In "Tarrano the Conqueror" is presented a tale of the year 2430 A.D.—a time somewhat farther beyond our present-day era than we are beyond Columbus' discovery of America. My desire has been to create for you the impression that you have suddenly been plunged forward into that time—to give you the feeling Columbus might have had could he have read a novel of our present-day life.
To this end I have conceived myself a writer of that future time, addressing his contemporary public. You are to imagine yourself reading a present day translation of my original text—a translation so free that a thousand little colloquialisms will have crept into it that could not possibly have their counterparts in the year 2430.
Apart from the text, you will occasionally find brief explanatory footnotes. Conceive them as having been put there by the translator.
If you find parts of this tale unusual or bizarre, please remember that we are living now in a comparatively ignorant day. The tale is not intended to be fantastic or full of new and strange ideas. I have used nothing but those developments of our present-day civilization to which we are all looking forward as logical probabilities—woven them into a picture of what life in America very probably will be five hundred years from now. To that extent, the tale itself is intended to be only a love story of adventure and romance—written, not for you, but for that future audience.
RAY CUMMINGS.
CHAPTER I. The New Murders
CHAPTER II. Warning
CHAPTER III. Spy in the House
CHAPTER IV. To the North Pole
CHAPTER V. Outlawed Flight
CHAPTER VI. Man of Destiny
CHAPTER VII. Prisoners
CHAPTER VIII. Unknown Friend
CHAPTER IX. Paralyzed!
CHAPTER X. Georg Escapes
CHAPTER XI. Recaptured
CHAPTER XII. Tara
CHAPTER XIII. Love—and Hate
CHAPTER XIV. Defying Worlds
CHAPTER XV. Escape
CHAPTER XVI. Playground of Venus
CHAPTER XVII. Violet Beam of Death
CHAPTER XVIII. Passing of a Friend
CHAPTER XIX. Waters of Eternal Peace
CHAPTER XX. Unseen Menace
CHAPTER XXI. Love, Music—and a Warning
CHAPTER XXII. Revolution!
CHAPTER XXIII. First Retreat
CHAPTER XXIV. Attack on the Palace
CHAPTER XXV. Immortal Terror
CHAPTER XXVI. Black Cloud of Death
CHAPTER XXVII. Tarrano The Man
CHAPTER XXVIII. Thing in the Forest
CHAPTER XXIX. A Woman's Scream
CHAPTER XXX. The Monster
CHAPTER XXXI. Industriana
CHAPTER XXXII. Departure
CHAPTER XXXIII. First Assault
CHAPTER XXXIV. Invisible Assailants
CHAPTER XXXV. Attack on the Power House
CHAPTER XXXVI. City of Ice Besieged
CHAPTER XXXVII. Battle
I was standing fairly close to the President of the Anglo-Saxon Republic when the first of the new murders was committed. The President fell almost at my feet. I was quite certain then that the Venus man at my elbow was the murderer. I don't know why, call it intuition if you will. The Venus man did not make a move; he merely stood beside me in the press of the throng, seemingly as absorbed as all of us in what the President was saying.
It was late afternoon. The sun was setting behind the cliffs across the river. There were perhaps a hundred and fifty thousand people within sight of the President, listening raptly to his words. It was at Park Sixty, and I was standing on the Tenth Level.[1] The crowd packed all twelve of the levels; the park was black with people. The President stood on a balcony of the park tower. He was no more than a few hundred feet above me, well within direct earshot. Around him on all sides were the electric megaphones which carried his voice to all parts of the audience. Behind me, a thousand feet overhead, the main aerials were scattering it throughout the city, I suppose five million people were listening to the voice of the President at that moment. He had just said that we must remain friendly with Venus; that in our enlightened age controversies were inevitable, but that they should be settled with sober thought—around the council table. This talk of war was ridiculous. He was denouncing the public news-broadcasters; moulders of public opinion, who every day—every hour—must offer a new sensation to their millions of subscribers.
