Chapter I: Front Matter

WHEN FREEMEN SHALL STAND

By NELSON S. BOND

Earth was conquered by Venus and her master. But
the mysterious faces of Mt. Rushmore became the gods
that gave hope and fighting courage to beaten Man!

[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from
Fantastic Adventures November 1943.
Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that
the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]

"That," said Stephen Duane, "is that!" He wiped his hands on an acid-stained apron, turned to his assistant. "We all set now, Chuck? Got the stuff?"

"Right here, Lootenant."

"What? What's that you called me?" Stephen Duane's voice flattened.

"I said--" Chuck began.

"I heard you. Chuck, for Pete's sake, won't you lay off that 'Lieutenant' nonsense? I've got a front handle; one you've been using for three years. What's the matter? Don't you like it any more?"

Chuck Lafferty shrugged. "Them," he said patiently, "was the good old days. But times has changed. We're in the Army now. You've got bars on your shoulders--remember?--and I'm just a sergeant. Which makes a difference."

"Nuts!" snorted Steve. "I'm still a chemist, Chuck, and you're my lab assistant. And so far as you're concerned, I'm still just plain old Steve Duane. Get it?"

"Yeah. Yeah, sure, Lootenant."

"_Wha-a-at?_"

"I mean, yeah, sure--er--Steve."

"That's better. Now, let's get to work on the final experiment. If this gas does what I _think_ it will, World War II is going to end all of a sudden, and a madman named Hitler is going to be caught with his _panzers_ down. Let's find out. Bring that flask over here while I get one of the guinea pigs from the cage. Put it on the--Wait a minute! Who left that door open?"

Chuck, gingerly lifting a small, stoppered vial from its shockproof rack, glanced over his shoulder wonderingly.

"Not me!" he denied. "I always make sure it's shut. Maybe the guard outside--?"

"Well, whoever did it," frowned Duane, "must be more careful. Our country's at war, and there's been entirely too much enemy sabotage and espionage around these parts already! You outside there! Guard!"

A khaki-clad figure appeared in the doorway, saluted smartly.

"Yes, Lieutenant?"

"Close that door, soldier, and see that it's kept--say! What _is_ this, anyway? Why the gas-mask?"

The guard's voice was weirdly muffled by his rubbery face covering.

"Orders, sir. Trial blackout and mock gas attack in fifteen minutes, sir. All men on duty have been ordered into masks, sir."

"So?" Steve Duane stared at the guard thoughtfully. "Well, in that case, you may resume your post. But this time close the door carefully. Oh, and by the way, soldier--"

He spoke with studied casualness as the guard turned away. The other man glanced back.

"Yes, Lieutenant?"

"You might be kind enough to--_Achtung!_"

* * * * *

His voice shifted abruptly from a tone of easy _camaraderie_ to one of sharp command. It was an old ruse--but it worked! Reflexes conditioned into the soldier's body through long years of training exercised themselves. The man's heels clicked together, his frame stiffened.

On that instant, his suspicion verified, Steve Duane hurled himself forward.

"I thought so!" he roared. "A spy at our very door, eh? Grab him, Chuck!"

But the room was wide, and the Nazi spy had realized his mistake the moment he made it. He, too, swept into swift action. A tug wrenched the .44 from his holster; impetuously he ripped the mask from his face to reveal eyes gleaming with fanatic determination. Malice thickened the heretofore well-concealed guttural accent which bespoke his ancestry.

"Stop! Another step, _Leutnant_, and you die! We are alone here. That has been arranged. _We_ are not so foolishly overconfident as you stupid Americans. _Ja_--" He laughed--"it was _I_, Eric von Rath, who opened the door, the better to watch your progress, hear your braggart claims. _Zu_, you have a new weapon to end the war, _nicht wahr_? But our _Fuehrer_ is the one who will use that weapon. Now--" He swung the ugly muzzle of his automatic to bear on Chuck Lafferty--"bring me the vial! Quickly, _bitte_! I have no time to waste--"

Dazed by the sudden turn of events, Chuck faltered a half step forward, stopped, turned questioning eyes to Duane. Steve nodded imperceptibly. His quick mind had appraised the gravity of the situation, found but one slim chance of coming out on top.

To take the flask from Lafferty's hand the Nazi must for a split second, at least, relax his guard. It was narrow figuring, but if in that second he could move....

"Go ahead, Chuck. Give it to him," he ordered.

"B-but--" hesitated Chuck.

"Give it to him!"

The enemy agent laughed coarsely. "Your _Leutnant_ is no fool. A coward, yes; but, then, all Americans are cowards at heart, _nein_? Bring the flask here! _Ach_--be careful, you blundering _eisel_!"

