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Roy Glashan's Library
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Astounding Stories, November 1936, with "The Eternal Wanderer"
THE vast interior of the Interplanetary Court was tense with excitement. Tier on tier sat the spectators, right up to the hollowed round of Deimos' curving surface. Red, burly Martians, green-scaled Venusians, and the vitreous men of Mercury leaned forward in their seats, gawping as at a play. Only the Earthmen slumped in sullen despair, knowing too well what the verdict would be.
So, too, did the prisoner. He had no illusions as to the outcome. But that did not prevent Cliff Havens from facing his judges—executioners would be the better term, he thought bitterly—with head held high and steady, fearless gaze.
They were coming in now—four of them—delegates from the four inner planets of the solar system—all-potent rulers of the known universe. Guards surrounded them—Martian giants, with flame disintegrators gripped in three-fingered paws. Other Martians, ocher-colored, stalked the aisles of the crowded audience with arrogant tread, alert for the tiniest hostile demonstration, paralyzing cones at the ready.
Especially were they clustered in the sections reserved to the Earthmen. Their brutish, unlovely countenances were aflame with provocative fires as they stepped deliberately upon the unwary toes of the seated Earth people and jabbed malicious elbows deep into their sides. But the slighter men of Earth made no counter move, and shrank fearfully into themselves at the approach of their tormentors.
One hunched and self-effacing Earthman, however, whose broad and powerful shoulders oddly belied the straggling white beard and seamy lines that aged his face, growled in his throat as a particularly vicious guard half knocked from his seat a youngster some two aisles away. His lean hand slid from its hiding place in the folds of the long brown garment he wore—the insignia of an Earth elder—and clenched into a hard, knotty ball. Even as the unsuspecting guard, grinning with contempt for these cowardly Earth weaklings who would not be goaded into revolt, came nearer, the fist poised low, ready to lash out with hate-strong speed.
But the prisoner's eyes, flicking backward just in time, caught the gesture, and flashed instant warning. Submissively, the white-bearded elder smuggled his betraying fist back into the folds of his garment, and hunched his shoulders to a lower stoop as the Martian swaggered past.
The judges were in their seats. A hush fell over the vast assemblage. Exotic necks craned. Beulah Moorhouse, conspicuous in the front row of the Earth section, turned her agonized glance from the prisoner to the slight, overshadowed figure of the solitary Earth delegate on the judges' platform.
But the little man, frail and incongruously splendid in his golden judge's robe, opened his trembling hand in an almost imperceptible gesture of despair. His thin, ascetic face was haggard, and his eyes wavered away from those of his daughter in humiliating admission that he had failed her.
THE girl sank back into her seat with a stifled sob. It was all over then. Cliff Havens, the brave, the reckless, the man she loved, was doomed. Resentment against her father flared and died. After all, Warren Moorhouse had been helpless. They were three and he was one. Besides, Vesgo, the Martian chief——
Cliff Havens, the prisoner, saw that slight gesture of the Earth judge. For an instant the blood shivered in his veins; then it flowed evenly again. He had expected it. Poor Moorhouse! He must have gone through hell back there in the secret chamber of the tribunal. His eyes moved with fierce scorn over the others as they arranged their golden robes in their chairs.
Lupu, the Venusian head, had scaly hands, webbed between the fingers, and long, almost fish-like face. There were feathered gills just under his pointed ears, and his slitted nostrils breathed in the rare, cool atmosphere of the tiny, hollowed planet with manifest discomfort. Venus, his homeland, was a welter of waters with infrequent, lushly overgrown islands, pelted interminably by steamy rains. There might have been a flash of pity in his protruding eyes for the prisoned Earthman; it was hard to say.
Slem, the representative of Mercury, lolled in his seat with lazy indifference. The lining of his robe was padded with heating units, otherwise he would have frozen to death in the inimical cold of Deimos. His hard, vitreous skin, rich in silicates and almost glass-like in its transparency, was well adapted to the burning wastes of the Sun's nearest planet. No denizen of Mercury could have lived an instant in the suffocating steam of Venus without artificial protection. His broad, flat face held no human emotion; his tiny, deep-set eyes, sheathed at will by vitreous membranes to keep out the overpowering glare of the Sun, betrayed no semblance of his thoughts.
But it was Vesgo, the Martian, who dominated the council, even as he towered over them in gigantic stature. His huge, brown-red body radiated power from every pore. His great, bulbous head was arrogantly poised. His nostrils flared wide to gulp in the thin air; his faceted, saucer-like eyes, wide-angled for the feeble sunlight of his native planet, were cruel and cynically calculating.
His race were the lords of the solar system, and he was the chief of Mars. It was a huge jest to him, this pretense at a council of the planets, this make-believe at a democracy of aliens with aliens. The Martian legions policed the spaceways; their flame disintegrators were efficient deterrents to malcontents from Mercury to the asteroids. He frowned at that.
Cliff Havens, the defiant Earthman who stood before him for judgment, had come dangerously close to success. Left to his own devices, Vesgo would have ordered him to the torture mines of Ceres, the asteroid where the flesh-rotting minerals, from which came the disintegrating principle of the Martian weapons, made gibbering madmen of the strongest prisoner in the slow progress of eternal days.
But it was better thus. Let his fellow delegates of Mercury and Venus grasp at the shadowy semblance of seeming authority. It contented them, contented the masses of their people. Behind the forms he ruled, yea, even over that poor timid old man from Earth. The Earthmen were thoroughly cowed now, their rebellion laid low in blood and flame. As for Cliff Havens, let the forms be observed—the forms prescribed by interplanetary law. It did not matter.
SLOWLY, he heaved his powerful body erect. Beaulah stiffened in her chair; the Earth elder, hidden in the inner rows, muttered fiercely in his beard. His quick, strangely young eyes darted around at his compatriots, seeking for signs that they too—— But their faces were expressive only of cowed resignation or hopeless despair.
"Cattle!" the elder gritted to himself.
"If they only had guts——" His fingers still gripped the Dongan pellet gun beneath his robe. It was a tiny weapon and he had palmed it while the guards had searched him before admission on a forged pass to the interior of Deimos. But there was nothing now to be done—later, perhaps, when the mockeries of the formal law had been solemnly mouthed. There were three possible penalties. The first two could be managed, given daring men and certain preparations. These were already arranged. But the third penalty! He shivered at the thought of it. It had never been invoked before. It was too barbarous, too horribly fiendish. They couldn't——
Vesgo stared with his wide, calculating eyes at the prisoner. Cliff paled slightly, and tensed himself for the verdict. It was coming now.
"Clifford Havens," Vesgo squeaked—there was something sinister in the bat-like gibbering of the red giants of Mars, "the judges of the Interplanetary Court have considered your case with extreme care. The evidence is clear. By your own confession, by the testimony of innumerable witnesses, you have been proven guilty of most heinous crimes.
"You and your misguided dupes on the planet Earth, member of our august confederation, have dared to rise in revolt against the Interplanetary Council. You slew many of our brave and faithful police; you captured and destroyed two of the council's space cruisers; you dared in your wicked schemes to murder Xlar, the confidential secretary of our own delegate, my esteemed colleague, Warren Moorhouse." He turned and bowed ironically to the little man, who blinked and seemed to shrink even deeper into his golden robe.
"For that there can be but one decision: death! The judges were unanimous on that."
Cliff heard it without a qualm. But a low, tortured cry rose from Beaulah. Her scorching eyes went to her father's suddenly white face. Unanimous! Good Lord, her father had assented, had not made the fight he had promised!
