Contents

COPYRIGHT INFO

A NOTE FROM THE PUBLISHER

THE MEGAPACK SERIES

INTRODUCTION, by Philip J. Harbottle

RED HERITAGE

HE CONQUERED VENUS

HE WALKED ON AIR

THE MASTER MIND

ISLAND IN THE MARSH

SECRET OF THE MOON TREASURE

SUPERHUMAN

SEEDS FROM SPACE

THE SILVER COIL

PHANTOM FROM SPACE

ARCTIC GOD

THE GHOST SUN

WHITE MOUSE

KNOWLEDGE WITHOUT LEARNING

WORLDS WITHIN

THE VOICE COMMANDS

THE JEWELS FROM THE MOON

THE RED MAGICIAN

FLIGHT OF THE VAMPIRES

WEDDING OF THE FORCES

MARTIAN AVENGER

THE OTHERS

LATER THAN YOU THINK

FIRST OF THE ROBOTS

SECOND GENESIS

COPYRIGHT INFO

The John Russell Fearn Megapack is copyright © 2014 by Philip J. Harbottle. All rights reserved.

* * * *

These stories were previously published individually as follows, and are reprinted by permission of the author’s estate, and his agent, Cosmos Literary Agency

“Red Heritage” was first published as by John Russell Fearn in Astounding Stories January 1938, copyright © 1938 by John Russell Fearn, copyright © 2014 by Philip Harbottle.

“He Conquered Venus” was first published as by John Russell Fearn in Astonishing Stories June 1940, copyright © 1940 by John Russell Fearn, copyright © 2014 by Philip Harbottle.

“He Walked On Air” was first published as by John Russell Fearn in Fantasy Booklet #1, 1991 (having been written in 1934), copyright © 1991 by Philip Harbottle.

“The Master-Mind” was first published as by Vargo Statten in Vargo Statten Science Fiction Magaine #3, 1954, copyright © 1954 by John Russell Fearn, copyright © 2014 by Philip Harbottle.

“Island In the Marsh” was first published as by Thornton Ayre in Startling Stories November 1940.

Copyright © 1940 by John Russell Fearn, copyright © 2014 by Philip Harbottle.

“Secret Of the Moon Treasure” was first published as by Thornton Ayre in Amazing Stories July 1940, copyright © 1940 by John Russell Fearn, copyright © 2014 by Philip Harbottle.

“Superhuman” was first published as by Geoffrey Armstrong in Tales of Wonder #1, 1937, copyright © 1937 by John Russell Fearn, copyright © 1982 by Philip Harbottle.

“Seeds From Space” was first published as by John Russell Fearn in Tales of Wonder #1, 1937, copyright © 1982 by John Russell Fearn, copyright © 2014 by Philip Harbottle.

“The Silver Coil” was first published as by Thornton Ayre in Amazing Stories November 1942, copyright © 1942 by John Russell Fearn, copyright © 2014 by Philip Harbottle.

“Phantom From Space” was first published as by John Russell Fearn in Super Science Stories March 1940, copyright © 1940 by John Russell Fearn, copyright © 2014 by Philip Harbottle.

“Arctic God” was first published as by Frank Jones in Amazing Stories May 1942, copyright © 1942 by John Russell Fearn, copyright © 1981 by Philip Harbottle.

“White Mouse” was first published as by Thornton Ayre in New Worlds #1, 1946, copyright © 1946 by John Russell Fearn, copyright © 2014 by Philip Harbottle.

“Knowledge Without Learning” was first published as by K. Thomas in New Worlds #1, 1946, copyright © 1946 by John Russell Fearn, copyright © 2014 by Philip Harbottle.

Worlds Within was first published as by John Russell Fearn in Astounding Stories March 1937, copyright © 1937 by John Russell Fearn, copyright © 1982 by Philip Harbottle.

“The Voice Commands” was first published as by Dennis Clive in Science Fiction June 1940, copyright © 1939 by John Russell Fearn, copyright © 2014 by Philip Harbottle.

