Jack Williamson - Three From the Legion

THE LEGION OF SPACE

The Legion of Space was originally published in Astounding Stories, 1935.

Fantasy Press edition published 1947.

THE COMETEERS

AGAINST THE LEGION

Published by arrangement with Pocket Books

a Simon & Schuster Division of

Gulf & Western Corporation

1230 Avenue of the Americas

New York, New York 10020

Printed in the United States of America

CONTENTS

THE LEGION OF SPACE

THE COMETEERS

ONE AGAINST THE LEGION

THE LEGION OF SPACE

DEDICATION

To all the readers and the writers of that new literature called science-fiction, who

find mystery, wonder, and high adventure in the expanding universe of knowledge,

and who sometimes seek to observe and to forecast the vast impact of science upon

the lives and minds of men.

CONTENTS

Prologue THE MAN WHO REMEMBERED TOMORROW

1. A FORT ON MARS

2. AN EYE AND A MURDER

3. THREE MEN OF THE LEGION

4. “WELL, JOHN, I AM A TRAITOR!”

5. THE “PURPLE DREAM”

6. THE EMPTY THRONE

7. GILES HABIBULA’S HIGHER CALLING

8. WITH DEATH BEHIND

9. “To THE RUNAWAY STAR!”

10. FAREWELL TO THE SUN

11. THE TRAP ON PLUTO’S MOON

12. STORM IN SPACE

13. THE BELT OF PERIL

14. CORSAIR SUN

15. UNDER THE UNKNOWN SEA

16. BLACK CONTINENT TO CROSS

17. THE ROPE IN THE JUNGLE

18. NIGHT AND THE CITY OF DOOM

19. GILES HABIBULA AND BLACK DISASTER

20. “A CERTAIN SLIGHT DEXTERITY”

21. THE HORROR IN THE HALL

22. RED STORM AT DUSK

23. YELLOW MAW OF TERROR

24. “FOR WANT OF A NAIL”

25. WINGS ABOVE THE WALLS

26. TRAITOR’S TURN

27. THE JOKE ON MAN

28. THE GREEN BEAST

29. AKKA—AND AFTER

PROLOGUE

The Man Who Remembered Tomorrow

“Well, Doctor, what’s your verdict?”

He sat up on the examination table, with the sheet wrapped around his bent and

stringy frame, and firmly commanded my nurse to bring back his clothes. He looked

at me, his bright blue eyes sharply curious and yet oddly unafraid—for I knew he

expected a sentence of death.

“Acquittal, John,” I told him honestly. “You’re really indestructible. Remarkable

shape, for a man of your age—except for that knee. You’ll make me a good patient

and a better chess opponent for the next twenty years.”

But old John Delmar shook his weatherbeaten head, very seriously.

“No, Doctor.” In that same tone of quiet and unexcited certainty, he might have said

today was Tuesday. “No, Doctor, I’ve less than three weeks. I’ve known for several

years that I’m going to die at eleven-seven on the morning of March 23, 1945.”

“Nonsense,” I told him. “Not likely—unless you jump in front of a truck. That knee

may always be a little stiff, but there’s certainly nothing else—”

“I know the date.” His thin, old voice had a flat, impersonal conviction. “You see, I

read it on a tombstone.” He didn’t seem to regard that statement as remarkable. “I

came in this morning just to see if you can tell me what it is that I’m to die of.”

He looked entirely too sane and cool to fall victim to any superstitious notion.

“You can forget the idea of that,” I assured him heartily. “Physically, you’re sounder

than most men twenty years younger. Except for that knee, and a few assorted

scars—”

“Please don’t think I want to question your diagnosis, but I’m really quite positive.”

He seemed apologetic, and oddly hesitant. “You see, Doctor, I’ve an unusual—well,

call it a gift. I’ve meant, some-tune, to tell you about it. That is, if you’d care to

hear—”

He paused, diffidently.

I had wondered a long time, about old John Delmar. A faded, stiff little man, with thin

gray hair and blue eyes that were curiously bright, strangely young. Still erect and

agile, for all the years he owned to, he walked with a slight quick limp from that old

bullet wound in his knee.

We had first met when he came home from the war in Spain—he looked me up to

bring me word of a friend of mine, not a third his age, who had died beside him,

fighting with the Loyalists. I liked him. A lonely old soldier, he didn’t talk too much

about his campaigns. We discovered a mutual interest in chess, and he made a

pleasant companion. He had a youth of heart, an eager and unquenchable vitality, rare

in a man so old. My medical interest, besides, was aroused by his durable physique.

