John Russell Fearn Omnibus

by John Russell Fearn

  “And by that time,” Terry murmured, staring over the flood from the headquarters’ windows, “we ought to have gotten sense enough to tame Earth’s periodic illnesses.”

  Elsa, lying in the heavy easy chair beside him, smiled a little.

  “I’m not interested in the future, Terry; nor for that matter am I interested any longer in the past. All I want is the present—to see again the blue skies, sunshine, fields of corn.”

  “You will,” Terry promised. “We’ll take up where we left off —”

  Terry smiled a little, turned to the girl and gently pulled the ring from her right hand.

  “What’s that for?”

  “Just this.” He flung the window wide, hurled the ring out into space with all his strength.

  For a long time they both sat in the cool, reviving breeze staring at the spot in the flood waters where it had disappeared.

  THOUGHTS THAT KILL

  The enormous telescopic reflector, balanced on universal bearings and motivated by softly humming engine, reared in a five hundred foot tower of rare and gleaming metal through the roof of the great observatory.

  Kilran, master of the last five hundred men on the Earth, stood in silence as he gazed into the amazing reflecting mirror. Its flawless surface evidenced the advanced science of the five hundred, only survivors of a once-mighty race.

  Like his fellows, Kilran was a small man, pinched and under-developed, seeming almost top-heavy by reason of his immense and highly-developed head poised on skinny neck and shoulders. His entire cranium was hairless and tight-skinned, overshadowing a face that was a set mask, expressionless and inflexibly cold. Centuries of science, a heritage of supreme achievement, had stamped from him all traces of natural sentiment and humanity.

  He was purely a pitiless intellect, always probing, always searching for new fields wherein to pursue the still unsolved problems tabulated and cross-indexed in the recesses of his ultra-developed mind.

  His scarcely blinking large black eyes gazed with smoldering steadiness into the reflector and studied the young and lovely planet it depicted. Venus!

  No longer the cloud-sheathed hell-planet of olden times, but a thriving world covered with dazzling blue oceans and bright green foliage. Venus was still a very warm planet, but none the less a possible habitation, a place whereon to continue progressive existence.

  At a sudden sound beside him, Kilran looked up from his scrutiny. Ajikon, astronomer in chief, had paused beside him. Behind him, their big eyes on the mirror, were the remainder of the five hundred—leathery, big-headed monstrosities revoltingly unlike the ancestors that had once fought and vanquished and died.

  “Well, Kilran?” Ajikon did not speak. Vocal organs had long since ceased to exist. His highly sensitive brain merely transmitted the thought into the receptive brain of the master.

  “A fair world indeed, Ajikon,” the Master impacted. “The more I study it, the more it appeals to me—a habitable world of similar dimensions to our own, and, according to our instruments and probes, possessing air only slightly denser than that of Earth. It has life, of course, but then …” His scar-like lips tightened significantly.

  “Ugly, plasmic life! Low in form! It can—and will—be destroyed. It is the inevitable law of the cosmos that the fittest survive. We, with our highly trained telepathic brains, our vast knowledge, shall do that … at their expense!” He gestured with contempt to the lowly life forms reflected in the mirror.

  “Everything is prepared,” Ajikon’s thoughts went on smoothly. “The last details of the space machine are finished. We only await your command before transferring into it the last heritages of this exhausted world.”

  “Then proceed at once. I am satisfied that Venus shall be our future home. Dismantle all machinery of future use to us. At sundown, every man will be in the vessel at his appointed place.”

  Ajikon bowed his great head, turned, and quietly departed.

  The ruler stood on, lost in speculations—planning, devising, scheming with all the power of his super-sensitive mind. There would be vast new accomplishment-total elimination of all Venusian life. Earth brains must and would go on! The infra-intellect of Venus could not possibly stand against them.

  *

  The reddish-gold glare of the sun was flooding the gaunt spires of the mountain range when the enormous spaceship finally swept upwards from the last habitat of Mankind. Within moments, the city had been left in the valley, a crumbling, shining mass of metal, last legacy to the intelligence of a race seeking newer, fresher fields.

