W WrnmSmm 5 ^iiiiiiiiiiiiiiinniiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiriTiiTiiiinnmLuijLiiiiiimiiiiiiiiiiiuiiiiiiiiiiiiiifiiiiMiujiJiiiiiii U I TALKED WITH GOD • , . yes I did, actually and literally ff As a result of that little talk with God, some twenty years ago, there came into my life a Power so staggering that at first I wondered about it: Then, when I realized that it was the Power of God, I discov- ered that the shackles which had bound me for over forty years went a-shimmering. There came into my life a Power the like of which I had never known. Up to that time I was perhaps the world’s biggest failure. NOW . . . ? Well my every dream had come true. I am President of The News-Review Publishing Co. which publishes the largest circu- lating daily newspaper in this area. I live in a wonderful home which has a beautiful pipe-organ in it. My needs are all amply taken care of, Dr. Frank B. Robinson and I drive a wonder- ful Cadillac. YOU TOO CAN TALK WITH GOD, and when you do, if there is lack in your life, this same Power which came into mine can come into yours. Fear, distress, and all the other allied things pass out of the life when this staggering Power comes in. If you will fill in the coupon below, I’ll send you free of all cost, information which may make you blink your eyes. It may sound unbelievable at first, but it’s true — believe me. So fill out and mail the coupon ... NOW. This is our 20th year of operations exclu- clusively by mail, so you need have no fear. We are quite reliable, and are interested only in your finding the same Power Dr. Robinson found. FREE FREE Psychiana, .Dept. X-35 Moscow, Idaho, U.S.A. Please send me absolutely tree — details oi how you discovered the Power of God in your life. NAME CITY STREET AND NO. STATE Copyright 1946, Psychiana Tifiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiimiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiimimmiiiiimiimimii 3 you’re that man, here’s something that will interest you. Not a magic formula — not a get-rich-quick scheme — butsomethingmoresubstantial, more practical. Of course, you need something more than just the desire to be an accountant. You’ve got to pay the price —be willing to study earnestly, thoroughly. Still, wouldn’t it be worth your while to sacrifice some of your leisure in favor of interesting home study — over a comparatively brief period in your life? Always pro- vided that the rewards were good — a salary of $3,000 to $10,000? An accountant’s duties are interesting, varied and of real worth to his employers. He has standing! Do you feel that such things aren’t for you? Well, don’t be too sure. Very possibly they can be! Why not, like so many before you, investigate LaSalle’s modern Problem Method of training for an accountancy position? Just suppose you were permitted to work in a large accounting house under the personal supervision of an expert accountant. Suppose, with his aid, you studied accounting principles and solved problems day by day — easy ones at first — then the more difficult ones. If you could do this — and if you could turn to him for advice as the problems became complex — soon you’d master them all. You cover accountancy from the basic Principles righdup through Accountancy Systems and IncomeTax Procedure. Then you add C. P. A. Training and pre- pare for the C. P. A. examinations. As you go along, you absorb the principles of Audit- ing, Cost Accounting, Business Law, Statistical Con- trol, Organization, Management and Finance. Your progress is as speedy as you care to make it — depending on your own eagerness to learn and the time you spend in study. Will recognition come? The only answer, as you know, is that success does come to the man who is really trained. 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Send me, without cost or obligation, the 48-page book, “Accountancy The Profession That Pays/* and full information about your accountancy training program. Vol. XXX, No. 1 A THRILLING PUBLICATION April, 1947 A Complete Fantastic Novel WAY OF THE GODS By HENRY KUTTNER Spawn of atomic fission, this strange company of mutants exiled by humanity battles against enslavement in a foreign world dominated by the evil spirit of the Crystal Mountain! 11 Two Complete Novelets THE GREGORY CIRCLE William Fitzgerald 50 Trying to connect hillbilly Bud Gregory with the atomic dust destroying America was like joining simple math and nuclear physics! QUEST TO CENTAURUS George 0. Smith 74 Given the joke assignment of tracking down a Kilroy of space, Alfred Weston discovers the fate of the solar system is in his hands! Short Stories SKIT-TREE PLANET Murray Leinster 41 Wentworth and Haynes struggle against an intangible distant enemy VICTORIOUS FAILURE Bryce Walton 66 Professor Klauson is driven back from the threshold of immortality THE RELUCTANT SHAMAN L. Sprague de Camp 90 Virgil Hathaway becomes the possessor of eight stone-throwing sprites Special Features THE READER SPEAKS The Editor 6 THE STORY BEHIND THE STORY A Department 111 Cover Painting by Earle Bergey — Illustrating "Way of the Gods" Published every other month by STANDARD MAGAZINES, INC., 10 East 40th Street, New York 16, N. Y. N. L. Pines, President. Copyright, 1947, by Standard Magazines, Inc. Subscription (12 issues) $1.80, single copies, 15c. Foreign and Canadian postage extra. Entered as second-class matter May 21, 1936, at the Post Office at New York, N. Y., under the Act of March 3, 1879. Names of all characters used in stories and semi-fiction articles are fictitious. 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ANY SET ON APPROVAL All you need do to get any set for personal examination is to fill in and mail the coupon and give required informa- tion. Read the generous offer in coupon and send today. AMERICAN TECHNICAL SOCIETY Vocational Publishers Since 1898 Dept. X449, Drexel at 58th Street, Chicago 37, Illinois - SEND COUPON TODAY JP AMERICAN TECHNICAL SOCIETY, Dept. X449 Drexel rat 58th Street, Chicago 37, III. Send for 10 days’ free use, the following set of books : I will pay the delivery charges only, and if fully satisfied, will send you $2.00 in 10 days and then $3.00 a month until the total price of $ is paid. If I return the boobs in 10 days I will owe you nothing. You are to include a Year’s Con- sulting Privileges with your engineers without extra charge. Name * Address City state Please attach letter stating age, occupation and name and address of employer, and at least one business man’s name and address as reference. Men in service also please give home address. A Department Conducted by THE EDITOR HOIL "THAT with Bell completing rocket planes designed to hit a top speed of ™ * 1,700 miles per hour, with coffee coming in compressed cakes like bouillon cubes and machines without feelings replac- ing cotton sharecroppers with same, science is coming on apace in fields other than nuclear physics. And writers of science fiction are really having a heck of a time remaining ahead of the field. One of the most arresting and significant of all the new gadgets to turn up in the news, however, was the artificial snowstorm described in a recent report of General Elec- tric Corporation. This is something to pon- der over during both long winter and short summer nights. After discovery that dry ice pellets, under certain atmospheric conditions, could pro- duce snowflakes in the laboratory, GE tech- nicians put their discovery to a field test. When meteorologists reported a large cloud over Mount Greylock in the Berkshires of Western Massachusetts, they took off in a plane loaded with the frozen carbon dioxide formerly used only to keep ice cream and other perishable foods sufficiently gelid. Aloft, they sprayed that cloud, which was some three miles in length, with the pellets. The result was one very local and very early - season snowstorm. It was finally decided that one pellet, about the size of a pea, could pro- duce several tons of snow in passing through such a cloud. Climate Control in Reverse This is the long-awaited climate control in reverse' — and with a vengeance. When Mark Twain complained that no one ever “did anything about” the weather, it is highly dubious he was thinking of making it worse. Granted reasonably chilly winter weather, what the Chamber of Commerce of, say, Louisville could do to Cincinnati or Dallas to Forth Worth or vice versa is appalling to consider! Just a plane and some dry ice ground up in a hamburger machine could create any number of local Siberias. Now if the GE scientists can come up with as simple a means for causing clouds to evaporate entirely, we could keep a couple of mountains under snow for skiers and let the rest of the world off scot free. The possible military ramifications of the very real artificial snowstorm are equally appalling. A couple of bombers or even Piper Cubs equipped with dry ice could probably raise merry hob with a foe’s com- munications and turn shock troops into snow shovelers for months at a time. As a matter of fact, this reporter is in hearty favor of more and more horrible mil- itary devices, for reasons he will explain. It is, to say the least, highly improbable that we should retain sole control of the atomic bomb for long. And it will probably be a darned good thing for the world when ev- eryone has it. Deadly Vapors Poison gas was the great terror weapon of World War One. When first introduced by the Germans against the Canadians at the Second Battle of Ypres in 1915, it threatened completely to disrupt the Allied battle line in Flanders. The Allies were quick to make their own and to give the Kaiser’s legions a dose of the lung-destroying chemicals. More and more deadly gases were invented (Continued on page 8) I* C. S. graduates turn up in lots of places — but not “behind the 8-ball.” You’ll find thousands of them in top ex- ecutive posts . . . hundreds of thousands holding good positions and regularly collecting promotions and pay raises. They realized that the advancements go to the trained men . . . and that prac- tical, authoritative I.C.S. training is just as close to any one as the nearest letter- box. Many of them started drawing the dividends of larger pay checks and in- creased responsibilities before they com- pleted their I.C.S. Courses. The road they followed to success is open to you. I.C.S. 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TRAIN FOR A FUTURE IN DIESEL • Prepare for the big earning power of Diesel Trained Men. Start learning at home, in spare time. UEI’s easy, practical training covers all phases of DIESEL engine operation, fuel systems, auxiliary equipment, repairs and maintenance. When home course is completed, you come to Chicago for actual shop practice on DIESEL MOTORS under expert instructors, at UEI’s fine, modern school. BEGIN AT ONCE -GET ALL THE FACTS FREE. WRITE TODAYr DIVISION UTILITIES ENGINEERING INSTITUTE 0 1314 Balden Avenue » Dept. 1047D * Chicago 14, Illinois 8 THE E.EADEH 5PEA14S (Continued from page 6) as were more and more effective means of propagating them in desired areas. By the time Germany invaded Poland in 1939 to start World War Two, every country had great stockpiles of deadly vapors and could turn out masks in dime-store profusion. But, except for some isolated instances in Ethopia and China where the Italians and Japanese employeed the stuff against de- fenseless people, no one turned poison gas loose. The reason, of course, was that all were vulnerable and all were supplied with the weapon. Its use would have amounted to military insanity. And contrary to pacifist opinion, military men are not usually bait for the bughouse. With planes attaining round-the-world ranges so that no city anywhere is safe from any foe in the world, the use of the atom bomb will soon be even more ridiculous. No leader of any country has any desire to see his own cities vaporized and their popula- tions' destroyed — which is what will happen if he launches an atom bomb attack once the bomb is a universal possession. The same limitation holds for biological or bacteriological warfare, that holy terror of the Sunday supplements. So let’s have more and more horrible inventions. The more horrible the invention the more the threat of retaliation will ensure the peace the world so sadly needs to bind up its wounds. OUR NEXT ISSUE F OR ITS June appearance, THRILLING WONDER STORIES presents a trio of long stories which should give lovers of that pseudo-science known as scientifiction or, more briefly, as STF, a full meal of interest- ing and thought-provoking, to say nothing of exciting, reading material. First in line is THE BOOMERANG CIR- CUIT, by Murray Leinster, final short novel in the brilliant Kim Rendell trilogy of which the first two stories, THE DISCIPLINARY CIRCUIT and THE MANLESS WORLDS, have already appeared in TWS. Once more Kim Rendell is called in to res- cue the inhabitants of the freedom-loving Second Galaxy from attack — this time the final and most cunning effort of those who would control all the skies for exploitation. With their matter transmitters destroyed, things look very black indeed for Second Galaxy inhabitants, who are once more being brought under the control of the vicious dis- ciplinary circuit in the hands of ambitious (Continued on page 97) * They Never Knew,f It Was SO EAST To Ploy Thousands Now Play Popular Songs Who Didn’t Know a Note of Music Before You, toe, con born year favorite instrument at home, without a teacher, this quick, • easy, msney-sovinq way T HINK of the fun YOU are missing! The popularity, friendship, good times! Why? Because you think it’s hard to learn music. Y T ou have an idea that it’s a slow, tedious task, with lots of boring drills and exercises. That’s not the twentieth-century way ! Surely you’ve heard the news! How people all over the world have learned to play by a method so simple a child can understand it — so fascinating that it's like playing a game. Imagine! 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TELL THEM YOU'LL STAY ALLl ^E SjML NIGHT, IT’S ALMOST DARK AND WE’VE NEVER HAD ' MORE WELCOME GUEST/’ ’ NOR ONE r-, WITH MORS Together they glided across the rashing air currents (Chap. II) WAY OF THE CODS By HENRY I4UTTNER Spawn of atomic fission , this strange company of mutants exiled by humanity battles against enslavement in a foreign world dominated by the evil Spirit of the Crystal Mountain! CHAPTER I New Worlds H E LOOKED at the October morning all about him as if he had never- seen October before. That was not true, of course. But he knew that he would never see it again. Unless they had mornings, and Octobers — where he was going. It did not seem likely, though the old man had talked a great deal about key-patterns and the se- lectivity of the machine, and the multiple universes spinning like motes in a snow- storm through infinity. "But I’m human!” he said aloud, sitting cross-legged on the warm brown earth and feeling the breeze which gave the lie instantly A CONFUTE FANTASTIC NOVEL 11 12 THRILLING WONDER STORIES to his thought. He felt the gentle pull at his shoulder-blades which meant that his wings were fluttered a little by the breeze, and in- stinctively he flexed the heavy bands of mus- cle across his chest to control the wing-sur- faces. He was not human. That was the trouble. And this world, this bright October world that stretched to the horizon around him was made to shelter the race that had become dominant, and was jealous of its dominion. Humanity, that had no place for strangers among its ranks. The others did not seem to care very much. They had been reared in the creche almost from birth, under a special regime that iso- lated them from the humans. The old man had been responsible for that He had built the huge house on the hillside, swooping curves of warmly-colored plastic that blend- ed into the brown and green of the land — an asylum that had finally failed. The walls were breached. “Kern,” someone behind him said. The winged man turned his head, glancing up past the dark curve of his wings. A girl came toward him down the slope from the house. Her name was Kua. Her parents bad been Polynesian, and she had the height and the lithe grace of her Oceanic race, and the shining dark hair, the warm, honey-colored skin. But she wore opaque dark glasses, and across her forehead a band of dark plastic that looked opaque too, and was not. Be- neath, her face was lovely, the red mouth generously curved, the features softly round- ed like the features of all her race. She was not human either. “It’s no use worrying, Kern,” she said, smiling down at him. “It’ll work out all right. You’ll see.” “All right!” Kern snorted scornfully. “You think so, do you?” Kua glanced instinctively around the hill- side, making sure they were alone. Then she put both hands to her face and slipped off the glasses and the dark band from her fore- head. Kern, meeting the gaze of her bright blue eye, was conscious again of the little shock he always felt when he looked into her uncovered face. For Kua was a cyclops. She had one eye centered in her forehead. And she was — when the mind could accept her as she was, not as she should be — a beautiful woman in spite of it. That blue brilliance in the dusky face had a depth and luster beyond the eyes of humans. Heavy lashes ringed it, and the gaze could sink fathom upon fathom in her eye and never plumb its depths. UA’S eye was a perfect lens. Whatever lens can do, her eye could do. No one could be sure just what miraculous mechan- isms existed beyond the blue surface, but she could see to a distance almost beyond the range of the ordinary telescope and she could focus down upon the microscopic. And there may have been other things the single eye could do. One did not question one’s companions too closely in this house of the mutations. “You’ve been with us two years, Kern,” she was saying now. “Only two years. You don’t know yet how strong we are, or how much we can accomplish among us. Bruce Hallam knows what he’s doing, Kern. He never works on theories. Or if he does, the theories become truth. He has a mind like that. You don’t know us, Kern!” “You can’t fight a whole world.” “No. But we can leave it.” She smiled, and he knew she saw nothing of the golden morning all around them. She knew nothing, really, of the cities that dotted the world of 1980, or the lives that were so irrevocably alien to her. They should have been alien to Kern too, but not until he was eighteen had the wings begun to grow upon his shoulders. “I don’t know, Kua,” he said. “I’m not sure I want to. I had a father and a mother — brothers — friends.” “Your parents are your greatest enemies,” she told him flatly. “They gave you life.” He looked away from the penetrating stare of that great blue single eye and past her at the big plastic house. That had been asylum, after the massacre of 1967 — asylum against the hordes bent on extirpating the freakish monsters created by atomic radiation. He could not remember, of course, but he had read about it, never guessing then that such a thing would ever apply to him. The old man had told him the story. First had come the atomic war, brief, ter- rible, letting loose nameless radiations upon the world. And then had followed the wave upon wave of freak births among those ex- posed to it. Genes and chromosomes altered beyond comprehension. Monstrous things were born of human parents. One in ten, perhaps, had been a successful mutation. And even those were dangerous to homo sapiens. 14 THRILLING WONDER STORIES Evolution is like a roulette wheel. The con- ditions of the earth favor certain types of mutation capable of survival. But atomic energies had upset the balance, and mutations spawned in sheer madness began to spread. Not many, of course. Not many were viable. But two-headed things were born— and lived — along with geniuses and madmen. World Council had studied the biological and social problem for a long time before it recommend- ed euthanasia. Man’s evolution had been planned and charted. It must not be allowed to swerve from the track, or chaos would be let loose. Geniuses, mutant humans with abnormally high I.Q.’s, were allowed to survive. Of the others, none lived after they had been detect- ed. Sometimes they were difficult to detect. By 1968 only the true-line mutations, faith- ful to the human biological norm, were alive — with certain exceptions. S UCH as the old man’s son, Sam Brewster. He was a freak, with a certain — talent. A superhuman talent. The old man had dis- obeyed the Government law, for he had not sent the infant to the labs for checking and testing— and annihilation. Instead, he had built this great house, and the boy had never gone far beyond its grounds. Gradually then, partly to provide the youth with companionship, partly out of compassion, the father had begun to gather others togeth- er. Secretly, a mutant infant here, a mutant child there, he brought them in, until he had a family of freaks in the big plastic house. He had not taken them haphazardly. Some would not have been safe to live with. Some were better dead from the start. But those with something to offer beyond their freak- ishness, he found and sheltered. It was the bringing in of Kern that gave the secret away. The boy had gone too long among ordinary humans, while his wings grew. He was eighteen, and his pinions had a six-foot spread, when old Mr. Brewster found him. His family had tried to keep him hidden, but the news was leaking out already when he left for the Brewster asylum, and in the years since it had spread until the authorities at last issued their ultimatum. “It was my fault,” Kern said bitterly. “If it hadn’t been for me, you’d never have been molested.” “No.” Kua’s deep, luminous eye fixed his. “Sooner or later you know they’d have found us. Better let it happen now, while we’re all still young and adaptable. We can go and enjoy going, now.” Her voice shook a little with deep excitement. “Think of it, Kern! New worlds! Places beyond the earth, where there could be people like us!” “But Kua, I’m human! I feel human. I don’t want to leave. This is where I belong!” “You say that because you grew up among normal people. Kern, you’ve got to face it. Tlie only place for any of us is — somewhere away.” “I know.” He grinned wryly. “But I don’t have to like it. Well — we’d better go back. They’ll have the ultimatum by now, I sup- pose. May as well hear it. I know what the answer is. Don’t you?” She nodded, watching his involuntary glance around the empty blue sky, the warm October hills. A world for humans. But for humans alone. . . . Back in the Brewster plastic asylum, the inmates had assembled. “There isn’t much time,” old Mr. Brewster said. “They’re on their way here now, to take you all back for euthanasia.” Sam Brewster laughed harshly. “We could show ’em a few tricks.” “No. You can’t fight the whole world. You could kill many of them, but it wouldn’t do any good. Bruce’s machine is the only hope for you all.” His voice broke a little. “It’s going to be a lonely world for me, children, after you’ve gone.” They looked at him uncomfortably, this strange, unrelated family of freak mutations, scarcely more than the children he had called them, but matured beyond their years by their strange rearing. “There are worlds beyond counting, as you know,” Bruce said precisely. “Infinite num- bers — worlds where we might not be freaks at all. Somewhere among them there must be places where each of our mutations is a norm. I’ve set the machine to the aggregate pattern of us all and it’ll find our equivalents — something to suit one of us at least. And the others can go on looking. I can build the machine in duplicate on any world, any- where, where I can live at all.” He smiled, and his strange light eyes glowed. It was curious, Kern thought, how fre- quently in mutations the eves were the give- away. Kua, of course. And Sam Brewster with his terrible veiled glance protected by its secondary lid which drew back only in anger. And Bruce Hallam, whose strangeness was not visible but existed only in the amaz- WAY OF THE GODS 15 ing intricacies of his brain, looked upon the alien world with eyes that mirrored the mys- teries behind them. Bruce knew machinery — call it machinery for lack of a more comprehensive word — with a knowledge that was beyond learning. He could produce miracles with any set of devices his fingers could contrive. He seemed to sense by sheer instinct the courses of in- finite power, and harness them with the sim- plest ease, the simplest mechanics. There was a steel cubicle in the corner of the room with a round steel door which had taken Bruce a week to set up. Over it a panel burned with changing light, flickering through the spectrum and halting now and then upon clear red. When it was red, then the — the world — upon which the steel door opened was a world suitable for the little family of mutations to enter. The red light meant it could support human life, that it paralleled roughly the world they al- ready knew, and that something in its essen- tial pattern duplicated the pattern of at least one of the mutant group. Kem was dizzy when he thought of the sweep of universes past that door, world whirling upon world where no human life could dwell, worlds of gas and flame, worlds of ice and rock. And, one in a countless number, a world of sun and water like their own. . . . I T WAS incredible. But so were the wings at his own back, so was Kua’s cyclopean eye, and Sam Brewster’s veiled gaze, and so was the brain in Bruce Hallam’s skull, which had built a bridge for them all. He glanced around the group. Sitting back against the wall, in shadow, Byrna, the last of the mutant family, lifted her gray gaze to his. Compassion touched him as always when he met her eyes. Byrna was physically the most abnormal of them all, in her sheer smallness. She came scarcely to Kern’s elbow when she was stand- ing. She was proportioned perfectly in the scale of her size, delicate, fragile as some- thing of glass. But she was not beautiful to look at. There was a wrongness about her features- that made them pathetically ugly, and the sadness in her gray eyes seemed to mirror the sadness of all misfit things. Byrna’s voice had magic in it, and so did her brain. Wisdom came as simply to her as knowledge came to Bruce Hallam, but she had infinitely more warmth than he. Bruce, Kern sometimes thought, would dismember a human as dispassionately as he would cut wire in two if he needed the material for an experiment. Bruce looked the most normal of them all, but he would not have passed the questioning of the most superficial mental examination. Now his voice was impatient. “What are we waiting for? Everything’s ready.” “Yes, you must go quickly,” the old man said. “Look— the light’s coming toward red now, isn’t it?” The panel above the steel door was orange. As they watched it shifted and grew ruddier. Bruce went silently forward and laid his hand on the lever that opened the panel. When the light was pure red he pushed the steel bar down. In half-darkness beyond the opening a gust of . luminous atoms blew across a craggy horizon. Against it there was a suggestion of towers and arches and columns, and lights that might have been aircraft swung in steady orbits above. No one spoke. After a moment Bruce closed the door again, grimacing. The light above it hovered toward a reddish purple and then turned blue. “Not that world,” Bruce said. “We’ll try again.” In the shadow Byrna murmured: “It doesn’t matter — any world will be the same for us.” Her voice was pure music. “Listen! Do you hear planes?” the old man said. “It’s time, children. You must go.” There was silence. Every eye watched the lighted panel. Colors hovered there to and fro through the spectrum. A faint ruddiness be- gan to glow again. “This time we’ll take it if it. looks all right,” Bruce said, and laid his hand again upon the lever. The light turned red. Soundlessly the round door swung open. Sunlight came through, low green hills, and the clustered roofs of a town were visible a little distance away in a valley. Without a word or a backward glance Bruce stepped through the door. One by one the others moved after him, Kem last. Kern’s lips were pressed together and he did not glance behind him. He could have seen the hills of earth beyond the windows, and the blue October sky. He would not look at them. He shrugged his wings together and stooped to enter the gateway of the new world. Behind them the old man watched in si- IS THRILLING WONDER STORIES lence, seeing the work of his lifetime ending before his eyes. The gulf between them was too broad for leaping. He was human and they were not. Across a vast distance, vaster than the gulf between worlds, he saw the family of the mutations step over their threshold and vanish forever. He closed the door after them. The red light faded above it. He turned toward his own door where the knocking of World Council’s police had already begun to sum- mon him to his accounting. CHAPTER II His Own Kind A BOVE them, the sky was blue. The five aliens who were alien to all worlds alike stood together on a hilltop looking down. “It’s beautiful,” Kua said. “I’m glad we chose this one. But I wonder what the next one would have been like if we could have waited.” “It will be the same no matter where we go,” Byrna’s infinitely sweet voice murmured. “Look at the horizon,” Bruce said. “What is it?” They saw then the first thing that marked this world alien to earth. For the most part it might have been any hilly wooded land they knew from the old place; even the roofs of the village looked spuriously familiar. But the horizon was curiously misted, and before them, far off, rose — something— to an impos- sible height halfway up the zenith. “A mountain?” Kern asked doubtfully. “It’s too high, isn’t it?” “A glass mountain,” Kua said. “Yes, it is glass — or plastic? I can’t be sure.” She had uncovered her single eye and the shining pupil was contracted as she gazed over impossible distances at the equally im- possible bulk of that thing on the horizon. It rose in a vast sweep of opalescent color, like a translucent thundercloud hanging over the whole land. Knowing it for a mountain, the mind felt vertiginous at the thought of such tremendous bulk towering overhead, » “It looks clear,” Kua said. “All the way through. I can’t tell what’s beyond it. Just an enormous mountain made out of— of plas- tic? I wonder.” Kern was aware of a tugging at his wing- surfaces, and glanced around in quick recog- nition of the strengthening breeze. He was the first to notice it. “It’s beginning to blow. And listen — do you hear?” It grew louder as they stood there, a shrill, strengthening whine in the air coming from the direction of the cloudlike mountain. A whine that grew so rapidly they had scarcely recognized it as noise before it was deafening all about them, and the wind was like a sud- den hurricane. That passed in a gust, noise and wind alike, leaving them breathless and staring at one another in dismay. “Look, over there, quick!” Kua said. “An- other one’s coming!” Far off, but moving toward them with ap- palling speed, came a monstrous spinning tower of — light? Smoke? They could not be sure. It whirled like a waterspout in a typhoon, vast, bendng majestically and righting itself again, and the air spun with it, and the wild, shrill screaming began again. The vortex of brilliance passed them far to the left, catching them in its shrieking hurri- cane of riven air and then releasing them again into shaken silence. But there was an- other one on its way before they had caught their breath again, a whirling, bowing tower that spun screeching off toward the right. And after it another, and close behind that, a fourth. The noise and the violence of the wind stunned Kern so that he had no idea what was happening to the others on the hilltop. He was susceptible because of his wings. The hurricane caught him up and whirled him sideward down the slope— shrieking in his ears with a noise so great it was almost silence, beyond the range of sound. Stunned, he struggled for balance, leaning against the rushing wall of air as solid as a wall of stone. For a moment or two he kept the ground underfoot. Then his wings be- trayed him and, in spite of himself, he felt the six-foot pinions blown wide and the muscles ached across his chest with the vio- lence of the wind striking their spread sur- faces. The horizon tilted familiarly as he swooped in a banking curve. The glass mountain for a moment hung overhead and he looked straight down at the wooded hills, seeing tiny blowing figures reeling across the slopes in the grip of the hurricane winds. Hanging 17 WAY OF THE GODS here far above the treetops, he could see that the monsters of whirling light were coming thicker and faster across the hilltops, striding like giants, trailing vortices of wind and sound in their wake. For an instant he swung in the grip of the hurricane, watching the vast whirling spindles moving and bow- ing majestically across the face of the new earth. Then the vortex caught him again and he was spun blindly into the heart of the whirl- wind, deafened with its terrible screaming uproar, wrenched this way and that upon aching wings, too dizzy for fear or thought. Time ceased. Half senseless, he was whirled to and fro upon the irresistible winds. He closed his eyes against flying dtist, locked his hands over his ears to shut out the deafening shrill of the blast, and let the hurricane do with him as it would. Kern felt a hand on his arm and roused himself out of a half-stupor. He thought, I must be on the ground again, and made an instinctive effort to sit up. The motion threw him into a ludicrous spin and he opened his eyes wide to see the earth whirling far below him. He was coasting at terrific speed through the upper air upon a cold, screaming high- way of wind, and moving easily beside him, * riding on broad pinions like his own, a girl paralleled his flight. ONG pale hair streamed behind her away from her blue-eyed face, whipped to pinkness by the blast. She was calling something to him, but the words were snatched from her lips by the wind and he heard nothing except that shrill, continuous howling all around them. He could see that she held him by one arm, and with her free hand was pointing downward vehemently. He could not hear her words, and knew he probably could not understand them if he did, but the gesture’s meaning he could not mistake. Nodding, he shrugged his left wing high and arched his body for a long downward spiral toward the ground. The girl turned with him, and together they glided sidewise across the rushing air-currents, delicately tacking against the wind, picking their way by instinctive muscular reactions of the spread pinions, while below them the ground swayed and turned like a fluid sea. Kern glided downward on a wave of exul- tation like nothing he had ever experienced He heard a voice of impossible sweetness, and slowly, slowly, he felt warmth return to him (Chap. VII) before in his life. He knew little about this world or about the girl beside him, but one thing stood out clearly — he was no longer alone. No longer the only winged being on an alien planet. And this long downward glide, like the motion of perfect dancers re- sponding each to the other’s most delicate motion, was the most satisfying thing he had ever known. 