1,000-Year Voyage

by John Russell Fearn

  Instantly they came hurrying around her, full of that complete trust which is the prerogative of a child. Merva stared at them in bewilderment, trying to fathom how it was that they came to be alive when she had seen them not so very long ago upon the table in the lounge covered with a sheet. But she had not been present at the intended ejection of their bodies into outer space. She remembered how bluntly she had been told that her presence would not be welcome at such a ceremony…. What then had happened to so change the circumstances?

  She said nothing there and then but ushered the children along the corridor into the lounge, studying them intently as she followed behind them. They appeared to be in perfect health again and from the way they moved there was obviously no lack of energy either.

  Smiling to herself, Merva followed them into the lounge and then after insistent clamourings she concocted a story to explain the disappearance of their parents. She explained it away by saying that they had all been expelled out into space when the window of the room they were in had been struck and destroyed by a meteor, and the air had rushed out in the void. At their young age the children readily accepted the lie, along with her reassurance that she had repaired the breached hull, and that the cosmic accident was unlikely to ever happen again.

  She finally left them and went out to prepare a meal for each one of them. As they ate it with an avidity that astonished her she questioned each one of them in turn and eventually managed to piece together what was evidently the truth.

  Closer examination had revealed to their parents that they were not dead but stunned into something very close to what might be called suspended animation by the tremendous shock of having their bodily energy drained from them. Apparently their heartbeats had dropped almost to zero but a very careful analysis had shown that the heartbeats were still there and therefore they were alive.

  They had been put in the storage hold for a reason that none of them seemed to understand but which Merva grasped readily enough. Evidently their parents had been planning some kind of scheme that they had intended later to spring upon her—Merva. It was the realisation of this fact that made her all the more satisfied that she had taken the right step in eliminating the adults completely. She bolstered her story by telling the children that their parents had known of the impending meteor strike and had placed the children in the storage hold for their own safety.

  She was now left her with their progeny to mould and train exactly as she wished alongside Exodus.

  Far from resenting the reappearance of the children Merva accepted it gladly. It gave her three girls and four boys, including her own son, who, when they matured would be capable of producing progeny and that perhaps would be the beginning of a small but relentless army who would exact the vengeance which she had in mind.

  It meant that her original plan which was to include only herself and her son would have to undergo revision: not that that mattered, for the more there were to carry out the plan the better.

  So from that moment onwards she appointed herself as the children’s mentor and day by day and week by week taught them all the arts of scientific accomplishment as she knew them together with the doctrine of revenge that was always uppermost in her thoughts. Cleverly, she blamed the death of their parents directly on the Earth authorities, who had been responsible for unjustly banishing them into space. Inevitably the children were moulded by what she taught and told them, and deprived of their own parents they accepted everything she said as being the absolute truth. Out here in the depths of space there were no other adults, no other minds, to give the lie to anything which Merva said.

  Inevitably she was the absolute controller of the ship.

  The only thing which she did particularly notice was the slow change in Exodus as month by month and presently year by year he moved onwards towards maturity.

  In the early stages he had seemed to be an absolute replica of herself, but gradually there came a slow transition of his mental outlook and it was forced upon Merva that he had a great deal of his father in him. Not only in physical appearance, for very early on he revealed his late father’s majesty of bearing and insolence of expression, but in his mental outlook as well. He had all of Rigilus’ manner allied to his mother’s complete ruthlessness and the two together were a decidedly formidable combination.

  It was not very long before Merva realised that she had a problem child on her hands insofar as he only obeyed her orders when he felt that they would be of any particular benefit to him, and outside of that he was completely defiant, nor could anything that she could do cause him to change his policy.

  The one advantage so far as Merva could see was, that being the type of boy he was, Exodus assumed complete domination over the other children and they, being of much weaker stock, accepted his leadership without question. Perhaps in the end, Merva considered, this might prove to be an advantage.

  For her, the weeks and months spread gradually into years and the awful journey still continued uninterrupted, the vessel now being apparently billions of miles from the nearest point of contact. There was nothing now but the stars and the far distant Milky Way galaxy and the nebulae beyond that. Of Earth, the Solar System and its Sun there was no longer the slightest trace.

  Years—years—years. Merva did not appear to be a day older, so completely did the life energy she had absorbed at regular intervals maintained her age at one constant level. But Exodus was now fifteen and the children around him between that age and twelve. Everyone of them was well educated and with a highly scientific outlook—Merva had seen to that—and likewise every one of them was concentrated upon the one thing nearest to her own heart, revenge upon the descendants of the people of Earth for the injustice which they had brought into being.

  Not that Merva had confined herself exclusively to the education of the children. She had found time here and there to concentrate her coldly scientific brain upon the problem of devising weapons with which to wage destruction upon Earthlings when the time came.