The last sentence broke in a gasp from von Rath. He was not the only one to shout warning. Steve's fearful voice echoed his cry.

"Good Lord, Chuck, be careful! Don't drop that! We will all be--_look out! Be care_--"

_The cold sweat of sudden fear broke on his forehead. Not fear of his foeman, but of what might now seize them all. Even as he shouted, the glass shattered upon the floor. From if rose a pale, chill, ominous mist. A sharp, unidentifiable odor assailed his nostrils; black vertigo staggered him. The world reeled and tumbled into wells of seething darkness; the darkness was peopled with gray, swirling phantasms; he sensed motion within and about him; a multitude of half-heard sounds rolled like surging waters past his ears. This for a fearful moment. Then_:

"--_ful!_" he cried. "That's dangerous, Chuck--"

* * * * *

His hands groped forward, governed by an instinctive motion, to catch the falling flask. But, amazingly, they met and clutched nothing! More frightening still, the muscles of his well-knit, athletic body flamed with sudden agony, racked in protest as if they had been welded for months in a plaster cast.

Over straining sinews and bones that ached horribly, Lieutenant Stephen Duane had no more control than has a month old baby. With a gasp more of shock than of fear, he pitched headlong to his knees, his chest, his elbows.

He tried to roll, that his shoulders might break his fall, and succeeded in a measure, but concrete grated against one cheek painfully. The jolt shook him like the impact of a sledgehammer. He spat dry dust flavored with the warm, salty taste of blood and cried again:

"Chuck! Chuck, what--?"

Then the paralysis which had held him lessened; with an effort he lifted his head and stared about him, eyes stark with incomprehension.

The laboratory was gone! The bright-gleaming lights had vanished, as had the rows upon rows of glistening beakers and retorts ... the work-benches and hooded range ... the centrifuge and tubes and hissing Bunsens ... the vast intricate array of chemical paraphernalia that should be here ... all were gone!

There was only this dingy, windowless room, bare and musty, lighted by the feeble flames of candles guttering upon worn wall-sconces.

A sense of panic fear tugged at Steve Duane's heart. He cried yet again, "Chuck! Chuck Lafferty! Where are you?"

The answer came from behind him. Drowsily at first, as if the speaker were wakening to respond from the depths of drug-numbed slumber, then more coherently, the answer gaining speed like the disc of a hand-started phonograph.

"--grab it, Steve! It slipped! _Look out! The gas is escap_--"

Steve turned just in time to see his subordinate and lab assistant strain frozen muscles forward in futile attempt to stay the fall of a non-existent bottle. Chuck's eyes were open, but their blankness mirrored nothing. He was toppling, as grotesquely as had Duane a moment before, to the floor.

Clenching his lips against the pain that flooded him with every motion, Steve inched forward to cushion his chum's fall. Chuck's body, locked as if in _rigor mortis_, was a dead weight. Not only that, but--a sudden realization heightened Steve's sense of eerie--cold!

Chuck's body was cold! Not with the soft clamminess of a drugged or shellshocked invalid, but with the all-pervading iciness of carven marble!

But stiff or limber, cold or quick, Lafferty's white lips were moving. And they framed Steve's own query.

"Steve--what happened? Where are we? And what are we doing _here_?"

Steve said, "Flex your fingers, chum. That's right; work 'em. Yeah, I know it hurts, but it unfreezes 'em. Now, try moving those knees and elbows."

* * * * *

Chuck performed, obediently, the exercises Steve had found loosened his own rigid body. Soon he, too, was able to lift his head and stare about him. He turned to his superior officer, but Steve's shake of the head answered his questions before they were given voice.

"I don't know, Chuck. It's all--fantastic! What's the last thing you remember? Before you woke up, I mean."

"Woke up?" repeated Lafferty wonderingly. "I wasn't even asleep. What do you mean, woke--?"

"That," commented Steve queerly, "is what _you_ think! You weren't asleep, eh? Well, take a look at the hunk of statuary behind you."

Chuck turned and gulped. "The--the Jerry!"

"Right! That's what _you_ looked like, chum, a moment ago. And me, too, I suppose. But I wouldn't know about that, and I wasn't on deck to watch myself unfreeze--as he's doing right now. Catch him, Chuck!"

"The hell with him!" said Chuck. "Let him break his dirty Nazi neck!" But he obeyed. The German woke blubbering with pain and fright, howled for mercy when he discovered his hands no longer held a weapon of destruction. But no thought of vengeance motivated Steve at the moment; his sole interest was in learning what weird fate had befallen them. There was time and enough to handle their enemy as he deserved; now the problem was to find out what had happened. Therefore he gave the German the benefit of his advice, and in a short time the three erstwhile "statuettes" sat staring at each other in dim perplexity.