18 THRILLING WONDER STORIES For the first time he realized one of the great secrets of a flying race — to fly alone is to know only half the joy of flying. When another winged being moves beside you on the airways, speed matching speed, wings beating as one, then at last you taste the full ecstasy of flight. Kern was breathless with joy and excite- ment when the ground swooped up at them and he banked against the rush of his glide. With suddenly fluttering wings, he reversed his position in the air and felt with both feet for the solid earth. He had to run a little to cut down his speed, and the girl ran beside him, breathless and laughing a bit as she ran. When they came to a halt and swung to face one another the long ashen hair blew forward in a cloud that had caught up with her at last, and she fought it, laughing, and brushed back the tangled mass with both hands, the pale wings the exact color of her hair folding back from her shoulders. He saw now that she wore a tight tunic of some very fine, supple leather, and long tight boots of the same material. The hilt of a jeweled knife stood up against her ribs from a jeweled belt. Around them the wind still blew cold and shrill, but the blast of it was slackening no- ticeably and warmth was creeping back little by little into the air. They stood on a wooded hill, under trees whose whipping branches added to the tumult of noise, and Kern could see a broad vista of the land before him, with no more of the vast bending giants of the hur- ricane moving across it. The storm must be over, he thought. The girl spoke. She had a pleasant con- tralto voice, and the language she spoke was slightly guttural and of course entirely strange. Kern saw the surprise and doubt on her face when she saw that he did not under- stand her. “I’m sorry,” he said. “You’re a pretty thing. I wish we could talk to each other.” She matched his smile, but the bewilder- ment deepened on her face. Kern thought, She can’t believe I don’t know her language. Could that mean there’s only one tongue spoken in this world? It’s wishful thinking— -I want so much to believe it! Because that might mean the people here are all winged, and move around so easily that separate languages haven’t had a chance to evolve. His heart was beating faster, with an eager- ness that he found a little ludicrous. He had never suspected even in his own dreams how much it would mean to him to belong at last to a race that could accept him as one of its own. Bruce Hallam had set his machine in the aggregate pattern of the whole mutant group, knowing as he did so how unlikely it was that more than one of them could hope for an equivalent world on a single planet. But Bruce’s skill being what it was, Kern told himself there was no reason to be surprised that the expected had happened. This world was his own. A winged world. He was luckiest and first of the group to find a place where he belonged. Exultation closed up his throat with the joy of being no longer alien. “Or maybe I’m building too much on one example,” he warned himself aloud. “Are we all winged in this world, girl? Say some- thing, quick. I want to learn your language! Answer me, girl — are you an alien too, or is this the world where I belong?” She laughed at him, recognizing the half- serious tone of his voice though the words meant nothing. And then her glance went across his shoulder, and a look of subtle with- drawal crossed her face. She said something in her guttural tongue and nodded toward the trees behind Kern. He turned. A third winged figure was walking toward them under the still-roaring trees, wings whipped by the wind until the newcomer staggered now and then when the full blast caught him. K ERN was aware at first only of profound thankfulness. Another winged person was almost the answer to his remaining doubt. Where there were two, surely there must be many. This was a man. Like the girl, he wore thin, tight leather and a dagger at his belt. His « hair was red, and so were his silky wings, but his face was duskily tanned and Kern caught the flash of sidelong, light eyes as the man approached them. He saw, too, in anoth- er moment, that the newcomer was a hunch- back. Between the shining reddish wings the man’s back was slightly crooked, so that he looked up at them with his head awry. He had a young face, with beautiful clear planes, beneath the darkness of his tan. “Gerd — ” the girl called, and then hesi- tated. He flashed the light eyes at her, and Kern decided it was probably his name. The pale gaze moved back to Kern, and watched him searchingly as the hunchback WAY OF THE GODS 19 fought the wind to the shelter of their tree. The man was wary, ready for distrust before he so much as saw Kern’s face. It was odd, in a way. They talked, the girl excitedly in her con- tralto voice, guttural words tumbling over each other. Gerd’s answers were brief, in an unexpectedly deep tone. Presently he un- sheathed his dagger and with it gestured toward Kern and the valley below them. Kern bristled a little. There was no need for threats. If these people were still in a state of undevelopment where knives were their customary weapon, he was far beyond them in some ways at least. It was not a pleasant introduction to this world, where he felt himself already native, to have those first directions pointed out with a bare blade. The girl, seeing his scowl, laughed gently and came forward to take his arm. She ges- tured Gerd away with her other hand, and he smiled grimly and stood back. The girl fluttered her wings a little and made a swoop- ing gesture of her hand to indicate flight. She pointed to the valley. Then she stepped away to the brow of the hill, unfolded her wings, tested the dying wind with them, and leaned forward with sublime confidence into the void. The updraft caught her beneath the pinions and bore her aloft on a beautiful sweep, her pale hair blowing like a banner. In midair she twisted to beckon, and Kern laughed in sheer delight and ran to follow her, spreading his dark wings so that at the fourth stride, with a leap, suddenly he was airborne. It was a glorious feeling to fly without shame or need of concealment. He scarcely heard the beat of wings behind him as the hunchback took to the air in their wake. The joy of fly- ing in company was great enough just now to shut out all other thoughts from Kern’s mind. They swept high along the slow-running river of wind over a winding valley. Kern, watching for the companions with whom he had entered this wonderful world, saw no motion at all among the trees they soared over. He caught sight presently of a cluster of roofs far ahead, at the top of the valley, built around a stream that wound to and fro among the houses, and was filled with excited speculation as they neared the village. My people, he thought. My own people. What kind of a town will it be, and what sort of culture? How fast can I learn the lan- guage? There’s so much to find out. The thought broke in his mind. For some- thing — he had no name for it — was stirring very strangely through his body. For an instant the whole airy world went blind around him. It was as if a new pair of lungs had opened up within him and he had drawn a deep, full breath of such air as no human ever tasted before. It was as if new eyes had opened in his head and he had looked on a new dimension with multiple sight. It was like neither of these, nor was it like anything a man ever experienced before. New, new, inexpressibly new! And it was gone. In flight Kern staggered a little, his wings forgetting to beat the sustaining air. The thing had come and gone so quickly, and yet it was not a wholly unfamiliar thing, after all. Once before something like it had happened. Something, different, but at the time heart - breakingly new. It was when he first felt the wings thrust out upon his shoulders. When he first felt the change within himself that cut him off from mankind. “Am I changing again?” he asked himself fiercely. “Isn’t the mutation over yet? I won’t change! I belong here now — I won’t let any- thing spoil that!” The feeling was gone. He could not re- member even now what it had been actually like. He would not change! He would fight change while breath remained in him. What- ever strange new mutation struggled now for being in his mysterious flesh he would stran- gle before he let it come between him and these people with wings. It had gone, now. He would forget it. It should be as if it had never happened. CHAPTER III Gathering Danger UNLIGHT winked from the diamond- paned windows of the village. They cir- cled above the rooftops and came in against the wind for a landing on the high, flat roof of the central building, its open square paved with tiles painted in bright, crude pictures of flying men and women. From above Kern could see the cobbled streets winding narrowly past overhanging eaves, little stone bridges arching the stream that gushed rapidly down through the village. Flowers were bright in narrow, ordered bands 26 THRILLING WONDER STORIES around the houses. There were steep streets that rose in steps around the curves of the hill upon which the town was based. The roofs were steeply pitched, arguing a heavy snowfall in winter, but each of them had a landing area on the highest part of the house, usually facing a low door let into a gable. And Kern’s last doubt departed. This was indeed a village of flying people. He had come into his own world at last. His content lasted about five minutes. Then they came 1 down upon the brightly tiled landing-roof of what, was probably the townhall, and Kern, already fluttering his wings for a landing, saw something that made him instinctively tighten the chest-muscles that controlled his wings so that they stiffened into broad pinions again. He soared and made a second circle about the rooftop. The girl had reversed herself and was reaching with one foot for a landing when she saw what had startled him. She laughed and looked up, beckoning through the cloud of her settling hair. Kern made a third circle, fighting the up- draft among the houses while he looked down dubiously at the two dead men sprawled upon the roof. Both were young and both were winged. The girl walked delicately by them as if they were not there, settling her wings precisely. She stepped over the pool of blood, still liquid, that ran from a wound in the nearer man’s neck, streaked across the width of his quiet pinion, and that puddled the bril- liant tiles with a color of even brighter hue. There was a measured beating of the air above Kem. and he looked up to see the hunchback hovering on silky red wings above him. Sunlight flashed on a bared knife-blade. Gerd gestured down. And there was some- thing about his poise in the air, the way he handled his muscular, twisted body, that warned Kem not to precipitate a struggle. It occurred to him for the first time that fighting in midair must be an art requiring skills he had never learned — yet. Gingerly he circled again and came down very lightly at the edge of the roof, holding his wings half-open until he was sure of his footing. The girl was waiting for him. She smiled, her blue glance flicking the dead men. Then she slapped her own dagger significant- ly, glanced at the bodies and back at Kern, and with a careless beckoning motion turned to enter the roof door. A little dazed, Kern followed. Did she mean she herself had killed them? What extraor- dinary sort of culture had he found ready- made for him here? The first doubts stirring in his mind, he stooped his wings under the door-frame and groped down a narrow, curv- ing stairway behind the floating hair of his guide. Behind him he heard Gerd’s feet thump uncompromisingly from step to step. Voices came up the stair-well as they de- scended. At the bottom of the flight Kern followed the girl into a big stone-paved room, low-ceilinged, smoky from the fire that blazed in a huge cavern of whitewashed brick at one end of the roof. The room was full of the living and the dead. Bewildered, Kern glanced about at the winged bodies which had obviously been dragged carelessly out of the center of the room and heaped against the walls. Blood lay in coagulating pools here and there on the flags. The men about the fireplace seemed to be debating something in loud voices. They looked up sharply as the girl entered. Then there was a clattering rush and a clamor of guttural voices as they hurried to greet her. Kern made out one word among their sen- tences that seemed to be her name. “Elje — Elje!” Their voices echoed under the low ceiling, their wings made a rustle and soft clatter as they shouldered together around her. If it had not been for the unconsidered dead at their feet, Kem would have been happy with- out reservation, knowing at last beyond any doubt that this was a world of the winged. They were talking about him, obviously. Elje, braiding her disordered hair, spoke rap- idly and glanced from Kern to her compan- ions and back again. Kern did not wholly like the looks of the men. Without wings, they would have seemed an undisciplined, violent group. Their faces were scarred and weather- beaten. All of them wore knives, and they had clearly been in a hard fight within the last few hours. Among the dead on the floor there were men without wings. There were also, he saw now, a few women; some winged, some not. Two races? Somehow he surmised that was not true; there was a subtle likeness among them all, the wingless and the winged, that marked them of the same racial stock. Presently he began to notice that the un- winged were all either elderly or adolescent. He remembered that his own wings had not begun to grow until he was past eighteen. Was it only in their prime that this race could fly? And would he, with advancing years, WAY OF THE GODS 21 lose again this glorious attribute he had only now begun to enjoy? T HE thought damped that surge of exul- tation which still flooded his mind be- neath the surface bewilderment. And then he grinned wryly to himself, thinking: “Maybe it won’t happen. Maybe I won’t live that long!” For the looks of the grim men around him were not encouraging. If he had guessed right about a universal language in this world, it was not strange that his ignorance of it gave them room for suspicion. And in a village where life was held as cheaply as it was held here, he could probably expect direct and violent reactions to suspicion. He was not far wrong. The men spoke among themselves in brawling voices a mo- ment or two longer, the girl Elje braiding her hair carelessly and putting in a word now and then. While Kern stood there, debating with himself what was best to do, the argument came to a swift climax. Elje called something in a clear voice and, directly behind him, Kern heard a guttural monosyllable in an- swer, and the rustle of wings, and felt some- thing cold and edged laid against the side of his neck. He stood quite still. Then the hunchback, Gerd, sidled around into his view, holding the sharp knife with a steady hand against Kern’s jugular. The pale eyes in the dark young face were steady and full of cold threat. Someone moved across the flagstones be- hind him and Kern felt hands draw his wrists together, felt the roughness of rope pulled tight around them. He did not protest. He was too surprised, and too unaccustomed to violence in his daily life, to know just now what course he should take. And he was filled still with the thought that these were his own people. A something heavy and clinging fell sud- denly across his wings. He jumped and looked back. It was a net, which a man with a scarred face and suspicious, squinting eyes was rapidly knotting' together at the base of his pinions. The hunchback grunted another monosyl- lable and drove the point of his knife against Kern’s shoulder, jerking his red head toward a flight of stairs across the room. The winged men drew back to let the two pass, silent now and watching with impassive faces. Elje, fin- ishing the last of the second braid, tossed the pale silken rope of it across her shoulder and would not meet Kern’s eyes as he went by. The stairs twisted unevenly through nar- row stone walls. At the third level the hunch- back threw open a heavy, low door and fol- lowed Kern into the room beyQnd. It was rather a pleasant little place, circular, with tile-banded walls and a tiled floor. The sin- gle window was barred and looked out over rooftops and distant hills. There was a low bed, a table, two chairs, nothing more. The hunchback pushed Kern roughly to- ward one of the chairs. Both of them, Kern noticed, had low backs to clear the wings of those who might sit in them. He sank down and looked at the red-winged man expectant- ly. What happened then was the last thing, perhaps, that he might have expected to hear. Gerd held out his dagger, level across his palm, pointed to it with the other hand and growled, “Kaj.” He slapped his sheath then, said, “Kajen,” and dropped the dagger into it. His pale eyes bored into Kern’s. Unexpectedly, Kern heard himself laugh- ing. Partly it was relief, for he would not [Turn page] ... /rs QOAUTy 22 THRILLING WONDER STORIES have been surprised to feel the edge of that knife called kaj sink into his throat once the door had closed behind them. Instead, apparently this was to be a lesson in language. , . . Once, in the night, he awoke briefly. Strange stars were shining through the bars of his window. He thought there was some- one stealthily looking at him from beyond the bars, and sleepily realized that it would take as great skill to fly in silence as to walk with- out noise. But he saw no one. He slept again and dreamed it was Elje at the window, touching the bars with light fingertips as she smiled in at him in the starlight, her face dabbled with blood. For two weeks he saw no one but Gerd. The pale eyes in the dark face became very familiar to him, and gradually the deep voice became familiar and understandable too. Gerd was a patient and indefatigable teacher, and the language was a simple one, made for a simple culture. Indeed, Kern learned it so rapidly that he began to catch Gerd’s suspi- cious sidelong glances, and once, from his door, overheard a conversation on the stair outside when Gerd and Elje met. “I think he may be a spy,” the hunchback’s deep guttural said. Elje laughed. “A spy who doesn’t speak our language?” “He learns it too readily. I wonder, Elje — The Mountain is cunning.” “Hush,” was all she answered. But Kern thereafter was careful to pretend he knew less of the language than he really did. The Mountain. He thought of that in the long hours when he was alone. A mountain, strange of shape, the color of clouds, tower- ing halfway up the heavens. It was more than inert matter, if these winged people spoke of it with that hush in their voices. For a fortnight he waited and listened and learned. Once more, in the night, with the nameless stars looking in at the window, he felt that inexplicable stirring of , alien life deep within him, and was frightened. It passed quickly, and was gone too fast for him to put any name to it, or to remember it clearly afterward. Mutation? Continuing change, in some unguessable form? He would not think of it. N THE fourteenth night, the Dream came. He had not thought very much about Bruce Hallam. Kua and the others. Subconsciously, he did not want to. This was his world and the other mutants were actually intruders, false notes in the harmony. Danger he might find here, even death, but it was a winged world, and his own. There were dreams at night. Voices whis- pering, whose tones he half-recognized and would not allow himself to remember when he awoke. Something was searching for his soul. Before that final contact on the fourteenth night, he had eavesdropped enough on other conversations held on the stairs between Gerd and Elje to understand a little of what went on around him. Gerd was urging that they leave the town and return somewhere, and Elje was adamant. “There’s no danger yet.” “There is danger whenever we’re away from the eyrie. Not even the Mountain can guide enemies through the poison winds. Our safety has always been a quick raid, Elje, and then back to the eyrie. But to stay here, gorging ourselves — in a town - — is madness.” “I like the comfort here.” Elje said naively. “It’s been a long time since I’ve eaten and drunk so well, and slept on such a bed.” “You’ll sleep on a harder bed soon, then,” Gerd said dourly. “The towns will gather. They must know already that we’re here.” “Are we afraid of the townsmen?” “When the Mountain walks — ” the hunch- back said, and left the sentence unfinished. Elje’s laughter rang false. That night, Kern felt seeking fingers try again the doors of his mind, and this time his subconscious resistance could not keep them out. He recognized the mind behind that seeking — the infinitely sad, infinitely wise mind of the mutant Byrna, with the lovely voice and the pale, unlovely face. For a moment he floundered, lost in the depths of that intelligence so much more fathomless than his own. For a moment time- less sorrow washed him like the waters of the sea. Then he found himself again, and was looking, somehow, through new and dif- ferent eyes, into a grassy hollow filled with starlight. Into Kua’s beautiful honey-colored face and her great single eye. Into Sam Brewster’s veiled gaze. Dimly he groped for Bruce Hallam, who had opened the door for them all. Bruce was missing. And as for Byrna — it was Byma’s eyes through which he saw them. Her mind, gripping his like the clasp of hands, cupping WAY OF THE GODS 23 his like a bowl of still water. Soundlessly through space came a voice. Kua’s voice. “Byrna, have you found him?” “I think — yes. Kern! Kern!” Without words, he answered them. “Yes, Kus . Yes, Byrna. I’m here.” There was resentment in Kua’s voice — the voice of her mind, for no words were spoken in this curious seance. Kern found time to wonder briefly if Byrna had always possessed this strange ability to bridge distances, or if it had burgeoned in her here as something struggled in himself for new being. “We’ve been trying a long time, Kern,” Kua said coldly. “You were hard to reach.” “I — I wasn’t sure you’d be here any longer.” “You thought we’d have gone on to other worlds. Well, we would have, if we could. But Bruce was hurt. In the storm.” “Badly?” She hesitated. “We — can’t be sure. Look.” Through Byrna’s eyes Kern saw Bruce Hallam’s motionless figure, lying silent on a bed of boughs. He looked oddly pale, almost ivory in color. His breathing was nearly im- perceptible. And Byma’s mind, groping through the void for his, found only a strange, dim spinning — something too far away and too abstract for the normal mind to grasp. She touched it briefly — and it spun out of contact and was gone. “A trance?” Kua said. “We don’t know, yet. But we’ve used Byrna’s vision and learned a little about this world. How much do you know, Kern?” Kern told them then, with Byrna’s tongue, too absorbed in the needs of the moment to realize fully what a strange meeting this was of more than human minds, over unguessed distances of alien land. He told them what he knew, what he had guessed from overheard conversations — not much, but a general pic- ture. “The planet’s mostly ocean. A small con- tinent, about the size of Australia, I think. City-states all over it. Elje’s band are outlaws. They have a hideout somewhere, and they raid the towns. They seem — well, scornful of the townspeople, and a little afraid, too. I can’t quite understand that.” “This — Gerd? He spoke of a Mountain?” Kua said. “Yes. Something about — when the Moun- tain walks.” “You know the Mountain,” Kua said. “The storm came from there. Those vortices of light and energy rose out of it.” M ERN remembered the spindles of blind- ing brilliance that strode across the land in the maelstrom of the winds. “We don’t understand much of it yet,” Kua was saying in a troubled tone. We know there’s danger connected with that Mountain. I think there is life there, something we don’t know about. Something that probably couldn’t have developed on Earth. The conditions could have been too alien. But here anything is possible.” Kern felt the thought forming in his brain — in Byrna’s brain. “Life? Intelligent life? What do you know about it?” “Maybe not life as we understand the word. Call it a — force. No, it’s more tangible thin that. I don’t know—” The thought-voice of Kua faltered. “Dangerous. We may learn more of it, if we live. This much we’ve seen, though, through Byrna’s vision, and mine. We’ve sensed forces reaching out from the Mountain, into the minds of men. The minds of the winged townspeople. Assembling them for war.” She hesitated. “Kern, do you know they’re on their way now, to your town, where the outlaws are?” He was instantly alert. , “Now? From where? Flow soon can they get here?” “I’m not sure. They aren’t in my sight yet — over the horizon, that is. Byrna, tell him.” The mind that held Kern’s stirred, and through it he saw as through a haze rank upon rank of winged beings flying with steady beasts of their pinions over a dark night-time terrain. Byma’s thought mur- mured, “You see, I can’t tell how far. It’s new, this clairvoyance since we came from Earth. I could always see but not so clearly, and I never could show others what was in my mind. So I only know these men are flying against your village.” “And the force of men — the Mountain, I think, has armed them somehow,” Kua put in. “Byrna has seen the weapons they carry. You’d better warn your friends — your jailers or whatever they are. Otherwise you may be caught in the middle of a fight.” “I will.” Kern’s mind was full now of something new. “You say you’ve developed this clairvoyance since the time when you came here, Byrna. Has it happened to the others, too?” “To me, maybe, a little,” Kua said slowly. “A sharpening of focus, not much more than THRILLING WONDER STORIES 24 that. To Sam—” Her thought form glanced sidewise to Sam Brewster, sitting silent, with the hood of his secondary lids drawn over his terrible eyes, “ — I think nothing’s happened. He can’t join our talk now, you see. Byrna’s mind can’t reach into his at all. We’ll have to tell him all that’s been said, later. And Bruce.” She shrugged. “Perhaps the winged people will tell you how we can help him. The edge of one of the vortices caught him, and he’s been like this ever since. We’d hoped to go on, you know, Kern, to find our own tvorlds as you- — perhaps — have found yours. But without Bruce, we’re helpless.” Kern was aware of a tightening and strengthening of his own mind as a problem at last came before him that must be met. Until now he had been almost in a trance of wonder and delight and dismay at the new things of this new, winged world. But the time for lassitude was over. He gathered his thoughts for speech, but Kua’s voice cut his beginning phrases short. “Kern, there’s danger in the Mountain. The —thing — whatever it is, knows we’re here. It lives in the Mountain, or perhaps it is the Mountain. But Byrna has sensed hatred from it. Malevolence.” There was a sudden harshness to her thought. “Kern, you’re a soft fool!” Kua said. “Did you think you could reach Paradise without earning it? W'hether you help us or not, you’ve got to face danger before you’ll find your place in this world, or any other. I don’t think you can manage without us. And we need your help, too. Together, we may still lose the battle. Separately, there’s no hope for any of us. We know! The Mountain may be a mutation as far beyond us as we are beyond the animals. But we’ve got to fight.” Her voice blurred suddenly, faded to a thin drone. The starlit hill and the faces before him swirled and melted in Kern’s sleeping sight. He struggled for a moment against in- tangible danger — something formless and full of strong malevolence. He saw — what was it? A vast, coiling Something like a ribbon of fire, moving lazily in darkness and aware of him — terribly aware. Far off in the void he felt the quiver of fright in a mind he knew — Byrna’s mind. But he lost the contact instantly, and then some- one was shaking him by the shoulder and saying something in insistent, guttural tones. He opened his eyes. CHAPTER IV Evil Mountain ffN HIS vision, the coiling flame had left jit so brilliant an image upon his eyelids that for an instant he could see nothing but the blue-green scar of after-sight swimming upon his vision. Then that faded and he was staring up into Gerd’s darkly handsome young face. Kern struggled to sit up, beating his wings a little to help him rise. The gust stirred Kern’s red hair and sent motes dancing in the beam of sunlight falling across the bed. Kern in the aftermath of amazement and terror forgot to dissemble his knowledge of the winged men’s tongue. The simple syl- lables raced off his lips. “Gerd, Gerd, you’ve got to listen to me! I’ve been finding out things I didn’t suspect until now. Let me up. The townspeople are coming!” Gerd put a hard palm against his chest. “Not so fast. You seem to have learned our