Anton York, Immortal

1

Mason Chard laughed.

For a year now he had been cruising aimlessly in the interplanetary depths of the Solar System. His beryllium-hulled space ship was motivated by the controlled interplay of the gravitational stresses filling the void. His power plant greedily absorbed solar radiation and rammed it through whirling quartz coils which cut the force-lines of gravitation, producing reactive motion. The same titanic energies which swung the ponderous planets in their eternal orbits were used, in part, to propel the tiny ship. It was superpower, limitless. And eternal, in the sense that gravitation was eternal.

Eternal!

Mason Chard liked that word. For, barring violent death, Mason Chard himself was eternal! In his veins flowed blood enriched with a self-renewing enzyme that was the antithesis of death and decay. His body cells were doubly endowed with radiogens, the tiny batteries of life which sucked energy from the cosmic rays, from the universe at large.

Mason Chard could not die from “disease” or “age” until the Universe had run down to the point where cosmic radiation was halved. That would be millions of years in the future!

The Immortal laughed again. His ruminations covered, in reverse order, the most eventful thousand years in human history. Just the year before, Earth’s vigorous race had established an outpost on far Pluto, thus completing a phase in its empire building. Previous to that there had been interplanetary wars, heroic pioneering, and dauntless feats of exploration. The parade of a thousand years, glorious and packed with drama, marched through Mason Chard’s mind. The laughs that punctuated his ponderings were for those times he, Chard, had interfered with the course of history.

There was the time, for instance, he had led the insurrection of the native Callistans against the domineering Earthmen, purely for the diversion of espousing a lost cause. At another time it had been his whim to destroy three successive rescue ships on their way to a marooned group of explorers in the wilds of Titan, so that he could watch brave men die.

Chard had had to amuse himself in those endless centuries to escape the dreary cycles of ennui. He had long felt himself above the ties of race and allegiance. Roaming the interplanetary void at will, a mysterious and half-mythical anarchist, he had often dammed the progress of mankind’s growing dominion in the Solar System. Along with the ties of blood and tradition, Chard had thrown conscience into the discard. It had not caused him one twinge to see thousands of space ship crews annihilated in the intra-world war he had personally embroiled, five centuries before, between Venus and Earth. He had watched the holocaust through his vision screen, grimly amused.

Mason Chard had never taken the trouble to analyze himself. If he had, he would have realized himself to be a colossal ego, inflated by the drug of immortality. He would have recoiled from the picture of a cold, heartless, scheming scoundrel, clothed in a super-vanity. Yet perhaps only one little thing made him this, rather than an honoured, inspired, immortal leader—

His chuckle was just a bit bitter as reminiscences took him back to that time almost a thousand years ago when he had run afoul of Earth law. Realizing his immortality, he had started an abortive drive for world domination. He had not planned thoroughly and had been captured. Fortunate that capital punishment, even for treason, was outlawed in that day, he had been exiled to a lonely asteroid. His sentence had been 199 years. There, for seventy-five years, he was made to attend the warning light beacon that warded off space liners. A supply ship had come once a year.

The only light spots, in that dreary, bitter incarceration were those times the officials had been amazed at his longevity, not knowing he was immortal. He had been a man. in the prime of life at the start of his sentence. He was still a man in the prime of life seventy-five years later. He might have waited to serve out his 199 year sentence, to confound them utterly, but before that a pirate of space landed to destroy the beacon in some deep-laid plot. Chard gratefully joined the pirate crew, became their leader in a few years, and later betrayed them.

Thus had his career begun. Then Chard’s reflections went back to the stirring events of the middle Twentieth Century.

He had been thirty-five then—really thirty-five—occupied as a research scientist. Dr. Charles Vinson, his former instructor, had called him to a secret conference with a half hundred others, unfolding a breath-taking scheme. He had inoculated them all with the Elixir of Youth, whose formula he had stolen from Anton York, and as immortals they had begun the subjugation of Earth. Anton York himself had defeated the plan, destroying the Immortal fleet.

Of the Immortals, only Mason Chard was left. He had been left in charge of their secret underground headquarters in Tibet and had thus escaped York’s vengeance. For, years he had remained in hiding, waiting until Anton York had left the Solar System, plunging out amid the stars like a god whose duties were done. Chard, keeping his identity secret, had watched Earth, equipped with the legacy of space travel York had left, attempt the conquest of the Solar System.

And then had come his lone and foolish attempt to win the rule of Earth. Reaching again this point in his review of the past, Chard laughed once more, this time harshly.

“A thousand years I’ve fooled around and played with fate,” he muttered to himself, staring out at the dome of stars. “But I have learned much. I am prepared now to accomplish the aim that Vinson tried and failed, and I later, and before us, men like Napoleon, Attila the Hun, and Alexander the Great. I am going to conquer the world. Not the world they knew, but the world of today—the entire Solar System!”

His cold, cruel eyes blazed with sudden fire.

“I have the power to do it. And more important, I know the method. It must be done through fear! Fear is the common weakness of all humanity, excepting myself. I have learned to laugh at fear. But these mortals, they know fear. It can strike them powerless, tie their hands and wits. I will conjure up a fear that will strike in every heart in the Solar System. I will play up this fear, feed it, until they grovel at my feet. I will become emperor of nine worlds!”

In the melodramatic ecstasy of the moment, Mason Chard flung a clenched fist toward the watching stars, pledging himself.

“One against six billions—and I will win!” he boasted. Once again his super-ego had found something on which to feed itself.

2

SOMEWHERE, far out in interstellar space, Anton York, a man-made god, roamed the uncharted deeps of the void. Immortal and wise beyond human understanding, he plunged on in a timeless lethargy, taking pleasure in observing the slow majesty of the cosmos. The stars surrounded him like silver studs in the celestial vault. With him was his immortal mate, Vera York.

Their earth-born love had transformed itself into a spiritual bond that made them almost one. They did not need food or air; their bodies were in a state of suspended animation. They lived only in the mind, exchanging thoughts by telepathy. Their ship drew illimitable power from the vast storehouse of energy with which space was crammed, the cosmic rays. Subtle warpings of the gravitational lines of giant, distant suns gave the ship lightning motion. Unbound by the blind rules of Earthly science, they had often, and at will, exceeded the speed of light. On and on they had gone, nomads of the cosmos.

At times they had slowed and visited other planetary systems, had held concourse with alien races. Life exhibited itself to them in a hundred strange, incredible ways. Minds existed in the Universe whose thought processes were unfathomably queer. Never had they felt any kinship with other intelligences. And never, in all their Brobdingnagian journeying, had they found any planet system quite like the Sun’s, nor any world quite like Earth.

