Twin of the Amazon Read online

  The Amazon had plans to colonize Mars—but the Martians put a spoke in her wheel. Making a quick trip to the red planet, the Amazon could find no trace of life in the bleak deserts of ferric oxide that covered the globe; but soon after her return a huge meteorite landed near Stonehenge on Salisbury Plain. No such monster had fallen since the one that fell on Siberia in 1908— but carefully as the scientists examined it, they could find no clue as to its place of origin, and wrote it off as one more wanderer from outer space.

  Three weeks later, an inexplicable accident destroyed the Central Power House in London, chief generator of atomic power for the Home Counties. The same night, the durrilium-metal span of Westminster Bridge collapsed, and the alarmed authorities realized that some mysterious force was undermining the strength of every metal structure in the country. It was the Amazon who first connected the disasters with the Stonehenge meteorite, and guessed that the latter might have been directed from Mars; nor was it long before the Amazon and her friends were at grips with the ruthless powers of an alien civilization.

  Also by John Russell Fearn

  THE GOLDEN AMAZON’S TRIUMPH

  THE AMAZON’S DIAMOND QUEST

  THE AMAZON STRIKES AGAIN

  TWIN

  OF THE AMAZON

  by

  JOHN RUSSELL FEARN

  THE MASTER

  SCIENCE FICTION SERIES

  No. 5

  THE WORLD’S WORK (1913) LTD

  KINGSWOOD :: SURREY

  ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

  The characters, places, incidents and situations in this

  book are imaginary, and have no relation to any person,

  place or actual happening

  FIRST PUBLISHED 1954

  Printed in Great Britain by Richard Clay and Company, Ltd,

  Bungay, Suffolk

  CHAPTER I

  There were four people seated at the huge polished table in the Directors’ Room of the Dodd Space Line Building. Before them were papers, statistical files, records of the spaceship company’s activities—and future plans.

  Chris Wilson, grey-haired and heavy-shouldered, mused through the records before him whilst his wife Ethel looked on. Now and again she gave a faintly puzzled smile and shook her head.

  “I don’t understand one-half of all this, Chris,” she protested. “You know I’ve no commercial instincts.”

  “Shame on you, as a Director of the Line!” Chris Wilson reproved, grinning. “Anyway, it’s all quite straightforward. We have here simply a statement of past successes—and failures—together with a blueprint of our future intentions. To remain successful we have to extend our activities, of course: that’s normal to any company, even one running space-ships from here to Venus and back. This morning, as soon as Vi arrives, we’re going to see what we can do to include Mars in our route.”

  Across the table the gigantic Commander Howard Kerrigan, President of the Venusian end of the Space Line, had relapsed into meditation. Ruth, his wife, a slender, grey-eyed woman with hair whitening at the temples, glanced at her watch.

  “It’s past ten,” she announced. “Vi’s late.”

  “She’ll be here,” Kerrigan told her, stirring himself. “She’s never missed an appointment in her life—and she certainly won’t miss a meeting as important as this—”

  He turned in expectancy as the door opened. A young woman with black hair, very blue eyes, and dressed in the sauciest two-piece and hat which 1990 could produce, came in.

  “Any room for a little one?” she asked solemnly. “I’m going on a shopping tour, and I want some money. They said I’d find you in here.”

  “Enter the erring daughter,” Chris sighed, but he kissed the girl affectionately as she stooped first to him and then to her mother. “And so because you want money you have the temerity to burst into the Directors’ Room, have you? You’re not a Director, you know—yet.”

  “No; but I shall be some day,” the girl answered brightly. “And anyway I’m always interested in whatever Aunt Vi does—which is one excuse, apart from money, for my being here. You haven’t kept things to yourselves so much as you imagine, remember! Little Ethel keeps her ears open.... After all, Aunt Vi and I are just like sisters. Look at the things we’ve done together! Conquered Venus between us; then there was that spot of bother at the South Pole———” “Yes, but that was four years ago, dear!” her mother laughed. “And those sort of adventures are out henceforth, I hope. I don’t like my little girl getting mixed up in such things.”

