1,000-Year Voyage

by John Russell Fearn

  He glanced towards her and, for a moment, even his almost impervious senses were shaken by the picture of carnal attractiveness that she presented.

  “Naturally something is troubling me.” His voice sounded unnaturally curt as he endeavoured to cover up his emotions. “It is this absolute lack of anything to do which is grinding me down. I have always been a man of energy, one who must always be doing something, one who must have whole worlds to juggle with and whole nations to control. That I should have to sit here like a God on the Heights of Olympus, staring down on to the immensities of space without the power to command that space is something so bitter that I am lost for words.”

  “In that,” Merva said gently, “you reveal a complete lack of discipline over your mind, Rigilus. You do not find me bemoaning my fate. You do not find me looking out over space and saying that I can’t control it. I never look on anything which I cannot control!”

  Rigilus looked at her sharply. This was a new mood even for Merva Ansof. He thought he had seen her in every possible emotional form, yet here was yet another phase of her complex and utterly merciless character.

  She seated herself as he looked at her and the glow of light from the stars and the now distant sun set the soft texture of her sheath-like gown shimmering with a ruby brilliance.

  “Rigilus,” she said, with an almost poisonous gentleness, “you and I in our control of the Solar System have never really had the time to get to know one another properly, have we?”

  “I had hardly ever considered that necessary,” Rigilus responded, thinking. “We acted as two units in a thoroughly efficient machine and the necessity to know more of each other personally hardly entered into it.”

  “Not then, perhaps,” Merva admitted, with a shrug of her satin-smooth shoulders, “but it enters into it now don’t you think? The rest of these fools aboard this ship—those whom we trusted so much and who are now revealed as only thinking of themselves—are all married and intending to bring into this vessel reproductions of themselves, with their own limited little viewpoint and their ridiculous little sentimentalities which would make absolute nonsense of your own magnificent scheme of revenge. It is up to us Rigilus, to change all that.

  “If they can have their progeny and instil into them their limited notions and doctrines of conscience and right living, why shouldn’t we have our children and inculcate into them the things that we both are strong for vengeance upon those who drove us hither. By that,” Merva Ansof continued, her green eyes flashing a brief glance, “I do not mean that we should for one moment abandon the plan which I suggested to you earlier on, namely the elimination of the parents when the children have reached an age when they can be educated into understanding what we want them to understand. Meantime there is surely no reason why we cannot have children of our own, who can take over a leadership when we ourselves find we are getting beyond that.”

  “In other words,” Rigilus said rather bluntly “what you’re suggesting is marriage?”

  “Naturally. I cannot imagine two people more suited to each other than you or I, Rigilus. You have the immense masculine strength and the power and I—,” Merva looked down at herself and gave a faint, almost tigerish smile, “—and I am obviously a woman, with every wile and subtlety that the name implies.”

  As Rigilus didn’t answer but still continued to look out of the window Merva rose to her feet and began to move slowly about the lounge. Rigilus did not watch her but he heard the soft silken rustle of her garments as she moved.

  “I am not attempting to force anything upon you,” she said after a while, “I am merely suggesting it as the most commonsense move in the situation in which we now find ourselves. You and I want revenge and we mean to have it. But if something unexpected came along and the pair of us were wiped out of existence it would be nice to know that we had others who would carry on the plan for us even if we could not.

  “All this, of course, is assuming that anything might happen to us before the children of our colleagues reach an impressionable age. For the furtherance of your plan, Rigilus, we have got to have children of our own, and from the very moment that they become able to comprehend things the doctrine of vengeance must be instilled into them.”

  “You hardly sound like a potential mother-to-be,” Rigilus commented at last. “In fact you sound to me more like a machine deciding how many cogs it needs to make itself efficient.”

  “Never mind what I sound like,” Merva replied, coldly, “confine yourself instead to the commonsense of the suggestion I have made! In fact, consider yourself fortunate that a man of your domination and character should have a woman offering herself to him! Few women come towards you, Rigilus, because you frighten them. There’s a tremendous strength and purpose about you that the normal woman finds almost repugnant I should imagine. I though, being of a totally different calibre, can appreciate it.

  “What is more, I want to know more about it. What is even more important I desire that the union of the mind that we have had so long in the control of other people’s destinies should now be a union that will reproduce a reproduction of ourselves. I shall not put forward the suggestion again. All that I await is your answer.”

  Rigilus was still silent. Not that there was really any point in him withholding his answer for he knew exactly what he was going to say. He had never in his life refused Merva Ansof, and he did not intend to refuse her now. He had never quite fathomed why he had always bowed to her suggestions because he was anything but a man of weak will or undeveloped individuality.

  Deep down he wondered if it was because he was afraid of Merva Ansof. She was so unlike any other woman he had ever known. He turned at last and saw her standing looking at him, her green eyes with their long eyelashes wide and intent. Again the thought crossed his mind, was she a hypnotist? No, not that, he decided. Merva Ansof’s secret lay in her tremendous subtlety and all the snake-like vice of which her sex was capable.

  “Yes,” Rigilus said, almost simply. “I do believe that union between us might be a very sensible idea.”

