes the answer had been given. Valno snatched up the calcula­tions.

  “See! Our world will break almost dead across the equatorial belt. One piece will hurtle away from the moving sun, and the other towards it. The latter will be restrained by the gravitational pulls of the remaining planets. It is four thousand miles wide, but loses one thousand miles of surface area by the action of heat and condensation. It becomes plasmic and forms into a globe. The other half retains its former size of four thousand miles diameter and is formed into a globe through the passage of ages.”

  Jus nodded, but said nothing. He had no idea what his ruler was driving at.

  “You observe?” Valno went on, studying the charts. “The condensed half is left with no revolution. It turns one face perpetually sunward, has only the very slightest libration from side to side, follows a vast orbit round the moved sun which takes three hundred years to complete. But with the half we intend to use it will be very different. The cataclysm will impart to it a revolution of three hours fourteen minutes, lengthening to ten hours by the time Genesis comes round again. That, my friend, is ideal.”

  Valno picked up the reports the astronomer had brought in.

  “Reacts on carbon. That’s not very surprising. Our own life is basically carbon. The life which will come to these other worlds will also be carbon, I expect. That means that if we are ever to restore light and warmth to our particular shattered System we shall have to steal their sun and destroy them. That is neither just nor necessary. I have a better plan, but it can only be put into effect when Genesis comes on its next trip—countless ages in the future.”

  “And in the meantime?”

  “In the meantime we shall be deep inside the uncondensed half of our world, in suspended animation. We shall awaken when the first radiations of returning Genesis—as we will call our star—strike the light-reaction cells near our abode. The radiations will precede Genesis itself by some four years, which will give us ample time to act.”