Suddenly they knew what it was. Immortal they might be, abhuman and superhuman, children of space itself, but they could not deny what it was—nostalgia! They had lived in space five times as long as on their birthworld, yet on the way back they knew they were heading home! A warm pulse-beat rose in their brains as they neared the little yellow-white star buried near the hub of the gigantic pin wheel of the Milky Way Galaxy.

When the Sun had begun to enlarge among the stars, Anton York willed himself out of his hypnotic state of bodily suspension. Mind-controlled relays turned on the various mechanisms that supplied heat, air, and artificial gravity. His lungs took in a deep, shuddering breath, the first in several years. His heart suddenly began rumbling in his chest. Congealed blood, bearing the Elixir-enzyme, began to circulate to body cells whose radiogens drew life-energy from the cosmic rays.

His wife, Vera, joined him a moment later. They embraced, and drank the thrill of corporeal existence. The ship was once again a living room, after being a cold, preserved coffin for the years of their swift journey through remotest space.

York consulted his instruments and made rapid mental calculations.

“We’ve been gone from the Solar System just one thousand and one years, Earth scale,” he announced. “When we left here we were thirty-five years old, physically. And that’s exactly how old we are on our return—physically. Of course mentally, spiritually, we’re much, much older. We’ve lived some, haven’t we, Vera?”

“Gloriously, Tony!”

“Odd that we’ve come back here, to this drab little planet system. Remember the grand system of the triple suns—one white, one orange, one red—with its fifty-six gigantic planets? And yet, in a way, I’m glad to be back here.”

“There’s no place like home,” quoted Vera gaily. She knew she was going to enjoy the revival of old memories and associations.

York wheeled the ship in a course high above the plane of the Solar System, as they approached, adopting a wide swinging parabolic course. Soon dark and gloomy Pluto appeared among, the stars, grew to high magnitude, then faded in the rear. Pinkish Neptune with its one great moor paraded past their ports, like a will-o’—wisp. Steel-grey Uranus with its smoky atmosphere, exhibited four huge satellites considerably off to one side.

York, cut obliquely and swept over xanthic Saturn with its brilliant rings and brood of moons, Vera studied the sight with their ship telescope, remarking that for sheer beauty the Saturnian system was unmatched in all space.

Cyclopean Jupiter hove to, an agate striped with brownish bands, the largest of planets with the largest number of satellites. They had seen monster planets beside which Jupiter would be a pea, but somehow, for sheer impressiveness, this great planet was second to none. Vera, gazing at it through the telescope, expressed her admiration. The four largest moons glinted brightly not far out from their primary. The smaller satellites were fainter, but distinguishable from the pinpoint stars by their small discs.

Suddenly Vera looked up.

“Tony,” she asked puzzledly, “how many moons did Jupiter have?”

“Ten—and still should have,”

“That’s what I thought.” Vera bent her eyes to the binocular sights again. “Strange,” she declared after a moment, “only nine moons are there now!”

“What? That’s nonsense!”

“Look for yourself.”

York looked, and counted. He saw the first small Jovian moon, close to the planet like a tiny silver flea preparing to land. Further out, in order, were the four largest moons, Io, Europa, Ganymede and Callisto. Seven times as far was another small moon. Twice as far out as this were two still smaller satellites. And a little further out, the last. Their total was nine. Obviously, one was missing. But which one was it?

Not trusting to memory—memory that would have had to reach back a thousand years—York rummaged through his chart closet and retrieved an old astronomical book. He turned to a diagrammatic picture of the Jovian system and compared the printed orbits to imaginary ones in the telescopic view. The missing moon was number six, a small one of perhaps a hundred miles diameter, whose orbit had been more than seven million miles from Jupiter’s surface.

“Some mystery here,” York muttered, straightening up. “A moon just can’t go disappearing like that. We’ve been away a thousand years, yes, but that moon revolved in its orbital groove for millions of years before that!”

What did the missing moon of Jupiter signify? A clue revealed itself several hours later, as the Jovian planet drew steadily nearer. York had turned on his powerful radio receiver and listened to the amazingly clipped speech that vibrated through the ether. Evidently the English language, though universally used, had suffered considerable alteration. Listening carefully, York realized it had been brightened and made more flowing. Undoubtedly their speech would sound archaic to these people of the 31st Century.

Suddenly a powerful, booming voice had blanketed other stations and vibrated throbbingly from the loudspeaker. Its production must have cost a fortune in power. It was a cold, hard, emotionless voice, with arrogant inflections.

“People of the Solar System!” it said. “And particularly, Councillors of Jove! You are aware, undoubtedly, that the number six satellite of Jupiter has vanished from its age-long orbit about its primary. Where is it, you ask. It is at present a good many millions of miles from its former position and is still moving away. This phenomenon is unprecedented. You wonder what inconceivable, but natural, force has done this.”

The speaker paused and then went on dramatically: “It is not a natural force! It is man-made! Your lost Moon has been dragged away from its primary—literally—by means of a force-beam and a supremely powerful engine. I, the Immortal, built this super-engine and moved a world! My price for the return of this satellite will be complete rule of the Solar System!”

The voice became ominous: “I have demonstrated that I have in my hands illimitable power. If I can move worlds, I can destroy worlds! My demands are not unreasonable, for I have the wisdom of ages, far more than any other living man. I have lived more than a thousand years. I am immortal, and all-powerful. You will have twenty-four hours in which to discuss this matter, and arrange to call a council at which I will be made emperor. The Immortal waits.”

“Did you hear that—the Immortal!” gasped Vera. “Is it possible that he is one of Vinson’s group? or has the Elixir been rediscovered?’

“It’s one or the other,” mused York. “The removal of a satellite from its orbit is no bluff. It’s quite a feat, even though it is a comparatively small body. Whoever that person is, he’s dangerous.”

He stroked his brow thoughtfully.

“Vera, I had planned to go directly to Earth, to spend a few quiet years there. Incognito, of course, and then to stock up on supplies. But instead I think we’ll hover around Jupiter and see the outcome of these amazing circumstances.” His eyes narrowed. “Unless the human race has changed a lot since our time, there’s going to be resistance to the Immortal’s challenge for supremacy. And after that trouble!”

Promptly when the twenty-four hours were up—Earthscale being standard in the System—the Immortal’s booming radio voice came again from the depths of space, demanding to know if his ultimatum had been accepted. York listened carefully for the reply, which came after a certain time lapse because of the distances involved.

“The council of Jove, representing the Supreme Council of Earth and the Solar System, declines to accept your terms.