  She came forward at that and her dead white hands rested on his as they gripped the edge of the enormous window ledge.

  “You will not have cause to regret this, Rigilus,” she said, quietly. “Your aims and ambitions always have been and always will be mine too.”

  Rigilus nodded slowly.

  “We shall tell the others, of course?”

  “Of course. What else can we do? And as master of the ship you will have to perform the ceremony. I should imagine the others will be glad of our union. It will make us so much like—what is the old world phrase? One big happy family....”

  Typically Rigilus wasted no more time. Leaving the lounge he headed through the main corridor to the big solarium where the rest of the party was gathered and coming into their midst, made his announcement. He had just come to the end of it when Merva Ansof herself came silently through the doorway and stood looking upon the others with that curiously mocking smile which she could use so effectively.

  “Naturally,” Randos said, rising to his feet, “we are both delighted and encouraged, Rigilus, that you should have decided upon this course. The only thing that has surprised me is that you and Merva did not marry long ago.”

  “So long as we do it now,” Merva herself remarked, “what does that matter? The need of marriage was not so great when we were on the Earth as it is now that we are outcasts in space. There remains nothing now, Rigilus,” she added, glancing towards him, “but for you to perform the ceremony. The old necessity of witnesses and so forth is eliminated by the fact that those of us here comprise the only world we know, or are ever likely to know again.”

  Rigilus nodded slowly, seeming as though he found it difficult to absorb the fact that this giant space liner cleaving the silent depths was indeed their only world for all time to come. Then gathering himself together he went across to the nearby bookshelf, took down the Bible—still accepted among Earth People as a cr
iterion for absolute solemnization—and came back again to where Merva was standing. In a matter of a moment he had recited the few lines necessary to make his marriage to Merva Ansof entirely legal, then from the little finger of his left hand be withdrew a small circlet of gold and slipped it upon Merva’s third finger as she held out her hand towards him.

  “All legal and complete,” he remarked, smiling at her seriously. “I am afraid, my dear, that if you are expecting anything in the nature of a romance you are going to be sadly disappointed. I am not a romantic man and never have been.”

  “I don’t want a romantic man,” Merva answered, studying the ring. “All I require is a man who has power, which, as his wife I can share.”

  Such was the simple nature of the initial ceremony, so simple indeed that the remaining members of the banished party very soon forgot all about it. They accepted the day by day routine as a natural part of their lives and it was perfectly obvious from the remarks they passed now and again that they had entirely lost all remembrance of Rigilus’ original statement concerning the scheme of vengeance.

  For that matter Merva herself did not mention it either. She was quite content to bide her time, knowing that she was now in a quite unassailable position as the wife of Rigilus, and naturally she was quite determined that she would press her own case to the uttermost when, with the passage of years, the time arose to make the elimination of the unwanted ones necessary.

  Not that she was idle as the days and months fled by and not only Earth but the entire Solar System retired into the infinite depths of space and was lost to sight amidst the constellations which formed the backdrop behind it.

  “I am surprised, Rigilus,” she commented one morning as she came upon him at work in the enormous laboratory in the centre of the vessel, “that you accept so completely the fact that we can never complete our journey to Alpha Centauri.”

  He glanced at her, giving his serious smile.

  “I cannot see that there is anything in that to occasion surprise, Merva. As you are aware, we are no longer accelerating, but moving at a constant velocity. Since our speed is far below the speed of light, it is an irrefutable fact that neither you nor I—nor any of us aboard this ship for that matter—can live for the thousand years it will take to reach Alpha Centauri.”

  “Are you absolutely sure of that?”

  Rigilus hesitated, vaguely puzzled. He had always known Merva as a woman of extremely brilliant scientific ideas, and therefore one absolutely steeped in logic. That she should even assume to question the fact that he or herself could live for a thousand years was extraordinary.

  “Of course I’m sure of it,” he answered at length, “and so must you be.”

  “Matter of fact I’m not.” Merva reclined against the edge of the enormous machine bench. “I’ve been giving a great deal of thought to the matter during the last few weeks Rigilus. I have been thinking how wonderful it would be if you and I were still alive and in perfect condition mentally and physically at the end of our colossal journey. By that time we would have developed the mightiest scheme of vengeance that ever was.

  “We might even have worked out the necessary mathematics to take us back across space at almost the speed of light, infinitely faster than our outward journey. The fuel is there, that we know, therefore the only thing that is needed is the necessary scientific ingenuity to defeat the blight of old age.”

  “You don’t ask much,” Rigilus commented drily. “You should know that for many years now we have been at work trying to find out how to create synthetic life, but all our endeavours came to nothing. I think you are wasting your time in hoping for a life of a thousand years.”

  “I never waste my time in talking about anything which is not capable of realisation,” Merva replied deliberately, “hear me out while I tell you my plan.

  “There exists in every normal human being up to the age of about ten a tremendous life energy. You should be aware of that from the findings of scientists of as far back as nearly a hundred years ago. It was a Russian scientist whose name I forget who first made the discovery whilst engaged upon a complicated operation which demanded the transplanting of a young heart into an old body.”