He had reached this point when without warning his body pitched forward. The balcony rail caught it; and it hung there inert. The slanting rays of the sun fell full upon the ruffled white shirt; white, but turning pink, then red, with the crimson stain welling out from beneath.
For an instant the crowd was stunned into silence. Then a murmur arose, and swelled into shouts of horror. A surge of people swept me forward. I could not see clearly what was happening on the balcony. The form of the murdered President was hanging there against the rail; a score of government officials were rushing toward it; but the body, toppling over the low support, came hurtling downward into the crowd, quite near me; but I could not reach it—the throng was too dense.
The shouts everywhere were deafening. I was shoved along the Tenth Level by the press of people coming up the stairway. Shouts, excited questions; the wail of children almost trampled under foot; the screams of women. And over it all, the electrically magnified voice of the traffic director-general in the peak of the main tower roaring his orders to the crowd.
It was a panic until the traffic-directors descended upon us. We were pushed up on the moving sidewalks. North or south, whichever direction came handiest, we were herded upon the sidewalks and whirled away. With a hundred other spectators near me I was shoved to a sidewalk moving south along the Tenth Level. It was going some four miles an hour. But they would not let me stay there. From behind, the crowd was shoving; and from one parallel strip of moving pavement to the other I was pushed along—until at last I reached the seats of the forty mile an hour inside section.
The scene at Park Sixty was far out of direct sight and hearing. The park there had already been cleared of spectators, I knew; and they were doubtless bearing the President's body away.
"Murdered!" said a man beside me. "Murdered! Look there!"
We were across the river, into Manhattan. The Tenth Level here runs about four hundred feet above the ground-street of the city. The man beside me was pointing to a steel tower we were passing. It was several hundreds yards away; on its side abreast of us was a forty-foot square news-mirror, brightly illumined. On all the stairways and balconies here a local crowd had gathered, watching the mirror. It was reporting the present scene at Park Sixty. As we sped past the tower I could see in the silver surface of the mirror the image of the now empty park from which we had been so summarily ejected. They were carrying off the President's body; a little group of officials bearing it away; red, broken, gruesome, with the dying rays of the sun still upon it. Carrying it slowly along to where an aero-car was waiting on the side landing stage.
We were past the mirror in a moment.
"Murdered," the man next to me repeated. "The President murdered."
He seemed stunned, as indeed everyone was. Then he eyed me—my cap, which had on it the insignia of my calling.
"You are one of them," he said bitterly. "The last word he said—the lurid news-gatherers."
But I shook my head. "We are necessary. It was unfortunate that he should have said that."
I had no opportunity to talk further. The man moved away toward the foot of a landing stage near us. A south-bound flyer had overtaken us and was landing. I boarded it also, and ten minutes later was in my office in South-Manhattan.
I was at this time employed by one of the most enterprising news-organizations in Greater New York. There was pandemonium in there that evening. My supper came up in the pneumatic tube from the public cookery nearby, but I had hardly time to taste it.
This, the evening of May 12, 2430, was for me—and for all the Earth—the most stirring evening of history. Events of inter-planetary importance tumbled over each other as they came to us through the air from the Official Information Stations. And we—myself and a thousand like me in our office—retold them for our twenty million subscribers throughout the Anglo-Saxon Nation.
The President of the Anglo-Saxon Republic was murdered at 5:10. It was the first of the new murders. I say new murders, for not in two hundred years had the life of so high an official been wilfully taken. But it was only the first. At 6:15 word came from Tokyohama,[2] that the ruler of Allied Mongolia was dead—murdered under similar circumstances. And ten minutes later from Mombozo, Africa, the blacks reported their leader killed while asleep in his official residence.
The Earth momentarily was without leadership!
I was struggling to get accounts of these successive disasters out over our audiophones. Above my desk, in a duplicating mirror from Headquarters, I could see that at the palace of Mombozo a throng of terrified blacks were gathered. It was night there—a blurred scene of flashing lights and frightened, milling people.
