Anton York, Immortal

1

On Mount Olympus, as all know who have read Greek mythology, live the gods. Jove, Mercury, Apollo, Bacchus, Neptune—their names are legion.

But there are not many gods, in a riotous confusion. There are but three. Immortal, and wise with the passing of time, these Three Eternals have looked over Earth and its folk at times, sometimes amused, sometimes angered, most often unconcerned.

They looked out upon the world of the Forty-first Century and were again unconcerned, though its inhabitants were doomed, unknown to themselves.

“Ah, these mortals and their absurd little civilization!” said one. “It is about time they and all they represent go into limbo—at our hand.”

“It is dull waiting,” yawned the second. “I wish—I actually wish—they knew of it, and challenged us. I would even wish a champion to appear for them. Anton York, for instance, who was greatest of them all.”

“Anton York!” The third laughed. “He is far out in space. And if he were here, what could he do against us? Nothing!”

They smiled at one another, secure in that knowledge, and went back to their intricate game of four-dimensional chess, developed to help pass the slow crawl of time in their immortal lives…

Out in the vast, uncharted depths of interstellar space, a small globular ship plunged Earthward at a speed greater than light.

Within it, Anton York and his immortal mate grew hourly more eager. They were returning for a visit to the world of their birth, after a long absence. Like gods they had gone where they willed, viewing strange worlds, queer civilizations, taking deep pleasure in watching part of the majestic sweep of cosmic history.

Earth’s individual history had faded in their minds, overlaid by countless other events, but now nostalgia tingled through their veins. Near-gods they might be, but even gods must have a place called “home.”

“I can hardly wait to get back!” said Vera York, with all the enthusiasm of an American waiting to see the Statue of Liberty after a year in Europe. “Why have we stayed away so long Tony?”

“How long has it been?” Anton York asked, vaguely.

“A thousand years!” Vera had checked the time-charts, amazed herself.

“That long?” York shook his head. “Time does fly, as an old proverb says. Yet, what is time to us? We will live, Vera, till half the Universe has run down into cosmic rays. Millions of years, at the least!”

It was bare truth. They were thirty-five years old—in appearance. In their bloodstreams flowed an elixir of self-renewing enzymes that constantly rebuilt radiogens, the tiny batteries of cell life. The boundless energy of all-pervading cosmic rays fed these radiogens, supplying the undying fires of youth to their bodies. Old age and disease could not touch them. The finger of Death could only mark them by violent means, if Fate so willed.

Vera shivered slightly.

“Millions of years!” she echoed. “Sometimes it isn’t good to think of that.” Her eyes, a little haunted, sparkled suddenly. “The first thing I’m going to do, when we arrive on Earth, is to take a swim in some cool mountain lake, surrounded by green trees. There will be birds singing, and soft warm breezes whispering through the leaves, and white clouds sailing on high—” She choked a little “Oh, Tony, I’m just beginning to realize how much I miss those simple things!”

York nodded. In all their galactic roaming, there had been no world quite like Earth. No spot in the Universe quite so dear in their memories.

“We’ll undoubtedly find a great civilization there on Earth,” mused York, more practical-minded. “When we left, in the Thirty-first Century, mankind was already beginning to make the most of its nine-world empire. We’ll find humanity in its happiest and mightiest phase since the first dawn man built the first fire and found that Nature could be his ally. Mankind deserves it too, Vera, for all of its previous bickerings, maladjustments, and crimes against itself. Civilization went through its adolescence in the Twentieth Century, when we were born. Now it must be approaching maturity.”

His eyes shone as he went on.

“And, fully matured, mankind will one day inherit the stars! It will be destined to replace so many of the worn-out, decadent civilizations that fell by the wayside throughout the cosmos. But only when they are ready for it. As we have done in advance, the ships of Earthmen will seek far worlds and—”

“Tony, look! The bolide chart!”

Startled at his wife’s sharp interruption, York turned to look.

The bolide chart was a luminous screen whose milky surface showed any and all material bodies within range. Nothing larger than a grain of sand could escape the supersensitive instrument which recorded every tiniest ripple in the ubiquitous ether. With its train of mechanisms, the chart instantly recorded distance, speed, direction, size, shape, colour and electrical charge of any passing object within the relatively close radius of a billion miles.

It was one of the precautions York had taken, with his scientific genius, to avoid accidents in treacherous space, so that their immortality was further safeguarded.

He watched the little black dot streaking across the lighted screen. At their tremendous speed, the passing object would be gone in seconds.

“No danger of collision with it,” he said, integrating the data in his head. “It has a speed, relative to space, of a hundred thousand miles a second. Size, twice as large as our ship. Shape, quite uniform, elongated. Colour, silvery. Direction, toward Alpha Centauri, from about Sol’s position. Electrical charge—”

The dot slipped off the edge of the screen, beyond range. “It’s gone,” said Vera. “First bit of matter we’ve passed in empty space, in days. Data sounded like a space ship, but of course it was only a lonely, wandering meteor of space. Maybe the next record will be that of the planet Pluto, within the Solar System. We’re close now!”

York was strangely reflective.

“Yes, we’re close—within a few trillions of miles. And therefore, it could be… Vera, I think it was a space ship! I barely caught its electrical charge record; and it seemed to be inordinately high—like that of a power-plant of some sort. Meteors don’t have power-plants. If it was a space ship, does it mean that Earthmen have already achieved interstellar engines! And were they heading for Alpha Centauri, the nearest star to Sol? And what for?”

“We’ll find out when we arrive at Earth,” began Vera, but her immortal husband interrupted.

“We’ll find out now!”

York snapped on his radio, twirling the dials of his transmitter. Underneath the cabin floor a great generator hummed to life. A million kilowatts of electrical power, drawn from the eternal shower of cosmic rays, surged through the radio’s diamond-walled tubes.

The stentorian radio voice that burst from the antennae of his ship was borne by sufficient energy to be heard with the weakest of receptors within a light year. On Earth, that amount of power would have heated all metals within a mile ten degrees above their surroundings.

“Anton York calling the space ship heading for Alpha Centauri!”

After he had called over and over, without an answer, he frowned in perplexity and reached for the engine controls.

“I’ve got to find out about that ship,” he muttered. “The fact that it doesn’t answer is—ominous!”

With his inertia-suspension field on full power, York slowed his ship from its translight speed to zero in short hours, and shot back along the course of the mysterious ship. It was odd to find a ship out here in the depths between stars. He overhauled it in another few hours. They stared as it bulked huge against the backdrop of flaming stars.

It was unlighted, dark, but York’s detectors showed that its power-plant was warping space and accelerating constantly. He tried his radio again, with no result. Then he sent a rocket signal over its bow, and when that failed, gave a baffled grunt.

“One of two things,” he conjectured. “Its occupants are up to no good, or it’s a derelict. We’ll find out quick enough.” “Careful, Tony,” warned his wife.

In a space suit, presently, York cautiously maneuvered himself toward the strange ship with his reaction pistols. Vera was covering him with their guns. But no sign of hostility came from the accelerating ship; no sign of life at all.

Finding a hatch with the usual outside emergency lever, York entered the ship. A hand flash lighted the way as he went down a darkened companionway into the main cabin. He gasped as his cone of light revealed the figures of two men lying unconscious against the back wall, as though they had been thrown there violently.

Unconscious? York had only to notice their utter stillness to realize they were dead!

Back in the other ship, Vera listened as York’s voice came from his helmet radio, a half hour later.

“Listen, Vera! This is a first-class mystery. The crew of two are dead, from excess acceleration. The air is thin, barely breathable, very impure. Their food supplies are mouldy. Water, evaporated. It’s almost as though they had been holding out against terrific odds. Must have left Earth months and months ago, at their slow speed, less than light. Died trying to reach an impossible goal, light years away. Fools, they had no chance at all! Only a translight speed engine would do it. What drove them to this suicidal attempt at interstellar travel?”

His voice was half angered, half sorrowful.

“Daredevils there have always been,” returned Vera. “Some, in Earth’s history succeeded—Columbus, Byrd, Lindbergh.”

“Daredevils? Perhaps.” York was preoccupied. “Strange, though that these men planned so poorly. And the haggard expressions on their faces, frozen in death, are those of men driven by some tremendous fanaticism. I wish I knew—”

Vera heard the soft indrawing of his breath, as he seemed to stoop, and then his voice again, excited.

“Vera, go into the lab and prepare the following injections, as I give instructions. Adrenalin—”

He went on, rapidly naming several rare compounds among his supplies, and giving the percentage of their solution.

“I’m coming across with one body,” he said then. “Also have a bottle of oxygen ready. Hurry!”

“Tony, you mean—”

“Yes, reviving a dead man! One has been dead only an hour. He’s still warm. Rigor mortis hasn’t set in. But we’ll have to hurry!”

2

TWENTY minutes later, Vera was handing York a hypodermic as they bent over the body of a man dead for more than an hour. Earthly science would have given the case up as hopeless. But York, with a knowledge of life forces garnished in several lifetimes of research, battled to bring back the spark of sentience. After a series of injections into the spine and heart, he waited. Powerful compounds were at work.

A fine dew of sweat beaded York’s forehead. It was a slim chance, at the most.

Vera caught her breath suddenly.

A quiver ran over the corpse. A cheek muscle twitched. A low, hesitant thumping came into being in the quiet of the cabin. A beating heart! The ribs flexed suddenly, and the lungs gasped for breath.

York clapped a breathing cone over the man’s nose and sent a stream of hissing oxygen into his lungs. The body quivered all over now, and suddenly the eyes flicked open, staring around blankly.

York took away the breathing cone, looking at the resurrected man a little proudly. He had run far into Death’s territory and retrieved one of its victims!

“Can you speak?” York queried.

The vacant eyes paused on his for a moment, but only a broken gabble came from his lips.

Vera shuddered at the weird gibbering.

“Tony, you’ve brought back his body, but not his mind! It’s horrible!”

York shuddered himself.

“But I’ve got to find out about the ship and journey,” he insisted. “I’ll try telepathy.”

His brow furrowed as he concentrated on projecting a telepathic message. Within his left ear reposed a tiny instrument that could amplify brain waves enormously, his own or those of others. Sometimes he and Vera, for long periods of time, had communicated solely by telepathy, though it was mentally tiring.

York looked up at his wife after a moment, shaking his head.

“He doesn’t respond coherently. His thought waves are completely disorganized. All I could pick out was some mysterious reference to the Three something. The Three Eternals, it sounded like.”

Suddenly the gibbering of the resurrected man stopped. A look of sanity and awareness stole into his eyes.

“Who are you?” he asked quite clearly.

York had understood, though the man’s accent was queer, the product of a thousand years of language evolution since York had last been on Earth. He bent over the man eagerly.

“I’m Anton York,” he returned, projecting the mental thought also, lest his archaic accent were not understood.

“Anton York!” The man’s eyes widened, as a train of thought instantly followed that name.

The legendary Anton York! Two thousand years ago, in the Twentieth Century, he had been born, grown to the prime of life, and stayed there deathlessly; preserved by his father’s life elixir. He had set out to solve the secret of gravitation, in three lifetimes of research. He had succeeded, but in the meantime the secret of his father’s virus had been stolen.

York had fought and defeated fifty other Immortals before Earth was safe from their would-be overlordship.

Then he had gone out into space, he and his immortal wife, like gods.

They had returned. A thousand years before, in the Thirty-first Century, they had come back to find themselves again pitted against an Immortal who had survived York’s vengeance against dictatorship. Before this renegade scientist had been sent to the death he deserved, York had performed the greatest man-made feats in all history.

Since the Thirty-first Century, Venus had a moon, also Mercury, and Mars had a third. York, world-mover, had done that, he had also formed rings for Jupiter, given Mercury a period of rotation, and relieved the harshness of most of the planets by suitable manipulations of heat, water, and gigantic natural form. He had prepared the Solar System for mankind’s dominion.

Then he had gone out into space again, drawn by its grandiose lure. A thousand years again he had not been heard from.