Warren Moorhouse shivered in his robes. He cursed the day he had ever accepted election to this hollow mockery. How could he explain what had happened? That Vesgo, in quick asides, had threatened destruction to Earth and all its teeming millions if the decision were not unanimous? That only so could the erring planet dissociate itself from the criminal revolt of the young man who now stood fearlessly before them.
The Earth elder in the spectators' rows leaned forward breathlessly. Of course the penalty would have been death. He had expected that. But the mode! All his being clamored, waiting——
The vast audience stirred uneasily.
The silence was electric.
A VOICE blazed out suddenly, ringing with scorn. The prisoner was speaking. "Of course," Cliff said proudly, "I had expected nothing else from the court. You are going to murder me with due legal process. Why? Because I and thousands of my Earth fellows could bear no longer to see our beloved planet ground down by an alien, unspeakable tyranny. I say so now and-I shall continue to say so as long as the power of speech is in me.
"Once, not many years ago, the Interplanetary Confederation was in truth a league of equals, a conference of free planets on a democratic basis. But that was before Mars discovered the secret of flame disintegration."
He faced the glowering Martian judge boldly. "You, Vesgo, conceived the treacherous plot. Step by step you worked, with the cunning of a snake and the treachery of a jackal. Quietly you gained control of the Interplanetary Police, of the cruisers of the spaceways. Your henchmen, armed with the disintegrators, swarm the planets. Your spies were smuggled into the local planetary councils as secretaries, to report to you each move, each word that is being uttered. Of course I killed Xlar. It was he who warned you of our plans, who enabled you to bathe Earth with the blood of its bravest sons."
He swung passionately to Lupu, the Venusian, to Slem, the Mercutian, from them to the astounded round of spectators. "You are all slaves," he shouted, "slaves in fact of the Martian tyrants. Be not deluded by the hollow shams of the council. Even that shall soon be stripped from you. Vesgo is preparing. Rise now, sweep the Martian power from your planets, regain your ancient heritage before it is too late. We of Earth tried, and failed through treachery. Join us——"
Vesgo's brick-red countenance was a hideous scarlet. His fuddled senses clicked to a cold, consuming fury. Already the men of alien planets were on their feet, clamoring, hurling indistinguishable epithets at each other. A certain elder of Earth had half withdrawn his Dongan pellet gun, joyously, ready to lead the planetary men against the Martian guards, with bare hands if necessary. "Good old Cliff!" he whooped.
In seconds the interior of Deimos would be a seething, uncontrolled madness. Vesgo's squeak, curiously penetrating, ripped through the tumult.
"Seize the prisoner," he shouted. "Stop his blasphemous mouth. Slay the first spectator who makes a move."
The great round seemed suddenly to swarm with Martian guards. They hurled themselves upon Cliff, clapped wool-covered hands over his mouth, twisted his arms behind his back until the bones seemed ready to snap. Hundreds of others breasted the sections of Earthmen, Venusians and Mercutians, flame distintegrators swinging in ominous unison. Little flicks of the middle fingers, and blasting destruction would sear through the huddled mobs in an orgy of slaughter.
IN seconds it was all over. The frightened men of the planets shrank hurriedly into their seats, aghast at their own temerity. The bearded Earthman mouthed dreadful curses to himself, and once more was a stooped, inconspicuous old man.
Beulah, who had started to her feet in a wild access of hope, sank down again in numbing despair. Only the Martian section clamored raucous approval and hurled biting taunts at the cowed denizens of the other planets.
For a moment Vesgo permitted his huge, faceted eyes to wander over the vast concourse, to fix finally on the still struggling prisoner. His thoughts were busy behind the smooth facade of his inscrutable countenance. This obstreperous prisoner from Earth had fathomed his plans only too well, had revealed them to the men of the planets. No matter what disclaimers he made, no matter what protestations of belief they yielded to his face, already the seeds of suspicion were at work.
As for Warren Moorhouse, he dismissed him contemptuously. A poor, feeble old man, long past the prime of vigorous action. But Lupu, the delegate from Venus, was intelligent. So far he had followed his, Vesgo's lead. But those slitted fish eyes had rested on him at certain times in council meetings with disconcerting meaning, as if veiled thoughts played behind the blandness of his gaze. And even Slem, the stupid Mercutian, back on his own burning planet, might, in the long, blazing days, have time to ponder on the meaning of these things he had just heard.
Vesgo was able to follow a tortuous, involved policy for many Martian years, if necessary, to gain his secret ends. But he was also capable of quick, unalterable decisions. He made one now.
He faced the once more silent assemblage with exasperating calm. His high-pitched voice was openly contemptuous. "I see," he said, "that there has been a conspiracy afoot. The contagion of rebellion was not confined solely to the planet Earth. By their actions only now the denizens of the other planets have betrayed their complicity. Mars, our beloved homeland, was the focus and aim of all your damnable plotting." His voice hardened. "Very well then. We are prepared; we shall act at once."
He stepped back, pressed a tiny button on the arm of his ornate chair. Soft blue flames flickered over the circular ornament that had seemed merely a design for the headpiece. It was a microphone, attuned to a tight band secret wave length. Vesgo had prepared well for all emergencies. He spoke rapidly into the instrument.
"Vesgo, chief of Mars, calling all special Martian units. Proceed at once to execute Plan B of your instructions. The captain who fails in his appointed task goes, a slave, to the mines of Ceres. That is all."
Lupu, the Venusian delegate, was on his webbed feet at once. The green of his face was a sickly pallor; his gills feathered outward in the unfamiliar medium with unwonted excitement.
"What is the meaning of this mummery?" he demanded in thin, flute-like tones.
The corners of the Martian's wide gape of a mouth twisted as he looked down on the slender alien. He could crush him with one sweep of his huge arms.
"It means, oh, Lupu," he mocked, "that the mummery is ended. Even now the space cruisers of the Interplanetary Police are speeding to all your planets. They are Martian, manned and captained by Martians. Within hours their flame disintegrators will be trained on the principal cities of your rebellious planets. My secret agents—your private secretary for one—oh, Lupu; others, carefully planted at strategic points, are ready to cooperate. Within an hour of Martian time it will all be over. The sham of the Interplanetary Council is done." He spat black juice on the immaculate, polished, lava-like floor. "You are slaves, all of you. Mars, the great and glorious, is your master, and I, Vesgo, am the chief of Mars."
CLIFF, held by strong, brutal hands, writhed in helpless rage. He had known this was coming, had tried to organize the planets against the day. He had failed; more, the fools of Mercury and Venus had joined the tyrant to crush Earth's futile gesture of revolt. It was done, finished. He was sentenced to death. That did not matter; though an anguished qualm shivered through him at the thought of Beulah. He saw her now as he twisted in vain attempt to break free—her lovely, pallid face, the hopeless agony of her once sparkling eyes as they fixed burningly on his—as if to fix his visage in her memory for ages to come.
For a split second the huge interior of Deimos was a stunned, frozen silence. Then a low growl came from a certain ancient Earthman. It was taken up, spread, and died immediately. For Martian guards thrust forward flame disintegrators, eager for the word. The Martian sections clamored and shouted their glee until the echoes rebounded from the shell of the sixty-mile round.
Warren Moorhouse slumped in his seat, groaning. He was a weary old man, weighted down with the realization of his own futility. Slem, the Mercutian, stared stupidly. His sluggish mental processes had not grasped the situation entire. But Lupu had. His webbed, green-veined hand moved like lightning to the button on his chair. The transmitter glowed into being.
"Hordes of Venus," he fluted desperately, "this is Lupu on Deimos. Take warning——"
He got no further. A Martian whipped up his paralyzing cone, tripped the lever. Lupu stopped in mid-word, thin-slashed mouth agape, unable to close. He was a green statue in a golden robe, rigid, turned to marble.
