Eando Binder - Anton York, Immortal

“Remember bringing an asteroid to Venus, as its new moon?” murmured Vera. “How happy we were in that accomplishment. So many Earth settlers sighed for moonlight, through the long Venusian nights.”

She felt her husband start slightly.

“Vera!” he whispered tensely. “You’ve given me an idea. Suppose we towed away another asteroid, took it to Earth. Suppose we gave it a tremendous velocity, and aimed it for the key island. Even the Eternals wouldn’t be able to stop trillions of tons of hard rock plunging down without warning upon their heads!”

York woke Kaligor, after much mental shouting, and outlined the plan to him. “Good!” agreed the Muan.

Once more hope went with them as they maneuvered far from Earth’s vicinity, out to the barren asteroids. After some search, they singled out a dense little body roughly five miles in diameter. Their ship was no more than a grain of sand beside it, but before long they were nudging it out of its age-old orbit, with the illimitable forces of their telekinetic projector.

Hour by hour it gained velocity, in the long stretch of space toward Earth.

York spent brain-numbing hours over the equations of its course. He had to hit precisely one certain spot on Earth, the while it inexorably continued to revolve and rotate. It took timing to seven decimal places. It was super-ballistics, with the asteroid in the role of a gigantic shell shot from a mythical cannon against a target that moved in the four dimensions of space time.

“And yet,” he summed it up, when done, “it’s really easier to figure this hundred-million-mile trajectory in space than it would be to aim a cannon shot on Earth for a mere thousand miles. The motions and laws of space are precise, unvarying. Those on Earth are subject to the vagaries of wind, temperature and air density. I think we’ll be able to land the asteroid squarely on the island, at a speed of a hundred miles a second.”

It took them two weeks to push the asteroid within striking distance. Gradually its velocity had mounted. It had been aimed unerringly to reach Earth’s orbit, plunge into its atmosphere, and drop like a great bomb on the island of the Three Eternals.

“It can’t fail!” said Kaligor confidently, rechecking York’s figures for the third time. “The Eternals will have no warning. The, asteroid is too small to shine as a moving star except in the last few minutes. It will light incandescently when it strikes the atmosphere, but a few seconds later it will land. The Eternal, will be ground flat into the Earth itself! And at the same time, the island will be cracked apart, reversing the rise of Atlantis. York, it is a splendid plan!”

“I hope it works.”

Now that the zero moment approached, York was assailed by doubts. Yet how could the Eternals survive it, this hurling of a world at them?

Reaching a point a—thousand miles above Earth, York halted his ship. The asteroid plunged on. It vanished from their sight. Then, five seconds later it reappeared, glowing slightly. With each passing second, as it hurtled into the thicknesses of the atmosphere, it brightened.

Like a glowing diamond, it plummeted for the ground—and the island. It been aimed perfectly.

“Here’s a little present for you, Eternals!” sang out Kaligor, moving for the ship’s telescope.

It struck!

Watching, they saw it shatter into a shower of sparks, from their perspective, that spattered far over the Pacific Ocean. Dense clouds of steam shot skyward. More than a quadrillion tons of rock had smashed into Earth, the impact was sufficient to affect, by a measurable, split second, the rotation of the planet. Earthly astronomers would later notice that, and record the fall of the largest meteorite in history, little suspecting the man-made agency behind it.

York drew a deep breath. That mighty mass had rocketed straight down upon the marble home of the Three Eternals. By no stretch of imagination could they have survived.

“York!”

Kaligor, at the telescope, had given the sharp mental cry. “The marble building is still intact! The asteroid struck some shell of force over, it, broke on that, and the pieces simply slid off into the ocean on all sides!”

He followed this stunning, incredible announcement with an urgent warning.

“Quickly! lights off, ship unpowered, minds closed! They will be after us in a moment. We’re safer here than in trying to outdistance them after detection.”

They waited for long hours, minds locked against mental probing, realizing the. Eternals would not dare leave their island unless they detected the position of their quarry.

At last, as before, a broadcast telepathic message rustled in their minds.

“Did you think to catch us unawares, Kaligor and Anton York?” scoffed one of the Eternal Three. “We remembered that you had learned to move worlds before, Anton York. We expected you to try this. A trigger-touch dome of force protected the island and our home. Even if you should hurl the Moon down on us, we would shunt it aside. We dealt with world-moving forces long before you! Must we repeat over and over that you are as children to us? Children who must eventually be caught and punished?”

York went to his controls and eased the ship away from Earth, following a regular liner route so that the eternals’ detectors would not single them out.

“Now what’s left, Kaligor?” he asked, biting his lip. “What’s left to try—and it’ll be the last try!”

But Kaligor was sunk in the myths of his mind, in temporary escape from the stark, pressing problem that brought haggard lines to the faces of his two companions.

“Mirbel!” his mind was murmuring, as they had first heard it murmuring from inside the steel block—“Mirbel, is that you? And Binti? I have been to a strange dream world, called—let me think—Earth! Earth, yes. I dreamed of struggle, futile opposition to super-scientists. But that is impossible, isn’t it, Mirbel? I’m the supreme scientist in the Universe! Binti, tell me it sufficient!”

Losing patience at last, York prodded the bemused Muan.

“Wake up, Kaligor! This is no time to dream. In the name of the Universe, stop mumbling and talking to those two. They’re, figments, myths, dummies—do you understand?”

York was immediately sorry for his outburst. But Kaligor came awake.

“Phantoms! Figments!” he echoed. “Myths, dummies! Yes, you’re right.”

Suddenly his telepathic contact broke, became a rush of jumbled thought. For a moment York thought he had again dropped into his enchanted spell, but his telepathic voice returned, now clear, strong.

“Anton York,” he said, “what is most important in all this—ourselves or the civilization we are trying to save?”

“Civilization!” returned York without hesitation. “They are our people—yours and mine. They advance, slowly but surely.” Firmly he repeated: “The civilization—for what it is to become. It must be preserved, even at the cost of our lives!”

York felt a strange embarrassment, with the last word, as though he had thrown it before the robot’s face.

“I cannot die,” said Kaligor evenly. “No, but I can sacrifice to an equal extent.”

“What are you driving at?” York demanded.

“There is only one way to achieve that aim for which we would both make the final sacrifice,” continued Kaligor. “By decoying the Three Eternals away from the island long enough to blow it up!”

Kaligor went on, and suddenly it was all starkly clear to York.

A year went by, a year in which York, Vera and Kaligor laboured over intricate mechanisms.

Then, one day, they faced the Eternals once again at their island. Kaligor sat hunched at the controls of the ship. His telepathic radiation issued from a human brain, clothed in an inhuman shell. Their fleshly bodies offering sharp contrast York and Vera stood back of him, almost woodenly tense, as their plan was started.