Lankar of Callisto
- Автор: Картер Лин Спрэг
- Серия: Callisto #6
- Язык: английский
- Жанр: Научная фантастика
Электронная книга - «Lankar of Callisto». Краткое содержание книги:
...in the mysterious and treacherous domain of the insidious Mind Wizards. Searching for him is a fearless armada of his loyal friends, and a stranger who knows him better than anyone on Callisto. The stranger, Lankar, is none other than Lin Carter, accidentally transported through the Gate Between the Worlds to the land of the Thanatorians. Aware of Jandar's plight, Lankar joins the search beyond the world's edge and suddenly finds himself battling for his own existence against the most nightmarish creatures on the planet - the gruesome flesh robots of Kuur and the fiendish Mind Wizards of Callisto themselves...
“Both the young prince and his mother are in excellent health … although they miss you terribly, of course. Everyone is fine, and working strenuously to find this country and free you, you and your friends. Ah, is this place bugged, do you know?”
“What?”
“Microphones, I mean. Or eavesdroppers hidden in the walls; that sort of thing.”
“Oh, of course. Sorry, sir! It’s been so long since I spoke English with anyone, I’m beginning to forget some of it. No, we can’t be overheard here, I’m certain of that.”
“Good. I came here in the Second Armada, you will, have already guessed. You must have known there would be a Second Armada: no one is going to give you up for dead before they have absolute proof of your demise. The ships are overhead now, anyway the Xaxar is: I came down in one of the gigs with Glypto and Dr. Abziz―”
“Glypto! The scrawny little rascal-bless him! But―there are so many questions! First of all, how do you come to be here on Cadisto, sir? In fact, how do you happen to know anything about me in the first place?”
I sighed; my mouth felt dry as cotton and my head ached with a sharp throbbing pain just behind the eyes. The only thing I wanted to do was to lie down and close my eyes and wait till the pain dulled and faded away. But I began talking. I told him that the first manuscript, addressed to his friend Gary Hoyt, an air force major stationed in Saigon, had been found by friendly Cambodians and had eventually been received by Hoyt. Not knowing what else to do with what he cautiously decided was a work of fantastic fiction, and remembering how he and Jon Dark had often chatted about the relative merits of Burroughs, Carter and Norton (Andre), Hoyt had mailed it to me with an apologetic covering letter, saying I could do with it anything I wished-keep it as a touching tribute from a devoted reader of my novels, throw it away, even publish it if I thought it deserving of print. Jandar regarded me dazedly as I told him that, of the four manuscripts I had thus far received from the other side of the world, three had been published by Dell just as he had written them, and had been eagerly received by hundreds of thousands of readers.
“Hundreds of thousands!” he repeated in a stunned tone. “I never dreamed―”
I told him next that a distinguished British expert in Asian archaeology, following the clues in that first manuscript, had found the Lost City and was exploring its mysteries for science. Finally I told him how Noel and I had flown to Cambodia to visit Sir Malcolm’s dig, and how I had slipped and fallen into the Well just as he had done a year and a half before. I finished with a cursory account of my own modest adventures on Callisto, and the launching of the Second Armada.
“Mr. Carter, I don’t know what to say,” he muttered haltingly. “I certainly never wanted to drag anybody else into the middle of this mess … .”
“Forget it,” I grinned. “For an unadventurous man, I’ve got to admit I’ve been having the time of my life!”
“Since you read the last portion of the latest manuscript, then you’ll have already guessed we were caught by Jugrid’s jungle warriors while trying to scale the sides of the plateau,” he said grimly. “At thirty to three, it wasn’t much of a fight. We were not mistreated, just force-marched back to the caves where the Mind Wizards carried us off to Kuur. They fly on the gigantic winged reptiles the Thanatorians call ghastozars―something like pterodactyls, only a lot largerwhich they control by telepathy. We’ve been treated decently enough so far, no torture or anything like that, although it’s never been a secret that when they’re through with us we’ll end up like those flesh robots you saw. They do something to the brains of the poor chaps, with drugs or surgery, something that destroys their will completely.”