"You were lucky, Lupu," Vesgo said, "that it was not a disintegrator. Next time——"
It had taken a long while for the significance of the scene to penetrate the brain of the vitreous being from Mercury. But something snapped now. His tiny, deep-set eyes glittered like hard diamonds, his limbs of silicated flesh retracted like a clasp knife, jerked open like jagged lightning. Straight for the unguarded chief of Mars he catapulted, with a roar of crashing thunderbolts.
Vesgo uttered a startled squeak, jerked vainly to one side. The glassy bodies of the Mercutians were steel-hard battering-rams, against which the spongy, water-secreting flesh of the Martian would pulp in a hideous spatter.
A flame seared out from a Martian gun. It leaped across the intervening space, contacted the plunging Mercutian. It caught him square in the middle. Even as his fist was raised to batter at the unprotected head of the Martian leader, there was a crackle, a hiss, and—there was nothingness. Molecules, atoms, electrons, protons—of flesh, of bone, of tissue—had disintegrated into primal, inchoate, invisible stuff.
Before the horrified gaze of the onlookers, a torso with uplifted hand, cleanly dissociated, wabbled in mid-air, and fell with a splintering crash to the smooth, stony floor. Two legs, unconnected, solitary, jerked forward with acquired momentum, to slide to a grisly, toppling fall ten rods farther.
Vesgo righted himself, his flaring nostrils gulping with the fear of remembered death. His saucer eyes glittered furiously. "Take the carrion remains," he ordered, "and throw them into empty space, as a warning to all future proposers of traitorous murder. As for you, Clifford Havens"—he turned to the young Earth prisoner—"you shall be another warning. Weakly, I had permitted that fool Moorhouse to persuade me to the simple, easy penalty of flame disintegration. But now I impose another—the penalty of the Eternal Wanderer."
A LOW mutter of horror rose from the blanched lips of the Earth spectators.
Beulah rose from her seat with arms outstretched in frantic appeal. "Please, Vesgo, not that! Any punishment but that."
"Silence!" the Martian raged.
A guard rushed up, thrust her back in her chair with brutal force.
In the rear the Earth elder groaned in utter despair. The Eternal Wanderer! The extreme penalty, to which death itself was easy. His plans, his arrangements were worthless. All hope of fescue was gone. Had it not been for the slumped figure of Beulah Moorhouse, he would have whipped out his Dongan gun, burned the sneering Martian leader down with the inextinguishable fires of its tiny pellets, and died in a final suicidal fight against the massed weapons of the guards. But that would have meant hideous, indiscriminate slaughter, the lives of thousands of hapless Earthfolk, an unknown fate for Beulah. So he subsided, gritting his teeth.
Cliff was the calmest of them all. He had steeled himself against all fates, against the torture mines of Ceres, even against this. Death would come sooner or later. It must. Then the insanely weary interval would be as if it had never been.
The guards hustled him out, past the huddled, fainted girl. His eyes went to her desperately. How beautiful she was, even with the pallor on her face! Never, never again would he see her. Then he saw the aged man in the long brown robe. Their eyes met, flicked hastily away for fear of betrayal. For an instant Cliff's frozen heart warmed within him. Good old Kerry! Loyal to the very end! He smiled bitterly. What ingenuity Kerry Dale must have used to worm his way into the very center of the enemy's camp, where recognition meant instant death! What plans must have brewed in that nimbly fertile brain, now brought to naught by the penalty imposed.
The secret of the Eternal Wanderer was a close-held secret of Mars. They boasted and bragged about it. From it there was no escape, no hope for the fated sufferer. And now it was to be used upon himself.
He was thrust violently into a lift; the door slammed to shut out the craning thousands. They were rising swiftly to the surface shell. Deimos, tiny satellite of Mars, not over twenty miles in diameter, had been hollowed out by the engineers of Mars, converted into the permanent seat of the Interplanetary Council. Thus, ingeniously, the council was brought within the power of the Martians' guns. The huge, tunneled flame disintegrators of the ocher planet, belching their mile-deep shafts with formidable menace out at all hostile attempts from space, mocked at the 14,600-mile distance to its infinitesimal moon. One blast from the Martian surface and satellite and council and all would disappear from the face of the heavens.
The lift came to a silent stop. The door opened smoothly. The huge Martians shoved him staggering out.
Cliff found himself in a cylindrical cell, black-walled, a unit with the sterile crust of Deimos. Overhead, a view-porte, cased with yard-thick quartz, gave on outer space. A disk of flaring red showed to one side: Mars, the warrior planet. A faint blotch of deeper red showed near the edge, from which dark lines radiated like the spokes of a wheel. Cliff knew it to be Antor, the capital city of the race, with its strange, soaring structures up to the very limits of the thin, cold atmosphere, and its canals through which the snows of the polar regions sluiced in melted flood through the brief summer seasons. Outside of that there was only the deep, jet black of eternal space.
He grimaced bitterly. There dwelt the arrogant masters of the solar system, and he, the man of Earth who had defied them, was doomed to an unbelievable end.
Swiftly, he inspected the cold, smooth round of his prison. The walls were a piece with Deimos. The lift was gone, and not the tiniest crack showed where the door had been. The quartz above was thick and tough. Besides, there were Martian cruisers anchored to the outer surface, and guards in space suits and weighted leaden shoes who patrolled the bleak, airless round. There was no chance of escape. So, with infinite calm, he composed himself on the basalt floor, and promptly fell asleep.
HE awoke to the rough shaking of his shoulder and the squeaking of a Martian voice in his ear. "Get up, Earth dog. You have slept enough; soon you will beg for sleep, for death itself." The guard guffawed at his own humor.
Cliff rose alertly to his feet. The chamber was crowded with Martian giants, each with the paralyzing cone at the ready. They were taking no chances. He glanced upward for a last look at the alien planet. There was no sign of it. Instead, a space unit was clamped in place over the quartz, and a ladder he had not seen before reared itself upward. The quartz disc was wide on its hinges.
Without a murmur, he clambered up the ladder, into the space unit. For a moment he stood blinking in the dazzling light of the search beams that were trained on the air-filled quartz chamber from long, grim cruisers swinging outward from anchor on the desolate, weakly gravitationed surface. Within the planet, artificial gravitation as well as artificial light, heat and air were used.
Then, as his vision cleared, he saw, at the farther corner, a weird complex of apparatus. He had never seen anything like it before. Six upright slabs of exceedingly thin metal backed each other in an ascending series, approximately a foot apart, each larger than the one in front, and so arranged that their oblong rims seemed to represent the outer limits of the emergent light rays from a focal funnel tube some ten feet in front.
The frontal surfaces of the metal plates were tessellated into an almost infinite number of tiny squares of bright, variegated colors, so that, in the glare of the search rays, the upright slabs seemed aglow with innumerable rainbows. The first, and smaller plate in the series, some eight feet tall and five feet wide, had four manacle clamps near the corners. Long electron tubes flanked the slabs on their perpendicular sides.
Cliff stared. For the moment the scientist in him overcame the mystery of his approaching fate. What was it? That funnel, wide-angling tube, for example, was obviously in focus with the series of metallic slabs, and just as obviously, from its hook-up with an intricate arrangement of quartzite bulbs, was destined to pour a stream of emanations upon the serried plates. But whether they were X rays, gamma rays, neutron bullets or cosmic rays, there was no means of telling.