For he had endured many things.

He had always been reticent. I was, I believe, his most intimate friend through those

last, unwontedly peaceful years, yet he had given me no more than the barest hints of

his long and remarkable life. He grew up, he told me, in the frontier West; he rode

with a gun in a cattle war when he was only a boy, and somehow he got into the

Texas Rangers a little short of the legal age. Later he served in the Rough Riders, and

in the Boer War, and under Porfirio Diaz. In 1914 he joined the British Army—to

make up, he said, for fighting the British in South Africa. Later he was in China and

in the Rif, in the Gran Chaco and hi Spain. It was a Spanish prison camp that stiffened

his bad knee. His hard-seasoned body began to fail him at last, and he finally came

home, too old to fight again. That was when we met.

I knew, too, that he was busy with some literary project—dropping in at his rather

shabby rooms for a pipe and a game of chess, I had noticed his desk piled with closely

written pages. Until he came to the office that morning in the spring of 1945,

however, I had supposed that he was merely writing the memoirs of his colorful past.

I had no inkling that his manuscripts dealt with recollections of the more wonderful

future.

Fortunately, no patient was waiting that morning, and his quiet air of matter-of-fact

certainty about the moment of his death piqued my curiosity. When he was dressed

again, I made him fill his pipe and told him that I’d be glad to hear.

“It’s a good thing that most fighting men are killed before they get too old to fight,”

he began a little awkwardly, settling back in his chair and easing his knee with thin,

quivering hands. “That’s what I was thinking, one cold morning, the year this war

began.

“You remember when I came home to New York—or I called it coming home. But I

found myself a stranger. Most people don’t have the time that you do, Doctor, for old

fighting men. There was nothing for me to do. I was useless as a worn-out gun. That

wet, gusty morning—it was April thirteenth, I remember—I sat down on a bench in

Central Park, to think things over. I got cold. And I decided—well, that I’d already

lived too long.

“I was just getting up from the bench, to go back to the room and get my old

automatic, when I—remembered!

“That’s the only word I know. Memory. It seems a little strange, though, to speak of

remembering things that haven’t happened yet. That won’t happen, some of them, for

a thousand years and more. But there’s no other word.

“I’ve talked to scientists about it, Doctor. A psychologist, first. A behaviorist. He

laughed. It didn’t fit in, he said, with the concepts of behaviorism. A man, he said, is

just a machine. Everything a man does is just mechanical reaction to stimulus.

“But, if that’s so, there are stimuli that the behaviorists have never found.

“There was another man who didn’t laugh. A physicist from Oxford, a lecturer on

Einstein—relativity. He didn’t laugh. He seemed to believe what I told him. He asked

questions about my— memories. But there wasn’t much I could tell him, then.

“What he told me helped to ease my mind—the thing had had me worried. I wanted to

talk about it to you, Doctor. But we were just getting to be good chess companions,

and I didn’t want you to think me too odd.

“Anyhow, this Oxford man told me that Space and Time aren’t real, apart. And they

aren’t really different. They fade one into the other all around us. He spoke of the

continuum and two-way time and a theory of the serial universe. I didn’t understand it

all. But there’s no real reason, he said, why we shouldn’t remember the future—all of

us. In theory, he said, our minds ought to be able to trace world-lines into the future,

just as easily as into the past.

“Hunches and premonitions and dreams, he believed, are sometimes real memories of

things yet to come. I didn’t understand all he said, but he did convince me that the

thing wasn’t—well, insanity. I had been afraid, Doctor.

“He wanted to know more about what I—remembered. But that was years ago. It was

just scattered impressions, then, most of them vague and confused. It’s a power, I

think, that most people have to some degree—it simply happens to be better

developed in me. I’ve always had hunches, some vague sense to warn me of danger—

which is probably why I’m still alive. But the first clear memory of the future came

that day in the park. And it was many months before I could call them up at will.

“You don’t understand it, I suppose. I’ll try to describe that first experience, in the

park. I slipped on the wet pavement, and fell back on the bench—I had got cold,

sitting there, and I wasn’t so long back from Spain then, you know.

“And suddenly I wasn’t in the park at all.

“I was still falling, all right. I was in the same position—but no longer on the Earth.

All around me was a weird plain. It was blazing with a glare of light, pitted with

thousands of craters, ringed with mountains higher than any I had ever seen. The Sun

was burning down out of a blue sky dark as midnight, and full of stars. There was

another body in the heavens, huge and greenish.