“You, the Immortal, are hereby declared an outlaw and a traitor. As such, you will be hunted and destroyed by our Space Patrol. If you will restore the sixth satellite of Jupiter to its rightful position, and give your person into custody, the ultimate sentence will be lightened.”

For answer, a grating laugh came from the Immortal. “I have been declared an outlaw by several other provisional governments in the past thousand years, but I have never been apprehended.” The voice suddenly spat fire: “You will take the consequences of your answer. The missing satellite is thirty millions of miles from Jupiter. It will be returned to you—as a projectile! At the speed of a thousand miles a second, it will crash into Ganymede and destroy it! That is my answer!”

York snapped off the radio and turned to Vera with horrified eyes.

“He’s a madman!” exclaimed Vera. “Tony, can’t we do something about this? After all, these are our people, this is the world of our birth. We can’t stand by and see an inhabited world destroyed!” York sprang to his feet. “We will do something!”

3

York bent over an instrument whose readings Indicated that the Immortal’s message had come from the direction of the Sun. Then he stepped to the telescope and scoured the region thirty million miles sunward from Jupiter. He discovered it among the numberless stars, in the belt of Orion near giant blue Betelgeuse—a small half-disc. It was the lost moon.

York then seated himself at the pilot board and touched studs that guided huge gravitational stresses through his engine. Following a course he had already calculated in his mind, he drove his ship in smooth acceleration toward the tiny, lost moon. Like a ball from some cosmic musket, the ship hurtled sunward.

Inside, nothing was felt of the tremendous, crushing acceleration York had applied. He had long before solved the secret of inertia-suspension. They could have leaped from a cruise to the speed of light in one second without the slightest discomfort.

An hour later their destination loomed large in their front port. It had moved position—toward Jupiter. The Immortal had already begun its furious thrust, aimed it like a titanic cannonball for Ganymede. He had said he was doing it by means of a force-beam—a closed beam of artificial force which could be made more rigid and gripping than a solid bar of steel York had used small force-beams himself, at times, to anchor his ship above strange worlds whose surfaces were not attractive for landing.

But this Immortal’s force-beam was one designed to move a world. Only one force was capable of moving a world—another world’s gravity field. He was either pulling it, or pushing it, by means of some great gravity field. If pulling, he was using Jupiter’s gravity field. If pushing, he was drawing power from the distant Sun’s field. Figuring rapidly, York decided he was probably doing the former, since Jupiter was so much nearer and more effective.

He slowed his ships mad pace and took up an orbital path around its Jupiter side. If the Immortal was on this side at all, he must be at one certain spot—the spot bisected by an imaginary line drawn from the center of the moon to the position in Jupiter’s orbit where Jupiter would be in twelve hours, and where Ganymede would be an hour later.

His quarry’s distance from the moon’s surface was one factor York could not foretell. It, depended purely on the design of the force-beam projector he used. Thus, although York had the search narrowed down geographically, he had to hunt hit-or-miss in the third dimension spaceward from the lost moon’s surface.

York wasted four precious hours searching for the invisible, silent, undetectable space-tractor with which the Immortal was catapulting the lost moon homeward. He spent only an hour on the sunward side, where the sunlight would have quickly revealed any lurking ship. All this while the derelict moon’s speed increased and it had already negotiated half the distance to Jupiter. In another five hours—

“The proverbial needle in the hay-stack,” York muttered to his wife. His face was strained. Suddenly he snapped his fingers. “We’ll have to take a chance,” he said grimly.

The chance of being crushed by the terrific force-beam itself, designed to handle millions of tons of mass, with toy-like ease. York simply shuttled his ship back and forth over the general area under which the force-beam must be anchored. He rode ten miles over the surface, to give himself leeway. His weaving course would eventually run him into the path of the force-beam.

It came finally—a furious wrench that made the entire ship groan and creak. It spun violently and dashed ground-ward at lightning speed, caught in the world-moving force of the beam. Securely strapped in their seats, York and Vera felt as though they were being torn apart. Their inertia-suspension was not equipped to neutralize rotary motion.

Vera fainted. York, with an effort of will, clawed at the controls and stopped their twisting plunge a hundred feet above the brittle, rocky surface of the lost moon. Vera came to almost immediately, smiling gamely. York was exultant.

“Now we have him located!” he cried.

He adopted a course perpendicular to the spot they had nearly crashed upon, crawled up into the starry vault. Twenty-five miles above the surface the Immortal’s ship appeared among the stars. It was a gigantic thing with two enormous, bulging tubes at its back. From one of these was projected the force-beam. It returned to the other tube—after passing into the center of the planet below and firmly gripping it.

The motion of this moon-and-ship system was accomplished by creating an unbalanced strain of its appreciable gravitational field in relation to mighty Jupiter. As a stretched rubber-band tends to snap together, so the distended force-field strained to close the gap between.

With lights out in his cabin, York pulled close to the dark ship. Into his meteor-screen he phased in another screen, one that was supersensitive to electromagnetic waves of high power. It would allow transmission of the low-power radio waves, but any radiation of high power would cause it to snap on instantaneously an impenetrable blanket screen. This protective wizardry had many times saved York out in space among hostile races.

Idling next to the huge space-tug, York radioed across.

“Anton York calling the Immortal. I am just outside your side ports, a hundred feet away. Reduce speed immediately and reverse your force-beam.”

Evidently the Immortal had had his radio set open and heard, for his laugh sounded.

“The Space Patrol, eh?” his voice hissed. “Take that—”

There was a sharp click in York’s cabin, which cut off the radio voice abruptly. An eye-searing shower of sparkles blossomed where the Immortal’s lethal beam of exploding neutrons had impinged on the protective screen. Again the sparkles cast a lurid glare over the two ships, and revealed an amazed face at one of the larger ship’s ports. A third time the high-powered beam expended itself against the impenetrable screen of York’s ship.

York broadcast as the trigger-touch relay screen released the stronger one.

“You can’t destroy me. My screen is beam-proof. But I can destroy you, Immortal!”

A gasp came from the radio.

“What did you say your name was?” asked the Immortal, as though suddenly realizing he had heard the strange name before.

“Anton York.”

“Anton York! Not the—”

“Yes, the same Anton York who left the Solar System a thousand years ago. The York who annihilated the armada of the Immortals, of which you are apparently a survivor. Remember the weapon I had—the one which turned the Immortals’ ships to black dust? I still have that weapon!”

“W-what do you want?” came the Immortal’s cowed voice.

“I told you before. Reverse your force-beam and slow down the moon you are dragging. Then you will take up the course I plot, which will return this moon to its former orbit as the sixth satellite of Jupiter. One slightest infraction of my orders and I will turn you and your ship to—black dust!”

