Anton York, Immortal

PROLOGUE

At the top of Mount Everest’ stand two gigantic statues of enduring diamond, a hundred feet tall. Gleaming in the stratosphere, they rear higher than any other man-made object on Earth’s surface, as the two after whom they had been modelled rear higher than any others in human history.

Those were the statues modelled after the immortal Anton York and his mate.

In the year of their commemoration, 4050 A.D., the President of the Solar System Council spoke to—a gathered crowd of ten million, and to a television audience of ten billion on nine planets. His voice was emotion-filled and awed, as though he spoke of gods.

“Anton York and his wife are dead. But Anton York’s name will live, alongside those of Alexander, Caesar, Napoleon and other empire builders. And Confucius, Christ, Mohammed and other spiritual leaders. And Adam, Jove, Robin Hood and other mythological names. For Anton York was like all these in one respect or more.

“He was born—in the twentieth century. Preserved by his father’s life-elixir, he lived on, immortally. These great exploits will ring down the hall of history: His defeat of the fifty Immortals who wished to subjugate Earth, in the twenty-first century. His legacy of space-travel to mankind, soon after. His defeat of Mason Chard, the last of the ruthless Immortals, in the thirty-first century. His astro-engineering in the Solar System, giving Jupiter rings, moons to Mercury and Venus, and ridding all the planets of harsh obstacles to colonization.

“But the greatest of all was his return from the deeps of space, in our present time, to wage some titanic battle against the mysterious Three. Eternals, who wished to destroy contemporary civilization. We do not, even know the true story of it, save in snatches. We know only that the Three Eternals, survivors from some forgotten time—perhaps Atlantis—pursued Anton York’s space ship out beyond Pluto, a year ago.

“An astronomer’s plates, on that dark outpost, caught something of the event. The space ship of the Three Eternals hurled some destructive force at York’s ship. The latter seemed loaded with mighty energies. Both ships vanished in an explosion that must have rocked the Universe from one end to another. Pluto was shoved a million miles out of its orbit by etheric concussion!”

He paused to let the worlds imagine the incredible fury of that scene.

“We can only surmise at what mighty, unknown forces were released. And we can only wonder why York, to destroy the Three Eternals, sacrificed himself. Evidently he could defeat the Eternal& only in that way, in a battle of gods.

“Of one thing we are sure. The incredible career of Anton York is over. We are gathered here to commemorate his memory, in the most lasting material we know, on this highest peak of Earth’s entire surface.”

The speaker looked over the solemn, hushed multitude packed at the base of the towering mountain. He delivered his funereal text.

“Anton York, benefactor of humanity, is dead!”

1

Those words, if they could have rolled by some magic throughout the greater cosmos, would eventually have impinged on the ears of the person in question, and made him smile.

For Anton York was alive.

Yet he had not been sure of that himself, at first. With a shock his brain had awakened. His staring eyes focused on the cabin wall of his ship. It looked as it had always been. But queerly, he saw two walls. It was a doubling effect, as if two superimposed images lay on one another. And he could not move. He was in the grip of some paralysis that locked every muscle in his body, including his lungs and heart. He was not breathing and his blood, chilled and viscous, lay stagnant in his veins.

Yet he was alive, for his thoughts were free. Or was this death?

His thoughts probed out in mental telepathy, which he had used so often with his wife. He could not turn to look. “Vera!” his mind called. “Vera, are you near?”

Her mental voice came back, confused, dim.

“Yes, Tony. I hear you. You must be near. I feel as though we are mental wraiths. Is this the life-after-death? How wonderful, Tony, not to be separated after all—” Her psychic tone became startled. “But look! This is the cabin of our ship, even if it appears double somehow. It was destroyed in that frightful explosion caused by the Three Eternals. How can a material ship pass into the life-after-death?”

It was a grimly ridiculous thought.

“No, Vera.” York’s thoughts were reflective. “The ship wasn’t destroyed. Nor were we. It’s sheer speculation, but perhaps the explosion acted so suddenly and so powerfully that it blew the ship away intact. Like tornado winds that blow straws right through oak boards without knocking off one grain. Vera, we’re alive!”

“But this paralysis—”

“Suspension of life, through the shock of super-fast motion. Germs, in centrifuges whirled at high speed, pass into a dormant state, as Earth scientists know. All our cells have gone as a unit into suspended animation.”

“You mean that we’ll stay helpless like this? For ages, thinking, thinking…” Vera’s psychic voice was alarmed, half hysterical.

“No,” York answered quickly. “Don’t forget we have twice the normal number of life-giving radiogens in our cells. Cosmic rays are constantly pouring into them. The energy stored will sooner or later break the deadlock. We just have to wait.”

Cosmic radiation fed itself into their immortality radiogens. Electrical energy, the warmth of life in the last analysis, gradually built up as in a storage battery. The stunned cells, knocked out by the force of the super-explosion, slowly returned to normal.

It took a year.

During that time, happy at escaping the death that had seemed inexorable, they conversed mentally. They spoke of things past, wondering of things present, and looked forward to things future, once they were free. Well inured to the dragging of time in their 2,000 years of life, the short year passed quickly to them, where it might have driven an ordinary mortal mad.

Anton York felt the twitch of some buried muscle one day. Others came alive quickly, as if it were a signal. The involuntary muscles instantly took up their given tasks. The heart beat and the diaphragm pumped up and down, sucking air into the lungs.

York leaped up suddenly, only to collapse again with a groan. The atrophied muscles refused to take up their burden that quickly.

A few minutes later he arose again, stronger, and turned to help Vera up. He supported her while her body went through the same phases. Finally they embraced each other, knowing the supreme joy of life, when death had seemed inevitable.

“Tony, dearest, are we truly immortal?” Vera spoke, using her vocal chords instead of the tiring telepathy. They noticed immediately that the sound echoed, in the same queer doubling effect of their vision. She went on. “Disease and old age can’t touch us. Now even that terrible explosion, violent death, failed! We’re like the legendary gods.”

“Don’t think that way!” York returned almost sharply. “We must never lose our perspective. We’re immortals through science. And some principle of science accounts for our escape. I had our energy coils loaded to capacity with power enough to shatter a sun. When the Three Eternals shoved a dis-beam at us and released it, the explosion acted on every atom simultaneously, blowing ship and all away as a unit. Probably at the speed of light and out into remote space.”

“The Three Eternals!” Vera burst in suddenly. “If they survived the explosion too, they may be near now, ready to blast us again—”

York, reminded of their deadly enemies, was already leaping toward the visiscreen, for an all-around view of surrounding space. Like their eyes, the view-plate seemed afflicted with the singular doubling effect. The firmament of stars around them contained all pairs. But no alien ship blocked out any part of the sky.

“The Eternals aren’t here,” York announced, his nerves easing. “They must have been destroyed then—no, wait! I see their ship now. Just a speck far away, where they were blown in a different direction.”

Vera bent close to the view-plate suddenly.

“And look. Another ship is approaching theirs! A queer ship.

“Hsst!” York warned. A totally alien ship might be friend or enemy. “Tune in mentally, if you make contact with the Three Eternals.”

Opening their minds full range, they waited to—hear any telepathic radiations from the distant scene. At last they heard a voice, in the universal language of telepathy. Yet they recognized it for an alien, non-human voice, by its mental overtones.

“What ship is this?” challenged the voice, as though it were a patrol ship on the high seas. “Answer immediately!”

York and Vera waited breathlessly. At last one of the Three Eternals answered groggily, as though he, too, had just emerged from the same suspended state following the explosion.

“The ship of the Three Eternals. We just survived a tremendous explosion, miraculously. Who are you? Where are you from?” The psychic voice was staccato, peremptory.

“From Earth.” And then, typically, the Eternal spoke angrily. “But who are you to make demands? I resent your insolence.”

“Earth!” It seemed to be a startled exclamation from the alien. “The J-X seventy-seven creatures! You’ve come to rescue—” The words broke off. Then came a horribly merciless tone. “I am sorry.”

In the view-plate, York and Vera saw a green energy-ray stab from the alien ship to the Three Eternals. In a supernal flash of sparks, the ship of the Three Eternals vanished!

The back dot of the alien ship hovered for a moment, as though to make sure of their work. Then it scudded away, disappearing into the void beyond.

Vera shuddered. “I’m glad the Three Eternals are gone, though I’ve never wanted the death of a human before. They were such evil beings.”

“Evil beings?” York’s voice was tense. “What about those ruthless aliens? They did us a favour, destroying the Three Eternals, but we’d get the same if they found us. Who are they? From what system? Why are they patrolling space?”

Vera had no answer.

“I wonder where we are,” York mused. “We have a lot of things to do and find out. First, this queer doubling of our sight and voices.”

A strange expression came over his face. He strode to his laboratory workroom and for the next few hours laboured with his intricate instruments. Vera brought in hot food, in answer to their reawakened appetites. She found her husband tapping his finger on the barrel of an electronic spectroscope. He was frowning, and behind the frown was startled disbelief.

“Tony,” Vera asked, “have you found out where we are? Let’s return to Earth. I don’t like the thought of meeting those aliens.”

“Return to Earth?” York had started. He gripped her shoulders. “I just made a rough measurement of the velocity of light here. It’s only a hundred-and-eighty-one miles a second—five thousand miles a second slower than it should be! And the velocity of sound is quite a bit below eleven hundred feet per second!”

“That accounts for the doubling phenomenon,” Vera returned quickly, for she was no less of a scientist than her husband. “Our eyes and ears are attuned to different rates. But, Tony, you look so worried.” At the same instant it struck her. “Why should light and sound travel slower?” she gasped.

For an answer, York swept his hand toward the nearest port. Out there lay the eternal stars, but what had happened to them? Even they were changed. In their many lifetimes of Wandering, Anton York and Vera had come to know the star map almost as minutely as one knows the streets of a city.

“Those are not our stars,” York said in a low voice. “Vera, this is not the Universe we used to know!”

After eating in stunned silence, York spoke again, more calmly.

“I see It quite clearly now. The explosion blew us up as unit—completely out of normal space-time—into a new universe! I’ve suspected for some time that different universes lie side by side, or wrapped up in one another. They occupy the same space and time, but not the same space-time. Notice that distinction. It’s like taking two chemical reagents and mixing them in various proportions, to get many different compounds.

“This space-time, with its ‘shorter’ time and ‘longer’ space—judging from the low light speed—is separate and distinct from our Universe. Yet the two universes are contained in one another like alcohol in water. Earth, in one sense, is no more than a few miles away in space and a few hours in time. In another sense, it’s remoter than the most distant nebula and several eternities removed on an all-embracing time scale.”

Vera’s brows came together over a white anxious face.

“Tony, it confuses me. I’m afraid. I feel as if we’re dropping into an endless pit here. I never felt that way in our space. Tony, let’s go back to our Universe right away.”

He shook his head, telling her with his eyes to prepare for greater shock.

“We can’t. At least for the present Our engine, Our energy-coils, our generators—all our motivating machines are dead. I tried them. You see, there’s slower energy here too. We’re marooned in this other universe, and drifting like a wandering comet. We’re helpless, too. If those patrolling aliens happen to spy us…”

York left the rest ominously unsaid.

2

BUT this did not happen. In the following year, York spent mind-numbing hours in his laboratory. Vera took down an endless series of notes. Together they sought to readjust their science to the new conditions.

In one thing, nature’s laws of compensation were automatic. Their eyes and ears learned gradually to work under new conditions. The irksome doubling effects disappeared. But all else was still a mystery.

York became irritable.

“I’m getting nowhere,” he raged. “I feel as, helpless as a baby. la our Universe I had a wealth of super-science, by Earthly standards, at my fingertips. Now I can’t even make a single reaction motor. Rockets here don’t obey Newton’s Third Law! It’s getting me down. I’m like a Stone Age man looking around and wondering what it’s all and, Vera, I don’t like it.”

He went on, betraying a nervousness he had kept under control rigidly.

“The Three Eternals had no chance to fight back when they were destroyed. Neither would we, if—that patrol ship found us. But that isn’t all.”

Both knew without saying that there were other dangers. Already their stored air and food supplies were running low. In their own Universe, York would have laughed and transmuted oxygen and protein from sheer metal, bending the atoms to his will. But here, in a maddening universe with new set of laws and measurements, he had less command over circumstances than a Neanderthal Man in some 20th century city.

“That Sun, Tony,” Vera whispered. “It’s far past first magnitude now. We’re drifting straight toward it. Another year—”

She left the appalling thought unfinished. In another year, unless they achieved a workable motor, they would fall into the huge, blazing sun. For a year it had grown steadily brighter athwart their drifting course. But they might starve first, or be caught by the patrol ship.

They had three ways to die, in this strange, mad universe, none of them pleasant.

The alien sun grew until it was the size of Sol from the distance of Pluto. They began to feel the slight acceleration, as its tentacles of gravity clutched at their ship. It was a strange, huge star, red as Antares.

Periodically, every twenty-two days, it increased in brightness. At its maximum it was almost blue-hot. Then it declined to the red state again. On and on the cycle went, with the precise regularity of a delicately made clock.