“A fantastic black machine was gliding down over those terrible mountains. It was

larger than you’d think a flying machine could be, and utterly strange. It had just hit

me with some weapon, and I was reeling back under the agony of the wound. Beside

me was a great explosion of red gas. The cloud of it poured over me, and burned my

lungs, and blotted out everything.

“It was some time before I realized that I had been on the Moon —or rather that I had

picked up the last thoughts of a man dying there. I had never had time for astronomy,

but one day I happened to see a photograph of the lunar craters—and recognized

them, and knew that the greenish crescent had been the Earth itself.

“And the shock of that discovery only increased my bewilderment. It was nearly a

year before I understood that I was developing an ability to recall the future. But that

first incident happened in the thirtieth century, in the conquest of the Moon by the

Medusae—the man whose last moments I shared was one of the human colonists they

murdered.

“The faculty improved with practise, like any other. It’s simply telepathy, I’m

convinced, carrying thought across Time and not merely through Space. Just

remember that neither Space nor Time is real; they are both just aspects of one reality.

“At first I got contact only with minds under great stress, like that of the dying

colonist. Even yet, there are difficulties—or I shouldn’t have asked you to examine

me this morning, Doctor. But I’ve managed to follow human history, pretty well,

through the next thousand years. That’s what I’ve been writing.

“The history of the future!

“The conquest of space is what thrills me most. Partly because it’s the most difficult

achievement of human engineering, the most daring and the most dangerous. And

partly, I suppose, because my own descendants played a big part in it.”

An eager ring of enthusiasm had risen in his voice, and now he paused awkwardly, as

if suddenly self-conscious because of it. His sharp blue eyes searched my face. I kept

silent until he went on, sure that the least show of doubt would stop him.

“Yes, Doctor, I’ve a son.” His thin brown face showed a wistful pride. “I don’t see

much of him, because he’s a very busy young man. I failed to make a soldier out of

him, and I used to think he’d never amount to much. I tried to get him to join up, long

before Pearl Harbor, but he wouldn’t hear of it.

“No, Don never took to fighting. He’s something you call a nuclear physicist, and

he’s got himself a nice, safe deferment. Now he’s on a war job, somewhere out in

New Mexico. I’m not even supposed to know where he is, and I can’t tell you what

he’s doing—but the thesis he wrote, at Tech, was something about the metal

uranium.”

Old John Delmar gave me a proud and wistful smile.

“No, I used to think that Don would never accomplish much, but now I know that he

designed the first atomic reaction motor. I used to think he had no guts—but he was

man enough to pilot the first manned atomic rocket ever launched.”

I must have goggled, for he explained:

“That was 1956, Doctor—the past tense just seems more conven-lent. With this—this

capacity of mine, you see, I shared that flight with Don, until his rocket exploded,

outside the stratosphere. He died, of course. But he left a son, to carry on the Delmar

name.

“And that grandson of mine reached the Moon, Doctor, in a military rocket. After

uranium was discovered there, he went back to take command of the American

outpost—a little camp of air-tight domes, over the mines. But the ghastly atomic

wars, in the 1990’s, isolated the Moon. My grandson died there, with the rest of his

little garrison, and it was nearly two hundred years before human civilization was far

enough recovered from the wars to build another space rocket.

“But it was a Miles Delmar, late in the twenty-second century, who finally went back

to the dead mining camps on the Moon, and then set out for Mars. He left too much

shielding off his atomic reaction motor, to lighten his ship for that voyage, and the

leaking radiations killed him and all his crew. The dead ship carried the bodies on,

and crashed in the Syrtis Major.

“Miles’s son, Zane Delmar, patented the geodyne—which was a vast advance over

the heavy, dangerous atomic reactors. He found the wreck of his father’s ship on

Mars, and survived an attack from the native Martian beings, and later died of a

Venusian jungle-fever. The victory of men over space wasn’t easy—quite! But Zane’s

three sons carried on the war. And they made a huge fortune out of the geodyne.

“In the next century, all the solar system was pretty well explored, as far out as the

moon of Neptune. It was fifty years more before a John Ulnar reached Pluto—our

family name was changed, about that time, from Delmar to Ulnar, to fit a new

universal identification system.

“His fuel exhausted, so that he couldn’t return, John managed to keep himself alive

for four years, alone on the Black Planet. He left a diary that his nephew found,

twenty years later. A strange document, that diary!

