Synthetic Men Read online

  * * *

  Gary Horne whirled to face the indistinct shape near him.

  “Thala!” he breathed. “What—what brought you here?”

  “The knowledge that you would return to the machine that carried you from Earth,” she said simply. “I knew return would be in your thoughts, so—I came.” Her slight figure was close to him.

  Without quite knowing where he found the courage, Gary Horne suddenly took the girl in his arms and pressed his lips to her own. A long moment they held each other, and in Thala’s eyes was a light that shines in the eyes of all women when they are in love—

  The Queen drew away presently, her cheeks rosy and her breath a little tremulous.

  “We must hurry,” she said quickly. “After that there will be time for—things of the heart. Here, there is constant danger of your being discovered. I have brought food that you may work while you study the machine.”

  He thanked her with his eyes.

  “These tubes, Thala.” Gary Horne gestured at the apparatus. “They seem to be the only part damaged. Probably their filaments were made of copper and could not withstand the heat generated. But I think if we replace these tubes the machine will work!”

  The girl nodded eagerly. “I can bring them tomorrow.”

  “Fine! I knew you would.” Then he remembered something.

  He took the platinum band from his pocket and handed it to Thala.

  “I wouldn’t want to be caught with this,” he said. “Your associates wouldn’t like it a bit.”

  The girl smiled appreciatively. She removed the silver band she had been wearing and donned the platinum one.

  “This little silver band,” Horne said, “might turn out to be a good decoy—just in case.”

  Outside, the faint shuffling of feet made them both start. Wordlessly, poignantly the Queen nodded. Horne said no more. He turned his back and made quickly for the door. In a matter of moments he was gone.

  Could he have been two places at once, he would have seen the girl staring out a window in the large chamber. And there were tears in her eyes.

  Chapter V

  The Final Hour

  Through bridge and elevator Gary Horne made his way back to his underground retreat. He slumped down in a corner, but for hours was unable to relax. Thoughts of Thala, of this strange new world, of the cruelty of its rulers, of the dire necessity to rescue Earth from an incredible fate marched across his brain. Finally sleep claimed him again for the second time in a relatively few hours.

  But an exhausted mind is no mind at all, and finally the young scientist forced himself not to think…

  When he awoke he felt oddly refreshed. Had he slept too long, Horne wondered. Anxiously he hurried along the dark corridor to the elevator, rocketed up from the depths and again stepped across the bridge.

  It was still dark outside. He must have slept the clock around.

  Warily Horne crept along the guardrail. Faint light shone through the windows of the auditorium. Thala must be there waiting for him!

  He would surprise her, come through the window. He leaned against the railing for a second and caught his breath. As if that had been a signal, a dazzling burst of light sprayed over him from a dozen different directions, to impale him helplessly against the wall!

  Terror knifed his heart. He crouched, frozen into immobility. Abruptly, a sound behind him made him spin about.

  “The sharp eyes of Vulkor were right, Earthman,” Jaro said exultantly. “It was you indeed whom he saw leave the auditorium last night. Her Majesty must have been mistaken, in saying she had been alone there.”

  Out of the darkness beyond the pale of light the Workmaster strode, flanked by Vulkor and Harnak. All of them carried the strange, effective pistols that could stun a man without killing him. Gary Horne’s eyes swept back as other shapes drew closer. Within a few seconds a throng of twenty angry Thorians ringed him.

  Jaro stepped forward and tore the metal ring from his pocket. His eyes gleamed as he gripped it in his skinny hand.

  “You valued it highly, man of the Seventh Plane,” he smirked. “A life is a high price to pay for such a miserly bit of metal!” His small eyes gleamed as though he were already watching the physicist’s death struggles.

  “It would be far less than I would pay to see this band twisted about your scrawny neck!” Horne rasped.

  Jaro laughed harshly. He turned from the heartsick captive and glanced at the lighted windows of the auditorium. With a smirk at the others, he said,

  “Let us give Her Majesty the privilege of deciding what his death shall be. She waits for him inside. It would not be customary to execute him without first consulting our ruler!”