  So far the weapons had not got beyond the drawing board stage; she planned at a later date, when the children were far morc mature than they were now, that they should all work upon the task of making the weapons for themselves, thereby understanding in most complete detail what exactly was required from each one of them. Her plan was to make each boy and each girl, when they became men and women, the controller of one particular weapon and a specialist in his or her line. In this way she felt confident that there could be no mistakes when the far distant day came for the onslaught to be waged.

  She knew perfectly well of course that the only two survivors of the thousand year voyage would be herself and her son but she was relying a good deal on the mechanism of hereditary for the other children when grown to adult life, to hand on to their own children all the knowledge which they had absorbed, most of it naturally inherited and the rest of it taught. Hence her reason for being so completely thorough with every detail of each weapon.

  “To you, Exodus,” she said on one occasion, when he had reached the age of eighteen, “I am handing over this automatic annihilator. You will find after careful study of the details that it is by far the most powerful weapon ever conceived. Operating on full power it will be capable of blotting out an entire city with one blow and I very much doubt if the peoples of Earth, unprepared for an onslaught, will be able to counteract anything of that nature. That is the main thing that we have in our favour, Exodus—the absolute surprise with which we shall attack.”

  Exodus nodded slowly as his mother looked at him with her earnest green eyes, her face set as ever in that cruel, inflexible mould.

  “Are you quite sure, mother, that you are not taking too much for granted?” he asked after a while.

  “That sounds to me rather a ridiculous question, Exodus, since I never take anything for granted. What exactly do you mean?”

  “It is not that I fear our inability to finish the journey,” he said, pondering. “The only thing I am wondering abou
t is shall we have enough power to make the journey back—and even more shall we have enough ingenuity to be able to work out how to get back to Earth within a reasonable time? You say the journey outwards before the switchboard is released from the electronic brain will take a thousand years. If it were to take us that long to get back I cannot help but feel that the tedium of the trip would bring both you and I to the point of looking for suicide as a way to end it.”

  Merva looked at her son fixedly.

  “How very much like your father you are,” she said slowly. “He once said something like that, though not in quite so many words. I’m going to say to you what I said to him—a statement like that is nothing else but sheer defeatism! You don’t suppose all the energy, learning and struggle which is being gone through in these years is going to be terminated by anything as ridiculous as suicide, do you?”

  “Naturally I don’t wish it to,” Exodus shrugged, “I’m merely stating what appears to me as a problem. What methods are we going to use to return at a speed faster than we have made the outward journey?”

  Merva looked irritated. “Yon need not have the slightest fear that we shall find our way back and quickly too. Remember that this ship is not moving at anything like its optimum velocity. Once the locks of the controls on the switchboard are removed it will be possible to increase the speed very close to the speed of light—186,000 miles per second. We shall do this by accelerating constantly. We can do this because the atomic energy basis of our engines is almost inexhaustible. Travelling at the speed of light, our ship could reach Earth on the return trip from Alpha Centauri in just a little over four years. Of course that is impossible, because we will need time to build up the speed, and then an equal amount of time to decelerate at the other end. But clearly we can reach the Earth in a comparatively reasonable time and then strike.”

  Exodus nodded but did not comment, a fact that made Merva wonder what exactly had passed through his mind at that moment.

  “I assume then,” he said presently, “that you are now going to teach me all there is to know about this atomic annihilator.”

  “Exactly,” Merva assented, “just you alone. The others will be taught how to operate the other instruments in the hope that they will hand it on to their children later—and incidentally Exodus, you are in your nineteenth year and therefore more than mature. Have you singled out amongst the girls there are in this space machine which one you have decided upon?”

  “I have,” he answered calmly.

  “And has she responded to your attentions or has she some particular desire for one of the other young men?”

  “It doesn’t concern me what particular desires she has,” Exodus replied. “I have decided which one it is to be and I shall take her whether she likes it or not.”

  Merva nodded slowly and then gave a rather grim smile.

  “There is little doubt as to whose child you are,” she said gravely. “Very well, Exodus, I’ll leave that particular matter entirely in your hands. I would point out to you that the need for more children is becoming somewhat urgent. Take a look at the gauge on the life energy machine there.”

  Exodus crossed to it and studied its complicated meter system then he turned with a look of surprise.

  “How does it happen that such a lot of energy has been used up?” he questioned. “I understood you to say when you explained about this machine that there was enough energy to last a thousand years—that you would have all you need, including myself, of course.”

  “I miscalculated somewhat,” Merva sighed. “Not that it signifies for there will be other children from whom energy can be taken. Up to now you have not had any of the energy, because had you done so it would have necessitated you staying apparently at the particular age at which you received the energy. That would have been absurd had you remained somewhere round a constant twelve years of age; there would have been no point in it, but now that you are in your nineteenth year the first absorption of energy can begin. Hence the necessity for children because once you and I are both using the energy there is bound to be a very big drain upon the supply we have here.”