Now he was here once more, and the eyes of the revived man showed sceptical disbelief. Many there were, among Earth’s people, who openly denied that any such man as Anton York had ever lived. It might well be, they said, an accumulative fable, involving the careers of dozens of mysterious scientists.

York caught all this from the man’s startled mind. He smiled slowly.

“I’m Anton York and I’m not a myth,” he said quietly. “I’ve revived you from death, to find out about this mad journey you are making. Why were you going to Alpha Centauri, without adequate preparations?”

A look of horror suddenly flooded the man’s eyes, as if just their recalling something.

“Civilization is doomed!” he said, his voice a dry croak. “There will be holocaust, destruction, all over Earth! The Three Eternals are doing it! We found out, tried to warn Earth. No one believed—we couldn’t prove it. We hoped to reach Alpha Centauri, find planets to migrate to, save the race. Three Eternals—vicious demons—destroy civilization—doom—”

The voice became incoherent again, as though the ominous news he told had again driven his mind under. York shook his shoulder.

“Tell me more!” he demanded: “Who are the Three Eternals? Where are they? Exactly what are they doing?”

“Three Eternals—gods of Mount Olympus—destroy all mankind—”

His voice trailed off into pure gibberish. A moment later his eyes glazed. His head dropped back and he fell into a second death, one from which even York’s super-science could never rescue him.

Anton York and his wife arose, sadly.

“Gods of Mount Olympus destroying mankind!” Vera murmured. “It must have been some hallucination of his broken mind.”

York turned a grave face.

“Maybe not though! Civilization on Earth might really be in danger. The faster we get there and find out—”

In the following twenty-four hours that it took them to reach the Solar System, even at ten light speeds, the immortal pair were plagued by unrestful anticipation. They almost dreaded arriving now, perhaps to find some holocaust in progress on Earth, or already finished. The ship they had encountered had left Earth months before. What had happened in that time?

Sol, a comparatively mediocre yellow star in the hosts of heaven, became a sun. They swept past the dark outer planets. It thrilled them to see the splendour of Saturn’s rings, unmatched in all the galaxy. Jupiter’s rings, mark of York’s last visit, thrilled them still more. Then past garnet Mars toward the green globe of Earth.

Familiar it all was to the two cosmic wanderers, but they hardly noticed. Earth occupied their thoughts—and the mysterious prophecy of doom on that planet. Yet nothing seemed amiss when they had dropped into the atmosphere layer.

A mile high, York halted his ship. Below them spread Sol City, the greatest metropolis of all time, with its fifty million inhabitants, the nerve center of the Solar System. It sparkled brightly in sunlight. Aircraft and space ships rose and descended from its many ports ceaselessly. It was bustling, vibrant, symbol of a busy, prosperous civilization.

There was nothing wrong here! York and Vera looked at each other in relief.

There was an interruption in the sanctorum of the Solarian Council chamber, in the capitol of Sol City. A dozen gray-bearded men, executive ruling body of the Solar System, looked around in annoyance. Who had dared disturb them?

Through the opening door, strode a tall man of erect bearing ignoring the protests of a clerk.

“We couldn’t stop him, sirs!” stammered the clerk. “Not even the guards. He has some strange power!” The clerk bolted, as though unnerved.

The intruder walked boldly up to the council table.

“I wanted to see you gentlemen,” he said calmly. “It’s urgent. When the guards resisted me, I used certain telepathic powers that I have.’

“Who are you?” demanded the president of the council, glaring.

“Anton York!”

The councillors smiled.

“Strange,” mused the president, “how parents with the family name. York have always baptized their sons Anton. It’s a great name to carry through life.”

“No, I’m the real Anton York. I came out of space a few hours ago.”

The councillors looked at him narrowly. They started a little at his smouldering eyes. Insane! The asylums were filled with those who imagined they were the almost mythical Anton York as in an earlier age so many had identified themselves with Napoleon.

“Yes, of course,” said the president gently, tapping his forehead for the benefit of his colleagues. “Now you just come with us—”

York could not blame them for not believing. But as they all converged on him, with the intent of hustling him out, he set his lips a little grimly.

“Sit down, all of you!” he commanded.

The men all stopped. Their faces were puzzled. Nothing tangible opposed them, yet they could not go on. Rulers of the Solar System, they turned back and sat down, impelled by a subtle force that could not be resisted.

“My mental commands must be obeyed, though I’m sorry I had to use them with you,” York said firmly. “You must listen to me, whether you want to or not. I am the Anton York. I have the lore of the stars, and of two thousand years of time. I have some questions to ask.”

Gasping, the councillors now realized it was the truth. The stranger’s words were spoken with an archaic accent that alone tied him with a previous age. It was Anton York in person—stunning thought—returning to Earth after a thousand-year sojourn in the space that was his virtual home. The visitation was totally unexpected. They stared in awe at this immortal who had almost godlike powers at his command.

“I see you are finally convinced,” resumed York. “Now tell me, does any danger threaten civilization?”

“Danger?” The president shook his head. “We don’t know what you mean!”

Relieved, but still mystified, York recounted briefly the episode in space.

The president shook his head sadly.

“So that was the ultimate fate of those two!” he murmured, and went on in explanation. “They were two flyers who told a wild story. They claimed they had been to Mount Olympus and had found the mythological gods of Greece, or at least three of them, called the Three Eternals. Furthermore, they were evil beings and planned destruction of civilisation, by causing some hare-brained geological upheaval.

“They were so insistent that we sent ships to Mount Olympus, but of course nothing was found there. They claimed to have been in a great marble building. Obviously insane, they were sent to an asylum. They escaped three months ago, and we heard no more of them till today, from you. Their mad flight to Alpha Centauri to search for worlds to migrate to, proves their insanity. They insisted the three evil gods would not rest till all mankind were annihilated!”

3

IT was a strange story the councillor in Sol City related, and later, when York recounted it to Vera, he was still thoughtful. “Hallucination, after all!” Vera said with a note of finality.

“But, Tony, you still look a little worried.”

“I am,” he admitted. “What do you say, Vera, that we take a trip around this Forty-first Century world, just to see that everything is all right?”

Vera nodded enthusiastically.

“Let’s! After a thousand years of absence, it will be intriguing to look over this old Earth of ours.”

In their space ship, upheld and motivated by the subtle warpings of gravitation, they soared over the world of mortal men.

Civilization had taken great strides forward, particularly in technology and industry. All the great cities of the Thirty-first Century had grown greater still. The somewhat makeshift space ship dromes of that earlier time in interplanetary expansion had been replaced by magnificent structures. With remarkable speed and efficiency, ships could be unloaded, restocked, refuelled and overhauled. Interplanetary trade flourished.

The population of this age had reached a new peak. No less than ten billion human beings scurried over Earth’s surface, and at least another billion were spread among the other planets.

The food problem had been solved by weather control, the manufacture of artificial staples from mineral matter, and the conversion of all desert lands into vast gardens. The great Sahara was no longer a desert, as York and his wife had known it. Irrigation through a tremendous canal from the Mediterranean had transformed it into one giant wheat field.

To supply his ever-growing demand for metals, mankind had finally tapped the vast ocean reservoir. Hundreds of electrical plants, on important coasts, powered by the eternal tides, extracted salt products. Ocean water poured in one end, to come out at the other almost chemically pure. Every element known, in varying amounts, then reposed in the caked residues in their plants. It was simply a matter of the application of Forty-first Century chemistry to separate these materials.

The wealth of products thus made available could not be measured in antiquated terms of dollars and cents. Of radium alone, least abundant of the ocean solutes, there was extracted a full ton each year. Gold, now a useful metal for its resistance to corrosion, coated everything metallic that people wore or used daily.

The high economic standard resulting from this material wealth had also allowed cultural expansion. Even the most backward of races and groups had access to literature, art, music and facilities for scientific research. Travel was within the means of most, and the preserved wilds of central South America, North America’s West, and parts of Asia and Africa were constantly frequented by tourists.

“And this is the civilization supposedly marked for destruction!” York mused. “Who would even contemplate such a thing? Who would have the power? I’m just about convinced, now, that those two poor devils were hopelessly insane.” He brightened. “Now we can take another trip around the world, and really enjoy it!”

It was while they were leisurely crossing the South Atlantic one day that York suddenly halted their slow passage and lowered the ship toward water. In the bright sunlight, the smoothly rolling waves made a fascinating picture. But York stared as though he had never seen such a sight before. Finally he took out a pair of binoculars and trained them below.

“That’s water, Tony!” laughed Vera. “Dihydrogen oxide—remember?”

“But you never saw water quite like that, before,” returned York seriously. “Look for yourself.”

After a moment, Vera looked up from the glasses. “Why, it looks as if countless little seeds are floating—”

“Those aren’t seeds, but bubbles!” interposed York. “MilIions upon millions of tiny bubbles coming up from the ocean floor. Let’s find out how far their range is.”

He was already at the controls, sending the ship parallel to the ocean level. A mile away he stopped, looked, nodded. “Still there!”

A mile further he went, again nodded. Next time he went five miles, then ten, a hundred, a thousand, and still found bubbles. His face grew solemn.

The next day he sent their ship scudding in straight lines north, and south, and east and west, and in six other radial directions over the South Atlantic. He stopped every hundred miles while Vera reported with the binoculars. They mapped the area infused with bubbles as roughly three thousand miles long and two thousand miles wide, set squarely between Central America and Africa. It included all the Sargasso Sea.

“What does it mean?” asked Vera when her patience at her husband’s moody silence had run out “Why should this vast area of ocean surface be filled with bubbles? Where do they come from?”

“They can only come from below, from—” York paused, snapped on his radio. “Anton York calling the central radio exchange,” he barked.

“Y-yes sir,” came a half-frightened voice a moment later, awed by the distinguished caller. “What is it, sir?”

“Connect me with your main oceanology station in the Atlantic, please.”

When the station at Cape Verde had answered and the director was called, York queried him.

“Yes,” came the reply, “we’ve noticed those bubbles all right. They’ve been coming up for the past ten years! Their origin is beyond our best guesses. We’ve sent diving bells down a mile, our limit, without any clue. The bubbles must come from below that.”

“One more question,” York said. “Have the coast lines of the Atlantic changed at all in those ten years?”

Suddenly a sharp note of worry sprang into the director’s voice.

“Yes! It’s a disturbing fact that the entire coast line of Western Europe is sinking at an unprecedented rate. Already, relatively, the water level has climbed a foot. Many coast lands will soon be threatened by inundation.

“The effect isn’t local, however. The coasts of America are lowering also. And in the Pacific, the same thing is happening. There, too, a vast area of bubbles exists. We scientists have taken up the problem seriously. We don’t know what this may lead to, if it keeps up, but we are making plans to dyke all sea coasts.”

“Thanks.” York snapped off the radio abruptly. He stared unseeingly out of a port.

“If this keeps up,” he murmured, “dykes won’t help a bit. Coasts sinking! Is it a natural event—or otherwise!”

Vera looked at him queerly.

“Of course it’s a natural event, Tony,” she commented. “The gods of Fate play strange tricks. Perhaps Jove, dissatisfied with the present civilization, is trying to destroy it with Neptune’s weapons. That’s just the way myths grow, Tony, trying to explain—”

She stopped and gasped as her husband suddenly whirled, snapped his fingers, and dived for the pilot board as though their lives depended on it. “Tony, have you gone crazy?”

“No, but I could kick myself!”

York sent the ship scuttling at the highest rate of speed safe in an atmosphere. His direction was east.

“I bow again to feminine intuition,” he resumed. “We’re going to Mount Olympus, Vera, to visit the gods! There’s just, a chance that those two lost souls were not mad. They did predict a geological upheaval. And then that man’s dying words—”

“About the Three Eternals, Mount Olympus? Vera cried.

“Then Tony, maybe there’s danger!”

But York did not answer. His face was set with a glowing anticipation as he drove for what he hoped would be the solution to a mystery as great as any he had ever encountered.

The globular ship raced over the southern coasts of Europe, over the Mediterranean, past what had, formerly been Spain, France, Italy and Albania. It turned south a little into the mountainous interior of Greece. Finally the misty summit of Mount Olympus loomed ahead.