language in your sleep. No, stay there.” His voice rose. “Elje!” She was a moment or two in coming, and Gerd stood back with his hand on his dagger and his pale, suspicious eyes unswerving as he watched Kern. When Elje came, bright- faced in the morning sun, her ashen braids wound in a coronet that glistened against the high arch of her wings, he spoke without taking his eyes from Kern. “Our guest awoke this morning with a strangely fluent knowledge of speech. I told you before of the danger from spies, Elje.” “All right, I do know more of your lan- guage than I pretended,” Kern admitted. “I just learned it faster than you believed, that’s all. That doesn’t matter now. Do you know the townspeople are coming to attack?” Gerd bent forward swiftly, half-open wings hovering above him in the sunlight. “How do you know that? You are a spy!” “Let him talk, Gerd,” Elje said. “Let him talk.” Kern talked. . . . In the end, he could see that they did not yet fully trust him. It was not surprising, for the tale would have bewildered anyone. But the prospect of an advancing army was enough to divide their thoughts. “If I were a spy, would I warn you they WAY OF THE GODS 25 were coming?” Kern demanded, seeing their dubious glances fixed on him at the end of his story. “It isn’t the army you’d be spying for,” Gerd said reluctantly. “Your other world — Earth,” Elje mur- mured, her eyes searching Kern’s. “If that were true, it could explain some things. But we know of no other worlds.” Briefly Kern thought that it might be easier for one of Elje’s culture to believe in the existence of other worlds than for a denizen of some more sophisticated civilization. The people of this winged race had not yet closed their minds to all they could not see. It was not a race so sure of its own omnipotence that it denied all unfamiliar things existence. “How could I hurt you now?” Kern said. “Why should I warn you, if I were on their side?” “It’s the Mountain,” Elje said surprisingly. “Why do you suppose we kept you here in this bare room, without furnishings, without anything you could build into a weapon? Or do you know?” Bewildered, he shook his head. “We were not sure if you were a slave to the Mountain. If you were, a coil of wire, a bit of iron — -anything — would have been dangerous to us in your hands.” Her eyes were questioning. Again Kern shook his head. Gerd began to speak, his voice faintly derisive. “A long story and an evil one. Perhaps you know it. At any rate, we’re the only free people in this world. Oh, there may be a few others, but not many, and they don’t live long. The Mountain is jealous of its slaves. Aside from our group, all the rest of mankind be- longs to the Mountain. All!” “This Mountain?” Kern said. “What is it?” Gerd shrugged his red wings. “Who knows? Demon — god. If we ever had a history, no one knows it now. No legend goes back beyond the coming of the Mountain. We only know that it has always been there, and from it, whispers float out to men in their sleep, and they become slaves to the whisper. Something happens in their minds. For the most part they live as they choose, in their cities. But sometimes that voice comes again, and then they’re mindless, doing as the Mountain bids them.” “W r e don’t know what the Mountain is,” Elje said. “But we know that it’s intelligent. It can guide men’s hands to make weapons, when there’s a need for weapons. And it can send out storms, such as the one in which we found you. Not for a long, long while has there been a storm out of the Mountain. If you’re not a spy, how do you explain the fact that your coming and the storm happened in the same hour?” HE SHRUGGED. About that, he also was U puzzled, “I wish I knew. But I’ll find out, if any human can. Do you mean the army that’s coming against you is sent by the Mountain? Why?” “As long as we remain free, the Mountain will try to enslave us,” Elje said. “And we’ll fight the townsmen for the things we need, since we don’t dare fight the Mountain. We’ve stayed too long in this village — yes, Gerd, I know! We’ll return to the eyrie now. If an army of the townsfolk is coming, they’ll have weapons the Mountain made them build, and the weapons will be dangerous, whatever they may be this time.” “The prisoner may know all this already,” Gerd said dourly. “That doesn’t matter. But it will matter if we take him to the eyrie. He could lead our enemies there, Elje.” “Through the poison winds?” But Elje drew in her lower lip thoughtfully. “He tells a mad story, Gerd. I know that. Could it be true?” “Well, what then?” “These companions he spoke of. They sound like gods. And they talked of fighting against the Mountain.” “Fight against the stars,” Gerd said and laughed. “But not the Mountain. Not even gods could win such a war.” “They aren’t gods,” Kern said. “But they have powers none of us know. I think our coming marks a turning place in the history of your race, 'Elje — Gerd. You can kill us or abandon us and go on as you always have, or you can believe me and help us, and fight this time with a chance of winning. Will you do it?” Elje was silent for a moment. Then she laughed and stood up suddenly with a flutter of her wings. “I’ll go along with you and talk to your friends,” she said. “If they’re as you say — yes, Kern, I’ll believe you. For the Mountain nev- er has changed human flesh. It can touch our minds, but not our bodies. I think in the be- ginning were men whose brains had some weakness that let the whisper come in, and those men were armed by the Mountain and 28 THRILLING WONDER STORIES killed their fellows, until only we outlaws remained. “Our minds over the generations have been bred to resist invasion as the townspeople were bred to welcome it. I think — I know — if the Mountain could reach into our bodies and make that tiny change that would open our mind to it, then it would win. But it can’t. It can’t alter our bodies except by killing us. If I see with my own eyes these companions of Kern’s, I’ll know there is a power greater than the Mountain. And we’ll fight together, Kern!” A little later, floating high above the nest of hills which cradled the village, Kern rocked on spread wings and pressed his eyes tightly shut, thinking with all the strength of his mind: “Byrna, Byrna! Answer me, Byrna! Help me find you. Byrna, do you hear?” Silence, except for the small noises drifting up from far below, distant shouts as Elje’s winged band collected in haste the loot they would take with them to their eyrie. Kern’s vision swam with the flecked clouds of sun- light on closed lids. Deliberately he blanked his mind to receive an answer. None came. “Byrna! There may not be time to waste. Byrna, Kua, answer me!” In his eagerness and impatience he re- membered again what he had glimpsed dimly through Byrna’s memory, the ranks of armed fliers moving through the night on steadily beating wings toward the village. Perhaps from so far away they would not arrive for many hours — perhaps so near that the cloud on the horizon now was not mist, but armed men. . . . “Byrna! Do you hear me?” “Kern!” The answer he sought came with sharp impact, like a blow in the face. As if she were almost at his side and speaking with dreadful violence. He caught terror in the contact of minds, cold, controlled terror that chilled him so the sunny air turned suddenly icy around him. He knew instantly that she had heard him before, had been hedging for just the right contact so that there need be no wasted moments of groping and finding focus upon one another. He caught the hard impact and the terror and the urgency in the moment their minds met. Then her thoughts tumbled into his mind: “Kern! Hurry! No time to waste. Do you see the grove of blooming' trees left on the horizon? Come! Make new contact there.” She blanked as suddenly as she had en- tered his mind. And because thoughts are so infinitely more rapid than words she had con- veyed those four ideas — identification, haste, locality and a promise of future contact— in almost no lapse of time at all. But in that brief instant while their minds did meet, something happened. Kern rocked on shaken wings as if a blow had jolted him. He snatched his mind back from the brief touch with Byrna’s quickly, quickly, scorched with the incandescent ha- tred that had blazed in the void between them. For the coiled ribbon of fire which had swum so strangely through nothingness when he woke from his clairvoyant dream was awake and alive now, and terribly avid. WT HAD been waiting, he knew in the in- Bi stant while his mind leaped back in re- coil from that burning contact. It had found them as he waked slowly from the long, leisured conversation in the seance. Since that moment it had lain, coiled, in waiting. It? Folding his wings, he dropped forward in a long, breathtaking dive, the air screaming past his ears. From a tiled rooftop far below, he saw two figures rise, one on pale wings, one on glossy red. He spread his own pinions then, exulting in the strain on his chest- muscles when the broad surfaces checked his dive, bore him up in a steep arc that made the air feel warm and solid as he carved a long curve through it. “That way,” he told Elje. pointing, when she rose within hearing. “We’ll have to hurry. There’s something wrong. I think perhaps the Mountain, or Something in the Mountain, knows we’re here.” Elje’s clear bright color blanched in the sunlight. Behind her, Gerd’s eyes flashed side- ward in the dark face, suspicious, mistrusting still. “Why do you say that?” Kern told them as they flew, the grove of blossoming trees on the horizon seeming to slip rapidly down the edge of the skyline and draw nearer far below. It was not easy to talk and fly. Kern’s breath began to come fast, and his chest and wings ached with the speed, after so many days of inactivity. When he finished speaking there was silence. “The eyrie lies that way.” Elje said pres- ently, in a controlled voice. She pointed right with a smooth bare arm. “I’ve sent most of the men on with our loot. Cerd chose twenty to follow us. You don’t know where or how WAY OF THE GODS 27 far the Mountain’s men are?” Kern shook his head. “Maybe I can find out at the next meeting with Byrna.” He glanced behind them and saw the little band of Elje’s bodyguard flying a few minutes in their rear, big men all of them, with stolid, hard-eyed faces. Several carried light wicker squares looped up with straps. “Seats for your friends, Kern,” Elje ex- plained. “We need them when we carry our young people or our old ones, who no longer have the power to fly.” Her face darkened, as Kern knew their faces always did when the winged people thought of the days in which they would no longer travel the lanes of air. It occurred to him then that their battles might be ferocious things, fought by men as fanatic in their own way as those who fought on Earth for entry into an imagined paradise. For these men fought their own old age as surely as they fought an enemy. No one who has once spread wings upon the air- currents willingly faces a life without wings. The blooming grove was beneath them now. “If you make contact this time with — it — again, Kern, I think it will know more easily where to direct its men,” Elje said. “There is great danger. Will you let this meeting with your friends go for awhile? You may be do- ing them harm as well as us. The army of the Mountain may be very near now.” Kern hesitated. He had been dreading with every wingbeat the moment when he must open his mind again to that coiled and scorch- ing malevolence. For an instant he toyed with the idea of postponing searching for Bju-na’s mind, but he knew it would only mean put- ting off the inevitable. Grimly he shook his head, “Byrna!” he called out mentally. “Byrna, what next?” As before, for long moments there was no answer. Then briefly, like a gasp, he caught the touch of Byrna’s mind — only briefly and very incoherently, because between them in the instant of contact flashed the blinding hatred of the — the interloper. Only when their minds touched, apparently, could the white-hot malevolence reach them, but it lay ambushed and ready, and this time it seemed to flare out between them almost before Byrna’s voice could speak. Reeling back, shaken and stunned by the thing between them, Kern caught only a ragged thought or two from Byrna’s mind. “Three hills — hurry — army!” That was all that got through. For an in- stant the void flamed with the blankness of sheer hatred. Then Kern opened his eyes and caught himself on reeling wings. Elje and Gerd watched him without speaking as he controlled his shaken faculties with a great effort. Elje was white with terror, but on Gerd’s face suspicion was still predominant. Three hills in a shadowy row cut the hori- zon line. Kern gestured toward them and in silence the little group flew on. If Byrna’s gasp of “ — army — ” meant the enemy were nearly upon them, there was nothing to do except fly as they had been flying, in the hope of reaching the mutants before disaster over- took them all. CHAPTER V Pursuit T HE three hills were not quite below them, and Kern was watching the skyline anxiously for signs of the winged army which was moving against them, when something from below flashed across his eyes. He blinked and looked down. From a clump of trees the light-beam flashed again, dazzlingly, from a tiny point of brilliance. Then a small figure stepped out from the shelter of the branches, waving at him. It was Kua. Even from this height he could see the reflected light in twin points on the sun-glasses she held in one hand. She had signalled him by the heliograph with the only thing they had for reflecting light. Pointing downward, he let one wing tilt high and came about in a long glide, lying at full length upon the air with his heels higher than his head. The ground swung like water in a cup and Kua seemed to rush up- ward to meet him as the swift dive cut the space between them. The others were with her by the time Kern had put his feet to the grass. He was con- scious, as always, of a little shock of memory renewed when he met again Kua’s great single gaze from the center of her forehead. Byrna, hurrying to meet him, lifted a pale, drawn little face. “Kern!” she cried in a voice that was pure music. And he thought there was in her eyes, and in Kua’s, a subtle something that was new to him. Mutation had gone on, perhaps, with them as with him, a step beyond Earthly n THRILLING WONDER STORIES mutation. Their powers were strengthened, so that, in part, they both were strangers to him. Sam Brewster came out smiling and ex- tending his hand, and Kern took it with the little inward quailing he had always felt be- fore Sam, the instinctive averting of his gaze from Sam’s veiled eyes. Beyond Sam’s shoulder he saw Bruce Hallam lying mo- tionless, as if he had not stirred since they laid him on the pallet of boughs. His face was ivory-hard and as withdrawn from liv- ing as the face of a statue that had never known life. Everything was confused for a few mo- ments. Byrna was crying, “Hurry, hurry!” and Kua’s distance-piercing glance kept sweeping the horizon as the winged people swooped to the ground behind Kern and came forward swiftly, wings half open to speed their hurrying feet. Kern heard Elje’s little gasp of incredulity and dismay when Kua’s blue central eye turned upon the newcomers, but the winged girl was too good a commander to waste time after that first glance which confirmed what Kern had told her. In a matter of seconds they were in the air. Bruce Hallam, still motionless in his mys- terious slumber, had been swung on a wicker carrier between two burly fliers. The other three mutants, in their seats between winged bearers, scarcely had time for amazement or uncertainty as they were wafted aloft. Kern, flying with the rest over the rolling hilltops with the vast glass cloud of the Mountain shadowing the horizon, timed his flight to the pace of the slowest so that he might talk in midair with the wingless people in the carriers. And close beside him Elje and Gerd hovered, watching almost jealously every expression on the faces of the speak- ers. “What do they say, Kern?” Elje asked breathlessly, timing her words to the rhythm of her wings. “Are — are you sure these people are human? I never saw such — such — creatures. Gerd, after all could they be gods?” Gerd laughed shortly, but there was un- easiness in his voice. “Let them talk. Is the enemy near yet? Ask them, Kern.” “Near, I think,” Byrna said. She was clutching the straps of her swaying chair with both tiny hands and her incredibly musical voice might have been crooning a song in- stead of shaping the syllables of terror which echoed the look in her eyes. “Kern, I don’t dare — look — for them any more! You saw what happened! Kern, tell me what it was you saw. “I? Fire, I think. A coiling ribbon of it— and hate. I could almost see the hate!” “Tlie Mountain,” Byrna said, her eyes turning automatically toward the great cloud hanging ominously in the sky. “What do you know about it, Kern? Have these people told you?” Briefly he gave her the story Elje had re- counted. “It has never yet been able to change people physically, or there wouldn’t be any outlaws left.” he finished. “At least, so Elje thinks. Byrna, I wonder if it could change us? We’re malleable — abnormally malleable. I—” He hesitated. Not even to Byrna did he yet want to speak of the deep, mysterious stirrings he had felt in his own flesh. “You think you and Kua may have felt something like a changing in yourselves?” Byrna nodded, her eyes wide and dis- tressed. “We can’t tell how much, yet. May- be the Mountain is the cause of it.” Unexpectedly Sam Brewster, swinging be- tween his carriers above Byrna, leaned for- ward. “The Mountain’s where the answer is, Kern. I don’t think we’ll be safe until we’ve explored it.” “Safe!” Kern said grimly. “If you’d seen what I have, you’d never talk that way.” “It won’t matter,” Kua called from a little way ahead, twisting in her seat to send a piercing blue gaze back at them. “Look! They’re coming!” ERN’S sharp exclamation as he banked swiftly and turned to follow her point- ing finger was explanation enough to Elje and Gerd what was happening. A shiver of ex- citement ran through the whole flying group, a tightening of muscle and mind. For an in- stant their pace slackened, simultaneously, without signal, almost as a flight of birds wheels simultaneously at no perceptible mes- sage. There was nothing visible on the horizon where Kua pointed. “I can see the first of them — a long line,” she said. “They’re carrying something, but I’m not sure what it is. Round things — nets of something shining, like thin wire. Light’s WAY OF THE GODS 29 flashing from it when the sun hits them.” Rapidly Kern told Elje. “New weapons,” she said. “I expected that. I wonder — well, we’ll know soon enough.” She beat her wings together and soared sud- denly above the group, looking down with speculative eyes. “We’re going too slowly. Kern.” She flashed a glance at him. “This other friend of yours, the injured one. He’s heavy. He slows us. And he takes two men out of the fight if we’re caught. I think — ” She made an expressive downward gesture. “No!” Kern said quickly. “He’s the most powerful of us all, if we can rouse him.” “Well, he must be first to fall, if the need comes.” Elje said. “But we’ll wait.” She called commands to the group flying before them, and eight men wheeled in the air and swung back. Kern watched them slip smooth- ly, without a break in their wing-beats, into the harness of the wicker carriers, relieving those who had borne the burden this far. “Now, quickly!” Elje said. “The eyrie!” They were almost over the jagged hills where the outlaws’ refuge lay, when the first ranks of the enemy swept over the skyline and saw them. The fugitives had flown low, taking advantage of every line of hills and trees for cover, and despite their burden they flew fast, their pace nearly matching that of the pursuers because of the all-night flight the enemy had made. But they had not yet reached shelter when the sound of a horn, clear and high, fell through the sunny air, and after it, drowning out the thin, sweet notes, the roar of angl-y men sighting their prey. Elje was very calm. “Gerd,” she said. “You’ll lead the way in?” “No!” he growled. “Let one of the captains go. I feel like a fight.” “Stay, then,” Elje answered. She called a command to a man in the front rank of her little party. They were flying as fast as wing could carry them toward a gap between two jagged, dark hills through which Kern could see a wilderness of tortured rock beyond. It looked volcanic in origin, and waves of intermittent heat and strange metal- lic odors drifted to them on the wind as they approached. “There are poisonous currents in these hills,” Elje told Kern as they swept forward. “Many of us died before we learned the way through them. Now we have a shelter where no one can follow us who hasn’t a guide.” Abruptly she ceased to speak. Kern turned a startled glance and saw her reel in midair, throwing back her head so that the clear line of her throat was white and taut against the blue sky. Then, without a word, suddenly she crumpled in full flight. An instant longer her wings sustained her and she hung limp from the spread pinions. Then they too folded back and she dropped like a stone. Time stopped for Kern. Everything stood still, the hills with their floating vapors, the flying troupe, the breeze halted among the trees below. He could see the first ranks of the oncoming enemy halted too and hanging motionless in space, their shouts nothing but a buzz in his eai'S. He saw too, very clearly, the great ovals of the weapons they carried, and the light that whirled in intricate, thin patterns like wires of brilliance within the ovals. He saw the cone of light reach out from the nearest oval and touch another of the fugitive fliers. It had happened in an instant, and it was over. Kern dived for Elje’s falling body al- most before she had ceased to speak, swung under her, caught her across his arms in a welter of slack wings and loosened hair. Gerd’s harsh voice was shouting orders above him. By the time Kern had labored up to their level with his burden he saw the newly-appointed guide of the winged men vanishing into the cleft between the hills, leading two by two the harnessed pairs who carried the mutants. The roar of savage voices behind them filled the shaken air, . and the roar of countless wings beating in ranks as the enemy swooped upon them. They were very near now — so near Kern could see the distorted, shouting faces and the flash of knives in the hands of the foremost. It was a strange and eerie thing to realize that no human hatred burned behind the angry faces, but the fiery, venomed malig- nancy which was the Mountain. Or did this oncoming rabble know why it fought? Did they think this fury their own emotion, not a monstrously inspired rage that turned them to automatons? A cone of light swung past Kern, numbing his wing-tip, and touched a fast-flying man in front of him between the wings. The man jolted convulsively, arched backward and then crumpled to hang for an instant motion- less on the momentum of his own flight. The wings folded as Elje’s had done, and the man dropped downward out of sight. SO THRILLING WONDER STORIES ERD was gesturing Kern frantically on. The hunchback hovered on red pinions recklessly in full view of the enemy, knives flashing in each hand, ready to engage who- ever came within reach of his blades. He was shouting hoarse orders scarcely audible above the rushing thunder of the enemies’ wings and their voices bellowing for blood. The last of the little band was pouring through the hill-cleft now, Kern almost the last of all with his limp burden hanging across his arms. The air was full of twisting vapors and he could not see very clearly as he swept closer to the hills. It was, curiously, a night- mare sensation, half-blindness from the poi- son vapors and half- deafness from the roar of wings and voices. He could only follow the back of the man ahead, dimly seen through the mists. Elie hung motionless in his arms, her trailing wings fluttering a little to the measured beat of his own. The last thing he saw as he glanced back was Gerd poised above the cleft to follow him in, ready to fight a rear-guard action if need be. And then, all in one brief glance between drifts of vapor, Kern’s heart contracted as he saw two more winged shapes beating desper- ately toward him through the dimness, two men flying tandem with a harnessed burden between them. It was Bruce Hallam’s bearers. And Elje had been right. Bruce’s weight was too great for the flying men to carry fast enough. Evi- dently they had been left too far behind to follow the other bearers in and had only now made up the distance which would save them. Or would it save them? In spite of himself, Kern tilted his wings and hesitated in the air, twisting his head to watch. He saw' Gerd gesturing savagely to hurry them in — heard the hunchback’s deep howl. “Drop him!” Gerd howled. “Drop him and come on!” But before they could obey, a cone of white fire swept silently through the coiling fog and enveloped bearers and burden alike in a bath of radiance. There was no sound, except for the all-en- compassing uproar of the pursuit. In silence the doomed fliers stiffened and glided an in- stant still carrying their fatal weight between them — and then dropped. The three of them vanished together into the engulfing mists. Kern flew on with Elje. He labored on leaden wings through the fog. Whiffs of burning vapor stung in his nostrils and set his pumping lungs on fire. Elje was an almost unbearable weight in his arms. Coughing, choking, ready to think every wing-beat his last, he stumbled through the air in the wake of the man before him, his only guide through this aerial labyrinth of poison. Hot updrafts caught him and tossed him aloft, cross-currents fetid with strangling vapors sent him into perilous side-slips toward the jagged black peaks dangerously near. At this speed he knew he could not survive the slightest contact with those knife- edged rocks. And Bruce’s loss was a heavier burden to bear than even Elje’s dead weight. For only Bruce could have opened the doors for the rest to escape into worlds of their own. And upon Bruce’s uncanny skill he had pinned his highest hopes of freeing this world from its enemy. Strangling, choking, muscles aching from the strain of long flight, he reeled on in the wake of the flying outlaws. The end of the ordeal came without warn- ing. One moment he was flying blindly through the updrafts and the smoke, the next he found himself floating in clear still air over what seemed a great lip of rock. Winged men below gestured him down and he dropped slowly on aching wings and let his feet touch the rock gingerly. Elje coughed in his arms as he shifted weight from wings to feet. Electrified, he looked down, forgetting everything else in this new surprise. He had been certain she was dead or dying. She opened her eyes, looked at him blindly, and let the lashes flutter down again. But at least she was still alive. The men of her band closed around them then and one of them took Elje from his arms. Kern looked around curiously as he followed Elje’s bearer across the rock. A cavern lifted its high arched entrance be- fore them, black rock without and within, and the lip of rock thrust out before it, black too. Above the platform, which must have been two hundred feet across, the air was still and no poisonous vapors swirled, but they still rose all around the edges of the rock and leaned together high above like a tent roof that blotted out the sky except for oc- casional rifts far overhead. It was like a painter’s concept of Hades, even to the winged men with the hard, violent faces swarming out to meet the newcomers. WAY OF THE GODS 31 The mutants were among them. Kern told them shortly of Bruce’s loss. He did not want to dwell on it, for it seemed a death-blow to the hopes of the others and perhaps to his own, too, if this world was ever to be peopled by any but automatons. None of the mutants spoke after he had told them. The loss was a stunning one and Byrna’s sad, small face grew sadder and very pale, while Kua’s great blue eye filled with tears as she turned away. Sam Brewster muttered something under his breath and for an instant Kern saw the veiling secondary lids twitch across his eyes, as they always twitched when Sam was angry, in involun- tary preparation to draw back. “Sam!” Kern said sharply. Sam grimaced and turned away too, closing the secondary lids again. Inside the cavern, on a straw mattress un- der a stretched crimson tent, Elje was lying. A fire burned in a crude hood of rocks, its heat cupped in the red tent and reflected back again upon the bed. Someone was holding a bowl of steaming liquid to her lips as Kern came up. Kern watched her drain it slowly. When she lay back upon the cushions her eyes re- mained open and she looked around the circle of watching men with understanding dawning in her face. Color came back into it after awhile, and then she coughed again and sat up. “All right,” she said. “I’m better. What happened?” Kern told her. “Gerd?” she asked when he had finished. The men looked at one another inquiringly. A growl of dissent went through the cavern. No one had seen him. Someone rose on heavy wings and flapped out under the dome to search the platform outside. Gerd was not to be found. Elje’s face darkened. “We could afford to lose twenty men better than Gerd,” she said. “You say he was last behind you, Kern? Didn’t you hear any fighting as you came in?” Kern shook his head. “I couldn’t tell. I thought he was following me. The last I saw was Bruce and his carriers going down.” LJE bit her lip. “I’m sorry. We’ll miss IB 1-1 him. He was one of the bravest and most loyal of us all. He’s been with us only a year, but I’d come to depend more on his judgment than — ” She broke off. “Well, it can’t be helped. I suppose the light-cones got him. I wonder how they work.” She flexed her wings and tried her muscles out ex- perimentally. “The rays don’t seem to leave any after-effects. I suppose the fatalities are meant to come from the fall. Well, at least we’re lucky to have got away without any worse losses.” She got to her feet and shook her head tentatively, shook her wings out and made two or three uncertain beats that nearly lifted her off the floor. “I’m all right now.” She spread her hands to the blaze for it was damply chill in the cavern. “The Mountain’s angry,” she said. “It isn’t only our raid on the village that brought this army out against us. There was that storm, too. Kern, I think the Mountain knows you’re here and is trying to — to finish you. Have you any idea why?” Kern had, vague theories too inchoate to put into words. He shook his head instead. Elje laughed shortly. “Gerd wouldn’t trust you. If he were here, he’d say it was your fault the enemy had [Turn page] Kidneys Must Remove Excess Acids Help IS Miles of Kidney Tubes Flush Out Poisonous Waste If you have an excess of acids in your blood, your 15 miles of kidney tubes may be over- worked. These tiny filters and tubes are work- ing day and night to help Nature rid your system of excess acids and poisonous waste. When disorder of kidney function permits poisonous matter to remain in your blood, it may cause nagging backache, rheumatic pains, leg pains, loss of pep and energy, getting up nights, swelling, pufliness under the eyes, head-' aches and dizziness. Frequent or scanty pas- sages with smarting and burning sometimes shows there is something wrong with your kid- neys or bladder. Kidneys may need help the same as bowels, so ask your druggist for Doan’s Pills, a stimu- lant diuretic, used successfully by millions for over 50 years. Doan’s give happy relief and will help the 15 miles of kidney tubes flush out poi- sonous waste from your blood. Get Doan’s Pills. (Aiv.J 32 THRILLING WONDER STORIES gathered against us. He’d say to put you out and let you shift for yourselves, all of you. Is there any reason why I shouldn’t?” Her voice was suddenly hard. Disconcerted, Kern stared at her. “If you don’t know any — ” he began, but she broke in quickly. “You saved my life,” she conceded, “but we’re not a sentimental people. We can’t afford to be. If your presence here is a menace to the safety of us all, I can’t indulge my own gratitude by putting my men in danger. We must- each contribute to the strength of the group, or perish.” She shrugged. “You’re one extra fighting man, but what about your friends? Have they abili- ties to counterbalance their being earth- bound?” “I think they have. This much is sure, Elje. Unless we can prevail against the Mountain somehow, I believe we mutants at least are doomed. Our coming has upset the balance in your world and the Mountain knows it and intends to be rid of us. Well, we’ve lost our best man, Bruce Hallam. With his help we might have moved openly against the Moun- tain. Without him, we are greatly handi- capped.” Kern grimaced wryly. “Remember, Byrna and I have been in — call it in tune — with whatever it is that constitutes the Moun- tain. We know what we’re facing. But I don’t see any choice. It’s kill or be killed.” Behind him Kua’s gentle voice spoke. “Kern,” she said. He turned. Elje turned too, and from the corner of his eye, he saw her recoil involuntarily from the strangeness of Kua’s face. Kua’s wide blue eye, with depth upon depth shining in it, was staring at the rock wall above the fireplace. Her face had a look of concentration and withdrawal upon it, as if in all but body she were miles away. “Kern!” she said again. “There are men coming. Many men. I think they are the same ones who were following us outside.” She hesitated, glancing quickly at Elje’s face, her eye refocusing swiftly and then going back to the solid wall. “Kua, you can see them?” Kern demanded. “Do you mean it? Do you know you’re not looking through empty spaces now, Kua? You’re looking through rock!” The shock of realization on Kua’s face as she turned to him was answer enough. “I am!” she gasped. “It never — that hasn’t hap- pened before. Kern, it’s true that we’re changing. More than we know, until some- thing like this happens! But I can see them. I can see through the side of the mountain.” Again she turned to stare with her fathom- less gaze into distances no human eye ever pierced before, unaided. “They’re coming,” she said. “Through the mists, the way we came.” Swiftly Kern told Elje what she had said. Elje leaned forward abruptly. “Through the labyrinth?” she cried. “But they can’t! No one can come that way with- out a guide. They won’t get far before they’re overcome by the gasses.” “They have a guide,” Kua said in a strangely gentle voice, turning her gaze upon Elje. “Your friend. Gerd.” CHAPTER VI Betrayal H ORRIFIED silence filled the cave for a moment when Kern ceased his trans- lation. Then bedlam broke out. The en- circling men who had listened so far in si- lence burst into violent speech, some deriding Kua’s claim, some cursing Gerd. Elje si- lenced them with a sharp command. “I don’t believe you,” she said flatly. “Gerd wouldn’t betray us.” Kua shrugged. “You’d better prepare to meet them,” was all she said. For a moment Elje’s composure broke. “But I don’t — it can’t be Gerd! He wouldn’t! Kern, how can we meet them? They’re a hundred to our one! This was our last refuge. If they’re coming here, all is lost!” “They don’t know we’re expecting them,” Kern said. “That’s our only advantage. Make the most of it. Is there any room for am- bushes along the way?” Elje shook her head. “It’s almost a single- file path everywhere. And Gerd knows it better than even I do.” Her wings drooped. Listlessly she stared into the fire. “This is the end of all resistance to the Mountain,” she said. “This is the day it wins the fight. None of us can come out alive. Gerd! I can’t be- lieve it!” “The Mountain — you think?” Kern asked her. “It must be that. He passed all our tests — and we have rigid ones — but somehow he must have been able to bide the truth from us. He’s one of the Mountain’s slaves and. WAY OF THE GODS 33 when it commanded, he had to obey,” “That proves it!” Kern said suddenly. “Why should the Mountain move against you today of all days, unless it has something to fear? Gerd’s been with you a year, you say. The Mountain could have struck any hour of all that time. But it waited — for an emer- gency. And this is the emergency. If it’s afraid of us, then maybe we’re stronger than we know. Maybe—” From the mists outside the high, hollow notes of a horn broke into his speech. Kern spun around. Voices rose in angry babble from the platform. There was a beating of wings that made a noise almost deafening under the dome of the cavern, and the fire flared wildly, the red canvas of Elje’s tent flapped in the blast as the outlaws rushed to the defense of their last refuge. Elje, shout- ing commands, rose with them. Kua and Byrna turned white faces to Kern. Sam Brewster, behind them, looked a ques- tion. Rapidly Kern told them what had been said. “You’d better wait here,” he finished. “I don’t know what’s coming, but you’ll be safer inside.” Sam smiled a grim and dreadful smile. “I can help,” he reminded Kern. “I’ll come out- side.” Together they walked to the door of the cave. There was tumult beyond, but an or- derly tumult. Ranks of the winged outlaws were hurrying aloft to hang overhead in wait. Elje marshaled the rest with a hopeless sort of efficiency into reserves. Before she had finished, the horn sounded again, on a note of triumph, and the first of the enemy burst through the fog upon them. “You see,” Elje said to Kern, the hopeless- ness clear in her voice. “They wanted us out in the open where they could finish us quick- est. They even gave warning so we’d be wait- ing for them. That’s how sure they are of us.” From the front of the platform a wave of the outlaw fighters, knives flashing in their hands, rose to meet the newcomers. And from above a second wave dived on half-closed wings. For a few moments there was a bloody melee at the mouth of the aerial entry where the enemy poured through. “We can hold them five minutes,” Elje said. “After that, we’re through.” Now for the first time Kern saw how the winged men fought. The hawk-dive was the thing he thought of as he watched the fighters swoop on their prey, saw the flash of knives held at an expert angle for the slash that would cripple wing-muscles and send the victim hurtling helplessly to the ground. One sweeping cut across the chest-muscles was enough to put a man out of the fight. But if the intended prey saw his adversary coming, then it was a matter of soaring and swooping for position. And Kern saw many times a winged man, outmaneuvered by his enemy, rise on desperate wings and hurl him- self headlong into a death-like embrace, wings folded, so that the two fell like a single plummet, each striving frantically as they dropped twisting through the air for a blow that would cripple his adversary and break the wing-locked grip before the ground came too near. Now the gush of the enemy through the fog had become too great to stem as they poured by the score out of their narrow entry. The fight which had for a few minutes hovered at the mouth of the gap swept backward and upward until the great tent of vapor over the platform was filled with struggling men, and the air was blackened with the shadows of their wings. “They aren’t using those light-cones,” Kern said. “I’ve been waiting to dodge but none have come through yet. Why?” “I think because the Mountain sends out the light-beam that focuses through the wires,” Elje told him. “That’s the way their weapons usually work. And the Mountain can’t penetrate our mists and our rocks here. They’ve got to fight hand-to hand — but they can do it. There are too many of them. I — Kern, look! Is that Gerd?” A FLASH of red wings and red hair showed through the melee as some- one went by on whistling wings, too fast to see clearly. Kern caught one glimpse of a dark face and pale, fixed eyes — and thought there was grief in the eyes and the dis- torted face in that one glancing look he caught of it. Elje, beside him, shouted something across the platform and from its lip another wave of men rose in the hopeless defense of their stronghold. “We’ll go up with the last,” Elje said quiet- ly, glancing over her shoulder at the men who remained. “One more wave and then — the last. This way we’ll kill the greatest number before it’s over. Have you a knife, Kern?” As she spoke a man with a dripping knife soared past them over the edge of the plat- 34 THRILLING WONDER STORIES form, blood falling from a dozen wounds, face set -in blind, fanatic violence. Squarely be- fore them they saw him falter in midair, his gaze going past them to something in the shadow of the cave. Abruptly then he stiff- ened, his chin jerked up and his wings folded back as if they had been suddenly broken. He fell in a long slide, momentum-borne and inert, and crashed at Elje’s very feet. She had her knife at his throat in a swift, lithe crouch before she saw that no knife was necessary. Bewildered, she looked up at Kern. He stooped and took the wet blade from the man’s hand, wiped it on his leather jerkin. “Don’t look back, Elje,” he warned her harshly. “Sam? Sam!” “It’s all right, Kern.” Sam Brewster’s voice had a dreadful sort of amusement in it. “I’m not — looking.” Elje stared, speechless, into Kern’s face as the other mutant sauntered up to join them in the shelter of a heap of rock at the edge of the platform. Sam’s smile was thin and cold. The secondary lids veiled his eyes, but a gleam in their depths glittered even through the film and Kern looked hastily away. “What — what is it?” Elje faltered. “What killed this man?” “I did.” Sam was grinning without mirth. “Like this.” He turned away, face lifted, scanning the turmoil overhead where men dived and soared on blood-dappled wings, clasped one another in deathly embraces and hurtled earthward with knives flashing between them. At the edge of the platform, only a dozen feet overhead, such a pair writhed in gasping, murderous combat. As they watched, one man freed his knife-hand and in the same motion drove the blade hilt-deep into the other’s chest! The killer’s wings spread and stiffened in anticipation of what was to come, as his victim clutched convulsively at his shoulders in a last effort to save himself. For an instant one man’s wings supported them both. Then the dying man’s body went limp. Wings flaccid, he fell away from the blade and went hurtling downward through the mists, twisting and turning over while blood pumped from his chest. The killer paused for a moment in midair, breathing in deep gasps and looking for an- other adversary. His glancing eyes crossed Sam Brewster’s. For an instant he hung there, panting for breath, gaze locked with Sam’s. The knife dropped from his loosened fin- gers. Eyes still wide, he heeled over in the air stiffly. His wings broke backward and he fell after the man he had just killed. They vanished almost together into the fog below. Sam laughed grimly. When he turned the secondary lids were closed again over his eyes. “I can kill anyone who catches my eyes, when they’re open,” he said. Elje did not understand the words, but his gesture was enough. She caught her breath softly and looked away in sheer instinctive revulsion from that deathly gaze. “Elje, we’ve got to do something,” Kern said. “Now, while we can. We’ve got Sam. Kua and Byrna have their own powers, too. There’s no use waiting here to be killed. If only we could get away.” “Where?” Elje asked somberly. “The Mountain could find us wherever we went.” “We could go to the Mountain.” Kern’s voice was more confident than he felt. “If it’s so anxious to see us dead, then it must be afraid of us. Anyhow, that’s our only hope. Is there any way out except the way we came here?” Elje gestured aloft. “Only up. And you can see how thick the vapors are.” Kern glanced around the platform. There were perhaps fifty men remaining on their feet, waiting to be thrown into the last wave of the defense. He looked toward the cave- mouth and beckoned. Kua and Byrna hurried across the platform toward him, their faces pale and anxious. “Kua,” he said. “A little while ago you found you could look through walls. Look up. Do you think you could tell which of those vapors up there are poisonous and which aren’t?” Kua’s face lifted: her single eye narrowed. For a long moment no one spoke. “No, I’m not sure,” she said. “I can see a long way. through to the clear air. I can see that some of the fog flows in definite patterns, much thicker than the rest. But what’s poi- son and what isn’t — no one could tell that by looking, Kern.” “Is there a path through the places where the fog’s thin?” “Yes.” “We’ll have to take a chance on it, then. Maybe if it’s thin enough to breathe, we can get through.” 35 WAY OF THE GODS R APIDLY he told Elje what he hoped. “There are men enough left here to give us a chance if we fight our way. Sam and Kua are worth enough to be carried. I’ve never fought in the air and I wouldn’t be much help, so I’ll carry Byrna. It’s worth trying. Elje. Better than waiting here to be killed.” “Yes.” Elje’s voice was hopeless. “Better to die that way than this. All right, Kern, we’ll go.” She turned and shouted commands to the last men around her. A few minutes later the remnant of the rebel band went soaring into the air. The platform fell away below. It was like plunging into a maelstrom of shouts and cries, groans, gasps for breath, the deafening beat of many wings. Blood rained about them, knives flashed and fell, bodies hurtled past toward the ground. With Byrna’s light weight in his arms, Kern beat heavily upward. Con- fidence had suddenly begun to glow in him, against all reason. They would make it. He was irrationally sure of that. And they did. But not all of them. Sam Brewster was the one who fell. Almost at the last, when their depleted band had reached nearly the dome of the vaporous tent, a flung knife transfixed one of Sam’s bearers between the wings. He screamed, arched backward, and fell. Someone beside him dived too late for the reeling basket- seat in which Sam rode. The mutant pitched forward into space and dropped without a cry. It would have been suicide to dive back into that maelstrom of death in an effort to catch him. Sick at heart, Kern saw him fall twisting toward the ground. He saw, too, how man after man of the swarm around him stiffened and dropped after Sam on limp wings as the mutant’s lethal gaze took his own escort of dead men around him to his death. Then they plunged into the choking mists overhead, and no one had time to think of anything but his own breathing, his own urgent need to follow exactly in the wing- path of Kua’s bearers as she guided them through the fog. * * * * * Like a gigantic thunderhead the Mountain lifted its clear, pale bulk into the zenith. The mind quailed from the very thought of such height; it seemed to lean forward over the fliers and hover for a monumental collapses that would crush the world. When they drew' close, Byrna shuddered in Kern’s arms and turned like a child to clasp his neck and hide her face on his shoulder. “I can feel it,” she said in a muffled voice. “It’s watching. It’s trying to — to get into my mind. Don’t think, Kern. Don’t let it reach you!” Kern was briefly aware of a hot, coiling ribbon of hatred that moved through his brain and was gone as his mind slammed its gates of thought against the intruder. It was not easy to force his wings to carry them onward when his whole mind rebelled against draw- ing any nearer to the Mountain. He saw re- vulsion on the faces around him too, and caught uneasy glances cast sideward at his face. Their pace had perceptibly slowed. “I don’t like it either, Elje,” he said to the winged girl across the sw'imming void that flowed past far below. “But we’ve got to do it. What choice have we, except to be killed? They may be following us from the cave al- ready. Our only hope’s to reach the Moun- tain where we viay do a little damage be- fore — ” He did not finish. There was no need to finish. Now' they were so near the wall of opal- escence rising like the end of the world before them that Kern could see their own reflec- tions floating distorted high up on the face of the cliff. “Is it glass?” he asked. “No one knows.” Elje controlled a shiver. “No one who came close enough to find out ever returned. It may be just a — a solid mass. I don’t — ” She had glanced across her shoul- der to answer him. Now her gaze went fur- ther. “They’re following,” she said in a dull voice. “If it is solid, we’re trapped.” Kern looked back. In a dark mass like a low, level cloud on the horizon, the winged ranks of the enemy moved in their wake. Kua suddenly pointed. “Look ahead,” she said. “Up there on the cliff, to the left — is it a cave? I — why, it’s opening wider!” Everyone looked eagerly. There was a mo- ment’s silence. The Mountain too seemed to wait and listen. But Kern saw no change in the face of the cliff. Unbroken, unshadowed, opalescent, it lifted before them. Wind sighed past them toward the cliff, ruffling their wings. The sigh grew stronger — was a rising sough of sound— a sough that soared to an ear-stunning, shriek Headlong 36 THRILLING WONDER STORIES they whirled toward the Mountain, helpless, drawn upon that sudden irresistible wind. Kern clutched Byma tighter and fought his wrenched wings as the cliff rose up in his face, like a solid cloud. Dimly he could make out the shape of the opening at the same moment it engulfed him. Stunned with surprise, he went tumbling into the cliffside on that sucking wind, half -blind- ed by the opalescent mist which filled the tunnel. It was like spinning through a solid, for the impalpable stuff they flew through was indistinguishable to the eye from the stuff of the Mountain itself. Light dimmed behind them as they were drawn helpless in tumbling flight deeper and deeper into the heart of the cloud — the Moun- tain — there was no term for what it was they sped through. The wind that bore them along slowed. The deafening noise of it fell and was a sigh, a whisper — silence. For an instant they hung in opalescent nothingness, gasping for breath. Then Kua’s voice sounded sweetly in the hush. “Look back — look back! I can see the way we came. I can see it closing. Like water flowing together. No, like running sand.” Kern ceased to hear her. For suddenly he was aware of an almost imperceptible thick- ening in the mist around him. Something not seen, but felt A closing and a supporting, so that the weight of his body and Byrna’s no longer hung wholly upon his wings. A solidi- fying in the very air. He could not move. CHAPTER VII Combat ELENTLESSLY the Mountain which had opened to receive them had closed again, gently and solidly. The little group of captives hung frozen in the very postures of flight spread-winged, hair still blowing in a wind which no longer moved past them. They were frozen as if in a moment of eternal Now, as if time had ceased to move and their own motions had ceased with it. And then before them in the opalescent cloud of the Mountain a thin coil of light be- gan to glow. Swiftly it grew clearer. And Kern looked with the eyes of the body upon that which he had seen before with the eyes of the mhal He felt the malevolence beat out at them be- fore the fire itself came wholly into focus, strong hatred, curiously impersonal. It was the hatred of a Mountain, a cloud, not a human hatred. The lazy, coiling ribbon moved through the solid fog, the foggy solid glass, somewhere ahead of the captives. It was impossible to gauge distances here, but the thing was close enough to see in every detail. Its slowly writhing coil that drew in and out of its own folds with a leisurely, never-ending motion. Its burning color that was hot to the eye and hot to the perceptive mind with the heat of its consuming hatred. Something lay within the coils. It was draw- ing its ribbon -folds caressingly about that something. They could not yet see what For an instant or two the great, slow, burn- ing thing moved in its long folds before them, blind and impersonal and hating. But then came a new change. Then it looked at them. Spots of luminous darkness began to swim slowly through the coils. They came and went Whenever a coil moved itself to face the captives in the solid glass, eye-spots swam upon that coil, flickering out again as the fiery curve moved on. It watched. It waited and hated and was silent That which lay within it, bathed in the caressing coils, began to move. The coils al- tered their pattern to leave what they sup- ported visible. And Kern felt a shock of emptiness within him that made the vision blur for a moment. When he looked again it was unmistakable and clear before him. Bruce Hallam, lying quietly on the sup- porting coils, his eyes open and regarding them as impersonally as the eyes that came and went upon the ribbons of fire. “This — ” Bruce Hallam said clearly “ — is my world.” The words came to them as if through emp- ty air, with a cold clarity that allowed of no mistake. For it was not wholly Bruce Hallam who spoke. It was a voice of fire too. Hatred and blinding light coiled through the words as it coiled through the fog before their eyes. Two beings spoke with the single voice, but two beings who were now one. Sudden memory flashed through Kern’s mind. He saw the long-ago, far-away room again, where the little group of mutants had stepped from one universe to another. He saw Bruce opening his steel door upon a WAY OF THE GODS 37 waiting world, searching it with his eyes, closing the door again. He understood now. Bruce had known. Somehow, he had known in the single glance which world held kinship for him and which did not. Bruce, with his mutant’s uncanny skill at creating out of any means at hand the more- than-machinery which would do his bidding, had recognized this world. Kern remembered with shock his own blindness when Elje had described to him what the Mountain’s slaves, under its guidance, could do with any materi- al at hand — how, when they still suspected Kern of complicity with the enemy, they had cleared his room of any matter out of which he might build a weapon to destroy them. Yes, this world was Bruce Hallam’s — not Kern’s after all. A -winged -world, yes, but a world under dominance. And Bruce’s was the dominant realm. All this flashed through his mind with the swiftness of a single thought, -while Bruce’s coldly burning words still sounded in their ears. He was remembering how impersonal Bruce had always been, how remote from human feeling, when he heard the cold voice again. “There is no place in my world for you,” Bruc told them calmly. “There is room only for the winged people — and Me. You come from malleable flesh, a malleable heritage. I can not trust you here. My coming into the •world made a cyclone here in the Mountain, drawing out forces better left untouched. I was helpless then. I could not save — myself - — until I was out of your reach. The time has come to destroy the last remnants of those who defy me. And you mutants whose flesh I can not control must go with the rest.” He did not stir, but the coiling flame moved with sudden quickened speed, flowing toward them through the imprisoning glass which held the humans so inflexibly. Bruce, then, was only the voice of this dreadful duo. The ribbon of flame was the body. A long loop of it moved lazily forward, falling gently like a silk ribbon through air. After it the fiery length followed gracefully, weaving in and out of its own folds, and with- in the folds, always caressed by them stream- ing over and around his body, Bruce Hallam moved too, rigidly, supported on the coiling loops, not a muscle of his own limbs stirring. K ERN watched them come. He had no idea what would happen when the burning coils touched the first human, but he could feel the white heat of its malevolence flow before it. Helpless, voiceless in the grip of the unyielding glass, he strained fiercely for — for — he did not know what. Only to be free to fight even uselessly against the on- coming enemy. Sharply the thought in his mind broke in two. He had known this cleavage before, but the utter strangeness of it stunned him for a moment so that his thoughts went blank while something, something stirred incredibly through his body. The old feeling of change, of unutterable newness, of an unguessed sense opening with- in him like nothing man ever knew before. Three times he had known this feeling since he stepped into the winged world. Three times he had crushed it down, fearing and hating it for its threat of making him alien again, alien to the winged people he had hoped would be his own. But this time he did not fight. This time, in the violent, straining effort to break free, he broke instead some barrier which had until now held back the new thing, the some- thing which had burgeoned relentlessly with- in him ever since he came within the Moun- tain’s realm. The glass walls that held him like a pris- oner in ice grew dim and vanished. His com- panions pilloried in glass beside him wavered into darkness. He no longer felt the warmth of Byrna frozen in glass in his arms. Every- thing was dark — even the slow — coiling rib- bons that looped leisurely toward him through solid substance. And then out of that darkness came light. All about him came light. And it took a long moment for him to discover he was not seeing that light with eyes. He was seeing it — in- credibly, impossibly — with his whole body. He saw everything around him in one all- encompassing range. “This is the way the Mountain sees,” he knew with sudden certainty. How he knew it was not clear; it was a knowledge that came with the new vision. He and the Mountain, they shared a common faculty. Motion far away caught his fathomless at- tention and he was looking out through the clouded side of the Mountain and seeing, as if he stood before them, the flight of the on- coming winged men who had followed the fugitives from the eyrie. They were nearly here now, approaching the monstrous cliff as blindly as if they meant to dash themselves to death against it. With the same all-embracing sight, Kern 38 THRILLING WONDER STORIES was aware of the people frozen around him into the glass, and of the looping coils that flowed toward them, and of Bruce Hallam, rigid as an image of stone, moving with the moving ribbons. But they looked very different now. The people. He knew their faces, the familiar outlines of their bodies, but he could see through the bodies with his new vision. And the appalling thing he saw was not the structure of bone and muscle and nerve which a part of his mind expected there. These things were only pale shadows upon the — the other. The people were rings of flat, luminous color, disc upon disc of it, superimposed, overlapping, no two people with the same patterns or the same colors. And he knew that the muscular structure humans are aware of, the skeleton, the nerves, are only a part of what comprises them. Only a part — and not the part important to the Mountain. The Mountain ruled by other means. Every flying man approaching outside the cliff had one thing in common with his fel- lows. Each was made up of ring after ring of colors, brilliant arcs and half-moons lying one upon another and in continual delicate shifting motion. But in each, and moving slowly over the rings, a circle of luminous darkness swung. Darkness like the eyes which swam up to the surface of the coiling ribbons that embraced Bruce Hallam. An eye— the eye of the Mountain. That was the thing the Mountain used in them to transmit its commands, then. The point of contact in each man that made him a slave when the orders came. There was no such eye in any of the people imprisoned around Kern. He saw his own body with this new vision, rings and discs of color like the rest, and with no dark, circling spot that meant the Mountain owned him. The Mountan is a creature of glass, he told himself clearly. Its body is this opalescent stuff which is solid or gas as the Mountain wills. It can make tunnels and caverns like open mouths through it and close them again. And its brain, its motivating force, is the rib- bon of fire, endless, revolving upon itself in the center. It has many strange senses. One of them I share now. He thought: When we came here, we some- how brought on a cyclone of violent forces drawn from the Mountain itself. Because Bruce Hallam had an inhuman kinship with the entity which dwells here. But it was an entity so strong, so accustomed to mold the minds of its victims and use them like tools to create other tools, that we ourselves were reshaped without knowing it. This strange new sense began very early to take shape in me. Kua reacted too, and Byr- na. Sam? I don’t know. He’s gone. But as for me, I have changed. Something stirred mysteriously through his flesh, and without the need to look down, Kern’s horizon-circling vision told him that light had begun to glow in him — fire — long, rolling loops of fire that stretched with in- credible flexibility through the solid glass imprisoning him. T HE ribbon of fire upon which Bruce’s body rode paused in its motion, hesitated, almost drew back. Kern felt dimly its sur- prise and its strange, inhuman hatred. But only dimly, for his own mind was too stunned with this final revelation to let any other feeling through. Too malleable, he thought despairingly — flesh too malleable to hold its own form under the irresistible altering pull that was the Mountain. And now through the icy glass which held the humans rigid, two shapes of coiling flame turned lazily over and over — one shape supporting a human body and glowing incandescent with malevolence, the other still too amazed for emotion, but stretching its new limbs of fire with a sort of reluctant, voluptuous luxury as the endless ribbon rolled in convolutions of flame in and out of its own length. A strange, inhuman luxury, this, to stretch upon the firm, perme- able glass, moving through it as light might move, in a dimension of its own. Hatred like a blast of furnace-heat struck upon Kern’s new awareness with an impact that jolted him out of this bewildering mental fog. Hate and fear. He had felt that blast before, invisibly in the voids of thought, and terror had come with it so that he fled blindly to escape. But this time fear did not follow after the hate. This time he welcomed con- flict. “Now we’re equals — matched equals,” he told himself, and felt even in this moment of danger and surprise the utter difference of his own mind through which thoughts moved slowly and clearly, like his new limbs through the solidity of the glass. If he had ever owned a body of flesh and blood, it was his no longer. If his mind had ever dwelt there and shaped its thoughts to the contours of brain and skull, WAY OF THE GODS 39 they were shaped no longer. This was new, new, terrible and wonderful beyond human understanding. Slow exultation began to burn in him as he rolled the great coils of fire which were his body toward that which until now had dwelt here alone. Now the Mountain had a double mind — if the fiery ribbon was indeed the mind of the thing — but moving still through a sin- gle gigantic body of opalescent glass. And within that vast body, the doubled mind moved upon itself in suicidal combat. Hatred was a bath of flame that engulfed him as their farthest coiling loops touched — touched and engaged with sudden violence. But Kern was not afraid now, not repelled. With a surging lunge he tested the strength in that shape which was the twin of his own. The ribbons writhed and strained. Then they paused for a moment and drew back in mu- tual consent. And simultaneously, as if hurled by a single mind, lunged forward again. This time the fiery limbs entangled until their full endlessly revolving lengths were wholly engaged with one another and the two identical shapes of rolling fire strove furiously together in a single knot that boiled with ceaseless motion. Hatred burned and bubbled all around Kern’s awareness as he strove coil against coil with the enemy. But it did not touch him any more. He felt no fear. And when he be- gan to realize that he could not vanquish this being by strength alone, not even then