  “Suppose,” Exodus said, again with that thoughtful look upon his powerfully cut face, “we ever arrive at the point where there is only enough energy for either you or I. What would be done in a case like that?”

  Merva sighed. “What a boy you are for anticipating trouble.” There is no conceivable reason why there shouldn’t always be enough energy for both of us providing we can maintain a constant supply of children which just makes it that the energy seems to last just from generation to generation. If however we did get into the desperate position of having to choose between one and the other I would of course choose to perpetuate myself because I know more than all of you put together.”

  A slight gleam seemed to come into Exodus’ greenish grey eyes, but he did not make any further comment. Instead he said:

  “When you are ready to show me the details of the atomic annihilator mother, I am ready to listen. Then when I have had the first lesson I shall go in search of Vilnia and tell her that in accordance with your wishes I have decided to marry her.”

  “So you intend to thrust the responsibility of your marriage to Vilnia upon me? That it?”

  “Certainly, just in case she should register some kind of protest. It is always comforting to have someone in authority to fall back upon if there should be any kind of argument.”

  Merva nodded, but there was a frown upon her brow. She was not altogether sure that she liked the situation. She knew perfectly well that Exodus was quite capable of looking after himself and had never needed anybody upon which to fall back. What he was actually doing was exhibiting a great deal of his mother’s subtlety insofar that when it came to a matter of extreme delicacy he did not intend to take the responsibility if he could thrust it elsewhere.

  “Take up your position before the annihilator,” Merva ordered. “I’ll show you what has to be done.”

  Exodus obeyed and for the next two hours he was absorbed in the most profound concentration as his mother gave him every detail that she herself had conceived concerning the diabolically effective instrument.

  Merva could not be sure whether his profound interest in the invention was out of respect for her erudition or if it was that he wanted to get every detail at his finger ends for his personal use. She endeavoured to convince herself that this desire on his part was purely to further the great scheme of vengeance that she had so constantly expounded.

  She would not and could not believe that he was perhaps learning everything possible so that should the time come, he could if necessary take her place….

  In a word, Merva was faced by something that made her profoundly uncomfortable—a son whom she felt she could not trust.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  TREACHERY

  ONCE this first lesson was over Exodus did not linger in the laboratory; instead he took a cool but respectful leave of his mother then hurried through the depths of the ship until he came into the lounge. Here he looked around him quickly on the young teenagers, his eyes searching for Vilnia. Failing to find her he went further and finally tracked her down in the enormous conning tower in the summit of the vessel where she was seated on the padded ledge under the great dome, her eyes turned to the frigid glitter of the stars.

  “I have been looking for you, Vilnia,” Exodus said, coming forward.

  At the sound of his voice Vilnia turned quickly towards him. She was a slim, blonde, elfin girl only just on the edge of maturity. She had wide blue eyes that looked as though she were incessantly wondering what had brought about the incredible state of affairs in that she and her contemporaries were forever condemned to remain in this speeding space machine.

  “Looking for me?” she repeated as Exodus came up and settled beside her on the padded seat. “Why, does somebody want me?”

  “Yes.” Exodus gave a calm nod. “I do. I have just returned from a long conversation with my mothe
r,” he explained. “She has decreed that the time has come for marriage between each of us aboard this vessel—a matter far more important than it would be in the normal society of a planet—so I decided to seek you out and tell you that I have decided to marry you.”

  “From the way you speak it does not appear that I am allowed much choice,” Vilnia said, rather coldly. “For your information, Exodus—or do you know already—my affection is entirely for Drando, and I do think—”

  “We are not interested in Drando,” Exodus interrupted. “I said that I have decided to marry you and that precludes the possibility of anybody else even attempting it. Where your personal inclinations lie does not matter. As I said before we are not on a planet where there is a matter of choice and for the same reason affection does not enter it either.

  “I realise that we are both only young as yet even though my mother tells me that I am mature far beyond my years, but there is a certain reason why the matter of marriage cannot be delayed by any of us much longer. Needless to say the reason is entirely scientific “

  Vilnia turned away from his direct, dominating gaze and instead once more surveyed the heavens. There was a certain droop about her slim, still somewhat undeveloped shoulders.

  “Even though we are not on a planet, Exodus,” she said, after a moment or two, “there are still certain basic human emotions that need to be satisfied. At least I think so. Nothing but desperate unhappiness can come from a marriage which has no more feeling or warmth than those stars out there.”

  “Which means,” Exodus commented, “that you are reducing marriage to the old formula of sentimentality and love under which disguise the demands of lust are satisfied.”

  The girl looked at him sharply, astonished. He seemed quite unmoved by her glance and continued:

  “My mother has taught me—and I believe implicitly in everything she has to say—that to the true scientist love and sentiment are outworn emotions. One marries for only one definite reason—the production of progeny Those progeny are not just produced for the sake of it but again for another definite reason and in this case a scientific one, so you see the whole thing is really little more than a straightforward business deal and human feelings does not even come into it.