His puzzled glance moved past the funnel, and paused understanding on the great machine of cogs and rollers and levers and tracing styluses flush against the quartz wall of the space unit. He had seen such brain machines before, though on a much simpler scale. Through the aid of their remarkable wizardry the most complex, the most abstruse mathematical problems could be solved in the course of minutes—problems that otherwise might have taken weary months of calculations, problems even that were unsolvable by the human brain.
It was the brain machine that had made possible the reduction of the universe to a single equation, that had rendered interplanetary flight a matter of piercing the space-warp continuum, instead of the infinitely slow communication along the normal gravitational world lines; and it had created a mathematics of its own that even Warren Moorhouse himself, the greatest mathematician of the system, could not follow.
THE brain machine, nevertheless, was a familiar sight. Not so the sloping apparatus to which it was attached. This was a banked series of keys, arranged in parallel longitudinal and lateral rows, for all the world like an ancient linotyping machine, in the days when books and papers were still being printed from metal type. But the keys were carved into curious shapes—each the tiny simulacrum of a man, all essentially alike, yet differing from each other by the faintest of hairbreadth variations.
For one sweeping second Cliff Havens' eyes held on the conglomerate of intricate apparatus; for a longer instant they clashed defiantly with the mocking gaze of Vesgo, the Martian; for a casual flicker they rested on the sear-brown figure of a strange Martian whose high bald pate accentuated the bulge of his bulbous head and whose attention was all directed to tightening the knobs of the queer, banked keys.
Then his troubled stare went on, out toward the cruisers, out toward the black of outer space. Where was the Eternal Wanderer; where was the dread space vessel that no one had ever seen, yet all the solar system had trembled at? For the very name had conjured up a vision of some strange, hermetic craft, in which the doomed victim, tight-sealed, was flung into the unknown reaches of space, to wander in eternal agony without hope of surcease or of rescue. Yet inside the space unit was only a series of machines which held no meaning, and outside, angling off from the curved surface of Deimos, were only the too-familiar cruisers of the Martians.
The bald Martian straightened, said: "All is in readiness, magnificent."
Vesgo grinned at Cliff—and in all the system there is nothing more malign than a Martian grin. "You need not seek vainly for the Eternal Wanderer, Earth dog," he squeaked. "It stands before you, quiescent, yet quivering, awaiting its prey." His three-fingered hand rested heavily on the manikin type.
Cliff started. The guards gripped him tight, fearing a sudden break. "That the Eternal Wanderer?" he echoed scornfully. "Is that your vaunted instrument of torture with which you frightened the planets? It is but a feeble jest, Vesgo, and I do not easily scare."
The Martian chuckled hoarsely. "The jest is better than you think, Earth rebel," he said. "It was I who spread the rumor of a space vessel, to hide its real identity from spying eyes. You are not afraid? Wait until Harg explains." He bowed ironically toward the bald Martian. "He is the inventor. Tell him, Harg."
Harg was sear with age and wrinkled like an overripe pomegranate. His faceted eyes stared straight at the astounded Earthman and did not seem to see him. His shrunken paw caressed the parallel columns with stroking fingers. Scientists were the same throughout the solar system.
"I am sorry, Clifford Havens, inhabitant of the planet Earth," he said slowly, "that my invention has been turned from it's original purpose to a fiendish instrument. But Vesgo, magnificent of Mars, has ordered it so, and I am the humblest of his subjects."
"Take care, Harg," Vesgo growled threateningly. "You presume on my patience."
The inventor bowed, humbly, yet with the faintest shadow of irony. "I do indeed, oh, magnificent. I shall refrain." He turned to Cliff. "What you see," he explained, pointing to the sloping bank of keys, "is but the mechanical counterpart of what has hitherto been the most abstract of mathematical forms of analysis—the matrix.
"By means of matrix mathematics any given problem is dissociated into an infinite series of quantities arranged in systematic array, and can thus be studied and relationships discovered which would otherwise have remained forever indecipherable. I have not only made a machine to dissociate the—ah—problem into a matrix pattern, but I have been able to limit the matrix series to a finite number of dissociants."
CLIFF knew that somehow, behind the slow, squeaky voice of the Martian scientist, death awaited him. Vesgo had refused him the torture mines of Ceres.
That meant but one thing—that the death of the Eternal Wanderer was far worse. But what had this dry, mathematical discussion, this theory of matrices, to do with it?
He faced the pair steadily. "It is all very pretty," he said coldly, "but I am no mathematician. Warren Moorhouse perhaps might understand, and be interested. I am, according to Vesgo, a rebel, and under a strange, unknowable sentence. Why waste my time—and his—with these abstractions?"
"Because," Harg sibilated, and this time Cliff was sure there was pity in the alien Martian, "you are the problem."
Still Cliff did not understand; yet somehow, for the first time since he had been captured, dread pulsed through his veins. Death by normal means, no matter how lingering, no matter how agonizing, would be accepted without cringing, without repining for his ill-fated rebellion—but this bloodless, mathematical enigma—— He laughed harshly to whistle up his courage. "If you mean that I am to be disintegrated," he stated defiantly, "I am not afraid. A quick, painless death—what more could I ask for?"
"I said dissociated, not disintegrated," corrected Harg. "The latter is death; the former is not. Rather, I would consider it an immortality of sorts. I don't know; none of the animals with which I have experimented have come back, could possibly come back."
A strange blur passed over Cliff's vision. He still did not understand, but something in Harg's manner, something in that last queer phrase——
In a daze, he heard Harg's squeaky voice go on and on. "The matrix is the key to the universe, to everything in it. This matrix of mine is built specifically for life forms, shaped generically for the various men of the solar system. The particular series I have just installed applies to men of the planet Earth.
"That funnel arrangement emits a new type ray I have recently discovered, the most penetrating in the universe. It pierces flesh and metal with equal facility, loosens the bonds that hold molecules together, atoms in their valences, electrons in their orbits. All attractions and repulsions disappear. The space-time continuum itself has no further influence. It is then that the matrix pattern applies. This world ray of mine is first transfused through the matrix and the brain machine to take on the required pattern; then it is focused on you, the problem to be solved." He indicated with shrunken hand the manacles on the frontal metal plate.
"Your corresponding matrix is patterned through the tessellated squares," he continued inexorably, "into the second plate; through its squares to the third, and so on until you are emitted from the sixth and final plate. These squares are so arranged that an infinite series of permutations and combinations are the end result, to make up a true or definitive matrix. That is all."
THERE was a strained silence as he ceased. The guards goggled foolishly, understanding nothing, yet convinced that their prisoner was doomed to a fate beyond the mere physical tortures of the mines of Ceres. But Vesgo knew, and knowing, grinned with avid anticipation.
Cliff straightened his shoulders. "You call it a matrix dissociation," he remarked evenly. "I call it disintegration. Whatever the means, the end result is the same. I vanish into a maze of constituent electrons, protons—matrices, if you will. What does it matter? I am dead, extinct, painlessly. Get it ever with."
"No," whispered Harg. "You are not dead—at least I do not think so. None of the test animals have ever returned to report. But, if my theory is correct, you are still alive, will remain alive for all eternity. That's what makes it so horrible. I had not intended my machine for use on man. I——"
"Harg!" Vesgo broke in sharply. "Yes, magnificent." The Martian scientist bowed humbly. Slowly he turned to Cliff. "You see, you will be a million million dissociants, each one of them somehow yourself, yet only the totality making up the real you. In each of you will be consciousness, and an awareness of incompletion. Yet the sum of you will be scattered through all of space and all of time; for the matrix formula that controls the universe will control you also. You may remember it. Long ago Heisenberg, Dirac and Schrodinger developed it: qp—pq-ih/2||
"Simple, but world-shaking," he continued, faceted eyes fixed on far-off places. "For 'q' represents the matrix coordinates of your being as well as those of the universe; 'p' is the momentum, and 'h' the quantum of action. But 'qp' does not equal 'pq,' and never can." The Martian actually shivered. "Where you will be, how long your scattered dissociants will pulse for each other, what your relation to the universe entire, I do not know, perhaps can never know. That is why I call it the fate of the Eternal Wanderer."
