Eando Binder: Anton York, Immortal

York did not give up. He thought next of a screen against the hypnotic force. Back at the Korian world, he consulted with Vuldane.

“There is no screen against their hypnosis,” Vuldane stated flatly. “We have tried. You noticed that your mental telepathy barely worked through our energy wall. Yet that energy wall is absolutely transparent to their hypnotic force!”

“Still, I want to try,” ground out York desperately. “I must. Give me one dome as a proving ground, and all the materials I need.”

“Agreed,” nodded Vuldane quickly. “I sympathize with you, York. But I have no hope for you.”

York tried everything in the next few months. He had a group of chained hypno-beasts as control, and set before them shields of various composition. Metal alloys, plastics, radium-coated diamond, and then more subtle walls of electro-magnetic energy, cosmic rays, even a vacuum. In each case, stationing himself with the shield between, their hypnotic force came through undiminished.

Vuldane was right. There was no shield to that demonic mental vibration.

“Tony, please, you must rest,” Vera insisted as he staggered and would have fallen except for her arm. “You haven’t closed your eyes in months.”

But York went on, sleepless, taxing the superb vitality of his immortal body to the utmost.

“There must be a way,” he chanted steadily, as though he were a child reciting a poem.

Vuldane came to visit him at times, and even made suggestions. Admiration, for York shone from his alien eyes.

“If anything at all can make me feel a pang of regret over sacrificing your race, it is you, Anton York. A race that produces such as you deserves continuation.” Then, in the next breath he added: “But my race must continue!”

“Vuldane, did you try everything?” York pleaded. “Did you try creating planetary earthquakes, floods, volcanic eruptions?”

The Korian nodded. “Naturally. We nearly disrupted one planet entirely, instituting a planet-wide geological upheaval. For a century the planet seemed clear. Not one hypno-beast appeared. Then suddenly they cropped up again from somewhere.” “An atomic fire, sweeping the whole planet’s surface?” cried York. “How about that?”

“And how would you stop the atomic fire from eating inward, consuming the entire planet to ash?” “The hypnosis itself,” sighed York. “That’s the angle I must work from. We can’t resist it or shield it. But how about a neutralizing projector?”

Fired with the new idea, York built what was essentially a scrambler, or a device that would spray out static to the hypnotic force. He was able to cast a field around his dozen control beasts and break up their flow of hypnosis into intermittent flashes. Borrowing a super-powerful generator from the Korians, York raced to the other Cepheid.

With the static machine going full blast, he was able to land on one planet. Hypno-beasts began crowding around this invasion of their world.

York sprayed his static around, neutralizing their hypnoforce. Then he swept his gun in a circle, whiffing out the monsters like a row of lighted candles.

It was as though he had touched off a hidden spring. A signal must have gone around the planet. Over the horizon marched incredible droves of them. They massed around the ship in such numbers that York’s lethal ray was like a little machinegun against all the armies of Alexander, Caesar and Napoleon combined. Sheer weight of numbers would win out.

“Tony, they’re getting nearer—”

“Yes, but if we had a million scramblers and a million guns, it would work!” York shouted happily. “Simple mathematics.”

And then it happened. With a tortured grind, the static machine sputtered and died. Like a tidal wave, the full force of hypnotism struck them, no longer scrambled. Vera passed instantly into a trance. York, with an effort of will that seemed to tear his brain up by the roots, jerked over the engine lever. The ship darted upward at a pace that took them out of the hypnotic range in seconds.

“Just in time,” York muttered. He looked over his static machine thoughtfully, incredulously. It was a fused maul. When they were back, Vuldane explained.

“We tried that too. The hypno-beasts are canny. Their technique is simple. They pour a massed hypno-force at the scrambler, overload it, and burn it out. We tried generators with world-moving power. They burned them all out. When will you begin to realize, Anton York, that this is a thousand-year job? We’ve planned it as such. It is not something that you can toss off overnight.”

York looked stricken.

“I’m sorry,” said Vuldane simply and sincerely, before leaving.

York looked at Vera. Not a shred of hope remained.

“Think of it, Vera,” he said hollowly. “Our race was doomed as far back as the nineteenth century, when the Korians came to take an Earth culture back with them. Even before you and I were born, our people were doomed unknowingly. I destroyed fifty Immortals, and Mason Chard, and fought the Three Eternals, to save civilization. I was even ready to sacrifice myself. And all the time, another race in another universe had put their finger on us and marked us for oblivion. Our whole life and effort, all my superscience and guidance of Earth, has been a mockery, a cosmic joke, a jest of the gods.”

Vera soothed him in ways she had learned through two thousand years of association. His weary head sought refuge in her lap. His bloodshot eyes closed for the first time in six months.

“All mockery,” he said bitterly. “I’ve had the thought of going back to Earth and destroying it, so that oblivion for them will be quicker and more merciful. Lighting an atomic fire on all the planets—It would be swift.”

“No, Tony. That would be pure spite against the Korians. Whatever they’ve been forced to do, they are a highly civilized, deserving race.”

“Fire!” York jerked erect, repeating his own word. A dawning look came over his face. “Fighting fire with fire! Vera, maybe that’s the answer. Instead of fighting them with our weapons, why not fight them with theirs?”

Sleep forgotten, hope reborn, York became twice the dynamo of activity he had been before.

“Time is short—six months. I have to measure the wave-length of the hypno-force, and then duplicate it.”

Six months. Six months in which York explored the psycho-magnetic scale. Earth’s scientists had taken two centuries to piece out the electro-magnetic scale. York condensed the same amount of research into a six-month snap of the fingers.

In the electro-magnetic scale were the octaves of radio waves, infra-red, visible light, ultra-violet, X-rays, gamma rays and cosmic rays.

In the psycho-magnetic range, York found the octaves of telepathy, clairvoyance, sixth-sense, hunch, hallucination, dreams. Far down the scale, like the elusive cosmic rays, he found the hypnotic range.

These super-penetrative radiations of hypnotism he measured with all the accuracy of an astrophysicist studying a spectrograph. They were so incredibly fine that York hazily understood them to slip through the interstices of the ether itself, as cosmic rays slipped through the planetary atoms.

“Now I know exactly what the hypno-source is,” York stated. “Vuldane, did you try to build a projector?” For the first time, Vuldane shook his head. “This is a great achievement, York. But I’m afraid you can’t build a projector. Not a mechanical one. Evolution produced the projector—an organic brain—after millions of years. You won’t duplicate that in the time left, even the full thousand years.”

York saw the logic of it. Then a strange look came into his eye.

“No. But I already have the projector.” He tapped his own forehead. “All I have to do is find the way to increase its powers to equal the brain projectors of the hypno-beasts!”