Greys—next to me—had a mirror tuned to Tokyohama. The sun there was shining upon almost a similar scene of panic. Black and yellow men—on opposite sides of the Earth. And between them our white races in turmoil. Outside my own window I could hear the shouts of the crowd that jammed the Twentieth Level.
Greys leaned toward me. "Seven o'clock, Jac. You've got the arrival of the Venus mail. Don't overlook it ... By the code, man, your hands are shaking! You're white as a ghost!"
The Venus mail; I had forgotten it completely.
"Greys, I wonder if it'll get in."
He stared at me strangely. "You're thinking that, too. I told the British National Announcer it was a Venus plot. He laughed at me. Those Great Londoners can't see their fingers before them. He said, 'That's your lurid sense of newscasting.'"
Venus plot! I remembered my impressions of the Venus man who was beside me when our President fell.
Greys was back at his work. I swept the south shore of Eastern Island[3] with my finder, and picked up the image of the inter-planetary landing stage, at which the Venus mail was due to arrive. I could see the blaze of lights plainly; and with another, closer focus I caught the huge landing platform itself. It was empty.
The station-master there answered my call. He had no word of the mail.
"Try the lookout at Table Mountain," he advised me. "They may be coming down that way.... Sure I'll let you know.... What a night! They say that in Mediterrania—"
But I cut off; it was no time to chat with him. Table Mountain, Capetown, had no word of the mail. Then I caught the Yukon Station. The mail flyer had come down on the North Polar side—was already crossing Hudson Bay.
At 8:26 it landed on Eastern Island. A deluge of Venus despatches overwhelmed me. But the mail news, before I could even begin to handle my section of it, was far overshadowed. Venus, now at 8:44 was calling us by helio. The message came in the inter-planetary code, was decoded at National Headquarters, and from there flashed to us.
The ruler of the Venus Central State was murdered! An almost incoherent message. The murder of the ruler, at a time co-incident with 6:30 in Greater New York. Then the words:
"City being attacked ... Tarrano, beware Tarrano ... You are in danger of ..."
In danger of what? The message broke off. The observers, behind their huge telescopes at the Potomac Headquarters, saw the helio-lights of the Venus Central State go dark suddenly. Our own station flashed its call, but there was no answer. Venus—evening star on that date—was sinking to the horizon. But our Observatory in Texas could see the planet clearly; and gave the same report.
Communication was broken. The authorities of the Venus Central State—friendly to us in spite of the recent immigration controversy—had tried to warn us.
Of what?
It must have been nearly nine o'clock when a personal message came for me. Not through the ordinary open airways, but in the National Length, and coded. It came to my desk by official messenger, decoded, printed and sealed.
Jac Hallen, Inter-Allied News. Come to me, North-east Island at once, if they can spare you. Important. Answer.
Dr. Brende.
Our Division Manager scanned the message curiously and told me I could go. I got off my answer. I did not dare call Dr. Brende openly, since he had used the code, but sent it the same way. I would be up at once.
With a word of good-bye to Greys, I shoved aside my work, caught up a heavy jacket and cap and left the office. The levels outside our building were still jammed with an excited throng. I pushed my way through it, up to the entrance to the Staten Bridge. The waters of the harbor beneath me had a broad band of moonlight upon them, dim in the glare of the city lights. I glanced upward with satisfaction. A good night for air-traveling.
My small personal air-car was on the stage near the bridge entrance. The attendant was there, staring at me as I dashed up in such haste. He handed me my key from the rack.
"Going far, Jac? What a night! They'll be ordering them off if many more go up.... Going north?"
"No," I said shortly.
I was away, rising with my helicopters until the city was a yellow haze beneath me. I was going north—to Dr. Brende's little private island off the coast of Maine. The lower lanes were pretty well crowded. I tried one of the north-bound at 8,000 feet; but the going was awkward. Then I went to 16,000.
But Grille, the attendant back at the bridge, evidently had his finder on me, out of plain curiosity. He called me.