Ten hours later the lost moon of Jupiter was restored to its age-old berth in the Jovian system, none the worse for its strange journey. It had not been inhabited nor even exploited for minerals. When York was satisfied that it had been given the right orbital speed to continue revolving properly, he allowed the Immortal to disengage the force-beam.

“You are coming with me now,” stated York. “You have been branded an outlaw and must be turned over to the courts for sentence. Be thankful your crime hasn’t been the destruction of Ganymede, as you originally intended.”

But Mason Chard, recovering from his first awe and fear at the appearance of the legendary York, had been thinking—and scheming. When he released his force-beam from the planetoid, he coincidently shortened its focus. Then he made his ship wobble as though he were clumsy at the controls. At the proper moment, when York’s ship was at his back, he jerked the levers and clamped his force-beam to it. Yelling in triumph, Mason Chard twisted his ship in circles, whirling York’s like a stone at the end of a string. He released it suddenly.

It receded into the starry background and dwindled to nothingness. Chard hastily rammed full power into his engines, to make good his escape. He took a course directly away from York’s ship, eager to put as much distance between as possible. That, he realized soon after, was a mistake.

When York was able to stop the flight of his ship and return to the spot where his prisoner had been, the other ship was long out of sight. It angered him that he had been tricked so easily. On the long chance that the other’s psychology had been to dash the other way, York immediately gunned his ship in the same line, with furious acceleration.

He turned his meteor-screen to full power, for its protection, and scanned the dark regions ahead. A mounting velocity that had never been matched in the Solar System before overhauled the fleeing ship in a few minutes. York smiled grimly as a black shape ahead occulted stars like an expanding balloon.

Realizing his stupidity at the last moment, Chard veered his ponderous ship into a parabola. But York’s ship clung near him as though attached by a chain. When Chard, in desperation, tried again to focus the powerful force-beam on his pursuer, a hazy beam of violet stabbed from York’s ship, sheering off the force-beam projector neatly. The fused beam of ultra-sound and gamma-radiation turned the metal it touched into black dust, as it had turned to black dust fifty Immortal ships more than a thousand years before.

Chard gaped at the instruments which told of destruction in the rear part of his ship and turned white. Hastily he snapped on his transmitter.

“Don’t destroy me!” he pleaded. “I surrender, York!”

“Very well,” said York grimly. “Let’s report to the Jovian Council. Head for Ganymede. I’ll follow.”

Chard had no alternative. Bitterness charged his heart as he swung toward Jupiter, completely subdued. The blow to his puffed ego made tears of helpless anger well to his eyes.

If the Jovian Councillors on Ganymede had been amazed at the disappearance of their moon, they were still more astounded at its sudden, reappearance. The fears of the panic-stricken inhabitants of Ganymede were quieted. Had this all been a huge practical joke by that queer, half-mythical person who had flitted in and out of history during the past thousand years? Or did it have a deeper significance. Many there were who did not believe in the existence of Mason Chard, explaining it as a recurrent fable dating from the time of the Immortals a thousand years before.

An attendant approached the Chief Councillor and whispered in his ear. The latter looked at the attendant as though he thought him insane, but at his earnest look nodded and sent him away. Then the Chief Councillor turned to his colleagues and raised a hand. His face was bewildered.

“Gentlemen,” he said in a high-pitched voice, “we are to be honoured with the presence of the Immortal, the man who recently threatened this world with destruction! And his captor is a certain—Anton York!”

A dead silence came over the room. Every face looked incredulous. Anton York, the greatest figure in past history—the immortal who had given mankind the secret of controlled gravitation. And then, more a god than a man, had plunged into outer space, no longer concerned with the petty affairs of men. He was here?

The silence became more impressive, if that were possible, as York strode into the room, followed by his dejected looking prisoner. York stood before them, a man of thirty-five years of age, tall, strong, virile. Physically he was no different from any other man in the prime of life, but he carried an aura of super intellect that was immediately noticeable. The Councillors felt themselves shrinking mentally.

“You say you are Anton York,” stammered the Chief Councillor, trying to be officious. “But what proof have you—” He broke off, staring fascinatedly into York’s wisdom-filled eyes. “You are Anton York!” he whispered, in stark realization that he could be no other with eyes like that.

York told his story, in what to them was queerly archaic English. At the end he gestured to Chard. “He is your prisoner,” York concluded. “His sentence will be in your hands.”

Mason Chard said nothing. He seemed utterly deflated in spirit But his eyes glared at York with a world of hate toward this man from the past who had come back like a ghost to spoil his plans. York stared back dispassionately. They stood thus, eye to eye, for a long minute. Two immortals from a long-ago era, meeting in a far future to find themselves opposed in aim and purpose. All the things of their time were dead and forgotten, except as history, but here they stood, a millennium later, to find themselves natural enemies.

The Chief Councillor tried to look sternly at the Immortal, but was awed by him too. This man had eluded the forces of law and order in the Solar System for one thousand years. At last guards were called in, to conduct him to a prison for later trial.

“And now, sir,” said the Chief Councillor, turning to York, “on behalf of the Supreme Council of Earth, the here-present Council of Jove, and the united peoples of the Solarian Empire, may I extend our deepest gratitude for—”

York waited patiently while the Chief Councillor, rising to the occasion, went on in this vein for several minutes. When he stopped for breath, York acknowledged the speech with a few polite words and then asked a question.

“Has the secret of immortality been rediscovered?”

“No,” replied the Councillor. “Mason Chard, the only mortal alive today, was from the original group of the 20th Century.”

Within himself, York sighed in relief. His father had been fortunate to stumble on one of the greatest secrets of the Universe, the secret of immortality. Pure, blind luck it had been, probably, against all the laws of chance. Better that the secret never again be discovered. It had caused sufficient trouble at one time. It had more possibilities of harm than good, as exemplified by Dr. Vinson’s disastrous scheme, and now this Mason Chard’s subversive career.

York stayed with the Jovian Council, an honoured guest, to ask many more questions. He had heard the histories and doings of many queer peoples in interstellar space, but this one had the appeal of familiarity. He thrilled to the epic thousand years of mankind’s advent in the Solar System.

Then, to see this great glory of man’s dominance in the nine-world empire, he and Vera embarked on a tour of the planets. But they did not leave Jupiter until they had witnessed the trial of Mason Chard. The criminal seemed to have suffered a change of heart after his encounter with York. He promised that in exchange for his life, forfeit under the law, he would work as a scientist for the betterment of mankind. By a narrow margin, his request was granted. A plan was drawn up for a laboratory to be built on the sixth satellite of Jupiter, the very one he had tried to destroy, in which he would labour, under heavy guard.