“It was Mary Ulnar—a peculiar Amazon she must have been— who began the

conquest of the silica-armored desert life of Mars. And Arthur Ulnar, her brother, who

led the first fleet to attack the cold, half-metallic beings which had extended their own

rule over the four great moons of Jupiter—he died on lo.

“More battles, however, were fought in the laboratory than in space. Explorers and

colonists met terrific, endless difficulties with bacteria, atmospheres, gravitations,

chemical dangers. As planetary engineers, the Ulnars contributed a full share to that

new science, which, with gravity generators, synthetic atmospheres, and climate-

controls, could finally transform a frozen, stony asteroid into a tiny paradise.

“And the Ulnars took a generous reward.

“For a dark chapter of the family history begins with the twenty-sixth century. By

then, the conquest of the solar system was finished. The Ulnar family had been the

leaders, and they seized the spoils. They had controlled interplanetary commerce

since the time of Zane and his geodyne, and they finally dominated the whole System.

“One bold tycoon had himself crowned Eric the First, Emperor of the Sun. For two

hundred years his descendants ruled all the planets as absolute despots. Their reign,

I’m sorry to say, was savagely oppressive. There were endless outbreaks for liberty,

cruelly put down.

“Adam the Third, however, was at last forced to abdicate—his great mistake was an

effort to suppress the freedom of scientific research. The scientists overthrew him,

and the Green Hall Council launched the first real democracy of history. For the next

two centuries, a genuine civilization existed in the System, defended by a small body

of picked and well-trained righting men, the Legion of Space.”

Wistfully again, old John Delmar shook his lean gray head.

“If I could have lived a thousand years later!” he whispered. “I might have fought

with that Legion. For that golden age of peace was broken. Another Eric Ulnar

ventured away into space, the first man to circle another star. He reached that strange

dwarf sun that astronomers know as Barnard’s Runaway Star—the few nearer stars

having proved to possess no planets. And he brought back terror and suffering and the

shadow of doom to the human planets.

“The mad ambition of that remote descendant of mine brought war between our

System and another,” that slow old voice said sadly. “War and invasion, treason and

terror. Even the Legion was betrayed.

“And then there was an epic achievement by a few loyal men of the Legion of

Space—perhaps the most heroic thing that men ever did. One of those few was

another Ulnar. John Ulnar. I like to think that his name came down from me.”

My office nurse chose that unfortunate moment to announce another patient. And

little John Delmar hastily knocked out his pipe, apologetic for having taken so much

of my tune. He came to his feet, unsteady on his bad knee, and a vision seemed to

fade from his oddly bright, live blue eyes.

“I must be going, Doctor.” And he added, quietly, “Now you see how I know that I’m

due to die on the morning of March twenty-third.”

“You’re sound as a bell,” I insisted again. “And much too sane to let any such

notion— But this is a very remarkable thing you’ve told me, John. I wish you had

mentioned it before; and now I’d like very much to see those manuscripts. Why don’t

you publish them?”

“Perhaps,” he promised vaguely. “But so few would believe, and I don’t like to

expose myself to any charge of fraud.”

I let him go, reluctantly. I meant to call at his rooms, to hear the rest of his story and

read his manuscripts. But the urgencies of wartime practise kept me busy all that

week—until his landlady phoned me, to say that poor old Mr. Delmar had been down

sick with a cold, for the last two days, alone in his rooms.

In two hours, in spite of his feeble protests, he was hi the hospital. If I had only made

the time to call, a few days before—but yet, perhaps, as he quietly believed, it may be

that the future is really already determined, as firmly unchangeable as the past.

Influenza, with pulmonary complications. The outlook seemed good enough, the first

few days, and I knew that old John Delmar’s fighting heart had pulled him through a

hundred more desperate situations. But sulfa and penicillin failed. His old heart

surrendered. He knew he was going to die, and he did—quite peacefully, under an

oxygen tent, on the morning of March 23.1 was standing by his bed, and I looked at

my watch.

The time was eleven-seven.

Whatever others may decide, I was well enough convinced, even before the proof of

death. John Delmar at first wished to have his manuscripts destroyed, because his

splendid scheme of a full history of the next thousand years was far from complete,

but I persuaded him to leave the finished sections hi my hands. As mere fiction, they

would be enormously entertaining. As a real prevision of future history, they are more

than fascinating.

The selection which follows deals with the adventures of John Star

—born John Ulnar—who was a young soldier in the Legion of Space, in the thirtieth

century, when human treason sought an alliance with the unearthly Medusae, and so

brought alien horror and black disaster to the unwarned worlds of men.