“Flesh robots―I like that! From Doc Smith, right? I’ve been thinking of them as zombies … .”
“Just like you, sir, I was surprised to find there are so few of the yellow devils. There were more when they came hereI think they traveled here from another planet, or maybe from another one of Jupiter’s moons. Their own world was dying, I gather. There must have been about fifty of them when they first got here, which was a dozen years ago. They found a snug hole in this uninhabited place to hide, and began plotting to conquer the world through the power of the mind alone.”
His tones were serious, his eyes brooding and grim. “Intellect is all that matters to them. Their chief, they call him `One’, is virtually nothing but mind. If you saw old Yanthu, the one in the antigravity chair, hitched up to the lifesupport system … he’s nearly a thousand years old, and he’s only `Three’ in their book. `Two’, a cold-eyed devil they call Koom Yaa, is the one who’s been interrogating me, over and over. They are fascinated to learn of Earth, and hungry for every tiniest scrap of information they can squeeze out of me about it. They want to go there, you see; they want to conquer it.
“They tried to take over Callisto, but a lot of things went wrong. They picked the Sky Pirates as the most perfect available tools―with their sky-ships, they were certainly the most technologically advanced civilization on Callisto, and, being a gang of cold-blooded murdering robbers, it didn’t take much to pervert them and to nudge them into the right path of action. They had two or maybe three Kuurians at Zanadar all the time, although I never guessed it. They got rid of the old Prince―you can induce heart attacks by telepathy, I have discovered, and also suicides and faial selfinflicted `accidents’―and elevated Thuton into his place. They had Thuton under their thumb all the while. Then something went wrong―one or two of the Kuurians were killed in an accident, maybe a sky-ship exploded―the gas is as explosive as hydrogen, you know. The one that was left turned renegade, got imperial dreams of his own, and pitted the Sky Pirates against Shondakor.
“The trouble was they were already running Shondakor by this time, having gotten the upper hand over Arkola, warlord of the Black Legion, who conquered the Golden City for them, forcing the Ku Thad out. The Kuurian at Zanadar, I don’t know his name, declared war on the Kuurian who was running things in Shondakor as the power behind the throne―his name was Ool; I killed him in the pits below the palace, or rather, he slipped and fell and killed himself. Anyway, my chance arrival here mucked things up for them. I came along at just the right time to be instrumental in breaking the Black Legion, and restoring Shondakor to Darloona and her people, and together we smashed the Sky Pirates, killing most of them when we detonated the vapor mines―the Kuurian died in the holocaust, too. I never even knew he was there.
“They started all over again in Tharkol. But by this time, twelve years had gone by and their numbers were greatly reduced. There’s only seventeen of them left alive―sixteen, by gosh, counting the one guarding the Secret Door, the one your othode jumped on. Well, you know what they tried in Tharkol. With the Sky Pirates eliminated from the running, the only major world powers left were Shondakor and the empire of the red men, the Perushtarians. They were going to manipulate Zamara into knocking over both countries, consolidating the new empire; then they would exterminate the Yathoon hordesmen and run the planet to suit themselves … .”
“For what reason, just the lust for power?”
“To live forever,” he said somberly. “You see, they’re the last of their kind in the universe, and they can no longer reproduce, since the last of their females died back before they left their home―world. To live forever they need an endless supply of healthy bodies wherewith to stock the organ banks―whenever they wear out a liver or a heart or whatever, they replace it with a healthy one―and a large supply of living slaves, under their mental thumbs, you know, to do the work. To be able to do this in complete security they want the comfort of knowing the entire planet is under their control, and that nothing can go wrong. A pretty picture, isn’t it? No rebels, no dissident factions, no guerrillas in the hills―the whole planet a mass of brain―dead zombies, to dig the fields and mine the metals and to just be there when somebody needs a new pair of lungs or a spinal cord.”