did he feel fear. Emotion was gone from him. Coil by coil he tested the thing he strove with, and coil by coil he found it braced irresistibly against his greatest strength. He could not swerve it by a single loop. But it could not swerve him. Matched in strength as they were in shape, the two crea- tures of flame lay for a moment upon the clouded ice, limb straining against limb in a perilous balance that permitted of no motion. Then, very delicately, the awareness that had been Kern reached out with a sense he had not until this moment known he pos- sessed, and touched the frozen body of Bruce Hallam. For he knew now that he and this enemy were too perfectly matched for either to prevail, unless one or the other found a lever by which his adversary could be over- thrown. Was it Bruce? Gently, and then with in- creasing pressure, he tried that rigid, un- yielding body which had once been human. There was nothing — nothing. Not even the discs of overlapping color which the still- human exhibited to his new sight moved through Bruce’s limbs. He was solid, unmov- ing, a shape of nothingness, and no sense could touch him. No, Bruce was not the source through which strength might be drained from the enemy. What, then? Kern asked himself with pas- sionless consideration. And the answer came clearly and unhurried, as if it had waited only this query to reply. The winged men waiting outside the moun- tain — that was the answer. Almost outstripping the thought, his sight and his strange new senses leaped to the sur- face of the Mountain. There the slaves hung on stretched wings, tilting to the updrafts from below, circling and soaring and waiting in mindless obedience for the command that would release them from their mental thrall. Once he had seen them as winged humans fighting with fanatic violence. Now they were only shapes of overlapping discs, full of slowly turning motion, and in each the Eye of the Mountain swimming leisurely over the surface of the colors. The Eye, he thought. The Eye! IKE a new, unguessed arm his awareness shot out and plunged into the nearest spot of darkness which swam over the colored discs. Plunged in— groped for contact — and tapped a source of flame. Up through the arm the flame leaped, and into Kern’s body of matching flame. Almost imperceptibly he felt the straining coils of the enemy give beneath the pressure of his own. Another, and another and another of the flying shapes gave up its tiny source of fire, and Kern’s strength grew with each. The combat which had hung motionless in mutual violence now writhed suddenly into action again as the balance was destroyed. But the fury of the enemy seemed to double too as it felt itself bent backward upon its own fiery coils. What had been combat before the stasis turned into abrupt turmoil now. The two rib- bons of flame convulsed together, lashing and whipping into an incandescent fury of strug- gle. And Kern knew in a timeless moment or two that even this was not enough. He must find some last source of power to give him the victory. The arm with which he had robbed the fly- ing men of their Eyes groped, plunged deep- 40 er, seeking more power within them, amazingly, found it. For an instant Kern could not understand why strength in a full, deep tide flowed into him as the light began to fail in his enemy. And then he understood, and a surge of tri- umph for the first time glowed through his whole being. For in giving its strength to its slaves, that it might command them, the Enemy had opened a channel which ran both ways. And in draining the slaves, Kern found himself draining the Enemy itself — reaching back and back through each slave into the source from which that strength came. From a score, a hundred channels, the Mountain must have felt its own power drain away. Its power, but not its hate. Kern could feel the sheer, inhuman malevolence burning about him in great washes of flame as the strength of the coils against his grew steadily weaker. The fire sank down within it, dim- ming and fading as the creature bled its own power away — bled flame, and slowly, slowly died! The turning ribbons of fight no longer moved against Kern’s awareness. His limbs engulfed not a luminous involuted band, but a thin, pale hatred which fell apart as he drew his own body back. It fell apart into a tiny rain of droplets, each of them dancing with its own seed of hate. Twinkling, fading, and the hatred fading with them, until they were gone. Kern felt change all about him, in the sub- stance of the Mountain itself. A vast, im- ponderable shifting of the clouded glass, a falling apart of the atoms which composed it, as its soul of fire had fallen. The opalescent stuff was a fog — a mist — a thin, dissipating gas which no longer supported him. The cold of clear air struck terribly upon his fiery limbs as the Mountain dissolved from about him. He convulsed upon himself in a knot of flame that seemed to consume itself and to cease — to cease — ***** Everything was blank around him. Neither dark nor light, but void. He hung motionless upon nothing. He was no longer a shape of flame. He was no longer a shape of flesh. He was nothing, nowhere. This was infinity, where time was not. For milleniums, he thought, he drifted there upon oblivion. Milleniums, or moments! From far away a something began to be. He did not recognize it — he knew only that where nothingness had been, now there was a something. He heard a call. That was it, a call, a sound of incredible sweetness. A voice? Yes, it was a voice of sheer mel- ody, saying a name. He did not know the name. “Kern — Kern,” it cried. The syllable had no meaning to him, but the sweetness of the voice that shaped it gradually began to rouse him from his stupor. Over and over the syl- lable sounded, and then with a sudden blaze of awareness he knew it for what it was. “My name!” he thought with amazement. “My own name!” The mind came back into him, and he knew. Like Bruce Hallam, he had hung frozen and empty from the touch of the all-consuming fire which had been himself. Like Bruce, he had been emptier than death. “Kern, Kern, come back,” wailed the voice of impossible sweetness. He knew it now. Byrna’s voice, lovely as a siren’s magical song, summoning him back to the living. Slowly, slowly, he felt warmth return to him. Slowly he drew his mind together again, and then his body came back around him, and with infinite effort he lifted the eyelids that shut out the world. He lay on a hillside in the full warm tide of the sunlight which poured down from an empty sky. There was no Mountain any more. No vertiginous thunderhead of glass tower- ing up the zenith, casting its pale shadow across the world. Someone bent over him, holding her wings to shut the sun’s glare from his eyes. Her wings glistened. Tentatively he flexed his own. And then strength came back with a magical rush to him, and he sat up with a strong beat of his pinions that almost lifted him from the ground. All around him smiling faces watched in the shadow of their wings. And he knew that he was free at last, and the winged world was free. And he was no longer alien. THRILLING WONDER STORIES And Next Issue’s Headliners: THE BOOMERANG CIRCUIT, a Kim Rendell Novel by Murray Leinster — THE BIG NIGHT, an Interplanetary Novelet by Hudson Hastings, and THE NAMELESS SOMETHING, a Bud Gregory Novelet bv William Fitzgerald SKIT-TREE PLANET By MURRAY LEBNSTER Against an intangible distant enemy, Wentworth and Haynes battle to save their spaceship — when defeat means exile! Wentworth sent the scout flier zooming in the direction of the mysterious city T HE COMMUNICATOR-phone set up a clamor when the sky was just begin- ning to gray in what, on this as yet unnamed planet, they called the east because the local sun rose there. The call-wave had turned on the set. Bob Wentworth kicked off his blankets and stumbled from his bunk in the atmosphere-flier, and went sleepily forward to answer. He pushed the answer- stud. “Hello, what’s the trouble?” he said weari- ly. “Talk louder, there’s some static. Oh — No, there’s no trouble. Why should there be? The devil I’m late reporting! Haynes and I obeyed orders and tried to find the end of a confounded skit-tree plantation. We chased our tails all day long, but we made so much westing that we gained a couple of hours light. So it isn’t sunrise yet, where we are.” Wentworth yawned as he listened. 41 42 THRILLING WONDER STORIES “Oh, we set down the flier on a sort of dam and went to sleep,” he answered. “No, noth- ing happened. We’re used to feeling creepy. We thrive on it. Haynes says he’s going to do a sculpture group of a skit-tree planter which will be just an eye peeking around a tree-trunk. No! Hang it, no! “We photographed a couple of hundred thousand square miles of skit-trees growing in neat rows, and we photographed dams, and canals, and a whole irrigation system, but not a sign of a living creature. No cities, no houses, no ruins, no nothing. I’ve got a theory, McRae, about what happened to the skit-tree planters.” He yawned again. “Yeah. I think they built up a magnificent civilization and then found a snark. Snark! Snark. Yes. And the snark was a boojum.” He paused. “So they silently faded away.” He grinned at the profanity that came out of the communicator-speaker. Then — back at the irreverently nicknamed Galloping Cow which was the base ship of the Extra-Solar - ian Research Institute expedition to this star- cluster— McRae cut off. Wentworth stretched, and looked out of the atmosphere -flier’s windows. He absently noticed that the static on the communication - set kept up, which was rather odd on a FM receiver. But before the fact could have any meaning, he saw something in motion in the pale gray light of dawn. He squinted. Then he caught his breath. He stood frozen until the moving object vanished. It moved, somehow, as if it carried something. But it was bigger than the Gal- loping Cow! Only after it vanished did he breathe again, and then he licked his lips and blinked. Haynes’ voice came sleepily from the bunk-space of the flier. “What’s from the Galloping Cow? Plan- ning to push off for Earth?” Wentworth took a deep breath and stared where the moving thing had gone out of sight. “No,” he said then, very quietly. “McRae was worred because we hadn’t reported. It’s two hours after sunrise back where the ship is.” He swallowed. “Want to get up now?” “I could do with coffee,” said Haynes, “pending a start for home.” W ENTWORTH heard him drop his feet to the floor. Bob Wentworth pinched himself and winced, and swallowed again, and then twisted the opener of a beverage can labeled Coffee, and it began to make bubbling noises. He put it aside to heat and brew itself, and pulled out two breakfast- rations. He put them in the readier. Finally he stared again out the flier’s window. The light outside grew stronger. To the north— if where the sun rose was east — a low but steep range of mountains began just beyond the spot where the flier had landed for the night. It had settled down on a patently artificial embankment of earth, some fifty feet high, that ran out toward the skit- tree sea from one of the lower mountain spurs. The moving thing had gone into those mountains, as if it carried something'. But it was bigger. Haynes came forward, yawning. “I feel as if this were going to be a good day,” he said, and yawned again. “I wish I had some clay to mess with. I might even do a portrait bust of you, Wentworth, lacking a prettier model.” “Keep an eye out the window,” said Went- worth. Meanwhile you might set the table.” He went back to his bunk and dressed quickly. His expression was blank and in- credulous. Once more he pinched himself. Yes, he was awake. He went back to where steaming coffee and the breakfast-platters waited on the board normally used for navi- gation. The communication-set still emitted static, cui’iously steady, scratchy noise that should not have come in on a frequency-modula- tion set at all. It should not have come in especially on a planet which had plainly once been inhabited, but whose every inhabitant and every artifact had vanished utterly. Habitation was so evident, and seemed to have been so recent, that most of the mem- bers of the expedition felt a creepy sensation as if eyes were watching them all the time. But that was absurd, of course. Haynes ate his chilled fruit. The readier had thawed the frozen fruit, and not only thawed but cooked the rest of breakfast. Wentworth drank a preliminary cup of coffee. “I’ve just had an unsettling experience, Haynes,” he said carefully. “Do I look un- usually cracked, to you?” “Not for you,” said Haynes. “Not even for any man who not only isn’t married but isn’t even engaged. I attribute my splendid men- tal health to the fact that I’m going to get SKIT-TREE PLANET married as soon as we get back to Earth. Have I mentioned it before?” Wentworth ignored the question. “Something’s turned up — with a reason back of it.” he said in a queer tone. “Check me on this. We found the first skit-trees on Cetis Alpha Three. They grew in neat rows that stretched out for miles and miles. They had patently been planted by somebody who knew what he was doing, and why. “We also found dams, and canals, and a complete irrigation system. We found places where ground had been terraced and graded, and where various trees and plants grew in what looked like a cockeyed form of decora- tive planting. “Those clearings could have been sites for cities, only there were no houses or ruins, or any sign that anything had ever been built there. We hunted that planet with a fine- toothed comb, and we’d every reason to believe it had recently been inhabited by a highly civilized race. But we never found so much as a chipped rock or a brick or any shaped piece of metal or stone to prove it. “We found out a civilization had existed, and it had vanished, and when it vanished it took away everything it had worked with, except that it didn’t tear up its plantings or' put back the dirt it had moved. Right?” “Put dispassionately, you sound like you’re crazy,” said Haynes cheerfully. “But you’re recounting facts. Okay so far.’’ “McRae tore his hair because he couldn’t take back anything but photographs,” Went- worth went on. “Oh, you did a very fine sculpture of a skit-tree fruit, but we froze some real ones for samples, anyhow. We went on to another solar system. And on a planet there, we found skit-trees planted in neat rows reaching for miles and miles, and dams, and canals, and cleared places — and nothing else. McRae frothed at the mouth with frustration. Some non-human race had space-travel. Eh?” Haynes took a cup of coffee. “The inference,” he agreed, “was made unanimously by all the personnel of the Galloping Cow.” ERVOUSLY Wentworth glanced out the flier window. “We kept on going. On nine planets in seven solar systems, we found skit-tree plantations with rows up to six and seven hundred miles long. — following great-circle courses, by the way — and dams and irrigation 48 systems. Whoever planted those skit-trees had space-travel on an interstellar scale, be- cause the two farthest of the planets were two hundred light-years apart. But we’ve never found a single artifact of the race that planted the skit-trees.” “True,” said Haynes. “Too true! If we’d loaded up the ship with souvenirs of the first non-human civilized race ever to be discov- ered, we’d have headed for home and I’d be a married man now.” “Listen!” Wentworth said painfully, “Could it be that we never found any artifacts be- cause there weren’t any? Could it be that a creature — a monstrous creature — could have developed instincts that led it to make dams and canals like beavers do, and plantings like some kind of ants do, only with the sort of geometric precision that is characteristic of a spider’s web? Could we have misread mere specialized instinct as intelligence?” Haynes blinked. “No,” he said. “There’s seven solar sys- tems, two hundred light-years apart, and a specific species, obviously originating on only one planet, spread out over two hundred light-years. Not unless your animal could do space-travel and carry skit-tree seeds with him. What gave you that idea?” “I saw something,” said Wentworth. He took another deep breath. “I’m not going to tell you what it was like, I don’t really be- lieve it myself. And I am scared green! But I wanted to clear that away before I men- tioned— this. Listen!” He waved his hand at the communicator- set. Static came out of its speaker in a clack- ing, monotonous, but continuous turned- down din. Haynes listened. “What the devil? We shouldn’t get that kind of stuff on a frequency-modulation set!” “We shouldn’t. Something’s making it. Maybe what I saw was — domesticated. In any case I’m going to go out and look for tracks at the place where I saw it moving.” “You? Not me? What’s the matter with both of us?” Wentworth shook his head. “I’ll take a flame-pistol, though running- shoes would be more appropriate. You can hover overhead, if you like. But don’t try to be heroic, Haynes.” Haynes whistled. “How about air reconnaisance first?” he demanded. “We can look for tracks with a 44 THRILLING WONDER STORIES telescope. If we see a jabberwock or some- thing on that order, we can skip for the blue. If we don’t find anything from the air, all right. But a preliminary scout from aloft would be wiser.” “That might be sensible,” Wentworth ad- mitted. “But the cussed thing scared me so that I’ve got to face it sooner or later. All right. Clear away this stuff and I’ll take the ship up.” While Haynes slid the cups and platters into the refuse-disposal unit, he seated him- self in the pilot’s seat, turned off the watch- dog circuit that would have waked them if anything living had come within a hundred yards of the flier during the nighttime. Then he gave the jets a warming-up flow of fuel. Thirty seconds later, the flier lifted smoothly and leveled off to hover at four hundred feet. Wentworth took bearings on their landing- place. There were no other landmarks that would serve as guides, for keeping the flier stationary. The skit-trees began where the ground grew fairly level, and they went on beyond the horizon. They were clumps of thin and brittle stalks which rose straight up for eighty feet and then branched out and bore copious quantities of a fruit for which no human being oould imagine any possible use. Each clump of trees was a geometrically perfect circle sixty feet in diameter. There were always just ninety-two feet between clumps. They reached out in rows far beyond the limit of vision. Only the day before, the flier had covered fifteen hundred miles of westing without coming to the end of this particular planting. W ITH THE flier hovering, Wentworth used a high -power telescope to search below. He hunted for long, long min- utes, examining minutely every square foot of half a dozen between-clump aisles with- out result. There was no sign of the passage of any creature, much less of the apparition he would much rather not believe in. “I think I’m going to have to go down and hunt on foot,” he said reluctantly. “Maybe there wasn’t anything. Maybe I’m crazy.” Haynes spoke in mild tones. “Speaking of craziness, is or isn’t that city yonder a delusion?” he asked. He pointed, and Wentworth jerked about. Many, many miles away, something reared upward beyond the horizon. It was indubit- ablv a city, and they had searched nine planets over without finding a single scrap of chipped stone to prove the reality of the skit-tree planters. Wentworth could see separate pinnacles and what looked like skyways connecting them far above-ground. He snapped his cam- era to his binoculars and focussed them, and of course, the camera with them. He saw architectural details of bewildering com- plexity. He snapped the shutter of his camera. “That gets top priority,” said Wentworth. “There’s no doubt about this!” The thing he had seen before sunrise was so completely incredible that it was easier to question his vision than to believe in it. He flung over the jet-controls so that the drive- jets took the fuel from the supporting ones. The flier went roaring toward the far-away city. “Take over,” he told Haynes. “I’m going to call McRae back. He’ll break down and cry with joy.” He pushed the call-button. Seconds later a voice came out of the communicator, muffled and made indistinct by the roar of the jets. Wentworth reported. He turned a tiny tele- vision scanner on the huge, lacy construction rising from a site still beyond the horizon. McRae’s shout of satisfaction was louder than the jets. He bellowed and cut off in- stantly. “The Galloping Cow is shoving off,” said Wentworth. “McRae’s giving this position and telling all mapping-parties to make for it. And he’ll climb out of atmosphere to get here fast. He wants to see that city.” The flier wabbled, as Haynes’ hands on the controls wabbled. “What city?” he asked in an odd voice. Wentworth stared unbelievingly. There was nothing in sight but the lunatic rows of skit-trees, stretching out with absolutely me- chanical exactitude to the limit of vision on the right, on the left, ahead, and behind to the very base of the mountains. There simply wasn’t any city. Wentworth gaped. “Pull that film out of the camera. Take a look at it. Were we seeing things?” Haynes pulled out the already-developed film. The city showed plainly. It had gone on television to the Galloping Cow, too. It had not been an illusion. Wentworth pushed the call-button again as the flier went on to- ward a vanished destination. After a mom- ent he swore. “McRae lost no time. He’s out of air al- SKIT-TREE PLANET 45 ready, and our set won’t reach him. Where’d that city go?” He set the supersonic collision -alarm in action. The radar. They revealed nothing. The city no longer existed. They searched incredulously for twenty minutes, at four hundred miles an hour. The radar picked up nothing. The collision-alarm picked up no echoes. “It was here!” growled Wentworth. “We’ll go back and start over.” He sent the flier hurtling back toward the hills and the embankment where it had rested during the night. The communicator rasped a sudden furious burst of static. Wentworth, for no reason whatever, jerked his eyes behind. The city was there again. Haynes photographed it feverishly as the flier banked and whirled back toward it. For a full minute it was in plain view, and the static was loud. Then the static cut off. Simultaneously, the city vanished once more. GAIN a crazy circling. But the utterly monotonous landscape 'below showed no sign of a city-site, and it was impossible to be sure that the flier actually quartered the ground below, or whether it circled over the same spot again and again, or what. “If McRae turns up in the Galloping Cow,” said Haynes, “and doesn’t find a blamed thing, maybe he’ll think we've all gone crazy and had better go home. And then — ” “Then you’ll get married!” Wentworth finished savagely. “Skip it! I’ve got an idea! Back to the mountains once more.” The flier whirled yet again and sped back toward its night’s resting-place. Ten miles from it, and five thousand feet up, the static became still again. Wentworth kicked a smoke-bomb release and whirled the flier about so sharply that his head snapped forward from the sudden centrifugal force. There was the city. The flier roared straight for it. Static rattled out of the communicator. One minute. Two. He kicked the smoke-bomb release again. Already the first bomb had hit ground and made a second smoke-signal. Ten miles on, he dropped a third. The smoke-signals would burn for an hour, and give him a perfect line on the vanishing city. This time it did not vanish. It grew larger and larger, and details appeared, and more details. It was a unit — a design of infinite complex- ity, perfectly integrated. Story upon story, with far-flung skyways connecting its turrets, it was a vision of completely alien beauty. It rose ten thousand feet from the skit-trees about its base. Its base was two miles square. “They build high,” said Wentworth grimly, “so they won’t use any extra ground they could plant their confounded skit-trees on, I’m going to land short of it, Haynes.” The vertical jets took over smoothly as he cut the drive. The flier slowed, and two blasts forward stopped it dead, and then it de- scended smoothly. Wentworth had checked not more than a hundred yards from the out- ermost tower. It appeared to be made of completely seamless metal, incised with in- tricate decorative designs. Which was in- credible. But the most impossible thing of all was that there was no movement anywhere. No stirring. No shifting. Not even furtive twinklings as of eyes peering from the strangely-shaped window openings. And when the flier landed gently between two circular clumps of skit- trees and Wentworth cut off the jets and turned off even the com- municator — then there was silence. The silence was absolute. Two miles high, near them towered a city which could house millions of people. And it was utterly with- out noise and utterly without motion in any part. “And the prince went into the castle,” said Wentworth savagely. “He kissed the Sleep- ing Beauty on the lips, and she opened her eyes with a glad little cry, and they were married- and lived happily ever after. Com- ing, Haynes?” “Sure thing, said Haynes. “But I don’t kiss anybody. I”m engaged!” Wentworth got out of the flier. Never yet had they found a single dangerous animal on any of the nine planets on which skit-trees grew, with the possible exception of what- ever it was he had seen that morning. Who- ever planted skit-trees had wiped out dan- gerous fauna. That had been one of the few seeming certainties. But all the same, Went- worth put a flame-pistol in his belt before he ventured into the city. He stopped short. There was a flickering. The city was blotted out. A blank metal wall stood before him. It reared all around the flier and the men in it. Between them and the city. Shining, seamless, gleaming metal, cir- cular and a hundred feet high. It neatly en- closed a space two hundred yards across, 48 THRILLING WONDER STORIES and hence some clumps of skit-trees with the men, “Now, where the devil did that come from?” asked Wentworth. Abruptly everything went black. There was darkness. Absolute, opaque. F OR PERHAPS two seconds it was un- broken. Then Haynes, still in the flier, pushed the button that turned on the emer- gency landing-lights. Twin beams of some hundreds of thousands candlepower lashed out, and recoiled from polished metal, and spread around and were reflected and re- reflected. There was a metal roof atop the circular metal wall. Men and flier and clumps of skit-trees were sealed up in a monstrous metal cylinder. Wentworth cried furiously: “It isn’t so! It simply can’t be so!” He marched angrily to the nearest of the metal walls. Twin shadows of his figure were cast on before him by the landing-light beams. Weird reflections of the shadows and the lights — distorted crazily by the polished surface — appeared on every hand. He reached the metal wall. He pulled out his flame-pistol and tapped at it. The wall was solid. He backed off five paces and sent a flame-pistol beam at it. The flame splashed from the metal in a coruscating shower. But nothing happened. Absolutely nothing. When he turned off the pistol the metal was un- marred. It was not even red-hot. “The sleeping beauty woke up, Went- worth,” Haynes said. “What’s the matter?” He saw Wentworth gazing with stupefac- tion at a place where the metal cylinder touched ground. There was the beginning of a circular clump of skit-trees. And he saw a stalk at a slight angle. It came out of the metal wall. The skit-trees were in the wall. They came out of it. He saw another that went into it. He went back to the flier and climbed in. He turned the communicator up to maximum power. The racket that came out of it was deafening. He punched the call-button. Again and again and again. Nothing hap- pened. He turned the set off. The dead still- ness which followed was daunting. “Well?” said Haynes. “It’s impossible,” said Wentworth,” but I can explain everything. That wall isn’t real.” “Then we ram through it?” “We’d kill ourselves!” Wentworth told him, exasperated. “It’s solid!” “Not real, but solid?” asked Haynes. “A bit unusual, that. When I get back to Earth and am a happily married man, I’ll try to have a more plausible story than that to tell my wife if I ever come home late, not that I ever will.” Wentworth looked at him. And Haynes grinned. But there was sweat on his face, Wentworth grunted. “I’m scared too, but I don’t make bad jokes to cover up,” he said sourly. “This can be licked. It’s got to be!” “What is it?” “How do I know?” demanded Wentworth. “It makes sense, though. A city that vanishes and re-appears, apparently without anybody in it. That doesn’t happen. This can — this tank we’re in. There wasn’t any machinery around to put up a wall like this. “The top wasn’t heaved into place either. It wasn’t lowered down to seal us in. It didn’t slide into position. One instant it wasn’t there, and the next instant it was. Like something that — hm— had materialized out of nowhere. Maybe that’s it! And the city was the same sort of trick! Maybe that’s the secret of this whole civilization we’re trying to trace!” His voice echoed weirdly against the metal ceiling on every hand. “What’s the secret?” “Materializing things! Making a — synthetic sort of matter! Making — well — force-fields that look and act like substance! Of course! If you can generate a building, why build one? We can make a magnetic field with a coil of wire and an electric current. It’s just as real as a brick. It’s simply different from a brick. “We can make a picture on a screen. It’s just as real as a painting. It’s just different. Suppose we could make something like a magnetic field, with shape and coloring and solidity! Why not solidity? Given the trick, it should be as easy as shape or color! “If we had a trick like that and wanted to stop some visitors from outer space, we’d simply construct a solid image of a can around them! It would be made of energy, and all the energy applied to it would flow to any threatened spot. “It would draw power to fight any stress that tried to destroy it Of course! And why should we build cities? We’d clear a place for them and generate them and maintain them simply by supplying the power needed to keep them in being! We’d make force-fields in the shape of machines, to dig canals or pile up dams.” 47 SKIT-TREE PLANET H E HAD raised his voice as he spoke. The solid walls and roof made echoes which clanged. He stopped talking. "Then there wouldn’t be any artifacts,” Haynes said calmly. "When a city was abandoned, it would be wiped out as com- pletely as the picture on a theatre-screen when the play is done with. But Went- worth!” “Eh?” “If we had that trick, and we’d captured some meddlesome strangers from outer space by clapping a can over them, what would we do?” He paused. “In other words, what comes next for us?” “Get in the pilot’s seat,” he commanded. “Put your finger on the vertical flight button. When you see light, stab it down so we’ll shoot straight up! If we trapped somebody, and if we lifted the trap we’d have something worse than a trap to take care of them with. They’d do the same, and they’ve got what it should take!” Silence followed. “Such as?” Haynes asked at last. “I saw one Thing this morning,” said Wentworth grimly. “I don’t like to think about it. If they’re bringing it over to snap us up when this can is lifted off us, we’re up against plenty of trouble. You keep your finger on the flight-button! That Thing was bigger than the Galloping Cow! I’ll try to tip McRae off as to what’s happened.” He settled down by the communicator. Every ten minutes he tried to call the expedi- tion’s ship. Every time there came a mon- strous roar of static as the set came on. and no other sound at all. Aside from that, noth- ing happened. Absolutely nothing. The flier lay on the ground with an un- natural assortment of reflected and re- reflected light-beams from the twin landing- lamps. There were four clumps of skit-trees sharing the prison with the flier and the men. Silence. Stillness. Nothing. Every