“They had better make the guard strong enough,” was York’s private comment to his wife in their ship. “Mason Chard is not the one to be trusted. The memory, of a thousand years of absolute freedom is going to irk him considerably as his prison years go by.” He shrugged. “But that is their problem. You and I, Vera, will make a tour of the Solar System, see just what the posterity of our time has done. It will be something like viewing the handiwork of our children.”

Their little globular ship was seen on every one of the worlds in the next year. The two immortals, everywhere looked-upon with awe and wonder, were a little amazed themselves at the wideness of man’s activity. Earth’s sons were in evidence everywhere, in communities ranging from great spanned cities to little isolated outposts a million miles from nowhere, literally. No environment had proved too trying. No dangers too great No difficulties too hazardous. No other race of beings equal or superior.

With little more than his bare nerve, man had gained a toehold on a variety of misfit worlds. It was the beginning of a truly colossal undertaking—the complete annexation of all. the Solar System. On remote, frozen Pluto, a band of hardy scientists reconnoitred, for possible colonization, the wastes of that planet.

On the way back from Pluto to Earth, York became very thoughtful. “Vera,” he said suddenly, “how do you suppose the colonists on Venus would like to have a moon in their skies?”

“What a crazy question!” said Vera, laughing. “Are you serious?”

“I was never more serious in my life,” York objected. He went on musingly: “If Mason Chard did nothing else, he gave me a great idea. He moved a moon—a world! Man, in progressing, must either adapt to his environment, or change the environment to suit himself. Vera, Vera!” he cried. “Don’t you see? Why not remake the Solar System to suit mankind?”

“But can they do it?” asked Vera, not quite grasping his meaning.

“They!” exclaimed York. “No—we! We can do it!”

Six months later York had completed his plans, stupendous plans which he presented to the Supreme Council on Earth n a simplified form. “All I will need,” he told them, “is the one ship built under my instructions, and full cooperation in certain state matters that will arise later.”

The Supreme Council, the rulers of all the empire, were stunned by the magnitude of the thing. They deliberated for two months. York was asked a million and one questions by experts and technicians, who were called upon to give their opinion. York was patient until they asked him if there would be danger.

“Danger?” he snorted, eyes ablaze suddenly. “No more than in any other human endeavour. No more than the pioneers who first settle a wilderness. Or to the man who first landed on Pluto with a clumsy ship. Or to the dawn man who ventured into the next jungle. All progress is hard won. It is the human heritage. It is not a question of danger—it is a question of courage!”

The grant was given. The parts for the great ship were manufactured at various centers of industry on Earth and shipped to the assembly ground York had been granted, near Sol City, the capital of the Solarian Empire. Under his watchful eye, it grew as a zeppelin-shaped craft a mile in length. Its interior was a maze of machinery patterned after York’s superscience. Only he understood their full possibilities.

Five years later it was launched, manned by a thousand picked spacemen and technicians. It rose into the sky like a mammoth cigar and lumbered off into space. As it left Earth, its great bulk delayed the next eclipse of the moon a hundredth of a second—the only man-made thing ever to do this!

4

York, alone with Vera in his private cabin which was perched like a conning tower above the nose, took pride in giving the orders that were to make a vision in his mind become reality. The Gargantuan ship eased past the orbit of Mars and approached the asteroids. Soon it passed asteroids which were far smaller and lighter than itself. Finally, the Cometoid, as it was named, hove to before Ceres, the largest of the asteroids, some 480 miles in diameter. A small colony of miners had already been safely taken away by another ship, leaving it deserted of human life.

The thoughtful-eyed man at the nose of the ship barked commands. A microphone carried his voice to all parts of the ship. A thousand men jumped to their duties. The ship’s stern lined itself with Ceres. An invisible bond sprang from ship to asteroid. The ship moved, towing the miniature world with it. The space-tug pointed for Venus and gathered speed.

Ceres, carted those 250,000,000 miles, was installed in an orbit close enough to Venus to allow its brilliant reflection to shine through the misty atmosphere. Thus Venus was given a moon to the delight of its warmth-loving inhabitants. The success of the macro-cosmic engineering feat gave York the same sublime feeling he had had a thousand years before, when he had first realized he was immortal. It was the beginning of a revamping of the Solar System. The astro-engineers of the Cometoid piloted their ship back to the asteroid belt and picked Pallas away. This 300-mile planetoid was given to Mars as a moon, to supplement its two tiny, inconspicuous ones.

Then something else was tried. York, long a lover of the majestic beauties of deep space, knew the value of beauty in man’s life. The brilliant spectacle of Halley’s Comet—faithfully returning every seventy-six years for untold centuries—inspired the next Herculean task. If a comet was such an entrancing panorama when it passed close to Earth or any other planet, why not make this spectacle grander and oftener?

No sooner said than done—with York and his science. Calculations of almost infinite intricacy gave the elements of an orbit that would bring the next comet closely, but neatly, by Earth, Venus and Mars. It was not much of a trick, comparatively speaking, to fasten the end of a force-beam to the comet’s nucleus and drag it into its new track around the Sun.

The first one, unfortunately, was lost in the Sun, but the next eight were more carefully warped into their new grooves of motion. After that, all the peoples of the inner planets—which held the bulk of the Empire’s population—were to be treated to brilliant cometary displays at least once a year.

The Empire applauded this miraculous bit of Universe-building and waited avidly for the next. York next directed his wonder-ship out toward Jupiter. This great planet’s nearest satellite, a small one, was evacuated by its small population and dragged to within two diameters of the primary.

There was some doubt over the issue but finally the giant planet’s gravitational stress obeyed the immutable laws of space and ripped the body to shreds, slowly scattering them in ring formation above its equator. Thus Jupiter had the same halo of glory Saturn had enjoyed for countless ages.

York’s next undertaking was to give Mercury a period of rotation. Burying the end of a force-beam deep within Mercury, as an unshakable anchorage, York diverted the tremendous gravitational stress of the nearby Sun to one side of the planet. York’s ship acted only as the medium of transfer of energy, not as the actual mover. Like the copper wire leading electricity to the motor, York’s engines tapped the cosmic tanks and poured their world-moving powers into the field of operation.

Slowly but certainly the surface of Mercury began to rotate under. the Sun’s rays. Two years of this finally gave the Sun’s first planet a day and night of forty hours each. With the more equal distribution of sun-heat and space-cold on its two formerly unmoving hemispheres, the entire planet was made habitable, instead of just the narrow twilight, zone. It went into the annals of the Empire’s history as a unique experiment in world-moving.

Then York revealed for the first time that he had atomic power available on his ship—the form of energy that had stubbornly defied man’s efforts to pry it loose from its matrix of matter. He must be truly a god, he who had that!

