The Best of Argosy #7 - Minions of Mercury Read online

  Introduction to the Best of Argosy

  by Robert Weinberg

  Minions of Mercury — Argosy August 31, 1940 — September 28, 1940

  By William Grey Beyer

  Detroit (AD 7952 Edition) is running around in circles — following the commands of men long dead and threatening chaos to the world. Enter Omega, swooping from the clouds with Mark Nevin flying behind him.

  Radio Archives • 2014

  Copyright Page

  Copyright © 1940 by Popular Publications, Inc. Copyright renewed © 1968 and assigned to Argosy Communications, Inc. “Argosy” and its distinctive logo and symbolism and all related elements are trademarks and are the property of Argosy Communications, Inc. All Rights Reserved. © 2014 RadioArchives.com. Reprinted and produced under license from Argosy Communications, Inc. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form.

  These pulp stories are a product of their time. The text is reprinted intact, unabridged, and may include ethnic and cultural stereotyping that was typical of the era.

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  Introduction to The Best of Argosy

  By Robert Weinberg

  Perhaps the most profitable decision ever made in American magazine publishing was made by Frank A. Munsey in 1896. Munsey had started a magazine titled The Golden Argosy in 1882, aimed at the boy’s adventure audience. In 1888, he dropped the word Golden as he tried to move to an older audience. In 1894, Munsey began publishing The Argosy as a monthly magazine. Two years later, he made his big decision. Reasoning that his readership bought his magazine for the stories it contained and not the paper the magazine was printed upon, Munsey started publishing The Argosy on much cheaper pulp-wood paper instead of the slick white paper used by nearly all magazines. This bold move enabled him to drop the price of his all-fiction magazine from a quarter to a dime. Munsey’s reasoning proved correct and The Argosy magazine became one of the best selling publications in America.

  The goal of Argosy, (the The being dropped over the years) was to publish the best adventure and action fiction for men and boys. Not that women were neglected as there was plenty of romance mixed in with the danger. But, Argosy remained true to its purpose for well over a thousand issues, printing the top-of-the-line stories by the world’s greatest masters of exciting fiction.

  The purpose of this series, The Best of Argosy, is to make available to modern adventure fans some of the finest stories ever published in the 1920s and 1930s issues of Argosy. This period is considered, by most pulp magazine historians, the magazine’s greatest. While many of the tremendous tales from these eras have been reprinted in book and paperback format, many many others have been forgotten and never before been reprinted. The Best of Argosy will make available incredible stories by such writers as George F. Worts, William Grey Beyer, Arthur Leo Zagat, Ray Cummings, Borden Chase, and dozens of others. Fire up your ray gun, cinch your saddle, put your car into gear – it’s time to revisit the golden age of pulp adventure with The Best of Argosy!

  Robert Weinberg

  Minions of Mercury

  An Exciting New Story of Mark and Omega, Adventurers in the Cosmos

  By William Grey Beyer, author of “Minions of the Moon,” “Minions of Mars,” etc.

  from the pages of Argosy August 31, 1940 — September 28, 1940

  Detroit (AD 7952 Edition) is running around in circles — following the commands of men long dead and threatening chaos to the world. Enter Omega, swooping from the clouds with Mark Nevin flying behind him.

  Foreword

  Given an overdose of an untried super-anesthetic, Mark Nevin went into a slumber that lasted for six thousand years. While he slept, there were wars; the civilization Mark knew disappeared; and mankind reverted to savagery.

  Mark might well never have awakened had not Omega, an omnipotent but prankish disembodied intelligence, roused him to become the father of a new and better race. Mark chose Nona as his mate, and Omega introduced radioactive elements to their blood, protecting them from fatigue, hunger, and pain.

  After a series of adventures, Mark and Nona settled down with the neo-Vikings of the North. Twelve years went by...

  Chapter 1: The Heavenly Visitor

  AT FIRST, Omega was slightly puzzled. Since Omega’s intellect was practically all-powerful — since in fact, Omega was in reality nothing but intellect, a vast, disembodied and slightly irresponsible brain-wave, bewilderment was an almost unheard-of experience for him. But now he could have sworn... In fact it had only been a short twelve years ago when he had sworn that nothing existed on the American continent anything like the very things he now beheld. Twelve years ago, he had told his friend and protégée, Mark, that the Scandinavian peninsula was the best place on the surface of the earth for him, Mark, to establish residence.

  He had assured Mark that nowhere in America, or what was left of it, was there a vestige of the civilization Mark had known in the days before his six-thousand-year long sleep, a cat-nap caused by an enterprising twentieth century surgeon’s maladroit use of a super-anesthetic. When Mark came to, the largest portion of America’s inhabitants were savage nomads, some of them cannibals, and the rest of them lived in a more or less feudal condition in the walled cities which were thinly scattered throughout the continent. Omega had been sincere when he had advised Mark to make his home among the Vikings of Norway.

  Omega had always taken an interest — sometimes beneficent, sometimes merely meddlesome — in Earthly developments. As Luna was his birthplace, it was natural to consider Terra as his real home, now that its satellite was cold and dead.