"They'll chase you out of there," came his voice. "Nothing doing up there tonight. That's reserved. Didn't you know it?"
I grinned at him. In the glow of my pitlight I hoped he could see my face and the grin.
"They'll never catch me," I said. "I'm traveling fast tonight."
"Chase you out," he persisted. "The patrol's keeping them low. General Orders, an hour ago. Didn't you know it?"
"No."
"Well, you ought to. You ought to know everything in your business. Besides, the lights are up."
They were indeed; I could see them in all the towers underneath me. I was flying north-east; and at the moment, with a following wind, I was doing something over three-fifty.
"But they'll shut off your power," Grille warned. "You'll come down soon enough then."
Which was also true enough. The evening local-express for Boston and beyond was overhauling me. And when the green beam of a traffic tower came up and picked me out, I decided I had better obey. Dutifully I descended until the beam, satisfied, swung away from me.
At 8,000 feet, I went on. There was too much traffic for decent speed and the directors in every pilot bag and tower I passed seemed watching me closely. At the latitude of Boston, I swung out to sea, off the main arteries of travel. The early night mail for Eurasia,[4] with Great London its first stop, went by me far overhead. I could make out its green and purple lights, and the spreading silver beam that preceded it.
Alone in my pit, with the dull whir of my propellers alone breaking the silence of the night, I pondered the startling events of the past few hours. Above me the stars and planets gleamed in the deep purple of an almost cloudless sky. Venus had long since dropped below the horizon. But Mars was up there—approaching the zenith. I wondered what the Martian helio might be saying. I could have asked Greys back at the office. But Greys, I knew, would be too busy to bother with me.
What could Dr. Brende want of me? I was glad he had sent for me—there was nowhere I would rather have gone this particular evening. And it would give me a chance to see Elza again.
I could tell by the light-numerals below, that I was now over Maine. I did not need to consult my charts; I had been up this way many times, for, the Brendes—the doctor, his daughter Elza, and her twin brother Georg—I counted my best friends.
I was over the sea, with the coast of Maine to my left. The traffic, since I left the line of Boston, had been far less. The patrols flashed by me at intervals, but they did not molest me.
I descended presently, and located the small two-mile island which Dr. Brende owned and upon which he lived.
It was 10:20 when I came down to find them waiting for me on the runway.
The doctor held out both his hands. "Good enough, Jac. I got your code—we've been waiting for you."
"It's crowded," I said. "Heavy up to Boston. And they wouldn't let me go high."
He nodded. And then Elza put her cool little hand in mine.
"We're glad to see you, Jac. Very glad."
They took me to the house. Dr. Brende was a small, dark man of sixty-odd, smooth-shaven, a thin face, with a mop of iron-grey hair above it, and keen dark eyes beneath bushy white brows. He was usually kindly and gentle of manner—at times a little abstracted; at other times he could be more forceful and direct than anyone with whom I had ever had contact.
At the house we were joined by the doctor's son, Georg. My best friend, I should say; certainly, for my part, I treasured his friendship very highly. He and Elza were twins—twenty-three years old at this time. I am two years older; and I had been a room-mate with Georg at the Common University of the Potomac.
Our friendship had, if anything, grown closer since my promotion into the business world. Yet we were as unlike as two individuals could possibly be. I am dark-haired, slim, and of comparatively slight muscular strength. Restless—full of nervous energy—and, they tell me, somewhat short of temper. Georg was a blond, powerful young giant. A head taller than I—blue-eyed, from his mother, now dead—square-jawed, and a complexion pink and white. He was slow to anger. He seldom spoke impulsively; and usually with a slow, quiet drawl. Always he seemed looking at life and people with a half-humorous smile—looking at the human pageant with its foibles, follies and frailties—tolerantly. Yet there was nothing conceited about him. Quite the reverse. He was generally wholly deprecating in manner, as though he himself were of least importance. Until aroused. In our days of learning, I saw Georg once—just once—thoroughly angered.