  Within the spaceship there was a gentle stir of activity, efficient but unhurried. Kilran and Ajikon stood together at the major observation window, both of them gazing in silence at the blackness of the void, the eternal stars, the still-but-little dimmed sun with its leaping prominence arms—and, far away in the darkness, Venus—world of the future, to be mastered by superhuman intelligence.

  In various quarters of the enormous vessel, the other Earthlings were at their varied tasks, some monitoring the powerful atomic engines by which the ship was driven, others assiduously watching air-conditioning plants; still others were examining and testing the mammoth destructive machinery with which to blast all traces of Venusian life from the face of that planet.

  Presently, Kilran turned from his phlegmatic survey of the outer dark and moved silently across the vast control room to the observational section. From a rack, his mummy-like hand extracted a series of metal light-prints. Meditatively, he studied them.

  His black eyes noted unblinkingly the queer whitish-yellow substance depicted on the prints—Venusian life, queer, almost revolting, yet manifestly of rudimentary intelligence, as evidenced by the low-built straggling edifices of stone that ranked as their cities.

  “Strange life indeed, Kilran,” came Ajikon’s mental impulses, as his powerful brain read every reaction of the ruler’s thoughts. “In a fashion, it is protoplasmic, and yet intelligent.”

  “That, I know already.” Kilran’s thoughts were emotionless. “I merely seek to refresh my memory. The more I see of this lowly life, the more easy does our victory appear. Here is a life that has never built itself up into a recognizable form, but has remained quasi-plasmic, semi-fluid, obtaining its energy by oxidation and feeding by incorporating within itself the organic matter in the Venusian seas. Later, presumably, it would have obtained its food by the simpler constituents of carbon dioxide, water, and inorganic salts.”

  He turned and replaced the prints in the rack. “Obviously a form where the intelligence, such as it is, has moved faster than bodily development,” he went on. “Yet, in another sense, it certainly must be an advantage to separate or flow together as occasion demands. Such a state, I imagine, would mean a unity or separation of intelligence at will. Peculiar life indeed!”

  He returned to the main observation window. Already, Venus was larger in the firmament. The ship was moving with slowly mounting velocity, gauged to produce an exact replica of Earthly gravitation. Before many hours were passed, it would reach the planet, and then—

  Kilran’s black eyes burned a trifle brighter as he stood in silent, brooding malignance.

  *

  As the time passed the distance to Venus correspondingly decreased, and the instruments of the Earthlings became active. Now all the profound science of their astronomy came into being—complicated spectroscopes, reflectors, highly efficient computers, humidity detectors—a hundred and one bright and shining devices that operated with smooth accuracy.

  The great laboratory control room became animated with the busily moving figures, dominated by the brooding form of Kilran himself, taking stock of everything, evolving his plan of attack.

  The reflectors, trained across the narrowing gap, revealed a weird state of perturbation existing now amongst the Venusians. In all directions in the open spaces around their strange cities they were moving inwards towards a rapidly swelling central unit, converging and assimilating with it in the fashion of tru
e protoplasm. From being composed of thousands of individual units that had stretched forth protoplasmic limbs at will, they were now swelling into one solid sea in the approximate center of their major city, overflowing to its boundaries.

  Kilran’s immense brow furrowed in vague puzzlement as he watched them in the mirror.

  “Evidently they have seen our ship approaching,” commented Ajikon, standing by his side. “Perhaps they have crude telescopic devices. Considering the immense size of our ship, it could possibly be seen. Apparently, by flowing together in that fashion they are seeking safety.”

  Kilran nodded slowly. “Yes, and in so doing they have sealed their own doom. We have nothing to do but to strike at the one unit with our atomic missiles …” He turned aside and directed his thought waves to the experts congregated around the weapons of destruction. “Be ready to release when I give the order,” he commanded briefly. “We have not much time to go.”

