1,000-Year Voyage (7 page)

“Yes, perhaps it is,” Merva admitted, shrugging, “I make no apology for that. I have the one saving grace of knowing exactly what I want, and what is more I know how to get it.”

In that instant she ceased talking and pressed the button upon her weapon. Immediately the men and women forming the circle endeavoured to fling themselves to one side, but they were not quick enough to escape the devastating area of the vibration.

Merva kept her finger relentlessly pressed upon the weapon's button and when she left the lounge five minutes later there was nothing to show for her activities but a haze of dispersing, evil smelling smoke.

And the vessel sped on….

* * * * * * *

The situation was at last as Merva wanted it. She was completely rid of all her enemies and free to plan the future exactly as she wished. There was, of course, no doubt in her mind as to what she intended to do—she would use the energy derived from the children to give herself and her son a thousand years of life. By that time she would have evolved the perfect plan and no doubt have discovered a way to drive the mighty space liner back across the course it had already taken but at an infinitely greater speed than upon its outward journey.

She would not even have the loneliness of space to weigh her down for with her son there was always the assurance of company, nor was it company that could pall for she had so much to teach him; he had so much to ask her that there would be very little time for idle moments. Yes, the situation was perfect and, not in the least disturbed by her conscience after the elimination of the men and women in the lounge, Merva picked up Exodus from the laboratory and calmly returned to her apartment to catch up on a good deal of lost sleep.

She awakened again to the awareness of strange sounds |coming from a far distant quarter of the ship. They were not loud enough to have actually awakened her for she felt refreshed after many hours of deep sleep, therefore for the moment the puzzle was complete. She glanced towards Exodus' bed, thinking that perhaps he was responsible for the noises, but to her surprise he was comfortably stretched out, sleeping deeply.

Puzzled and even slightly afraid, Merva slipped out quickly from the bed, drew her wrap about her and hurried down the corridor to the source of the noises. They appeared to be coming from the immense storage hold in which were kept the vast quantities of supplies necessary for this stupendous journey.

The noise sounded like someone hammering on the huge metal door. Just for an instant as she stood there alone in the corridor, knowing that she was in the depths of interstellar space, and with only a young and quite helpless boy for company, Merva felt her flesh creep a little. What conceivably could be alive on this spaceship when she knew that she had destroyed the last of her foes?

It took every vestige of her courage to slide away the massive bar that held the door in place and then open the door slowly and peer into the gloom beyond. Her hand felt round fumblingly for the light switch and snapped it on. At the sight that met her she caught her breath in a tremendous gasp of amazement.

There in the bright light stood the six children whom she had imagined were dead and already ejected from the space machine!

Instantly they came hurrying around her, full of that complete trust which is the prerogative of a child. Merva stared at them in bewilderment, trying to fathom how it was that they came to be alive when she had seen them not so very long ago upon the table in the lounge covered with a sheet. But she had not been present at the intended ejection of their bodies into outer space. She remembered how bluntly she had been told that her presence would not be welcome at such a ceremony…. What then had happened to so change the circumstances?

She said nothing there and then but ushered the children along the corridor into the lounge, studying them intently as she followed behind them. They appeared to be in perfect health again and from the way they moved there was obviously no lack of energy either.

Smiling to herself, Merva followed them into the lounge and then after insistent clamourings she concocted a story to explain the disappearance of their parents. She explained it away by saying that they had all been expelled out into space when the window of the room they were in had been struck and destroyed by a meteor, and the air had rushed out in the void. At their young age the children readily accepted the lie, along with her reassurance that she had repaired the breached hull, and that the cosmic accident was unlikely to ever happen again.

She finally left them and went out to prepare a meal for each one of them. As they ate it with an avidity that astonished her she questioned each one of them in turn and eventually managed to piece together what was evidently the truth.

Closer examination had revealed to their parents that they were not dead but stunned into something very close to what might be called suspended animation by the tremendous shock of having their bodily energy drained from them. Apparently their heartbeats had dropped almost to zero but a very careful analysis had shown that the heartbeats were still there and therefore they were alive.

They had been put in the storage hold for a reason that none of them seemed to understand but which Merva grasped readily enough. Evidently their parents had been planning some kind of scheme that they had intended later to spring upon her—Merva. It was the realisation of this fact that made her all the more satisfied that she had taken the right step in eliminating the adults completely. She bolstered her story by telling the children that their parents had known of the impending meteor strike and had placed the children in the storage hold for their own safety.

She was now left her with their progeny to mould and train exactly as she wished alongside Exodus.

Far from resenting the reappearance of the children Merva accepted it gladly. It gave her three girls and four boys, including her own son, who, when they matured would be capable of producing progeny and that perhaps would be the beginning of a small but relentless army who would exact the vengeance which she had in mind.

It meant that her original plan which was to include only herself and her son would have to undergo revision: not that that mattered, for the more there were to carry out the plan the better.

So from that moment onwards she appointed herself as the children's mentor and day by day and week by week taught them all the arts of scientific accomplishment as she knew them together with the doctrine of revenge that was always uppermost in her thoughts. Cleverly, she blamed the death of their parents directly on the Earth authorities, who had been responsible for unjustly banishing them into space. Inevitably the children were moulded by what she taught and told them, and deprived of their own parents they accepted everything she said as being the absolute truth. Out here in the depths of space there were no other adults, no other minds, to give the lie to anything which Merva said.

Inevitably she was the absolute controller of the ship.