"... Came up promptly, didn't you?" Georg was saying. He was leading me to the house doorway, but I stopped him.
"Let's go to the grove," I suggested. We turned down from the small viaduct, passed the house, and went into the heavy grove of trees nearby.
"He's hungry," Elza declared. "Jac, did you eat at the office tonight?"
"Yes," I said.
"Did you really?"
"Some," I admitted. In truth the run up here had brought me a thoroughly hearty appetite, which I just realized.
"I was pretty busy, you know," I added. "Such a night—but don't you bother."
But she had already scurried away toward the house. Dear little Elza! I wished then, for the hundredth time, that I was a man of wealth—or at least, not as poor as a tower timekeeper. True, I made fair money—but the urge to spend it recklessly dominated me. I decided in that moment, to reform for good; and lay by enough to justify asking a woman to be my wife.
We reclined on a mossy bank in the grove of trees, so thick a grove that it hid the house from our sight.
The doctor extinguished the glowing lights with which the tree-branches were dotted. We were in the semi-darkness of a beautiful, moonlit night.
"Don't go to sleep, Jac!"
I became aware that Georg and his father were smiling at me.
I sat up, snapping my wits into alertness. "No. Of course not. I guess I'm tired. You've no idea what the office was like tonight. Roaring."
"I can imagine," Georg said. "You were at Park Sixty when the President fell, weren't you?"
"Yes. But I wasn't supposed to be. I wasn't assigned to that. How did you guess?"
"Elza saw you. She had our finder on you—I couldn't push her away from it." His slow smile was quizzical.
"On me? In all that crowd. She must have searched about very carefully to——"
I stopped; I could feel my cheeks burning, and was glad of the dimness there under the trees.
"She did," said Georg.
"I sent for you, Jac," Dr. Brende interjected abstractedly, "because——"
But Georg checked him. "Not now, father. Someone—anyone—might pick you up. Your words—or read your lips—there's light enough here to register on a finder."
The doctor nodded. "He's afraid—you see, Jac, it's these Venus——"
"Father—please. It's a long chance—but why take any? We can insulate in the house."
The chance that someone who shouldn't be, was tuned to us as we sat there in that lonely grove! With the doctor's widespread reputation—his more than national prominence—it did not seem to me to be such a long chance either, on this, of all nights.
"As you say, no use in putting private things into the public air," I remarked; and I felt then as though a thousand hostile eyes and ears were watching and listening. "We can talk of what everybody knows," Georg commented. "The Martian Ruler of the Little People was assassinated an hour ago. You heard that coming up?"
"No," I said; but I had imagined as much. "Did they say—"
"They said nothing," Dr. Brende put in. "The flash of a dozen helioed words—no more."
"It went dark, like Venus?"
"No. Just discontinued. I judge they're excited up there—the Bureau disorganized perhaps—I don't know. That was the last we got at the house, just before you came down. There may be something in there now—you Inter-Allied people are pretty reliable."
The ruler of the Venus Central State, the leading monarch of Mars, and our three chief executives of Earth—murdered almost simultaneously! It was incredible—any one of the murders would have been incredible—yet it was true.
There had been times—in the Inter-Allied Office, particularly—when I had been insulated from aerial eavesdropping. But never had I felt the need of it more than now. A constraint fell over me; I seemed afraid to say anything. I think we all three felt very much like that; and it was a relief when Elza arrived with my dainty little meal.
"Any word from Mars, Elza?" her father asked.
She sat down beside me, helping me to the food.
"I did not look," she answered.
She did not look, because she was busy preparing my meal! Dear little Elza! And because of my accursed extravagance—my poverty—no word of love had ever passed between us!
I thought I had never seen Elza so beautiful as this moment. A slim little thing, perfectly formed and matured, and inches shorter than I. Thick brown hair braided, and hanging below her waist. A face—pretty as her mother's must have been—yet intellectual as her father's.