“A Cepheid variable,” York said “Like the Cepheids of our universe, it obeys some mysterious law of waxing and waning atomic-disintegration in its interior. And similarly, if the balance slips at some time, it will explode into a flaming nova. These are very unstable stars. If there are planets—”

He searched with his telescope. It was small, but through a principle of television magnification, had a resolving power ten times greater than a 100 inch reflector. He swept all the regions around the pulsing sun.

“Yes, it has planets, thirteen of them,” he announced finally. “We’re drifting toward the tenth outermost. We won’t fall into the sun after all, Vera. We’ll crash on that planet!”

He was grimly humorous.

“Radio.” Vera clutched at straws. “An SOS signal might bring rescue.”

“Or that patrol ship.” York shook his head. “But I don’t think their race is here at all. This Cepheid sun sheds an extremely variable radiation. Any planet here must have a range of temperature that shoots Sun frigidity to super-tropical heat every twenty-two days. Evolution must have balked at trying to adjust creatures to such rapid changes.” He laughed gratingly. “And in the first place, I can’t signal an SOS. There’s a new radio principle here, too.”

He faced around haggardly.

“Only one chance, Vera. If I can get one little rocket working, we can land safely on that planet.”

While the world enlarged to a dull slate orb in the next month, York laboured without sleep. He took drugs that would have killed a normal man, and phosphate foods that went directly to his brain without feeding his body. He trusted his tremendous vitality and the cosmic-fed radiogens to keep him alive.

A week before the deadline, a tiny clue came to him—for the first time. the basic laws of the new universe dimly formed in his striving brain. Earth scientists, thousands upon thousands of them, had taken several centuries to piece out the natural laws of Earth’s Universe. Alone, in two years, York began to note down the first fundamental rules in a totally new and strange universe where even light-waves slowed down.

“Newton’s Third Law, the one applied to rockets, has a clause here! The higher the energy, the slower the reaction. It’s almost backward. That means a slow-burning fuel will do the trick where an explosive one won’t. Now I’m getting somewhere.”

“Hurry, Tony!”

The planet loomed now like a giant blue moon.

Hastily York constructed a wide rocket tube at the stern. Loaded with slow-burning phosphorus, it belched forth—clouds of smoky vapour. It would be useless as a rocket in Earth’s Universe. But here it propelled the ship forward with amazing power.

York skilfully maneuvered the ship into a spiral course around the planet barely in time to stop a stone like plunge. It lowered screamingly into the atmosphere. The globular craft landed, just before consuming the last of their phosphorus supplies. York and Vera were thrown violently against the wall.

Vera crawled to her husband, weeping in mixed joy and fright.

“Tony, we’re safe! The ship held. Tony!”

Groggily he opened his eyes, stilling her alarm that he might have been killed.

“Yes, made it,” he mumbled. “New universe can’t beat us. Now let me sleep awhile—”

He slept for three days. When he awoke, he devoured the enormous quantity of hot foods Vera had held ready. York relaxed with a sigh. Then he reverted to normal after an ordeal that might have shattered the mind and health of an Earthly mortal. He relaxed only for a moment. Then he was at his instruments, testing outside conditions.

“Air unbreathable, mainly hydrocarbons. Temperature minus one hundred twenty, but rising. The Cepheid sun is building up to its maximum.”

They looked out over the alien world. It was fiat, barren, blanketed with white, frozen gases. BM these were dissipating slowly, swirling up into the atmosphere.

In a week’s time all the white gas-snow was gone. The previously barren loam stirred with life. Weird, saw-edged plant life burst forth and grew amazingly, at a visible rate. As the Cepheid luminary rose to its maximum, it poured down a flood of hot blue rays. Almost abruptly the environment became tropical. Pseudo-palms and ferns reached for the sky.

“Life, after all,” marvelled York. “But probably only plant forms, enjoying a brief ‘summer’ of less than two weeks before the Cepheid’s decline to ‘winter’ radiation.”

He made a sudden exclamation.

“No. I’m wrong again. See those scuttling little forms among the grasses, like rabbits and weasels? Animal life! Nature is more persistent than I thought. Well anyway, I’m almost sure rational beings could not have arisen.”

“I think you’re wrong again, Tony.” Vera smiled. “Look there, just over the horizon. I saw it before you awoke. In the telescope it looks like the top of a transparent dome. It may be a city.” She gasped suddenly, in remembrance. “Tony, suppose it’s the city of the patrol ship!”

York started, but spoke calmly.

“Suppose it isn’t. I’ll take a look at that dome. I’ve been trying for ten days to adjust our gravity engine, without result. If there are intelligent beings, and if they’re friendly, I can get the data from them. Or at least a few pointers about this crazy universe’s laws.”

Vera looked worried when he turned to leave.

“You’re unarmed, Tony, and on a strange world. Please be careful.”

“I won’t take any chances,” he promised. “Well keep in telepathic rapport all the time I’m away.”

Clad in his spacesuit, equipped with oxygen and temperature, control, Anton York moved off into what had become semi jungle. As he suspected, the life around him was unstable. The trees were so pulpy that they fell apart at a push. A little spidery-legged creature with feathers ran against his boot. The soft blow killed t. It’s body withered away on the spot. In its place, transparent grass shot up six inches in a minute and then crumbled in a gust of wind.

Swift life and swift decay was the rule here.

York plodded on He felt like some wanderer in a ghost forest, or a jungle-man treading primeval wastes. All the science, weapons, command of natural forces that he had wielded in his own universe were nothing here. He was unarmed, helpless. In direct ratio to his distance from the ship, he grew more worried. What if that dome actually did hold the ruthless aliens who had annihilated the Three Eternals without a second’s hesitation?

For the first time in 2,000 years, York felt insecure. Before, visiting hundreds of worlds, he had felt himself at least the equal of any other beings.

He resolved to use extreme caution when he reached the dome.

“That’s right, Tony,” came Vera’s clear telepathic voice. Slumberingly-is thoughts. “At the slightest sign of danger, race back.”

York came upon the dome suddenly. It was fringed about by rampant life blooming under the maximum rays of the Cepheid sun. He gasped. Of clear transparent material, its arc of curvature indicated that it must be at least ten miles in diameter and a thousand feet high at the peak. Only intelligence could have built, the structure—first-class intelligence!

A second shock came when he looked in. He had expected a city, a mass of buildings, dwellings, busy crowds performing their daily tasks, bustling civilization, protected under the dome from the constantly changing environment outside. Such should be the logical explanation for this mighty, arcing shell.

But instead—attack.

The scene inside was that of another world. Not a city, it was simply a stretch of rocky greenish ground, with patches of red vegetation. Here and there tall, red-needled trees, like weird pines, blocked the view. The atmosphere around was misty. The whole scene was in stark contrast to that outside the dome.

Did the intelligent race prefer to live in such a back—to nature setting? Why should a titanic dome, the product of super-science, enclose a queer bit of pastoral scenery? Was it a park perhaps, or some sort of a playground?

York found no answer as he trudged halfway around the dome. It was all the same inside, and apparently untenanted. That was most puzzling of all. But suddenly he saw movement. He strained his eyes through the distortions of the transparent medium.

Two furry creatures were slinking among a group of trees, within a half-mile of York’s position. He could barely make them out as apelike, walking erect on two legs. Their beads were remarkably large, denoting intelligence. Hand in hand, male and female apparently, they stumbled along. They glanced back at times, as though being stalked.

Abruptly another form lunged from behind a patch of red-berried bushes. It was a monstrous form, blubbery of body, revoltingly naked. Little stumpy legs moved it forward lumberingly—It had no claws. Its small head, bearing two saucer eyes, was perched on a long serpentine neck, giving it a periscopic view in all directions.

It looked, somehow, like a cross between a snake and walrus. It was repulsively ugly, but not formidable.

York watched as the two ape beings caught sight of the monster and ran with obvious fear. The beast lumbered after them clumsily. York, unconsciously loyal to the two beings more like himself, breathed in relief for them. They could easily outrun the horror.

But strangely their steps faltered. As though they had run into an invisible lake of syrup, they slowed down, their bodies straining futilely. At last the ape-man faced about, flinging the woman creature behind him. He awaited the attack of the monster.

“The ape-man will win,” York told Vera by telepathy, having transmitted the episode. “The monster, though large, has no claws, or biting jaws, or any air of strength. The ape-man should have faced it in the first place. One twist of his powerful hands on that long, thin neck and he can tear the beast’s ridiculous head, off. The beast is the one who should run.”

The ape-man, as though under York’s orders, leaped forward to grasp the thin neck with his gorilla like hands. But again something dogged his efforts. His arms fell helpless. He stood rigid. He made no move to escape as the beast whipped out a rubbery tentacle, wrapped it around his neck, and choked him lifeless. Then the tentacle’s end probed into the corpse like a proboscis, and drained the dead ape-man to a bloodless husk.

3

ANTON YORK tried to break his gaze from the revolting scene. He saw the woman-creature stalk forward like a robot and submit herself to the choking tentacle and draining of blood.

With a final effort, York wrenched his eyes away. In the act, he knew why it was so hard.

“Hypnosis!” he breathed. “That horrible monster fascinates his prey as a snake does a bird, and the victim is doomed.”

“But why do the builders of the dome, who must be higher life-forms than the ape-creatures, allow that to go on?” Vera’s telepathic tone was shocked, unbelieving.

“I don’t know,” returned York. “There’s some amazing mystery behind this. The dome-builders might be those same aliens of the patrol ship. I just glimpsed another dome, Vera, a few miles away. I’m going to that one and find out what I can.”

“Tony, I’m worried. There is a terrible menace in all this. Please come back!”

But Vera knew that her husband wouldn’t. Quite aside from his own problems and danger, York’s scientific curiosity had been aroused. He had never, in all their travels among strange worlds, left a mystery unsolved.

The second dome, when York arrived, was exactly like the first in size and shape, enclosing a space about ten miles in diameter.

But the scene inside was vastly different. The ground was sandy and speckled with clumps of oddly shaped cacti life. The air seemed thin and clear, with heat ripples streaming down from the peak of the dome, where a huge gleaming apparatus hung suspended.

York quickly discovered mangy, lean creatures similar to Earthly wolves. They loped after and caught smaller animals, in this cross-section of an alien desert.

Suddenly, from behind a towering rock formation, stabbed a hissing—ray. It struck a wolf creature, electrocuting it. York stared as the wielder of the electric gun ran from concealment.

At first glance, York understood why its movements were stiff and awkward, why its skin glinted metallically. York knew it be a silicon being, one with silicon atoms replacing those of carbon. Intelligence reposed in the flint-scaled face, though it was dead of expression.

The silicon-man took out a sharp knife and began slicing the carcass. With a flint he struck fire, feeding it with twigs of dried cactus. He rolled a strip of flesh in the sand, then toasted it over the fire, finally gobbling it down with relish. Within his stomach, York surmised, some strange chemistry of digestion replaced the carbon atoms in the flesh-food with silicon atoms from the sand “salt.”

As the silicon-man began a second strip, there was an interruption. A large form ambled from behind the rocks. York had to look twice, for it was the same repulsive type of beast that had killed the two ape-creatures in the other dome!

It came forward confidently. The silicon-man heard its approach. He whirled about, drew his ray gun.

“Give it to him!” York found himself urging the silicon-man. “Shoot the beast down.”

The crystal-man seemed to make every effort. His gun pointed and his body trembled, but no shot was fired. Eyes fastened on the beast’s saucer orbs, he stood as rigidly as a statue. Hypnosis again! The beast seemed to give a silent signal. With what might have been a curse, the silicon-man picked up his knife, holstered his gun, and trotted away. He looked back once, shaking his fist in a manlike gesture, but with an air of helplessness.

The hypno-beast promptly inserted its sucking organ into the wolf creature’s corpse and drained it dry of blood. It could not use the silicon-men as food. But it still had the demoniacal power of chasing them away from prey they had killed.

What was the answer to this amazing riddle? The hypno-beast in two domes, in two different environments, lorded it over other life forms. Why had the builders-done this? They could be neither the ape-men, the silicon-men, nor the hypno-beast. For all had obvious shortcomings as beings of great intelligence.

Who were they? Where were they? Why had they built these domes? Were they the ones who also patrolled space?

Driven by the mystery, and suspecting a. third dome, York scanned the horizon and spied not one, but two more. He struck out for the nearest. So impatient that he sidestepped for nothing, he bowled over pulpy trees and fragile ferns with his swinging arms. He left behind him a trail of trampled vegetation that was already regrowing behind him.

The third dome was identical with the others. He would have been startled if it weren’t. And the scene within, as he expected, was totally different from the other two domes, and also from this planet’s indigenous environment.

It was a cold setting, in the third dome. White snow lay over all, sprayed down at times from an apparatus suspended under the dome’s peak. Hardy vegetation existed here that had the peculiar power of motivation, like animal life. Stubby rootlets slowly inched forward the low trees and bushes, seeking a nutritious spot in which to sink the feeding roots. Shaggy white forms, almost invisible against the white background, sneaked among the moving vegetation. It must be bitterly cold in there, far colder than any spot on Earth, perhaps duplicating the frozen wastes of Uranus’ moons.’

