Vault of Ungodly Horror #19

“The Caretakers of Andromeda”

Andromeda. The Universe of Earth-Alpha II.

On the planet Andromeda were beings called the Caretakers. They were grossly humanoid. By some accounts, they had a capacity for mutation almost equal to humanity’s, although this might only be true of the flask-spawned race engineered by the Caretaker scientists. Mutants made up 50% of the Caretaker population, while an undetermined number of the barbarians were androids. No two mutants were the same. The mutants were extremely long-lived, measuring their lives in centuries rather than years, and no instinct for self-preservation, with many seeking their own demise, though they apparently could not directly end their own lives.

The Caretakers were divided across the planet into small civilizations, which include democracies, monarchies, and dictatorships. The population was also divided among the mutants and tribes of barbarians composed of a mixture of normal/baseline Caretakers and androids. In addition, they once possessed an advanced interstellar fleet, but the technology was lost after the great war that occurred over 10,000 years ago. The sole surviving ship from that era was piloted to Earth by a being known as the Eye Lord and crashed on Earth. This group of Caretakers eventually remastered astronomy and the use of telescopes, and began studying for ways to return to the stars.

Time passed, and the Caretakers back home underwent civil war. Their nuclear weaponry, vastly more efficient than Earth’s nuclear devices of a later age, destroyed most of society. Those who survived went mad, deserting the cities. They began living in tiny, primitive tribal enclaves.

Back on Earth-Alpha II, the Eye Lord found diagrams on the layouts of long ago-created starships. These layouts had been inadvertently left behind by the Dynasty, a worldwide empire ruled from a sea city beneath the waves and populated by fish-men who had human bodies with fish heads and wielded tridents that shot bolts of lightning, when the alien beings abandoned Earth-Alpha II for better “accommodations”. The barbarians that the section of the Caretakers that fled from their planet’s civil war contained came to worship the remaining starship as a god.

As the sun set on Earth-Alpha II, the Eye Lord returned to the last starship of their once mighty stellar fleet. As he approached, the barbarians condemned the mutant for his forbidden treading on sacred ground. The Eye Lord reminded the android barbarian that the mutants had built the ship and the androids as well, but the android condemned him as a blasphemer and ordered his troops to attack. With no other open path, the Eye Lord attacked the barbarians, and made it inside the starship. He soon opened the star portal, right there on the planet, but the barbarian commander pushed the Eye Lord through the portal, make room for him to follow, after swiftly sealing the ship’s hatch. The ship, designed to survive the rigors of space, kept the barbarians out. During the melee, the Eye Lord hit the ignition; most of the barbarians ran for cover, while the rest were reduced to ashes during the ship’s takeoff.

But what became of the Eye Lord and the android barbarian leader?

The portal the Eye Lord had opened took them to another world, far from the Milky Way and the Andromeda System both. They ended up surrounded by numerous demonic-like creatures, some with lips or fingers or feet for heads. Their fight came to an end, as the beings took Eye Lord and the barbarian as their gods.

Back on Andromeda, the civil war came to an end, and debate raged as to whether science should be employed toward perfecting the race, uniting it once more. In time, the Caretakers built what they called the Incubator Factories, decreeing that children born of women would be destroyed, and all natural reproduction would cease. To many however, it seemed inherently wrong to take evolution out of nature’s hands. They thought to reverse the trend, with terrorist means. They began bombing the Incubator installations, and shortly thereafter, another full-scale war erupted. This time, the Caretakers wiped themselves out, leaving only a select few survivors to carry on to use science as a means of restoring Caretaker society to its former glory through clones, using themselves as the main source of samples.

One clone eventually left Andromeda for Earth, placing himself in stasis. En route, the ship was nearly struck by a comet from which radiation bathed the clone while he slept. When he finally reached Earth in 411 A.D., the clone — now calling itself P’intar — discovered the radiation had granted him superhuman strength, the ability to project spheres of concussive energy from his hands, telekinesis he used to fly at great speeds, and levitate other objects or beings. He could also generate force fields around himself and others, and he could survive in the cold vacuum of outer space unaided.