I had taken Elza to the great music festivals of the city, and counted her the best dressed girl in all the vast throng. Tonight she was dressed simply. A grey-blue, tubular sort of skirt, clinging close to the lines of her figure and split at the side for walking; a tight-fitting bodice, light in color (a man knows little of the technicalities of such things); throat bare, with a flaring rolled collar behind—a throat like a rose-petal with the moonlight on it; arms bare, save for the upper, triangular sleeves.
It must suffice; I can only say she was adorable. Almost in silence I ate my meal, with her beside me.
Georg went into the house once, to consult the news-tape. It was crowded with Earth events—excitement, confusion everywhere—inconsequential reports, they seemed, by comparison with what had gone before. But of helios from Mars, or Venus, there were none reported. Of Venus, the tape said nothing save that each of our westward stations was vainly calling in turn, as the planet dropped toward its horizon.
I finished my meal—too leisurely for Georg and the doctor; and then we all went into the house, to the insulated room where at last we could talk openly.
As we entered the main corridor, we heard the low voice of the Inter-Allied news-announcer, coming from the disc in a room nearby.
"And Venus——"
The words caught our attention. We hurried in, and stood by the Inter-Allied equipment. Georg picked up the pile of tape whereon the announcer's words were being printed. He ran back over it.
"Another helio from Venus!" he exclaimed. "Ten minutes ago."
And then I saw his lips go tight together. He made no move to hide the tape from Elza, but she was beside him and already reading it. Her fingers switched off the announcer's droning voice.
"Pacific Coastal Station," Elza read. In the sudden silence of the room her voice was low, clear, and steady, though her hands were trembling. "P.C.S. 10.42 Venus helio. 'Defeat! Beware Tarrano! Notify your Dr. Brende in Eurasia, danger.'"
We men stared at each other. But Elza went on reading.
"P.C.S. 10.44 Venus helio. 'Lost! No more! Smashing apparatus!' The Venus sending station went dark at 10.44.30. Hawaiian station will call later, but have little hope of re-establishing connection. Tokyohama 10.46 Official, via Potomac National Headquarters. Excitement here continues. Levels crowded——"
Elza dropped the tape. "That's all of importance. Venus Central Station warning you, father."
A buzz across the room called the doctor to his personal receiver. It was a message in code from Potomac National Headquarters. We watched the queer-looking characters printing on the tape. Very softly, in a voice hardly above a whisper, Georg decoded it.
"Dr. Brende, see P.C.S. 10.42, warning you, probably of Venus immigrants now here. Do you need guard? Or will you come to Washington at once for personal safety?"
"Father!" cried Elza.
Georg burst out. "Enough of this. We cannot—dare not talk in here. Father, come——"
We went out into the corridor again, across which was the small room insulated from all aerial vibrations. In the corridor a figure was standing—the one other member of the Brende household—the maid-servant, a girl about Elza's age. I knew her well, of course, but this evening I had forgotten her existence. She was standing in the corridor. Did I imagine it, or had she been gazing up at the mechanism ten feet above the floor—the mechanism controlling the insulated room?
"You wish me, Miss Elza? I thought I heard you call."
"No, Ahla, not 'til later."
With a gesture of respect, the girl withdrew, passing from our sight down the incline which led to the lower part of the house.
It was a very small incident, but in view of what was transpiring, it gave me a shock nevertheless.
For Elza's maid was a Venus girl!
The insulated room was small, with a dome-shaped ceiling, no windows, and but one small, heavy door through which we entered, closing it carefully behind us.
"At last," Dr. Brende exclaimed. "Now we can talk freely."
But I was not satisfied. "That girl, Ahla—can you trust her?"
They all looked at me in surprise. When one is close to danger, sometimes one recognizes it least; with Ahla in this household for over a year now, they could not imagine her an enemy.
"I saw her looking up at the insulator," I added swiftly. "Out there in the corridor. Am I talking wild? Perhaps I am. But she seemed startled; and she was standing just under the insulator, wasn't she?"
"But—" began Elza.