York stared, startled by something.

“Vera, listen as I describe—” When he had finished, he asked: “Does it remind you of anything?”

After a moment her psychic voice came back excitedly.

“Yes. It does sound exactly like the fifth planet of 61—Cygni, which we visited over a thousand years ago. But Tony, that was in our Universe! How could that exact setting be here?”

York made no answer. He was watching a scene within the dome. It had a larger scope than he had at first realized. A small city stood under one part of the shell overhang. Solid ice blocks and snow cement composed the square buildings, decorated artistically with shaped icicles and patterned snow crystals. York had seen the same structures on 61—Cygni, unless imagination had filled the gaps of memory after a thousand years. Water was the staple budding material, with temperatures ranging far below zero at all times.

Such was the city. The inhabitants were squat quadrupeds, their four, feet flattened smooth so they could glide over snow and ice on these natural skis. All other surfaces of their bodies were covered with fluffy, warm feathers. They were warm-blooded creatures. Their beaked heads held large, intelligent eyes.

At the moment, excitement reigned in the village of snowbird people. The males had collected on the flat roof tops, swinging around catapults of leather and wood. They knew nothing of smelting or metals in their low-temperature environment. The boiling point of water was to them the blast heat of a high temperature furnace.

The attack they prepared for came. York’s snow-blinded eyes hadn’t even noticed the body of white forms rushing across the open stretch before the village. They were of the same race. York cursed, as he had always cursed over the civil wars of the human race.

The catapults thumped, slinging blocks of hard ice upon the attackers. The latter stood their ground, setting up giant catapults of their own. Great bombs of hard, crushing ice arced into the village, cracking through walls and ceilings. The attackers were numerous, the besieged few. Perhaps this was the final assault of a long series of battles. The patched village crumbled, and the defenders were decimated under the bombardment.

York knew that hours had passed. He had watched with a fascinated wonder. In what way did this little battle, in a ten-mile patch of winter-world under a dome, fit in with the general mystery?

And then York saw the finale. From the distance, where they had been concealed by a mound of snow, came a group of naked hypno-beasts! No extreme of environment seemed to bother them. They passed among the victorious attackers, who advanced robotlike into the village. This was hypnosis control on a large scale. The hypno-beasts had directed an army of the bird people against the bird people’s own kind! The beast-masters browsed through the village, probing their tentacles into dead bird-men, feeding well of victims killed by their own brethren.

York ground his teeth in loathing and rage at the hypno-beasts. Surely in all the two universes, there could not be a more revolting, dangerous form of life. For a mad moment he beat with his gauntleted fists at the transparent wall that separated him from the monsters, as though to charge in and challenge them. The shell felt as solid and unshakable as foot-thick steel.

“Tony, control yourself!”

York relaxed. “Vera, there’s some answer to this. I won’t give up. I’m going to the next dome—and the next—”

Three days passed. York again went sleepless and without food, drawing on the super-vitality with which the elixir of immortality had endowed him. He visited a dozen more domes.

In those dozen domes were the environments of a dozen different worlds. The creatures who roamed within ranged from wormlike crustaceans to great, scaly dinosaurian forms. Intelligence reposed in anything, from a dog-sized spider to a ten-foot high mammoth.

In one dome, blobs of liquid life were held together by thin skins. Rolling through a noisome, swampy purgatory, they devoured everything after spraying out a vicious poison whose touch was fatal.

Most of the intelligence levels were low, held back by inhibiting environments. But in one dome, tailed and fine-fingered beings had mastered a great science. Here too was civil war, with most of—the beings dominated by the hypno-beasts, slowly conquering the rest.

The hypno-beast was in every dome! It was the sole common denominator of the baffling mystery. But what could be the purpose of the builders?

Trudging to the next dome, a queer phenomenon overtook York. With the suddenness of a dream ending, the flimsy life forms of the planet faded away. York watched the horizons melt down, as all the vegetation went to seed, dried to brittle dust. He looked up. The Cepheid sun had passed, its maximum. Temperature was declining rapidly, and the short “winter” was approaching.

In the space of a few hours, the planet’s surface was bare, wind-swept, as he had first seen it. He was on a high knoll, and when he looked around, he gasped. Within his range of vision now were dozens—no, hundreds—of the domes, in all directions. They marched down the horizons as—though beyond them were hundreds more.

York was suddenly struck by something vaguely familiar in the sight. He squinted his eyes so the wide sweep of the planet below and the sky above were narrowed.

“Vera!” he telepathed excitedly. “I think I know now, partially. This is like a vast laboratory. Those domes are bell jars, in some stupendous series of experiments. The dome builders are the scientists. The creatures within are guinea pigs of this macro-cosmic research!”

“That sounds logical, Tony,” Vera returned. “But for what purpose? And why should there be hypno-beasts in every dome?”

York pondered.

“The answer might be simpler than we suspect. The builders must be super-scientists, greater than any we’ve yet met. I am not excluding the Three Eternals and ourselves. They have roamed all through this universe, carrying back ‘samples’ of various worlds. Like biologists breeding cultures of mice or fruit-flies, they are carrying out a tremendous observation of hundreds of life forms. This must have taken centuries. The purpose behind it must be something vital to them. What can it be? Hundreds of life forms from all over their universe, pitted against the frightful hypno-beasts—”

“From our Universe, too!” interposed. Vera. “I remember that winter-world of sixty-one Cygni clearly. The one under the third dome you visited was from there. Tony, what does it all mean?”

York had now approached the next dome.

He glanced in Again he gazed upon an alien scene. Leafy green trees dotted a woodland sward of rich emerald grass. The air above was blue, Puffs of soft clouds drifted’ down from an apparatus at the dome’s peak.

Not far beyond, a field of golden grain rippled as a warm breeze rustled over it. Several four-legged, horned and hoofed bovine creatures grazed on the grasses beside a brook that wound through sylvan glades. Little bright-coloured birds piped from high branches, though York heard no sound through the transparent shell. A red-furred animal crept forward and suddenly leaped. A startled white-furred creature bounded away like a rabbit—

“Tony, don’t you recognize it?” Vera’s psychic voice was tense, as she read his transmitted description. “It’s our own Earth!”

4

YORK jerked violently. He had been staring impersonally, as he had at all the other alien environments, without realizing it was shockingly familiar. The blind spot in his brain had suddenly been dissolved.

“Vera, you’re right!” His telepathic voice was a whisper. “It’s a ten-mile section of our own native world, down to the last blade of grass. Good Lord, if there are Earth people here and hypno-beasts also—”

Abruptly York’s whole perspective changed. Before he had been scientifically fascinated, altruistically enraged at the dominance of the hypno-beast in each dome over races with which he felt no kinship. Now the hot blood pounded in his veins. In here must be his own people, his own kind. The race that had given him birth. The people with whom, though he was half a god above them, he felt the ties of blood brotherhood.

“The builders!” he shouted aloud in his suit, stunning his own ears. “Where are they? I must find them. They can’t do this—”

He broke off. Something within the dome had caught his eye.

A man and a girl emerged from the shadowy forest, scaring away what York now recognized as a fox and a rabbit. They peered carefully in all directions and then advanced into the field, toward the cows. The man carried two empty buckets. Over his shoulder was slung a rifle like weapon, and in his belt was an unsheathed knife. Both were dressed in hides and woollens. The setting was pastoral, very near to the ancient pioneering days of America in the remote nineteenth century.

York knew nothing of those days personally. Earth for two thousand years had advanced to a much more scientific civilization. But the scene struck chords of aching kinship. This was a part of Earth, no matter if from a far past, and those two were his own people. If he could talk with them, they might explain this incredible mystery.

He pounded on the glass of the dome with his gauntlets and shouted, hoping to attract their attention. They were within a few hundred feet, but they took no notice. York desisted. Perhaps the dome was so polarized that they could see nothing but a blank gray wall.

York watched.

The couple reached the cows. The girl began milking, while the young man stood on guard, peering about cautiously. But gradually he became lax. His eyes wandered toward the girl herself. He spoke to her, smiling, and she smiled back. At times they laughed and he bent over once to touch her hair.

The love of a man and a maid—It was here too, under this prisonlike dome, on an alien world, in an utterly strange universe.

—“Tony, it’s wonderful and it’s horrible,” Vera said.“Wonderful that love can survive any twist of space and time,_ but horrible that these two have been taken from their home world. Do ,you suppose the builders watch somewhere, through some instrument, as if at ants?”

“Hush!”

York spied a slinking form among a patch of trees at the edge of the pasture. It was another man. He had unslung his rifle. He was kneeling now, taking aim for the man beside the girl.

York pressed his face against the dome glass and searched back of the man. He saw it suddenly, the pink-skinned, oily bulk of a hypno-beast. The man kneeling and shooting was under the beast’s dominance, ready to kill at his bidding!

York screamed in warning. Then, realizing the uselessness of that, he concentrated on hurling a. powerful telepathic warning. In all his wanderings throughout the universe, he had never yet heard of a substance that could stop the super-penetrative radiations of thought. But the dome did. His psychic vibrations rebounded with such force that they stunned his mind like a sledge-blow.

Yet perhaps the tiniest of thought impulses wormed through. The young man beside the girl turned uneasily, gripping the stock of his rifle. That move saved him for the time being. The shot ripped through the air from the ambusher, grazed his shoulder. Instantly he ducked, shouting to the girl. She flung herself flat in the grass, overturning the milk. The two cows lumbered away, lowing in fright at the sharp report. York filled in the sound sequences in his own mind.

Flat on his stomach, the young man unlimbered his rifle and cautiously raised his head, searching for his enemy. A puff of smoke from behind a bush and a shot that grazed over him gave him the clue. He fired back. A dozen shots were exchanged. One or the other was marked for death.

York ground his teeth when a shot from the attacker struck. In agony the young man doubled up, forming a better target. A second shot mercilessly crashed through his head. He sprawled out in death. The girl leaped up and flung herself on the body, weeping. Then she sprang to her feet and ran, as the victor came racing up, evidently to capture her alive.

Blindly the girl ran toward the dome shell. The man had cut her off from the concealing forest. Back of them the hypno-beast, who had instigated the tragedy, waddled up to the corpse. It occupied itself with its vampirish meal, as its brothers had over and over again in the other domes.

The girl was trapped. She ran to the dome wall and beat against it with her tiny fists, screaming. York moved to the spot. He saw her clearly, but she obviously saw nothing beyond the wall. She did not see that York stood there nearly mad with helplessness and fury. He could not answer the girl’s pitiful cries for help.

She turned her back to the shell as the man came up. He was young, too, not vicious in appearance at all. But behind his youthful features was the mark of mental slavery. He was the living zombie of the hypno-beast He spoke to her, and his face was strangely gentle.

York, no more than ten feet away outside the wall, was able to read their lips.

“Mara, why do you run from me? You loved me once. Come with me to our village.”

“Yes, I loved you once,” returned the girl, looking at him in pity rather than fear. “But now you are a slave of the Beasts. And you killed Jorel ruthlessly.”

“But only at the command of my master. I did not want to.” His eyes were pained and pleading. “Forgive me, Mara, and come to live with me. You did not love’ Jorel. What else have we to look forward to, save a little happiness, in this tiny world of ours?”

The girl’s eyes blazed. “Why did you not kill the beast, Master? Look, he squats there, unsuspecting. Shoot him!” “I cannot!” The man shook his head.

“Mantar—for me!”

He looked at her and suddenly his face grew determined. Whirling, he flung up the rifle, taking aim at the feeding bulk a hundred yards away. It was a large target. He couldn’t miss. York’s heart leaped in hope, as the girl’s must have.

But before a shot rang out, the beast’s serpentine neck twisted. Its saucer eyes turned hypnotically on them, as though it kept mental tab on its slave. Mantar made a tremendous effort to press the trigger. His whole body trembled. But, with a groan he lowered the weapon. The girl attempted to seize it, to do it herself. Now Mantar, under dominance, resisted her.

“I cannot,” he said wearily. “I’ve tried before. All of us at the slave village have tried before. We cannot break that horrible power the Beasts have over our minds.” He turned to the girl. “Mara, run! You are of the fortunate ones who can resist. Run for the forest. I think I can resist my master’s mental command long enough to let you escape. Hurry!”

He gave her a push. But the girl turned back, and flung her arms around his neck.

“I can’t. I still love you, Mantar. I will give you what happiness I can I will go with you.”

“No, Mara. It means slavery. Go, please.”

But the girl clung to him. Then it was too late. The Beast left its ghoulish feast and advanced. Arm in arm, the pair walked toward it, to return with it to the slave village. On their young faces was written the bitterness of their chained lives under this dome lighted by an alien Cepheid sun.

York turned away as if from an, unreal drama on some dream. stage. Tears of helpless rage misted his eyes. Two thousand years of travel and observation among many civilizations had not made him callous to the fundamental decencies of life.