  “Yes, I am quite informed upon such experiments,” Rigilus assented, his brow clouding somewhat.

  “Very well then. Why should that experiment be lost in the medical annals of the past when we can turn it to such advantage? There never was a more desperate need for all the medical and scientific skill we can bring into use. As I understood it the transplanting of the young heart into the old body was just a straightforward operation. What really emerged from that experiment was the fact that this Russian scientist was able to positively prove that from a young body there emanates a form of energy totally different from that of a body that is adolescent or mature.

  “Anyway, he found there was enough of the energy to cause a reaction upon the electrical instruments he was using. The later treatise he wrote showed that the energy was not confined to that one particular body but exists in all young ones up to approximately the age of ten years from the moment of birth.”

  “Well,” Rigilus enquired, still puzzled. “How does that affect us in our particular case?”

  “It helps us in this way. Since that energy is available it must surely be capable of transmission from one body to the other—in other words a kind of energy blood transfusion, if you know what I mean. If blood can be transferred from one person to another by mechanical means, then I’m perfectly sure that energy can be transferred from one person to another by electrical means.

  “What I am suggesting is this: when the children of our colleagues have reached the age of about five years they should be capable of giving forth all the young and vital energy which we require. Between now and that time we have plenty of opportunity to build the necessary electrical equipment which should be able to absorb and store that bodily energy which can afterwards be transferred to us. By that I mean you and me. That should have the effect of counterbalancing the incessant breakdown of cells and loss of energy which is the ultimate cause of old age and death.”

  “Your plan,” Rigilus said, after a moment or two’s reflection, “has all the brilliance which I have come to expect from you. Have you, however, thought what will happen if we withdraw from them vital energy? It is more than possible that they will die because of it. Nature put that energy there for a reason and its removal might bring about their death.”

  “Would that matter?” Merva asked, shrugging.

  “I think it would,” Rigilus retorted. “I don’t wish to see the death of our children. I understood that they were to be brought into being for the sole purpose of carrying on the plan of vengeance upon which we are both agreed.”

  “I am not talking about our children,” Merva retorted; “I said the children of our colleagues, which is a very different thing. They don’t concern us; they are merely the offspring of those who have proved disloyal to us when it comes to the execution of a scheme of revenge. My original idea was to inculcate into them the plan of vengeance against Earth, but how much better it will be if we ourselves can carry out that plan a thousand years hence.

  “Use the children for energy purposes only, destroy the parents who will be bound to raise objections and finally it will leave only you and me, Rigilus, given almost eternal life—and most certainly life which will last for a thousand years—and if there are others besides us they will be our own children who will be wholly in agreement with our plans. If they are not in agreement then they must be eliminated.”

  “Evidently,” Rigilus remarked with a wistful smile, “I was right when I said you regarded children as nothing more than cogs in a machine and if the whole machine does not function perfectly because some of those cogs are not suitable, they must be destroyed. That is what it amounts to, isn’t it?”

  “Entirely,” Merva assented. “At least, the scheme is a good one; you must admit that.”

  “Yes, I admit
it,” Rigilus conceded, sighing. “The only thing I am wondering about is if the chance to live a thousand years would be appreciated. For myself even though only a matter of months have gone by since we left the Earth I am already completely wearied with the monotony of this space journeying. The very thought of a thousand years of it makes me feel inclined to open the airlock at this very moment and fling myself into the void.”

  “That,” Merva said, with a contemptuous smile, “is nothing else but defeatism, and I am surprised that a man of your rugged strength should even contemplate it Rigilus. Let us have no more of it: let us concentrate instead upon the scientific possibilities of the idea that I have put forward. Let us use all the resources of this great laboratory here for the creation of the necessary electrical equipment to absorb life energy. There will come a time when the first children will begin to appear amongst us and from that moment onwards our plan will start to move slowly but inevitably towards its climax.”

  Rigilus nodded assent because there as nothing else he could do, though inwardly he did not agree with Merva’s almost horrifying conception of absorption of life energy; he was on the other hand the creator of the original scheme of vengeance and therefore he certainly could not back out at this juncture. Later there might come a chance to turn Merva from her chosen course but right at this moment there was nothing else Rigilus could do but fall in with her wishes.

  “Have you any preconceived ideas on what kind of equipment we ought to construct?” he enquired.

  “Certainly I have; in fact, more than that, I have blueprints. Here, see them for yourself….”

  Rigilus stood watching in some surprise as from the pocket of her silken one-piece garment Merva took a folded sheet of graph paper and spread it out on the bench.

  Rigilus studied it, noting immediately the immense attention to scientific details that had always been Merva’s strong point.

  “Since at the moment there are no children aboard,” she said after a moment or two, “we have no means of determining the amount of energy they give off. You will see from this apparatus here that I have allowed for that and have constructed it very much on the principle of one of the ordinary power-absorbers used in our laboratories back on Earth. The energy is picked up by this magnetic brush system and is then stored up as potential for release when required. I’m absolutely convinced that such an appartus ought to work admirably.”