  “Not even with Aunt Vi?” The younger Ethel gave a reproving look. “Mum, you know I couldn’t be safer than when I’m with her.”

  She turned to the vast window and gazed out upon the squat roofs and radio-beacon towers of 1990 London. Absently her gaze looked westwards, from which direction an air-taxi bearing Violet Ray Brant, the extraordinary “Golden Amazon”, was due at any moment. Right now the air-lanes were mainly clear, except for clumsy freighters and, in the far distance, an Earth-Venus space liner was streaking like quicksilver into the soft glow of the summer morning.

  “Sisters...” Commander Kerrigan mused. “That has a bit of a queer ring, somehow.”

  The girl turned from the window to glance at him. “What’s queer about it, Uncle Howard?”

  “Chiefly the fact that you are twenty-six and that your Aunt Vi must be about forty years older. Oh, I know you wouldn’t think it to look at her—but to consider you as sisters! Think of the age difference!”

  “Oh, Howard, stop classing Vi as an ordinary woman!” his wife protested. “When you’re in the grave—and I too— she’ll still look as though she is in the twenties... Ruth Kerrigan sighed wistfully. “That Dr. Axton way back in 1940 certainly must have been a wonderful surgeon, considering what he did to Vi’s glandular structure. Gave her five hundred years of life, superhuman strength, and the brain of a genius. Yet sometimes I wonder about her.... Do you think she’s really happy?”

  “With more intelligence than any other scientist on this Earth or Venus?” Kerrigan exclaimed. “What more can she want? I’d be well pleased with half what she’s got.”

  “Maybe you would—but there are times when I think she’d prefer to be a real woman instead of the pitiless, sexless, clever creature she is, with a beauty which becomes more phenomenal with every year. I sometimes think I—”

  “Here she is!” the younger Ethel exclaimed in sudden eagerness. “Her air-taxi’s just heading down to the roof park.”

  The four at the table became a little more alert, waiting; and presently the board-room door opened and the woman they were expecting came in.

  “Sorry I’m late,” she apologized, smiling and closing the door. “There was a bit of congestion in the air-lanes over Hampshire, otherwise I’d have been on time. I’ve been up in the Midlands on business.” She glanced at the quartet then at the girl beside the window. “I thought you’d be here, Rosy Cheeks,” she added dryly, using the younger Ethel’s childhood nickname. “I never made a plan yet but what you managed to be in on it somehow.”

  “The strategy this time is that she needs money with which to shop,” her father grinned.

  The younger Ethel gave a rather embarrassed smile and did not speak. Ruth Kerrigan looked at the slender young woman advancing towards the table—for she certainly did not appear to be beyond the early twenties—in her grey costume and white blouse; then she cocked an eye on her husband.

  “See what I mean, Howard?” she asked. “Impossible to assess by ordinary standards.”

  “Uh-huh. You’re right, dear.”

  “Ordinary standards?” the Golden Amazon asked in surprise, her deep-violet eyes suddenly questioning. “Are you discussing me?”

  “O
f course,” Kerrigan told her, grinning. “But we’re not alone in that. The whole world does it... and no wonder!” Violet Ray Brant seated herself at the table and smiled in the queer inward way she had, as though a private joke were amusing her. Chris Wilson sat considering her idly, his mind flying back down the years, and he could not recall a time when she had not looked just as she did now—flawlessly beautiful, amber-skinned, with a flowing mass of hair the shade of molten gold.

  “As you know,” the Amazon said, glancing up as she unzipped the brief-case, “I’ve been busy for the past two years on my instantaneous transportation system, or in other words the scientific way of transferring matter piecemeal from place to place. In an emergency—such as happened during the South Pole affair when I had to pursue Irma Mueller to Venus—I accomplished the transference from Earth to Venus, but something went wrong at the reassembly end. I finished up with amnesia. Remember? I’ve corrected such troubles now, with the result that anything organic or inorganic can be moved from here to anywhere at literally the speed of light.”