“Do you really expect to find something here?” asked Vera as they approached. “After all, it’s just a Greek myth, dating from five thousand years ago, about Jove and the other gods.”

York smiled peculiarly.

“Vera, we are myths too, a few centuries after each visit to Earth!”

Presently they were floating over the peak of Mount Olympus. They gazed down searchingly. As with other mountain tops, it was a scene of jagged rocks, scraggly growths, and dark hollows here and there tufted with snow.

“I hardly know what to look for, but nothing is there out of the ordinary,” said Vera, almost in relief. “Besides, the president of the council said they had searched and found nothing.”

“Look!” York pointed. “That large hollow to the left. Notice the shimmer over it?” He trained his periscope screen. “Can’t clarify it. It looks almost as though—something is behind that shimmering mist!”

Vera grasped his arm. “Please, Tony, be careful!”

He lowered the ship cautiously until it was no more than a hundred yards over the strange, quiescent mist that did not stir in the wind. Still nothing could be distinguished beyond it save vague shadows and lights. Switching on his electroprotective screen, out of caution, York descended slowly till he had almost touched the layer of concealment.

A few more feet the ship sank then stopped abruptly.

York and Vera looked at each other. No tangible barrier opposed them; only the queer, glittering, impenetrable mist. Experimentally, York put more power into his engine. His ship pressed against the weird obstruction until the hull creaked, but not one more inch was gained.

York eased up, muttering.

Then, with a suddenness that made them start, a powerful telepathic voice beat into their brains.

“Who is it seeks the presence of the Eternal Three?”

Glancing significantly at Vera, York answered, by the telepathy he had developed and used so many times before in space.

“Anton York, the Immortal!”

“Descend!”

Coincident with the word, the shimmering mist beneath their ship’s keel vanished. Below was revealed the full extent of the hollow, desolate save for a huge marble building in its center. It was of ancient Grecian style, and the stone was stained with great age.

“Those two men were here!” gasped Vera. “They told the truth. Tony, do you suppose everything else they said—” York shook his head noncommittally.

4

ANTON YORK landed the ship before the edifice, leaving his electro-screen on, when the telepathic voice invited him to step into the building, York politely declined. Instead he snapped on his televisor requesting them to do the same, if they had such an instrument.

A moment later it proved they had and his screen became spangled with whirling lights that finally crystalized into the image of an ornately furnished room in which sat three men.

York and Vera looked at them closely.

Their rich, velvety togas were of a strange, unknown style. Their features, though strictly human, were a strange blend of Oriental and Nordic qualities. In age, they all seemed at the prime of life. But most of all it was noticeable that their eyes glowed with that same strange light that was in York’s and Vera’s—the sign of immortality!

“We have been expecting you, Anton York,” said one of the three, still using the universal language of telepathy. “Ever since your arrival in the Solar System, we knew you would hear of us. How did it happen?”

York told of meeting the derelict ship, and the resurrected man’s words.

“He said you had threatened destruction of civilization!” he concluded challengingly.

The spokesman smiled frostily.

“Yes, I believe we did tell them the story. Briefly, some months ago, they were flying over Mount Olympus in an airplane. Its motors failed and they smashed up on our roof of protective mist. As a whim, we nursed their lives. As a further whim, we told him the story you heard. We wanted to see if it would drive them mad. But we lost interest in them quickly, sent them away. We have lived a long, long time. Nothing in the world of mortals interests us anymore.”

Something of rage arose in York at the calm, cold way the man spoke of other humans.

“You had no right to toy with two human lives!” he cried hotly.

The Eternal shrugged.

“We have lived a long, long time,” he repeated: “Conceptions of right and wrong melt into one another through the centuries.”

York was about to reply angrily again when Vera touched his arm.

“Don’t argue with them, Tony—no use!” she whispered rapidly, consciously willing her broadcast thoughts blank. “Find out all you can about them instead.”

York pressed her hand, spoke to the trio of cold-faced men.

“Just how long have you lived?”

Again the icy, disdainful smiles from all three of them.

“You have lived how long, Anton York—some two thousand years since you were inoculated with the radiogen-renewing serum? We, too, were given such an elixir of youth to keep up eternally at our prime, but that was—twenty thousand years ago!”

The incredible statement left both York and Vera, numb for a moment. These three had lived for almost an astronomical age!

“It can’t be true!” stammered Vera. “It can’t.”

“It is true, however,” assured the Eternals. “For twenty thousand years we three have lived and breathed: You wonder how we could have filled in our time. Most of it has been spent in space,—as you two have spent your time. We have roamed endless distances, seen uncounted other worlds of other suns.

“However, at first it intrigued us to do certain things in the Solar System. We laughed to ourselves, Anton York, when we saw you moving asteroids and giving Jupiter rings. For you were simply carrying on what we had dropped in boredom. We were the ones who made Saturn’s rings! And we had blown up the planet revolving between Mars and Jupiter, testing our powers, to make the present day asteroids.

“Venus originally had a moon which we moved to a new orbit. It is called Mercury now. Mercury, in mythology, is the wandering god—or the wandering planet. We named all the planets.

“But these things lost their novelty after a time. We did no more. Wandering through the void and observing other worlds and civilizations occupied much more of our time. That eventually palled also. Immortality has its penalty of ennui, as you will notice, too, when you have lived a little longer and seen the ashes of futility behind the fires of life. The past five thousand years we have stayed on Earth, finding its pageantry at least interesting as anything else in the Universe. We have been in mankind’s history, even as you have been. We, not the primitive Egyptians, built the great Cheops Pyramid, though they copied it with theirs. It is our marker to show the slow passing of time in a swifter scale. Each century the light of a fixed star moves a little along the scale at the back of a passageway. ‘Fixed’ star! Even the stars have moved, in our time!

“We caused the Noachin Flood, inadvertently, when we split once solid Gibraltar, filling the Mediterranean basin. For a time, during the great Grecian Era, we mingled somewhat with mortals, giving rise to their famous mythology, Our science deeds and seeming miracles, in various roles, impressed them as the doings of a race of gods.

“And other things we have done. But these things, too, have ceased to interest us. In the past three thousand years we have done little but sigh and wonder if perhaps suicide would not be preferable to the slow poison of ennui. Even your rise two thousand years ago, Anton York, and your exploits of a thousand years ago, failed to intrigue us more than casually. We have utterly lost that strange but important human ability to care about anything!”

Suddenly York and Vera saw in their eyes the haunting lassitude of spirit that obsessed them. They were three incredibly old men—despite their young bodies—who had tasted life to the full and could no longer wring out one drop of stimulation. Mentally, they had already died.

Anton York drew a long breath. At times he, too, even in his comparatively short two thousand years of existence, had wondered how long it would be before there would be nothing new to him—nothing further to lure his interest. Then he shook off the dull spell. One must not think of such things too much.

“From what land do you come, preceding recorded human history? He asked, anticipating the answer.

“Atlantis,” was the reply from the Three Eternals. “At that time Atlantis in the Atlantic Ocean and Lemuria in the Pacific were two great continents. Their civilizations touched heights never since exceeded. But they warred incessantly, and it was to lead to their mutual destruction.

“We three had been great scientists of that time. We discovered the secret of immortality, partook of it. Also conquering gravity, as did you, we went out into space for a time. When we came back, Atlantis and Mu lay under the oceans, and new lands had risen! Atlantis, in trying to undermine Mu with giant atomic-power machines, touched off a fault in Earth’s crust, leading to world-wide holocaust.

“Thus, we three found ourselves orphaned from the world we had known. Our magnificent cities and glorious monuments lay under the ocean ooze. Strangely, that is the only thing that can now stir our hearts—thought of that ancient glory. A nostalgia that has survived twenty thousand years—and has grown stronger!”

York’s nerves became tense.

“Yes?” he prompted.

A slight glow came into their faces as their spokesman went on. His psychic voice vibrated strongly.

“Thus we have decided to bring up our homeland of Atlantis, from its briny grave. Resurrect it, rehabilitate it, restore some semblance of its former grandeur. A long, tedious task, perhaps, but one we will truly enjoy.” A fanatic light came into his eyes. “Sentimentality is the one human emotion we have not lost. We cherish a memory. It can be moulded into reality. Atlantis must rise again!”

York and his wife looked at one another. That accounted for the bubbles over the South Atlantic. The ocean floor ooze, disturbed after long ages of quiescence, was giving up its occluded gases.

“How is it being done?” queried York, feigning deep curiosity, and nothing more.

“It is simple. We made a long study of Earth’s crust, through seismological data. Any major geologic disturbance is linked to others. They form a chain. By setting them off in the proper order, any desired end result can be obtained. Exploding a certain small island in the Atlantic, we started waves of concussion in the thin, unstable crust. The slow, irresistible forces existing in the plasma layer beneath the crust were awakened. They will culminate by pushing the floor of the Atlantic and. Pacific up above water level.

“This was started ten years ago. Perhaps in another century or so, the process be completed. We are in no hurry. Then we will begin our great reconstruction of Atlantean glory!”

“Can the process be stopped?” asked York, wondering if they would answer.

It may have been a mocking light that shone from their eyes as the reply came.

“Yes, by a suitable counter wave in the crust, to neutralize the first.”

York snapped himself alert. He had heard all he wanted to hear. His telepathic radiations almost crackled as he said:

“And in the meantime, Earth’s billions of people will go to their doom!”

“That is unfortunate.” The Eternal shrugged. “However, some few will be chosen and saved to repopulate the new Atlantis. The rest must die simply because they will have no place in our new world. All the old lands will not sink, but for a time, as the process approaches its climax, there will be violent earthquakes and storms that will decimate most of them.”

“It’s the most cold-blooded scheme ever thought of by man!” raged York, his self-control breaking. “You must not go on with it!”

The Three Eternals in the visi-screen looked annoyed, then faintly amused.

“Who will stop us? You?”

“Yes!” returned York, grimly. “I give you fair warning. I have a weapon whose activity you have probably seen wielded. In ten seconds, if you do not agree to reverse your geological process, I’ll use it!”

“You are brave, Anton York, but foolishly so,” the answer came back imperturbably. “We have illimitable power. We three.”

“One!” interposed York, in answer.

With his protective screen on full power, York trained his weapon’s snout at the marble building and counted tensely. The Eternal triumvirate sat there disdainfully, as though un—aware of danger. One of them idly reached over to a panel and flipped a small switch. York’s clammy finger tightened at the count of nine, squeezed at ten.

The ravening burst of energy that sprang from his gun expended itself harmlessly against an invisible screen surrounding the marble temple. Beyond it, rocks and trees shrivelled into a soot-black mist that drifted upward like vagrant smoke. The weapon’s force was that of subgamma and ultra-sound waves, able to shatter molecules to black shreds.

York desperately rammed on full power, never before used, and left it for a full minute. The opposing screen did not weaken in the slightest. York gasped. Even his own screen, he knew, would not have withstood that hell fury for that long. The Three Eternals, in the visi-screen, smiled scoffingly.

Sensing his own danger, York leaped for the controls. But at the same moment, some paralyzing force gripped his body, held him rigid. One of the Eternals was manipulating controls on his panel.

“Rash one!” came the telepathic taunt. “We have more command of natural forces that you could dream of! We are masters of twenty thousand years of science. Anton York, you have declared war on us. We should annihilate you on the spot, as we could easily do. But it would be beneath our dignity to destroy that which cannot harm us. Therefore, go with your life. But never again test our patience and strength!”.

Anton York’s ship eased off the ground, in the grip of some intangible force. Suddenly it was flung upward, as though by a Titan’s hand. York and Vera were thrown into a heap in a corner of their cabin, but the paralysis left them. York grasped a hand rail, half dragged himself toward the pilot board and quickly righted the ship. Then he helped Vera to her feet.

York said nothing but his face burned with humiliation. They had been cast away as though they had been vermin. He looked down as the ship floated at even keel. The shimmering mist lay over the hollow, hiding its three eternal inhabitant. Hiding a menace supreme!