“Jewels From The Moon” was first published as by Ephriam Winiki in Science Fiction August 1939, copyright © 1939 by John Russell Fearn, copyright © 2014 by Philip Harbottle.

“The Red Magician” was first published as by John Russell Fearn in Fantasy August 1938, copyright © 1938 by John Russell Fearn, copyright © 2014 by Philip Harbottle.

“Wedding Of the Forces” was first published as by Polton Cross in Future Fiction November 1940, copyright © 1940 by John Russell Fearn, copyright © 2014 by Philip Harbottle.

“The Martian Avenger” was first published as by Polton Cross in Amazing Stories April 1939, copyright © 1939 by John Russell Fearn, copyright © 2014 by Philip Harbottle

“The Others” was first published as by Volsted Gridban in Vargo Statten British Science Fiction Magazine #3, 1954, copyright © 1954 by John Russell Fearn, copyright © 2014 by Philip Harbottle

“Black Outlook” was first posthumously published as by John Russell Fearn in Fantasy Booklet #2, 1991 (having been written in 1959), copyright © 1991 by Philip Harbottle

“First Of The Robots” was first published as by John Russell Fearn in Space Fact and Fiction April 1954, copyright © 1954 by John Russell Fearn, copyright © 2014 by Philip Harbottle

“Cosmic Juggernaut” was first published as by John Russell Fearn in Planet Stories Summer 1940, copyright © 1940 by John Russell Fearn, copyright © 2014 by Philip Harbottle.

A NOTE FROM THE PUBLISHER

I love pulp science fiction, from the sword-and-planet adventure stories to galaxy-spanning space opera. I was delighted to invite Philip J. Harbottle, the literary agent for (and owner of) John Russell Fearn’s estate, to put together a John Russell Fearn Megapack for our line. He went above and beyond the call of duty, also contributing a long introduction, which I hope you will take the time to read before diving into the stories. (It’s really interesting, honest!)

Enjoy!

—John Betancourt

Publisher, Wildside Press LLC

www.wildsidepress.com

* * * *

Over the last few years, our “Megapack” series of ebook anthologies has grown to be among our most popular endeavors. (Maybe it helps that we sometimes offer them as premiums to our mailing list!) One question we keep getting asked is, “Who’s the editor?”

The Megapacks (except where specifically credited) are a group effort. Everyone at Wildside works on them. This includes John Betancourt (me), Carla Coupe, Steve Coupe, Bonner Menking, Colin Azariah-Kribbs, A.E. Warren, and many of Wildside’s authors…who often suggest stories to include (and not just their own!)

RECOMMEND A FAVORITE STORY?

Do you know a great classic science fiction story, or have a favorite author whom you believe is perfect for the Megapack series? We’d love your suggestions! You can post them on our message board at http://movies.ning.com/forum (there is an area for Wildside Press comments).

Note: we only consider stories that have already been professionally published. This is not a market for new works.

TYPOS

Unfortunately, as hard as we try, a few typos do slip through. We update our ebooks periodically, so make sure you have the current version (or download a fresh copy if it’s been sitting in your ebook reader for months.) It may have already been updated.

If you spot a new typo, please let us know. We’ll fix it for everyone. You can email the publisher at wildsidepress@yahoo.com or use the message boards above.

THE MEGAPACK SERIES

MYSTERY

The First Mystery Megapack

The Second Mystery Megapack

The Achmed Abdullah Megapack

The Bulldog Drummond Megapack*

The Carolyn Wells Mystery Megapack

The Charlie Chan Megapack*

The Craig Kennedy Scientific Detective Megapack

The Detective Megapack

The Father Brown Megapack

The Girl Detective Megapack

The Second Girl Detective Megapack

The First R. Austin Freeman Megapack

The Second R. Austin Freeman Megapack*

The Third R. Austin Freeman Megapack*

The Jacques Futrelle Megapack

The Anna Katharine Green Mystery Megapack

The Penny Parker Megapack

The Philo Vance Megapack*

The Pulp Fiction Megapack

The Raffles Megapack

The Red Finger Pulp Mystery Megapack, by Arthur Leo Zagat*

The Sherlock Holmes Megapack

The Victorian Mystery Megapack

The Wilkie Collins Megapack

GENERAL INTEREST

The Adventure Megapack

The Baseball Megapack

The Cat Story Megapack

The Second Cat Story Megapack

The Third Cat Story Megapack

The Third Cat Story Megapack

The Christmas Megapack

The Second Christmas Megapack

The Classic American Short Stories Megapack, Vol. 1.