  Yet here, on Earth, something was going on that he had missed — an unforeseen development that bordered on the impossible. Omega thought back to the time when he had visited this place. He remembered distinctly that the city had been in a very low state of social development at the time. It was just another feudal town of the many that had sprung up amid the ruins of the civilized communities of the twenty century. Ruled by an iron-fisted despot, it had been plunged in tyranny and squalor when he had last seen it. It had been one of the worst of the lot, in fact. There had been many others with better government and more enlightened laws. More enlightened, that is, for the times.

  Omega did whatever a disembodied intelligence could do in the way of frowning with thoughtful effort.

  The solution came when he realized that it had been more than a thousand years since he had been here. Time certainly did fly, he thought, happy in his coinage of a phrase. He remembered the progress, both social and scientific, which had been made in shorter periods during the history of mankind. And while it was apparent that other cities in America had remained at a standstill, it was understandable that one of them hadn’t.

  THAT definite progress had taken place was easy to see. Factories had sprung up and were puffing up smoke at a furious rate. Vehicles were moving along the streets, and they weren’t drawn by horses. Idly Omega noted that none of these was traveling in or out of the city, though several wagons pulled by teams of horses were. Yet the roads leading through the gates were smooth and capable of carrying autos.

  Further, he noted that most of the horseless vehicles were trucks, designed for freight, rather than passengers. Evidently these people
didn’t consider that the best use of an automobile was to get them away from the city. No... They wouldn’t, naturally. The walls explained that. Outside the city lurked danger, in the form of roving bands of nomads. Though it did seem queer that when some of the inhabitants did venture out, they preferred horsepower to swifter ways of travel. Unless, for some reason, the people of this city didn’t want their advancement known to the rest of the world.

  Detroit had been the original name of the city below. Possibly that was the reason for the sudden progress. Detroit had once been a great industrial center, chiefly inhabited by those engaged in large-scale manufacture.

  It was conceivable that the descendants of these people were slightly different from the inhabitants of other cities. Their ancestors had been skilled workers, technicians and engineers. There was a tendency for such skills to be inherited. Then again, technical treatises and books on science and physics and chemistry might have escaped destruction during the last great war.

  These might well have been discovered and deciphered by the descendants of the men and women who had originally used them. And that, no doubt, coupled with natural inherited tendencies, had enabled the new city of Detroit to show such amazing progress since he had last observed it.

  With Omega, curiosity was a vice. He decided to investigate. First, he set about whipping himself up a human body to inhabit. He could just as well have descended into the city as the invisible thought-pattern that he was, and thereby have roamed freely about, observing without being seen; but that was not his way.

  He preferred to get his information as a man would get it, by mingling with the people he wished to observe. A man can learn more about a man than can all the disembodied intelligences in existence, for the hearts and souls of men cannot be felt and known merely by the processes of the brain.

  So Omega created his body — a decrepit and ancient one, with a wrinkled face and wise old eyes — by the direct mental manipulation of the vast energies which pervade all space. Courtesy and discretion caused him to perform the operation at some distance outside the city walls. Then, with tottery steps, he proceeded, with the aid of a cane — literally, an after-thought — toward the nearest gate in the wall.

  As he neared it, two men appeared atop the barricade, one on each side of the gate. They were archers; and they were obviously going to make a fuss about letting him in.

  “Halt!” cried the hefty one. “Why do you seek entrance?”

  “Because I want to be inside, butterball,” answered the ancient in a surprisingly hearty voice.

  The guards looked at each other, and then the skinny one nodded. As if this was a signal, the other quickly fitted an arrow to his bow and let fly at Omega. The arrow sped true to the mark, in this case, approximately the pit of the aged man’s stomach. As it struck, the ringing sound of a gong was heard, and the arrow shivered to bits.

  “One cigar,” remarked the old one. “How about opening that gate?”

  THE archer looked puzzled, then assumed prayerfully that Omega wore some sort of armor under his ragged clothing. Grinning, he reached behind him and produced a high-powered rifle. Omega wondering vaguely why he hadn’t used this in the first place, watched the man take careful aim at the central portion of his spurious and non-essential anatomy. This time the sound of the gong and the flat crack of the rifle shot came together. Omega shook his head, grumbling.

  “Phooey,” Omega said, with dignity. “What manners! You need a lesson, Hawk-Eye.” Then he went into action. Taking a short run he made a prodigious leap and landed beside the dumbfounded guard.

  “I hate being shot at so early in the morning,” growled the ancient. “Give me that!”

  The guard, his coarse jaw sagging, handed over the gun, without argument. He had made the fatal but perfectly understandable error of looking into the eyes of the old one; and after that his will was not his own. Omega took a look at the rifle. It resembled a model that had seen wide-usage during the great war which had finally wrecked civilization. Smokeless powder had been used in the cartridges; and that didn’t fit in with Omega’s theory about inherited knowledge. Detroit had never been a munitions town, though it had experienced, and disastrously, the results of their manufacture. The gun itself held the answer to the puzzle. Bolt for bolt, and screw for screw, it was the exact duplicate of the actual guns which had been used in the last war.

