Synthetic Men Page 21

  Ann pressed against Larry's side, seemingly unconscious that there had ever been anything wrong between them. "What was he, Larry?" she whispered.

  "I don't know," he admitted. "But he was old—Lord knows how old. That crystal heart he gave you ... there was something queer about it. I think that when I destroyed it, I killed him, too."

  The girl suddenly buried her face against his chest. "Oh, Larry!" she sobbed. "It's so horrible. Let's go back ... now!"

  "Just as soon as we comb a few gold bars out of the sky," he told her softly. "Then we're going back and carry on with those plans we had before you gave me back my ring. But—I'd like to find out some time—just how old he was, and what he was."

  Sooner than they had expected, they were to find at least the answer to Thaddeus Carlyle's age. Larry and Ann were married the day they docked in New York. For their honeymoon they sailed to England. It occurred to Larry while they were there to look for the Monfort tomb in Westminster Abbey.

  They found it, an ancient stone crypt with the names of thirteen Lord Monforts inscribed, hidden in the shadows of the building's oldest wing. Birth and death dates followed each name. But after Thaddeus Carlyle's name were engraved only the numerals:

  "1262—"

  "Wish I had the courage of my convictions," muttered Larry. "I'd get them to finish it for the poor devil: '—died, 1970.'"

  The End

  *******************************

  The Invisible World,

  by Ed Earl Repp

  Amazing Stories October 1940

  Novelette - 10291 words

  He was a "man without a world", but not even punishment

  could make him reveal why he had been a traitor

  Chapter I

  First Mate Ian Patrick’s thoughtful advance down the corridor stopped before the door of the radio room. Without knocking, he went into the vibrant atmosphere of buzzing transformers and reeking ozone. Sparks, chief operator of the liner Oracle, was hunched over the desk with ear crooked to the dim cracklings of an amplifier.

  Patrick dropped a thin sheaf of papers before him.

  “Snap out of it, Curly,” he grunted. “Location and readings as of two minutes ago. Send ’em out.”

  Sparks’ short, barrel-shaped body twisted in the chair as he glanced up at Patrick. Unconsciously the radio operator ran a palm over the unsullied surface of his onion-slick scalp, a frequent gesture since commencing the use of a patent hair elixir. The first mate’s employment of the nickname “Curly” dated back to the first bottle.

  Sparks scowled at him. “Quiet!” he hissed. “Picked up a news broadcast. Vickers is at it again!”

  Patrick’s preoccupied air left him. He caught a breath and pulled up a chair to join Sparks at the loudspeaker. A news broadcast was something unusual out here in the void, millions of miles from Earth. With universal conditions as they were at the moment, Sparks spent most of his time trying to pick up news from war-harried Earth and Mars.

  “—Vickers’ message came with customary suddenness,” rasped the dim voice from the speaker. “Just five days after the Allied Worlds High Command dispatched the new and deadly Kuhlon guns by freight ship to the fleet off Jupiter, Karl Vickers radioed that his Plutonian hordes would descend on helpless Mars and Earth within a fortnight.

  “This may mean almost anything, since his successful attack on Venus came within three days of a similar warning to that planet last month. If Vickers succeeds in slipping through the cordon before the Kuhlon weapons are installed in the ships, the situation will indeed be grave for the Allied planets. Vickers’ disintegrators, while inferior to the new Kuhlon gun, are vastly more deadly than the weapons now in use aboard the fleet ships.

  “But Commander Yerkes has radioed to Mars and Earth the assurance that Vickers is still somewhere within the noose of warships Yerkes has thrown around Vickers’ hideout off Jupiter. Just where that hideout is, no one can say. Yerkes has narrowed the hunt down to a comparatively small territory; but since no asteroids are known to exist within that sphere, Vickers would still seem to hold his trump card—that is, complete mystery as to his whereabouts.

  The voice faded out, and none of Sparks’ tuning would recover it. Sparks shut off the receiver and wagged his head.