York knew it was no use to continue aggression openly. His gamma-sonic weapon—never before unsuccessful—had failed to pierce the defence of the Three Immortals. Even the furies of atomic power were a lesser force. The Three were impregnable. If York was a god in his powers, they were super-gods.

“What can we do against them?” wailed Vera. “Against twenty thousand years of science?”

York sent his ship away from Mount Olympus. He did not attempt to answer a question that had no immediate answer. But a bleak look had come into his eyes—the reflection of a super-mind wrestling with a super-problem.

5

DURING the next year, the crews and passengers of various ocean liners and huge transoceanic aircraft sighted York’s globular ship, here and there. At times it hovered motionlessly over water, at other times over islands. Several times it was seen at the docks of Sol City, picking up certain apparatus that the council had had manufactured at York’s orders. No one knew, not even the councillors, what the instruments were for.

Inside the ship, York laboured as only a man with a set idea can work. The instruments were ultra-divining rods. By an intricate sonic principle, they were able to make clear the structure of inner Earth, as the X-ray reveals a skeleton. York could send down a sound wave that would reflect, hours later, from the hot core of Earth.

York finally accumulated a sheaf, of papers scrawled with condensed mathematical equations and notes. Salted throughout the manuscript were dynamical formulae involving mountain-sized masses of land, water and air, Trembling, he fingered the pages.

“No time to make them look pretty,” he murmured to Vera. “But I have it almost completely worked out. With my seismological observations of the past year to go by, the Earth as a whole has been moved into the laboratory. I have dealt with this planet as though it were a compound in a test tube, or a slide under a microscope. With these Earth dynamics, I can predict the result of any major geological phenomenon, just as the Three Eternals worked it out. Look!”

He spread out a large flat map of the world and put his pencil tip on a spot in the Atlantic Ocean.

“An island existed here ten years ago. The Three Eternals knew it to be the key to their aim. They exploded it. The tremendous ground waves this started touched off certain strains in Earth’s crust. Atlantis and Mu, long buried, began rising. The other lands are slowly sinking. But I can stop it!”

York’s pencil moved to the Pacific, circling a dozen tiny atolls among the Polynesian group.

“The key lies somewhere here,” he explained. “The antidote to their poison. The explosion of one of these islands will send out ground waves setting off related, but opposing strains. There will be a cancellation of effects. In a decade or less, Earth will quiet down with no more than a few coasts undermined. Atlantis and Mu will not rise!”

“All humanity, now and in the future, will owe you its life!” cried Vera, happy in his success. Suddenly a deep horror flooded her eyes. “But the Three Eternals will destroy you—us—for it, Tony! What is to prevent them? Can they destroy us, Tony, or—”

To Vera it was a strange thought that anyone or anything could destroy them. For had they not lived two thousand years?

York nodded sombrely. “They can!” He clamped his teeth together firmly. “But first we’ll finish our job, and then think of that. I still have to determine exactly which island to demolish.”

A few hours later their ship hovered over Southern Pacific waters. Only a few uninhabited islands speckled the vast, reaches of ocean. York carried on his sub-surface probings, but finally gave a baffled grunt.

“I’ve narrowed the field down to three of these islands,” he mused, “but I can’t seem to go any further with the data, from here. I have to be dead sure I explode the right island. If I hit the wrong one, the result might be just as catastrophic as what the Three Eternals started.”

He thought a moment. “Vera, there’s only one way. These measurements involve the strains within Earth’s crust. I must map the strains at first hand. I must go down there, in person. Down miles and miles below the ocean, to where the greater ocean of subsea plasma fumes.” His brow wrinkled thoughtfully, as the mind behind already began shaping a machine unknown to Earthly science: “No mines or man-made submarines go down that far, of course. I’ll have an Earth-boring ship made—a mechanical mole.”

Vera was quick to sense something, in her husband’s words. “You’re using too many ‘I’s, Tony. You’re not going down without me!”

“It’s liable to be very dangerous, Vera. World-shattering forces lie down there.” Seeing the set of her, jaw, he tried a humorous tack. “Why don’t you visit your aunt for a few weeks?”

But instead of smiling, her eyes became a little sad. She had no aunt, or relatives at all from that long-gone day of their birth. Neither had York.

“We even have no descendants,” she murmured, for that had been the price of immortality. “No one on this Earth we can remotely call kin. Tony, don’t you see? If I stayed up here and you, going below, never came back, I’d be more lonely than the loneliest meteor in space!”

Within another year, the precision factories of the Forty-first Century industry had turned out the parts from York’s blueprints. Time, of which they had a plethora, meant nothing to the eternal pair as they superintended the construction.

The mechanical mole took shape as a segmented cylinder of fused, transparent diamond—York’s secret—buttressed with steel of colossal strength. Its front end held the fan-wise jets of York’s gamma-sonic force, for converting solid matter to impalpable dust. The technicians who assembled the machine understood little of what they made, further than that it could possibly plow through anything short of neutronium.

The completed vehicle was shipped to one of the Polynesian Islands, via barge dragged by the world’s largest freight ship, and here York dismissed all attendants. Alone with Vera, he drew a breath.

“I’ve been wondering all this time if the Three Eternals would find out and interfere in some way,” he confided, “despite the secrecy with which it was done.”

Vera shuddered, as she always did at mention of the Three. “They’re like three vultures, waiting, waiting—”

York waved a hand. “Take a last look at the Sun, dear. We may not see it again for weeks!”

Then he led the way into the craft, sealing its pneumatic hatch. An hour later, after carefully checking the supplies of tanked air, food, water, and his many instruments, he started the motor.

The titanic energies of gravity warped into his coils, spraying disintegrative forces from the under nose jets, The nose of the ship dived into the pit formed and like a great worm, it bored downward, roaring powerfully. In seconds, the segmented tail of the ship had vanished beneath the surface. When it had penetrated through top soil and loose ground, it struck bed-rock and there the rate of boring settled to an average of eight hundred feet an hour.

Swirls of black soot shot back from the rock-eating noses so that they saw little of their course into Earth’s skin. It was a bumpy ride, and vibration shook them so violently that they clamped their teeth tight to keep them from rattling like castanets. Each hour York stopped the ship and let their aching bodies recuperate somewhat.

Down and down the mechanical mole drilled, meeting no material obstacle that its blasting rays could not whiff to unresistant dust. Once their rate slowed by half, as they went through a hard-grained granitic stratum, packed densely by the crushing weight overhead.

York did not fear collapse of the tunnel about them. The braced diamond-walls of the ship would have survived the weight of Mount Everest, balanced on its tip, on each square inch of surface.

A week later, York stopped the ship when his gravity instruments read twenty-five miles below Earth’s sea level. For three days he and Vera rested their bruised bodies and jangled nerves.

“Well,” said York then, “here we are, twenty-five miles down, deeper than man has ever been before, within the Earth he lives upon, like”—he thought of an appropriate metaphor—“like bacteria swarming about a marble.”

With Vera’s skilled help, York made tests of temperature, pressure, density of the solid rock about them, with instruments that extended out of walled pockets in the hull. Most important of all, he measured the strain imposed by the mighty masses of rock above, and the pressing hot core of Earth below. The figures represented leashed forces whose unbinding would have buckled Earth’s crust like a toasted apple skin.

“They are ordinarily in balance, these brute forces,” said York. “The Three Eternals have unsettled them to the extent of raising two continents and lowering the rest. We have to restore the balance.”

A week later, he again started the motor and drilled downward.

“My answer doesn’t lie here,” he decided. “We’ll have to penetrate almost fifty miles down, right through the crust to the barysphere. It is semi-fluid and hot. We’ll have to be very careful.”

Vera knew without saying that, they were risking their lives. But so they had many times before, out in space. They were calm in the thought that if they went, they would go together. York was glad now that Vera had insisted on coming along.

At a depth under Earth of forty-five miles, York again halted. Strangely, the temperature was not much greater here than it had been at twenty-five miles. In fact, not much more than man’s deepest mines.

“Earth’s skin, is a good conductor of heat,” York explained for his own satisfaction. “And brings most of it directly to the surface, which accounts for volcanic action, hot springs, and the non-freezing of the sunless ocean bottoms.”

Slowly he dictated a mass of measurement data to Vera, using his instruments. Hourly, he became more excited. Finally, a day later, he was jubilant.

“I have it now, Vera!” he cried. “The plasma stresses have a node, a point of concentration, right here! It runs as a straight line up to the island next to the one we bored down into. When we destroy that island, counter waves in the crust will cancel those started by the Three Eternals and then—”

“Tony!” It was a sharp cry from Vera. “Tony, I feel strange! I feel as though someone were near us—telepathy—”

“Nonsense!” snapped York, slightly annoyed. “Who could be forty-five miles under the surface?” He started. “Except the Three—”

“Eternal Three!” came the distinct telepathic message, mockingly.

And at that moment, one entire side of the tunnel in which their ship rested dissolved away. A craft lay revealed beyond. It was segmented, like theirs, but larger and with a hull of some clear, greenish material through which were plainly visible the three leadenly-calm, almost unhuman features of the three dwellers of Mount Olympus!

6

YORK felt the alarmed pumping of Vera’s heart, her body pressed against his, and his own pulse raced. Fool that he hadn’t thought of bringing down a weapon with him! But even that, he reflected with sagging spirit, would not have helped, against the impregnable Three.

“Anton York,” came the telepathic voice, heavy with threat from the other Earth-boring ship, “you have signed your own death warrant. We have been picking up your conscious thoughts, with certain long-range psychic instruments, ever since you left us, at Mount Olympus. We detected that you were trying to upset our plans. We did not think you would succeed in finding the necessary data. But when you dived underneath the Earth, we followed in the mechanical mole ship we used for our measurements twelve years ago. As a scientist you are seemingly a little more adept than we thought.”

The Eternals paused as though to give the ironic compliment full play.

“So adept that we must now destroy you. There cannot be two masters of Earth!”

“I do not wish to master Earth!” remonstrated York. “Only save it!” He tried pleading. “Think once, what you are doing—murdering ten billion people! Even if you live to the end of eternity, your conscience could never be free of that stigma!”

“You are an idealist, Anton York,” responded the implacable trio. “We are realists. The present race and civilization do not deserve continuance. They are cluttered with traditions, superstitions, periodic setbacks of their own devising. Scarcely three centuries ago, there was again a worldwide depression, accompanied by needless famine, rioting and maladjustment-of affairs. Civilization fell back as it has so many times.”

“But it climbs steadily!” reminded York.

“When we have raised Atlantis and Mu,” the voice went on, ignoring his remark, “we will people them with a new race, set in a super-civilization, like a precious stone glittering in a setting of purest gold.”

“And in ten years there will be bickering, struggle for power, and anarchy,” predicted York quickly. “You are the idealists, so divorced from your former life that you do not realize the fundamental rule of life—experience! Your new civilization, started at the topmost stage, would collapse into the hollow sands of its non-existent foundations.”

For the first time, a trace of anger came from the Eternals, as though their pride had been pricked by this calm, searching analysis.

“Cease fool! You are to die. But one thing we wish to learn from you before you go—the secret of your gamma-sonic weapon. Though it did not destroy us, and though we have equal forces, we wish to add it to our knowledge!”

York’s silence was stinging.

“Very well,” resumed the Eternals’ spokesman. “We will get it anyway. In advance, knowing your nature, we’ve planned how. You will be left to die, in this cavern, without your ship. Without a single implement with which to dig—, or commit suicide. You will go insane, before death by asphyxiation. In that condition, your mind will automatically throw off all its thoughts, willed and unwilled. Back in our laboratory at Mount Olympus, an instrument is set to pick up the mental record, and at our leisure we will extract from it the gamma-sonic data. Thus you will die and serve us at the same time.”

There was no fiendish note in the quiet exposition of their hideous plan. It was a cold, passionless scheme, in which human feeling meant nothing. York doubted that they knew the meaning of love, anger, hate, mercy, or any emotion. Twenty thousand years of living had drained them dry of all but crystallized intellect.