"This is not peace between us," he warned the German agent. "Only a truce until we find out what's happened. One false move, and--" He stopped significantly; then, to Chuck, "All right, Chuck. Your story. You were saying--?"

"I don't know," wailed Lafferty, "from nothing! All I know is that just a couple of minutes ago you ordered me to hand this lug a flask of that new anesthetic we were working on. I--I stumbled, and the flask slipped from my hands. As I fell, I tried to grab it--"

"And I yelled, 'Be careful!'"

"That's right. And then--and then all at once here I was, stiff as a board and falling flat on my puss. In _this_ place--whatever it is! Steve--" Chuck stared at the young officer fearfully--"you don't think we--we're _dead_, do you? I mean, maybe the gas asphyxiated us, or something--?"

"If we are," stated Duane bluntly, "my Sunday-school teacher had the wrong steer on the afterworld. I _hurt_ when I came to. And disembodied spirits don't have nervous systems; not that I know of. Anyhow, have you noticed your clothes?"

Chuck did, now, for the first time. He stared, then fingered wildly at the apparel in which he was clad. Perhaps unclad would be more apt. For his garments--like those worn by Steve and the spy--consisted of a metal harness about the loins, a short, metal-cloth cape suspended from the shoulders, and a pair of doeskin sandals.

He gasped, "Hell's bells, Steve! Superman duds!"

"Except," pointed out Duane, "that Superman, even in his balmiest days, never decked himself out in cloth like the stuff we have on! Don't you recognize the metal?"

* * * * *

Chuck squinted more closely at the material of which their garments were woven, then: "Gold!" he croaked. "Solid gold! Sweet Moses, Steve, now I know I'm off my nut! I drop a flask of gas, draw a blank--and snap out of it flopping on my pan with 18 karat panties on! What makes here? A gag?"

"It's no gag," said Steve soberly. "I don't pretend to know all the answers, Chuck, but there are several facts I _can_ deduce from what I see in this room. The first one is--our new gas worked."

"W-worked?"

"Better," nodded Steve, "or _worse_ than we ever dared hope. There's only one logical explanation for the situation we find ourselves in. You dropped the flask, the anesthetic knocked us out, slowing down our basal metabolism--according to my expectations--and we fell into a state of catalepsy.

"That is why our muscles were stiff, our bodies cold and our joints rigid. Our minds recognized no lapse of time. That does not mean there has been none. All of our functions--breathing, digestion, elimination--have been slowed." He turned to the third member of their party. "Can _you_ remember what happened? You were farthest from the fumes. You--Hey! What do you think you're doing? Come back here!"

Von Rath had been inching away from them stealthily. Now, well out of arm's reach, he leaped suddenly to his feet, raced toward a doorway at the far side of the chamber.

"A trick, _nein_? You are trying to make me reveal my _Vaterland's_ secrets? You don't catch me in your dirty, democratic trap. I--"

His words ended with the same dramatic suddenness as his headlong flight. For as if stricken by lightning, all at once he dropped to the floor and lay still! Blood burst from his nose and mouth.

In a flash, the two Americans were at his side. Awe weighted Chuck Lafferty's words.

"Goddlemighty, what hit him? He went down just like he was pole-axed, Steve!"

But Steve, having satisfied himself that the spy was only unconscious, had already found the answer. He swept his hands before him, felt cool smoothness beneath their palms.

"Glass!" he said. "A solid wall of it! We're caged like animals under a bell!"

"What?" Lafferty, too, pawed wildly at the crystal-cool invisibility that bound them. "But air, Steve! There's air coming through somewhere--"

Duane's questing eyes had found the answer.

"Up there," he said. "See--near the ceiling? It's a wide crack in the glass. Chuck, I'm beginning to piece the puzzle together. It's mad, but it all ties in.

"That crack up there may be the thing that caused us to waken! From the appearance of this chamber, it used to be hermetically sealed! Then the dome split, air seeped in, and we wakened. But if that is true, what has seemed to us but a second's time may in reality have been weeks ... years...."

"Years!"

"Possibly," warned Steve, "longer than that! It was experimental work we were engaged in, Chuck. _Methioprane_ was a compound about which nothing was known. Set yourself for a shock. While we slept, not only years but _centuries_ may have passed!"

"Centuries!" echoed Lafferty bleakly. "B-but, Steve--the war? Who won? And where are we now? How--?"

Steve Duane shook his head.

"You know as much about that as I do. I'm guessing, anyway. There _may_ be another explanation. But--" His head turned--"I think we'll know the answer in a few minutes."

"Eh? What do you mean? How?"

"Because," replied Steve tautly, "unless my ears are deceiving me, we're about to entertain guests. I heard footsteps coming down the outer corridor a moment ago, and--see? Now the door is opening!"