  Gradually, an odd change became revealed amongst the master-scientists. At first, they scarcely noticed it, their attention entirely trained on the rapidly increasing disc ahead of them. They hovered around their machinery and observational centers ready to rain destruction and death on the now completely massed alien life form covering a good portion of Venus’ land surface.

  Then there crept into the efficiency of the space machine a note of error. The principal control pilots both made simultaneous mistakes in their tasks, and just as quickly recovered themselves—but the slips were noticed by the keen brain of Kilran as he mentally tabulated every beat, every rhythm, of the lesser minds around him. He turned from his survey of the enlarging planet and regarded the two men with his cold black eyes.

  “What is the matter?” His thoughts had the icy venom of intolerance, biting contempt for the slightest flaw. “For an instant you both lost control of your minds. What is the meaning of such a retrogressive act?”

  The men did not respond, half from shame, half from bafflement.

  “It must not happen again! Your lives depend upon it.” Kilran turned back to the window.

  Hardly had he done so, however, than the effect came again—this time more forcibly. A wave of mental power, so low, so gross in conception that it pained, moved through the ship and passed on. The crew gasped slightly at the sudden wrench on their sensitive brains, then fought their way back to balance.

  “You felt that, Ajikon?” Kilran questioned.

  The astronomer nodded. His lean hand was tenderly stroking his immense brain case.

  The slightest disturbance was sufficient to upset those extraordinary brains, nurtured as they had been through centuries of evolution to pure efficiency. To meet up with a coarse mental element was equivalent to pouring crude oil into an intricate mechanism.

  Kilran’s tiny mouth and chin tightened into a vicious line as he stared down at the fast-approaching bulk of Venus. It was only a thousand miles away now. The great white mass of the unified Venusians was distinctly visible to the naked eye.

  “Can it be possible that such lowly forms …” his thoughts began, appreciable to everyone in the room; then he shook his great head impatiently. “No, the thing is absurd! They are a low, unintelligent form of matter—cannot possibly do anything against minds like ours. We probably crossed a pocket of intense radiation. It is not uncommon in outer space —”

  He broke off suddenly and began to issue swift instructions for the guidance of the vessel as the planet loomed perilously close.

  The technicians obeyed, lean hands flying over their panels, great heads shining in the floodlit expanse. But before they could execute the orders, a truly devastating wave of mentality engulfed them. Their brains rocked under its force; their hands, jerking up in reflex movements under the sudden pain, caused the great vessel to jerk around in a wild half-circle that flung several of the intellectuals off their feet.

  Kilran spun around, just in time to see the two pilots go reeling from their chairs to the floor, hands clasped wildly to their heads. The mad beatings and surging of their tortured brains hammered into his own; frantically, he tried to form a coherency. They were in the grip of a searing mental power, their own minds interlocked in a spiral of increasing agony.

  “Control yourselves!” thundered his own hammering thought waves, charged with fierce command. “Control, you fools! Control!”

  He moved forward quickly, Ajikon by his side, but before either of them could reach the raving, helpless pair, they were themselves overcome with the same awful, overwhelming force.

  It hurled Ajikon to the floor, left him writhing in exquisite torture as the waves beat into his highly sensitive brain cells. Kilran alone still stood erect, gazed through blurring eyes at the extraordinary sight of his followers reeling and toppling in all directions, some of them even retrogressing far enough to find the old ridiculous emotion of hysteria. The vast control room began to ring with the sound of wild, insane laughter.

  Desperately, Kilran fought for control, stood with little hinds clasped at his sides, great brows wrinkled in a tremendous effort to offset the supreme tortures raging through his brain. To his mystification, they were not thoughts of menace or deliberate mental attack—that he could have understood; they were instead chaotic, jumbled impulses, incredibly low in meaning, the product of beings but dimly evolved and certainly not in possession of the art of pure thought-transference.

