Asteroid Man (13 page)

"Long, long centuries ago as you reckon time, I was a member of a highly technological community; a community so far advanced in comparison of the achievements of your tiny planet that you would have been as dust beneath our feet, you would have been as inconsiderable as insects, as plankton swimming in the sea. We had machines about which you could know nothing. The children in our primary schools could have taught your wisest sages far more than they could ever have dreamed. But there was something wrong with our society, something devastatingly wrong." The asteroid man's voice had lost something of its silky, deadly calm. It had become charged with what must have been the equivalent of emotion in the alien's weird mind.

"Yes", it repeated, "something was badly wrong. It treated its greatest sons as though they were criminals. It couldn't realize the truth when the truth was presented to it!" Greg knew that this was the paranoia coming out. He played on it.

"And what was the truth?" he asked eagerly. Got to keep him talking; it's coming out now.

"I was the truth," said the asteroid man. "I was the greatest intelligence that that supreme society had ever thrown up. I held in my mind the universe as men could hold a drop of water in the palms of their hands. I understood all mysteries and all knowledge. I knew the answer to all things, and there was only one obvious place for me to fill, in my society—"

"Its supreme leader," said Greg with a note of sincerity which he found difficult to put into his voice.

"Of course," said the asteroid man. "How strange that a primitive savage such as you should have grasped so deep and important a fundamental issue, which those who lived on my world were unable to appreciate. Strange how the simple, savage mind, the primitive, undeveloped mind like yours, can come direct to a point of truth which has defeated the greatest scientific and philosophical minds of a superior society. Very strange." It was mastering its emotion now, and the voice had turned back to the silky monotone. In his mind's eye Greg could see the steel claw wrapped in the thin velvet glove.

"And so," went on the asteroid man, "because they would not recognize and accept me as their rightful lord and master, I had to fight against my own people. I worked my way up from the bottom. I became first a departmental chief, then a senior administrator and, when the time was ripe, I struck! History hung in my hands, but I was betrayed, betrayed by the very people upon whom I had relied. They had been against me all the time. They, who I thought were my loyal servants and subjects, had been working for the other government departments; they had been keeping a track on my every move, playing with me as a fisherman plays with a powerful pike. At the last minute I recognized their treachery for the baseness that it was. And recognizing it as I did in the nick of time, I rose against them and escaped their net." He looked across at Greg's pinioned form. "Nets are difficult things to escape from, aren't they?"

"They certainly are," replied the space man with grim humor. "I take my hat off to you for inventing this one. There isn't a creature in the galaxy could burst is way out of this."

"Thank you," said the asteroid man. "You flatter my ingenuity. Not that it needs any flattery—but you do flatter it." There was a note of passion in his voice again. The head was moving jerkily from side to side in the shadows as it spoke.

"Yes, I escaped from their toils and their net. The pike bit through the line before it could be landed, and then—"

"And then?" asked Greg.

"What I had been attempting to do by stealth I attempted to do by open warfare. I retreated to my satellite hideout, a satellite that I had been secretly preparing, and I blessed the day on which I had decided to tell nobody, so that none but I was aware of it. There I waged a deadly war against them. Alas, their technology is as strong as my own. If there had only been six men with me, equipped with satellites like this one, we could have destroyed even that technological society. But I failed—for the time being at any rate. One day I shall go back and shall destroy them. They captured me with their vast armies, millions to one—with their unlimited power sources, their unlimited power reserves. I could fight them as man to man, I could give them blow for blow, but I hadn't any supply lines. There was no one to bring me any ammunition. They had millions of troop carriers. There was no one to supply me with electric power, there was no one to help me maintain my war machine, and so my one-man battle collapsed. They starved me out, they laid siege to me, they dragged me—me," he repeated in a terrible voice, "who should have been their rightful leader—before a court of men with human minds. Lesser by their puerile standards. I, who should have been their god, was judged like a common criminal."

"Then?" asked Greg.

