Page:Amazing Stories Volume 15 Number 10.djvu/77

Rh she asked, unbelievingly. "All my palace servants are beyond suspicion."

"You forgot the borers of the tunnel, the planners and designers. I have my agents in the highest, most trusted positions." He grinned in triumph.

"All the same, King Bommelsmeth, as you call yourself, my father will break you as he broke Sommalu."

"Oh, no! Sommalu was a hasty fool. All the same, he showed how shaky your father's rule had become. It only needed a man with a little more intelligence than Sommalu to succeed where he so nearly succeeded. I work with science. Your father has neglected science. That is his big mistake. Nothing in life stands still, Princess. Either we go forward or we go back. Obstructions of progress must be removed. And if many have to suffer and die, and many more be partly bereft of reason, what does it matter in the end? What is a generation in the life of a race? We must have progress."

"What you call progress," she snapped.

For a second his eyes blazed with anger, then he controlled himself.

"Why should I lose my temper with you? You are absolutely in my power. I can break you, bend you to my will at any time I choose. Think, Princess. Where do my ape-men come from? I will tell you. They are the inhabitants of the cities I have captured.

"I have discovered the force that produces evolution. A radiation it is that irritates the cells that compose living bodies, driving them to devise ever more and more complicated chemical processes. I can reverse the development. My evolution-reversing field makes the cells that compose the bodies of men forget how to behave as the cells of men. They revert to the ways of our ancestors, countless ages ago. Skin cells forget how to produce the smooth skin of a man and remember only how to make the hairy skin of an ape. Legs become short and bowed, arms long, eyebrows huge and beetling. Brains become smaller.

"I herd my captives into camps, and round the camps I throw evolution-reversing fields. In a few days they change into hairy ape-men such as you have seen, their bodies powerful, their intelligences dim, their memories of their human existence like vague, confused dreams of the distant past. They respond only to my orders and the orders of my men. At a certain stage I stop the process, and another company of most capable soldiers is ready to follow my orders."

"You must be a fiend from hell," she gasped.

IS eyes glowed with a queer light.

"Your skin," he said, "is smooth and clear. Your face is beautiful, your hair a delight. I am ready to give you the highest place for a woman in Mars, by my side. But one more remark like that and that skin will soon be covered with coarse hair, that delicate face will become the face of an ape, that—"

Her shuddering gasp stopped him, He grinned.

"What must I do to escape that?" she asked.

"Under the ocean bed," he said, "where your father would never find it though he searched for a thousand years, I have my headquarters. There I work and plan beyond all possible reach of your father’s prying television.

"But I can relay television back, if I choose. From there you will televise your father. Tell him that you are my prisoner, and that he must submit to me. All his armies must deposit their battlespheres, warplanes and all other arms in a spot I shall name, and you will be queen of all Mars. Otherwise