He stopped, but to Cliff the mute chamber was a roaring echo of sound. Death he could stand; torture he could face, and smile at his tormentors; but this strange, mystical non-death, this dissociated being, sent the blood pounding in his veins with sledge-hammer blows. The white face of Beulah swam before him, anguished, hopeless; the angry eyes and brick-red thatch of Kerry Dale, unaccountably masked by banda juice well rubbed in and the long brown garment of an elder. They had done their best to save him. It was not their fault. Now it was too late.
Through the roaring and the haze he heard Vesgo's impatient squeak. "Enough of idle talk. Place the rebel in the clamps, guards, and you, Harg, waste no further time."
Cliff struggled, but the powerful Martians dragged him to the upright metal slab, jerked arms and legs into the tight, clicking embrace of the prisoning circlets. Like a gigantic X he stood, flat against the rainbow-tinted plate, facing the curious funnel with wide, steady eyes. Now that the doom was upon him, he was calm, unafraid. He must not permit Vesgo the satisfaction of seeing him cringe.
HARG avoided his eyes. He tripped a switch. The flanking electronic columns lighted up with blue flame. He pulled a lever. The brain machine whirred and slid and turned, cog within interminable cog. Styluses traced complicated curves; hidden parts clicked and pounded. The matrix keys bobbed up and down as though pressed by invisible fingers. Harg's skinny hand was shaking as it crept reluctantly toward the final lever.
Cliff took a deep breath, faced his fate with head erect. "You need not worry, Harg," he said. "Whatever happens, I am not afraid. As for you, Vesgo," his voice rose contemptuously, "my removal will not end revolt. There are millions of others waiting to——"
The lever jerked downward. At once the chamber was filled with leaping blue flames. Tubes whined and sizzled; giant disks whirled in a blur of motion. The great pointing funnel jerked under invisible impacts. Yet nothing happened. For a moment a wild hope pulsed through Cliff that the dread machine would not function, that perhaps it was all a ghastly jest.
Then, suddenly, a deep-violet light leaped from the orifice, bathed him in its glare. Instantly he felt himself shattered into a million, million tiny bits. He opened his mouth to cry out with the supernal torture of that horrible sensation, but he had no mouth. He flung against his manacles, but they were no longer there. Harg's pitying gaze, Vesgo's face aflame with satisfied cruelty, instruments, the chamber itself, hazed, faded, were lost in an infinity of space and time. Only the infolding, rending flame remained, only the succession of tessellated plates.
His body had melted, was driven through the first of the slabs as if it were thin air. For an infinitesimal moment he flattened against the second. Another violent, supernal shattering. The million, million shards dissociated once more, forced their way through tinier, and more numerous squares, repeated the process at the third, the fourth, the fifth.
At the sixth and largest, there was a blinding flash, a grind as of the indivisible shattering into the ultimate, and blaze and metal slabs alike vanished in a whelming concussion——
CLIFF HAVENS was conscious. He knew that, for he thought; he saw with the invisible eye of his mind; he felt. But what he was, or where he was, was something else again. He tried by a supreme effort of will to concentrate himself. He could not. For, wherever he exercised the act of volition, he sensed at once that he was in a million, million other places.
It was a dreadful sensation, such as had been vouchsafed to no mortal man since the beginning of time. He was a matrix, a dissociation into an infinitude of symbols, each somehow himself, yet each curiously incomplete, demanding union with the totality with a yearning beyond all mortal anguish. The universe of things held him entire; yet he was nowhere.
He tried to orient himself. A coordinate envisaged the solar system, saw Vesgo within a Martian cruiser, driving through the spaceways. Venus was a flame of radiolite bombs; the tossing oceans boiled with vast explosions. Mercury lay supine and baking under the menacing flash of the Martian warships. Earth was a sullen, muttering huddle, policed by huge battalions. Beulah, Kerry Dale and Moorhouse were vanished.
Then, in spite of himself, Cliff was no longer there. He was a different quantity in the depths of space. A great red sun enveloped him at its core; atoms exploded in the fierce furnace fires; electrons vanished in a wave of radiation; matter was being annihilated.
In a breath-taking flash Sun and electrons were gone. A planet swam within his grasp, mighty, magnificent, circling two golden stars. A vast civilization reared off its glassy surface, beings that were whorls of pure essence floating in eternal music. Like a clicking camera the scene shifted. He was still there, observing that glorious race, yet he was far away, so far a million light years intervened.
A nebula—a filmy cloud of primal stuff in which a swarm of stars glittered like glowworms in a moonlighted haze, rushed past him with a speed approaching light. He was on the outermost boundaries of the universe, the very rim of exploding space.
Then that, too, was a dim, remote awareness. He was out of space, out of time, where nothing had yet been born, where nothing yet existed. He was surrounded by nothingness. Somewhere, unimaginable eons away, a universe was expanding, gobbling up the formlessness into the pattern of its warp; but here it was not yet. Perhaps it would never be. Yet was it empty; was it void of all things?
If only Cliff could have coalesced, brought all his infinite matrix elements together, perhaps he might have known; perhaps he might have understood. For something brooded over the emptiness, something beyond all cosmic imaginings.
The Cliff that was there shrank shriveling into himself. That formlessness was more awful, more supernal, than all the other Cliffs throughout the fashioned universe could envisage. Perhaps, he willed desperately, here were the ultimate secrets, the life stuff that awaited the advent of expanding space and time to impregnate with its quickening influence.
He was tossing suddenly in the probability storms of an electron train of waves; again, he saw a nova hurtle flaming gases into space; he rode a light wave that had started out from Andromeda a million years before, and was tired of its endless journeying; he was present when the universe was born; he floated supinely on the waveless heat death of the final trump. He partook in chemical reactions and witnessed the collision of two rushing stars; he was here, there, everywhere—all space was intertwined with his matrix—so was time. Strange races came from the slime, flowered, died.
Yet always he saw and saw not; was aware and knew that he was not fully aware. Always his infinite series, the components that were his matrix, yearned for totality, for the wholeness that once had been Clifford Havens, a mortal man in a pin point of time and space.
It was a yearning of unimaginable intensity; a torture more dreadful than any possible contriving. A million, million Cliffs cried out the unutterable pain of separation, of endless incompletion, wailed for that totality which must forever be denied them. He was a problem to which the key had been withdrawn, a problem that could never be solved. An endless, hopeless eternity awaited him——
THE vast interior of the Interplanetary Court was dark. The curving tiers were tenantless; the carved seats of the judges were vacant. Nothing stirred; nothing moved. In all of Deimos' hollowed round there seemed no life, no motion. Only on the surface, swinging idly to the magnetic clamp of the landing porte, was a solitary Martian cruiser, sole sentinel for the silent court.
It was a routine guard. What could possibly happen to Deimos? Who in all the solar system dared attack its sanctity? Mars was the ruling planet—absolute, overpowering. Vesgo had planned his coup well. On Venus there had been a flurry of revolt. Lupu's warning message had raised the Ashmen from their surging oceans. But Vesgo had come hard on its heels, captaining a mighty armament of the cruisers of the spaceways. Flame disintegrators had sprayed the Venusians hordes, radiolite detonators had shattered them in their hiding places in the caves beneath the seas; paralyzing cones had held them rigid.