  As he stood struggling to master his brain, he felt the ship sweeping through a great uncontrolled circle, travelling madly around Venus, caught in the gravity field like a trapped animal.

  He likened the hammering thoughts, increasing now in intensity, to the beating of a myriad of mighty bells in discord, each carrying a certain impression, and each impression was, to his advanced state, extremely revolting in the scale of knowledge. The Venusians were only intelligent slime, able to fuse or divide at will. They were puzzled by his space ship, becoming terrified … That much he could grasp amidst the beating insanity.

  Then he was forced to his knees, holding his head in both tiny hands. Sheer and absolute mental defeat was biting through him in a million shafts.

  “Ajikon!” he vibrated desperately. “Ajikon! Listen—if you can!”

  By an enormous effort, he held his concentration on the astronomer as he stirred dully and looked up.

  “I believe I understand!” Kilran dropped flat as his anguished brain vibrated with growing feebleness. His thoughts were those of a, being on the verge of death from mental torture. “We—we overlooked one thing! Our brains, evolved through generations to receive and transmit thoughts also received the thoughts of the Venusians as we came in range. So far —” He broke off, only mastering extinction by a supreme effort.

  “So far we have only communicated amongst ourselves, but here, near Venus, we receive the low, terrible thoughts of the Venusians, creatures far below us in intellect. Their thoughts are veritable poison to our mentalities. They have converged into one unit purely for safety, out of fright, but in so doing all their thoughts are merged into one and we receive the full impact of a myriad primitive minds … You—you understand?”

  The astronomer’s thoughts were anguished. “Yes, and—and to a brain there is no relief! Light you can shut out with your eyes, sound you can stop also—but thought is eternally there! We can never cease to think; there is no known insulation against it! It’s beating—hammering! I —”

  His huge head sagged and fell. With a low exhalation of breath, he relaxed and became still …

  Kilran moved slowly, concentration blurred by the raging tumult within him. He looked around at the strewn figures of those who had already died.

  With a sudden return of fierce endeavor, he fought to gain the control board—anything to drive the ship out of this mad chaos. But in that desire he had met his physical master too.

  Specialization, centuries of brain usage at the expense of the body, had deprived him of almost all power of muscular effort. His little bony limbs sagged weakly under the pressu
re he strove to give to them. Brain, muscles and nerves were no longer working in intelligent coordination. Groaning weakly, he sank once more to the floor …

  Thoughts, memories, bitter regrets, wildly intermingled with the confusions of Venusian minds, surged through the turmoil. The future, the idea of progress, the intended ruthless destruction of these low life forms … How futile! How impossible! The end of the mighty Earth race was to be this—mental destruction at the hands of creatures thousands of generations behind in intelligence! The vaguest suggestion of a bitter smile crossed Kilran’s face as he sank for the last time—

  The space machine whirled on, still following its self-made orbit around Venus. It had provided that world with a satellite—the final, accidental, achievement of Earthly science.

  For generations, it would continue to circle, until Venusians finally found a way to cross space and examine it. Until then—and perhaps not even then—they would never know how they had defeated a ruthless menace, how the very quality of their thoughts had driven the last mighty brains of Earth to their ultimate extinction!

  Irony! Cold, merciless irony!

  DEBT OF HONOUR

  The ocher sand of the Martian desert spouted towards the blue-black sky under the impact of the falling space machine. The vessel slithered a little distance and became still in the long trough it had gouged for itself.

  For a long time nothing disturbed the desert’s silence. A thin, icy breeze stirred mournfully across it; the small sun moved among the faint stars…until at last its pale light picked out a group of four radio driven robots moving methodically across the waste on smoothly jointed legs. Flawlessly made, rather hideous, equipped with various strange instruments, they finally gained the vessel, set to work with the pincer hands and tools upon the airlocks.

  There were three airlocks in all. The guiding intelligence behind the robots saw to it that no trace of Mars’ thin, deadly cold air entered the vessel that none of the Earthly warmth air pressure inside escaped…