1 A Fort on Mars

“I’m reporting, Major Stell, for orders.”

John Star, lean and trim in his new Legion uniform, stood at attention before the desk

where the stern, white-haired officer sat toying with the silver model of a space

cruiser. He felt the major’s merciless eyes come up from the tiny ship to search out

every detail of his small-boned, hard physique. Taut and almost quivering, he endured

that probing gaze, burningly anxious to know his first assignment.

“Are you ready, John Ulnar, to accept your first order in the Legion as it should be

accepted, to put duty above everything else?”

“I hope so, sir. I believe so.”

What would it be?

“I hope so too, John Ulnar.”

John Star was then called John Ulnar; the “Star” is a title of distinction given him

later by the Green Hall. John Star we shall call him, according to the Green Hall’s

edict.

This day, one of the first in the thirtieth century, had been the supreme, the most

thrilling day of his twenty-one years. It marked the end of his five arduous years hi

the Legion Academy, on Catalina Island. Now the ceremonies were finished. His life

in the Legion was about to begin.

Where, he wondered eagerly, would his first tour of duty be? On some cruiser of the

Legion Patrol, in the cold wastes of space? At some isolated outpost in the exotic,

terrible jungles of Venus? Or perhaps in the Guard of the Green Hall, itself? He

strove to conceal his consuming impatience.

“John Ulnar,” old Major Stell spoke at last, with maddening deliberation. “I hope you

realize the meaning of duty.”

“I think I do, sir.”

“Because,” the officer continued, as slowly, “you are being assigned to a duty that is

peculiarly important.”

“What is it, sir?”

He could not resist the desire to hasten the satisfaction of his anxious curiosity, but

Major Stell refused to hurry. His keen eyes still scanned John Star pitilessly, while his

thin fingers continued to turn the silver toy on his desk.

“John Ulnar, you are being given a duty that has previously been entrusted only to

seasoned, chosen veterans of the Legion. It surprised me, I may say, that you were

selected for it. Your lack of experience will be a disadvantage to you.”

“Not too much of one, I hope, sir.”

Why didn’t he come to the point?

“The orders for your assignment, John Ulnar, came directly from Commander Ulnar

himself. Does it happen that you are related to the Commander of the Legion, and his

nephew, Eric Ulnar, the explorer?”

“Yes, six. Distantly.”

“That must explain your orders. But if you fail hi this duty, John Ulnar, don’t expect

any favor of the Commander to save you from the consequences.”

“No, sir. Of course not!”

How long could he endure this anxiety?

“The service to which you are assigned, John Ulnar, is not well known. It is in fact

secret. But it is the most important that can be entrusted to a soldier of the Legion.

Your responsibility will be to the Green Hall itself. Any failure, I may warn you, even

if due only to negligence, will mean disgrace and very severe punishment.”

“Yes, sir.”

What could it be?

“John Ulnar, did you ever hear of AKKA?”

“Akka? Why, I think not, sir.”

“It isn’t ‘akka.’ AKKA. It’s a symbol.”

“Yes, sir. What does it mean?”

At last, was he coming to it?

“Men have given their lives to learn that, John Ulnar. And men have died for

knowing. Only one person in the System knows precisely what those four letters stand

for. That person is a young woman. The most important single duty of the Legion is

to guard her.”

“Yes, sir.” A breathless whisper.

“Because, John Ulnar, AKKA is the most precious thing that humanity possesses. I

need not tell you what it is. But the loss of it, I may say—the loss of the young

woman who knows it—would mean unprecedented disaster to humanity.”

“Yes, sir.” He waited, painfully.

“I could assign you to no duty more important than to join the few trusted men who

guard that young woman. And to no duty more perilous! For desperate men know that

AKKA exists, know that possession of it would enable them to dictate to the Green

Hall—or to destroy it.

“No risk, nor any difficulty, will deter them from attempting to get possession of the

young woman, to force the secret from her. You must be unceasingly alert against

attempts by stealth or violence. The girl—and AKKA—must be protected at any

cost.”

“Yes, sir. Where is the girl?”

“That information cannot be given you, until you are out in space. The danger that

you might pass it on, unwittingly or otherwise, is too great. The girl’s safety depends

on her whereabouts being kept secret. If they become known—the whole Legion fleet

might be inadequate to defend her.

“You are assigned, John Ulnar, to join the guard of AKKA. You will report at once, at

the Green Hall, to Captain Eric Ulnar, and place yourself under his orders.”

“Under Eric Ulnar!”

Jack Williamson - Three From the Legion

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