"Ah, then," said the asteroid man. "Ah, then. Yes, yes, what did they do then? You may wonder why I lurk in the shadows. Once I looked very much as you look now, apart from minor physiological differences. I could have passed as one of your people. But they put the sign of the criminal upon me. They jeered at my asteroid war. Do you know what they did then? For they felt that they were ethical and enlightened in their own strange way, savages though they were, compared to me. They'd set me adrift, not in an asteroid like the one from which I made war—a technological masterpiece—but they set me adrift with the barest necessities of life and the scars of the criminal upon me, upon a chunk of rock, an ordinary asteroid. I had nothing but my brain and my bare hands and a supply of air and chemical equipment for replacing and recharging it. That and a very limited supply of water. A quantity of concentrated food, a space suit, and a lump of bare barren rock. They mocked me as they set me adrift. They said they hoped his majesty would be comfortable on his new world."

Greg found himself thinking of the exiled Napoleon on Elba. Now he knew what accounted for the awful bitterness of this asteroid man—a great brain twisted by paranoia—abandoned on a lifeless rock. Not an island with friendly seas to beat against the rocky coast, could bring him whispers of the world beyond. Not an island where the sound of wind could almost bring him the sound of men's voices. Not on an island beneath the same sun that shone down on the living teeming worlds of human society, but upon an asteroid! A lonely, desolate asteroid, winging relentlessly, remorselessly through space. Going on forever amidst space and the dark nothingness between the stars.

"There was only one thing on my side," said the silky voice. "Only one thing—and that was Time. I had all the time in the world. I had already discovered one secret about which they knew nothing, and which no one could take from me. I, Ultimus, had discovered the elixir of life. No one knew, for they did not live enough to see that I was not aging as they aged. The elixir, I had already drunk of it before they marooned me, before they exiled me, and I knew that I could wait for a million years—for a million, million years till their puny world had turned to dust and they along with it. I knew that they would never get that elixir. Only a mind as great as my own could have torn that dreadful secret from the elements."

"And so there I was, a lonely mortal on my tiny barren world. It was my home, my prison, my castle, my fortress, my universe. It was my bread; it was my drink. There was something else that they couldn't really know—a man with infinite time at his disposal has infinite patience. All progress is evolution. Technology breeds technology. Development is the mother of development, and invention is the ancestor of invention. Once you've got the first single machine, then like an avalanche going down a hill, that machine grows and enables you to develop other machines. It will scarcely seem possible to a savage mind like yours; if you had been marooned on this asteroid in the dim and distant past, you would have given yourself up for dead. You would have allowed the weight of circumstances to crush your mind out of existence. But I did not do that, for I am Ultimus, I am the Great One, I am the asteroid man. Step by step, inch by inch, making first one primitive tool and then another, improving and developing year by year and century by century, slowly, so painfully slowly at first that I couldn't measure my own progress, and then gradually faster and faster like a snowball rolling down a snowy mountainside, I developed more and greater technological achievements, until I had once more developed for myself upon this asteroid the same standard of living that I would have enjoyed back upon my home world. Those who sentenced me to this living death were dead themselves, and I had inherited that standard of life which they denied to me. The wheel had swung full circle. The balance had tipped. I was drifting alone in space, the ageless, blue-back mystery of space. Between the stars, between the very galaxies, I floated from constellation to constellation on my tiny rocky kingdom. On this asteroid, as on many others, you will find the duplication of all the chemical elements; you will find that the proportions vary from the preponderance of that which is of no use and the paucity of things which you need. But here I had enough to work with. Step by step I rebuilt my world. Take the most complex reaction, take the most intricate biochemical development and, given the hundred basic elements, you can reproduce it if you only have the skill. And so I built it all up from nothingness. I literally created a world out of bare rock, my brain, my bare hands, my courage, and my will power. I, Ultimus the asteroid man, did all this!"

The paranoia was becoming a thousand times more pronounced as he went on to list his own achievements.