The Mercutians, leaderless on the death of Slem, retreated sullenly to their burrows. On Earth, the flower of mankind had died in Cliff's desperate rebellion, and the Martian giants were everywhere, itching for the chance to harry and burn and slay. And Warren Moorhouse was still missing, with his daughter, and Kerry Dale, on whose head Vesgo had set a price.
Even the cruiser was dark and asleep. It was the night watch. A single burly Martian yawned in the forward chamber, flame disintegrator dangling from his belt. He was sleepy, and there was really nothing to watch. Through the crystallite panel he could see the dark, desolate, moveless surface of Deimos. The space unit in which the matrix complex was housed was a smooth, quartzite round from which there was no exit into outer space.
The sentinel let his weary eyes roam over its darkling depths, turned them upward to the flaring red disk of Mars, his homeland. He had been away from his home on the main canal for almost a year, on space duty. There was a wife, three small children—— Grumbling under his breath, he sat down. It was very still and home was remote. His head nodded; he was asleep.
A tiny pencil of flame pierced the interior of the Interplanetary Court, swung probing over the curving wall. "Careful, Kerry," a girl's voice floated through the darkness. "Maybe there are guards inside."
"I made sure of that," the wielder of the torch retorted. "Vesgo never would expect to find us here. He's turning Earth upside down looking for us. That's a swell gadget you attached to Beulah's space yacht, Mr. Moorhouse. We'd never have been able to slip through the Martian patrols otherwise."
"The invisibility magnet?" came a third voice out of the dark. "It's simple enough in operation. I've been working on it for years. It simply bends the light waves around the ship, so that, from the outside, there is nothing to be seen."
"We couldn't see, either," grumbled Kerry. "It's a damn tough job flying by blind reckoning."
"Hurry, please!" Beulah implored. "Every second counts. We've got to find Cliff."
THE pin point of flame swung erratically over the blank-seeming wall. When Kerry spoke again his voice was queerly hard. "That's another damn tough job. The Eternal Wanderer doesn't give up its secrets. It is you who are wasting time. We should be manufacturing invisibility magnets as fast as we can, install them in every craft we can seize, man them with loyal men, and slam the Martians to hell. If Cliff could only hear us, those would be his orders."
"I'm sure of that, Kerry," Warren Moorhouse said quietly. "But Beulah insisted——"
"Do you think I could rest a moment," she said, "knowing that poor Cliff is somewhere, suffering Heaven knows what tortures? Even now—it may be too late—to do anything."
"It was too late before we even started," Kerry muttered. Aloud he merely said: "How certain are we of getting him back?"
"We aren't," Moorhouse answered. "It's just a chance. But Harg, before he died—for pretended disobedience to Vesgo's orders—whispered the secret of the Wanderer to me. We had been rather friendly before Vesgo achieved delusions of grandeur. He was able to produce a matrix dissociation, but was baffled by the problem of reintegration. I think I've worked that out. Cliff's hide-out on Earth was rather completely equipped."
Kerry grinned painfully under his banda-juice mask. "Poor Cliff! He worked hard enough to make a go of his rebellion. If it hadn't been for that damned Martian spy who was your secretary—— Hello! There's the panel."
The brilliant pencil of flame edged along a thin, almost invisible crack in the curving rock. "I watched pretty carefully when they led Cliff out."
The three Earth people made their way cautiously past the empty tiers. Beulah's heart thudded so loud she was certain it could be heard on the planet Mars itself. She had risked the possible success of a new uprising against the tyrant by her insistence on this insane venture to rescue Cliff—Cliff, who had become an unimaginable series of beings, who had been thrust into a doom beyond all human conception. She choked back a sob. Her father must succeed. He had been a weakling too long, a striving after moderation. Now he must be ruthless, hard, prove his title as the greatest scientist in the solar system.
The torch illuminated the panel, reflected yellow glow on her father's haggard face, painted false shadows on the falser Earth elder with the banda-simulated wrinkles. His lean, brown fingers were moving deftly over the surface. They held suddenly, pressed.
"There she goes," he grunted with satisfaction. A black hole yawned before them. They stepped through slowly, Dongan guns wary in their hands. But the lift was deserted. The silence was oppressive. Kerry fumbled for the button control, and swiftly, silently, they rose to the surface, past the prison chamber in which Cliff had been immured, into the space unit on the surface.
Kerry flicked off the betraying flash. With infinite caution they edged their way in, ready to blast a path should an alarm be raised. But the unit was dark, and, through the quartz-inclosing bubble, they saw the dark, grim shadow of the guardian cruiser. The search beam which should have been trained on the unit was blank; its sentinel asleep.
"What a break!" Kerry exploded joyfully. "Get busy, Mr. Moorhouse; it's your deal from now on. I'll stand guard."
Beulah squeezed her father's ascetic hand with desperate pressure. "Dad!" The single exclamation betrayed more than a volume of words. He understood, patted her trembling shoulder, and went to work. Harg had sketched the various parts of the matrix machine for him with feeble, yet frantic haste, as he lay on the sodden soil near their hide-out, gasping out his life blood. Moorhouse had found him, cut down by a glancing ray, had tried to ease Iris last moments.
FOR over an hour Warren Moorhouse worked as he had never worked before. The baleful overhead disk of Mars cast an eerie, and barely sufficient glow into the space unit to show him the various pieces of apparatus. The sweat poured from his limbs, though the air was frosty and damp from long disuse.
Kerry watched the long, dark hulk of the cruiser with grim intensity, Dongan gun ready to spray inextinguishable fires through the thick quartz at the slightest alarm. It would have been suicide, of course; but he was not the man to yield without a fight.
Beulah bit her lips until the blood came, in her tremulous anxiety. A hundred times her glance darted toward her father; a hundred times she quivered voicelessly: "Faster, dad! Faster!" and withheld the crowding words. Poor dad! He was doing his best. She would only disconcert him with speech. But the minutes were precious. Soon space day would be stirring, and the Martian cruiser would awaken to routine activity. In which case it would be impossible to avoid discovery.
"Cliff! Where are you? Come back, Cliff!"
Then Moorhouse stepped back, said in tired tones: "That's about all I can do under the circumstances. Get away from those metal slabs. I'm ready to reverse the process. I've staked everything on the function of the square root of minus one in the brain machine. If that integrates properly to positive unity, then, according to my theory, the entire matrix equation—qp—pq-ih/2||—should reintegrate, and reproduce Cliff exactly as he was before he was dissociated." He shrugged weary shoulders. "At least, I hope so. Ready!"
Levers swung downward; switches knifed; buzzers pressed. The great tubes glowed into being. The brain machine clanked and whirred and spun. The light blazed in their dazzled eyes; the noise was deafening to their straining ears. It was impossible that the Martians on the silent cruiser would not see, would not feel the vibrations even through the thick quartz.
It was a peculiar sensation. Everything seemed negative, reversed. The flame in the tubes was violet, but withdrawn as if it were beyond the spectrum, made somehow visible to mortal eyes. The clash and slam of meshing gears sounded recessive, remote, as if the beating waves of air were concave rather than convex. The funnel sucked in luminence from the serried metal plates, draining the circumambient atmosphere of all vitality.
Beulah gripped Kerry's arm suddenly, cried out in suppressed accents. "Kerry! Dad! Look! The last plate!"
THEY stared at it breathlessly, forgetting their precarious situation, forgetting even the Martian cruiser at anchor beyond the quartzite shell. The largest metal slab had sprung into gleaming, tessellated life. The rainbow-hued squares glowed and shifted and played with magnificent iridescence. Then the kaleidoscopic colors formed a vague, shimmering, but unmistakable pattern—the two-dimensional pattern of a man!