“It’s awful, Vera,” he said dully. “If I were in my own Universe, I’d blast down this dome on the spot and wipe those Beasts out to the last cell. Here I’m helpless even to get in.” A determined note rang in his psychic tone. “But I will get in. I’ll come back to the ship and conquer this universe’s science laws, no matter how long it takes. And then—”

He was interrupted.

Over the bulge of the glass dome appeared a small ovoid ship. It swept down swiftly, darting back and forth as though searching. Instantly wary, York stood stock-still. Movement would betray him.

But the occupant of the craft seemed to spy him. It dropped down lightly and landed a dozen yards away. A hatch opened and a figure stepped out. In its hand glinted what could only be a weapon.

“Tony, what’s wrong?”

“Silence, Vera,” shot back York. “Don’t contact me again unless you get my signal. On your life!”

Obediently no telepathic sound came from Vera.

York transferred his attention to the visitor. He was a travesty of a man, with spindly legs and arms, thin flat-chested body, and delicate tentacular fingers. Sharp, shrewd features—peered inquisitively. Wearing no space-suit, he seemed perfectly at home in the bitter cold that York could not have survived for a minute. He breathed the hydrocarbonous air without discomfort. The forehead was low, topped by feathery hair, but the cranium in back bulged grotesquely. Intellect supreme reposed there.

“Who are you?” he demanded, in the universal language of telepathy. He answered himself. “You are obviously one of the J-X-Seventy-seven creatures. Earthmen, you are called. I was up in the conditioning apparatus when I thought I heard a powerful telepathic shout, and came to investigate. How did you get out of the dome?”

The being’s canny eyes looked at York suspiciously.

“Or did you come from Earth? A ship from Earth was recently intercepted. I thought I heard you exchange a telepathic message with someone. Have you an accomplice? Where is your ship?”

Staccato, peremptory questions, they were just like those shot at the Three Eternals, before they were destroyed.

York faced a dilemma, greater than any before. If he revealed the true story, the ship would be found, Vera captured. Both would then be helpless. York would have no chance to piece out the new science of this universe. He would have no future chance to face them, armed and powerful. These thoughts that flashed through his mind, he willed in a closed circuit, so the alien would not hear. There was only one solution.

“I have no ship,” he returned in broadcast telepathy, knowing Vera would also hear. “I was in the dome. I built this space-suit, hoping to escape. Somehow, a few minutes ago, the dome wall where I sought an opening suddenly weakened and I fell through. I don’t understand it. It, simply happened.”

York held his breath, Only one thing made the thin story plausible. The dome must be an energy shell, not a matter shell. This York knew from the fact that his telepathy had MA penetrated it. Matter was utterly transparent to thought. Therefore, if at times the energy shell could conceivably weaken in spots, one might fall through.

The being eyed him closely, suspiciously, but also with a certain disdain. It was not worth his continued attention.

“Come,” he said. “Back you go. You won’t be lucky enough to fall out a second time.”

He extracted a queer, flaring-ended instrument from his belt and trained it on the section of the dome wall nearest them. Some force sprayed out’ in a six-foot circle, neutralizing the dome force. A push sent York through, along with a rush of hydrocarbonous air.

When he turned, he saw only a dull gray wall, blocking off all view of the outside world.

5

HE TURNED. He was within the dome, in the transplanted patch of Earth. He knew no more than before of the scheme behind it all. But some of the people here might furnish clues.

He stepped forward eagerly. Only one thing bothered him—his completely severed connection with Vera. Within himself he prayed that she would not foolishly wander from the ship and into danger.

For now he knew that danger supreme lurked behind all this.

He walked a hundred feet before he thought of removing his suit. He slung it over his shoulder and went on. He drew in deep lungfuls of air that had all the peculiar tang and sweetness of Earth’s atmosphere. The builder-scientists had done a remarkable job of duplicating the Earth environment. It was pleasantly warm.

For a while, wandering through a cool forest in which birds sang and squirrels chattered, York lost himself in a pleasant sense of well-being, after the irksome period in the clumsy space-suit.

The sleep that he had long denied himself conquered him. He lay down in a soft patch of grass, passing off into restful slumber.

He awoke at a soft touch on his cheek.

Startled, he looked up into the face of a girl. It was a lovely face whose blue eyes and warm smile seemed meant only for him. The girl sat beside him, apparently having been there for quite a while.

“What is your name?” she asked. “I am Leela. I watched you sleeping. You are good to look at.”

York understood, though the words were a form of English queerly slurred.

“Anton York,” he returned, trying to ease his archaic accent to something approaching hers.

The name that would have made any contemporary citizen of Earth freeze into awe and incredulous wonder failed to bring more than a welcoming smile to the girl’s lips.

“An-ton Y-york,” she repeated. “Anton York. I like it. And you are nice. I love you!”

Without another word she threw her arms around his neck, kissing him. York gasped at the girl’s directness and pushed her away gently.

“Just a minute,” he objected, and for perhaps the first time in centuries, he stammered a little. Fleetingly he felt glad that the wall of force kept Vera from knowing about the kiss. “Certainly you don’t mean what you say—”

“But I do,” insisted the girl softly, kissing him again.

“Don’t you want me to love you?”

York had to think for a moment. And for a moment he glanced around dizzily, aware that the girl’s presence made the setting seem almost a paradise. Then his eyes caught a glint of pink skin a dozen yards away, behind leafy bushes.

Instantly the camouflage that had made the place seem so wonderful vanished. It was in reality a hell, in which the hypno-beast not only played man against man, but woman against man!

York pushed the girl away. The monster, divining that it had been seen, lumbered forward. Over York swayed the serpentine neck and gleaming eyes of the Beast, reminding him of all the tragedies he had seen, in this dome and the others.

York sprang erect. Their eyes locked.

York’s first impulse was to dash at the monster and twist its thin neck. But when he tried, he had the sensation of plunging into an invisible flood of force that tore at him and beat him back. It came from those glittering saucer eyes—the hypnotic force!

York tried to wrench his eyes from the Medusa stare that turned him to helpless stone, but failed. He fought the intangible force for a stubborn minute before he eased back.

Still he could not tear his eyes away. Now the force changed. Like a resistless gravity, it pulled him forward, but at the same time locked his arm muscles. He fought to strain backward against the ghostly hands that seemed to draw him forward. One step—two steps—He advanced like a bird caught in the spell of a snake.

The dome, trees, grass, girl—all had vanished. York saw only two enormous, deadly, compelling eyes that seemed to grow and fill the whole universe—He did not even see the quivering tentacle that stretched in anticipation for his throat.

But all the while, within York, something had been working. His subconscious mind gave the call of alarm. His immortality radiogens, stored with cosmic energy that constantly battled the poisons of old age and the raids of deadly germs, released a tide of power to his brain.

York stopped, stiffening, fighting the invisible force with renewed strength. The hypnotic force gave one final tug. York swayed, straining, and then took a step backward.

The spell snapped like the twang of a bowstring. York had won.

He leaped forward, but now in command of himself. The Beast bleated in fear, trying to run. York easily overtook it, grasped the neck and wrung it like that of a chicken. The head drooped on its broken neck. The hellish eyes glazed. The body thrashed wildly for several minutes before it finally lay still in death.

York stared at it with hands on hips, panting more in loathing and rage than exertion. Never in all his exploits had he felt more completely satisfied. He had destroyed a fleet of powerful ships once, and moved worlds, and wielded a godlike science. But here with his bare hands he had killed a repulsive beast. That was his supreme achievement!

After a while, he smiled in detached calm at the strange contrast between this event and the others in his stirring career. His thoughts were terminated by a pair of soft arms that stole about his neck.

“You have saved me-freed me!” Leela murmured. “Now I truly love you. Take me with you.”

York disengaged himself firmly.

“Leela, I have a wife. I’ve had her for a long, long time and wouldn’t change now!”

He wondered what she would say if he told her he was two thousand years old. He decided not to, for the present. “You have a—mate?’

“Yes.” York was relieved, for she did not press her attention. “Now—tell me about this beast, and you.” To himself he mused: “Beauty and the Beast.”

“The master brought me here, where the Free Ones often come. If we found a young man—as we did you—I was to lure him with me, away from any others. It was a hateful duty, please believe that. Then the Beast would either kill him or bring him back to be a slave. The Beasts use all sorts of means to reduce the numbers of the Free Ones. They are trying to kill off all those of the Free Ones who are too mind-powerful to become slaves.”

“You mean there are certain ones here who can resist the Beasts’ spell, like myself?”

The girl looked at him, puzzled.

“Surely you know that. Why do you ask questions as though you have never been here before?’

“I haven’t,” York said. “I came from outside the dome wall.”

She stared at him in sudden astonishment, at his strange clothes, at his oddly glowing eyes, the sign of immortality.

After a moment, shrugging helplessly, she answered his questions.

“Yes, many can resist the spell. And each generation there are more.”

“Generation!” gasped York. “You’ve never heard of me, Anton York? You’ve never been on Earth?”

“Earth? You mean the Original World, which our forefathers came from, they say. No, of course not. I was born here.”

“And how many generations have there been, according to that story?’

“One hundred.”

One hundred generations! At least two thousand years! For twenty centuries Earth people had been under this great dome, living and dying, in some gigantic experiment carried out by the dome builders. York shook his head. More and more it loomed as something vital and far reaching—and sinister.

“Do you know why this was done?” he pursued. “Why your forefathers were taken from the Original World and brought here? Or where the hypno-beasts came from?”

“I know little,” vouched the girl. “But perhaps at the village of the Free Ones some of the learned men know. Come, I’ll lead you there.”

Glancing at him in growing wonder, she turned. York followed.

The way led out of the small forest, into open land. There were more grazing lands for cattle and beyond lay a checkerboard of tilled fields with ripening crops. Nut-browned men laboured among them and waved greetings. They all had rifles and looked cautiously behind York and Leela to make sure they were not slaves of the hypno-beasts, on some sinister errand.

The village two miles ahead struck a chord of ancient memory in York’s mind. It was a stockaded camp, surrounded by a wall of high wooden posts with here and there a lookout station. Within were log cabins and horse-drawn wagons and buckskin garbed people. It was a setting that had vanished from Earth’s history since the nineteenth century. It was here, reincarnated and apparently jelled. Why?

York’s mind bristled with unanswered questions. He was impatient when an elderly woman spied them. She dropped an armload of kindling wood and hugged Leela.

“My child, my child!” she cried, yet with a stoic lack of tears in her motherly joy. “You are back. I thought I’d never see you again. It’s been a year. Leela, my baby—”

“He rescued me.” Leela pointed to York. An eager crowd formed around, shouting greetings to the girl who had miraculously returned from the slavehood of the Beasts. “He killed my Beast master with his bare hands!” She told the story.

The crowd gaped at York in awe. As much, York mused, as the peoples of the thirty-first century had gaped at him for moving worlds. Here he had done nothing more than wring a Beast’s neck. He hadn’t used a single scientific principle except that a broken spine caused death.

York made an impatient gesture and the girl understood. She led him to the center of the village where a two-storied cabin stood, guarded by two long-haired stalwarts with rifles. One of them started and greeted Leela with a hug and kiss. York smiled at her hungry response. It relieved him entirely of his role as hero-rescuer, with which she had girlishly surrounded him.

The young man stuck out his hand, after the story, and wrung York’s hand with a grip of steel. No weaklings, these men. Then he spoke hesitantly.

“According to custom, Leela is yours.”

“But I have a mate,” York returned quickly. “She is outside the dome wall.” He began to explain. Seeing their blank stares, he asked again for an audience with those in authority.

“You mean the Congress.” The young guard went in and returned after a moment, nodding. “They will see you.”

The Congress proved to be a group of ten elderly, gray-haired men, past the days of physical activity but wise in years and experience. They listened as Leela once again gave the details.

“It is a strange story,” said Robar, the head of the council. “Who are you, Anton York? I have never heard the name York among our people.” There was suspicion in his voice, and in all their stares. “You may be from the Beast village, sent as a spy. The Beasts try all sorts of tricks in their attempt to subdue us.”

The atmosphere became tense, and the young guard even raised his gun threateningly.

“No!” It was Leela who sprang to York’s defence. “Don’t forget I was in the Beast village for a year. The name is not known there, either. If he is a spy, so am I, for I came from the Beasts.”

The impassioned words served to heighten the tension, included the girl in their suspicions. York stepped forward with determination.

“Listen to me. I have lived for two thousand years. I was born on what you know as the Original World, in the twentieth century. In the year seventeen-seventy-six, thirteen colonies in a land called America declared their independence from a land across the Atlantic Ocean. They formed a Congress. Your Congress comes from that. In the following century, the thirteen colonies grew, pushing westward against redmen called Indians. Eventually the land stretched from ocean to ocean. There was a Civil War, the assassination of a great man named Lincoln. Then an industrial empire arose, oil was found, gold. A steam railroad spanned the continent. Buffalo herds were exterminated.”