"Then, step by step, I went on to fight back at the communities which had betrayed me. Here and there I found a survivor drifting on wrecked ships, so I took them into my laboratories, and I altered them a little, as they a millennia ago had altered me."

Greg felt a shudder running down his spine as he wondered what kind of mark the ancient society had made upon the asteroid man. Confined as he was by the pressure on his neck, he flexed his muscles a little to try to restore the cramped circulation. Something that might have been the ghost of a laugh flickered across to him from the shadows.

"No use you trying to escape," said the asteroid man. "No use at all. You're one of the most helpless prisoners anywhere in the universe at the moment. The strands of that net are made from anatomically condensed material, thousands of times stronger than steel. You'll never cut it and you'll never break it."

"How did that moron of yours manage to cut it then?" asked Greg.

"Oh, that's equally simple," said the asteroid man. "His knife is one of the things that is capable of dealing with those strands, for it is itself made of atomically condensed hardness. Nature is very often extravagant. I have merely done away with the spaces between the electrons, neutrons and the nucleus. I have compounded far more atoms than there should be into a very limited space. The net appears comparatively light to you. It is actually far heavier than any other substance of the same volume in the universe; it has a higher specific gravity than anything else of equal size anywhere." The enormity of the scientific procedure involved drew an admiring whistle from Greg.

"But surely you could undo this net? You don't have to wait until your disciple—or whatever it is—comes along with his knife?"

"I could dissolve the strands of that net," said the asteroid man, "with as much ease as a fire can dissolve butter."

"I don't believe you," said Greg. "You may be able to condense it, but you can't dissolve it as easily, surely. Nothing and nobody could do that."

"Are you trying to trick me with some puerile device?" said the asteroid man. "Do you think that I, Ultimus, the new god of the universe, would be taken in by anything as savage and barbaric as an appeal to my vanity?"

"No. I'm simply saying that you couldn't undo what you've done. You might have a scientific power to set off an avalanche to blow the top off a mountain, but you couldn't put it back. Any fool can destroy—it's the man who can create. Anybody can tie a man up in a net made of unbreakable thread, but not anybody could break that unbreakable thread. That's the real test of intelligence, to be able to reverse an action that you've carried out."

"Do you really think so?" asked the asteroid man. He's biting, thought Greg.

"Well you can argue round if you like, but I shan't be very inclined to believe these tales of your so-called superlative power unless you can prove to me that what you've done you can undo."

"Come closer," said the asteroid man, "and see if you can do something besides talk."

By dint of much heaving and rolling, Greg inched his way nearer to the platform with the brilliant lights.

"That's close enough," said the asteroid creature. "Now you wish to see me dissolve the net."

The underground chamber was electric with suspense, tense with pent-up hates and fears and emotions. Greg could feel the atmosphere as surely as though his hands were across the terminals of some great dynamo. His breath seemed to freeze inside his lungs. His heart stopped beating. He hoped that his eyes, the expression of his face, would not betray him. He tried to freeze it into a mask. He had never been a good poker player. He hoped he could do something now; something that would be good enough to fool the supreme, yet evil, intelligence.

The asteroid man leaned further back into the shadows and moved a hand toward Greg. The hand held a glowing, circular object, like a small orb of pure, incandescent light. It was almost like the symbol of power itself.

"Dissolve," said the asteroid man slowly. His fingers seemed to squeeze the orbs. Its color changed from a brilliant white to dull red, from red to orange, from orange to yellow. Greg watched the fantastic rainbow tints replacing one another, almost too fast for the eye to follow. From yellow to green, then to a brilliant emerald. The emerald deepened into a turquoise, and the turquoise into a pure sapphire blue. The blue in turn gave way to a deep indigo, and that in turn to violet.

The glowing, gleaming, glittering orb ceased to emit light and became so black that the outstretched hand in the shadows seemed to be full of nothingness. The black seemed to play strange tricks with Masterson's eyes. It apparently reflected no light at all, almost as though the asteroid man could read his thoughts.