  “Be grand for freight,” Chris Wilson agreed. “But if we extend the idea to human beings, don’t we rather cut our own throats? We have poured billions into the Space Line, both here and on Venus, to get it to perfection. If we have this radio-instrument method it will mean that at least half of our fleet of space-ships may become white elephants. Then what?”

  The Amazon smiled. “Because I’m a scientist, Chris, I’m not necessarily a bad business woman,” she remarked. “I don’t intend that instantaneous transportations shall be used for human beings in a general way. In fact, I doubt if above ten per cent of people would take kindly to the idea. I have devised it chiefly for the fast moving of freight, so that when competitive Space Lines rise up—as assuredly they will when other scientists get space-flying to perfection—we can still be one jump ahead of them. Until that time comes I intend to use this system entirely for my own use. First, as a quick way to get to Mars and back.”

  “Now we’re getting at it,” Kerrigan said, in sudden interest. “You’ve been working for four years on this Martian colonization project. What’s the angle, Vi?”

  “The angle’s simple enough. We have got to annex Mars and add it to the Federation of Inner Planets.”

  The quartet looked at one another, and then Chris spread his hands.

  “Just like that, eh? Astronomers tell us that Mars is a dead world—or as good as. Utterly unlike Venus, where we have everything reasonably peaceful at last. There we have extremes of temperature, but at least it’s a place that can be colonized—and indeed it has been. But Mars! You might as well suggest that we try and colonize the Sahara!”

  The Amazon was quite undisturbed. Her brief smile revealed the perfection of her teeth.

  “So far,” she answered, “our space fliers have never landed on Mars. Their orders have been to by-pass it. I’ve had good reason for issuing such orders. You see, there may be things on Mars—traces of ancient civilizations, for instance—of incomparable scientific value, which blundering, untrained space navigators might ruin. When Mars is examined as a possible future colony I’ll do it myself—as I intend to, tonight.”

  “By instantaneous transportation?” Chris Wilson asked, and the girl nodded.

  “Should I find it is a planet capable of colonization I’ll put my plans in operation,” she continued. “Everything is worked out to the last detail. Special power-houses will be built, whose purpose will be solely to disperse gases into the Martian atmosphere and bring it up to a density comparable with Earth’s. That in turn will form clouds; they in turn will—again by scientific methods—be made to disgorge incessant rain until finally the arid deserts are restored to the ocean floors they once were. They in turn will irrigate the rest of the planet, and so Mars will blossom as a small-scale Earth, and a very useful colony and new stopping-place for the Dodd Line. The only thing I won’t be able to alter will be the gravitation, which is two-fifths of ours.”

  “It’s a wonderful scheme,” Ruth Kerrigan said, her face bright as she grasped the possibilities. “Just the kind of plan one comes to expect from you, Vi—limitless in its scientific implications. But this colonization will take a long time, won’t it?”

  “Perhaps five to seven years before perfection is achieved and all settlers are duly domiciled,” the Amazon responded. “Little enough time, though, when you consider that a dead world will be restored to life. By then”—her deep violet eyes wandered to where the younger Ethel was standing, listening in wrapt attention—“Rosy Cheeks will be turned thirty, and perhaps have enough maturity in her adventurous soul to take over control of the Martian end. That is what I am hoping for.”

  “Why, Aunt Vi, that’s wonderful!” Ethel exclaimed, her blue eyes sparkling. “And you really think I’d be capable of—”

  “You might then; certainly not now,” the Amazon told her. “In time, though, you’ll grow like your father—heavy and disinclined to exercise. Yes, by thirty you ought to be just right. If you are married by then and have a man to aid you, all the better.... However,” the Amazon continued, “I’m getting too far ahead. The thing right now is for me to go to Mars. I shall leave my home laboratory this evening at ten o’clock. I shall reach Mars and reassemble by time switch one minute later. I intend to stay for half an hour exploring—in the Martian noonday according to my calculations—and at ten-thirty-one I shall be back on Earth with my views as to whether colonization is practicable.”