The only thing which she did particularly notice was the slow change in Exodus as month by month and presently year by year he moved onwards towards maturity.

In the early stages he had seemed to be an absolute replica of herself, but gradually there came a slow transition of his mental outlook and it was forced upon Merva that he had a great deal of his father in him. Not only in physical appearance, for very early on he revealed his late father's majesty of bearing and insolence of expression, but in his mental outlook as well. He had all of Rigilus' manner allied to his mother's complete ruthlessness and the two together were a decidedly formidable combination.

It was not very long before Merva realised that she had a problem child on her hands insofar as he only obeyed her orders when he felt that they would be of any particular benefit to him, and outside of that he was completely defiant, nor could anything that she could do cause him to change his policy.

The one advantage so far as Merva could see was, that being the type of boy he was, Exodus assumed complete domination over the other children and they, being of much weaker stock, accepted his leadership without question. Perhaps in the end, Merva considered, this might prove to be an advantage.

For her, the weeks and months spread gradually into years and the awful journey still continued uninterrupted, the vessel now being apparently billions of miles from the nearest point of contact. There was nothing now but the stars and the far distant Milky Way galaxy and the nebulae beyond that. Of Earth, the Solar System and its Sun there was no longer the slightest trace.

Years—years—years. Merva did not appear to be a day older, so completely did the life energy she had absorbed at regular intervals maintained her age at one constant level. But Exodus was now fifteen and the children around him between that age and twelve. Everyone of them was well educated and with a highly scientific outlook—Merva had seen to that—and likewise every one of them was concentrated upon the one thing nearest to her own heart, revenge upon the descendants of the people of Earth for the injustice which they had brought into being.

Not that Merva had confined herself exclusively to the education of the children. She had found time here and there to concentrate her coldly scientific brain upon the problem of devising weapons with which to wage destruction upon Earthlings when the time came.

So far the weapons had not got beyond the drawing board stage; she planned at a later date, when the children were far morc mature than they were now, that they should all work upon the task of making the weapons for themselves, thereby understanding in most complete detail what exactly was required from each one of them. Her plan was to make each boy and each girl, when they became men and women, the controller of one particular weapon and a specialist in his or her line. In this way she felt confident that there could be no mistakes when the far distant day came for the onslaught to be waged.

She knew perfectly well of course that the only two survivors of the thousand year voyage would be herself and her son but she was relying a good deal on the mechanism of hereditary for the other children when grown to adult life, to hand on to their own children all the knowledge which they had absorbed, most of it naturally inherited and the rest of it taught. Hence her reason for being so completely thorough with every detail of each weapon.

“To you, Exodus,” she said on one occasion, when he had reached the age of eighteen, “I am handing over this automatic annihilator. You will find after careful study of the details that it is by far the most powerful weapon ever conceived. Operating on full power it will be capable of blotting out an entire city with one blow and I very much doubt if the peoples of Earth, unprepared for an onslaught, will be able to counteract anything of that nature. That is the main thing that we have in our favour, Exodus—the absolute surprise with which we shall attack.”

Exodus nodded slowly as his mother looked at him with her earnest green eyes, her face set as ever in that cruel, inflexible mould.

“Are you quite sure, mother, that you are not taking too much for granted?” he asked after a while.

“That sounds to me rather a ridiculous question, Exodus, since I never take anything for granted. What exactly do you mean?”

“It is not that I fear our inability to finish the journey,” he said, pondering. “The only thing I am wondering about is shall we have enough power to make the journey back—and even more shall we have enough ingenuity to be able to work out how to get back to Earth within a reasonable time? You say the journey outwards before the switchboard is released from the electronic brain will take a thousand years. If it were to take us that long to get back I cannot help but feel that the tedium of the trip would bring both you and I to the point of looking for suicide as a way to end it.”

Merva looked at her son fixedly.

“How very much like your father you are,” she said slowly. “He once said something like that, though not in quite so many words. I'm going to say to you what I said to him—a statement like that is nothing else but sheer defeatism! You don't suppose all the energy, learning and struggle which is being gone through in these years is going to be terminated by anything as ridiculous as suicide, do you?”

“Naturally I don't wish it to,” Exodus shrugged, “I'm merely stating what appears to me as a problem. What methods are we going to use to return at a speed faster than we have made the outward journey?”

Merva looked irritated. “Yon need not have the slightest fear that we shall find our way back and quickly too. Remember that this ship is not moving at anything like its optimum velocity. Once the locks of the controls on the switchboard are removed it will be possible to increase the speed very close to the speed of light—186,000 miles per second. We shall do this by accelerating constantly. We can do this because the atomic energy basis of our engines is almost inexhaustible. Travelling at the speed of light, our ship could reach Earth on the return trip from Alpha Centauri in just a little over four years. Of course that is impossible, because we will need time to build up the speed, and then an equal amount of time to decelerate at the other end. But clearly we can reach the Earth in a comparatively reasonable time and then strike.”

Exodus nodded but did not comment, a fact that made Merva wonder what exactly had passed through his mind at that moment.

“I assume then,” he said presently, “that you are now going to teach me all there is to know about this atomic annihilator.”

“Exactly,” Merva assented, “just you alone. The others will be taught how to operate the other instruments in the hope that they will hand it on to their children later—and incidentally Exodus, you are in your nineteenth year and therefore more than mature. Have you singled out amongst the girls there are in this space machine which one you have decided upon?”

“I have,” he answered calmly.