  If the thing had been something close to the original, he would have said that it represented a development of modern times. But this was too close for that. It was a copy, if it was not actually one of those in use over six thousand years ago, and preserved in some miraculous fashion to the present day.

  Omega dropped the weapon and turned to the guards, just as the skinny man, who had not yet felt the power of Omega’s mind, was drawing a careful bead on him with another gun.

  “This is too much, really,” Omega said and froze the man with his finger tight against the trigger. “Mustn’t shoot people in the back. Didn’t your mother ever teach you that?”

  Gently, he probed the man’s mind. Gently, because with the full force of his vast mental power, a weak human brain would be burned out in an instant. And this didn’t look like a particularly bright specimen.

  Surprisingly he learned that the man’s mother had taught him not to shoot people in the back. She had, in fact, taught him to be a pretty good boy. Omega noted, still more puzzled, that the man wasn’t essentially vicious. He really was an exemplary citizen. Nor could Omega, at first, find anything to account for his inhuman and unreasonable actions. Then he found it, stuck way down at the bottom of the man’s subconscious, tucked away under a lot of old inhibitions and report cards. The man had a fixation, probably hypnotically induced.

  But try as he might he could find no memory, conscious or subconscious, of the identity of the person who had imposed the fixation. There was merely the post-hypnotic command that the guard should open the gate to no one but those citizens who were able to give the proper passwords. Others were to be killed summarily. Arrows were to be used for the purpose unless they failed because of distance or armor.

  Further, the rifles were never to be used in cases where their use might be observed by strangers too far away to be killed instantly.

  Chapter 2: Metropolis, 7952 AD

  OMEGA shook his head and turned to the other man. But he found the same thing there. Except that the skinny man was claustrophobic and had a mother complex. Neither man had any awareness of the hypnosis. Both would act normally up to the moment when someone unauthorized attempted to enter the gate. Then they would obey the hypnotic command.

  Irritably and with a certain pettishness, Omega erased the influence of the former hypnosis, and replaced it with a command of his own: the guards were to open the gate freely to anyone who might approach. He chuckled to himself as he floated gently down from the top of the wall, into the city.

  Omega noticed a change from his last visit. Then the city had been surrounded by miles of tilled and cultivated soil. Hundreds of soldiers were on constant guard duty throughout the area, protecting the fields from raids by savage nomads. But now the outposts of the city were on the walls themselves. The surrounding fields were no longer in use.

  Just inside the walls of the city there lay a narrow strip, no more than a half-mile wide, which seemed to be intensely cultivated. A half-mile by about twenty miles — hardly enough to feed a city of such size. Omega noticed pipe-lines for irrigation. A constant mist seemed to be rising from these. He also noticed that at regular distances, on the city side of the narrow strip, were tall, windowless towers, surmounted by what appeared to be immense concave mirrors, pointing downward and outward over the cultivated area.

  Omega decided that this needed looking into.

  The nearest tower was a short distance away. He hobbled to its base and found a small, locked door. A push of a finger opened it. Its simple lock presented no difficulty to one whose vision was not limited to a medium with so many drawbacks
as light, which refused to turn corners or penetrate through such porous materials as wood and iron.

  When occasion demanded Omega could see, or hear, or feel, over such diversified media as cosmic rays, ultra violet, sonic waves and even gamma rays, all of which he could manufacture as needed.

  The tumblers of the lock yielded instantly to his mental burglary and he mounted the pair of stairs which he found directly behind the door. He groaned as his creaky joints made audible protests. Omega delighted in an acting ability that was, if nothing else, unique. He lived his roles.

  A head poked forth from the top of the stairwell, and a pair of eyes widened in surprise. “I must have forgot to lock the door,” muttered the head. Then aloud, “What do you want, old one?”

  “A cup of coffee and a piece of apricot pie, please,” said Omega amiably. A taste for apricots ranked high after curiosity in a list of Omega’s vices.

  “Never heard of either,” said the man at the top. “You’d better get out of here. It’s against the rules to allow anybody near the growth projector. Dangerous, too. There’s leakage around that mirror, and it does something to your insides. We have to work in short shifts on account of it.”

  “I’m an old man anyway,” remarked Omega, as he puffed up to the top and gazed at a roomful of machinery. “What’s all this?”

  “That’s the machine that makes the growth ray,” the man answered. “It’s tuned to the potatoes. Turns out a new crop every two days. They dig them out at night, when the ray’s shut off. Say, you must be a stranger in this city!”

  “You couldn’t tune it to apricot pies, I don’t suppose. No. Pity. Great town you have here,” Omega said, shifting his attention from the machinery, which he didn’t understand, to the projection ray itself. He analyzed that briskly and identified it as a wave he had run across once before. It had been used by a highly advanced race living on one of the planets which encircled a sun a few hundred light-years distant. The ray was the result of a highly developed civilization, and he wondered at its presence here on a benighted earth.