Excitement grew in the men’s faces.

“It fits in with our legends,” whispered Robar. “The thirteen American tribes—the redmen—the Big War—buffalo vanishing.” He looked at York with sudden awe. “I believe you, Anton York. You have come from the Original World to help us?”

“If I can,” York nodded. “But first I must know all I can. What do your legends tell of coming here?”

Robar pondered, as though searching misty impressions handed down from father to son.

“Little. Until eighteen-eighty-eight, our forefathers lived on the Original World, in a village like this, called Fort Mojave. They fought the redmen at times. But one day strange flying ships appeared, against which their guns were useless. The whole village of a thousand men, women and children was forcibly taken here. At first there were no Beasts. They lived with little trouble, though sad at being taken for their home world. Then the Beasts appeared suddenly, and life became a constant battle against them. So it has been for generations.”

“But why were they brought here?” York queried. “And why were the hypno-beasts introduced into this bit of transplanted Earth?”

“It was never known. Not one glimpse of those mysterious people is recorded. Life has gone on, as it must. We have almost come to forget how it all started. All we concern ourselves with is the survival against the Beasts.”

York bit his lips. The mystery was still unexplained. The dome builders had not vouched one item of information to their bell jar specimens. Nor, probably, to any of the other kidnaped beings in all the other domes.

Rage shook Anton York. It was cold-blooded, autocratic, cruel if not actually vicious—this experimentation with generations upon generations of poor, marooned groups of beings. Something must be done!

6

IN THE following days, York found out all he could ever find out, under the dome itself. The village of the Free Ones housed about six thousand people. Their fields and hunting ground occupied a little more than half of the total space under the dome. Beyond a narrow river that bisected the area was the territory in control of the hypno-beasts and their mental slaves. It was understood that the slaves numbered about four thousand. But their life-span was short, for the Beasts bred them as food.

In all, then, there were ten thousand human beings under the dome, in this isolated bit of Earth. That meant over three hundred persons per square mile, more crowded than Europe had been before the scientific era of soilless crops! Under those circumstances, waging a grim battle against the Beasts constantly, science had not had a chance to advance. The few deposits of metal ores and important minerals had long since been worked out. Metal was hoarded like gold.

York’s observations included the river. It sprang from underground, near one dome wall, and vanished underground again at the opposite side. A thousand feet above, under the center of the dome, he could vaguely see the giant, gleaming apparatus that duplicated sunlight in regular twenty-four hour periods. At times it puffed out clouds, showers and even fogs. Outside the dome was a hydrocarbon atmosphere, a climate ranging from Uranian cold to Mercurian heat under a variable Cepheid sun. In here was a bit of Ireland or California.

The builders had done a perfect job. But why? The question rang like a gong in York’s mind. And gradually he came to have the feeling of being watched. He sensed eyes above that looked down, coldly and scientifically, watching over all and recording the pulse of life beneath. It was a maddening sensation.

York felt like screaming at times, though for two thousand years he had learned to control his emotions with almost god-like equanimity. The other people had come to accept dome life as normal, natural, and all else as illusion or legend.

York temporarily shelved the matter of the grand purpose behind all this. The immediate problem was the hypno-beasts. If he could do something against them, he would perhaps be foiling in some small way the scheme of the master-scientists.

One horrible thought lurked in his mind. Suppose the dome builders were propagating the hypno-beasts for the eventual purpose of dominating the universe with them?

“We hope to conquer the Beasts in due time,” Robar informed him. “In each generation a higher percentage of the children are almost completely immune to the Beasts’ hypnotic powers. For the first thousand years, the village of Free Ones was small and barely escaped extinction hundreds of times, but in the past thousand years our numbers have increased. Today we outnumber the slave group. In another few centuries—”

“Too long to wait,” York interrupted. “The hypno-beasts are semi-intelligent, but not scientific. Science can destroy them. How do your guns operate?”

Examination proved that the rifles were models of the flint-lock muskets of the nineteenth century. The bullets were of hard wood, to conserve metal. The propellant was powdered charcoal. Because of the peculiar laws of this universe, the mere firing of a pinch of charcoal had the power of guncotton, as York’s rocket had worked with slow-burning phosphorus.

“There’s some all-embracing equation behind it all,” York told himself. “If I could only find it, I’d have the power to wipe out the Beasts, blast down the dome, and face the master race—”

A horn sounded, on this third day. It was the alarm of attack. Instantly the village mobilized. Men marched to the river, York with them. The enemy troops had crossed in wooden boats and now lay scattered behind bushes and low hills. The Free Ones took to cover and it settled down to sniping.

York, with a rifle resting in a tree crotch, could not bring himself to fire at the figures he sighted now and then. They were human, after all, even if bent on killing their own kind under the command of the hypno-beasts. The Beasts were there, across the river, directing their forces by long-range hypnosis. York could feel the subtle pull of it.

The sniping dragged on for hours, till the Free Ones flanked and drove the attackers back. They did a revolting thing. Hoisting their dead to their shoulders, they deposited them on the other bank, at the feet of the Beasts, who then fed. That seemed to be the sole purpose of the attack, unless it was revenge for the beast killed by York.

The opposing forces left the river bank and vanished toward their village. The short battle was over. York watched as the Free Ones went among their dead and cut them in ribbons so that all the blood drained into the ground. The grisly business was done stoically. In the curious economy of the little patch of Earth, it served to foil any chance of the Beasts feeding on them, and it also fertilized the ground. Back in the village, York found the girl Leela standing among the wounded. She bravely choked back tears as she stared down at her lover’s white face.

“He will live,” she whispered. “But he will never walk again. He was paralyzed by a shot in the spine. Oh, Anton York, can’t you help me?”

She was suddenly weeping against his shoulder. York patted her soothingly, and then set his lips.

“Do you want to take a chance?” he asked her. “A chance that he will be whole again—or die?”

“I trust you, Anton York,” the girl said instantly.

He operated. Centuries before, against the day when some physical accident might try to rob him of Vera, York had studied surgical technique and become adept. With a skill that no Earthly surgeon had ever approached, he removed the bullet with a sharp knife. Antiseptic herbs that the people cultivated protected the wound. The young man passed into a restful sleep from which he would awake fully restored.

York waved aside the girl’s gratitude and shook a fist up toward the peak of the dome. Within him, rage had become a tidal force. They were playing at being gods up above, the merciless dome builders, unmoved by these tragedies.

They must be out to conquer the universe, breeding the horrible hypno-beasts as their scavenging horde! And it must be stopped.

But how?, York, super-scientist of Earth’s Universe, would have tried. But York, scienceless orphan in a new, unknown universe, was practically helpless.

A year passed. York spent most of his time with endless computations. For a blackboard he used a patch of sand and a stick. Again and again he laboriously worked out equations for the new universe’s master laws, only to find, by simple tests, that they were wrong. All the while he had the feeling of being watched. And to worry him further, what had become of Vera? Had she run out of food or air supplies? Had she been captured?

One day she seemed near him. He shrugged off the hallucination, but suddenly jumped up. It was her mental voice crying, faint and far away. York followed it like a radio beam and came to a portion of the dome wall where it was strongest.

“Vera!” he telepathed. Most of his mental vibration surged back from the wall, but some leaked through. “Vera, are you there? We’re taking a chance, contacting like this.” Then he became tenderly eager. “Are you all right, my darling of the ages?”

“Yes, Tony. I can see you. You look thin and haggard. I had to come. I’ve been distilling the planet air, and eating the pulp of the twenty-two day plants. I’m all right.”

York briefly recounted his year of separation from her.

“I’m all right, too, but I have to solve the master laws of this universe.”

“Tony, that’s why I came. I’ve been working on computations also. It came to me suddenly. Entropy, Tony—This universe has a lower entropy. Exactly one point one-six four. I measured it.”

It struck fire in York’s mind.

“That’s it, Vera! Good girl. But now, go quickly before the dome people detect you. I’ll work out the laws. I’ll wipe out the hypno-beasts, and then break out of the dome, one way or another.”

“Be careful, dear,” with that, Vera’s mental voiced moved away.

York returned to the village, his brain buzzing. Entropy, of course! Not only slower light, slower sound and “longer” space, but also a slower entropy—slower dissipation of energy in this universe. It accounted for the relatively high potential energy in slow-burning fuels. This universe had not run down as much as Earth’s Universe.

With this vital clue, York’s equations began to take life. Formulas dovetailed, and the ubiquitous zero did not always crop up to mock him. In another month, he had calculated the elements of a ray weapon, freed of the clumsiness of propellant guns.

He called Robar and the Congress to session. The men looked at him a little strangely.

“What is it, Anton York?” Rau asked. “We are not sure if you are a madman or not. For a year you have spent your time hunched over a plot of sand, making marks with a stick. What have you been trying to do?”

“Discover science for you.”

“Science? We do not even know the word.”

York began at the beginning. “After the tune of your forefathers, science arose on the Original World. Machines were made that do all things. Also weapons of war. Weapons, for instance, that blast things to bits. I am going to make one. I will need help and metals. Most of your rifles will have to be melted.”

Robar looked dubious. “It will be dangerous partially to disarm ourselves. And how do we know that you are not merely a madman?”

The gods must be laughing at the irony, York thought. But he could not blame them. They knew nothing of him, or even of science. York picked up a little quartzite pebble that he saw on the floor.

“If I make this stone shine in the dark,” he demanded, “will you agree?”

They nodded. York went out and returned with the radium capsule of his suit’s heating coil. Radium and radioactivity were two things not greatly changed by the new universe’s laws. Holding the radium point near the stone, it shone fluorescently, in the dark. The councillors exclaimed in wonder. The project began.

York met and conquered what seemed insuperable difficulties in the next six months. Metals had different melting points in this universe, glass had altered properties, and electricity had new values for its ohm, ampere and volt. But at last he had a workable radium battery that shot its current through a series of interlaced coils behind a convex mirror of polished steel. The whole was mounted on a large-wheeled base.

It was heavy and clumsy, and so crudely worked that even an artisan of the late Stone. Age might have laughed. But it held a giant of power.

At the final test, York clapped together the contact handles of his switch. Electricity pulsed through the coils. A field of strain surrounded a metal bar. Its end, at the focus, became a diamond of incandescence—and atomic disintegration. An energy ray of neutrons hissed from the cathode mirror. It stabbed invisibly for a lone tree which had been picked out as the target. The tree cracked in half, its mid-portion blasted to atoms.

The villagers cried aloud in fear and wonder, and their faces plainly said, “Witchcraft!” York wondered what they would say if they knew he had once, in his own Universe, moved the planet Mercury. Yet York himself was stirred by the simple blasting of the tree. It marked the first step in his conquest of the new universe’s laws of science and power. Back in his ship’s lab, if he could get there, he would be in a position to wield powerful forces—defy the dome builders!

But first, the hypno-beasts…

7

M-DAY reigned in the village. Every able-bodied male flocked to the banner. This was not to be a war, but a crusade against the hated Beasts. Once and for all under this dome, they would be exterminated. As York led his two thousand grim, determined men, he had the curious thought that in any earthly war they would be worth ten thousand other fighters. For in their breasts beat the tidal wave of hate nurtured for twenty centuries.

They crossed the river, most of them swimming, holding their rifles high. York’s machine was pulled across on a raft. On the opposite shore, in enemy territory, sentry-line retreated till reinforcement came. In a matched battle, York’s yelling men smashed through. They took prisoners wherever possible. For when the Beasts were gone, these poor mental slaves would again be free, normal humans.

The army marched on the Beast village. It was a sprawling, filthy mass of hovels, but suitably protected by a high wooden wall manned by riflemen. His approach was an open field. York’s men could employ no strategy except to scatter and crawl forward from clump to clump of grass. Bullets whined, picking them off.

York gave his instructions to Darrill, Leela’s young man, who was commander.

“Get your men as close to the wall as you can, without too much loss of life. Give me time to set up my machine and aim. Then rush in and mop up. Kill all the Beasts you can.”

Darrill nodded and his men crawled forward, like the plainsmen of old stalking the wily Indian. York went over his machine’s parts carefully, then aimed it for the nearest part of the city wall. He pressed the contact switch. His first blast went high, thundering harmlessly against the dome wall beyond.

His second struck. A ten-foot portion of the stockade burst into flying splinters. Two men, slaves of the Beasts, went with it as mere splinters of flesh. Again and again York knifed his switch, hurling detonations of neutrons, raking the village wall. It became a saw-edged ruin.

The village beyond was exposed to attack!

Now Robar’s forces arose and charged. The Beasts, in their quasi-human cunning, rallied their slave-men to the breaches. They poured a withering-fire at the attackers. York hated to do it, but he swept his super machine-gun across the defenders’ ranks. Slave-men and Beasts fell in bloody tangles.

Robar’s forces reached the village, stormed in, and began mopping up. Since most of them were at least partially immune to the hypnosis, by heredity, they promised to make it short work.

