Eando Binder: Anton York, Immortal

The range of The Immortals’ weapons was known to be just as great, but they had not thought to use them on this lone ship three miles away. Now however, the air droned with the concussion of atmospheric rents, made by invisible streamers of their ray-forces. Their rays were amplified cathode radiations, million-watt bundles of electrons at half the speed of light.

York was not caught napping. His ship had already moved upward, at right angles to their position, presenting a target moving at a speed of ten thousand miles an hour. It was cruel for the men exposed to the air around the vitrolite gun, but necessary. York flung his ship above the clouds. The-Immortals seemed nonplussed. They scattered widely and massed their beams upward, on the blind chance of scoring a hit. When York’s ship did appear, far on the other side of his former position, it was heralded by the destruction of eight more of Vinson’s fleet. Most of his ships were already destroyed and the fight had hardly begun!

Under this scene, the waters of Lake Erie boiled and rose in great clouds of steam. Niagara Falls, though York tried to avoid it, took most of one of his gun’s charges, and, became in one minute an unrecognizable jumble of churning waters and puffs of black vapour. Grim reminder for all time of this battle of the gods.

The Immortals fled, ingloriously, scattering wide. The swift, sweeping sword of destruction from York’s ship picked them off one by one. There was no limit to its range. It hounded the last one down after a brief chase. And the menace of the Immortals was over!

The world had to content itself with honouring three of the five men who had handled the vitrolite gun, and burying the other two, dead from their ordeal. York, after landing them, had promptly departed, without a word to anyone. Without waiting for thanks and praises. Like a god he had come and like a god he left.

And like a god he went out into the void not long afterward, with his wife, leaving behind him the legacy of space travel. The secret of the super-weapon went with him. The secret of immortality was no longer his to give away. Earth had had a god, one who had nearly destroyed it, and then saved it. One who had shown the way to other worlds. One who had exhibited an awesome weapon to warn mankind what its warfare could lead to. One about whom many legends were to be woven, true and false.

But now the god was gone—forever. Once given a taste of the supreme freedom of the void, he could not return to the pettiness of Earth. Nor did he care to interfere in any way, altruistic or otherwise, in its normal course of affairs.

On and on he went, he and his immortal companion. Their understanding and wisdom grew to cosmic heights.

They visited many worlds, many suns. Time meant nothing. They discovered the secret of voluntary suspended animation, requiring no food or air. They became truly gods.

Somewhere in the dim future ages he must die, this manmade god. Sometime when the scales of time have sufficiently lowered the amount of cosmic radiation which gives the god life.

Mason Chard laughed.

For a year now he had been cruising aimlessly in the interplanetary depths of the Solar System. His beryllium-hulled space ship was motivated by the controlled interplay of the gravitational stresses filling the void. His power plant greedily absorbed solar radiation and rammed it through whirling quartz coils which cut the force-lines of gravitation, producing reactive motion. The same titanic energies which swung the ponderous planets in their eternal orbits were used, in part, to propel the tiny ship. It was superpower, limitless. And eternal, in the sense that gravitation was eternal.

Eternal!

Mason Chard liked that word. For, barring violent death, Mason Chard himself was eternal! In his veins flowed blood enriched with a self-renewing enzyme that was the antithesis of death and decay. His body cells were doubly endowed with radiogens, the tiny batteries of life which sucked energy from the cosmic rays, from the universe at large.

Mason Chard could not die from “disease” or “age” until the Universe had run down to the point where cosmic radiation was halved. That would be millions of years in the future!

The Immortal laughed again. His ruminations covered, in reverse order, the most eventful thousand years in human history. Just the year before, Earth’s vigorous race had established an outpost on far Pluto, thus completing a phase in its empire building. Previous to that there had been interplanetary wars, heroic pioneering, and dauntless feats of exploration. The parade of a thousand years, glorious and packed with drama, marched through Mason Chard’s mind. The laughs that punctuated his ponderings were for those times he, Chard, had interfered with the course of history.

There was the time, for instance, he had led the insurrection of the native Callistans against the domineering Earthmen, purely for the diversion of espousing a lost cause. At another time it had been his whim to destroy three successive rescue ships on their way to a marooned group of explorers in the wilds of Titan, so that he could watch brave men die.

Chard had had to amuse himself in those endless centuries to escape the dreary cycles of ennui. He had long felt himself above the ties of race and allegiance. Roaming the interplanetary void at will, a mysterious and half-mythical anarchist, he had often dammed the progress of mankind’s growing dominion in the Solar System. Along with the ties of blood and tradition, Chard had thrown conscience into the discard. It had not caused him one twinge to see thousands of space ship crews annihilated in the intra-world war he had personally embroiled, five centuries before, between Venus and Earth. He had watched the holocaust through his vision screen, grimly amused.

Mason Chard had never taken the trouble to analyze himself. If he had, he would have realized himself to be a colossal ego, inflated by the drug of immortality. He would have recoiled from the picture of a cold, heartless, scheming scoundrel, clothed in a super-vanity. Yet perhaps only one little thing made him this, rather than an honoured, inspired, immortal leader—

His chuckle was just a bit bitter as reminiscences took him back to that time almost a thousand years ago when he had run afoul of Earth law. Realizing his immortality, he had started an abortive drive for world domination. He had not planned thoroughly and had been captured. Fortunate that capital punishment, even for treason, was outlawed in that day, he had been exiled to a lonely asteroid. His sentence had been 199 years. There, for seventy-five years, he was made to attend the warning light beacon that warded off space liners. A supply ship had come once a year.

The only light spots, in that dreary, bitter incarceration were those times the officials had been amazed at his longevity, not knowing he was immortal. He had been a man. in the prime of life at the start of his sentence. He was still a man in the prime of life seventy-five years later. He might have waited to serve out his 199 year sentence, to confound them utterly, but before that a pirate of space landed to destroy the beacon in some deep-laid plot. Chard gratefully joined the pirate crew, became their leader in a few years, and later betrayed them.

Thus had his career begun. Then Chard’s reflections went back to the stirring events of the middle Twentieth Century.

He had been thirty-five then—really thirty-five—occupied as a research scientist. Dr. Charles Vinson, his former instructor, had called him to a secret conference with a half hundred others, unfolding a breath-taking scheme. He had inoculated them all with the Elixir of Youth, whose formula he had stolen from Anton York, and as immortals they had begun the subjugation of Earth. Anton York himself had defeated the plan, destroying the Immortal fleet.