  “Bad business,” he growled. “Where the devil can that butcher be hiding? If they could only get him in their sights just once—”

  “I’ve got a sneaking hunch they don’t much want to find him anyway,” Patrick mused. “Vickers may only have five or six ships with him, but any one of them is worth twenty of ours. Compared to his disintegrators, our guns are like water-pistols.”

  “But if the Kuhlon guns reach the fleets in time!” Sparks reminded him fervently. “The freighter that’s carrying them must be almost there by this time. The High Command hasn’t announced what ship it is, but it must be a fast one—not a space tramp. Let’s see—they said the guns were shipped five days ago. That would put the ship—”

  Patrick sat up straight. “Right about where we are!” he exclaimed. “We’re only four and a half days out ourselves.”

  A grin claimed Sparks’ thick lips. “Hell, how do you know we aren’t carrying the guns! Our course takes us darned close to the fleet!”

  Ian Patrick chuckled. “If I hadn’t supervised the loading and sealing of the holds myself, I might believe the skipper did have something up his sleeve. But all we’re carrying is baggage and a few scientific instruments.”

  * * *

  Sparks looked a little disappointed, and he started to pick up the notes Patrick had tossed on the desk. Then, with a scowl, he remembered something. Digging a folded paper from his vest pocket, he gave it to Patrick with somewhat the air of a man who handles a poisonous insect.

  “Nathan asked me to give you this,” he grunted. “Wants to see you, I suppose. Dammit, Ian, you’re taking a risk every time you talk to that guy!”

  Patrick flung the note into a corner.

  “Do you think I don’t know it?” he raged, his temper boiling up without warning. “What’s he trying to do—get me in trouble? If the skipper knew I’ve been talking to that old coot, it’d be the rocket rooms for First Mate Patrick from now on! And at a time like this!”

  “Where you made your mistake,” Sparks offered, “was in talking to Jared Nathan the first time.”

  * * *

  Patrick jammed his hands in his pockets.

  “I can see that now. He’s hiding around every corner these days, as hungry for conversation as a starving man for food. Still—somehow I can’t help feel sorry for him. Fifteen years aboard this ship! Not allowed to talk to a soul as long as he lives. Hasn’t touched solid ground or seen an inhabited world since they put him on board! Not that he didn’t deserve it,” he finished grimly.

  Sparks snapped on the transmitter and twirled dials.

  “I can see him hugging his sides in his cabin right now!” he gritted. “Him—the man that turned that mad dog, Vickers, loose on the world again after he was stopped!”

  Ian Patrick had no answer for that. Bitterness brimmed in his dark eyes, drew harsh lines in his face. He was thinking of Karl Vickers; of Jared Nathan, who had released Vickers fifteen years ago after his bloody dream of power had broken and a tribunal had sentenced him to death on Planetoid 53.

  Karl Vickers was the butcher who had followed in the wake of the warmongers of Europe. Possessed of boundless craft and hunger for power, he had the bloodlust of a savage, the cruelty of an Inquisitioner. In a two-year war, he swept his Central European army over the world, conquering every nation on the globe with his new, resistless weapons. His purges of conquered ruling bodies were carnivals of lust and cruelty. With his blood thirst unsated, he descended on Venus and charged across the little world, murdering five million souls in the process.

  It was on Mars that the remnant of Earth’s armies joined the Martian legions to defeat him in the ghastliest battle mankind had ever witnessed. Vickers lived to be sentenced
to slow death on Planetoid 53. On that bare chunk of rock, he and his war ministers were to be abandoned with a small store of food and a limited quantity of oxygen in their space suits. Death would be the slow, maddening kind Vickers deserved.

  But Fate had other plans for him.

  Fate, in the form of a traitor, Jared Nathan, rear admiral in the Terrestrial Fleet, had set the condemned men free in a life-ship before the planetoid was reached! After that, Nathan gave himself up to his own men—without a word as to his reason for the act!

  Jared Nathan had paid—was still paying—for his treachery. But Karl Vickers was loose on the universe again. He was back from Pluto, where he had amassed the greatest killing machine in history. Venus had gone down under a series of raids. The strange, disk-like ships, led by Vickers’ black flagship, Vengeance, had brought mass murder to the peaceful planet. Vickers left that planet in the hands of a few thousand of his savage Plutonian fighters, and now had his ships stationed about Mars and Earth awaiting his word to attack.