  The Workmaster gestured for the others to bring Horne along, and turned on his heel to stride into the building.

  * * *

  Black despair caused a sob to well from the young scientist’s throat as they hauled him along. What a horrible botch he had made of things! His bitter thoughts came to an abrupt end as Queen Thala suddenly appeared before them. Her lovely face turned pale and distraught as she saw what had happened. She stood in the doorway to the auditorium with one hand held to her breast.

  Jaro strode forward arrogantly. With a curt nod he gloated,

  “A captive, Your Majesty! We have brought him to you for sentence. No doubt he would like to hear the fatal word from your own lips!”

  Thala could barely suppress an anguished gasp. Gary Horne’s heart struck a sharp beat as he saw the thin metal band about the girl’s forehead. If the Thorians knew it was the one they sought!

  His eyes wandered past Thala to the little heap of apparatus that lay on the floor at the foot of the pyramid on which the machine rested. The girl had kept to her part of the plan. If only he could have performed his!

  “Step forward, Earthman!” Jaro commanded harshly. “Kneel at the feet of our Queen and receive sentence.” Cunning hatred twisted his thin lips. His little black eyes sparkled venomously.

  Gary Horne was thrust, forward by his guards over the threshold while the Masters strode past him into the rooms. Thala bit her lip as he went down on his knees before her where she stood by the door. Only her great strength of will kept the tears back from her soft, compassionate eyes. Slowly she extended her right hand and placed it on his shoulder.

  The young scientist started, as the pressure of her fingers dug into his shoulder. His eyes swept up to seek hers. Was she trying to tell him something? For her hand seemed to be pulling him toward her, urging him to something which he could not understand.

  Her blue eyes burned into his. They were trying to impart a message, a message she dared not think for fear the Council would intercept it. For a brief moment the four rulers were behind her in the room. In that moment Gary Horne understood.

  Hope lent strength to his legs as he sprang past her across the door-sill. Thala followed him an instant later. A roar of rage welled up from the captors behind as they charged after him. Then there was a clang as Thala slammed the door shut and swung the heavy metal locking device into place. Fists and pistol butts thudded on the panels, and strange cries came to their ears as angry men forgot their thought-impulses in their excitement.

  The door was bulging inward as the girl whirled and rushed over to the young scientist. For just a moment he I took her in his arms and held her close then he tore himself away and cried,

  “The tubes—are they ready?”

  Thala ran and picked up the parts he had hoped were the needed replacements.

  “Ready!” she told him. “They need only to be placed in the machine.”

  Horne seized her hand and dashed up the steps toward the top of the pyramid. He squatted beside the apparatus and tore out the old vacuum tubes, shoved the new ones into the sockets. His fingers trembled in their eagerness. Below them the door resounded to heavy smashes as some object was swung against it. Thala’s breathing was audible to him just in back as she waited tensely.

  Now he stood up
excitedly. “The switches?”

  Without a word the girl hastened to a circular switchboard and turned several dials. A crackling of power filled the room as motors over the ceiling broke into life. The vacuum tubes glowed hotly. The atomic machine was now in operation!

  “How—how does it work?” Horne breathed.

  Thala pointed over their heads to where a large, silver reflector looked toward them.

  “The power is reflected onto the third step,” she explained. “When you pass onto it, the force will strike you.”

  A splintering noise announced that the door was on the point of giving. Gary Horne turned to the girl.

  “At this moment,” he said tensely, “I’d rather do anything in the world but step on that spot. Because when I do that—I’ll know I’ve stepped across the void that will separate us forever.”

  “But—you must!” Thala breathed, handing him the little platinum circlet she had taken from her head. “Your world must live on, though our own hearts die.” But her soft lips trembled and belied her brave words.

  Horne gripped her hands tightly as he turned away. Abruptly, he swung around.

  “Thala!” he burst out eagerly. “Why can’t you do it, too? Come with me, step on the spot as I do, and then nothing can ever part us again. We’ll be together in my world for the rest of our lives!”