The Classic Humor Megapack

The Dog Story Megapack

The Doll Story Megapack

The Horse Story Megapack

The Military Megapack

The Pirate Story Megapack

The Sea-Story Megapack

THE GOLDEN AGE OF SCIENCE FICTION MEGAPACKS

1. Winston K. Marks

2. Mark Clifton

3. Poul Anderson

4. Clifford D. Simak

5. Lester del Rey

6. Charles L. Fontenay

7. H.B. Fyfe

8. Milton Lesser (Stephen Marlowe)

SCIENCE FICTION & FANTASY

The First Science Fiction Megapack

The Second Science Fiction Megapack

The Third Science Fiction Megapack

The Fourth Science Fiction Megapack

The Fifth Science Fiction Megapack

The Sixth Science Fiction Megapack

The Seventh Science Fiction Megapack

The Eighth Science Fiction Megapack

The Ninth Science Fiction Megapack

The Edward Bellamy Megapack

The First Reginald Bretnor Megapack

The Fredric Brown Megapack

The Fred M. White Disaster Megapack

The First Theodore Cogswell Megapack

The Ray Cummings Megapack

The Philip K. Dick Megapack

The Dragon Megapack

The Randall Garrett Megapack

The Second Randall Garrett Megapack

The Edmond Hamilton Megapack

The C.J. Henderson Megapack

The Murray Leinster Megapack***

The Second Murray Leinster Megapack***

The Jack London Science Fiction Megapack

The Mad Scientist Megapack

The Martian Megapack

The A. Merritt Megapack*

The E. Nesbit Megapack

The Andre Norton Megapack

The H. Beam Piper Megapack

The Pulp Fiction Megapack

The Mack Reynolds Megapack

The Darrell Schweitzer Megapack

The Science-Fantasy Megapack

The Robert Sheckley Megapack

The Space Opera Megapack

The Space Patrol Megapack

The Steampunk Megapack

The Time Travel Megapack

The Second Time Travel Megapack

The William Hope Hodgson Megapack

The First Willam P. McGivern Science Fiction Megapack

The Second Willam P. McGivern Science Fiction Megapack

The Willam P. McGivern Fantasy Megapack

The Wizard of Oz Megapack

HORROR

The Horror Megapack

The Second Horror Megapack

The Achmed Abdullah Megapack

The Second Achmed Abdullah Megapack

The E.F. Benson Megapack

The Second E.F. Benson Megapack

The Algernon Blackwood Megapack

The Second Algernon Blackwood Megapack

The Cthulhu Mythos Megapack

The Erckmann-Chatrian Megapack

The Ghost Story Megapack

The Second Ghost Story Megapack

The Third Ghost Story Megapack

The Haunts & Horrors Megapack

The Lon Williams Weird Western Megapack

The M.R. James Megapack

The Macabre Megapack

The Second Macabre Megapack

The Third Macabre Megapack

The Arthur Machen Megapack**

The Mummy Megapack

The Occult Detective Megapack

The Darrell Schweitzer Megapack

The Vampire Megapack

The Weird Fiction Megapack

The Werewolf Megapack

The William Hope Hodgson Megapack

WESTERNS

The Western Megapack

The Second Western Megapack

The Third Western Megapack

The B.M. Bower Megapack

The Max Brand Megapack

The Buffalo Bill Megapack

The Cowboy Megapack

The Zane Grey Megapack

The Lon Williams Weird Western Megapack

YOUNG ADULT

The Bobbsey Twins Megapack

The Boys’ Adventure Megapack

The Dan Carter, Cub Scout Megapack

The Dare Boys Megapack

The Doll Story Megapack

The G.A. Henty Megapack

The Girl Detectives Megapack

The E. Nesbit Megapack

The Penny Parker Megapack

The Pinocchio Megapack

The Rover Boys Megapack

The Second Carolyn Wells Megapack