York embarked on the second part of his super project of interplanetary landscaping. Much of Mercury’s surface was given a baptism of supernal fire. Atomic-powered pulveriser-beams transformed its hitherto drab, uninspiring harshness of rock areas into a garden bed of nutritious soil. Hardy plant forms were later to be sown abundantly, to soften the bleakness of the vast calcite plains.

Moving to Venus, York clarified its smoky atmosphere by chemically stripping from it millions of tons of water vapour, carbon dioxide, and the granite dust that arose from its violent wind storms. This took five years, positioned high in the atmosphere, spraying waste products out into space at a speed which insured their departure forever.

Mars was next carefully surveyed, for the purpose of filling its long empty sea bottoms. By repair and extension of its monumental canal system, some polar water had been forced equator ward by the colonists. But only a faint trickle had got into the sea bottom. Warning everyone away from the polar regions, York swung a tremendous heat ray down on the age-old ice.

With a master’s touch, he produced a head of water that snaked over the flat lands and eventually poured into those ancient hollows that may once have floated a lost civilization’s ships, millions of years before. The process, repeated at the other pole, filled the sea bottoms to great depths and duplicated on a miniature scale the oceans of Earth.

All these feats on a planetary scale were measured in years. At times the Cometoid had to be grounded for repairs, refuelling, restocking with supplies and men. For men died in this service, with the passing years, and had to be re placed with younger, fresher forces. But York and Vera, eternally young, knew nothing of the passage of time except as a mathematics of the mortal mind. To them, the rebuilding of the Solar System filled the space of a day in their long, long lives.

York turned the Cometoid’s blunt prow toward the major planets again. Jupiter’s poisonous atmosphere was swept clean of its venomous gases by a series of enormous suction machines, like vacuum cleaners, which converted the obnoxious molecules into solid precipitates that fell to the ground. Because the Jovian planet was such a huge one and its atmosphere so extensive, this cleansing took ten years. But for future ages, people would be able to wander freely over its tremendous surface in their levitation shoes.

Io, Jupiter’s moon, was scoured sweet from its deadly, tenacious fungi by a tongue of protonic flame.

Saturn’s ammoniated atmosphere was suitably neutralized by a two-year belching forth of hydrogen-chloride gas from leviathan gas chambers. York’s chemical stores were all produced by transmutation of nearby and often surrounding raw products.

The bitter coldness of Uranus’ frosty surface was relieved by deep and wide shafts that brought up the planet’s internal heat. York dug the shafts by means of a pillar of livid atomic energy that disintegrated matter at almost the solar rate.

Neptune offered the tricky problem of being completely covered with a hundred-foot layer of solidified and liquefied gases. This had not prevented daring souls from living in this inimical environment in completely self-sufficient arks that floated over these bitter seas. York did not pass the challenge. After all the residents had been warned away, he dropped innumerable bombs of atomic flame deep in the frigid, fluid wastes.

For two years Neptune was a flame in the heavens to rival the Sun as the brilliant atom-fire burned its way through all the surface sea, dissipating most of it into space. The planet’s true surface was revealed for the first time in incalculable ages, to become the dwelling grounds in the future of Earth’s ever pressing hordes.

York carried his mighty tools lastly to remote Pluto, some four billion miles from the Sun. Perhaps in the future, man, who could carry his air and heat with him, might find reason to inhabit this dark and cold planet. Here he chiselled down and smoothed over a surface that had been violently tossed into jagged upheaval by the long-ago interaction of its molten mass and the sudden chill of space.

When this was done, York raised the Cometoid above Pluto and contemplated his work, here and in the rest of the Solar System. He felt a deep glow of pride. Then he swung his eyes out beyond Pluto, out toward the distant immensity of interstellar space. Into his eyes came a strange look—a yearning for the greater freedom of the macrovoid.

“Our work here is done,” he said to Vera.

“Yes,” said Vera. “Well done.” She too was gazing out at the unplumbed infinity in which they had lost themselves for a thousand years—for a magnificent second of eternity.

“We will go out there soon,” said York. “By the way,” he continued, “how long have we been at this work—in the time scale of Earth?”

“Fifty years,” answered Vera. They both laughed, then, at the meaningless words.

The giant, blunt Ship left Pluto and with ponderous grace hurtled toward the dim, distant Sun. York landed it at Ganymede for repairs. It was here that he heard the news of Mason Chard’s escape from imprisonment.

“I knew that would happen,” he said to the Councillors, shaking his head. “You should have executed him. Now you will have him on your hands again, stirring up trouble for the next thousand years, as he has for the past thousand. Well, that is your problem. If I knew any way of finding him, I’d go out after him. But of course, he’s far too clever to run across my path again.”

Escape had seemed impossible, at first, to Mason Chard. He had been isolated in an underground laboratory on Jupiter’s sixth moon, watched over day and night by armed guards. The exits above had been policed, and overhead a Space Patrol ship had kept close watch for possible rescue by confederates.

But Mason Chard had had no confederates. He had at times hired unscrupulous men in certain projects, but never had he entrusted them with his full plans or retained them. Immortal and conceited, he felt himself above human ties.

He did not know the meaning of the term friend. As a lone wolf he had pursued his way and so it would be to the end. For fifty years he had waited for his chance to escape. His scientific endeavour for his captors, on which promise he had won his life, amounted to little. His was not the keen scientific brain, but simply an average one. He was, in the last analysis, a common man with the gift of immortality. He had amused himself in the past thousand years in the way a coarse mind would—by playing god with the people whom he outlived century after century.

Chard’s escape was typical of his ruthlessness. He had surreptitiously put together bit by bit a miniature of the same weapon he had developed for his space ship. It charged itself with the energy of the cosmic rays and was able to release it in short, concentrated blasts of exploding neutrons, before which nothing human could stand.

Chard killed his personal guards without compunction. Donning a space suit, he made his way to the exit and burned down the three men there. When the members of the landed Space Patrol ship came on the run to investigate, the superior range of his weapon gave Chard the victory. Their ship was his means of escape from the sixth satellite.

Chard allowed some of the bitterness of his fifty years of incarceration to come out in one short, harsh laugh, as the prison satellite faded from his view. They would pay for the humiliation it had cost him, these mortals! When York had left the System and gone far out into space, then Chard would act.

The Immortal had not been out of contact with events in the Solar System for the years of his imprisonment. He was granted the use of a radio and televisor and had watched with avid interest York’s remoulding of the Solar System. Safe in his secret hideout in the deepest crater of Earth’s moon—which had been unmolested for the fifty years of his absence—Chard now watched the ceremonies attendant to York’s landing on Earth, his mission finished.

