Eando Binder - Anton York, Immortal

When this was done, York raised the Cometoid above Pluto and contemplated his work, here and in the rest of the Solar System. He felt a deep glow of pride. Then he swung his eyes out beyond Pluto, out toward the distant immensity of interstellar space. Into his eyes came a strange look—a yearning for the greater freedom of the macrovoid.

“Our work here is done,” he said to Vera.

“Yes,” said Vera. “Well done.” She too was gazing out at the unplumbed infinity in which they had lost themselves for a thousand years—for a magnificent second of eternity.

“We will go out there soon,” said York. “By the way,” he continued, “how long have we been at this work—in the time scale of Earth?”

“Fifty years,” answered Vera. They both laughed, then, at the meaningless words.

The giant, blunt Ship left Pluto and with ponderous grace hurtled toward the dim, distant Sun. York landed it at Ganymede for repairs. It was here that he heard the news of Mason Chard’s escape from imprisonment.

“I knew that would happen,” he said to the Councillors, shaking his head. “You should have executed him. Now you will have him on your hands again, stirring up trouble for the next thousand years, as he has for the past thousand. Well, that is your problem. If I knew any way of finding him, I’d go out after him. But of course, he’s far too clever to run across my path again.”

Escape had seemed impossible, at first, to Mason Chard. He had been isolated in an underground laboratory on Jupiter’s sixth moon, watched over day and night by armed guards. The exits above had been policed, and overhead a Space Patrol ship had kept close watch for possible rescue by confederates.

But Mason Chard had had no confederates. He had at times hired unscrupulous men in certain projects, but never had he entrusted them with his full plans or retained them. Immortal and conceited, he felt himself above human ties.

He did not know the meaning of the term friend. As a lone wolf he had pursued his way and so it would be to the end. For fifty years he had waited for his chance to escape. His scientific endeavour for his captors, on which promise he had won his life, amounted to little. His was not the keen scientific brain, but simply an average one. He was, in the last analysis, a common man with the gift of immortality. He had amused himself in the past thousand years in the way a coarse mind would—by playing god with the people whom he outlived century after century.

Chard’s escape was typical of his ruthlessness. He had surreptitiously put together bit by bit a miniature of the same weapon he had developed for his space ship. It charged itself with the energy of the cosmic rays and was able to release it in short, concentrated blasts of exploding neutrons, before which nothing human could stand.

Chard killed his personal guards without compunction. Donning a space suit, he made his way to the exit and burned down the three men there. When the members of the landed Space Patrol ship came on the run to investigate, the superior range of his weapon gave Chard the victory. Their ship was his means of escape from the sixth satellite.

Chard allowed some of the bitterness of his fifty years of incarceration to come out in one short, harsh laugh, as the prison satellite faded from his view. They would pay for the humiliation it had cost him, these mortals! When York had left the System and gone far out into space, then Chard would act.

The Immortal had not been out of contact with events in the Solar System for the years of his imprisonment. He was granted the use of a radio and televisor and had watched with avid interest York’s remoulding of the Solar System. Safe in his secret hideout in the deepest crater of Earth’s moon—which had been unmolested for the fifty years of his absence—Chard now watched the ceremonies attendant to York’s landing on Earth, his mission finished.

“Why has he done all this?” wondered Chard. “Is he planning to ingratiate himself with the people of the Empire, so that they will offer him a throne? Has he come back from remote space to wrest from me my dream of ten lifetimes?” Always theatrical in his thoughts, from a thousand-year inflation of ego, Chard’s eyes blazed as he concluded: “Is there to be a battle of the gods for this kingdom of mortals? If so, let him beware! He has bested me once, by a trick, but I’ve not tested my full powers!”

Despite this boast, however, Chard felt a strong relief as the televised image of York, standing on a tall marble platform before a sea of faces at Sol City, said:

“People of the Solar System! As the city-planner levels and prepares his city-site, so have I prepared the Solar System for the future Empire of mankind, and his subject races. But when the city-planner is done with his work, he does not seek or accept the rule of the city, he has made possible. That is for the city itself to do. The Supreme Council has offered to relinquish authority. You people have petitioned me for ruler. The crown has been offered me, but I must decline, even though it is the greatest crown in the history of man. We are going out into fathomless space again, my wife and I. It is our destiny!”

Chard’s eyes gleamed in satisfaction. That would make things simpler for him.

After the crowd’s low moan of disappointment had subsided, York spoke again, waving an arm toward the huge, shining bulk of the Cometoid nearby in its landing cradle.

“I leave you this legacy,” he said. “It is an instrument which may yet prove of further use to you. I have left full and complete instructions for its operation and functions in the control chamber. I only ask that you practice care when you make use of the Cometoid. It can be a mighty engine of world-destruction, if used wrongly, or carelessly. Its powers are like the sinews of Jovian-sized Titans. Rightly applied on the other hand, it can be of inestimable utility, in ways comparable to the things I have done with it in the past fifty years.”

Chard’s eyes had narrowed, looking at the Cometoid. The thoughts it conjured up were so intense that he failed to hear York’s short and final farewell speech. He was suddenly aware of the televisor scene broadening to show a tiny, globular ship leaping into the sky. A million awed faces watched it dwindle to a pinpoint glistening in the sunlight, and then vanish completely.

As they arrowed away from Earth, the immortal couple were silent with their thoughts.

“You have done a great work, Tony,” said Vera. She kissed him impulsively. “They will not forget it for all the ages to come.” A slight frown came to her face. “But, Tony, do you think it wise to leave the Cometoid in their hands? It is such a powerful thing. And they are like children at times.”

“Yes, it is wise,” said York softly. “It is the only way.”

Pluto toiled by their ports after a time. Behind lay the nine-world empire of man. Ahead lay the vast void.

MASON CHARD bided his time patiently. He would wait a full year for York to plunge far, far into the void. So far that no chance message could leak out to him and bring him back. For the success of his present plans, it was essential that the one being who could possibly disrupt them was totally out of the picture. Mason Chard waited a long year, a year that seemed longer to him than the previous hundred had been.

In that time, he perfected his plans with a finesse that assured triumph barring a remote unlucky chance. Delving into the vast worldly riches he had accumulated throughout his extended lifetime, he circulated among the scattered spaceports. Keeping his identity utterly secret, he hired a man here and there. He picked them carefully—bitter, disappointed souls whose careers had not been untainted, yet whose abilities as spacemen at one time had been, or still were, respected. Knowing human nature as he did, from a thousand years of observation, he could readily choose men whose cupidity was great and conscience small. Swearing each to utter secrecy, he had them congregate quietly and singly, as he met them, at his lunar lair.