A few minutes later, York and Vera stood alone in the cavern that had been formed by the two mechanical moles. Their ship was gone, disintegrated before their eyes by a cold beam which caused matter to fall into rotting grains. York and Vera had previously been carried out of the ship, under the Eternals’ paralysis ray. Then the Three had released one tank of oxygen into the space, lest they die too soon. Finally, their ship had left, spraying a heat ray behind it that fused its own trail, as the Eternals had fused off the tunnel made by York’s ship.

“This is our end, Tony!” whispered Vera, huddling close to him. “Dying like trapped rats, forty-five miles under Earth’s surface, in a sealed pocket of rock. But we’ll fool them, Tony, in one thing. We won’t go insane. We’ll talk over our life—two thousand years of it. It’s been glorious. We’ll die in peace!”

York kissed her tenderly for her bravery and they talked. They renewed stirring memories of their sojourn in space, and of their last two visitations to Earth. But within an hour their voices faltered and their nerves shrieked.

They could see each other by weird radio-active glow from the surrounding rock. It was more hellish than darkness would have been. Aching silence greeted every pause in their speech. The excessive warmth began to torture their bodies, unrelieved by a breath of current in the confined air.

They were buried alive! That corrosive thought ate into their enforced resignation.

Vera began to babble aimlessly, her eyes wild. York fought back the darkening cloud of madness. Was there no escape? They had no slightest tool, implement, or material object other than their clothing and their bodies.

No escape! They had not even a spoon with which to start digging, useless as that would have been with forty-five miles of stone to penetrate. York had the inane thought for a moment that they had fingernails, something to scratch with—madness!

“One thing I have,” he remembered, without the slightest surge of hope. “The brain-wave instrument within my left ear, with which I commanded the councillors, The Three Eternals missed it, or disdained it. But what good is it? I can command minds with it, but stone is mindless.”

And soon they, too, would be as mindless as their prisoning walls.

“I can hear your thoughts,” Vera mumbled, laughing hysterically. “You won’t give up, Tony, but how foolish. You’re trying to think a way out—think a way out—think a way out—”

Her voice began to repeat like a cracked phonograph record, as her mind teetered.

“Think a way out!” echoed York, his mind clicking. Suddenly he grabbed Vera, shaking her violently. “Vera, maybe that’s it! My brain-wave concentrator projects telekinetic forces. With it, I made other minds cause their bodies to act, move. Perhaps, without the relay minds between, I can use telekinesis to make movement—even of stone!”

“Move stone?” Vera said sepulchrally, in a moment of calm. “But that would take energy, much more than to cause mobile human machines to move, as with the councillors. Energy, lots of it, to move tons of stone over which are tons more—” Her voice broke. “Tony, why do we even think of it? False hopes are just added torture.”

“Energy,” mumbled York defeatedly. “More energy than our bodies contain, if we could use even that.”

He ground the thought of telekinesis out of his mind and joined in Vera’s resignation.

“Die in peace—we must,” Vera murmured, straining against another attack of hysteria.

“It’s a little ironic, isn’t it?” mused York. “Two thousand years of science at my fingertips, gathered in thirty lifetimes of thought and research. And yet, without tools, I’m as helpless as any single-lived man would be, in this same dilemma. A thousand years ago, in a great ship, I moved planets. Today, stripped of implements, I’m no better than a worm.”

Something probed into his mind. He had felt it many times before in the past years, without realising it had been—, the Three Eternals, spying out his thoughts.

“Still sane?” came the cold, blunt psychic voice of one of the Eternals, rather faintly. “You have remarkable fortitude, Anton York. But you will succumb, even as we might, be it admitted. We are halfway to the surface. When we reach it, you will be babbling, spilling your mind into our recorders.” The voice clicked off.

Vera shrieked. She had heard too.

“Don’t, Vera!” soothed York. “Don’t you see? They did that to drive us to insanity more quickly. Let’s remember our resolve—to die in peace.’

“If we only could!” she moaned. “But it’s such torture. And my skin, itching—that radioactive emanation—”

York felt it too, a bothersome tingling on his skin, to add to their discomfort. It was caused by radium in the rock.

York leaped up.

“Radium—energy!” he cried. “Energy for the telekinesis! There it is, all around us! Vera, I’m going to try it. My brain wave should be able to utilize this energy as well as that of a human body.”

He offered up a prayer to all the gods in the Universe that he was right.

Vera, sobered by hope, watched him. York stood, facing one wall, his face drawn into a pucker of fierce concentration. The same intangible force with which he had impelled the councillors to sit down and listen to him now, sprang against the rock. York had never fully tested the mental ray’s possibilities. Could he command matter to fall away before him?

New beads of sweat joined those from the heat, on his brow. Nothing visible, nothing of which he even knew the formula, hurtled against adamant rock. Radioactive energy lay pulsing there. Could he tap it, mould it to his use, with nothing more than pure mentality?

Aching minutes passed, then slowly the rock began to slough away into a depression. There was a rustle, as of billions of crystals rubbing against one another, changing position.

Matter obediently aligned itself in a circular wall forming a tunnel.

York walked forward, step by step, like a god before whom nothing could stand. Foot by foot, the tunnel shaped itself.

“Follow me!” York said to Vera, in clipped phrases, without turning his head. “It’s working—mind over matter—telekinesis, energized by radium.”

York fashioned his mind-wrought tunnel on the steepest upgrade they could climb. It was no use to bore to the ship’s tunnel, as that rose almost perpendicularly. He would have to push on at a slant, through perhaps a hundred miles of rock, before reaching the Sun. A problem arose—that of thinning air, as the tunnel extended. York stopped to command oxygen to spring out of the rock. It did, in gusty abundance.

“Chemical telekinesis!” he said to Vera. “Even the electrons and protons shape new atoms, under this mental force. Vera, this is a true miracle of science!”

He went on, shaping his tunnel. The lack of radium in certain strata, later, did not stop York, for his mind had subtly found the way to extract even the locked energy in non-radioactive rock. In foresight, he made the tunnel oval-shaped, distributing the tremendous pressures in the rock around Nature’s sturdiest geometrical design. The unbolstered cavern held, for the same reason that a fragile-shelled egg can resist terrific pressure.

Back of them, a while later, they heard a sudden rumble, as their former prison space collapsed. York stopped, facing Vera.

“Quick!” he said, in inspiration. “Will your broadcast thoughts blank. Let the Three Eternals think we died!”

For an hour they remained quiet. They could feel the strange mental probe darting about their closed minds—the Three Eternals trying to discover some mental sign of life from their recent prisoners. York cautioned Vera to hold out, even when the tunnel back of them progressively collapsed.

At last the psychic finger left. The Eternals were convinced of their deaths!

7

HOPEFUL now of true escape, York forged ahead. His mental chisel, powered by mighty demons of energy, forced the creaking, groaning rock aside, against blind, brute gravity. When his mind began to reel, drained of energy he transferred his brain wave concentrator into Vera’s ear. Her progress in forming the tunnel was little slower than his.

Later, when food and water became necessity, York commanded these. Water dripped from the rock overhead, into their mouths. Food, though a more stubborn problem, was solved when York dug up from memory the exact chemical formulae of starches, proteins and sugars, which he had determined as an esoteric research, centuries before. At command, the pliant rock molecules gathered into globules of the nutritious compounds and fell into their hands.

“It’s so incredible!” murmured Vera, munching, as though unable to believe all this had happened.

“The tool of mentality!” responded York. “I’ve hit upon it by accident. It is probably the ultimate in forces, if it is fully developed.”

Some hours later, when they had progressed miles, York almost fell forward on his face. His tunnel had broken through into a large chamber. They stepped forward and saw, in the weird glow of radioactive walls, a gigantic ovoid cavern, its walls and ceiling braced with ten-foot-square ribs of metal.

“Man-made!” whispered Vera in awe, her voice reverberating back in amplified echoes. She sniffed. “Breathable air, but musty. The place seems old-terribly old!”

“I think I know what this must be!” cried York, eyes lighting. “Remember the Three Eternals’ story—Mantis undermining Mu, in their war? This must have been an underground’ headquarters, from which the Atlantides drilled upward for their frightful task!”

Though they had seen many strange things, in the worlds of space, none struck them with more eerie wonder than this relic of an ancient folly on their own world.

Nothing remained in the chamber of twenty thousand years before save the metal ribbing which had withstood subterranean pressurcollapsed.ge. Two great metal doors once leading the away in and out, still held, though by now masses of rock must press against them. The Atlantides had built well.

Yes, one thing remained, they saw. An enormous square block of metal squatted in the exact center of the floor, of no discernible purpose. York and Vera walked past it, on their way to start their new tunnel in the opposite wall.

Vera stopped abruptly, her face shocked. Slowly she turned this way and that, finally fastening her eyes on the metal block as though hypnotized.

“Tony, I heard a telepathic voice—from within this metal block!”

York, at first sceptical, turned back, knowing his wife was more sensitive to faint impulses than he was. Standing close to the side of the block, concentrating, they seemed to hear a dim voice. It was an inarticulate psychic mumble, exactly as, though someone were day-dreaming.

“Someone is in there!” gasped York, walking around the block to find it solid metal on all sides, and at the top.

Finally he stood back, on straddled legs, and fixed his eyes on the metal. A depression formed, matter sloughed away, as his telekinetic beam ate inward. It was York, the scientist who did this, unable to pass by the mystery of a mind voice from within a metal block.

Suddenly there was no more reaction. His mental ray had struck something it could not penetrate, halfway in. Then they heard strange stirrings, and the psychic mumble clicked off. A dim form crept out of the opening York had made. Vera trembled and slipped her hand in. his. What unbelievable thing, imprisoned in metal, had survived-how long—and was coming out?

“A robot!” breathed York, when it stood clear.

It was obviously built in the image of man, but grotesquely disproportioned. Its body, though metallic-looking, Seemed to be as flexible as rubber. Its faceless head bore two gleaming eye mirrors over which shutters blinked rapidly, as though even the dim glow of the cavern blinded it after total darkness.

It looked around slowly, with a queer air of bewilderment. Finally it’s eyes turned to them.

“No, not entirely a robot,” it telepathized clearly, but haltingly. “I have a human brain within my skull-case. My name is Kaligor. Now tell me, what—what world is this?” “Earth!” returned York, surprised. “What else could it be? You are from Atlantis, or perhaps Mu, Kaligor?”

“Atlantis? Mu?” The telepathic voice was uncertain. “Yes, Mu of course. Now I remember! You must forgive my slowness. I have been buried in that block of metal for a long time—since the sinking of Atlantis and Mu. How long is that?”

“Twenty thousand years!” breathed York.

“Only twenty thousand years?” The man-robot seemed astonished. “I had thought it to be much longer—almost eternity!”

York and Vera looked at each other. Before, after only one hour, they had felt themselves going mad. How had this mind, human though metal-housed, survived two hundred centuries.

Kaligor caught their amazement.

“It is a long, queer story,” he vouched. “I nearly did go mad, in the first few hours. Then I took hold of myself and saw that I could save sanity only by rigid mental discipline. There was only one answer—escape fantasies of my own devising. I must have some one thing, a complicated path, along which my thoughts could wind slowly. In those twenty thousand years I have devised, mentally, an entire new Universe! In a framework of six-dimensional geometry!”

He paused, then went on. “I meticulously thought out each separate sun, its weight, size, brilliance, spectrum, and so on. Finishing this, possibly within a century, I took one particular sun, pictured a mythical system of planets around it, and worked out all the elaborate details of their orbits, satellites, eclipses, and such. Still I found I must go on!”

“You hoped for rescue all that time!” cried York. “For twenty thousand years?”

Surely, in all eternity, there had never been a longer wait!

“I’ve been justified, haven’t I?” returned the robot-mind, with grim lightness. “Since you stand before me, my rescuers! Ah, but how slow-footed was time! I dared not stop building my fantasy world. At that moment, I would go insane, realizing my hopeless predicament. To get into greater detail, consuming more time, I peopled one of the worlds with intelligent beings, far different from humans. I devised their complete biological background, to the last cell.