  For the Tri-World allies the future was a black and terrifying one.

  Ian Patrick got up, as Sparks fingers began tapping out the ship’s location to Central Navigation.

  “Well, I’ll see you later,” he muttered. “I’m due on the bridge in ten minutes.”

  Leaving the room, he headed forward. His way took him past Jared Nathan’s door, but he did not slacken his pace as he approached it. But as Patrick came even with the door, it flew open and Jared Nathan slipped into the portal!

  * * *

  The dim light of the corridor showed a man of middle height standing there, gray of head and sallow of skin, a lonely-looking figure with the shadows of hell in his eyes. Dissipation had stamped its mark on him. Jared Nathan had few pleasures these days, and drinking was chiefest of them.

  He stepped forward then and signalled to Patrick.

  “Thank God you came!” he breathed. “I was afraid you might go by.”

  “As a matter of fact,” cut in Patrick coldly, “I intended to. These conversations have got to stop, Nathan. It would mean my discharge if I got caught. The risk’s not worth it.”

  “I know.” Nathan nodded bitterly, “But—this once! You’ve got to listen to me, Patrick. I want you to throw the Oracle off her course tonight!”

  Patrick was stunned. While he was trying to assimilate the audacious words, the traitor drew him into his untidy little cabin and shut the door.

  “Throw her off her course!” Patrick gasped finally. “Are you crazy, Nathan?”

  “Far from it. If anyone’s out of his mind, it’s Captain Baldwin. This ship is rushing into danger and apparently I’m the only one who knows it! I’m calling on you to do something about it. All I ask is that you cut in around Planetoid 27 on the outer side, instead of passing between it and the sun. Then you can go back on the regular course.”

  Nathan’s bleary eyes searched the young officer’s face. With his seedy old blue suit and dissipation-rotted features, he was not an object to inspire trust in a man of Ian Patrick’s responsibilities. Yet something in his face spoke of sincerity—and terror.

  Patrick shook his head. “Do you think I’d risk jail for such a harebrained act? And at the request of you, of all people! It’s no dice, Nathan. I didn’t think I looked feeble-minded enough to pull a stunt like that! Understand this, once and for all, I’m through risking my stripes on your account. The next time you bother me, I’ll have to report you.”

  But as he turned to leave the cabin, Jared Nathan flung himself before the door.

  “Good God, Patrick! You don’t know what you’re doing!” he choked. “Karl Vickers is on Planetoid 27, waiting to pounce on us as we go by!”

  “Vickers!”

  The word came like an explosion from Patrick’s lips, and one brown hand leaped out to seize Jared Nathan by his scrawny neck.

  “If I thought you were in cahoots with that mad dog again—by the Lord, I’d kill you!”

  The traitor’s eyes did not flinch before the unsheathed steel of Patrick’s gaze.

  “For your own good,” he drawled, “you’d better not kill me until I speak my piece. If Captain Baldwin wasn’t such a blind fool, he’d know what I know—that Vickers means to have the load of Kuhlon guns we’re carrying!”

  His words had the effect on Ian Patrick of a blow behind the ear.

  “This ship—carrying guns!” he blinked. “You—you’re drunk, Nathan!”

  “Possibly,” the smaller man replied dryly. “But still in good possession of my faculties. Do you mean to say you didn’t know the holds were full of Kuhlons?”

  “But I supervised the loading of the ship myself!” Patrick argued. “We’re carrying nothing but baggage and scientific instruments.”

  Nathan shook his head. “I don’t sleep much while we’re in Earth ports, Patrick. I keep thinking about the things beyond these steel walls that I’ll never see again—trees, lakes, hills. Consequently, I hear just about everything that goes on aboard ship during the night. The night before we left, I heard them unload our cargo and bring in a new one!

  “It took eight hours to reload, and the men were working fast. It doesn’t take a master mind to realize we’re not actually taking a bunch of fatheaded business men to a Tri-Worldly trade convention on Mars, but a load of cannon to a panicky war fleet!”