Beulah wrenched herself away from Kerry, flung blindly forward, arms outspread. "Cliff!" she implored. "Cliff! Come back to me!"
Her father caught her stumbling figure just in time, pushed her violently away from the sphere of the sucking rays. "You'd have killed him, killed yourself!" he cried.
They crouched in the farthermost corner, watching, eyes popping, as the phenomenon unfolded, became more startling in its awesomeness. The flat, dissociated thing of myriad hue on the final screen flickered, vanished. At once the fifth screen blazed into an ecstasy of colors; a pattern formed, clearer, more distinct, but still ineffably vague.
From the fifth to the fourth, then to the third, leaping across the interval to the second upright plate, more and more substantial at each jump, coalescing dissociated states through a lesser and lesser number of squares, trembling more and more to a three-dimensional state.
Warren Moorhouse crouched, hunched over, holding his breath. A queer unease flowed through his senses, stinging his brain to furious activity. Something was wrong about that reintegrating figure; something had been horribly wrong with his calculations. Even as the tessellated luminence poised on the second plate for its final, ultimate leap to the first and normal slab, the solution burst on Moorhouse with shattering realization, brought a great cry from his pallid lips.
"My Lord! What have I done! I made a mistake! The equation is wrong. I integrated 'i' to positive unity, but that reverses the positions of 'q' and 'p.' He will be 'pq—qp,' not the other way round. Heaven knows what he'll be!" He darted forward frantically, grasping for the master switch. "Cliff! Cliff! Wait! don't come back yet!" He was shouting as if the poised simulacrum on the second plate could actually hear.
"It's too late," said Kerry, pulling back against the solid wall. For the first time in his reckless life he was afraid.
Beulah was moaning softly to herself. Even as Moorhouse's fingers clamped on the switch, a solid, three-dimensional form surged through the first and ultimate plate, bulged into the circlets of the chaining manacles. The figure stirred, blinked, looked around the space unit.
Moorhouse felt his fingers stiffen and fall away from the useless switch. Kerry flung a warding hand over his eyes, pressed backward against the unyielding quartz. Beulah held herself taut. Her voice was a shriek, a wail of agony. "Cliff! Is it your——"
The figure brought its enigmatic glance back to the three mortals crouching in utter fear before him. There was something terrible about that glance, about that queer, immovable face, about the contours of his body. They were human, yet something more—or less—than human. It was recognizably Cliff, yet a Cliff of a different order of being.
Moorhouse was mumbling to himself over and over again: "I reversed 'q' and 'p'; the equation is different. What have I done?"
THE integrated being that had been Cliff Havens said nothing. No mortal sounds could ever emanate from those rigid, superhuman lips. He seemed slightly out of line, strangely angular and distorted, as if he were only the three-dimensional facet of a four-dimensional creature. He was beyond these cowering mortals, who once had loved and been loyal to him; his glance swept them and reported back to a brain in another dimension; he was not their kind, never could be!
"What has happened to you, my dear?" Beulah cried out in terrible anguish. This creature who strangely resembled the man she had loved was remote, alien, thinking thoughts that were not hers, feeling emotions that were beyond her. Suddenly she was afraid of him.
Dazzling light swept the darkened chamber. A fierce white blaze pierced the quartz, laid bare in every detail the matrix complex, the crouched figures of the Earth people, the strange apparition still outstretched in a gigantic X on the metal slab. Warning signals clanged and reverberated through the great hollow of Deimos.
"They've seen us," the girl cried out.
Kerry ripped out an oath, tugged furiously at the Dongan gun lie had thrust hack into its sheath.
The Martian cruiser quivered, lights blared forth from every view porte. The lone sentinel bounded to his feet, flame disintegrator level. The yawning orifices of force trained into position.
But, even as Kerry brought his gun up and forward, his pressing fingers held rigid; his body froze immobile. Beulah was a marble, backward-shrinking statue. Moorhouse toppled slowly, caught off balance, arms uplifted. A paralyzing cone had pumped its frozen waves of force into the space unit.
"Got them, commander," said a Martian gunner hoarsely. "Look! They're the Earth dogs his magnificence was after."
"Good work!" approved the officer. "There's a reward for their capture. You'll get it. But who—what is that thing on the metal plate?" His tone of surprise changed swiftly to shrill alarm. "Quick!" he squeaked. "Blast the disintegrators; trip the radiolite bombs—ah-h-h-h!"
He slid slowly to the deck of the cruiser. All around him gibbering cries of fear stifled in tight Martian throats. Gunners crashed unmoving before their weapons, stared sightlessly upward; brown Martian giants in the hold, tumbling out of beds at the signal of alarm, fell the remaining distance with sickening plops. The lights blared, the search beam held unwavering, but the grim battleship was a thing of death and utter silence.
Three mortals, rigid in the grip of the paralyzing cone, stared with eyes that could not move, that could not refocus. The being on the upright slab, the strange creature that looked like a distorted Cliff, had moved. He stepped away from the tessellated metal, passed through his inclosing manacles as if they did not exist.
He turned toward the Martian cruiser, aflame with lights, resounding with the shouts of its crew, and extended his hand. At once the shouts died down, vanished. No disintegrator portes belched their cargoes of destruction, no radiolite bombs fell to blast Deimos out of space.
He turned, faced the frozen Earth people. His arm went up again. At once the invisible bonds that held them fell away, the frozen cries thawed and hurtled on their interrupted flight. Kerry mumbled oaths, felt the hackles rise on his skin. Moorhouse, prone on the floor, mouthed a meaningless succession of "p's" and. "q's." The girl flung out her arms imploringly toward the simulacrum of the man she had loved, then shrank back, chilled and afraid, from the fathomless calm of his angular face.
For a long time he looked at and through them, as if they were no impediments to his vision, as if he beheld the workings of their inner mechanism, as if he saw the structure of the universe entire.
Then he seemed to have come to a conclusion, engineered in a remote dimension to which the apparition was but a single facet. He had not said a word; his lips had not yielded from their taut, fixed lines. He strode forward, unhesitatingly, straight for the farther wall that led to outer space.
Beulah found her voice again, cried out terribly. "Cliff! Come back!" Then she fainted.
Cliff, an integrated matrix of reversed components, had passed through the thick quartz walls as if they were thin air, was seen striding at increasing speed through the fathomless depths of outer space——
THE rest is history. The telling of it would take volumes in itself. But on Mars, seated in his spidery quarters atop the topmost structure of the capital city, Vesgo lolled in smug self-satisfaction. The televisors flashed in rapid succession, bringing him reports from his captains and lieutenants on the spaceways, from the subject planets, from the far-flung asteroids.
Everywhere matters were proceeding according to schedule. All revolts had been crushed in bloody ruin; everywhere the Martian guns dominated and controlled. And he, Vesgo, was lord of Mars, and therefore lord of the solar system. Already his faceted eyes turned speculatively to the frozen outer planets, leaped across the reaches of interstellar space to the distant stars themselves. There were no limits to his soaring ambition.
Two things only marred the surface of his contentment: one was the fit of rage in which he had ordered Harg's death for disrespect to himself. The scientist had actually balked at further use of his matrix dissociator on the rebels of the system. Unfortunately, no one else of Mars knew quite how to manipulate its complicated controls, and this most ingenious instrument of compulsion was perforce useless and idle.