  “And—and can we watch you make this—disappearing act?” the younger Ethel asked eagerly.

  “The difficulty,” the Amazon answered, closing the briefcase with slender, amber-tinted fingers, “will be to stop you! Come by all means—all of you.”

  . . . . . . .

  At quarter to ten that evening Chris, his wife and daughter, and Commander Kerrigan and Ruth, were in the immense private laboratory annexed to the Golden Amazon’s out-London home. It was a laboratory in which scientific miracles had either been performed—or would be. There were instruments alien to all normal design, devised by the scientific genius of the Amazon herself, with which she continued her everlasting search for the ultimate secrets of time and space. To the Amazon nothing mattered except science and the bending of its vagaries to her will.

  She stood now beside an electro-magnetic equipment which seemed to be mainly comprised of tall, slender tubes, insulators, and drums of highly polished copper wire. The actual controls were on a complicated switch-panel near by.

  In silence the quintet listened to her running through details already familiar to them, which when summed up meant that her atomic make-up could be broken down within the area of the apparatus and reassembled—without the need of a receiver—at any distance, be it a couple of yards or, as in the case of Mars, forty-three million miles. Then the actuation of a time-switch would reverse the process, and the Amazon would be back where she had commenced her journey, her atoms driven along an electromagnetic beam pointed directly at Mars and following it in its course under the actuation of electric motors.

  “I’m afraid,” Ruth Kerrigan said, sighing, “that most of the science is right over our heads, Vi. We’ll just have to take your word for it, as usual. You did it once, to Venus, so presumably you can do it again to Mars.”

  “Yes, but on that occasion there was a receiver fixed on Venus,” the Amazon pointed out. “In these past years I’ve worked out a system whereby a receiver isn’t necessary— and that’s a tremendous advantage. Anyway”—she glanced up at the clock—“time is getting on. Excuse me, will you, whilst I prepare?”

  She turned to the control panel and studied its gauges and meters. In silence the quintet watched her. She had forsaken the conventional two-piece of the morning, and was now attired in a head-to-toe one-piece garment of black. It outlined her perfect figure and made the flowing golden hair, caught into place by a gleaming band across her head, seem all the more yellow by comparison. Buckled about her shapely waist was a
belt of solid gold, in the pouches of which were picked instruments, the only equipment she ever carried when on a lone exploration trip. For the rest she usually relied on her keen intelligence or the tremendous strength of her physique.

  “You don’t think you are taking on too much, do you?” Chris asked her doubtfully. “I mean, you’ll be single-handed with a belt of instruments against a planet about which you know nothing! Just suppose there are hidden, sinister forces which you haven’t even thought of?”

  “If there are,” the Amazon replied, without turning from computations, “I’ll deal with them.”

  “Mars, what little we know of it, is a mighty strange world,” Kerrigan commented. “Even your own X-ray telescope hasn’t been able to discover much about it. You’d perhaps be safer if you went in the Ultra, where you can have all the guns and protection you need.”

  “It would take too long,” the girl said. “I’ll be all right; don’t worry.” She finished her study of the meters, set a number of switches, and then snapped on the power. A thin, droning hum rose in the quiet of the laboratory. "That’s the power-beam on its way,” she explained. “In about one minute, moving at the speed of light, it will have reached Mars. Then I’ll follow it!”

  She spoke without emotion, as she invariably did when about to commence a new adventure. Quietly she shook bands with each member of the quintet, glanced at the c lock again, and then stepped into the area of the magnetic apparatus. The chronometer on top of the switch-panel.sliced off the seconds deliberately.

  “Wait for me for thirty minutes,” she said, “and as you value your lives, and mine, don’t touch anything. When that second hand reaches sixty my trip will commence.” There was silence again, save for the drone of the electrical equipment. The tubes were glowing brightly in a variety of hues. The second finger snicked onwards—45— 50—55—