ten minutes Wentworth called the Galloping Cow. It was an hour and a half before there came an answer to Wentworth’s call. “ — llo!” came McRae’s voice through the crackling static. “Down in — gain — ■ no sign — sort anywhere — ” “Get a directional on me!” snapped Went- worth. “Can you hear me above the static?” “What sta — voice perfectly clear — ” came McRae’s booming. “Keep — talking. . . .” Wentworth blinked. No static at the Gal- loping Cow ? When his ears were practically deafened? Then it made sense. All of it! “I’ll keep talking!” he said fervently. “Use the directional and locate me! But don’t try to help me direct! Take a bearing from where you find me to where a fifty-foot dirt embankment sticks out from a mountain - spur to the north. Get on that line and you’ll hear the static, all right. “It’s in a beam coming right here at me. Follow that static back to the mountains, and when you find where it’s being projected from, you’ll find some skit-tree planters with all the artifacts your little heart desires. Only maybe you’ll have to blast them.” He swallowed. “It works out to sense,” he went on more calmly. “They built up a civilization based on generating instead of building the things they wanted to use. Our force-fields are globular, because the generator’s inside. If you want a force-field to have a definite shape, you have to generate it differently. Their cities and their machines weren’t sub- stance, though they were solid enough. They were force-fields! “The generators were off at a distance, throwing the force -field they wanted where they needed it. They projected solidities like we projected pictures on a screen. They projected their cities. Their tools. Probably their spaceships too! That’s why we never found artifacts. We looked where installa- tions had been, instead of where they were generated and flung to the spot where they were wanted. There’s a beam full of static coming from those mountains.” Light! With all the blinding suddenness of an atomic explosion, there was light. Went- worth had a moment’s awareness of sun- shine on the brittle stalks of skit-trees, and then of upward acceleration so fierce that it was like a blow. The atmosphere-flier hurtled skyward with all its lift- jets firing full blast, and there was the Galloping Cow lumbering ungracefully through atmosphere at ten thousand feet, some twelve or more miles away. M cRAE’S voice came out of a communi- cator which now picked up no static whatever. “What the devil?” he boomed. "We saw something that looked like a big metal tank, and it vanished and you went skyward from where it’d been like a bat out of a cave.” “Suppose you follow me,” said Wentworth grimly. “The skit-tree planters on this 48 THRILLING WONDER STORIES planet, anyhow, don’t want us around. By pure accident, I got a line on where they were. They lured me away from their place by projecting a city. “I went to look, and it vanished. I played hide and seek with it until they changed tactics and let it stay in existence. Maybe they thought we’d land on it, high up, and get out of the flier to explore. “Then the city would have vanished and we’d have dropped a mile or two, hard. But we landed on the ground instead, and they clapped a jail around us. “I don’t know what they intended, but you came along and they let the jail vanish to keep you from examining it. And now we’ll go talk to them!” The flier was streaking vengefully back to the embankment to where only that morning, before sunrise, Wentworth had seen some- thing he still didn’t like to think about. The Galloping Cow veered around to fol- low, with all the elephantine grace of the animal for which she had been unofficially christened She’d been an Earth-Pluto freighter before conversion for the expedi- tion, and she was a staunch vessel, but not a handy one. The flier dived for the hills. Wentworth’s jaws were hard and angry. The Galloping Cow trailed, wallowing. The flier quartered back and forth across the hills, examining every square inch of ground. Nothing. Absolutely nothing. The search went on. The communicator boomed. “They’re playing ’possum,” McRae’s voice said. “We’ll land and make a camp and pre- pare to hunt on foot.” Wentworth growled angrily. He continued to search. Deeper and deeper the flier went into the hills, going over and over every bit of terrain. Then, quite suddenly, the com- municator emitted babbling sounds. Shout- ings. Incoherent outcries. From the ship, of course. There were sudden, whining crashes, electronic cannon going off at a panic-stricken rate. Then a ghastly crashing sound, and silence. The flier zoomed until Haynes and Wentworth could see. They paled. Wentworth uttered a raging cry. The Galloping Cow had landed. Her ports were open and men had emerged. But now a Thing had attacked the ship with a ruth- less, irresistible ferocity. It was bigger than the Galloping Cow. It stood a hundred feet high at the shoulder. It was armored and possessed of prodigious jaws and gigantic teeth. It was all the nightmares of mecha- nistic minds rolled into one. It must have materialized from nothing- ness, because nothing so huge could have escaped Wentworth’s search. But as Went- worth first looked at it, the incredible jaws closed on the ship’s frame and bit through the tough plates of beryllium steel as if they had been paper. It tore them away and flung them aside. A mainframe girder offered resistance. With an irresistible jerk, the Thing tore it free. And then it put its claws into the very vitals of the Galloping Cow and began to tear the old spaceship apart. The crewmen spilled out and fled. The Thing snapped at one as he went but re- turned to its unbelievable destruction. Some- one heaved a bomb into its very jaws, and it exploded, and the Thing seemed not to notice. Wentworth seized the controls of the flier from Haynes. He dived, not for the ship, but for the space between the ship and the mountains. He flung the small craft into crazy, careening gyrations in that space. And then the communicator shrieked with clacking static. The flier passed through the beam, but Wentworth flung it back in. He plunged toward the mountains. He lost the beam, and found it again, and lost it and found it. “There!” he said, choking with rage. “Down from the top of that cliff. There’s a hole — a cave-mouth. The beam’s coming from there!” He plunged the flier for the opening, and braked with monstrous jetting that sent rocket-fumes blindingly and chokingly into the tunnel. The flier hit, and Wentworth scrambled to the forepart of the little ship and leaped to the cliff-opening against which it bumped. Then he ran into the opening, his flame-pistol flaring before him. T HERE was a blinding flash inside. The blue-white flame of a short-circuit created a gigantic arc. It died. The place was full of smoke, and something small ran feebly across the small space that Wentworth could see, and fell, and kicked feebly, and was still. Wentworth could hear a machine come to a jolting stop. And crouching there fiercely, he waited for more antagonists. None came. The fumes drifted out the cave-mouth. Then he could see the Thing on the floor. Clad in a weirdly constructed space-suit, the creature he had knocked over SKIT-TREE PLANET 49 was not human and looked very tired. It was dead. Next he saw an almost typical tight- beam projector, linked with heavy cables to a scanning device. He saw a model — all of five feet high — of the city he and Haynes had tried to reach. The model was of unbelievable delicacy and perfection. But the scanning system now was focused on a metal object which was a min- iature Thing with claws and jaws and armor. It was two feet long, and there was a cable control by which its movements could be directed. A solidity which was controlled by that ingenious mechanical toy could dig canals, or gather the crop from the tops of skit-trees — when enlarged in the projection to stand a hundred feet high at the shoulder — or it could tear apart a spaceship as a ter- rier rends a rat. There was more. Much more. But there had been only the one small Inhabitant, who wore a space-suit on his own planet. And he was dead. Haynes’ voice came from the flier at the cave-mouth. “Wentworth! What’s happened? Are you alive? What’s up?” Wentworth went out, still in a savage mood. He wanted to see how the Galloping Cow had withstood the attack. What he had seen last looked bad. It was bad. The Galloping Cow was a car- cass. Her enginess were not too badly smash- ed, but her outer shell was scrap-iron, her frame was twisted wreckage, and there was no faintest hope that they could repair her. “And — I’m engaged to be married when we get back,” said Haynes, white-faced. “We’ll never get back in that.” ***** Less than a month later, though, the Gal- loping Cow did head for home. Haynes, un- wittingly, had made it possible. Examination of the solidity-projector revealed its prin- ciples, and Haynes — trying forlornly to make a joke— suggested that he model a statuette of the last Inhabitant to be projected a mile or two high above the skit-tree plantations now forever useless. But he was commissioned to model some- thing else entirely, and in his exuberance his fancy wandered afar. But McRea dourly per- mitted the model to stand, because he was in a hurry to start. * So that, some six weeks from the morning when Wentworth had seen an impossible Thing moving in the gray dawnlight on an unnamed planet, the Galloping Cow was al- most back in touch with humanity. Two weeks more, and the outposts of civilization on Rigel would be reached. A long, skeleton tower had been built out from the old ship’s battered remnant. A scanner scanned, and a beam-type projector projected the image of Haynes’ modeling to form a solid envelope of force-field about the ship. It was much larger than the original hull had been. There would be room and to spare on the voyage home. And Haynes was utterly happy. “Think!” he said blissfully, in the scan- ning-room where the force-field envelope was maintained about the ship. “Two weeks and Rigel! Two months and home! Two months and one day and I’m a married man!” Wentworth looked at the small moving ob- ject on which the scanners focused. “You’re a queer egg, Haynes,” he said. “I don’t believe you ever had a solemn thought in your head. Do you know what wiped out those people?” “A boojum?” asked Haynes mildly. “Tell me!” “The biologists figured it out,” said Haynes. “A plague. The last poor devil wore a space- suit to keep the germs out. It seems that some wrecked Earth-ship drifted out to to where one of their explorers found it. And they hauled it to ground. They learned a lot, but there were germs on board they weren’t used to. Coryzia, for instance. “In their bodies it had an incubation period of about six .months, and was highly con- tagious all the time. Then it turned lethal. They didn’t know about It in time to establish quarantines. No wonder the poor devil wanted to kill us! We’d wiped out his race!” “Too bad!” said Haynes. He looked down at the small moving thing he had modeled for a new hull for the Galloping Cow. “You know,” he said blithely, “I like this model! I may not be the best sculptor in the world — as an amateur I wouldn’t expect it. But for a while after we land on earth. I’m going to be the most famous man alive.” And he beamed at the jerkily moving ob- ject which was the model for the hull of the Galloping Cow. It was twelve hundred feet long, as it was projected about the old ship’s engine-room and remaining portions. It hr a stiffly extended tail and an outstretched neck and curved horns. Its legs extended and kicked, and extended and kicked. The Galloping Cow, in fact, exactly fitted her name by her outward appearance, as sne galloped Earthward through emptiness. The GREGORY CIRCLE An Astonishing Novelet By WILLIAM FITZGERALD Trying to connect hillbilly mechanic Bud Gregory with the mysterious atom- ic dust destroying America was like joining simple math and nuclear phy- sics, but Dr. Murfree found the answer! CHAPTER I Chain Disaster O N MONDAY Bud Gregory sat in magnificent idleness before the shed which was his automobile repair- shop in the village of Brandon on the edge of the Great Smokies. That day something impalpable and invisi- ble descended upon Cincinnati and people began to go to hospitals with their blood undergoing changes over which the doctors threw up their hands. On Tuesday Bud Gregory meditated doing some work on the four automobiles awaiting repair in his shop, but did not feel like work- ing and went fishing instead. . . . On that day the Geiger counters in the Bureau of Standards in Washington went uni- formly crazy, so that it was impossible to standardize the by-products of the atomic piles turning out nuclear explosive for na- tional defense. On Wednesday Bud Gregory reluctantly put in half an hour’s work. Yawning, he took his pay for the job and went home and took a nap. That day forty head of cattle on a West Virginia hillside lay down and died and a trout-stream in Georgia was found to be full of dead fish. Four cancer-patients in a home Cregory threw a clumsy, homemade for incurables in Frankfort, Kentucky, sud- denly took a quite impossible turn for the better. They walked out of the hospital three weeks later and went back to work. On Thursday Bud Gregory — That was the way of it at the beginning. Bud Gregory seemed to have no connection with any one of the series of unusual events. The events themselves were simply prepos- terous. As, for example, the fact that all the foliage in a ten-mile patch of mountain coun- try in Pennsylvania turned vaguely purplish overnight, and then wilted and turned to un- wholesome pulp. Three days later there was not a green leaf or a living blade of grass in thirty-odd square miles. That did not seem to have any rational connection with Bud Gregory or any other event. But the connection was there. switch — and the earth rocked! It was Dr. David Murfree of the Bureau of Standards who was the first to add the vari- ous items together to a plausible sum. It did not include a backwoods automobile repair- man, of course — there was no data for that — but it was a very sound guess just the same. Murfree was a physicist, not a doctor of medicine and his salary at the Bureau was four thousand two hundred dollars a year with an appropriate Civil Service rating. He added the several odd events together, and they were convincing. But the answer was apparently impossible. He could not get any of his superiors in the Bureau to agree with him on the need for action. He thought the need was very great indeed. So he took a certain amount of accumulated Civil Service leave, drew out five hundred dollars from his bank and drove off in his battered old car to investigate at his own expense. Tucked in the car were certain items of equipment from the bureau which he had no right to borrow and which would take most of a year’s pay to replace if anything should happen to them. He went to the sere and barren area in Pennsylvania and made certain tests. He drove to Cincinnati and made more tests. He went on to the place in West Virginia where cattle had died and asked questions and did improbable things to other ailing cows and steers. Then he drove back to Washington at the best speed his rattletrap car could make. He went first to his home and told his wife to pack up. He explained with crisp precision and she looked at him in frightened doubt. He went to the Bureau of Standards — he was still technically on leave— and showed the 52 THRILLING WONDER STORIES results of his tests to some of the men who worked with him. They were still unable to use the Geiger Counters in the bureau, but one of his friends was heading for New York to use apparatus at Columbia which had not gone haywire. Murfree got him to take along his samples. Then he went to a friend who happened to be a meteorologist — and got confirmatory bad news. The weather-maps of the period cover- ing the unexplained phenomena told him just how likely his surmise was and where a search should be made for the primary cause of the disasters. rp^HEN Murfree piled his wife and small j£i daughter in the car, drew out all the rest of the money he had in the bank and headed for the Great Smokies. It was strictly logical action. Epidemic leukemia in Cincinnati, ruined Geiger coun- ters in Washington, dead cattle in West Vir- ginia, dead trout in Georgia, the sudden cure of cancer patients in Frankfort, Kentucky — and a ten-mile patch of dead vegetation in Pennsylvania. If Murfree could have gotten someone in authority to listen to him the measures to be taken would have been quicker and much more drastic. But nobody would listen. So Murfree had to work it out on his own. His car was old but he made Lynchburg the first day. He was not at ease. He got started early on the second day and, by night- fall, was well past Charlotte toward the mountains. He and his family stopped at a small country hotel and, during the evening, Murfree got into talk with a power-line man, who told him worriedly that power-line losses over three counties had gone up to seven times normal in two days in a smooth curve and now were headed down again. There was no explanation. Murfree fidget- ed when he heard it. He made his family sleep with closed windows that night in spite of the stuffiness of their rooms, and they started off again near daybreak. It was about three in the afternoon when he met Bud Gregory. Bud Gregory sat in splendid somnolence before the shed which was his repair shop. The village of Brandon was a metropolis of three hundred souls, not far within the Great Smokies. There were mountains in every direction. There was blue sky overhead. There was red clay underfoot. Bud Gregory dozed contentedly. There were three cars awaiting his attention. Each of them had been brought to him solely be- cause he was the best mechanic in seven states. Actually, he was much more than that — so much more that there is no word for what he was. Each car had been brought reluctantly, because he would repair them only when he felt like it or needed money, and then would do in minutes a job anybody else would need hours or days to do. At the moment he did not feel like working and he did not need money. So he dozed. Flies buzzed about him. Insects made nois- es off in the distance. Somewhere chickens cackled feebly and somewhere a wagon with a squeaky wheel moved sedately away from Brandon. Murfree’s car was plainly in trouble when Bud Gregory first heard it. Not many cars came through Brandon. The local highways were traversable by very light vehicles and they could be traveled by tractors, but mules were surest. This car was away off the main track. It came on, booming, and Bud Gregory awoke. It climbed rather desperately over a red-clay hill and came into Brandon. It was heavily loaded. Murfree drove. There were a woman and a little girl in the back. The rest was luggage — bags and parcels of every possible shape and size and outward appearance. But Bud Gregory looked at the car. Mur- free saw his sign and steered the car toward it. He stopped it — but the motor continued to run. Murfree plainly turned off the ignition. The motor boomed on. Murfree got out and called to Bud above the noise of the engine. “It won’t stop.” Bud rose, slouched to the car and threw up the hood. He reached in. There were thunderous racketing explosions. The motor stopped dead. Then it made frying, cooking noises. “Y’lucky,” Bud drawled. “Didn’t bum out no bearin’s yet.” Then he drawled again. “Pump-shaft broke, huh?” “Yes,” Murfree said bitterly. “I kept going in hope of coming on a repair shop. Can you fix it? Will the motor freeze up?” Bud spoke negligently, looking at the car and all the parcels. “Uh-huh. Oil’s all burnt up in the cylin- ders. When she cools she freezes. But if you pour water in ’er now you’ll bust the cylin- der-block.” 53 Murfree clamped his jaws, clenched. He wasn’t far enough into the Smokies for his needs and that power-line-loss business meant that he had to hurry. “Any chance of getting another car?” he asked desperately. B UYING another car would put an im- possible dent in his resources but he felt that the matter was urgent enough to justify such a step. He had two possible courses of action — this, and flight to the farthest possible part of the West. He’d chosen this because it meant a fight against the danger he foresaw. “This here’s a pretty good car,” Bud Greg- ory drawled. “Fix ’er up an’ she’ll be all right.” “But it’ll take days!” said Murfree bitterly. “You’ve got to take the motor practically apart!”. Bud Gregory spat with vast precision at a cluster of flies about a previous splash of tobacco-juice. “She’ll take a coupla hours to cool,” he said drily. “That’s all. No bearin’s burnt. Ain’t never yet seen a car I couldn’t fix. I got a kinda knack for it.” “But you’ve got to take off the cylinder- head!” protested Murfree. “And replace the rings and fix the valves and take the pump apart and get a new shaft! No garage in the world would undertake the job in less than four days!” “I’ll do it,” said Bud Gregory, “in two hours an’ a half. An’ two hours’ll be waitin’ for it to cool.” He grinned. He wasn’t boasting. He was showing off a little, perhaps. But he was saying something he knew with absolute knowledge. Murfree threw up his hands. “Do that,” he said bitterly, “and I’ll believe in miracles!” He got his wife and small daughter out of the car. He led them down to the general store of Brandon, which sold fertilizer, dry- goods, harness, perfumery, canned goods, farm machinery and general supplies. He bought the materials for a picnic lunch and he and his family came back. They sat in the car, with the doors open for coolness, and ate. But Murfree was uneasy. Bud Gregory dozed. Time passed. The crackling, frying sounds of the overheated motor dwindled and ceased. Presently Murfree got out and paced up and down beside the car, restlessly. After a time he went to the back and took out a small, heavy parcel. He opened it and there was a freakish-looking metal-lined glass tube with electrical connections plainly showing it to be akin to radio tubes, but of a completely different shape. Murfree threw a tiny switch, and from somewhere inside the box a “click” sounded. A moment later, there was another. Then two clicks close together, and a pause, and another. Murfree watched it, worried. It clicked briskly but unrhythmically. There was no order in the sequence of tiny sounds. Bud Gregory sat somnolently in the shade. He turned his eyes and regarded Murfree and the box. “What good does that do?” Murfree’s wife said. “None at all,” Murfree said wretchedly. “It only tells me nothing’s happened to us yet.” H E STOOD watching the box, in which nothing moved at all, but from which clickings came at brief intervals. Chickens cackled. Somewhere a horse cropped at grass and the sound of its jaws was audible. Insects hummed and buzzed and stridulated. The box clicked. Bud Gregory got up and came over curi- ously. He regarded the box with an interest- ed intentness. It was not an informed look, as of someone looking at a familiar object. It wasn’t even a puzzled look, as of someone trying to solve the meaning of something strange. He wore exactly the absorbed ex- pression of a man who picks up an unfamil- iar book and reads it and finds it fascinat- ing. “What’s — uh — what’s this here thing do?” asked Bud, drawling. “It’s a Geiger counter,” said Murfree. He had no idea what Bud was. Nobody had. Not even Bud. But Murfree said, “It counts cosmic-ray impacts and neutrons. It’s a de- tector for cosmic rays and radioactivity.” Bud’s face remained uncomprehending. “Don’t mean nothing to me,” he drawled. “Kinda funny, though, how it works. Some- thin’ hits, an’ current goes through, an’ then it cuts off till somethin’ else hits. What you want it for?” THE GREGORY CIRCLE His hands 54 THRILLING WONDER STORIES CHAPTER II Miracle I T WAS genuine curiosity. But an ordi- nary man, looking at a Geiger counter, does not understand that a tiny particle at high velocity — so small that it passes through a glass tube and a metal lining without hin- drance — makes a Geiger tube temporarily conductive. Murfree stared blankly at Bud Gregory. “How the heck — ” Then he said curiously, “It was invented to detect radiations that come from nobody knows where. And it’s used in the plants that make atom bombs, to tell when there’s too much radioactivity — too much for safety.” “I heard about atom bombs,” Bud Gregory drawled. “Never knew how they worked.” Murfree, still curious, spoke in words as near to one syllable as he could. This man had said he could make an impossible repair and had the air of knowing what he was talk- ing about. He looked at a Geiger counter and he knew how it worked and had not the least idea what it was used for. Murfree gave him a necessarily elementary account of atomic fission. He was appalled at the inadequacy of his explanation even as he finished it. But Bud Gregory drawled: “Oh, that — mmm — I get it. Them little things that knock that ura — ura — uranium stuff to flinders are the same kinda things that make this dinkus work. They kinda knock a little bit of air apart when they hit it. I bet they change one kinda stuff to another kind, too, if enough of ’em hit. Huh?” Murfree jumped a foot. This lanky and ig- norant backwoods repairman had absorbed highly abstruse theory, put into a form so simplified that it practically ceased to have any meaning at all, and had immediately de- duced the fact of ionization of gases by neu- tron collision. And the transmutation of ele- ments! He not only understood but could use his understanding. . “Right interestin’,” said Bud Gregory and yawned. “I reckon your motor’s cool enough to work on.” He put his hand on the cylinder-block. It was definitely hot, but not hot enough to scorch his fingers. “Yeah,” he said. “I’ll fix the pumpshaft first.” He went languidly to a well beside the re- pair shed. He drew a bucket of water. He poured it into the radiator. There was a very minor hissing, which ceased immediately. He filled the radiator, reached down and worked at the pumpshaft with his fingers and with a speculative, distant look in his eyes, then straightened up. He shambled into the shed and came out, trailing a long, flexible cable behind him. Up to the very edge of the Smokies and for a varying distance into them, there is no vil- lage so small or so remote that it does not have electric power. He put a round wooden cheesebox on the running-board of the car and drew out two shorter cables with clips on their ends. He adjusted them. Murfree saw an untidy tangle of wires and crude hand-wound coils in the box. There were three cheap radio tubes. Bud Gregory turned on a switch and leaned against the mud-guard, waiting with infinite leisureli- ness. “What’s that?” asked Murfree, indicating the cheesebox. “Ain’t got any name,” said Bud Gregory. “Somethin’ I fixed up to weld stuff with. It’s weldin’ your shaft.” He looked absently into the distance. “It saves a lotta work,” he added without interest. “But — but you can’t weld a shaft without taking it out!” protested Murfree. “It’d short!” Bud Gregory yawned. “This don’t. It’s some kinda stuff them tubes make. It don’t go through iron. It just kinda bounces around. Where there’s a break, it heats up an’ welds. When it’s all welded it just bounces around.” Murfree swallowed. He walked around the car and looked at the apparatus in the cheesebox. He traced leads with his eyes. His mouth opened and closed. “But that can’t do anything!” he protested. “The current will just go around and around!” “All right.,” said Bud Gregory. “Just as y’please.” He waited patiently. Presently there was a faint humming noise. Bud Gregory turned off the switch and reached down. He re- moved the connecting clamps and meditative- ly fumbled with the water pump. "That’s okay,” he finally said. “Try it if y’like.” THE GREGORY CIRCLE 55 H E POKED in the cheesebox, changing connections apparently at random. Murfree reached down and fingered the wat- er-pump. He had made certain of the trouble with his car and he knew exactly how the broken shaft felt. Now it was perfect, exact- ly as if it had been taken out, welded, smoothed, trued and replaced. “It feels all right!” said Murfree incred- ulously. “Yeah,” said Bud Gregory. “It is. Y’car’s froze, now, though. Take the handle an’ try it.” Murfree got out the starting-handle from the tool-box. He inserted it and strained. The motor was frozen solid. It could not be stirred. Murfree felt sick. “Wait a minute,” said Bud Gregory, “an’ try again.” He put a single one of the clamps on the motor and tucked the other away in the cheesebox. He turned on the switch. “Heave now,” he suggested. Murfree heaved — and almost fell over. There was no resistance to the movement of the motor except compression which was infinitely springy. There was no friction whatever. It moved with an incredible, fluid ease. It had never moved so effortlessly — though the compression remained as perfect as it had ever been. Murfree stared. Bud Gregory took off the clamp. “Try again,” he said, grinning. With all his strength. Murfree could not move the motor. Overheated, it was frozen tight with all the oil burned from the inner surface of the cylinders. Yet an instant be- fore — “Yeah,” said Bud Gregory, drily. He threw on the ignition switch, got into the driver’s seat, and stepped on the starter. The motor fairly bounced into life. It ran smoothly. He adjusted it to a comfortable idling speed and got out. “We’ll run ’er for ten-fifteen minutes,” he said casually, “to get fresh oil spread around. Then you’ all fixed.” Murfree simply goggled. “How does that work?” he said blankly. Bud Gregory shrugged. “Steel is little hunks of stuff stickin’ to- gether. These tubes make a kinda stuff that makes the outside ones slide easy on each other. I fixed up this dinkus to help loosen nuts that was too tight an’ for workin’ on axles an’ so on. That’ll be five dollars. Okay?” “Y-yes — my word!” said Murfree. He fumbled out his wallet and turned over a five-dollar bill. “Listen! You eliminated fric- tion! Completely! There wasn’t any fric- tion! Where’d you get the idea for that thing?” Bud Gregory yawned. “It just come to me. I gotta knack for fixin’ things.” “It should be patented!” said Murfree fe- verishly. “What’ll you make one of these for me for?” Bud Gregory grinned lazily. “Too much trouble. Took me a day an’ a half to put it together an’ get it workin’. I don’t like that kinda work.” “A hundred dollars? Five hundred? And royalties?” Bud Gregory shrugged. “Too much trouble,” he said. “I get along. Don’t aim to work myself to death. You can go along now. Your car’s all right.” He shambled over to his chair. He seated himself with an air of infinite relaxation and leaned back against the corner of the shed. As Murfree drove away he raised one hand in utterly lazy farewell. But Murfree drove down the red-clay road, marveling. There had been only a two-hour delay instead of the four to seven days that any other garage in the world would have needed. Murfree drove to what he believed would be either the only safe place within a thousand miles — that or the place where he and his family would definitely be killed. But for a while he did not think of that. He was facing the slowly-realized fact that Bud Gregory was something that there isn’t yet a word for. He could not yet rea- lize the full significance of the discovery, but it was startling enough to knock out of his head — for the moment — even the deadly danger implied by leukemia in Cincinnati and dead grass in Pennsylvania and dead trout in Georgia and Geiger counters gone crazy in Washington. Murfree still didn’t connect Bud Gregory with the danger. CHAPTER III Hidden Connection EATH fell out of a rain cloud in Kan- sas. A driving summer rainstorm swept across the wheatfields of the plains and 58 THRILLING WONDER STORIES where it fell the growing wheat died. The occupants of every farmhouse on which the rainstorm beat died too in a matter of days. The Mississippi River became a stinking broth of dead and rotting fish above St. Louis and the noisesomeness floated