“Sometimes, for what must have been days, I would wrestle with one single problem—for instance, the number of blood vessels in an inner organ. These intelligent beings, though their appearance would strike you with horror, are almost as real to me as you two now! In fact—”

He broke off, began again, his telepathic voice only now beginning to smooth its first halting pace.

“I had these imaginary beings—Wolkians, I called them——war with one another, explore their world, trade and all the other activities of a busy civilization. But still time hung endlessly before me—perhaps all eternity! So I conjured up single characters, in my dream world, and followed their lives from birth to death. I sketched out thereafter dozens of individual histories in complete detail. Some of my creations I grew to hate, some to love. There was brave Mirbel, and lovely Binti, for whom he fought—”

Kaligor’s psychic voice trailed away into an inarticulate mumble again. He started suddenly.

“But you would not understand,” he resumed, “how real these children of my brain are to me. On and on I spun my, formless dream, to keep that crushing thought of my rockbound prison, from my conscious thoughts. I have lived a thousand lives, adventures, dreams. I am even now half wondering if this may not be part of my dream!”

“No, this is real.” York smiled, but at the same time realizing a character in Kaligor’s dream might say the same.

And in that way had Kaligor kept from going mad.

He shook himself suddenly, as though throwing off the last shreds of his age-long dream.

“Who are you?” he asked. “How did you happen to come to this forgotten chamber?”

York told their story. At mention of the Three Eternals, Kaligor started and seemed to listen with rapt interest.

“The Three Eternals!” he burst out, when York had finished. “They are the same three who imprisoned me here! It came about in this way. I am of Mu, not Atlantis. I discovered the life-elixir, independently, partook of it, and in my utter zeal, decided to house my already immortal brain in an indestructible body, so that even accidental death could not claim my life. I would live forever! Ah, it was a foolish aim, not knowing at the time how palling life can become.”

For a moment Kaligor radiated the same ultra ennui of the Three Eternals. York and Vera realized that perhaps someday they too would long for escape.

Kaligor went on “We had skilled surgeons in our civilization, and one of these I had transfer my living, immortal brain into this robot housing. I had previously devised a solution surrounding my brain that drew energy from space itself, which pervades all things. I had spent two centuries constructing my robot body. It is not metal, as it appears to your eye. It is not matter at all, for matter can be destroyed. I wanted something absolutely indestructible. This body of mine is made of—what shall I call it?—interwoven energy. A sort of fibroid cloth of fundamental warped space time. When you destroy an atom, what is left? Its energy, which cannot be destroyed—ever. Of this is my body made.”

York faintly understood. “I see why my brain wave stopped so suddenly when it struck your form. I was commanding pure energy to vanish, with pure energy. A figure telling its mirror image to be gone!”

Kaligor waved a stumpy hand, in dismissal and went on.

“Thus finally and truly immortal, I began to think of the future. Plans of leading Mu’s civilization to astounding heights formed. And then, before I could begin, Mu crashed’ down into the sea, in that Titanic struggle for mastery with Atlantis, our bitter enemy.

“Tons of masonry fell on me, with no effect, of course. I found myself at the bottom of the sea, eventually, all my people drowned, murdered. Walking over the sea bottom to the shores of Atlantis, filled with horror, I was prepared to wreak vengeance. But Atlantis went down of itself, and civilization was done!”

His psychic tones were dull. “I must have sat on a mountain top, overlooking the broad seas that covered Mu, for a century, brooding, thinking I was the only human mind alive. But one day, in this newly arisen continent, I saw human forms. Some had survived! I questioned them. Though half savage, and the sinking of Mu and Atlantis already a legend to them, I found they were descendants of Muan—survivors. My own people! My spirits sang and I began teaching them, building a new Muan civilization in place of the old.”

He paused, his thoughts darkening. “Then the Three Eternals came. I met them for the first time. They had been in space, as they told you, and had come back to find their land and mine in limbo. Being Atlantides, they hated the thought of Muans inheriting the new world. We battled. I’ could not vanquish them, without weapons, nor could they destroy me, though they blasted me with every hellish force of their devising.

“At last, chaining me, they took me down to this chamber, buried me forty miles below Earth’s surface in a solid, metal block, knowing that as long as Earth existed, I would live and think and never be free. Even insane, I could not die! Their last words to me were that they were going above to hunt down the Mu-descended savages. Every last one. Rather an Earth peopled only by dumb animals than Muans, was their bitter text.”

“They obviously failed.” York smiled grimly. “Since human life went on and civilization rose again, in time—Egypt, Sumeria, Maya, and so on.”

Kaligor’s bright mirror eyes looked at them strangely.

“And you, Anton York, are of my race. We have a bond between us, linking us across an age of time. And we have a common enemy,—the Three Eternals. You can see what their present plan means—to destroy once and for all the second Muan race and civilization. They will be forced to use Muan stock in their proposed civilization, but inculcated with the ancient Alantide ideology, which was ever a belief in rule of the many by the favoured few. We of Mu believed always in communal cooperation.”

York nodded.

“We will go to the surface and fight the Three Eternals,” he said, glad to have an ally of such merit. “At present, they think we are dead and—”

York stopped short.

Vera gave a vocal cry, feeling the delicate mental probe of the Three in her femininely sensitive brain.

In a split second of time, before the probe had focused, she warned her husband and Kaligor to close their minds.

York commended her with his eyes, and they forced their minds in a telepathic short circuit.

Kaligor had caught on instantly, and likewise stood mentally inert.

8

Vera heaved a sigh an hour later. The probe had gone. “Lead the way,” Kaligor said to York. “Up to the surface world, with your brain wave excavator.”

It took them a month, York and Vera alternately forming the tunnel slanting upward. They became skilled in producing, food, water and air, when needed. Kaligor stalked after them silently, needing none of these necessities of life. Deathless he truly was.

As they neared the surface, he betrayed increasing excitement. To see the Sun again, the bustle of life, after twenty thousand years of caged dreams! At times, however, Kaligor seemed wrapped in a mental fog—. The artificial vocal cords with which he was equipped murmured his ancient tongue. York and Vera caught the tailings of their mental origins—brief flashes of a Strange, incredible Universe, peopled with non-existent beings!

Once the robot-bodied man stopped, confused, and it was an hour before York could convince him it was Earth, and not the dream stuff of Wolkia. Kaligor shook his head sadly.

“I live in two worlds,” he murmured. “I will never be sure which is real! Too long, too long have I dwelt in that other land!”

Vera was invaluable as their sentinel against discovery by the Three Eternals’ periodic, suspicious probings with their long-range mental detector, from their laboratory on Mount Olympus. Her quick mind detected instantly what the two blunter male minds might have noticed seconds too late. At her signals, they locked their minds instantaneously.

They emerged in Australia, as York had carefully planned, for it would have been disaster to burst through into the Pacific’s watery bottom. York and Vera breathed free air thankfully, exulting in the warn sunlight that bathed their skins.

Kaligor leaned against a rock, his strangely flexible body trembling. Free at last of his horribly entombed fate, his was the emotion of a resurrected soul, mistakenly buried, a million times intensified.

Their thoughts expanding, free of the underground, they were not on guard.

“The mental probe!” Vera screamed suddenly.

They closed their minds—but a second too late. The mental gimlet became a battering force, trying to pry further. It was all they could do to resist. Kaligor waved silently and began running. After a mile, the force slipped away, off focus.

“Lost the range,” panted York. “I don’t think they found exactly where we are, in that short time. Only that we’re somewhere in Australia. But now they do know we’re alive! We must get to my space ship, in Sol City, as soon as possible. At least in that, if they find us, we can fly away.”

Constantly on guard now, they set out. In a week they had crossed jungle and desert, reaching a busy seaport. Not disclosing their identity, passing—themselves off as explorers and Kaligor as a mechanical robot little different from those in use for menial labours, they boarded a strato-liner for Sol City. Lacking the necessary paper “money”—units of work based on a technological system—York employed hypnotism to delude the officials into believing he had paid for the passage.

But such details were trivial in dealing with the world of mortals. The burning thought before them was the coming battle to save civilization from the merciless hands of the Three Eternals.

Arriving in Sol City, they hastened to York’s space ship, parked in a drome. Once Inside, York drew his first easy breath in all those days. He sailed the ship out of the drome, up into the sky. Motioning Vera to the controls, he told her to set a course for the South Pacific, while he set down from memory the data of his subterranean exploration of geological stresses.

“The first thing to do is explode the key island that will counteract the rise of Atlantis and Mu,” he said “After that, we will reckon with the Eternals.”

Kaligor nodded, his manner charged with anticipation of soon facing the Three who had thought to bury him for all eternity.

Vera was thoughtful. “I wonder why they haven’t probed for us in the past few hours,” she murmured, quizzically.

“Tony, it’s ominous.”

They knew the answer a few hours later, as they slanted down toward the tiny atoll that must be blasted. There, waiting for them, glinting in the sunlight, was a greenish-hulled ovoid ship.

“The Eternals!” gasped Vera.

York stopped his ship and snapped on his electro-protective screen, expecting immediate battle. But instead, the clear telepathic voice of the Three Eternals sounded.

“So, Anton York, you managed to escape your rockbound prison. We again deplore our underestimation of you. How did you do it?”

York was silent.

“No matter,” came the unruffled tele-voice. “After detecting you with our mental probe, in Australia, and failing to pick you up again, we came here, knowing this would be your destination. We have one thing to thank you for—you have made things interesting for us, lightening our age-long ennui. If only you could oppose us further, give us a stirring fight, we would be grateful for the diversion!”

Mockery? Not exactly, it came to York. There was a core of sincerity behind the ironic words.

The Eternals went on. “But, of course, you cannot oppose us: Our twenty thousand years of science will crush your two thousand. We—” The psychic voice stiffened a little. “There is a third person, or mind, aboard your ship. Who—”

Kaligor’s flexible body had been trembling at this time, listening to the words of his ancient, bitter enemies. Now he took an unnecessary step forward.

“It is I, Kaligor!” boomed out the Muan’s tele-voice. “Do you remember me?”

“Kaligor!”

It was a startled chorus from all three Eternals. A moment later a queer ultralight flicked into the cabin, from the other ship. It moved about and finally centred on the robot. Like a detached eye, it roved up and down his body, and it seemed to express amazed bewilderment.

Finally the Eternals broke their shocked silence.

“Yes, it is you, Kaligor. Our tele-eye shows you on our screen. It cannot lie. You were freed by Anton York?”

Taking evident delight in the telling, Kaligor briefly recounted his rescue.

“Thus I face you again, Three Eternals, like a ghost from the past!” he challenged.

“Kaligor—with Anton York!” The involuntary thought of one of the. Eternals, barely perceptible, was a betrayal, as though the combination struck fear. Then hastily: “But no matter. We are about to destroy your ship, and you, Anton York. Kaligor, though indestructible, you will fall to the bottom of the sea. We will capture you again, seal you at the center of Earth perhaps, where no one will blunder in to set you free. You will lie there, spinning your endless dream further, while up here we will snuff out this Mu-spawn civilization and build the second Adantide era.”

“You are senile, mentally if not physically,” taunted Kaligor. “Atlantis, and all it stood for, are things of the past. Muan principles and culture will endure. I, Kaligor, say it and—”

At that moment, the Three Eternals opened fire. A sound—less blast of energy sprang against York’s electro-screen. The screen held, but succeeding blasts began to send a warning needle higher and higher toward the red danger mark of penetration. One touch of the disintegration beam on the hull and the ship would fall together like a rotten gourd.

York wasted no time firing back, remembering the last encounter where his gamma-sonic weapon had been so ineffective. He fled toward open space, before they brought their paralysis beam to bear.

“Fool!” he cursed himself. “I should have suspected they’d be waiting here. We should have thought of armament first.”

Up the ship arrowed. In free space, York tried his best acceleration, but the green ship of the Eternals clung on the trail relentlessly and drew steadily closer. Any principle of super-velocity York had discovered in his two thousand years of research must be known to the Eternals. And more.

“Tony, what can we do?” Vera moaned.

“Kaligor!” York appealed, in turn. “Can you think of anything?”

