Eando Binder: Anton York, Immortal

“There’s some all-embracing equation behind it all,” York told himself. “If I could only find it, I’d have the power to wipe out the Beasts, blast down the dome, and face the master race—”

A horn sounded, on this third day. It was the alarm of attack. Instantly the village mobilized. Men marched to the river, York with them. The enemy troops had crossed in wooden boats and now lay scattered behind bushes and low hills. The Free Ones took to cover and it settled down to sniping.

York, with a rifle resting in a tree crotch, could not bring himself to fire at the figures he sighted now and then. They were human, after all, even if bent on killing their own kind under the command of the hypno-beasts. The Beasts were there, across the river, directing their forces by long-range hypnosis. York could feel the subtle pull of it.

The sniping dragged on for hours, till the Free Ones flanked and drove the attackers back. They did a revolting thing. Hoisting their dead to their shoulders, they deposited them on the other bank, at the feet of the Beasts, who then fed. That seemed to be the sole purpose of the attack, unless it was revenge for the beast killed by York.

The opposing forces left the river bank and vanished toward their village. The short battle was over. York watched as the Free Ones went among their dead and cut them in ribbons so that all the blood drained into the ground. The grisly business was done stoically. In the curious economy of the little patch of Earth, it served to foil any chance of the Beasts feeding on them, and it also fertilized the ground. Back in the village, York found the girl Leela standing among the wounded. She bravely choked back tears as she stared down at her lover’s white face.

“He will live,” she whispered. “But he will never walk again. He was paralyzed by a shot in the spine. Oh, Anton York, can’t you help me?”

She was suddenly weeping against his shoulder. York patted her soothingly, and then set his lips.

“Do you want to take a chance?” he asked her. “A chance that he will be whole again—or die?”

“I trust you, Anton York,” the girl said instantly.

He operated. Centuries before, against the day when some physical accident might try to rob him of Vera, York had studied surgical technique and become adept. With a skill that no Earthly surgeon had ever approached, he removed the bullet with a sharp knife. Antiseptic herbs that the people cultivated protected the wound. The young man passed into a restful sleep from which he would awake fully restored.

York waved aside the girl’s gratitude and shook a fist up toward the peak of the dome. Within him, rage had become a tidal force. They were playing at being gods up above, the merciless dome builders, unmoved by these tragedies.

They must be out to conquer the universe, breeding the horrible hypno-beasts as their scavenging horde! And it must be stopped.

But how?, York, super-scientist of Earth’s Universe, would have tried. But York, scienceless orphan in a new, unknown universe, was practically helpless.

A year passed. York spent most of his time with endless computations. For a blackboard he used a patch of sand and a stick. Again and again he laboriously worked out equations for the new universe’s master laws, only to find, by simple tests, that they were wrong. All the while he had the feeling of being watched. And to worry him further, what had become of Vera? Had she run out of food or air supplies? Had she been captured?

One day she seemed near him. He shrugged off the hallucination, but suddenly jumped up. It was her mental voice crying, faint and far away. York followed it like a radio beam and came to a portion of the dome wall where it was strongest.

“Vera!” he telepathed. Most of his mental vibration surged back from the wall, but some leaked through. “Vera, are you there? We’re taking a chance, contacting like this.” Then he became tenderly eager. “Are you all right, my darling of the ages?”

“Yes, Tony. I can see you. You look thin and haggard. I had to come. I’ve been distilling the planet air, and eating the pulp of the twenty-two day plants. I’m all right.”

York briefly recounted his year of separation from her.

“I’m all right, too, but I have to solve the master laws of this universe.”

“Tony, that’s why I came. I’ve been working on computations also. It came to me suddenly. Entropy, Tony—This universe has a lower entropy. Exactly one point one-six four. I measured it.”

It struck fire in York’s mind.

“That’s it, Vera! Good girl. But now, go quickly before the dome people detect you. I’ll work out the laws. I’ll wipe out the hypno-beasts, and then break out of the dome, one way or another.”

“Be careful, dear,” with that, Vera’s mental voiced moved away.

York returned to the village, his brain buzzing. Entropy, of course! Not only slower light, slower sound and “longer” space, but also a slower entropy—slower dissipation of energy in this universe. It accounted for the relatively high potential energy in slow-burning fuels. This universe had not run down as much as Earth’s Universe.

With this vital clue, York’s equations began to take life. Formulas dovetailed, and the ubiquitous zero did not always crop up to mock him. In another month, he had calculated the elements of a ray weapon, freed of the clumsiness of propellant guns.

He called Robar and the Congress to session. The men looked at him a little strangely.

“What is it, Anton York?” Rau asked. “We are not sure if you are a madman or not. For a year you have spent your time hunched over a plot of sand, making marks with a stick. What have you been trying to do?”

“Discover science for you.”

“Science? We do not even know the word.”

York began at the beginning. “After the tune of your forefathers, science arose on the Original World. Machines were made that do all things. Also weapons of war. Weapons, for instance, that blast things to bits. I am going to make one. I will need help and metals. Most of your rifles will have to be melted.”

Robar looked dubious. “It will be dangerous partially to disarm ourselves. And how do we know that you are not merely a madman?”

The gods must be laughing at the irony, York thought. But he could not blame them. They knew nothing of him, or even of science. York picked up a little quartzite pebble that he saw on the floor.

“If I make this stone shine in the dark,” he demanded, “will you agree?”

They nodded. York went out and returned with the radium capsule of his suit’s heating coil. Radium and radioactivity were two things not greatly changed by the new universe’s laws. Holding the radium point near the stone, it shone fluorescently, in the dark. The councillors exclaimed in wonder. The project began.

York met and conquered what seemed insuperable difficulties in the next six months. Metals had different melting points in this universe, glass had altered properties, and electricity had new values for its ohm, ampere and volt. But at last he had a workable radium battery that shot its current through a series of interlaced coils behind a convex mirror of polished steel. The whole was mounted on a large-wheeled base.

It was heavy and clumsy, and so crudely worked that even an artisan of the late Stone. Age might have laughed. But it held a giant of power.

At the final test, York clapped together the contact handles of his switch. Electricity pulsed through the coils. A field of strain surrounded a metal bar. Its end, at the focus, became a diamond of incandescence—and atomic disintegration. An energy ray of neutrons hissed from the cathode mirror. It stabbed invisibly for a lone tree which had been picked out as the target. The tree cracked in half, its mid-portion blasted to atoms.