down- stream to poison the water all the way to the Gulf — and beyond. Dead birds fell from the skies over a dozen states and where they fell the earth went barren in little round spaces about them. A patch of the Gulf Stream turned white with dead fish. A game-preserve in Alabama be- came depopulated. There were three hundred deaths in one night in Louisville. There were sixty in Chi- cago. The Tennessee Valley power- generat- ing plant blew out every dynamo in five hectic minutes, during which sheet-lightning hurtled all about the interior of the genera- tor-buildings. Then death struck Akron, Ohio. Every- body knows about that — twelve thousand people in three days, and a whole section of the city roped off and nobody allowed to enter it, and the dogs and cats and even the sparrows writhing feebly on the streets be- fore they too died. It was radioactive dust that had done it. And Oak Ridge was blamed as the only possible source of radioactive dust and gas which could kill capriciously at a distance of hundreds of miles. The newspapers raged. Congressmen — at home between sessions — leaped grandilo- quently into print with infuriated demands for a special session of Congress in order that an investigation might be launched to fix responsibility — as if fixing responsibility would end the continuing disasters. Eminent statesmen announced forthcom- ing laws which would destroy utterly every trace of atomic science in the United States and make it a capital offense to try to keep the United States in a condition either to de- fend itself or to keep abreast of the rest of the world. Oak Ridge was shut down and every uran- ium pile dismantled — this to appease the public — and every available investigator was dispatched to Oak Ridge to uncover the appalling carelessness which had killed as many victims as a plague. The only trouble was that all this indig- nation was baseless. Radioactive dust and gases were the cause of the deaths to be sure. But the Smyth Report had pointed out the danger from such by-products of chain- reaction piles and elaborate precautions had been taken against them. The material which killed had not come from Oak Ridge. It couldn’t have. Murfree had never even suspected it. The amount of dust was wrong. The amount of deadly stuff necessary to produce the observed effects simply couldn’t have come from the atom piles in operation. It was too much — and besides it would have killed anybody in its neighborhood at the point of its release into the air. And no- body had died at Oak Ridge. It came from somewhere else. Picking his way desperately into the heart of the Smokies Murfree kept track of events by his car radio. Two hundred miles in — the roads were so bad that a hundred -mile journey was a good ten hour’s drive — there was enough data for a rough calculation of the amount of dust and gases that must have been released. When Murfree made his calculation sweat broke out all over his body. Such a quantity of fissioning material could not result from a man-made atomic pile. The piles that men had made were as large as were readily con- trollable. This was incomparably larger. All the piles at Oak Ridge and at Hand- ford in Washington together could not pro- duce a twentieth or a hundredth of the stuff that had been released. Somehow, some- where, a chain reaction had been started with so monstrous an amount of material to work on that it staggered the imagina- tion. And it was increasing! It seemed to be growing like a cancer! Whatever had begun a chain reaction out- side of Oak Ridge and Handford and however it had become possible, it staggered the .imag- ination. The output of murderous by-pro- ducts increased day by day. It was building up to an unimaginable climax. T HERE was no danger of an atomic ex- plosion, of course. An atomic pile does not blow up. But by the amount of by-pro- ducts released, something on the order of a small but increasing volcano -was at work somewhere. Instead of giving off relatively harmless gases and smoke, it gave off the most deadly substances known to men. There could be no protection against such invisible death. Poured into the air at suf- ficiently high level — doubtless carried up by a THE GREGORY CIRCLE 57 column of hot air — finely-divided dust and deadly gas could travel for hundreds of miles before touching earth. Apparently they did. Where they touched earth, nothing could live. Not only did living things die after breath- ing in the deadly stuff but the ground itself became murderous. To walk on an area where the ground emitted radioactive radiation was to die. To breathe the air exposed to those rays. . . . Murfree went desperately on in his search for the impossible source of the invisible car- riers of death. He found the first evidence that he was on the right track a hundred miles from a telephone. He was far beyond powerlines and railroads. He was in that Appalachian Highlands, where life and lan- guage is a hundred years behind the rest of America. He stopped to buy food and ask hopeless questions at a tiny, unbelievably primitive store. He tried the Geiger counter. And it clicked measurably more often than before. Twenty miles farther on its rate of clicking had gone up fifty percent. He spent a day in seemingly aimless wandering, driving the laboring car over roads that had never be- fore known pneumatic tires. Then he left his wife and daughter as boarders in a hillbilly cabin. His wife was not easy about it. She protested. “But what will happen to us?” she asked desperately. “I want to share whatever hap- pens to you, David!” Murfree was not a particularly heroic per- son. He was frankly scared. But he spoke firmly. “Listen, my dear! Something like a ura- nium pile has started up somewhere in these hills. It’s on a scale that nobody’s ever imag- ined before. It’s so big that it’s incredible that human beings could have started it. It’s pouring out radioactive dust and gases into the air. They’re being spread by the winds. Where the stuff lands everything dies. “And the pile is increasing in size and violence. If it keeps on increasing, it will make at least this continent uninhabitable, and it may destroy all the life in the world. Not only all human life but every bird and beast and even the fish in the ocean deeps. And something’s got to be done!” “But—” “I brought you so far with me,” said Mur- free doggedly, “because you were no safer in Washington than anywhere else. So far, death from the thing is a matter of pure chance. Wherever it’s happening the ground must be so hot that a column of air rises from it like smoke from a forest fire. “But the place where there’s least smoke from a fire is close to its edge. That’s why I brought you this close. You’re safer here than farther away and much safer than you’d be closer.” “But you intend to go on!” she protested. “I’ve got a protective suit,” he told her. “I managed to borrow one quite unlawfully from the bureau. I couldn’t get more. If I can get close enough to the thing to map it or simply locate it drone planes can complete the ex- ploration. But I’ve got to know, and I’ve got to take back some sort of evidence. “I’m going to be as careful as I can, my dear. The only hope that exists is for me to get back with accurate information. I’ll take that to Washington and then I take you and the kid as far away from here as what money we have will carry us.” “And if you don’t get back?” “You’ll be safe here longer than anywhere else,” he told her. “In the nature of things, if the stuff rises up on a hot-air column, it won’t start to drop until it’s a long way qff. “We’re probably not more than a hundred miles from whatever impossible thing a nat- ural atomic pile is. I’m leaving you what money I have. It will keep you here for years. Unless something can be done, the rest of America will be a desert long before that time! “I’m guessing,” he added gloomily, “but nobody else is even doing that! They blame Oak Ridge. But the weather-maps point clearly to this area as the place from which the dust must have been dispersed.” It was not a sentimental parting. Murfree was an earnest family man who happened also to be a scientist. He had done what he could for his family’s safety — and it wasn’t much. But now he had to do something which would most probably be quite futile, on the remote chance that it could do some good. If the source of radioactive dust- clouds now drifting over America were a natural phenomenon like a volcano, it was hardly likely that anything could be done about it. North America would probably become unin- habitable in months or at most a year or two. There might be some areas on the West Coast where prevailing winds could keep away the poison for a time, but it was entirely possible that ultimately the whole 58 THRILLING WONDER STORIES earth would become a desert of radioactive sand and its seas empty of even microscopic life. So Murfree left his wife and daughter as boarders in a hillbilly home a hundred and twenty miles from a telephone and two hun- dred miles from an electric light. He went on to verify the danger that he seemed to be the only living man to evaluate correctly. He still did not connect Bud Gregory with it. CHAPTER IV The Horror Hole M OTORISTS drove shakily to doctors in half a dozen cities, sick and fright- ened. They had high fevers and all the symp- toms of bums, but there was no sign of in- jury upon their bodies. Then it was observed that a patch of blight had appeared upon a coastal highway. All the vegetation in a space half a mile long and three hundred yards wide had died over- night. The highway ran through the blight- ed area. All the motorists had driven through it. Fish died in a reservoir connected to a great city’s water-supply system. The city’s water was cut off and a desperate attempt made to bring in drinking-water by tank-car. Power-lines leading from Niagara Falls were shorted by arcs which leaped across the air- gap separating the wires. Then came the deaths in Louisville. Nobody thought about Murfree, of course. He went on doggedly, unspectacularly, in search of the thing he knew might mean the depopulation of a continent and, of course, his own death if he should succeed in finding it. He went deeper and deeper into that island of the primitive, the back country of the Smokies. There was no flat land. Mountains were everywhere — spurs and crags and sprawling monsters of stone, with blankets of forest to their tips — patches of cornfield at slopes of thirty and forty degrees. There were beard- ed, ragged mountaineers with suspicion of strangers as an instinct — barefooted broods of tow-headed children — and mountains — and more mountains — and more. . . . Murfree’s progress was necessarily indirect, because he could set onlv the vaguest of bearings upon his objective. The Geiger counter clicked ever more rapidly. On the second day after he had left his wife be- hind, Murfree put on his protective suit. He looked more strange and aroused more suspicion among the mountaineers. There were no more roads, only trails, now. The car, however, was lighter not only by the absence of his wife and daughter, but by all of their personal possessions. He wormed his way along impossible paths, fording small streams and climbing prohibi- tive grades, while the noise of the Geiger counter increased to a steady, minor roar. He came to a mountain-cabin where nothing moved. A dog lay on the rickety porch, and did not even raise its head to bark at him. Murfree got out of his car and went to the cabin. He had been so intent on the task of making progress in the direction he wished to go, that he had not noticed the fact that the fo- liage here was dead in patches, that every- thing which had been green looked sickly. He called, and a feeble voice answered him. The family in the house was dying. He gave them water and stayed to prepare food for them. There was absolutely nothing else to be done. He knew what had happened, of course. They had been burned — painlessly, like sunburn — by the radiations from that monstrous atomic furnace which somewhere steadily poisoned the air. The bums went deep into their bodies. They had high fe- vers. They were languid and weak. They looked like ghosts. He asked questions and put food and water handy for them. Then he went on. There was nothing else to do. Only four miles farther his car ceased to have any power at all. A Geiger Counter works because it is so designed that a single cosmic ray or neutron, entering it and ioniz- ing the gas within it, breaks down the insu- lating properties of a partial vacuum and al- lows a current to pass. Here the air was so completely ionized that it had become a partial conductor. The spark-plugs spat small sparks. The timer worked erratically. The ignition system went haywire in air which permitted a current to pass. He got out o He managed iu <.*rn it about, ready for retreat. He heaved his portable Geiger counter over his shoulder. He had a thin sheet of cadmium to shield it, so that the THE GREGORY CIRCLE 59 source of the neutrons which made it rattle steadily could be detected. The cadmium ab- sorbed part of the neutron-flood. It lessened the counter’s rattling when between the tube and the neutron-source. He went on, on foot. Mountains reared upward on every side, and there were thick forests on every hand, but they were dead or dying. Once in a mile or two he saw small mountaineer cabins. They showed no sign of life. He did not approach them. The people in them were dead, or so near it that nothing on earth could help them. And his protective suit was not perfect. In any case he was receiving already a possibly dangerous dosage of radiation. Ev- ery minute of continued exposure added to his danger. He must get away as soon as he dared. But he struggled onward, over a land- scape more desolate than that of the moon, because the moon has never known life, while this knew only death. He reached a crest which was actually a pass between mountains. A steady wind blew from behind him here, and the counter roar- ed. The cadmium plate affected it, but not too much. This must be the place for which he searched. He went on. Presently he could look downward and see into a valley of dead trees and dead grass and dead underbrush. In its center was a cir- cular area a quarter-mile across which was — which was somehow unspeakably horrifying. It was bare, baked, yellowed earth. Not even the corpses of once-growing things re- mained upon it. It was simply red- clay baked to a tawny orange, almost but not quite at red heat, still baking from some monstrous temperature down below. Murfree saw dried leaves borne on the wind toward it. They fluttered above it and crisp- ed and carbonized and went skyward, smol- dering. There was a steady column of air rising from this hot place as from a chimney. At the very edge of the round area was the remnant of a log cabin. The side of the cabin nearest the sere space had carbonized and smoldered away to white ash. One wall had collapsed, facing Murfree. Wires ran from the cabin to a fence which precisely sur- rounded the barren place, upheld on thin metal rods. Sunlight glinted on glazed in- sulators. Murfree took field-glasses and looked into the cabin. He saw a heap of ragged, scorched clothing and something within it. He saw an assemblage of improvised, untidy apparatus from which glassy gleams were reflected. He could make out no details. Then he knew what had happened. It was not reasonable. It was starkly impossible. But it was no more impossible than welding a water-pump shaft in its place or eliminating all friction from a frozen-tight motor so that it could be started again, or, say looking at a Geiger Counter and understanding how it worked without the least idea of what it could be used for. Murfree had a small camera and dutifully took pictures without attempting to go clos- er. He had no hope that the pictures would turn out. The plates were surely fogged by the radiation. He bent his cadmium plate into a half-cylinder and did his best to make sure of what he now unreasonably knew. The results were not clean cut. They did not have that precise clarity that a really convincing test of a physical phenomenon should possess. But the edge of the barren area was sharp. It was distinct. And the neutron-flood came from the air above the bare space only. Dust swirled up in little sand-devils above the baked earth, and spun out to invisible thinness in the column of air which rose, spiraling to the sky. It rose and rose. The air itself was radioactive, containing radio- active oxygen and nitrogen and hydrogen — from water-vapor— and all the elements in a moisture-laden breeze. It was a chimney, a whirlwind of death-laden heated gases ris- ing to the skies. But the radioactivity of the earth — which surely made the heat and the poison — was somehow confined. Murfree turned very quietly and went away again. He knew that he had accom- plished his task as he had first envisioned it. He knew what poured deadly poison into the air. He had seen it. He could tell how to find it again. And so he must hurry. His protective suit might or might not have preserved his life. He might already be liter- ally a dead man, though he still walked and breathed and thought feverishly. If he could have been sure that he would live to descend into the valley and struggle to that half-burned log cabin, and utterly smash the vaguely-seen heap of wires and tubes and hand-wound coils — and if he could have been sure that it would not increase the men- ace — he would have done it. His own life seemed a very small price to pay for the ending of that lifeless, motion- less threat to the life of all the world. m THRILLING WONDER STORIES But he wasn’t sure. And the information he had — especially the fact that he knew what Bud Gregory was- — was so much more important than his own life that he could not risk the loss of what he had to tell. On the way from the place he had found, floundering on in the car that at first hardly ran at all, and then- back through the tor- tuous way past the mountainsides, of dying trees and patches of dying cornfields and the small and squalid cabins in which nothing moved, and the spectacle of a world dying about him, Murfree.hardly noticed the deso- lation or thought about his own very probable death. He thought with a grim concentration of Bud Gregory. CHAPTER V He Didn’t Know It Was Loaded T HE CAR stopped again before the re- pair-shed in Brandon. It was close to sunset Bud Gregory sat in a leaned-back chair against the corner of the shed. There were eight cars waiting for him to feel like working on them. He opened his eyes and grinned lazily as the car came to a stop. The sunset colorings were magnificent. There was a strange, vast quiet all about. It was the sunset hush. Mur- free stopped the motor and got out. “Car’s all right, ain’t it?” asked Bud Greg- ory genially. “The car’s all right,” said Murfree. “But I v,’ant you to do something for me.” “Not tonight,” said Bud Gregory. He yawned. “I was thinkin’ about knockin’ off an’ goin’ home to supper.” Murfree pulled out his wallet. He had thought it out carefully. An offer of too much money wouldn’t mean a thing to this man. “I just want you to talk,” said Murfree. “Five dollars for half an hour, just for tell- ing me about that outfit you built for some- body — that outfit that stops neutrons cold.” Bud Gregory blinked at him. “Neutrons,” Murfree reminded him, “are the little bits of stuff that make the Geiger counter — the funny radio tube — conduct electricity. You made an outfit for somebody that would stop them.” Bud Gregory grinned. “Now, how in heck did you know that?” he asked, marveling. “That fella wasn’t like- ly to tell nobody, an’ I ain’t!” “I know!” said Murfree grimly. “That fel- low wasn’t as smart as he thought he was. He’s dead. That outfit killed him.” Bud Gregory was startled. Then his grin turned rueful. “Serves ’im right,” he said uncomfortably, “but it’s his own fault. I told him it was dang’rous, but he done me a dirty trick. He swore he was gonna law me for the way I fixed his car. He said the way I fixed it, he couldn’t sell it even if it would run. “Then he says he'd call it square if I fixed up another kinda gadget for ’im, but I was gonna go to jail or have to pay for his car if I didn’t. I told him it was dang’rous, but I didn’t have no money to pay for his car. It run good, too! Better’n a new one!” Murfree waited. He counted out five one- dollar bills. “If he’s dead,” repeated Bud Gregory un- comfortably, “it ain’t my fault! I told him it was dang’rous but he wanted it, so ruther’n try to pay a hundred an’ a quarter or have a pack o’ lawin’, I done it. It took a time, too!” Murfree handed over one one-dollar bill. “That's sLx minutes’ talk,” he said. “Go on.” Bud Gregory leaned back. He spat ex- pansively. “Don’t mind this kind of work so much,” he said appreciatively. “This fella come drivin’ in just like you done. He’d skidded off a wet clay patch an’ smashed his radiator all to smithereens. He wanted me to fix it. It was too tough a job. “I told him I didn't aim to work myself to death, but he kept pesterin’ me, so I says, ‘All right. I’ll fix ’er so she can run for ten dollars.’ I thought that’d scare him off, but he took me up. An’ I didn’t know how to fix it, but I knew I could figger out a way. “So I got to thinkin’, with him pacin’ up an’ down waitin’ for me to set to work. An’ I thought to myself, ‘Fixin’ that radiator is a job of work! It’d be easier to figger out some other way to keep her cool!’ An’ then it come to me.” “What?” “All a radiator does,” drawled Bud Greg- ory, “is let the heat get out of the coolin’ water. His radiator wasn’t no good. If I fixed up some other way to take the heat out of the coolin’ water, she’d run just as good an’ I could bypass the radiator with a piece o’ THE GREGORY CIRCLE 61 hose. So I done it. Took me near an hour.” “How’d you take the heat out of the wat- er?” demanded Murfree. “Shucks!” said Bud Gregory. “I got a knack for that kind of thing. Y’know you can heat a wire by passin’ a current through it. I figured you can cool a wire by takin’ cur- rent out of it. “I fixed up a wire so the little hunks of stuff that metal’s made of got all lined up. Then the heat tries to knock ’em out of line, an’ makes ’em pass on them — uh — them little spinnin’ things that a electric current is.” M URFREE felt a crawling sensation at the back of his skull. This was un- canny. Bud Gregory was speaking of the polarization of atoms in a metal wire — which cannot be done — so that the random move- ments imparted by heat — which he could not know anything at all about — would set up strains which could only be relieved by an exchange of electrons, which would in turn, mean a current of electricity. He had simply reversed the normal process of turning current into heat, and had turned heat into electricity to cool a motor. The direct transformation of heat into electricity has been a scientists’ dream for a hundred years, one never accomplished. But Bud Gregory had done it to save him- self the trouble of repairing a shattered radiator. “So,” said Bud Gregory, “I stuck that wire in a hose an’ bypassed the radiator. It’d take out the heat an’ give current. I strung some ordinary wire under the car to use up the current. That’s all. “The car run good. He went off, but a week later he come back ragin’ that he couldn’t sell his car. Nobody ’d buy it without a regu- lar radiator workin’. How long I been talk- in’?” Murfee silently passed over another dollar bill. Bud Gregory was decidedly something that there is no word for. He knew intuitive- ly the things that trained scientists have as yet only partly found out. Just as some men know by instinct where fish will be found and what bait they will rise to, Bud Gregory knew the behavior of atoms and electrons. As freak mathematical marvels— -some of them half-imbeciles otherwise — perform in- finitely complex mathematics problems in their heads with no clear idea of the process, so Bud Gregory performed miracles in phys- ics with no idea how he did it. He simply knew the right answer when a problem was presented. Murfree felt an envy so acute that it was almost hatred. But back in the hills there was a thing that might make the world un- inhabitable. And Bud Gregory had made it. He fondled the dollar bill, folding it. “He wanted me to fix his car right, he says, an’ I got mad. I told him it was righter than when it was made. An’ it was! Then he says he’s goin’ to law me. But then he says, ‘Look here! I was makin’ a trip lookin’ for some minerals. “ ‘I got a thing that helps me find ’em, but part of it’s got lost. You fix me another an’ it’ll save me a long trip out an’ I’ll forget about the car an’ pay you ten dollars extra.’ ” He spat with an air of luxury. “He had a dinkus like you got, only big- ger. An’ he’d had a sheet o’ metal that was supposed to block off them little hunks of stuff that come down out of the sky. That’s what’d got lost. He says if I can fix somethin’ to take its place he’ll call it square, but he’ll law me otherwise.” Murfree interpreted mentally. Someone had been making a trip into the Smokies in search of minerals. He had a Geiger counter. He must have been working on a hunch that uranium could be found. It was not im- probable. When Bud Gregory fixed his car in an ut- terly improbable fashion — as he’d fixed Mur- free’s — -this unknown other man had under- stood, like Murfree. But he’d come back in feigned rage and demanded the equivalent of a cadmium shield, knowing that cadmium was unavailable. He’d realized what Bud Gregory was — a near-illiterate with intuitive knowledge of what subatomic particles could be made to do, a knowledge as unreasoning and as un- conscious as the feats of mathematical ge- niuses. He’d demanded an impossibility be- cause he knew Bud Gregory could achieve it. And Bud Gregory had! “He made me plenty mad,” said the lanky man, resentfully. “He stood there sneerin’ at me, sayin’ if I was so smart as to fix his car so it would run an’ he couldn’t sell it, maybe I could fix somethin’ that he needed. Either that or else.” Murfree recognized something like genius in the unknown man too. He’d taken the one infallible course to make Bud Gregory work. Threaten his leisure and sneer at his ability. Of course the unknown got what he wanted! THRILLING WONDER STORIES 62 “So?” said Murfree. “I fixed him up!” said Bud Gregory in amiable spite, “I fixed up a couple of radio tubes — he had ’em — an’ made ’em so that they made a kind of horn -shaped — uh — block. Nothin’ could go through it. Nothin’! No matter what size you fixed it, the horn ’ud be the same shape, an’ you could make it any size. “Nothin’ would get through the walls of that horn. Not even them little hunks of stuff you call — uh — neutrons. I set up the dinkus an’ showed him. “His clickin’ dinkus didn’t click any more. It stopped them neutrons dead. An’ then I says, ‘Just for extra, you can run a wire around the place you camp an’ set this upside down an’ not even bugs can get in to crawl on you. But it’s dangerous! It’s dangerous!’ ” He looked at Murfree, grinning. “I figured it’d make him sick as a dog but I’d warned ’im! It ain’t my fault if he stayed in it an’ died!” Murfree saw. He saw much more than Bud Gregory could tell him. He envisioned a quarter-mile circle of wire, built in a re- mote mountain valley. It made a horn-shaped — cone-shaped — barrier reaching down into the earth. Nothing could pass through that barrier, not even neutrons. There is some slight radio-activity every- where. Even rocks possess it. It is the cause of the internal heat of the earth. Perhaps the unknown man had come upon indications of uranium ore underground in that valley, perhaps not. But, surrounded by a shield through which no neutron could escape, any mass of material on earth would become an atomic pile! A SINGLE molecule of uranium in any mass of rock will sooner or later dis- integrate, giving off high-speed neutrons. Normally they travel indefinitely and are harmless. Some go up into the air and may ionize a single molecule. Some may find a fissionable atom and disrupt it. But by far the greater number are simply lost. Because they can escape. Within a bar- rier from which they cannot escape, they would bounce backward and forward until, within even a limited mass of matter, they did disrupt another atom. Neutrons from that disrupted atom would then go on and on! An ordinary atomic pile must be of a cer- tain minimum size because it loses so many neutrons from its outer surface that no chain- reaction can maintain itself. As the size of the pile increases the number that does not escape increases faster than the number that does. There is a size where enough strike fissionable atoms before escaping to maintain the reaction. When as many are freed as escape the pile, a chain reaction sustains itself. But when none can escape, there is no minimum size. There is no minimum purity of materials. Prevent neutrons from escaping and any- thing at all, of any size, becomes an atomic pile. Murfree passed over a third dollar bill. “Now I’m paying you to listen to me,” he said evenly. “That man used your outfit and made a circular block for neutrons a quarter- mile across with the horn pointed down. Maybe a million, maybe five million tons of rock were inside it. Maybe there was some uranium in it too. None of the neutrons could escape. Each one bounced back and forth until it broke another atom. That made more neutrons bounce back and forth and break other atoms. You knew that would happen. You knew even a little pile would make him sick. But he made a monstrous one! It didn't make him sick. It killed him. “Perhaps he intended to run it a while and then shut it off. It would have created enough radioactive isotopes by its normal working to make him a millionaire many times over. But he didn’t turn it off in time! Because it killed him! And so the pile kept on working! “Back in the mountains it’s working now. There’s hot air rising from it and every breath of it is deadly poison! It goes up high and the winds spread it and presently it comes down to the ground again and kills. He didn’t turn it off!” Bud Gregory gaped at him. It was clear that he had never thought of such a thing. So much more than a genius that there is no word for it, he was like a child or a savage in that he could not think ahead. But he understood now. The unnameable intuition which had carried him to the achievement of a miracle had not told him the consequences of the miracle. But as Murfree pointed them out he saw. “M-my gosh!” said Bud Gregory. He looked enormously concerned. “Nobody can live to get to it to turn it off,” said Murfree, grimly. “Maybe a plane can drop a bomb that will blast it. But it’ll be weeks before I can make myself believed. THE GREGORY CIRCLE 63 Meanwhile there’s poison being poured into the air. People are dying right now. “For five miles around that thing you made, there’s not even a blade of grass alive. The people in the cabins for ten miles around are dying and don’t know why. And that horn- shaped mass of ore and earth inside your field is full of more flying neutrons than any atom pile ever was. “Suppose -we turn that shield off with a bomb and all those free neutrons are turned loose at once! How far away will they kill every living thing? Fifty miles? A hundred miles?” Bud Gregory swallowed. He undoubtedly understood more clearly than Murfree him- self, now that it was pointed out to him. “M-my gosh!” he said again. “I — uh — I didn’t meant nothin’ like that!” Murfree handed him a fourth dollar bill with an indescribable sensation of irony. “Now tell me how to turn it off without killing everybody all the way to here!” he commanded evenly. “If it kills me to do it that’s all right. But if you don’t tell me how to stop the thing I’m going to kill you, you know. Here and now.” He didn’t raise his voice. He didn’t realize that he was threatening. It simply seemed necessary. If Bud Gregory could doom a continent or a world and not be able to stop what he had created, he was too dangerous to be allowed to live. But Bud Gregory spoke unhappily. “I didn’t mean nothin’ like that! I just meant to make