There was no answer from the robot, slumped in a corner of the cabin.

“Kaligor!” yelled York frantically.

The Muan started, raised his faceless head.

“What? Is that you, Binti? No—no—what am I saying? Her name is Vera York! What is this world? Tell me. I’m confused.”

“Earth, Kaligor!” groaned York. “Come out of your dream world. The Three Eternals—”

A flash of blinding light, as the enemy’s gas-ray rammed into, their screen, brought Kaligor to full awareness.

“The brain wave, York! Use that. Command their screen to fall away!”

York tried it, wondering how he had stupidly failed to think of it himself. Vera took the controls. York stared fixedly out at the enemy ship, concentrating. He threw every ounce of his brain power into the mental command for the Eternal& protective screen to break down, then fired his gamma-sonic weapon.

But the telekinetic force that had moulded hard stone like putty failed to crush the super-powerful screen of the Eternals. It was pure energy battling pure energy, again. The only noticeable effect was that the green ship fell back for an instant, as though it had struck something.

York tried again and again, his mind reeled with the draining effort. Each time the enemy ship faltered a little, but its screen held. Staggering, York slipped the brain wave concentrator out of his ear and handed it to Kaligor.

“You try it!” he gasped.

Kaligor held the tiny instrument before his forehead. York and Vera could not see on his featureless face the mental concentration brought to bear, but the ship of the Eternals bounced back a minute later after each repeated blow of telekinetic force.

“Their screen is adamant,” said Kaligor. “They’ll win out in the end, unless—”

Rapidly, he outlined a plan. York nodded and waited tensely.

9

KALIGOR once more faced the oncoming ship, through the port window. York and Vera could almost feel the tremendous mental forces he was concentrating, second by second. Kaligor released a blast of telekinetic force, a minute later, that hurled the green ship back and back until it vanished in the blackness of space.

At the same time, as they had planned, York shot their ship sideward at a prodigious pace. Then, in successive arcs, he warped their course at a random angle to the last position.

“Enough!” barked Kaligor, five minutes later. “Shut off the motor, the screen, every generator—and close your minds!” Obeying, the three now drifted in a silent, dark ship as inert as any meteor in space. They felt the mental probe of the Eternals, trying to locate them, but an hour later it ceased. A broadcast telepathic voice rolled over them.

“You have escaped for the time being, Kaligor and Anton York,” admitted the Eternals. “But we have won. We will go back to Earth, and set up a headquarters on the very island you would have to destroy, to save the Muan civilization. We will wait, on guard. If you return, we will destroy you. When the ancient lands have arisen, and we have constructed Atlantide civilization, we will search you out, in whatever remote corner of the Universe—for the final reckoning!”

Vera signalled the two men to keep their minds locked, when they were about to relax. Understanding, for it might be a ruse to discover them, they waited. It was not till three hours later that they cautiously opened their minds. No mental probe greeted them.

“They’ve gone back to Earth,” sighed York, “as they said.” He went on heavily. “They have won. We know now that we can’t penetrate their screen. They can ours, in a longer battle.”

“But, Tony, why can’t we build a better screen, and find some force to penetrate theirs?” suggested Vera.

York shook his head. “It would take years—centuries! In that time, civilization will be destroyed, the very thing we’re trying to save. Don’t you see, Vera? The Eternals are eighteen thousand years ahead of us. Ahead of Kaligor, too, for he lay impotent, dreaming, for that long time while they crawled up on the scale of science.”

“Impotent! Dreaming!” Kaligor gave a mental sigh. “Yes, dreaming. Ah, if I could only use some of the science of my dream world! Mirbel and Binti, that time they fought the triple minds of Kashtal, had a wonderful weapon… But it is no use. Their science was of the six-dimensional Universe, useless in ours. All dream stuff, all?, all——”

York and Vera almost pitied him, as he faded away into his dream world again, where all harsh realities could be solved.

“There’s only one hope,” pondered York. “Developing the telekinetic force. If we made a larger concentrator, one for all three of our minds at once, we might get a large enough blast out of it to smash their screen, instead of just pushing them away. What do you think of that, Kaligor?”

But Kaligor was lost in his dream, and Vera firmly silenced York’s half angry shouts to awake him.

“Tony,” she said softly, “waking from a beautiful dream ’is the worst feeling in all the world. Let poor Kaligor break into waking life gradually. He has been twenty thousand years in that other world—only a few days in ours!”

A week later, after a slow, careful cruise lest the Eternal’ detect them with long-range finders, they landed on an isolated section of the Moon, away from mining outposts.

Despite their grim situation, it amused them to tune into the radio news from the world of mortals.

“A dozen more ships have now docked, with burned-out instruments, and reported the same mysterious occurrence of last week, out in space somewhere between Earth and Moon,” said one announcer. “Without warning, loose energy of some sort surged in that area, burning out all radios, lighting systems, and intership phones. Dr. Emanuel Harper, famous physicist, estimates that some forty-five trillion ergs of energy were expended in a few minutes, at some point thousands of miles away from his particular ship.

“This would be enough energy to light all of Sol City for three thousand years! It was all scattered away in a few minutes. Who or what could do that? Is Anton York out there somewhere? What is he doing? A thousand years ago he moved planets. Is he preparing some similar engineering feat, to astound mankind?”

Vera smiled wanly. “Another chapter in the mythology of Anton York is writing itself. The truth they would not even believe!”

Tooling their scientific knowledge, Kaligor and York worked out a large-sized brain wave concentrator. In the workshop room of York’s, ship was every conceivable scientific tool. For raw material they used the molecules of the lunar terrain, shaping them into any metal, or product with applied chemical telekinesis.

They tested the machine one day. All three of them poured a combined mental command into the receiver. With creaks and groans that they felt as vibration through the ship, a nearby lunar mountain moved back ten feet!

“Remember that old Biblical adage, Vera?” said York, awed himself. “If ye have faith, ye can move a mountain!” York had moved much greater things at one time—whole worlds in fact. But he had used world-moving energies produced through gigantic machines. What they had done now had been done purely through mind, with the veriest of thoughts. And thoughts were limitless in scope.

They could have commanded the mountain to dance away and plunge into space at the speed of light, had they wished. Even so, would this peat new force prevail against the ultra-scientific Eternal Three?

They sailed to Earth, boldly now. The Three Eternals had already begun construction of a marble home, like that on Mount Olympus, on the key island in the Pacific. Their green-hulled ship came to meet them. Over the ocean waters they battled.

The Eternals hurled their Jovian charges of energy against York’s screen, rapidly wearing it down. Keeping their nerves in check, York, Vera and Kaligor stood before their brain wave projector. At Kaligor’s signal, they thrust a common mental command into the receiver.

A measurelessly powerful telekinetic beam leaped for the enemy ship. But nothing happened. Its screen did not buckle, as they had hoped.

And the ship itself did not even budge one inch, where at least it should have been dashed away!

“Failed, didn’t it?” came the taunting telepathic voice from the Three Eternals. “We managed to deduce it was telekinetic force with which you escaped last time. We’ve installed a simple enough counter radiator that split your beam and caused it to flow around your ship.”

Beyond, where the split beam rejoined and angled down to the ocean’s broad bosom, water churned madly. A mile-wide hole appeared, clapped together again and sent a mile-high wall of water rolling toward distant shores. Hours later, several coastal cities of mortal man would be wrecked by the greatest “tidal wave” in history.

“And now,” came the frosty announcement, “prepare for death!”

A particularly vicious blast shook York’s ship and nearly burst through his screen. York jerked his ship up and away. Flight again! But with no hope this time of escape.

So it seemed. Hounding them, the Eternals’ ship prepared to send its final barrage against York’s tattered screen. In another moment—annihilation.

But queerly, the Eternals suddenly lost the range. Their ship blundered past, almost striking them, and went on, as though searching. Soon it had lost itself in the curtain of space. York saw then that Kaligor was still standing before the telekinesis projector.

Only now he turned away.

“Hypnosis,” he explained wearily, as though it had drained all his wind. “I hypnotized them into the belief that we had suddenly become invisible. Change course quickly, York. They will be back in an instant. It won’t work twice.” York, as once before, shifted the ship at random arcs till they were far from their original position. The Eternals did not appear. Safe, for the time being.

They hardly spoke to one another in the next hour, as their ship cruised slowly in space. With the brain wave projector useless against the Eternals, they could think of no other weapon or force to, try.

“But we have to do something,” said York haggardly. “We can’t give up. Kaligor, there anything—anything—”

Kaligor shrugged wearily and lapsed into his escape world of dreams. York almost envied him and wished that he might dream so pleasantly. But York’s dreams, lately, had been nightmares in which the Three Eternals endlessly chased him to the remotest corners of space and time.

Vera smiled at him wanly.

“You must rest, Tony,” she admonished gently. “Let’s forget about the Three Eternals for a while. Maybe our minds, fresher, will think of something later. Let’s look out at the peaceful stars.”

They turned out the cabin lights and sat arm in arm before a wide port, gazing out at the star-powdered vault of the firmament. They talked over their many wanderings in space, trying to forget the maddening menace behind them. Venus gleamed brilliantly among the stars.

“Remember bringing an asteroid to Venus, as its new moon?” murmured Vera. “How happy we were in that accomplishment. So many Earth settlers sighed for moonlight, through the long Venusian nights.”

She felt her husband start slightly.

“Vera!” he whispered tensely. “You’ve given me an idea. Suppose we towed away another asteroid, took it to Earth. Suppose we gave it a tremendous velocity, and aimed it for the key island. Even the Eternals wouldn’t be able to stop trillions of tons of hard rock plunging down without warning upon their heads!”

York woke Kaligor, after much mental shouting, and outlined the plan to him. “Good!” agreed the Muan.

Once more hope went with them as they maneuvered far from Earth’s vicinity, out to the barren asteroids. After some search, they singled out a dense little body roughly five miles in diameter. Their ship was no more than a grain of sand beside it, but before long they were nudging it out of its age-old orbit, with the illimitable forces of their telekinetic projector.

Hour by hour it gained velocity, in the long stretch of space toward Earth.

York spent brain-numbing hours over the equations of its course. He had to hit precisely one certain spot on Earth, the while it inexorably continued to revolve and rotate. It took timing to seven decimal places. It was super-ballistics, with the asteroid in the role of a gigantic shell shot from a mythical cannon against a target that moved in the four dimensions of space time.

“And yet,” he summed it up, when done, “it’s really easier to figure this hundred-million-mile trajectory in space than it would be to aim a cannon shot on Earth for a mere thousand miles. The motions and laws of space are precise, unvarying. Those on Earth are subject to the vagaries of wind, temperature and air density. I think we’ll be able to land the asteroid squarely on the island, at a speed of a hundred miles a second.”

It took them two weeks to push the asteroid within striking distance. Gradually its velocity had mounted. It had been aimed unerringly to reach Earth’s orbit, plunge into its atmosphere, and drop like a great bomb on the island of the Three Eternals.

“It can’t fail!” said Kaligor confidently, rechecking York’s figures for the third time. “The Eternals will have no warning. The, asteroid is too small to shine as a moving star except in the last few minutes. It will light incandescently when it strikes the atmosphere, but a few seconds later it will land. The Eternal, will be ground flat into the Earth itself! And at the same time, the island will be cracked apart, reversing the rise of Atlantis. York, it is a splendid plan!”

“I hope it works.”

Now that the zero moment approached, York was assailed by doubts. Yet how could the Eternals survive it, this hurling of a world at them?

10

Reaching a point a—thousand miles above Earth, York halted his ship. The asteroid plunged on. It vanished from their sight. Then, five seconds later it reappeared, glowing slightly. With each passing second, as it hurtled into the thicknesses of the atmosphere, it brightened.

Like a glowing diamond, it plummeted for the ground—and the island. It been aimed perfectly.

“Here’s a little present for you, Eternals!” sang out Kaligor, moving for the ship’s telescope.

It struck!