The Space Patrol Megapack

The Tom Corbett, Space Cadet Megapack

The Tom Swift Megapack

The Wizard of Oz Megapack

AUTHOR MEGAPACKS

The Achmed Abdullah Megapack

The H. Bedford-Jones Pulp Fiction Megapack

The Edward Bellamy Megapack

The E.F. Benson Megapack

The Second E.F. Benson Megapack

The Henri Bergson Megapack

The Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson Megapack

The Algernon Blackwood Megapack

The Second Algernon Blackwood Megapack

The B.M. Bower Megapack

The Max Brand Megapack

The First Reginald Bretnor Megapack

The Fredric Brown Megapack

The Second Fredric Brown Megapack

The Wilkie Collins Megapack

The Stephen Crane Megapack

The Ray Cummings Megapack

The Guy de Maupassant Megapack

The Philip K. Dick Megapack

The Frederick Douglass Megapack

The Erckmann-Chatrian Megapack

The F. Scott Fitzgerald Megapack

The First R. Austin Freeman Megapack

The Second R. Austin Freeman Megapack*

The Third R. Austin Freeman Megapack*

The Jacques Futrelle Megapack

The Randall Garrett Megapack

The Second Randall Garrett Megapack

The Anna Katharine Green Megapack

The Zane Grey Megapack

The Edmond Hamilton Megapack

The Dashiell Hammett Megapack

The C.J. Henderson Megapack

The William Hope Hodgson Megapack

The M.R. James Megapack

The Selma Lagerlof Megapack

The Harold Lamb Megapack

The Murray Leinster Megapack***

The Second Murray Leinster Megapack***

The Jonas Lie Megapack

The Arthur Machen Megapack**

The Katherine Mansfield Megapack

The George Barr McCutcheon Megapack

The William P. McGivern Fantasy Megapack

The First William P. McGivern Science Fiction Megapack

The Second William P. McGivern Science Fiction Megapack

The A. Merritt Megapack*

The Talbot Mundy Megapack

The E. Nesbit Megapack

The Andre Norton Megapack

The H. Beam Piper Megapack

The Mack Reynolds Megapack

The Rafael Sabatini Megapack

The Saki Megapack

The Darrell Schweitzer Megapack

The Robert Sheckley Megapack

The Bram Stoker Megapack

The Fred M. White Disaster Megapack

The Lon Williams Weird Western Megapack

The Virginia Woolf Megapack

The Arthur Leo Zagat Science Fiction Megapack

* Not available in the United States

** Not available in the European Union

***Out of print.

OTHER COLLECTIONS YOU MAY ENJOY

The Great Book of Wonder, by Lord Dunsany (it should have been called “The Lord Dunsany Megapack”)

The Wildside Book of Fantasy

The Wildside Book of Science Fiction

Yondering: The First Borgo Press Book of Science Fiction Stories

To the Stars—And Beyond! The Second Borgo Press Book of Science Fiction Stories

Once Upon a Future: The Third Borgo Press Book of Science Fiction Stories

Whodunit?—The First Borgo Press Book of Crime and Mystery Stories

More Whodunits—The Second Borgo Press Book of Crime and Mystery Stories

X is for Xmas: Christmas Mysteries

INTRODUCTION, by Philip J. Harbottle

John Russell Fearn was an English author who began his career as a science fiction writer in the American pulp magazines in 1933, when his first novel The Intelligence Gigantic was serialised in Amazing Stories. The following year, he sold a short story, “The Man Who Stopped the Dust,” to Astounding Stories, the first of many outstanding “thought variants” he was to contribute to the magazine over the next several years.

