Kaligor went on, and suddenly it was all starkly clear to York.
A year went by, a year in which York, Vera and Kaligor laboured over intricate mechanisms.
Then, one day, they faced the Eternals once again at their island. Kaligor sat hunched at the controls of the ship. His telepathic radiation issued from a human brain, clothed in an inhuman shell. Their fleshly bodies offering sharp contrast York and Vera stood back of him, almost woodenly tense, as their plan was started.
“We have a new weapon,” boasted Kaligor to the enemy. “One that will not fail, Eternals. Death comes to you—”
Kaligor jerked a lever and a queer reddish beam sprang toward the enemy ship. It spangled against their screen, spread like red paint, but nothing else happened.
“A puny force, no better than your others!” chorused the Eternals triumphantly. “Now you, Kaligor and Anton York will greet that most final master—Death!”
Again York’s screen blazed to near extinction, as the Eternals threw their heaviest beams against it. And York’s ship fled for the fourth time, as though this were some play that must be enacted over and over again for all eternity.
Inside the ship, Kaligor manipulated the controls with his flexible, tentacular fingers. He drove the ship away at its utmost acceleration, arrowing into the open void. The more tender forms of York and Vera flattened against one wall, their eyes closing. Kaligor glanced at them and nodded in satisfaction. It would take the Eternals some time to catch up, at this superpace.
On and on the chase went, at rates unknown and impossible to ordinary space ships that mankind knew. Mars flashed by, then the asteroids, Jupiter, and finally Pluto, and the two ships catapulted out into the outer immensity, exceeding the speed of light. This was the final pursuit. It could end in only one way.
Kaligor felt the mental probe of the Three Eternals, playing over the unconscious forms of York and Vera, as though wondering what had happened to them. Even, for a moment, their visual teleray flicked about. Both probes left finally, and the chase went on Kaligor, though he could not grin physically, was certainly grinning within his human mind.
Inevitably, the green-hulled ship crawled closer, closer. Finally, within range, it began to batter at the screen again. Kaligor watched the needle spin to the danger mark—and pass it. The screen was down!
Flame leaped into the ship, searing, scorching. Metal glowed and melted. The two mortal bodies of York and Vera, still unmoving, unconscious, were touched by naked fire and then they began to dance and writhe. But only for a moment. Soon they were gone, consumed.
“The final sacrifice!” murmured Kaligor, watching the ship burn away around him.
Everything was consumed around Kaligor. But his body could not be consumed. He was out in space, free, the ship and all it had contained disintegrated to the last atom. A multitude of fiery stars decorated all space, watching indifferently this battle between superbeings.
“Thus you have finally been defeated, Kaligor!” came the telepathic voice from the victorious Three Eternals. “Anton York and his mate are no more and you—you will float through space, at your present velocity, for all eternity! It is a better end for you than what we had planned!”
But no answer came from Kaligor, to his ancient enemies. Instead, they barely detected a faint rumble.
“Binti! Mirbel! How good to see you again! I have just awakened from that dream. That dream of—what is it?—Earth! Binti, Mirbel, you are real. Not those others. They called you phantoms, Mirbel, and you, sweet Binti. They said you were just myths, figments of a dream I had spun in a long sleep. What was that other word? Yes, utmost. They called you dummies, and somehow, in that other dream of Earth, it was very significant, that word. Very significant, but I can’t remember—I can’t remember… Binti… Mirbel… I will stay with you now…”
“Dummies!” One of the Three Eternals roared that to the others. “Did you hear? I see it all now. We’ve been decoyed, lured away, while back on Earth—”
York back on Earth, turned away from the mind concentrator with which he had been projecting his thoughts out into space. Impinging on a delicate relay within the cleverly wrought dummy of himself aboard Kaligor’s ship, his mind had been there, as far as the Three Eternals’ mental probe had determined. Vera’s too. Now there was no reaction from the dummy-relay, proving the Eternals had finally caught up with Kaligor, after a long three-hour chase.
“It worked, Vera!” York cried “The Eternals have been decoyed at least beyond Pluto, thinking all the time that you and I were with Kaligor, when they were only life-like dummies. Organic robots, really, since they held our thoughts. And pretty cleverly made—artificial protoplasm, exact duplicates of us, in—case the Eternals used a visual check-up. Most important of all, the mental-relays within the dummies’ skull-cases.”
He laughed almost gaily. “The Three Eternals were fooled by one of the simplest, oldest tricks in the Universe!”
Vera was less jubilant, more solemn. “Kaligor thought of it,” she murmured. “His dream world was of some use after all. And now just think, Tony”—her voice became soft, pitying—“he must float on and on, in boundless space, never to know death. His sacrifice has been more, much more, than ours will be! And yet, perhaps, he would have it so. He will continue’ creating his mental universe, which he loves, and in which he—belongs. He will live in it! Perhaps who really knows?—it is as real as ours, to us. Life is all in the mind—” Her voice trailed away moodily.
York nodded, subdued. Then he stirred himself and piloted his ship up and out of the dense island jungle in which it was hidden. It was his own ship. The one Kaligor had piloted away had been an outward duplicate, built secretly in Sol City’s great factories.
“We have about three hours,” said York, “before the Eternals come back. Three hours for which Kaligor traded an eternity of helpless drifting.”
A few minutes later their ship hovered over the atoll marked for demolition, so that a geological process started years before might be reversed. York set his gamma-sonic weapon for instantaneous decomposition of the entire island to a depth of five miles. His generators were loaded to the full.
His lips pursed in anticipation as he depressed the button. Once again his unobtrusive violet ray shot forth from its gravity-fed power coils. Hissingly it struck the island, and the marble home of the absent Three Eternals, boring down at the speed of light.
Layers of matter peeled away and vanished in puffs of soot. Before the ocean waters roared in to fill the breech, the five-mile pit had been formed.
York flung his ship up at full speed as a spume of water spurted from the impact of walls of water crashing together with the face of solid steel. Down below, in the invisible depths of Earth that they had so recently quitted, a titanic ground vibration had spawned. Like a match it would touch off the gunpowder of subsea plasma. There would be a clashing of Gargantuan forces, one started years before by the Eternals. For a while the Behemoth of an earthquake would reign widely on Earth’s surface. But then it would be over, and Earth would be quiet…
Three hours later, York found confirmation of his success.
The bubbles arising from the Pacific floor had lessened by half. Mu was halting its slow upward climb. And in the Atlantic, a continent buried for twenty thousand years in its watery grave also ceased to seek an unnatural resurrection. “It is done!” breathed York, with quiet pride.
Vera’s face strained for the past days, grew yet more haggard.
“It is done!” she repeated, but with a deeper meaning. Suddenly she was in his arms, sobbing. “Is there no escape, Tony?”