Eando Binder - Anton York, Immortal

The crowd gaped at York in awe. As much, York mused, as the peoples of the thirty-first century had gaped at him for moving worlds. Here he had done nothing more than wring a Beast’s neck. He hadn’t used a single scientific principle except that a broken spine caused death.

York made an impatient gesture and the girl understood. She led him to the center of the village where a two-storied cabin stood, guarded by two long-haired stalwarts with rifles. One of them started and greeted Leela with a hug and kiss. York smiled at her hungry response. It relieved him entirely of his role as hero-rescuer, with which she had girlishly surrounded him.

The young man stuck out his hand, after the story, and wrung York’s hand with a grip of steel. No weaklings, these men. Then he spoke hesitantly.

“According to custom, Leela is yours.”

“But I have a mate,” York returned quickly. “She is outside the dome wall.” He began to explain. Seeing their blank stares, he asked again for an audience with those in authority.

“You mean the Congress.” The young guard went in and returned after a moment, nodding. “They will see you.”

The Congress proved to be a group of ten elderly, gray-haired men, past the days of physical activity but wise in years and experience. They listened as Leela once again gave the details.

“It is a strange story,” said Robar, the head of the council. “Who are you, Anton York? I have never heard the name York among our people.” There was suspicion in his voice, and in all their stares. “You may be from the Beast village, sent as a spy. The Beasts try all sorts of tricks in their attempt to subdue us.”

The atmosphere became tense, and the young guard even raised his gun threateningly.

“No!” It was Leela who sprang to York’s defence. “Don’t forget I was in the Beast village for a year. The name is not known there, either. If he is a spy, so am I, for I came from the Beasts.”

The impassioned words served to heighten the tension, included the girl in their suspicions. York stepped forward with determination.

“Listen to me. I have lived for two thousand years. I was born on what you know as the Original World, in the twentieth century. In the year seventeen-seventy-six, thirteen colonies in a land called America declared their independence from a land across the Atlantic Ocean. They formed a Congress. Your Congress comes from that. In the following century, the thirteen colonies grew, pushing westward against redmen called Indians. Eventually the land stretched from ocean to ocean. There was a Civil War, the assassination of a great man named Lincoln. Then an industrial empire arose, oil was found, gold. A steam railroad spanned the continent. Buffalo herds were exterminated.”

Excitement grew in the men’s faces.

“It fits in with our legends,” whispered Robar. “The thirteen American tribes—the redmen—the Big War—buffalo vanishing.” He looked at York with sudden awe. “I believe you, Anton York. You have come from the Original World to help us?”

“If I can,” York nodded. “But first I must know all I can. What do your legends tell of coming here?”

Robar pondered, as though searching misty impressions handed down from father to son.

“Little. Until eighteen-eighty-eight, our forefathers lived on the Original World, in a village like this, called Fort Mojave. They fought the redmen at times. But one day strange flying ships appeared, against which their guns were useless. The whole village of a thousand men, women and children was forcibly taken here. At first there were no Beasts. They lived with little trouble, though sad at being taken for their home world. Then the Beasts appeared suddenly, and life became a constant battle against them. So it has been for generations.”

“But why were they brought here?” York queried. “And why were the hypno-beasts introduced into this bit of transplanted Earth?”

“It was never known. Not one glimpse of those mysterious people is recorded. Life has gone on, as it must. We have almost come to forget how it all started. All we concern ourselves with is the survival against the Beasts.”

York bit his lips. The mystery was still unexplained. The dome builders had not vouched one item of information to their bell jar specimens. Nor, probably, to any of the other kidnaped beings in all the other domes.

Rage shook Anton York. It was cold-blooded, autocratic, cruel if not actually vicious—this experimentation with generations upon generations of poor, marooned groups of beings. Something must be done!

IN THE following days, York found out all he could ever find out, under the dome itself. The village of the Free Ones housed about six thousand people. Their fields and hunting ground occupied a little more than half of the total space under the dome. Beyond a narrow river that bisected the area was the territory in control of the hypno-beasts and their mental slaves. It was understood that the slaves numbered about four thousand. But their life-span was short, for the Beasts bred them as food.

In all, then, there were ten thousand human beings under the dome, in this isolated bit of Earth. That meant over three hundred persons per square mile, more crowded than Europe had been before the scientific era of soilless crops! Under those circumstances, waging a grim battle against the Beasts constantly, science had not had a chance to advance. The few deposits of metal ores and important minerals had long since been worked out. Metal was hoarded like gold.

York’s observations included the river. It sprang from underground, near one dome wall, and vanished underground again at the opposite side. A thousand feet above, under the center of the dome, he could vaguely see the giant, gleaming apparatus that duplicated sunlight in regular twenty-four hour periods. At times it puffed out clouds, showers and even fogs. Outside the dome was a hydrocarbon atmosphere, a climate ranging from Uranian cold to Mercurian heat under a variable Cepheid sun. In here was a bit of Ireland or California.

The builders had done a perfect job. But why? The question rang like a gong in York’s mind. And gradually he came to have the feeling of being watched. He sensed eyes above that looked down, coldly and scientifically, watching over all and recording the pulse of life beneath. It was a maddening sensation.

York felt like screaming at times, though for two thousand years he had learned to control his emotions with almost god-like equanimity. The other people had come to accept dome life as normal, natural, and all else as illusion or legend.

York temporarily shelved the matter of the grand purpose behind all this. The immediate problem was the hypno-beasts. If he could do something against them, he would perhaps be foiling in some small way the scheme of the master-scientists.

One horrible thought lurked in his mind. Suppose the dome builders were propagating the hypno-beasts for the eventual purpose of dominating the universe with them?

“We hope to conquer the Beasts in due time,” Robar informed him. “In each generation a higher percentage of the children are almost completely immune to the Beasts’ hypnotic powers. For the first thousand years, the village of Free Ones was small and barely escaped extinction hundreds of times, but in the past thousand years our numbers have increased. Today we outnumber the slave group. In another few centuries—”

“Too long to wait,” York interrupted. “The hypno-beasts are semi-intelligent, but not scientific. Science can destroy them. How do your guns operate?”

Examination proved that the rifles were models of the flint-lock muskets of the nineteenth century. The bullets were of hard wood, to conserve metal. The propellant was powdered charcoal. Because of the peculiar laws of this universe, the mere firing of a pinch of charcoal had the power of guncotton, as York’s rocket had worked with slow-burning phosphorus.