that fella sick as a dog. I figured he might make a little horn an’ sleep in it when he camped. He’d be plenty sick by mornin’. But the dumb fool — ” Then he knitted his brows. “I’ll figure out something. I gotta knack for that kinda thing.” CHAPTER VI . . . Who Wasn’t There J UST three days later, Murfree was back at the high hill-crest which was actually a pass between mountains. A steady wind blew from behind him. All about him the world was dead. Nothing lived. Nothing! He didn’t carry the counter, now. There was no point in it. He carried, instead, a clumsy contrivance set up in a wooden box in which canned to- matoes had once reached the village of Bran- don. Bud Gregory walked with him, anxiously holding before him a loop of wire which he said would stop the neutrons for his own protection. Bud Gregory had actually sat up at night to make the outfit for his own protection and the mass of tangled wiring Murfree carried. They reached a spot where they could look into the valley beyond. It was literally a val- ley of death. There was nothing alive in it. Not one blade of grass, not one shrub, not one bird or insect, not even a bacterium. Everything was dead. And a swirling, humming column of heated air rose skyward, snatching up deadly dust from a quarter-mile patch of earth that was quite red-hot, now. Every grain of that dust was the most deadly stuff known to men. Bud Gregory looked. He was pale. He had come through miles of desolation. He had seen the silent cabins of the mountain- folk and the shriveled crops that they had planted. He knew that he had made the thing which had killed them. But now, looking down at the carbonized half-cabin and the heap of huddled garments in it which had been a man, he muttered defensively. “That fella played heck! I told him it was dang’rous!” He propped up his loop of wire so that it still protected him. Murfree silently unloaded himself. Bud Gregory made a final assembly. There were a few — a very few — radio tubes. Murfree had traced every lead in the com- plicated wiring, and he could not even be- gin to understand it. By all modern knowledge of electronics, it would do nothing whatever. The tubes would light and current would flow and nothing would happen — according to modern know- ledge of such things. But Bud Gregory had labored over it and risked his life to bring it here. He was untutored and almost illiterate, while Murfree had spent years in the study of just such science as this should represent. So Murfree helped as a naked savage might help to set up a radio-beam, in absolute ig- norance of even its basic principles. “Like I told you,” said Bud Gregory in a troubled voice, “this new outfit is like that there thing that makes that — uh — pile. Only this don’t make a hollow horn. This here is solid. It won’t only stop them — uh — neu- trons from goin’ through a place. It’ll stop THRILLING WONDER STORIES 64 ’em dead in their tracks, right where they are when it hits. It’s gonna make a lot of heat.” He set up what could only be a directional antenna, weirdly distorted. Later, much later, Murfree would draw the design from memory and then marvel at the pattern it would project. Now he was simply grim. Bud Gregory checked his connections. “All I’m worried about is the heat,” he said uncomfortably. “I euess we better not look.” He adjusted the weirdly-shaped antenna. He sighted by some instinctive method of his own. Then he turned his head. “Don’t look. It’s gonna get hot!” He threw a clumsy, home-made switch. And the earth rocked. There were probably some millions of tons of material acting as an atomic pile, filled with all the monstrous energy of speeding neutrons. Then, suddenly, those neutrons stopped. Radioactivity stopped — dead. And all the monstrous power of the reaction in being, was converted into heat. It was not atomic energy at all. It was neutronic ener- gy, which is of a different and vastly lower order. But that was enough! The sheer expansion of stone, raised thous- ands of degrees in the fraction of a second, made the ground stagger. Murfree reeled as the very hill shook beneath him. There was a lurid flash of light. The dull-red glow- ing surface of the quarter-mile circle became instantly molten — white-hot — liquid! There was a monstrous bellowing and rumbling from the very bowels of the earth. And then the round lake of melted earth spouted upward. Gases underground strove mightily to expand in the mass of melted magma. Lava welled up and spread and en- gulfed the tiny fence and the half-burned cabin and the incredibly small apparatus which had created the whole cancerous ■thing. Cabin and everything else disappeared in the spreading white-hot flood. Then bubbles reached the surface. Gigan- tic masses of incandescent gas leaped up- ward. The rock was literally effervescing, boiling, bubbling in a horrible blinding froth which spouted masses of liquid stone into the sky. URFREE stood his ground for seconds Ivl only. Bud Gregory turned and ran and Murfree ran with him. Ahead of them a fiery mass of rock hurtled down and splashed. Fire broke out. There were other fires to right and left. Just once, as he fled, Murfree turned his eyes backward and saw a meteor-like mass of melted stone fall upon and obliterate the apparatus they had brought and used in the pass. Murfree felt, an illogical sense of re- lief even as he ran on desperately. The noise died down in half an hour. After all, huge as the thing had been, it was minute by comparison with an actual volcano, how- ever much more deadly. By the time they had reached the car storm-clouds were gather- ing over the blazing area. Ten miles away — the car ran perfectly from the first, in proof that there was no longer a neutron-flood to ionize the air — ten miles away they saw rain falling upon smokilv flaming hillsides. Lightning flashed among dark clouds. Water poured down. Not even a forest fire could survive such a down- pour. They went back to Brandon. It took them a day and night of steady driving, alternating at the wheel. Bud Gregory had little to say the whole way back. But when Murfree stopped the car before the repair shed and let him out Gregory grinned uncomfortably. “What you goin’ to do now?” He added apologetically: “I didn't mean to make noth- in’ like that. He made me mad an’ then he used that dinkus like it wasn’t meant to be used.” Murfree had deft his wife and daughter in Brandon while he went back into the hills. Now he spoke tiredly. “I’ll pick up my family and go hack to Washington. I’ll report as much as they’ll believe. Anyhow, when that rock cools off there’ll be more radioactive stuff in it than is available in all the rest of the world to- gether. Since your apparatus is cut off it won’t act as a pile now, but it’s plenty radio- active!” Bud Gregory swallowed. “I — uh — I lost time from work, goin’ along with you,” he said uneasily. “Y’oughta pay me day wages, anyhow. Huh? Say! You kinda liked that thing I fixed your car with. How’d you like to buy it?” Murfree grimly got out his wallet. He counted what he had left. It was his ex- penses for getting back home. “I’ve got just six hundred dollars,” he said. “It’s worth more, but I’ll give you that for it.” “She’s yours!” said Bud Gregory. All his uneasiness vanished. His eyes glistened. He THE GREGORY CIRCLE brought out the round cheesebox and put it in the back of Murfree’s car. “Anyhow,” he said contentedly,” I can al- ways make another one when I got a mind to. So long.” Murfree drove off and got his wife and little girl. He left Bud Gregory looking spec- ulatively at the eight automobiles awaiting the moment when he felt like working. . . . Back in Washington Murfree made his re- port At first they told him he was crazy. But seismographs did report a minor earth- quake centered just where he’d said. A plane flew over and brought back photographs which proved the truth. And then the Manhattan Project took over and built a splendid concrete road to the mass of highly if artificially radioactive rock and extracted large quantities of practi- cally every known radioactive isotope from it Everybody was happy. But they wanted badly to talk to Bud Gregory — and they couldn’t. When FBI men went to urge him impera- tively to came to Washington, he had dis- 65 appeared. He had bought one of the eight cars in his repair shop for twenty-five dollars, repaired it by some magic of his own and gone off with his wife and children. He was undoubtedly a motor-tramp, roam- ing the highways contentedly or sitting in magnificent somnolence, waiting until he felt like working or moving on. Incredible riches awaited him if he was ever found and con- sented to work. Neither event seemed likely. But Murfree was in the oddest situation of all. He couldn’t be officially praised for what he did on leave. Nor could he be required to give up the gadget he bought from Bud Gregory. And that gadget was useless. It worked, but nobody understood it, and every attempt to duplicate it had failed. Duplicates simply didn’t do anything. Murfee is still studying it. But he did gain something, after all. His wife and small daughter are likely to keep on living and he was promoted a grade in the Civil Service. Now he gets forty-seven hun- dred a year. When panic and widespread destruction threaten our cities, the Wizard of the Great Smokies invents a new gadget to protect America from atomic rockets — and uses it in an astounding and entertaining fashion — in THE NAMELESS SOMETHING Another Complete Bud Gregory Novelet Packed With Humor and Surprises By WILLIAM FITZGERALD Coming in Our Next Issue! VICTORIOUS FAILURE By BRYCE WALTON Professor Klauson stood on the threshold of immortality, only to be driven back by strange, unfathomable forces! W ITH good reason, Professor H. Klauson hesitated; his wife’s arms were holding him with a strange- ly insistent urgency and fear. He tried to dis- engage himself, but not with much enthusi- asm. Although he had not admitted it to anyone but the Presidium’s psycho-medic staff, he was afraid, too. Desperately and helplessly afraid. "Howard, please.” Her pale blue eyes were wide, staring into his with that intimacy only someone loved completely and without com- promise ever sees. "Don’t go back to the Laboratories, Howard. Don’t ever go back again.” He smiled, unsuccessfully. He had never been able to hide anything from Lin. “But, dear, this is ridiculous. We’re scien- tists! We’re not frightened by vague, in- tangible fears.” Her hands tightened on his shoulders. “We’re scientists; so let us admit the obvious. "VICTORIOUS FAILURE 67 Something doesn’t want you to ever com- plete your research, Howard. We’ve worked together for ten years, and now you’re right on the verge of discovering the secret of life itself. And it means more to humanity than anything else in the history of mankind. But I’m afraid, Howard, and so are you. What- ever is against us stopped you before. Your mind almost broke. It will try again, and this time your mind may not recover.” He managed to push her from him, and im- mediately he felt lonelier, isolated. His faint laugh sounded foolishly insincere. “Lin, for the love of science! You sound like a mystic. Any mind is liable to become unintegrated. You talk about invisible, in- tangible forces. These things can only be in men’s minds, dear. No mentality is im- mune to disorientation.” She sobbed, her head swung back and forth hopelessly. A cloud of lovely hair glinted liquidly in the shifting light from the har- monics glowing from the transparent walls of their apartment. He couldn’t leave her in this state. “Lin, darling, listen to me. I can’t abandon my life’s work. Particularly something so profoundly important to humanity. One more projection, and my ‘closed system’ principle will be concluded. After that, think of it, Lin! This is really the one thing mankind has been seeking. All his other activities are only bypaths. With eternal life possible, man- kind will have a real reason for struggling onward. Lin — ” “No, Howard,” she was saying, brokenly. “There isn’t an argument. To me, your mind is more important. Why did your mind black out just before you could finish your last experiment? Why. the whole magnificent psycho-medical staff at the Presidium couldn’t find a reason. All the charts show you to be amazingly normal. There is some- thing bigger than our science. Howard. It doesn’t intend for you to ever finish your research.” “A woman’s intuition?” he said sardonical- ly- “Not a woman’s,” she corrected. “Ours. Because you feel it the same as I do.” SICK, vague fear came over him as he stood there nervously, remembering the gleaming, arched height of the biochem- istry wards at World Science Presidium. That singularly awful instant just before he could finish his last experiment, when all his mental faculties had crumbled. The micro- film protector had just commenced whirring. Then that final spiraling downward into des- perate gray fear and unconsciousness. There had to be a logical explanation so that whatever blockage stood between him and the conclusion of his research could be torn down. The secret of the single cell had long been his. Whatever that three-dim mi- crophoto film revealed, he and only he could turn the key to open the ultimate secret door into victorious eternity for all man- kind. Now he blinked burning eyes. Lin was, of course, right. He felt it. too. A hidden, omnipresent kind of force that would pre- vent him from completing his research. But such a thought was adult infantilism, at best. A hidden force! In his world there had to be logical sequence of cause and effect. But even the psycho-medic staff hadn’t been able to find one. “Howard,” she was saying, lips quivering. “Remember our Moon House?” Klauson bristled, froze. “I remember. The World gave us a magnificent marble house on the Moon overlooking Schroeter’s Canyon — a return favor for my many gifts to man- kind. What a juvenile farce. Imagine me sitting up there on the Moon, with you — two futile little escapists, haunted by our own uselessness, and our fears. No, Lin. I’ve my particular destiny to fulfill. It isn’t hiding away on the Moon. I’ll never accept retire- ment on the Moon, or any place else. Ether now, or after my research on the life force. I’d rather die than stop working in science.” He started for the exit panel. Her voice cut deeply, slowed him, turned him. “You’re going to the Laboratories again then,” she asked faintly, “in spite of what happened before?” He nodded, but when he tried to say yes, his throat was dry and sticky. “Good-by, Howard,” she said. She was crying when he left. It made him feel terribly lost and guilty to leave her cry- ing. But he had to. What made it so bad was that Lin had never cried before; she was so strong, emotionally. Without any real cause, this made him more nervous and ir- ritable. But he was one of the world’s great- est scientists. Everything must have a cause, somewhere. Sometime. His gyroear dropped down on the spacious roof-landing of the Biochemistry Building at the World Science Presidium. It was be- ginning to rain — solid, heavy, sharp-driving THRILLING WONDER STORIES drops that spattered on the dull, plastic mesh as he walked hurriedly across it to the ifr- gress. “Hello, Professor Klauson. This is a sur- prise. I didn’t know you would be coming back so soon.” Klauson started violently, clutched at his heart. A sudden, shooting pain was there. Yet the staff had found nothing wrong with his mental or physical integration. They had checked and rechecked. “Oh — it’s you — Larry!” He paused, re- lieved. “You — you startled me, Larry. I didn’t see anyone on the landing.” “I just came over to do a little work on my own,” Larry explained. He was a young, enthusiastic, highly capable student biochemist, with a shock of unruly black hair. He had graduated from World Tech seven years ago, and had been Klauson’s assistant for five, working with him faithfully, sometimes during those gruel- ing sixty-four hour stretches. He had been the only one with Klauson when he had lost consciousness. “Didn’t expect you back so soon, Profes- sor,” said Larry, talking casually as their elevator dropped them down below the sub- floor level into the spacious, almost vaulted silence of Klauson’s private laboratories. “Say, Professor, you intend to try to finish up again tonight?” Klauson stiffened. He was here, he felt capable enough. It was only a matter of a few hours. Why not? Even as a therapeutic measure. “I believe I will, Larry. I wasn’t intending to, but now that you’re here, too, I might as well.” Larry said nothing. He stood in the soft, yet full brilliance of the invisible flueros, his black, almost blue hair hanging over his eyes. He smiled. Klauson started, he had never quite responded this way to Larry’s expression before. It seemed — peculiar, rath- er strange. He discarded that chain of thought and looked about his laboratory. OTHING had changed. Not that Klauson had expected things to be different. The microphoto film cabinets stood tier upon tier, a long stretch of recorded effort, a com- plete step-by-step, intricate process of cre- ating life from that awesome moment when he had known the successful preparation of the first simple colloid and had started on AMtanib .eunlnacie Through the actual combination of the first molecules and the organic colloid and then the first tiny speck of synthesized protoplasm. The frenzied day and night battle against time. Time, that was the predominant factor in nature that did tile trick. But he had com- pressed millions of years into twenty-five. From simple, organic compound through the simple colloid, the protein, the primitive pro- toplasm, the simplest unicellular organism, the flagellate and — then the great jump into the structure of the gene, the ferreting-out of that intricate, vital combination that gave man life and maintained it. He had con- quered — almost. The high, arched ceiling in the lab with its glowing columns and its streamlined equipment had been provided him by the en- tire earth — provided him by man’s coopera- tive faith in himself. Men who would find k> much greater an impetus to fight ahead if they only knew that whatever other suc- cess they might have, their ultimate end was inevitably life, instead of death. But he would affirm a greater investment of their faith than their wildest dreams had ever granted him. No other man, or com- bination of men, in the world could syn- thesize all the knowledge in those cabinets and emerge with the final answer that he alone could evolve. No one but himself. Larry Verrill might possibly develop some capacity to work on the chain. But unlikely. High specialization had made it Klauson’s responsibility alone. Enthusiasm, eagerness was returning; the fear was gone. “It’s so simple, really, now that it’s prac- tically over,” he said as he unzipped his aerogel cloak, and stepped toward the micro- photo film projector. He was talking mostly to himself, a habit of his, only partly to Ver- rill. “Yes,” said Larry softly. “I suppose you might call it simple.” “Carrel saw to it that cells with which he experimented had a chance to achieve im- mortality. Under controlled conditions, the growth proceeds forever, logically. The body, a collection of cells, is a ‘closed system.’ Like a gyrocar, that’s what we called it, didn’t we, Larry? No closed system can endure unless it can inspect itself, oil itself, and keep itself in repair. A gyrocar can’t do that, but the body can and does, though imper- fectly.” Klauson warmed to his subject, and his VICTORIOUS FAILURE §S voice assumed a fresh vigor. “We’ve conquered that imperfection! Yet I can hardly believe it myself. People can go on living without that final terrible, un- conscious fear of death that must defeat them. One more projection, Larry. One re- maining link for correlation. The answer is right here in this projector. An actual three- dimensional record of the very first spark in the heart of the cell itself, the primary bursting of a carbon atom commingling with a single cell, creating life. It’s the first and the final record, Larry.” Larry nodded, but his lips were twisted in a rather sad, cynical smile, it seemed to Klauson. “So simple, isn’t it, Professor?” “Yes, it really is,” asserted Klauson, his enthusiasm blinding him to the peculiar re- action of Larry Verrill. “Whatever is re- vealed in this three-dim projection will con- tain the final step for the infinite prolonga- tion of human life. When I synthesize it with Compton’s H-9 film, we’ll have it. Incredible, isn’t it?” “You may not realize just how incredible. How could you?” said Verrill. “Nor I either, for that matter.” Klauson hesitated, his hand frozen above the button that would throw the projector into life. Then, shrugging, his hand started to move down. But it didn’t. For then, unbelievably, terrifyingly, it hap- pened a second time. Professor H. Klauson felt a blackness encompassing the mighty, vaulted laboratory. It closed in tightly, smothering, icy. It wrapped his entire swirl- ing mind in darkness. . . . A little round man smiled broadly at him from a stool close to his bed in the psycho- ward. "Remember me. Professor?” His face beamed with self-possession. “You’re the clinic psychologist who han- dled the other electroencephal checkup,” said Klauson quickly. “Or are you?” “Good recall.” commented the psychol- ogist. “Name’s Dunnel. I’ve rechecked your whole file since your — ah — second disorienta- tion. Weak alphas of course; but that’s nec- essary in your type. No disrhythmia. Tempo’s exceptionally well balanced. Look, Profes- sor Klauson, there is still no logical reason for your being here. But meanwhile, these charts don’t fib. But I’m not so smug as to think we know so much about the old cortex. Still, logically, we can’t find a reason.” “But there must be a — ” “Oh, well find out, Professor. How do you feel now? The harmonics working all right?” "Not quite. Dunnel, both times I have been, well, terribly afraid before the at- tacks. Some kind of intuition. My wife noticed it, too.” “You’re beginning to build delusions and rationalizations. We must guard against that. You’re bound to put undue emphasis on it, make it far more complex and important than it really is, because it happened at such criti- cal moments. You deal in absolutes, Profes- sor. Cause must equal effect.” “But it wasn’t coincidence either time,” insisted Klauson. “Not logically. Coincidence is too simple, too handy a gadget, Dunnel. Isn’t it?” “Maybe,” said Dunnel, lighting a cigarette. “Anyway, I won’t burden you with a lot of hasty probing around. The Staff says you’re O.K. to leave the clinic today. Come to my of- fice tomorrow afternoon if you feel like it. If you don’t, call me up and tell me why. See you tomorrow.” A little later after the Staff had given him another thorough going-over which revealed nothing amiss, he met his wife who was wait- ing for him with their gyrocar on the roof- landing. NLY a third of Klauson’s normal life was gone, yet he looked twice his age except for rare moments like this. He kissed Lin almost boyishly as they stood together looking over the gleaming plastic structures piercing a clear, blue sky. A soft warm sum- mer wind blew disarmingly over Washington. Finally Klauson said abruptly: “I’m sorry, Lin. You were right. I’ll admit the obvious. Something beyond the scope of our science is blocking my progress. But what is it?” She shook her head, her eyes brooding with concern for him, deep, dark. “I’ve talked with the Science Council,” she finally said in a whisper. She turned with resolution to face him. “Howard, they have agreed with me. You need a very long vaca- tion. Our Moon House is gathering Lunar dust, if there is any. I have the Council’s support now. We’re going to the Moon and we’re not going to think about anything that even suggests biochemistry.” “There isn’t any such a thing, not on this world,” said Klauson. “Howard. We’re going to raise extra-ter- restrial flowers.” 70 THRILLING WONDER STORIES Klauson stared, and was suddenly and vio- lently angry. “Flowers! You’re mad!” “But the Council’s on my side, Howard. They’re going to” — she paused, lips trem- bling — “going to accept your resignation from the Presidium.” A sick hate flooded his stomach, burst in his brain. He was stunned, impotent. He quivered silently. It was their own staff that had said there was nothing wrong with him! Yet, they were demanding that he resign! Rest on that escapist’s bromide, Luna. Re- treat from reality; rot in meaningless isola- tion. “I’ll not do it, Lin,” he announced harshly. “I refuse to drop a conclusion that might mean the final step in human evolution.” He was dazed, ill, as she led him silently into the gyrocar and piloted it to their apart- ment. No use arguing with Lin about it. She had that ageless woman’s selfish love to pro- tect her own kind. She and the Council had combined to work against him, instead of helping him solve the cursed enigma. As soon as they reached home, Klauson contacted the Council President, Gaudet, on the teleaudio. He argued the case, objected fiercely, begged. Gaudet was kind, logical. “We’re all so sorry, Klauson,” his huge head said. “But it is quite obvious that you absolutely need a lengthy period of relaxa- tion. Although our own staff can find no log- ical basis for this decision, we undoubtedly shall, and soon. “You worked almost steadily for ten years. It is very possible that some highly special- ized cellular blockage has developed that even our probers have failed to detect. A few years, raising flowers as Mrs. Klauson has suggested, something completely dissoci- ated from your present work, is probably the answer. Then you can return to your laboratories. Meanwhile, your assistant, Larry Verrill, can continue with your re- search, perhaps?” “Verrill is an excellent assistant,” Klauson said, controlling himself with difficulty. “But he can never finish my work. I operate, many times, empirically; you know that. My brain alone holds the key to correlate most of the basic links of the chain.” But no amount of discussion could per- suade Gaudet. It had all been definitely de- cided by the Council and Lin. He would re- tire to the Moon House by Schroeter’s Can- yon and raise fantastic flowers in the Moon’s unique environmental conditions. He would vegetate and rot with the flowers! “Raising flowers!” Klauson sagged, groaned helplessly, desperately. The next afternoon in Dunnel’s office with its psycho-harmonics shifting benevolently from the opaque walls, Dunn el was saying: “Fear of failure, that’s one possibility; un- likely though. Doesn’t check with your psycho-charts.” “There is no doubt,” Klauson said. “I’m just as certain about this conclusive step as I’ve been about every one I’ve taken since I began.” “But you don’t know,” Dunnel pointed out, “until you’ve concluded and some illu- sive censor prevents that. Wait! Here’s an- other possibility: maybe you’re afraid of the consequences of giving humanity the ability to live forever! Think of what it would mean. Think of it consciously! I can’t. It’s too big. Every basic pattern completely altered. Psychology and the social sciences, particu- larly, would no longer apply. Humanity would become something unhuman by all present standards of evaluation. It’s really an alien concept, Professor. Subconsciously, you’re afraid of what it would mean!” “I see your reasoning there, Dunnel. Frankly, I’ve never considered that at all. I’ve been so wrapped up in the thing itself.” “But let’s assume that your subconscious has been working on it,” insisted Dunnel. “I tell you, Professor; you go back to that lab- oratory of yours, right now. Get in there with all the fatal paraphernalia and just in- trospect for a while. Think of the whole, and go beyond the limits of your specialized course. There are so many possible conse- quences to a sudden transition from mortality to immortality. Think about the things that can, and will, happen. Seems to me, that might well be the motivation for the fear. And, Professor, come back and see me to- morrow.” K LAUSON was like the pilots who get rocket psychosis on their first Luna run, and who must immediately make an- other flight or lose their resistance to space- fear forever. He must go back to the labora- tory. Try again. And Dunnel’s diagnosis about Klauson’s possible fear of the consequences of giving humanity sudden immortality — he definitely had something there. Klauson wondered why he had never thought of it before. Like Dun- VICTORIOUS FAILURE 71 nel had said, it would change every present standard of humanity. The enormity of the possible repercussion! Klauson trembled a little with triumph. Yes, that could be the basis for the fear. A scientist must weigh the consequences of his discoveries. Would the secret of eternal life be a boon, or a catastrophe for man? Klauson entered a public teleaudio booth and got Verrill’s apartment in east Washing- ton. Verrill’s eyes seemed to have changed — they looked like those of someone else. Ridiculous. Yes, he did need a rest. “Verrill,” he said tightly, “I’m going back to the laboratory again, right now. I want you there, too.” Verrill’s eyes widened, then narrowed. His mouth slipped into that sad, cynical grin. “If you insist, Professor. And you always would, of course.” "Why — er — naturally, I will.” said Klauson. “Meet me there in fifteen minutes.” The teleaudio faded, but Klauson sat there a moment. He brushed at his face wearily. So strange, the way Verrill had talked — like a stranger almost. But fifteen minutes later the vaulted height of the gleaming labora- tory was very silent, and seemed, somehow, cold, as Klauson saw Verrill walking toward him. Verrill seemed to blot out the labora- tory, loom extraordinarily large before him. Klauson had unconsciously been backing away. He felt the hard cold light of the sup- porting column against the small of his back. He was looking, fearfully, into Larry Ver- niks eyes. Into his eyes! Into incredible, swirling blackness. Into space and time and — - eternity. And Professor H. Klauson — knew. “Varro.” said the thin, wavering body. “It is time for your little transmigration. The Switcher is ready. Don’t think too much about what you must do. We are four-dimen- sional but we are still not very well adapted to the complications of the coordinate stream.” Klauson knew, yet it was far beyond his capacity to understand. He was seeing some- thing that had happened, yet was still to hap- pen. Fourth dimensionally, time, as he knew it, was meaningless. The man who had spok- en in this strange world revealed by Verrill’s alien brain, was named Grosko. The other figure, Varro, was also Verrill. Klauson knew that, but he understood very little. Grosko’s boneless fmgetfe were manipulat- ing the matrix coordinate console. “I’ve never been convinced,” muttered Varro. “It is an incomprehensible cycle, even to our fourth-dimensional minds. Where can there ever be any logical end?” “You have already taken on some of your three-dimensional characteristics — those of Verrill, whose body you will assume control of, and merge your mentality with. Already you are beginning to think in terms of ab- solutes, in terms of three-dimensional logic. Forget a hypothetical end, which our fourth- dimensional consciousness knows cannot exist. You will encounter no difficulties. You will gradually adjust yourself to their concepts of the absolute; but still you will retain enough of your Varro mentality to carry out your assignment.” “But it seems so unprogressive in the Uni- versal sense,” persisted Varro. “Everything seems only a big, futile circle.” “But not for us; that is your three-dimen- sional absolutism creeping in already though you have not even begun merging with Ver- rill yet. You are beginning to make pre- mature psychological adjustments. There are countless tangents of probability. And in the particular one that has evolved us, Professor Klauson must be prevented from completing his research. If he does, we will not evolve. But of course we have evolved, so it is in- evitable that you will carry out your assign- ment successfully. Inevitable.” “No free agency, even in the eternal sense.” mused Varro. “Everything in all