Another strange power he discovered was that he could project a portion of his own subconscious into the mind of another human or into an animal. He could then read the memories of that being, experience any sensations that being did, and could also influence the thoughts and emotions of that being, directing its behavior. He referred to this as “thought pitching.” P’intar found this out when he inadvertently transferred his subconscious into a rabbit. The rabbit moved about for a time, until it was found by a coyote and chased quite far from where it had been found. The coyote caught up with the rabbit, and began chomping on it. The shock of dying shunted P’intar’s subconscious back into his body which was miles away. He went into a catatonic state, as his ship collected him and placed him into a medical tubule. Both the tubule and the ship became P’intar’s home, as he slept away for centuries upon centuries underneath the mountainside the ship had burrowed into for safe hiding.

In the 1950 A.D., wealthy explorer Jonathan Cartwright was in the jungles of South America when he was separated from the rest of his exploration party. While searching for his group, Cartwright came upon some ancient ruins. He went inside the structure, which looked to him to be the work of some alien intelligence, and touched a gleaming gemstone embedded in a huge idol, which opened the floor and revealed a hidden stairway. Descending the stairs, Cartwright found an underground passageway illuminated with blazing torches.

“Amazing!” Cartwright said, when he came upon P’intar’s ship. “Simply amazing! This surely did not come from Earth, but the stars themselves! The representation of some lost alien civilization!”

How right he was. Unfortunately, Cartwright wasn’t the only one who had found the Caretaker ship. He found himself confronted by a pair of purple four-armed alien men. They were known as Sargons. Fighting as desperately as he could, Cartwright was no match for the menacing four-armed attackers. He was subdued and taken to a subterranean cavern, where he saw more of the Sargons, an apparent enemy to the Caretakers from long ago. The leader of the group informed Cartwright that they were infiltrating human civilization in their attempt to take over Earth, and had come upon readings belonging to the Caretakers, their sworn enemies.

As Cartwright uselessly struggled against his captors, the Sargons were about to execute him by hurling him into a pit of serpents; but Cartwright smelled the heavy vapor of methane leaking somewhere from the subterranean depths, and he got an idea. He managed to convince the aliens that he be allowed to smoke a final cigarette before his execution. Seeing no harm in Cartwright’s request, the Sargons allowed him to do so. But instead of lighting his cigarette, Cartwright lit all the matches, after which then tossed the flaming matchbook at the source of the methane. The gas exploded, and the distraction gave Cartwright the chance to escape from the cavern and run back into the jungle. The cavern where he had discovered the caretaker P’intar’s ship was sealed away in a cave-in.

Thirty years later, in 1980 A.D., a self-described ace newspaper reporter named Kent Wayne went to the mansion of Swami Samsedees for a seance. The mansion was built near the location of the Caretaker ship, and this abode was thoroughly tracked down by Wayne, who specifically wanted to see Samsedees and expose him as a fraud, after the Swami bilked his parents out of their retirement money over a bogus reading about their dead daughter, the one they had before Kent was born. He thought the swami looked like an out-of-work ham actor, and he couldn’t believe that his parents had been fooled by him.

But he wasn’t the only guest the Swami had at his mansion that day. There were others, as it was going to be a group reading. Wayne expressed his doubt regarding Swami Samsedees’s power to the other seance attendees.

“How can you folks fall for balderdash like this?”

“Ignore him, darling,” said Irene Miller to her husband, both of who wished to speak with Irene’s dead mother about where the woman hid a priceless broach. “He is a non-believer.”

So was she. She only wanted the broach for monetary game and assumed the Swami had it in his possession.

The greatly offended Swami went on with the seance, nevertheless. He even demonstrated a sampling of his ability by temporarily sending Wayne to a hellish realm, where he was surrounded by reanimated corpses. And then it was over as suddenly as it had started, and the reporter found himself back at the seance parlor.

“You were sent to where the dead dwell, Mr. Wayne,” said Samsedees. “Do you still doubt my power?”

“Ha! You were just trying to fool him with a hypnotic illusion!”

The reporter was about to leave the seance, but the Swami wouldn’t allow him to do so, for he insisted that once one had spoken to the dead, he could never again return to the living. Wayne denied speaking to any corpses.

No one knew, even the Swami, that Samsedees had gotten his ability from the radiation of P’intar’s ship, and that the dead he had shown the reporter were actually corpses belonging to the Caretakers. But Wayne didn’t believe any of it anyway, and stormed out.

Some weeks later, Swami Samsedees died of radiation poisoning. Authorities searched the area for the source, but never found it. The ship remained hidden underneath the mountain for another forty years, but this would soon change, and all of Earth-Alpha II would be placed in danger.