York stood tensely. Why hadn’t the dome builders interfered? He had half expected it. He was prepared to swing the snout of his super-gun up, if they appeared, and blast venomously at them. If they, had some weapon ready at the dome’s peak, and fired down, York would blast down the dome even if that meant a choking death.

It was a grim moment, for that was York’s first challenge to the dome builders. But not a sign came from the mysterious watchers.

The Beasts in the village did not accept extermination so easily, however. York had not noticed what went on at the back of the village, where a stretch, of concealing forest grew to the wall edge. He was suddenly aware of danger to himself. A force of hypno-beasts and about fifty slave-men were creeping up at his side.

Alone with his machine, York was surrounded. The men, at their masters’ commands, raised their rifles. A fusillade of bullets would riddle York and shatter his machine. Whatever the outcome of the village battle, York would meet his end.

Death and Anton York stood face to face.

Was this the way in which the dome-scientists were retaliating? Were they controlling the Beasts as they controlled the Slave-men, giving them the mental command to kill York?

York first darted his hand for the switch. At least he would take with him some of the enemy. A second thought clutched him. He had easily snapped, at first try, the hypnotic-power of the hypno-beasts he had once met. Suppose he hurled the full power of his mentality at them now?

In his two thousand years of life, York had come to learn something of the limitless depths of power within the mind. He had at times used hypnosis himself, and telekinesis. He rang out a call now to the cosmic fed radiogens of his brain. A field of force radiated from him. His mental force met and challenged the combined mental force of the five hypno-beasts.

A strange, silent battle was being fought there…

One lone man stood rigid, surrounded by five repulsive, rigid Beasts. No physical movement betrayed the fact that between them had sprung mental forces of tremendous magnitude. The slave-men cowered, mere brawling pawns in this psychic war. Whichever won, York or the Beasts, would command the slave-men to kill the other.

Perhaps a second passed, perhaps ten minutes. York felt the growing strain. Sweat ran down his face. His brain seemed to be burning alive as his immortality radiogens poured their energy into the field of mental force. He could not stand it much longer. His brain would burn out like an overloaded generator.

The ending was curiously undramatic. One of the Beasts seemed to sigh suddenly. It toppled over, head drooping on its serpentine neck, Medusa eyes closing. It was through, burned out! Another followed, then two more.

The last held out. Its eyes locked with York’s. York, reeling, called forth one more surge of mind energy.

The last beast toppled. With a snap, the spell broke. “Shoot the Beasts,” York commanded mentally.

Obediently the slave-men poured bullets into the fallen bodies. They jerked convulsively and died. York slipped to the ground, drained of energy, and fell into a state that was more of a coma than sleep.

When he came to, young Darrill was splashing water in his face.

“Anton York!” he cried joyfully. “The village is ours! We killed many of the Beasts. But about half escaped, running to the woods.”

York pulled himself together.

“No time to lose,” he said. “Organize a Beast-hunt. String your immune ones in a wide line and drive the Beasts into the open, past my machine. Every last one must be exterminated.”

It took a week. The immune men, like beaters driving wild game past hunters, herded the panic-stricken hypno-beasts at will. Whenever they were in the open, York’s neutron gun blasted into their numbers, ripping them to quiver bag shreds. It was not till Robar’s men had roamed for twenty-four hours without finding a Beast that York nodded in satisfaction.

“There is not a single Beast left in this ten-mile patch of Earth,” he announced.

But at the same moment, a lumbering form charged from a patch of bushes. It was the last of the Beasts. It seemed berserk, coming forward against a thousand rifles and the blasting-gun.

“Wait!” York yelled, as the men took aim with their guns. “Surround him. Bring him here alive.”

A dozen men dragged the struggling, bleating creature before York. Hiding his loathing at its blubbery, oily body and snakelike head, York addressed it by telepathy.

“Can you understand me?” he queried. “Will you answer my questions?’

“I understand you,” came back clearly from the hypno-beasts, confirming York’s belief in their semi-intelligence. “I will answer questions only if you promise me speedy death. I do not wish to live here, the last of my kind.”

York agreed. “Tell me this. Do you know why you are here, under a dome, pitted against Earth people?’

“No.”

“You don’t know why your kind have been put here, in hundreds of domes, pitted against hundreds of life forms?”

“I did not know of the other domes.” The creature was obviously startled. “I wonder—” His thoughts trailed to nothingness.

“What is your native world?”

“The planet system of another sun, according to a legend of ours. I was born here, of course. A long time ago, our progenitors were brought here to this dome.”

“And you have no idea why?”

“None. Now give me death.”

York gave the signal and a fusillade of bullets snuffed out the life of the last hypno-beast under that dome. York looked up. Were the dome builders staring down, watching in mockery? His hatred and loathing of the Beasts swiftly transferred to them. Why hadn’t they interfered? It must be against their plans to have the hypno-beasts wiped out under any one dome.

The maddening enigma of it grated York’s nerves. Was he a pawn in their hands? Or would he have the chance yet to do something, before they were quite aware of who he was and what he planned? If he could only get to his ship!

York worked rapidly. He altered the adjustments of his machine so it would radiate sheer energy. The scientific laws of this universe were no longer a mystery to him. He had the machine dragged to one part of the dome wall, and donned his space-suit. Its oxygen unit still held a trickle of the life-giving gas.

He faced the people he had freed of an age-long menace. “I am leaving the dome. But I will be back soon, to free you and return you to Earth. I swear it.”

He stepped through a patch of the energy wall, neutralized by his machine’s counter energy. Like a god he vanished from their sight, as he had so often from the people back on Earth.

Beyond the dome wall, he crouched for a moment, quietly, warily. Would the dome builders pounce on him now, like a cat on a mouse? But nothing happened.

York left the dome, treading through a pulpy jungle. The Cepheid luminary was just at its periodic maximum, shining as a blue-hot sun. The outer coating of York’s suit, a product of his advanced science, threw off waves of blistering heat.

He reached the ship, not daring to call Vera mentally before that moment. He jerked the lever of the air-lock and rushed in.

“Vera!” he called vocally. “I’m back. Vera—”

There was no answering sound in the cabin. York ran through the storerooms and laboratory before he knew the truth. Vera was not there! At first he felt almost physically sick. Then York’s nerves eased. Perhaps she had merely stepped out to gather pulp food. Guardedly he sent out a mental call, extending its range slowly in a widening circle about the ship. When no answer came, he recklessly swept a circle a hundred miles around.

Still there was no answer. Vera could not possibly be within range without answering—if she were alive.

York’s eyes went bleak. There was only one answer. The dome, builders had discovered the ship and captured Vera!

The icy rage that swept through York’s veins at that moment would have made any of his past enemies—the fifty Immortals, Mason Chard, the Three Eternals—tremble in stark fear. No savage Stone Age man, losing his mate of a few years, could match the blazing agony that seared within York. Vera had been his love, his constant companion, for two thousand years.

York made a vow, in a cold, deadly voice.

“No matter what or who you are, dome builders, I will search you out. And if you’ve touched a hair of her head—” He could find no threat that was adequate.

8

ANTON YORK laboured for a month. He feared detection at any moment. Why didn’t the dome builders come back for him? Why hadn’t the ship been guarded? The sheer strangeness of it utterly baffled him. Vera, of course, would never betray him. But by adding two and two, they must know of York. Were they so all-powerful that they feared nothing?

In that month, York accomplished miracles. He worked at his gravity engine, a protective screen against weapons, and his own weapons. Before, the ship had landed almost a derelict. Now it was again a floating fortress of might, as it had been in his own Universe.

It was not miraculous. It was simply that York had finally solved the new universe’s master laws. It took only minor adjustments to fit his instruments and energy coils to work under those new principles. And by virtue of lower entropy—higher available energy—York’s ship was now a more formidable fighting craft than it had been in Earth’s Universe.

Seated at his controls, he raised the ship one day. Lightly as a feather it darted up. His energy coils drew power from the planet’s gravity field, like a sponge sucking up water. As a test, he shot into space and rammed his ship forward at the speed of light. He braked with his inertialess field to zero in three seconds, without feeling the slightest jar. The engines hummed smoothly, like a snoring giant.

As the test of his protective screen, he chased down a meteor and cracked into it at twice the speed of light. His screen shattered the huge stone instantaneously. His hull was untouched.

He chased down another meteor and turned his gamma-sonic weapon on it. The livid beam whiffed fifty millions of tons of matter away in twenty-five seconds. He was amazed himself. In his own Universe, where lower energies reigned, it would have taken at least twice that time.

Satisfied, he dropped back to the planet, hovering over the domes. He saw their full extent now. There was more than a thousand in all, occupying a good portion of the otherwise barren wastes.

York drew a deep breath. He felt better now, better than he had for the three years he had been in this universe. He was no longer a marooned, helpless being. At his fingertips again was super-power.

He pondered. What was he to do? How could he find the dome builders? And Vera? They seemed bent on ignoring him. He speculated the thought of searching the other twelve planets of the Cepheid sun. This one seemed to be merely an experiment station. Find their center and confront them—

York smiled suddenly. He had a better idea. Ignore him, would they? His hands moved to the controls. His little globular ship dropped toward a dome. York sprayed down energy neutralizing force and his ship dropped through the dome wall into its interior. The wall reformed back of him. He was within. This was the very first dome he had seen, with its pathetic ape-race dominated by the hypno-beasts.

To the denizens of the dome, it must have seemed like the visitation of a god. The globular ship darted around like an angry wasp. Whenever a hypno-beast appeared, a ray stabbed down, and a puff of black soot replaced the Beast. In an hour, York had cleared the dome of every lurking hypno-beast. At the last, he hung over a crude village of the cowering, trembling ape-people, hurling down a mental message.

“You are free of your enemies! You will be returned to your home world eventually. I, Anton York, say it!”

This last was a challenge to the dome builders. From dome to dome York went. He freed the snowbird people of their hypno-beasts, and the silicon-men, telling both that they would be returned to their home worlds. Then he rocketed to other domes, raying down the hypno-beasts relentlessly. Intelligent they might be, and as deserving of their own existence as any other race. But their connection with the dome builders branded them, in York’s mind, as inimical, only deserving extinction.

Dome after dome, and the hunt sang through York’s veins lustily. This was the sport of the gods! But suddenly the cold shock of mason doused his mind. Another ship appeared before his, going from one dome to another.

Instantly York became cold, wary.

The dome builders had finally answered the attack he had made against their domes. He put his protective screen up to full power. No matter what weapons they had, he knew his screen would stand at least a few minutes of battering. He could flee, as a last resort, if his own weapon failed. Out in space, he knew a hundred tricks for eluding pursuers. There was no immediate danger.

He had tensed himself for attack, but it did not come. Instead, from the Ione ship, came the clarion voice of telepathy.

“You are Anton York, of Earth?”

“Yes. You have my wife, Vera, in captivity. My first demand is that you release her. Secondly, your dome experiment whatever it is, must be stopped. The various races must be returned to their own worlds.”

The psychic voice that came back seemed to be laughing. “Indeed! You have appointed yourself champion of the universe, Anton York?”.

“Call it what you want,” York shot back. “I only know that those races are suffering. They have been for too long under the dominance of the hypno-beasts. The Beasts must be destroyed to the last one.”

The other being seemed to stop laughing and became very sober.

“Exactly. And now we have found the way.”

Startled, York almost bit his tongue.

“You mean you have wanted the Beasts destroyed? Your long, elaborate experiment is for that end? But why—”

“I will explain all. Come with me to our main world, the Ninth planet.”

“Wait! If this is trickery, I have a powerful weapon.”

As answer, a tongue of queer green light suddenly sprang from the alien ship. It licked greedily around York’s ship. His electro-screen melted away as though it were cotton. The tip of the green tongue flicked against the hull and gouged out a chunk of meteor-hard metal, with the ease of a whip flicking off a patch of human hide.

York felt it as a tremendous shock that jarred through every inch of the ship, as if a mountain had been hurled down on him. He gasped. His screen, against which great meteors at the speed of light would have cracked to powder, had been pierced as easily by the green ray as a knife going through butter.

Illimitable power! Gigantic might! These the alien must have.

York had to know the full bitter truth. He tripped the lever of his great gamma-sonic weapon, training it dead-center on the other ship. The blast that emerged would have bored a hole ten miles deep in solid steel. It crashed against the alien’s screen, threw up a shower of sparks and dissipated. It dissipated like vagrant smoke. York was helpless.

“You see?” came from the alien. “We are supreme scientists. Your puny screen would go down in an instant, if I used any amount of power. But your death is not wished. Up to now we’ve patrolled space against possible expeditions from any planet. But we no longer have to. Follow me.”

York followed. They arose from the planet of domes and arrowed toward the Cepheid sun. Within an hour, at the speed of light they had neared the fifth planet. It was strangely like Earth, blue and cloud-wreathed. But only under the waning rays of the variable sun. Under its maximum rays, it must change to a hell hot purgatory, ten times more trying to life than the fierce humidity of Venus.

“You live under domes on your planet?” York queried, before they landed.