Watching, they saw it shatter into a shower of sparks, from their perspective, that spattered far over the Pacific Ocean. Dense clouds of steam shot skyward. More than a quadrillion tons of rock had smashed into Earth, the impact was sufficient to affect, by a measurable, split second, the rotation of the planet. Earthly astronomers would later notice that, and record the fall of the largest meteorite in history, little suspecting the man-made agency behind it.

York drew a deep breath. That mighty mass had rocketed straight down upon the marble home of the Three Eternals. By no stretch of imagination could they have survived.

“York!”

Kaligor, at the telescope, had given the sharp mental cry. “The marble building is still intact! The asteroid struck some shell of force over, it, broke on that, and the pieces simply slid off into the ocean on all sides!”

He followed this stunning, incredible announcement with an urgent warning.

“Quickly! lights off, ship unpowered, minds closed! They will be after us in a moment. We’re safer here than in trying to outdistance them after detection.”

They waited for long hours, minds locked against mental probing, realizing the. Eternals would not dare leave their island unless they detected the position of their quarry.

At last, as before, a broadcast telepathic message rustled in their minds.

“Did you think to catch us unawares, Kaligor and Anton York?” scoffed one of the Eternal Three. “We remembered that you had learned to move worlds before, Anton York. We expected you to try this. A trigger-touch dome of force protected the island and our home. Even if you should hurl the Moon down on us, we would shunt it aside. We dealt with world-moving forces long before you! Must we repeat over and over that you are as children to us? Children who must eventually be caught and punished?”

York went to his controls and eased the ship away from Earth, following a regular liner route so that the eternals’ detectors would not single them out.

“Now what’s left, Kaligor?” he asked, biting his lip. “What’s left to try—and it’ll be the last try!”

But Kaligor was sunk in the myths of his mind, in temporary escape from the stark, pressing problem that brought haggard lines to the faces of his two companions.

“Mirbel!” his mind was murmuring, as they had first heard it murmuring from inside the steel block—“Mirbel, is that you? And Binti? I have been to a strange dream world, called—let me think—Earth! Earth, yes. I dreamed of struggle, futile opposition to super-scientists. But that is impossible, isn’t it, Mirbel? I’m the supreme scientist in the Universe! Binti, tell me it sufficient!”

Losing patience at last, York prodded the bemused Muan.

“Wake up, Kaligor! This is no time to dream. In the name of the Universe, stop mumbling and talking to those two. They’re, figments, myths, dummies—do you understand?”

York was immediately sorry for his outburst. But Kaligor came awake.

“Phantoms! Figments!” he echoed. “Myths, dummies! Yes, you’re right.”

Suddenly his telepathic contact broke, became a rush of jumbled thought. For a moment York thought he had again dropped into his enchanted spell, but his telepathic voice returned, now clear, strong.

“Anton York,” he said, “what is most important in all this—ourselves or the civilization we are trying to save?”

“Civilization!” returned York without hesitation. “They are our people—yours and mine. They advance, slowly but surely.” Firmly he repeated: “The civilization—for what it is to become. It must be preserved, even at the cost of our lives!”

York felt a strange embarrassment, with the last word, as though he had thrown it before the robot’s face.

“I cannot die,” said Kaligor evenly. “No, but I can sacrifice to an equal extent.”

“What are you driving at?” York demanded.

“There is only one way to achieve that aim for which we would both make the final sacrifice,” continued Kaligor. “By decoying the Three Eternals away from the island long enough to blow it up!”

Kaligor went on, and suddenly it was all starkly clear to York.

A year went by, a year in which York, Vera and Kaligor laboured over intricate mechanisms.

Then, one day, they faced the Eternals once again at their island. Kaligor sat hunched at the controls of the ship. His telepathic radiation issued from a human brain, clothed in an inhuman shell. Their fleshly bodies offering sharp contrast York and Vera stood back of him, almost woodenly tense, as their plan was started.

“We have a new weapon,” boasted Kaligor to the enemy. “One that will not fail, Eternals. Death comes to you—”

Kaligor jerked a lever and a queer reddish beam sprang toward the enemy ship. It spangled against their screen, spread like red paint, but nothing else happened.

“A puny force, no better than your others!” chorused the Eternals triumphantly. “Now you, Kaligor and Anton York will greet that most final master—Death!”

Again York’s screen blazed to near extinction, as the Eternals threw their heaviest beams against it. And York’s ship fled for the fourth time, as though this were some play that must be enacted over and over again for all eternity.

Inside the ship, Kaligor manipulated the controls with his flexible, tentacular fingers. He drove the ship away at its utmost acceleration, arrowing into the open void. The more tender forms of York and Vera flattened against one wall, their eyes closing. Kaligor glanced at them and nodded in satisfaction. It would take the Eternals some time to catch up, at this superpace.

On and on the chase went, at rates unknown and impossible to ordinary space ships that mankind knew. Mars flashed by, then the asteroids, Jupiter, and finally Pluto, and the two ships catapulted out into the outer immensity, exceeding the speed of light. This was the final pursuit. It could end in only one way.

Kaligor felt the mental probe of the Three Eternals, playing over the unconscious forms of York and Vera, as though wondering what had happened to them. Even, for a moment, their visual teleray flicked about. Both probes left finally, and the chase went on Kaligor, though he could not grin physically, was certainly grinning within his human mind.

Inevitably, the green-hulled ship crawled closer, closer. Finally, within range, it began to batter at the screen again. Kaligor watched the needle spin to the danger mark—and pass it. The screen was down!

Flame leaped into the ship, searing, scorching. Metal glowed and melted. The two mortal bodies of York and Vera, still unmoving, unconscious, were touched by naked fire and then they began to dance and writhe. But only for a moment. Soon they were gone, consumed.

“The final sacrifice!” murmured Kaligor, watching the ship burn away around him.

Everything was consumed around Kaligor. But his body could not be consumed. He was out in space, free, the ship and all it had contained disintegrated to the last atom. A multitude of fiery stars decorated all space, watching indifferently this battle between superbeings.

“Thus you have finally been defeated, Kaligor!” came the telepathic voice from the victorious Three Eternals. “Anton York and his mate are no more and you—you will float through space, at your present velocity, for all eternity! It is a better end for you than what we had planned!”

But no answer came from Kaligor, to his ancient enemies. Instead, they barely detected a faint rumble.

“Binti! Mirbel! How good to see you again! I have just awakened from that dream. That dream of—what is it?—Earth! Binti, Mirbel, you are real. Not those others. They called you phantoms, Mirbel, and you, sweet Binti. They said you were just myths, figments of a dream I had spun in a long sleep. What was that other word? Yes, utmost. They called you dummies, and somehow, in that other dream of Earth, it was very significant, that word. Very significant, but I can’t remember—I can’t remember… Binti… Mirbel… I will stay with you now…”

“Dummies!” One of the Three Eternals roared that to the others. “Did you hear? I see it all now. We’ve been decoyed, lured away, while back on Earth—”

York back on Earth, turned away from the mind concentrator with which he had been projecting his thoughts out into space. Impinging on a delicate relay within the cleverly wrought dummy of himself aboard Kaligor’s ship, his mind had been there, as far as the Three Eternals’ mental probe had determined. Vera’s too. Now there was no reaction from the dummy-relay, proving the Eternals had finally caught up with Kaligor, after a long three-hour chase.

“It worked, Vera!” York cried “The Eternals have been decoyed at least beyond Pluto, thinking all the time that you and I were with Kaligor, when they were only life-like dummies. Organic robots, really, since they held our thoughts. And pretty cleverly made—artificial protoplasm, exact duplicates of us, in—case the Eternals used a visual check-up. Most important of all, the mental-relays within the dummies’ skull-cases.”

He laughed almost gaily. “The Three Eternals were fooled by one of the simplest, oldest tricks in the Universe!”

Vera was less jubilant, more solemn. “Kaligor thought of it,” she murmured. “His dream world was of some use after all. And now just think, Tony”—her voice became soft, pitying—“he must float on and on, in boundless space, never to know death. His sacrifice has been more, much more, than ours will be! And yet, perhaps, he would have it so. He will continue’ creating his mental universe, which he loves, and in which he—belongs. He will live in it! Perhaps who really knows?—it is as real as ours, to us. Life is all in the mind—” Her voice trailed away moodily.

York nodded, subdued. Then he stirred himself and piloted his ship up and out of the dense island jungle in which it was hidden. It was his own ship. The one Kaligor had piloted away had been an outward duplicate, built secretly in Sol City’s great factories.

“We have about three hours,” said York, “before the Eternals come back. Three hours for which Kaligor traded an eternity of helpless drifting.”

A few minutes later their ship hovered over the atoll marked for demolition, so that a geological process started years before might be reversed. York set his gamma-sonic weapon for instantaneous decomposition of the entire island to a depth of five miles. His generators were loaded to the full.

His lips pursed in anticipation as he depressed the button. Once again his unobtrusive violet ray shot forth from its gravity-fed power coils. Hissingly it struck the island, and the marble home of the absent Three Eternals, boring down at the speed of light.

Layers of matter peeled away and vanished in puffs of soot. Before the ocean waters roared in to fill the breech, the five-mile pit had been formed.

York flung his ship up at full speed as a spume of water spurted from the impact of walls of water crashing together with the face of solid steel. Down below, in the invisible depths of Earth that they had so recently quitted, a titanic ground vibration had spawned. Like a match it would touch off the gunpowder of subsea plasma. There would be a clashing of Gargantuan forces, one started years before by the Eternals. For a while the Behemoth of an earthquake would reign widely on Earth’s surface. But then it would be over, and Earth would be quiet…

Three hours later, York found confirmation of his success.

The bubbles arising from the Pacific floor had lessened by half. Mu was halting its slow upward climb. And in the Atlantic, a continent buried for twenty thousand years in its watery grave also ceased to seek an unnatural resurrection. “It is done!” breathed York, with quiet pride.

Vera’s face strained for the past days, grew yet more haggard.

“It is done!” she repeated, but with a deeper meaning. Suddenly she was in his arms, sobbing. “Is there no escape, Tony?”

“I’m afraid not,” returned York gently. “The Three Eternals will seek their vengeance. They are powerful beyond measure, as we know. It would do little good to try to hide, in space. Their long-range instruments would search us out, even light years away. Kaligor made his sacrifice. We must make ours, as we agreed.” He raised his head. “But Earth is saved. Earth gave us life. Kaligor too. We must think of it that way, my darling of the ages!”

Vera dashed the tears from her eyes, bravely.

“We have lived a full life, Tony dearest. Love, understanding and wisdom beyond the lot of ordinary humans have been ours. We have touched the stars for a brief moment, revelled for a bit of eternity. Dreamed a beautiful dream of immortality, like Kaligor. But we could not escape the laws of Fate, as we did the laws of life. It is over and I am content!”

They kissed, and dung to one another tightly, in their last embrace. Like—gods they had lived, but unlike gods, they must die. The finger of a greater destiny had so decreed.

Not long after, the powerful telepathic voice of the Three Eternals beat in upon their minds. Their ship appeared, dropping from the sky vulturously. Bluntly, seeing, the key-island destroyed, they promised swift death. York spun his ship away, as though trying to escape the inevitable. The large ovoid ship of the Three followed inexorably.

Pursued and pursuing, they shot far into space, out among the emptiness they both knew so well. When they had gone so far that York knew Earth could not be harmed by what was to come, he stopped. Grimly, he set his giant gravity coils, loaded to capacity with world-moving power. Then he smiled as he took Vera in his arms to await the end calmly.

Unknowing of his voluntary sacrifice, the Three Eternals rammed toward his ship enough power to grind it to subatomic shreds. It was like the lighting of a bomb. York’s ship released its groaning load of energy in one colossal charge. The ether itself writhed.

Both ships vanished! Back on Earth, every electrical instrument burned out entirely from the mighty reaction waves that had resulted.

They were gone, the gods that Earth knew. Greek mythology and the mythology of Anton York would carry on the legends of their exploits, in distorted form. But the gods themselves were one with infinity. But there would be no mythology of Kaligor, the Eternal Dreamer. Indestructible, falling perhaps eventually into the hot core of some sun, his dream would go on… on…