"Wait," I exclaimed. "When I first saw the President fall, at Park Sixty, I felt that a Venus man had done it. These other murders—they're all the same. Done by Venus men of the Cold Country."
"Ahla's country," Elza murmured.
"Yes. Exactly. And the Venus Central State has been attacked and has fallen. An assassination on Mars, and three here on Earth—all simultaneously. It's one gigantic plot, I tell you—and the Cold Country of Venus is at the bottom of it."
Georg jumped to his feet. "I'll see if the room has been tampered with."
He was back presently. "The insulator is intact. I set the alarm bell. If she touches it—"
"Where is she?"
"In the cookery, where she should be. I told her we would eat in an hour. That ought to keep her busy."
Dr. Brende made an attempt at a smile. "I think we are all a little overwrought—though with reason, no doubt. Sit down, Jac. Elza, come here by me. Don't look so solemn, child."
He drew Elza to him, with his arm about her. I would have spoken, but his gesture checked me. "I have much to say, Jac. I think I understand these events, perhaps better than any of you. Let me go back two years—when I was in the Venus Central State."
I nodded my remembrance; and he went on:
"At that time the authorities there were greatly perturbed. They were menaced by rebellion in the Cold Country. They would not let the Cold Country people into the Central State, for it is already overcrowded. You did not know that, did you?"
"You mean the threatened rebellion?" I asked. "They were trying to keep it secret, but we heard rumors."
"Just so. And Jac, I will tell you why they kept it secret. The Central State was encouraging emigration to the Earth. The Venus Cold Country is a poor place to live in—and on a whole its inhabitants are miserable people. Villainous, too, I should say. The Central State did not want them within its borders; and so it kept secret its troubles with them—and encouraged emigration to the Earth.
"We—as you know—make no distinction between Venus people. We are friendly with the Central State, and the Cold Country is governed by it—or was until tonight. Thus, you see, we have been in the position of having to receive these renegade immigrants. Shut out from all the good land and decent climate of Venus, they began coming here.
"But we did not want them, and of late we have been holding them off, cutting the quota allowed very materially. Last week, as you also know, in Triple Conference, our three races decided to allow at each Inferior Conjunction of the Earth and Venus, so small a quota that the Central State protested vigorously.
"The controversy has been hot; but the Central State—trying to foist off its undesirables on us—knows it is in the wrong. And fundamentally, it is friendly to us—I think it has proven that in the last two hours."
Again I would have spoken, but he went on at once.
"I know you're familiar with most of this, Jac. But you news-gatherers sometimes reason in too lurid a fashion. Let me go on. Mars was drawn into the affair. To extricate ourselves, we offered to admit—under temporary guard—all Venus immigrants who would pass on at once—at the first astronomical opportunity—to Mars. This would have been very nice for us—but not for Mars."
"They are hot-headed, in Mars," Georg commented.
"Quite so," said the doctor. "But very direct and forceful, nevertheless. They met our suggestion with a law excluding Venus immigrants entirely. It was this, I think, that precipitated tonight's events—though of course they must have been brewing for a long time."
"This Tarrano—" I began.
"I heard of him when I was in Venus," said Dr. Brende. "He was at that time a lower official in the Cold Country. Evidently he has risen in his world.
"I come now to conjecture—but I think it must be fairly close to truth. Tarrano, leading the Cold Country, has risen to open rebellion. His attack upon the Central State must have come suddenly—"
"You mean, just this evening?" Elza asked.
"No, of course not. But hoping to quell the rebellion, the Central State has suppressed news of it. At such a time—with this controversy going on—such reports would only injure the Central State's inter-planetary position. That's obvious, isn't it? Then tonight, when things were desperate, the Central State gave out its call. Tarrano has conquered Venus, I'm sure. And at the last, before destroying its helio, the Central State tried to warn us."
"Of what?" I demanded. "And what about these murders?"