  Facts swarmed through Patrick’s mind and kept him dumb. There was enough logic in Nathan’s words for him to catch rays of truth gleaming through his suspicion of the condemned traitor.

  The ringing of a bell in the hall jarred him. He was late on the bridge; the skipper was calling him. The down-to-earth sound seemed to put Patrick back on a footing of reality. Kuhlon guns—the devil! He gave a little snort of contempt.

  “It won’t do, Nathan. From another man, I might believe it. Coming from you—I guess you know what I mean.”

  Jared Nathan watched him go through the door. He heard his footfalls hurrying up the corridor. As the sounds died away, his shoulders slumped and baffled tears swam in his eyes.

  “Fool!” he cried. “You’ll find out—I was right. But it will be too late then!”

  Chapter II

  The Vengeance

  The clammy spell that Nathan’s words had left with him persisted in Ian Patrick long after he reached the bridge and sank into the pilot’s chair. He wished he had had time to go below and check on the cargo—just as an additional reassurance to himself.

  He tried to believe that the old ex-admiral was either a liar or twice a traitor. Both ideas rang in his mind like bad coins. Nathan had appreciated Ian Patrick’s quasi-friendship and wouldn’t have jeopardized it with a foolish lie. Treachery was also an improbability.

  Nathan was kept from the other passengers and not allowed even to read newspapers or listen to the radio. What he knew of present tragic conditions was from Patrick’s lips. The first mate of the Vengeance told himself Nathan was merely drunk—and tried to believe that, too.

  But to his ragged nerves, the throbbing of the stern rockets was like a frightened pulse in the heart of the ship itself.

  With the charts before him, Patrick kept his course on the dim guiding star out to the left of Planetoid 27. It was the sleeping period for the passengers and most of the crew, and silence walked the corridors. Patrick watched the asteroid swell like a great rock preparing to burst. The sun glistened on white-hot peaks, and shadows filled black valleys where subzero temperatures obtained. Patrick thought of a platter-shaped pirate craft hiding in one of those valleys…

  Almost abreast of the tiny world, the Oracle scarcely rocked to its slight gravitational pull. Patrick’s sweaty palm drew the accelerator back to full. The asteroid flashed by them!

  Planetoid 27 was safely behind, an empty threat exploded. Patrick laughed softly and thought of Jared Nathan nursing a bottle in his room while he cooked up the whole fantastic story.

  “Damned old coot!” he muttered. “Had me sweating ice water!”

  H
e threw a relieved glance back at the retreating rock. In the next moment Ian Patrick was on his feet. His face was the color of clay.

  “The Vengeance!” he gasped. “Nathan wasn’t lying. Vickers has got us!”

  He stared in fascinated horror as the flagship curved up from below like a black discus spun into the wind. Belching jets streamed pale fire. Guns were thrusting out between the rocket tubes in the disk’s rim, and while Patrick sat frozen, one of them flashed.

  From somewhere he drew the strength to pivot and stab at the alarm buttons. Bells began to shrill all over the ship. Their clamor was drowned as the Oracle gave a sickening lurch. A resounding clangggg! dinned against Patrick’s ears.

  He grabbed at the edge of the control board and clung to it while the Oracle went into a dizzy pinwheel. One of the stern tubes had been hit! Patrick fumbled for the controls, fought to right the ship. By the time he got it back on an even keel, it was all over for the good ship Oracle.

  The shadow of a black wing seemed to settle over it. Magnetic power brought it up against the flat bottom of the Vengeance with a smash. Seconds later, Patrick heard crisp tappings against the outer hull of the craft. Small shapes darted by the ports. Vickers’ Plutonian hordes were scuttling them.

  Patrick tore the short rifle from the wall and sprang through the door. From his elevated position on the foredeck, he could see the terrible confusion of the main deck. The passenger list consisted of two hundred men, but they were scurrying around yelling like ten times that many women. Junior officers were shouting for order. The senior officers, Captain Baldwin at their head, were rushing up the ladder to the bridge.

  Sparks came tearing down the hall from the radio room, with his bald forehead and pate wrinkled clear down to his rear collar button.