  The girl started as the idea took hold. “But—Gary,” she protested, “this is my world. I belong here.”

  “Why?” he argued. “We belong together, no matter whose world we must live in. Come with me, Thala!”

  The girl’s face was a screen of mixed emotions. She struggled with the desire to remain in her own world and the eagerness to be with him on Earth. It was a choice no woman had ever been faced with before in all the ages.

  There was a loud crash at the door, and then a roar of sound as the voices of the enraged Thorians carried through the smashed wood. The two lovers whirled to see what had happened. Horne’s eyes widened with fear. Jaro had broken the door down and now was springing through! At his heels came others, shouting, gesticulating, eager for the blood of the Earthman.

  “Quickly!” Gary Horne cried, turning back to his beloved. “Will you go with me?”

  She hesitated for a moment; then her lips parted to breathe, “I’ll go!”

  * * *

  Without another second’s pause Gary Horne picked her up in his arms and stepped down onto the third step. In his right hand he clutched the platinum ring. A column of green fire seemed to envelop them as the full force of the reversing ray burned down on their bodies. In that one moment all sound, all sight, everything ceased. The auditorium walls flowed back from them, seeming to retreat from the onrushing curtain of green fire that swept them back. The crackling of electricity faded out. A faint, far-off roar filled Garry Horne’s ears, like the sound when a sea shell is held to the ear.

  Again he was rushing up into the far reaches of space at breathtaking speed. Again there came the dizzying sensation of turning over in the air. His arms and legs lost all sensation. He was as nerveless as a stick of wood, as blind as stone.

  After a long while the green light faded. The soft roaring sound tapered off. A tension seemed building up, as though he was in a balloon that was being inflated and must soon break. Gary Horne’s ears began to hurt. Suddenly there was a loud bang. The tension ceased. Bit by bit feeling returned to his numbed limbs….

  He opened his eyes to find he was lying on the floor. With a jerk he sat up and started down into his arms, still crooked from the girl’s weight.

  “Thala!” Horne gasped. She was not there.

  There was nothing there! His arms were empty and the platinum circlet had vanished. He opened his hand where he had clutched the ring, and he fancied he saw a tiny, shining bit of dust float to the floor.

  “Thala!” he breathed in anguish. “Oh God, Thala!”

  He did not know how long his tortured thoughts reached out to that other world. He only knew, after a bit, that something was scraping on the floor by his side, and a stout, bespectacled man was saying:

  “Horne! For heaven’s sake, man, snap out of it! My, you had us nearly scared to death!”

  It was Dr. Lansinger, one of his research associates at the University.

  Lanky Dr. Andrews mopped his intellectual brow with a handkerchief. Andrews was a mathematician, and ordinarily he prided himself on his calm detachment.

  “For five seconds,” Andrews said hoarsely, “every man in this room could have sworn you had vanished. It—it’s utterly incredible!”

  Dr. Gary Horne, home again, got slowly, shakily to his feet and let his eyes travel about the familiar lecture hall.

  “Yes,” he said somberly, “it must have seemed—incredible, to you. Something about the violet-green light, I suppose. Must have knocked me down. I thought—for a while—that I had been—carried out of here myself. Funny—what a jolt of escaping electricity can do to you…”

  Five seconds, they had said. But not in the time-reckoning of the Fifth Plane! Not in the eyes of Gary Horne! And certainly not in the life of Thala, Queen of another world!

  Five seconds—but to Gary Horne it had been a lifetime. A lifetime, because though he was still young, and handsome, and famous besides, the girl of his dreams had vanished.

  The End

  *****************************

  Buccaneer of the Star Seas,

  by Ed Earl Repp

  Planet Stories Fall 1940

  Novelette - 10770 words

  "... and thou shalt be immortal!" Such was the

  curse of that 13th Century sorcerer. Now Carlyle

  roamed the uncharted star-seas, seeking Death

  as he sought the richly-laden derelicts in that

  sargossa of long-vanished space-galleons.