"Done by emissaries of Tarrano, no doubt. For revenge, because of the Martian and Earth legislation—or for—"
"I think we should not speculate too much," said Georg. "At least, not on that line. They warned you personally, father. We were so careful to keep everything secret—"
Dr. Brende mopped his forehead. He was trying to appear calm—I knew he did not want unduly to alarm Elza; but I could see that he was laboring under great emotion nevertheless.
"Things get out, Georg," he said. "We have been careful—yes. But two years ago, when I visited the Central State, I told them there what I hoped to accomplish. There were no grave inter-planetary problems then—I thought I had no need of great secrecy. And since then, though, we have been very careful—"
Careful! With a Venus girl from the Cold Country living in their household! Truly, humans are a strange mixture of sagacity and folly!
"The Central State has heard something concerning you," Georg said. "That could easily happen—prisoners captured from Tarrano's forces, for instance. With dispatches—or perhaps some intercepted aerial message."
What was this secret they were discussing? I was the only one in the room who did not know it. And why had Dr. Brende sent for me tonight?
I asked him both questions. His face went even more solemn than it had been before.
"I sent for you, Jac, because in a measure I anticipated what has now befallen. Danger specifically to us Brendes, I mean. We count you as our friend—"
How it warmed my heart to hear him say that; and to see the glance that Elza cast me!
"—Our friend. I am an old man—you are young. Yet you are wise, too. We need you tonight."
He raised his hand when I would have told him how glad I was to be with them.
"You know something of my work," he said, as a statement, rather than a question. "I should say, mine and Georg's and Elza's, for they have both helped me materially."
I knew that Dr. Brende had for years been one of the Earth's most eminent research physicians. It was he who discovered the light vibrations which had banished forever the dread germs of several of the major diseases. He did not practice; his work was research only.
He went on: "Jac, I have found what for years I have been striving to find—a vibration of light, though it is invisible—which so far as I can determine, kills every bacillus harmful to man. There is nothing new in the idea—I have been working at it all my life. Sunlight! Altered and modified in several particulars, yet sunlight nevertheless. How strange that for countless centuries, man never realized the blessed boon of sunlight—the greatest enemy of all disease!
"Each year, as you know, I have conquered some of what we call the major diseases. A few of them—cancer[5], for instance—persisted in eluding me. Its bacilli—you can easily recognize the tiny purplish, horned rods which cause what we popularly call cancer—just would not die. No form of light or other vibration I could devise, seemed to hurt them—unless I used a vibration harmful, even fatal, to the blood-contents itself: I killed the cancer—in the words of you news-gatherers—but I also killed the patient."
His eyes smiled at the jest, but his face remained intensely serious.
"Then, Jac, I solved that problem—just a few months ago. And upon the heels of it I solved another, of infinitely more importance." He paused slightly. "I have learned how to kill, or at least arrest, the bacillus of old age. It is a bacillus, you know. We grow old because every day we live beyond the age of thirty—the bacillus of old age is attacking us. I call them the Brende-bacilli—these tiny, frayed discs that make us grow old. I have seen them—and killed them!"
It dawned on me slowly, the import of what he was saying.
"You mean——"
"He means," said Georg, "that at present we cannot only banish disease—all disease—but we can keep your body from aging. Not permanently, doubtless—but with the span of life lengthened threefold at least. Only by violence now need you die prematurely."
This then was the secret the existence of which Tarrano had learned. He had....
But Dr. Brende was quietly voicing my thoughts.
"It seems obvious, Jac, that this Tarrano at least suspects that I have made some such discovery as this. That he would withhold it from mankind, for the benefit of his own race, seems also obvious. That he is about to make an attempt to get it from me, I am convinced."
I remembered the wording of the message of warning from the Central State. "Your Dr. Brende, in Eurasia." I mentioned it.
"Our main laboratory is there," Georg said. "In Northern Siberia—isolated from people so far as possible, and in a climate advantageous for the work."
Elza spoke for the first time in many minutes.
"We have guards there, Jac—eight of our assistants.... Father, I called Robins a while ago. He said everything was all right. But don't you think we should call him again?"