“The Three Eternals!” he burst out, when York had finished. “They are the same three who imprisoned me here! It came about in this way. I am of Mu, not Atlantis. I discovered the life-elixir, independently, partook of it, and in my utter zeal, decided to house my already immortal brain in an indestructible body, so that even accidental death could not claim my life. I would live forever! Ah, it was a foolish aim, not knowing at the time how palling life can become.”
For a moment Kaligor radiated the same ultra ennui of the Three Eternals. York and Vera realized that perhaps someday they too would long for escape.
Kaligor went on “We had skilled surgeons in our civilization, and one of these I had transfer my living, immortal brain into this robot housing. I had previously devised a solution surrounding my brain that drew energy from space itself, which pervades all things. I had spent two centuries constructing my robot body. It is not metal, as it appears to your eye. It is not matter at all, for matter can be destroyed. I wanted something absolutely indestructible. This body of mine is made of—what shall I call it?—interwoven energy. A sort of fibroid cloth of fundamental warped space time. When you destroy an atom, what is left? Its energy, which cannot be destroyed—ever. Of this is my body made.”
York faintly understood. “I see why my brain wave stopped so suddenly when it struck your form. I was commanding pure energy to vanish, with pure energy. A figure telling its mirror image to be gone!”
Kaligor waved a stumpy hand, in dismissal and went on.
“Thus finally and truly immortal, I began to think of the future. Plans of leading Mu’s civilization to astounding heights formed. And then, before I could begin, Mu crashed’ down into the sea, in that Titanic struggle for mastery with Atlantis, our bitter enemy.
“Tons of masonry fell on me, with no effect, of course. I found myself at the bottom of the sea, eventually, all my people drowned, murdered. Walking over the sea bottom to the shores of Atlantis, filled with horror, I was prepared to wreak vengeance. But Atlantis went down of itself, and civilization was done!”
His psychic tones were dull. “I must have sat on a mountain top, overlooking the broad seas that covered Mu, for a century, brooding, thinking I was the only human mind alive. But one day, in this newly arisen continent, I saw human forms. Some had survived! I questioned them. Though half savage, and the sinking of Mu and Atlantis already a legend to them, I found they were descendants of Muan—survivors. My own people! My spirits sang and I began teaching them, building a new Muan civilization in place of the old.”
He paused, his thoughts darkening. “Then the Three Eternals came. I met them for the first time. They had been in space, as they told you, and had come back to find their land and mine in limbo. Being Atlantides, they hated the thought of Muans inheriting the new world. We battled. I’ could not vanquish them, without weapons, nor could they destroy me, though they blasted me with every hellish force of their devising.
“At last, chaining me, they took me down to this chamber, buried me forty miles below Earth’s surface in a solid, metal block, knowing that as long as Earth existed, I would live and think and never be free. Even insane, I could not die! Their last words to me were that they were going above to hunt down the Mu-descended savages. Every last one. Rather an Earth peopled only by dumb animals than Muans, was their bitter text.”
“They obviously failed.” York smiled grimly. “Since human life went on and civilization rose again, in time—Egypt, Sumeria, Maya, and so on.”
Kaligor’s bright mirror eyes looked at them strangely.
“And you, Anton York, are of my race. We have a bond between us, linking us across an age of time. And we have a common enemy,—the Three Eternals. You can see what their present plan means—to destroy once and for all the second Muan race and civilization. They will be forced to use Muan stock in their proposed civilization, but inculcated with the ancient Alantide ideology, which was ever a belief in rule of the many by the favoured few. We of Mu believed always in communal cooperation.”
York nodded.
“We will go to the surface and fight the Three Eternals,” he said, glad to have an ally of such merit. “At present, they think we are dead and—”
York stopped short.
Vera gave a vocal cry, feeling the delicate mental probe of the Three in her femininely sensitive brain.
In a split second of time, before the probe had focused, she warned her husband and Kaligor to close their minds.
York commended her with his eyes, and they forced their minds in a telepathic short circuit.
Kaligor had caught on instantly, and likewise stood mentally inert.
8
Vera heaved a sigh an hour later. The probe had gone. “Lead the way,” Kaligor said to York. “Up to the surface world, with your brain wave excavator.”
It took them a month, York and Vera alternately forming the tunnel slanting upward. They became skilled in producing, food, water and air, when needed. Kaligor stalked after them silently, needing none of these necessities of life. Deathless he truly was.
As they neared the surface, he betrayed increasing excitement. To see the Sun again, the bustle of life, after twenty thousand years of caged dreams! At times, however, Kaligor seemed wrapped in a mental fog—. The artificial vocal cords with which he was equipped murmured his ancient tongue. York and Vera caught the tailings of their mental origins—brief flashes of a Strange, incredible Universe, peopled with non-existent beings!
Once the robot-bodied man stopped, confused, and it was an hour before York could convince him it was Earth, and not the dream stuff of Wolkia. Kaligor shook his head sadly.
“I live in two worlds,” he murmured. “I will never be sure which is real! Too long, too long have I dwelt in that other land!”
Vera was invaluable as their sentinel against discovery by the Three Eternals’ periodic, suspicious probings with their long-range mental detector, from their laboratory on Mount Olympus. Her quick mind detected instantly what the two blunter male minds might have noticed seconds too late. At her signals, they locked their minds instantaneously.
They emerged in Australia, as York had carefully planned, for it would have been disaster to burst through into the Pacific’s watery bottom. York and Vera breathed free air thankfully, exulting in the warn sunlight that bathed their skins.
Kaligor leaned against a rock, his strangely flexible body trembling. Free at last of his horribly entombed fate, his was the emotion of a resurrected soul, mistakenly buried, a million times intensified.
Their thoughts expanding, free of the underground, they were not on guard.
“The mental probe!” Vera screamed suddenly.
They closed their minds—but a second too late. The mental gimlet became a battering force, trying to pry further. It was all they could do to resist. Kaligor waved silently and began running. After a mile, the force slipped away, off focus.
“Lost the range,” panted York. “I don’t think they found exactly where we are, in that short time. Only that we’re somewhere in Australia. But now they do know we’re alive! We must get to my space ship, in Sol City, as soon as possible. At least in that, if they find us, we can fly away.”
Constantly on guard now, they set out. In a week they had crossed jungle and desert, reaching a busy seaport. Not disclosing their identity, passing—themselves off as explorers and Kaligor as a mechanical robot little different from those in use for menial labours, they boarded a strato-liner for Sol City. Lacking the necessary paper “money”—units of work based on a technological system—York employed hypnotism to delude the officials into believing he had paid for the passage.