  I

  An unpleasant shudder went through Thaddeus Carlyle as the great iron door thundered behind him. Reading Gaol's raw, damp atmosphere seemed to settle into his bones. Hobbling on rheumatic legs, the aged turnkey preceded him down the vaulted stone corridor.

  "'Tis the first time my key has disturbed Friar Bacon's lock these six months," his grumbling voice came to Carlyle's ears. "Plagued few they are that visit the roguish priest. Not even the canon comes now, to exhort him to renounce his black magic."

  Thaddeus Carlyle's dark eyes flamed with quick interest. "Then he practices still these works of the devil?" he queried softly.

  The turnkey stopped, his narrowed eyes mirroring fearful thoughts. With his crooked forefinger he tapped the young nobleman's gold-cloth tabard.

  "Only last month he asked for brimstone, charcoal and niter. We gave him the stuff, seeing no harm. A week ago, as I am passing his cell, there was a great flash and roar. The devil's powders had exploded as steam bursts a tight-lidded vessel! He carries still the marks of a burn."

  "No!" Carlyle's smooth features were blank. "Fire—from such stuff as that?"

  "That's not all, my Lord. Friar Bacon tells me that if we would give him enough of the stuff and a long tube, he could throw an iron ball across the Thames!"

  Turning away with a crafty nod and a meaningful blink, the turnkey led on to the mean little cell in which Roger Bacon had now spent nine years. The visitor was openly affected by the jailer's incredulous story. He had heard strange and terrible things of the Gray Friar. The church, in incarcerating him, had accused him of consorting with the devil. Some whispered that he had learned the secret of immortality. That was the rumor which had brought Thaddeus Carlyle, the second Lord Monfort, into the gloomy confines of Reading Gaol.

  The lock scraped shrilly as the jailer turned it. Throwing the heavy door open, he grinned: "Lucky for him you came, my Lord! In another month this lock should have been rusted past turning. Then Friar Bacon would have been forever without hope!"

  "Have I, indeed, such hope now?" a soft and gloomy voice inquired.

  The turnkey merely winked at the nobleman and hobbled off.

  C
arlyle was suddenly seized by panic. Now that he was so close to the notorious philosopher, fear smote him and he was on the point of turning back. Yet, ridden by an even greater fear, he stiffened his purpose and advanced. Closing the door, he stared at the white-bearded man seated before a great calfskin-bound book on a ponderous table.

  "What hast thou with me, young man?" demanded Roger Bacon, peering shrewdly from under ragged brows.

  "Only the admiration of an ignorant man for a very learned one," said Thaddeus Carlyle simply.

  Bacon's eyes misted. Precious years of his waning life had he spent in prison because there was no man to say such a thing before.

  "You—you do not believe what they say of me, that I consort with Satan?" he queried. "That my science and my secrets are Lucifer's?"

  "Well—as to that," said Carlyle, his confidence returning, "I am again the ignorant one. Where you get your knowledge I neither know nor care. I only know that your learning is great ... and that that learning can help me!"

  The Gray Friar wagged his head wonderingly. His eyes went over Thaddeus. He saw a strapping young man over six feet in height, with a muscular development such as came only from constant participation in the strenuous contests popular among the nobility. His skin was brown as leather, burned, Bacon reckoned, by hot Oriental suns during the last Crusade. He saw a man whose rich clothing spoke of a fat purse. And he was asked to help him—he, who could not help himself!

  "Who are you, young man?" he asked, at last.

  "Thaddeus Carlyle, the second Lord Monfort," was the reply.

  "A noble—!" Bacon murmured. "But you—you jest with me!"

  "Not so!" Carlyle threw a leg across the corner of the table and peered earnestly into the monk's face. "You are old and wise, Friar Bacon. Perhaps you do not know the fear of death. I do! Always it is with me, haunting my pleasures, disturbing my sleep—Fear of growing old and toothless, of losing my strength—of dying as helpless as the day I was born!"