“Why has he done all this?” wondered Chard. “Is he planning to ingratiate himself with the people of the Empire, so that they will offer him a throne? Has he come back from remote space to wrest from me my dream of ten lifetimes?” Always theatrical in his thoughts, from a thousand-year inflation of ego, Chard’s eyes blazed as he concluded: “Is there to be a battle of the gods for this kingdom of mortals? If so, let him beware! He has bested me once, by a trick, but I’ve not tested my full powers!”

Despite this boast, however, Chard felt a strong relief as the televised image of York, standing on a tall marble platform before a sea of faces at Sol City, said:

“People of the Solar System! As the city-planner levels and prepares his city-site, so have I prepared the Solar System for the future Empire of mankind, and his subject races. But when the city-planner is done with his work, he does not seek or accept the rule of the city, he has made possible. That is for the city itself to do. The Supreme Council has offered to relinquish authority. You people have petitioned me for ruler. The crown has been offered me, but I must decline, even though it is the greatest crown in the history of man. We are going out into fathomless space again, my wife and I. It is our destiny!”

Chard’s eyes gleamed in satisfaction. That would make things simpler for him.

After the crowd’s low moan of disappointment had subsided, York spoke again, waving an arm toward the huge, shining bulk of the Cometoid nearby in its landing cradle.

“I leave you this legacy,” he said. “It is an instrument which may yet prove of further use to you. I have left full and complete instructions for its operation and functions in the control chamber. I only ask that you practice care when you make use of the Cometoid. It can be a mighty engine of world-destruction, if used wrongly, or carelessly. Its powers are like the sinews of Jovian-sized Titans. Rightly applied on the other hand, it can be of inestimable utility, in ways comparable to the things I have done with it in the past fifty years.”

Chard’s eyes had narrowed, looking at the Cometoid. The thoughts it conjured up were so intense that he failed to hear York’s short and final farewell speech. He was suddenly aware of the televisor scene broadening to show a tiny, globular ship leaping into the sky. A million awed faces watched it dwindle to a pinpoint glistening in the sunlight, and then vanish completely.

As they arrowed away from Earth, the immortal couple were silent with their thoughts.

“You have done a great work, Tony,” said Vera. She kissed him impulsively. “They will not forget it for all the ages to come.” A slight frown came to her face. “But, Tony, do you think it wise to leave the Cometoid in their hands? It is such a powerful thing. And they are like children at times.”

“Yes, it is wise,” said York softly. “It is the only way.”

Pluto toiled by their ports after a time. Behind lay the nine-world empire of man. Ahead lay the vast void.

5

MASON CHARD bided his time patiently. He would wait a full year for York to plunge far, far into the void. So far that no chance message could leak out to him and bring him back. For the success of his present plans, it was essential that the one being who could possibly disrupt them was totally out of the picture. Mason Chard waited a long year, a year that seemed longer to him than the previous hundred had been.

In that time, he perfected his plans with a finesse that assured triumph barring a remote unlucky chance. Delving into the vast worldly riches he had accumulated throughout his extended lifetime, he circulated among the scattered spaceports. Keeping his identity utterly secret, he hired a man here and there. He picked them carefully—bitter, disappointed souls whose careers had not been untainted, yet whose abilities as spacemen at one time had been, or still were, respected. Knowing human nature as he did, from a thousand years of observation, he could readily choose men whose cupidity was great and conscience small. Swearing each to utter secrecy, he had them congregate quietly and singly, as he met them, at his lunar lair.

Through the centuries, he had at other times banded together similar groups, at the other hidden quarters throughout the Solar System. Yet never before had he picked so carefully, nor so many, nor for so stupendous a reason.

At last he had over two thousand men under his banner. Finally, with the entire band before him in his lunar headquarters, Chard revealed his identity. The hardened, laconic men-of-fortune were not too surprised.

But when he laid bare his reason for having them together, they were completely dumfounded. It was something that made them gasp. Chard spoke at some length. Surprise gave way to interest. Interest to avarice when he began to list the rewards that would follow. When Chard saw that he had won the majority over, he requested those who wished to withdraw to step away from the main crowd.

Some twenty men gathered together at one side of the huge underground chamber, expecting safe departure in return for a promise of secrecy. Chard calmly pulled out the hand weapon in his belt. A livid beam of exploding neutrons sprang toward the unlucky men, sprayed back and forth. In a minute a score of blackened bodies sprawled grotesquely. When the last screams of agony had died away, Chard sheathed his gun and turned to the silent group who had watched this wanton carnage.

“That,” he said ominously, “is to prove I mean business.”

The large armed force guarding the giant drome that had been built around the Cometoid was not prepared for the sudden, vicious onslaught that came out of the night sky. A half hundred silent ships dropped in their midst and sprayed fiery death. While this was going on, half the ships landed next to the drome and deposited small figures which scurried into the huge structure, blasting their way through metal walls with powerful heat-bolts.

Mason Chard himself was in the lead, closely followed by a dozen men who had been part of the crew of the Cometoid years before. With their knowledge, they showed the way to enter the ship and swarm up its miles of corridors, by railcar. Each of the dozen who knew the intricacies of the ship led a separate party in a separate direction.

An elevator took Chard and one other to the master control room. Quickly the other explained. Chard, veteran of space travel for a thousand years, soon had a working conception of the incredible craft’s controls. York’s amazing genius had reduced them to comparatively few. Then the ship’s local communication system was switched on. In a short time, various sections of the ship began reporting that the men had grasped their duties and were ready to execute them.

Chard snapped on the exterior vision screen and the all-seeing electric eye beyond the drome. The guard had been utterly routed. Then he saw a unit of Earth’s air police swoop down from the sky, answering an alarm. He watched as the half hundred well-armed ships staved off the more numerous attackers. The battle went on for long minutes. When reinforcements for the police arrived, the end was inevitable. But so, Chard had expected. It had all been timed to the last minute.

When his ships outside had been cut down to half under the blasting guns of the police, Chard received the final report from the last, remote corner of the huge ship. He barked orders. A steady, low throb rumbled in the bowels of the great vessel, and its walls began to vibrate from the birth of great energies.

When the last ten of his outside ships broke under the police onslaught, Chard grasped a lever with a sweaty, but confident hand, pulled it over. The mighty ship leaped from the ground, grinding the drome to shreds. Chard left his remaining ships to the mercy of the air police. He grinned sardonically to think they had believed he would bother to save any left after the battle.