The second was the continued failure of his cohorts to discover the whereabouts of Moorhouse, erstwhile timorous delegate on Earth, his rebel daughter, and that red-haired demon, Kerry Dale, second only to Clifford Havens as a trouble-maker. Well, at least Havens was gone, vanished into the unknown, spread inextricably to the farthermost reaches of the universe. Never again would he——
Vesgo gaped, his thick brown mouth wide open, his saucer eyes extended to the bursting. There, right before him, within the guarded sanctum of his chamber. supposedly impenetrable to hostile forces, stood the Earthman Ire had just consigned in his thoughts to the farthest reaches of space and time.
"Clifford Havens!" he squeaked throatily. It was impossible, incredible! He had simply conjured up a vision with the heat of his own imagination. The apparition had seemingly glided through the containing walls, two thousand feet above the ocher day of Mars. And that face, that strange side distortion, as if he had been flattened slightly in the process, that dreadful, silent expression in his eyes——
Vesgo's three-fingered paw flicked like lightning to a button—the alarm signal that would bring his guards catapulting, that would automatically turn on the paralyzing ray, seal all outside entrances and exits. His finger pressed convulsively. Nothing happened.
Cliff said nothing, his silence more terrible than any speech. He lifted his arm. Vesgo shrieked, collapsed into a huddled, moveless heap. Later, when a guard-opened the sealed chamber after repeated unanswered signals, he found the lord of the solar system dead, eyes bulging wide on some dreadful, invisible scene. There was no one else in the chamber.
AT one huge stride, terror stalked the Martian warriors throughout the spaceways. In no place, no matter how remote, were they safe from the inexorable vengeance of the man they had thought to have been rid of for all time. Everywhere the dread word flamed: "The Eternal Wanderer has returned!" and the bravest of the arrogant giants cowered and were afraid.
He struck wherever he willed and whenever he desired. The legions thrust up impenetrable walls of force, hid behind constant blasts of disintegrating rays. Yet, sooner or later, in battle cruisers, in walled forts, in laboratories sealed with the mightiest barriers known to science, Cliff appeared—passionless, expressionless, his face and mien terrible in its abstract façade—and the groveling wretches shrieked and died.
The three Earth people who witnessed his strange return had fled in all haste back to Earth. The invisibility magnet passed them through the still vigilant space fleets of Mars. Back in their subterranean hide-out they heard the incredible news and wondered. Moorhouse shook his grizzled head in awe. Sheets on sheets of furious calculations, intricate formulae, lay in heaped disorder before him.
"All the equations," he pointed wearily, "indicate that with a reversal of the matrix coordinates, 'h,' the quantum of action, is raised to the fourth exponential power. That can mean only one thing: that the energy states of the reconstituted being we once knew and loved as Clifford Havens require a four-dimensional continuum. That would account for his ability to appear almost simultaneously in widely separate places, to pass through three-dimensional walls as if they were so much unresistant air.
"What we had seen appear on the metal plate hack on Deimos was merely a three-dimensional facet of him; the rest of Clifford Havens is beyond our comprehension. That is also why our weapons do not harm him, and accounts for the strange powers that, emanating from a fourth-dimensional stratum, kill though invisible to our eyes."
Kerry girded himself grimly. He had cast off his aged disguise, and was once more a young man with powerful shoulders, flaming thatch of red hair, snub nose and freckles. "I'm tired of doing nothing," he declared. "It's time we poor limited mortals do some fighting on our own account." Then he was gone.
But Beulah remained behind, listless, more pallid than ever. What mattered it to her that the solar system was being saved from slavery to the Martians; what mattered it that Clifford Havens was the originating cause? He was lost to her forever; more thoroughly, more potently even, than if he had remained the Eternal Wanderer. Then, at least, there was always the hope of bringing him back.
But now that he was back—— His face has been utterly expressionless up there on Deimos; yet he must have sensed her physical shrinking, the cold wind of alienness that had enveloped him. Suddenly, to her father's startled surprise, she was in his arms, sobbing aloud the torture of her soul.
URGED on by the flame of Kerry's presence, enheartened by the heaps of Martian dead, first Earth rose in savage revolt and slew the few remaining Martians who had thought to hide from the invisible death. From Earth, rebellion spread to Venus, to Mercury, even to Mars itself, where a minority party had long protested the lust for conquest that had actuated Vesgo and his cohorts. Harg had been the secret head of the movement.
Martian overrule was swept out of existence; the planets once more regained their ancient independence. The spaceways filled again with peaceful freighters. The ravages of war were soon healed, and peace and plenty revisited the solar system.
Warren Moorhouse became chief of Earth, Kerry Dale commanded the Interplanetary Patrol, and the Interplanetary Court was reconstituted—no longer on Deimos, but in a huge, sealed cavern on Earth's Moon.
Precautions were taken against any future seizure of power. The planets rested from their warlike labors, took on again the decent appearance of ordered prosperity. One vestige alone remained of the days of chaos.
In the great new hall of the Interplanetary Court the magnificent central chair of the titular head was vacant. Nevertheless, before any decision was ever announced, the four judges bowed once before the seat of reverence. It was reserved for Clifford Havens, already a legendary hero.
But Clifford Havens had vanished. The four-dimensional being had withdrawn into the fathomless reaches of another dimension. Beulah was inconsolable. Daily she drooped, and only smiled wanly at all attempts at consolation by her father, by Kerry himself in his infrequent trips to Earth.
"It's all my fault," she declared passionately. "Cliff saw the repulsion in my eyes that fatal moment on Deimos; he has determined never to come back."
"Nonsense!" retorted both men gruffly, to hide their own discomfort. "He is now a being of a different order. Our Earthly emotions cannot touch him; no doubt we are beneath his contempt—mere worms to his extended comprehension." Which clumsy attempt at consolation only made Beulah more inconsolable than ever before, much to their astonishment.
Then, one day, during one of Kerry's hurried visits, Cliff appeared before them. The girl saw him first, started up with a great cry. Her arms went out. "Cliff, darling!" she cried. "I knew you'd come back."
He gazed at her with an almost god-like expression, remote, unconcerned. Then he flung out his arm. Another gesture, and writing traced itself on the open sheet before Moorhouse. Then Cliff vanished.
The paralysis left them. As one, they rushed to the desk. "Go to the matrix dissociator on Deimos," read the memorandum. "Do thus and so." The complex of machinery was drawn in exact detail, and careful directions followed.
As fast as the fastest space liner could hurl them through the warp to Deimos, it was not fast enough for Beulah. "Hurry!" she moaned through clenched teeth, while Kerry merely grinned, and her father looked serious.
THE space unit was just as they had left it. No one had been allowed on Deimos since the revolution. Once again they fled up the secret lift, and stood in an agony of impatience within the quartz unit while Moorhouse followed directions with frowning brow and concentrated air.
Again machines whined and tubes flared with faint violet. Again a pattern shimmered on the last plate, was pulled irresistibly from slab to slab, until Cliff Havens appeared, taut and drawn, within the chains that held him prisoner against the frontal upright.
Barely was her father able to shut off power before Beulah had hurled herself toward the man suspended in the manacles. Her fingers went trembling over the dear, familiar features—no longer distorted, no longer expressionless. Their lips met and clung desperately, while Kerry sprang the manacles open with feverish haste.
"Thank Heaven!" the girl whispered over and over.
Cliff settled back with a deep sigh. There was a queer, dazed look in his eyes. "It's mighty lucky you rescued me in time," he said. "I thought you'd never come. In another second Harg would have made me into a matrix—the Eternal Wanderer." He looked suddenly past the three. Surprise twisted his features. "But what happened to Harg and Vesgo? How did you get in here?"
Roy Glashan's Library
Non sibi sed omnibus
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