“No,” came back promptly, politely. “We live in the open. Our whole evolution has been adjusted to the periodic change. We live in frigidity during the wane, and in superheat when our sun waxes, and it is all the same to us. It is the keynote, Anton York, of the story I will soon have to tell.”

York’s ship landed, after the alien’s, in a wide field surrounded by a gleaming city that took his breath away. York had seen countless civilizations, but none so manifestly magnificent as this. He was aware of various subtle impressions. First, a vague air of sadness hung over the city. But it was an air of sadness that was lifting like mist under a bright sun.

Also, he noticed several ships, in the huge spaceport, hovering as though awaiting their arrival. They dipped. York was not sure, but the ships seemed to be saluting him! The burning mystery of it all, piled pyramid high in York’s seething mind. In some way, York, or something he represented, was a hero to these people.

He stepped out in his spacesuit, all thought of personal danger gone. The being from the other ship was like the one he had seen once before—thin, spindly, large-headed. His resplendent dress, of fine-spun metallic cloth, suggested high rank. By the deference of his crew and the others around, he must be of the highest rank.

“Yes, I am Vuldane,” the being returned, catching Bork’s thought “King of our race, the Korians. Follow me to my palace. Your wife, Vera, is there.”

York stepped eventually into a huge, glittering chamber.

He saw only one thing however. Vera stood in a spacesuit ahead.

He crushed her in his arms. He couldn’t say or telepath a word, at finding her safe.

“Tony, dear,” she said. “I worried for you. But I knew you would be brought here safely.”

She was amazingly calm. And behind her calmness was an odd, puzzled look. York looked around carefully. Suddenly he grasped her wrist. With his other hand he jerked a weapon from his belt, a smaller edition of his gamma-sonic force. He pointed it at Vuldane’s unprotected chest.

“Vuldane,” he snapped mentally. “I came here only to find my wife. Now, unless you want to die, command free departure for us from this planet. I’ll talk with you in space, later, if you come in an unarmed ship. I’ll give you three seconds.”

The king stood rooted in surprise, though not fear. York counted three then began to squeeze the trigger. But something knocked the gun down. It was Vera herself.

“Tony—no! It would do no good. They would hound you down. You must listen to their story first. And when it’s done, you will wonder yourself what is right and what is wrong.”

York holstered his gun. It had been a mad thing to do. But the past adventures, and the staggering mystery of it, had unbearably tortured his nerves. He whirled on the king, who seemed unperturbed.

“Tell me the story quickly. You are planning to conquer the universe?”

“No. We are too civilized for such paltry ambitions.” “All right. But you are propagating the hypno-beasts for some malign purpose. Revenge on another race?”

“No. We want the hypno-beasts killed as I told you. Every last one, if possible.”

“But why then the bell jar experiment? There is some threat to my world. I feel it. You want Earth?” “No. We do not wish your world, Earth!”

“Talk sense!” York groaned.

“Tony, don’t ask wild questions and interrupt,” Vera admonished. “Let him tell his story. Just listen.”

9

VULDANE nodded. “You would not have harmed me with your gun, by the way. This room is in an energyless field. No weapon works in it. Now listen. This is the story of our race—and our doom!”

“We evolved to intelligence a million of your years ago. Vera and I have compared notes. We did not evolve under this sun, but under the rays of another Cepheid, variable, at almost the other end of this universe. We lived there industriously and happily for a hundred thousand years. Then our astronomers announced that the sun was due soon to explode into a nova, killing all life on its planets. Cepheids are unstable stars.

“We had to migrate. But we had to find another Cepheid. And to make it difficult, we had to find a Cepheid with the exact period of waxing and waning that our original sun had—twenty-two days. Our biology, our metabolism, our very life-spark, is adjusted to that pulse beat, as yours is adjusted to a uniform condition.”

“I think I understand,” York said. “By analogy, on Earth, our most vigorous peoples are in the temperate zones, experiencing alternate winter and summer. Our tropical people are backward, and so are our Arctic people. We are adjusted to that variable pulse of life, though to you it would seem absolutely uniform. You, of course, are adjusted to a change from bitter cold to great heat, either of which would kill us.”

“Clearly put,” acknowledged Vuldane. “We found, after much searching, such a variable, and migrated to its planets. We set up our civilization and had another period of well-being. Then that Cepheid reached the explosion point. Again we had to search for a twenty-two day Cepheid—one with planets, which are rare—and migrate to it. We have migrated a dozen times in the past million years, Anton York. We are nomads of the cosmos, never knowing a true home.”

York felt the aura of sadness that suddenly radiated from the alien being. Certainly they were to be pitied for having been cursed to live under a temperamental star like a Cepheid, instead of a long-burning, stable sun, like Sol.

“We have been in this Cepheid system fifty thousand years,” Vuldane resumed. “Two thousand years ago our astronomers again gave out their sickening omen. This sun would soon explode. Again the packing up, the elimination of all but a comparative few to start the race over, the departure from loved homes, deserted cities, the trials of rebuilding a new civilization. That faces us again.”

“But why not migrate to a stable star and live under domes?” York objected. “You can duplicate any environment, as in the experiment domes. Surely you can duplicate your own.”

“Live under domes?” The alien shook his head. “It would stultify the race, wither it away. It is not a good life. Would your Earth people like it?”

York thought back to Earth’s colonization of the other planets. It was a tough existence. Young people aged rapidly. If Earth were to vanish, the remaining Earth race on other planets, in their sealed habitations, would die off through sheer strangulation.

“No, we must migrate to our type of sun,” Vuldane stated. His thought-voice changed. “But this crisis is sharper than all others have been in the past. We have combed our universe from end to end. Only one twenty-two day Cepheid is left, with a family of planets. The Cepheids of adjacent universes, like yours, are out of the question, for your astral laws are different. Our race would wither away as slowly but surely, in an alien universe, as under domes. We do not wish it. Thus that last Cepheid is our remaining hope. That is the last world possible for us! And now I come to that which affects your people—and the hypno-beasts.”

He eyed York a moment, as though reluctant to go on.

“That Cepheid has a family of ten planets, all inhabited by the hypno-beasts. Somehow their evolution inhibited them and they never became scientific. But they were endowed with the remarkable power of hypnotism. A kind of hypnotism to which our minds are peculiarly vulnerable. So strong did it seem that we doubted whether any minds could stand against it. But we had to find out.

“Thus we roamed our universe—and yours and others—and transplanted bits of inhabited worlds under the domes. We pitted them against the hypno-beasts. Our sole purpose was to find a race that could learn how to fight the Beasts, while using this universe’s scientific laws.”

The pieces all clicked into place abruptly, in York’s mind, with a stunning impact.

“I see,” he murmured. “A colossal search for a race of creatures parasitic to the hypno-beasts! A race able to resist the hypnotism and conquer the Beasts!”

“In broad detail, just that,” agreed Vuldane. “But for a long time we despaired of results. Most races succumbed to the hypnosis and became slaves of the hypno-beasts within a century or so. These we cast out as abortive cultures and procured new ones. In all, in the period of our long-range experiment, we have tried out more than ten thousand races, culled from seven universes!”

The staggering sweep of it overwhelmed York. Vera looked at him sympathetically. She had got over the first shock long before.

York looked at Vuldane, king of a driven, nomad race, in a new light. He and his people had the indomitable courage and never-say-die spirit that could only be admired in any race. York’s thoughts leaped ahead.

“Earth people,” he whispered. “Earth people are the ones!” Vuldane nodded, and somehow there was infinite regret in his manner.

“Yes, so it has proved. As with the many other races, we installed a thousand of your race in a dome, and pitted them against a control group of the hypno-beasts. One other remarkable, or damnable, attribute the hypno-beasts have. They are almost infinitely adaptable to any environment. They do not breathe oxygen. They absorb life energy from blood, any blood, and no extremes of temperature can stop them. We watched your race with avid interest for those two thousand years. We could not leap to conclusions. We used the true scientific method of thorough waiting. We watched as generation by generation your people developed immunity to the hypnotism. At the time you arrived, we had just about decided they were the ones. More, your rapid killing off of the hypno-beasts convinced us completely. Another race has developed immunity, but they do not have the scientific capabilities of yours.”

York knew he was grinning in a ghastly, mirthless way. “You mean,” he gasped, “that my coming decided you on my race, rather than the other? But I’m a special case. I’m an immortal among our race, and a super-scientist only because of that. You are overestimating—”

Vuldane smiled. “I cannot blame you for pleading in that way, trying to throw us off our decision. We know you are a special case. But you are still a sample of your race. The important thing is your race’s capacity for science. We will furnish all the science necessary to destroy the hypno-beasts.”

York pondered.

“You are supreme scientists. Why not simply ray down the beasts, with long-range beams from space, on their planets?”

“Do you think we haven’t tried everything possible?” responded the alien. “We did that long ago. We rayed down all their centers and cities. We tried to cover every square inch of their planets. When we thought we had reduced their numbers to a safe minimum, we built fortresses. The inevitable happened The Beasts rebred rapidly. They surrounded the fortresses in massed numbers, throwing their combined hypnosis within. Our people fell under the spell, were killed. The Beasts reigned again.

“You do not realize, Anton York, the tremendous power of their hypnosis in quantity. No minds in the universe can withstand it, except two. Those of your race and the non-scientific races.”

“No diseases sowed among them could kill them off?”

York queried. “No insect plagues them? Often it’s the little things that conquer the big.”

Again he got a withering smile.

“Before we used cultures of races, we gathered cultures of germs, worms, insects, crustaceans, plants. More than a million varieties of them, We sowed them among their planets. The hypno-beasts survived everything—everything. They are perhaps the most tenacious form of life in all the universe. Don’t forget we have been trying for twenty centuries. No, Anton York, only intelligence, immune to their hypnotism, will ever wipe them out.”

York shrugged. “I must admit a certain degree of sympathy in your problem. I appoint myself emissary to my world, to tell them of your need for help. How many Earth people do you think you need?”

York saw the stricken look in Vera’s eyes and prepared to hear a gigantic number.

“All of your people!” responded Vuldane softly.

York was past shock. He could only stare, as if turned to stone.

“All of your people,” repeated the alien. “It will not be a simple task, even with Earth people immunity, and our science given to them. The time is short now, before our sun explodes. We must move all your people to the Beasts’ planets, setting them up in fortresses which we will build. Many, perhaps most, of your people will succumb at first, till the following generations develop immunity. Finally they will wax strong, sweep out and conquer the Beasts completely. Then we will sow some disease among your people to kill them, and our new home will be ready for our occupancy.”

York’s psychic voice was a deadly hiss.

“By what right do you consider it your privilege to destroy my race to save yours?”

“By what right,” returned Vuldane, “do you consider your race more worthy of continuation than mine? We were civilized long before yours. If you think we are merciless in sacrificing an alien race for our benefit, what of your own race? To this day it fights among itself at times. We haven’t had internecine war for half a million years. Tell me, Anton York. Outside of your own personal prejudice, who is to judge whether we are wrong or right, except as necessity drives us?”

York could think of no answer. He knew now what Vera had meant before. It was the old story of Cro-Magnon man killing off Neanderthal. White men destroying the redmen of America. Earth people expanding into interplanetary space and the flower people of Ganymede dying out. On a grander scale, this was the same thing. A vigorous, highly civilized, powerful race was grimly holding onto its place in the sun. Could they be blamed?

York answered at last “No: There is no question of right or wrong in any scale of cosmic morals. But here is one thought, Vuldane. My people have millions of years ahead of them. Their sun is stable. You, on the other hand, are a doomed race. You will live another hundred thousand years in your new system, and then again that Cepheid will explode. Is it worth murdering my race, facing a million-year future, to save yours for one-tenth that? Can you pass into your inevitable oblivion with that on your conscience?”

“A strong point,” nodded Vuldane. “Except for one thing. Our astronomers have measured all the stars. A new Cepheid is being born in a certain star group. It is beginning to pulse slowly. In the slow timescale of the cosmos, it will not be a full-fledged Cepheid for another hundred thousand years. But if we gain our new breathing spell, as outlined, that Cepheid will be ready for us. And other Cepheids are being born, our astronomers note. Through them, we also have a limitless future ahead of us!”

York deflated utterly. He could already picture, in his mind’s eye, the nine planets of his sun, barren and deserted—human life gone. He looked up suddenly.

“All, you say, Vuldane. But there are more than ten billion of my race. Surely you can leave a few thousand behind, to breed our race again.”

Vuldane shook his head, with a combination of pity and ruthlessness.

“No. We dare not leave any of your race. Once they grew strong again, we would only have to destroy them later. Better that your race goes into total oblivion now.”

York could see that point, too. Knowing the crusade spirit of his own people, they would one day swoop down on the Korians, to right an old wrong. There would only be bitter interstellar war. The Korians, for their own sake, would have to guard against that.

And again it was not a question of right, or wrong, or cruelty, or anything in normal terms. This was something above and beyond such meaningless phrases out of Earth’s old law books.

“How much time is there?” he asked dully. “How soon before your Cepheid explodes into a nova?”

