The 13th Immortal By ROBERT SILVERBERG ACE BOOKS A Division of A. A. Wyn, Inc. 23 West 47th Street, New York 36, N. Y. THE 13th IMMORTAL Copyright ©, 1957, by A. A. Wyn, Inc. All Rights Reserved [Transcriber's Note: Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.] To Barbara Printed in U.S.A. THE SECRET OF THE FORBIDDEN CONTINENT "_Who was your father?_" the mutant asked Dale Kesley. And try as he might, Kesley could not remember; his past was an utter blank. But he knew one thing--the answer to his life's riddle lay in Antarctica, the once frozen continent, now an earthly paradise surrounded by an impenetrable barrier. But how to get there? The only means of transportation were the spindly six-legged mutant horses. And it was suicide for Kesley to travel on the American continents. Two immortal dictators had set king-size rewards for his capture--dead or alive. But somewhere in the two continents there was someone who would help him, someone he had to find. The future of the world depended on his success. CAST OF CHARACTERS DALE KESLEY - He couldn't find the answers until he knew the right questions. DRYLE VAN ALEN - The South Pole was his summer resort. NARELLA - She loved two men with one face. DON MIGUEL - He was a childless sire, an impotent potentate. DUKE WINSLOW - Once he had been wise; twice he had been fooled. LOMARK DAWNSPEAR - In his blindness, he saw all things. Prologue Centuries later, men would talk of those years as the Years of the Freeze. They would mean the years between 2062 and 2527, the years when mankind, shattered by its own hand, maintained a rigid cultural stasis while rebuilding. Those were the years when what was, would be. The years when there would be nothing new under the sun because mankind willed it so. The century of war, culminating in the almost total global destruction of 2062, had taught lessons that were not soon forgotten. The old ways returned to the world--ways that had held sway for thousands of years, and which had regained ascendancy after the brief, nightmarish reign of the machine. Mankind still had machines, of course; life would have been impossible without them. But the Years of the Freeze were years of primarily hand labor, of travel by foot or by horse, of slow living and fear of complexity. The clock rolled back to an older, simpler land of world--and froze there.