The Cometoid, a juggernaut of space, rose from Earth, manned by a thousand unprincipled scoundrels, captained by a ruthless, immortal demon. He might have been a demon from the way his evil eyes gleamed redly in triumph as he directed the captured ship toward the barren reaches beyond Jupiter. Here, where passing ships were rare, the Cometoid hovered for a month, while its new masters familiarized themselves with it.

Chard had not slipped up on anything. He had known from spies that the ship was well-stocked and fuelled. He had known that its creator’s instructions on the full operation of the monster craft were stored in the helm room.

Chard was astounded at the full scope of powers at his disposal. Sweeping atomic rays that could eat their way to the heart of a planet. Giant plants that could produce millions of cubic feet of violent gases, given suitable raw material. Powerful force beams that could grip mighty Jupiter himself and yank him from his age-old orbit. Energy-conversion machines which could store the dynamite of cosmic radiation and the slow, infinite power of gravitation.

Chard realized he had a truly godlike instrument in his hands, one that could make him master of ten universes, if he wished.

Chard’s stentorian all-wave radio voice that burst into the broadcast channels of the Solar System carried the most startling message in all history:

“Mason Chard, the Immortal, speaks! I speak to all the Solar System, and to all of its so-called ruling element. My ship, the Invincible—formerly the Cometoid—hovers over the moon of Earth. You all know the illimitable powers of this ship, but I invite the eyes of Earth to watch the center of the moon, the mountain range known to astronomers, as the Apennines. Watch it for the next hour!”

Millions of eyes on the night side of Earth watched and saw a small spark blaze in the center of the lunar disc. It grew and widened until it was a fiery incandescent diamond, spewing out a shower of sparkles that spattered over the entire moon’s face. Some terrific holocaust of supernal fire, comparable to the Sun’s blazing furnace, was creating a deep, molten puddle on the moon!

Then the sparkles ceased and the voice continued: “This same beam of atom-fire can quite readily be focused on any city or spot on Earth, to reduce it to molten matter that will not cool for a week. Or on any planet in the Solar System! The Invincible has moved from the moon to Earth. It is now hovering over Sol City. Nothing can save it, if I decide to destroy this citadel of ruling power!”

To himself, Chard added: “Not even the once timely York, who is now trillions of miles beyond reach.”

After a suitable pause, to allow the poison of fear to invade their minds, Chard continued:

“Does the Supreme Council of Earth, doomed at the flick of my finger if I so will it, have anything to say?”

Chard laughed triumphantly—

“No, but I have!”

Mason Chard choked in his laugh. Had his ears tricked him? Surely that had not been the voice of—

“Anton York speaking!” continued the quiet voice, inexorable as the stars. “Chard, you’ve just signed your death warrant. I knew you would try this sort of thing again. Unknown to you, the Council and I arranged, before I left Earth, to leave the Cometoid reasonably open to capture. You went for it, like a bee for its hive. You’ve been tricked, like any stupid fool. But it was necessary, for I could not leave the Solar System knowing you were at large, scheming. I’ve been hovering just beyond Pluto for the past year, waiting to trap you. It would be best if you would just quietly land the Cometoid and surrender yourself.”

Chard’s emotions racked his body. Dismayed to the roots of his being, his mind reeled on the verge of madness, A bitter acid seemed to eat its way to his brain and dissolve it. His gigantic ego wilted as overgrown weeds wilt under a hot Sun.

His hand touched cold metal. It was a lever that could release, in one stellar blast, the awful power of tons of matter. Could York’s little ship withstand it?

Chard sneaked a hand to his vision screen and twisted its knob rapidly. While the Solar System held its breath at this battle of wills between gods, he searched for York’s ship. Presently, he found it, a ridiculous pebble alongside the super-ship. Chard whispered orders into the local phone system, careful that his radio transmitter was off. Down below men fed giant powers into huge engines. Up above, a flaming-eyed man waited for the final moment. When it came, he jerked his levers with a desperate finality.

The frightful blast of energy that issued from one vent in the Cometoid’s broad side engulfed York’s ship and rammed it a mile backward. It should have blasted it to atom-debris. Chard turned a greenish white, for the little ship stopped, darted gracefully upward, and came back fully as fast as it had been flung away.

“Naturally, Chard, I was prepared for that,” came York’s unruffled voice. “Out in interstellar space, my screens have withstood forces far greater than those you’ve just released.—Want to try again? But I warn you”—here for the first time the voice became a little ugly—“you will die sooner that way!”

Chard screamed a series of orders to his crew. The men, unknowing of anything going on outside their respective cells, obeyed with trained alacrity, thinking, if they thought at all, that perhaps the Space Patrol had attacked and needed a lesson.

All hell burst-forth from the giant ship hovering over Earth. Some of its tremendous thunderbolts of destruction crashed down upon Earth’s surface and gouged it horribly, killing many. But the ship at which the hell borne fury was directed continued to gleam in the starlight. It was no longer buffeted by the flaming energies that pounded at its protective screen. York had fastened a force-beam to the center of the ship. Now he began to swing in an arc, swifter and swifter, until he was revolving about the great ship, held tight by the force-beam.

York knew the ship, knew that its blind spot was in this path. None of the world-destroying forces could touch him here. He was able to open his defensive screen, which did not allow offensive rays to be given out, and retaliate at last. First he dragged the great ship along until it was no longer over Sol City. Then a faintly shimmering violet beam, representing the accumulation of a vast amount of cosmic rays, bit viciously into the hull. As York revolved, it neatly sliced the great ship in two, like a knife cutting a sausage.

Mason Chard, as he sensed what had occurred, became a madman. But the sudden sensation of falling jerked his mind, as great fears can at such times. He died the many deaths he had escaped in his many lifetimes as the ship fell, and knew at last that his immortality was ended…

The two halves of the mighty ship crashed with a sound that could be heard miles away in Sol City. It was the signal for rejoicing.

As their ship sped away from the Solar System, fully stocked for the super trek in galactic space, Vera sighed.

“It has been so diverting, so interesting, Tony! I hate to leave. It was a cross-section of the great drama of intelligence pitting itself against the blind, immutable forces of the Universe, to carve out for itself a lasting dominion. For the lone, fearful ape-man, treading cautiously the threatening jungles of his origin to the bold daring man who placed foot on the last of nine far-flung worlds!”

York nodded. His eyes were misty as he scanned the infinite ahead.

“Yet it is all so petty, so small. There is a more supreme drama for us to witness out there. The sublime evolutions of suns and nebulae and the meta-galaxy itself. The riddle of eternity and infinity!”

Already their mental perspective had begun expanding to include the grandeur ahead. Earth and the Solar System receded to a sub-atomic mote in the incredible vastness of the void. A god and his mate were swallowed in its endless depths.