“Just a short thousand years. It will take all that time to bring your people, set them all in fortresses, and help them battle the beasts. And for us to migrate when that is done. The time is short.”

York drew himself up.

“Only one thing I ask, Vuldane.”

“Yes?”

“Before you begin taking my people, give me a certain time to try to figure out some alternative.”

Vuldane pondered. “The transference should begin immediately. However, it will take a year to complete our first fleet of ships capable of plunging through the space-time wall that separates our two universes. I give you that year, Anton York.”

Suddenly he thrust out his spindly hand.

“And good luck!”

10

YORK’S ship sped through the void at a pace that left laggard light far behind. His face was grimly set as, he took a course for the planetary system of the hypno-beasts. Vuldane had readily given the data.

“A year, Vera,” York said desolately. “A short year in which to save the human race! I must not sleep for that year Drugs will keep me going. Somehow there must be a way.”

“What do you expect to do among the Beasts?” Vera asked tonelessly.

“Anything,” York stated. “Anything possible.”

In a day they were there. The Cepheid sun was an exact duplicate of the one they had left. Its ten planets were large and widespread, fairly crawling with the hateful hypno-beasts. They had a semi-civilization. They bred whole races of creatures for their blood-food, for their ten planets of loathsome vampirism. Luckily they had no space ships. The whole universe—this and all others—would become theirs. They populated the ten planets simply through the accident of separate, parallel development.

York could feel the powerful beat of their hypnotic force radiating en masse from them. It dragged at his mind as gravity dragged at his ship. Recklessly he power-dived over one planet, spraying down his gamma-sonic rays, cutting a wide swath among them. The hypno-force clutched at him. Twice more he dived recklessly and barely won free the third time.

“Tony, please! It’s senseless.”

York nodded helplessly.

“I need a long-range projector. We’ll build one. No. We’ll have the Korians build us one.”

The ship sped back the way it had come. Vuldane readily agreed. Almost overnight his technicians turned out a super-projector for York’s ship and back he raced. With this he whipped his ship in a tight orbit around one planet and sprayed down the destroying rays in a band ten miles wide, from directly above the surface.

“If this works, Vera,” said in vague hope, “we’ll have a million more made. And I’ll go to Earth and get a million strong-minded men, and we’ll sweep every planet clean. The Korians weren’t able to get close enough to the planet.” But gradually he felt the finger of hypnotic force reach for him. His telescope revealed thousands of the massed hypno-beasts below, directing a combined hypno-ray upward at him. He kept up his deadly beam even when he felt, the cloying, insidious urge to drop down and yield to the Beasts. Sweat beaded his brow. God, what frightful mental power they had!

He had not watched Vera. Suddenly he noticed her at the locked controls, unhitching them and plunging the ship down. Her movements were jerky, robotlike. She was in a hypnotized trance.

“Vera!”

York left his gun and leaped for her. She turned on him, clawing and scratching. York bit his lip and swung his fist, knocking her cold. He zoomed the ship up, barely in time. His whole body had begun stiffening at the powerful clutch of massed hypnotism, from below. He whipped the ship into free space.

“Vera, forgive me,” he muttered when he brought her to with a dash of cold water. “Well, that’s out. The men from Earth would have as little, or less chance than I had.”

“Vuldane said they tried everything,” Vera murmured hopelessly. “Theirs is the only way. Setting Earth people down there, after blasting a space with their super-science. Letting them breed and produce immune generations. A thousand-year job, Tony—and we have only a year. It might as well be a second.”

York did not give up. He thought next of a screen against the hypnotic force. Back at the Korian world, he consulted with Vuldane.

“There is no screen against their hypnosis,” Vuldane stated flatly. “We have tried. You noticed that your mental telepathy barely worked through our energy wall. Yet that energy wall is absolutely transparent to their hypnotic force!”

“Still, I want to try,” ground out York desperately. “I must. Give me one dome as a proving ground, and all the materials I need.”

“Agreed,” nodded Vuldane quickly. “I sympathize with you, York. But I have no hope for you.”

York tried everything in the next few months. He had a group of chained hypno-beasts as control, and set before them shields of various composition. Metal alloys, plastics, radium-coated diamond, and then more subtle walls of electro-magnetic energy, cosmic rays, even a vacuum. In each case, stationing himself with the shield between, their hypnotic force came through undiminished.

Vuldane was right. There was no shield to that demonic mental vibration.

“Tony, please, you must rest,” Vera insisted as he staggered and would have fallen except for her arm. “You haven’t closed your eyes in months.”

But York went on, sleepless, taxing the superb vitality of his immortal body to the utmost.

“There must be a way,” he chanted steadily, as though he were a child reciting a poem.

Vuldane came to visit him at times, and even made suggestions. Admiration, for York shone from his alien eyes.

“If anything at all can make me feel a pang of regret over sacrificing your race, it is you, Anton York. A race that produces such as you deserves continuation.” Then, in the next breath he added: “But my race must continue!”

“Vuldane, did you try everything?” York pleaded. “Did you try creating planetary earthquakes, floods, volcanic eruptions?”

The Korian nodded. “Naturally. We nearly disrupted one planet entirely, instituting a planet-wide geological upheaval. For a century the planet seemed clear. Not one hypno-beast appeared. Then suddenly they cropped up again from somewhere.” “An atomic fire, sweeping the whole planet’s surface?” cried York. “How about that?”

“And how would you stop the atomic fire from eating inward, consuming the entire planet to ash?” “The hypnosis itself,” sighed York. “That’s the angle I must work from. We can’t resist it or shield it. But how about a neutralizing projector?”

Fired with the new idea, York built what was essentially a scrambler, or a device that would spray out static to the hypnotic force. He was able to cast a field around his dozen control beasts and break up their flow of hypnosis into intermittent flashes. Borrowing a super-powerful generator from the Korians, York raced to the other Cepheid.

With the static machine going full blast, he was able to land on one planet. Hypno-beasts began crowding around this invasion of their world.

York sprayed his static around, neutralizing their hypnoforce. Then he swept his gun in a circle, whiffing out the monsters like a row of lighted candles.

It was as though he had touched off a hidden spring. A signal must have gone around the planet. Over the horizon marched incredible droves of them. They massed around the ship in such numbers that York’s lethal ray was like a little machinegun against all the armies of Alexander, Caesar and Napoleon combined. Sheer weight of numbers would win out.

“Tony, they’re getting nearer—”

“Yes, but if we had a million scramblers and a million guns, it would work!” York shouted happily. “Simple mathematics.”

And then it happened. With a tortured grind, the static machine sputtered and died. Like a tidal wave, the full force of hypnotism struck them, no longer scrambled. Vera passed instantly into a trance. York, with an effort of will that seemed to tear his brain up by the roots, jerked over the engine lever. The ship darted upward at a pace that took them out of the hypnotic range in seconds.

“Just in time,” York muttered. He looked over his static machine thoughtfully, incredulously. It was a fused maul. When they were back, Vuldane explained.

“We tried that too. The hypno-beasts are canny. Their technique is simple. They pour a massed hypno-force at the scrambler, overload it, and burn it out. We tried generators with world-moving power. They burned them all out. When will you begin to realize, Anton York, that this is a thousand-year job? We’ve planned it as such. It is not something that you can toss off overnight.”

York looked stricken.

“I’m sorry,” said Vuldane simply and sincerely, before leaving.

York looked at Vera. Not a shred of hope remained.

“Think of it, Vera,” he said hollowly. “Our race was doomed as far back as the nineteenth century, when the Korians came to take an Earth culture back with them. Even before you and I were born, our people were doomed unknowingly. I destroyed fifty Immortals, and Mason Chard, and fought the Three Eternals, to save civilization. I was even ready to sacrifice myself. And all the time, another race in another universe had put their finger on us and marked us for oblivion. Our whole life and effort, all my superscience and guidance of Earth, has been a mockery, a cosmic joke, a jest of the gods.”

Vera soothed him in ways she had learned through two thousand years of association. His weary head sought refuge in her lap. His bloodshot eyes closed for the first time in six months.

“All mockery,” he said bitterly. “I’ve had the thought of going back to Earth and destroying it, so that oblivion for them will be quicker and more merciful. Lighting an atomic fire on all the planets—It would be swift.”

“No, Tony. That would be pure spite against the Korians. Whatever they’ve been forced to do, they are a highly civilized, deserving race.”

“Fire!” York jerked erect, repeating his own word. A dawning look came over his face. “Fighting fire with fire! Vera, maybe that’s the answer. Instead of fighting them with our weapons, why not fight them with theirs?”

Sleep forgotten, hope reborn, York became twice the dynamo of activity he had been before.

“Time is short—six months. I have to measure the wave-length of the hypno-force, and then duplicate it.”

Six months. Six months in which York explored the psycho-magnetic scale. Earth’s scientists had taken two centuries to piece out the electro-magnetic scale. York condensed the same amount of research into a six-month snap of the fingers.

In the electro-magnetic scale were the octaves of radio waves, infra-red, visible light, ultra-violet, X-rays, gamma rays and cosmic rays.

In the psycho-magnetic range, York found the octaves of telepathy, clairvoyance, sixth-sense, hunch, hallucination, dreams. Far down the scale, like the elusive cosmic rays, he found the hypnotic range.

These super-penetrative radiations of hypnotism he measured with all the accuracy of an astrophysicist studying a spectrograph. They were so incredibly fine that York hazily understood them to slip through the interstices of the ether itself, as cosmic rays slipped through the planetary atoms.

“Now I know exactly what the hypno-source is,” York stated. “Vuldane, did you try to build a projector?” For the first time, Vuldane shook his head. “This is a great achievement, York. But I’m afraid you can’t build a projector. Not a mechanical one. Evolution produced the projector—an organic brain—after millions of years. You won’t duplicate that in the time left, even the full thousand years.”

York saw the logic of it. Then a strange look came into his eye.

“No. But I already have the projector.” He tapped his own forehead. “All I have to do is find the way to increase its powers to equal the brain projectors of the hypno-beasts!”

“Good luck,” said Vuldane again.

His sympathetic smile, as he left, told of no hope for the outcome.

Precious time slipped by.

York worked entirely from the biological angle. With a super X-ray, he went minutely over the brain of one of the captive hypno-beasts, studying its cells, analysing it completely. When at last he had the answer, he had withdrawn a precious hormone from it. But would it work?

Vera volunteered to be the guinea pig. Anton looked at her for a long moment. “It might mean death,” he said grimly.

Vera was adamant, and Anton relented. He injected a few drops of the new hormone into the base of Vera’s neck, and watched for the results with eyes that burned with hope and dread. Vera went into a coma. Her skin became cold. Her heart stopped. York stood quietly, fighting for control.

An hour later, death drew back. Vera’s super-vitality rallied and life returned. She sat up, smiling. York said nothing. Words meant nothing now. Silently he led her to the test chamber, before a group of starved hypno-beasts. He locked her in. They surrounded her, eyeing her and closing in. Vera went rigid. Their eager tentacles stretched for her soft white neck.

York turned away, shuddering. Failure, after all!

Suddenly, within the chamber, the situation changed. As though an invisible blast had blown them back, the hypno-beasts fell away from Vera.

She stood up, her eyes blazing. One by one the Beasts rolled over and went rigid, in complete hypnosis.

Vuldane, when they faced him, was sceptical.

“I can’t do anything about it, York. I can’t recall the ships sent to bring the first of your people. We have little time as it is to start our grand plan. I can’t take a chance on your hypothetical anti-hypnosis hormone.”

“Make this test,” York demanded. “Send a shipful of your men to the Beast system, after they have been given my hormone injection. Command them to land among the thickest of the Beast communities and stay for ten hours. If they don’t come back, I won’t be able to fight your plan.”

Vuldane agreed. York injected the men, rescuing them from the deathlike effects by, heroic doses of drugs. The ship left.

Waiting for its return was a refinement of torture that ground York’s nerves to shreds. The hours stumbled by like his entire lifetime.

“Tony—look!”

The ship appeared. The Korians leaped out, eagerly telling their story of withstanding mass hypnotism for ten hours, and hypnotizing a ring of Beasts in turn.

Vuldane turned to York.

“You have saved your people, Anton York. It is a monumental achievement I will recall the first fleet immediately. All the culture races will be returned to their worlds. I cannot express my joy and relief that we are not forced to sacrifice your race. You may go back to your people now, and tell them they are saved.”

York shook his head. A strange look rested in his eyes, for this was the strangest thing of all the past episode.

“No. It is a story they would hardly believe. The only evidence for it would be the banishment of a thousand-people from Fort Mojave in eighteen-eighty-eight. That trifling event has long been forgotten and most likely unrecorded. Humanity was saved without knowing it was doomed. That will have to remain my secret.”

Vera nodded. It was a chapter of the mythology of Anton York that would never be written for the eyes of the Earth. It was the secret of Anton York.

EPILOGUE

Back on Earth, before the two colossi of diamond on Mount Everest, the yearly commemoration ceremony paeaned to its sad denouement.

“Anton York, benefactor of humanity, is dead!”