Over the next 15 years, Fearn published some 120 magazine stories in all of the leading pulp magazines under his own name and numerous pseudonyms, creating a variety of plot-forms under different styles that ranged from universe-destroying thought variants to the intensely human story. His most popular pen names were Thornton Ayre and Polton Cross. As Ayre, he introduced detective story techniques to science fiction and also created the first female super-heroine, Violet Ray (the ‘Golden Amazon’) with four stories in Fantastic Adventures (1939-43).

In 1944, Fearn completely revised his Amazon concept, upgrading his writing from the pulp level, and broke into the hardcover market in Britain with The Golden Amazon. In the totally different novel version, a baby girl is the unwitting subject of an idealistic scientist’s glandular experiments, his aim being to end world wars by creating a superwoman who would institute a scientific rule upon reaching maturity. The Golden Amazon was reprinted in the Canadian magazine the Toronto Star Weekly in 1945, and proved so popular with the magazine’s predominantly female readership, that Fearn was commissioned to bring the Amazon back to life for a whole series of sequels. These were tremendously successful, and appeared regularly in the Star Weekly over the next 16 years, ending only with Fearn’s death. The novels were syndicated to several American newspapers, with the early novels appearing in both hardcover and paperback in the UK and Canada respectively.

Having found a more lucrative market after the war, Fearn quit writing for the pulp magazines. He wrote hardcover detective novels as John Slate, beginning with Black Maria, M.A. The book was acknowledged as a classic of the “locked room murder” genre, and reviewers hailed ‘Slate’ as a second Agatha Christie. Writing as Hugo Blayn, Fearn then created a scientific detective, ‘Dr. Carruthers.’ Fearn also became a very successful writer of Westerns and Romances, and his 52 science fiction novels as Vargo Statten became best-sellers and were translated worldwide, particularly in France and Italy.

But after publishing some 180 novels, Fearn died suddenly in September 1960, the victim of a massive heart attack, aged only 52. His grief-stricken widow fell seriously ill herself, and was unable to promote his work, or answer publishers’ letters. His work quickly fell out of print, and since much of it was under pseudonyms that were not generally known to be his, Fearn was in danger of becoming completely forgotten.

His reputation was only revived by the publication in 1968 of the present writer’s biography, The Multi-Man, which included a detailed bibliography and revealed dozens of pseudonyms for the first time. Posthumous work quickly appeared in a new British SF magazine, Vision of Tomorrow. After Mrs. Fearn asked me to become her agent, a number of Fearn’s novels and stories were reprinted. The Vargo Statten books again became bestsellers in Italy, as did some of his detective novels and westerns. In 1995, the New York-based small press Gryphon Books launched a ‘Science Fiction Rediscovery’ series, eventually reprinting all of the ‘Golden Amazon’ novels, and other titles. Over the next decade, other larger publishers began an extensive reprinting of his novels in all of the genres in which he had worked—this time under his own name.

The best of these novels are currently in print in the U.S. from Borgo Books and Wildside Press, who have also issued a number of collections of his best early science fiction pulp stories, beginning with The Best of John Russell Fearn in two volumes, followed by A Case for Brutus Lloyd, Dynasty of the Small, Last Conflict, The Man From Hell, Rule of the Brains, Something From Mercury, Valley of Pretenders and World Without Chance, all edited by Philip Harbottle.

But these collections have only skimmed the cream of the crop; they have deliberately been restricted to stories that have not greatly dated scientifically. There yet remains a large number of Fearn’s early science fiction stories that have never been reprinted simply because they are now known to be ‘impossible’ in that they feature Martians or Venusians and the like, and as such have become fantasy. What was still possible to speculative writers in the 1930s and 1940s is no longer believable today.

But should such stories be allowed to slip into oblivion and be entirely forgotten? Cannot such stories, with due allowances made for the time when they were written, still entertain and amuse modern readers willing to suspend their disbelief and simply enjoy these stories in their historical context?

Gathered together in this Megapack is a generous first selection of these early ‘lost’ and ‘impossible’ Fearn stories, so that modern readers can judge for themselves!

—Philip Harbottle,

Wallsend,

December 2013.

RED HERITAGE

A trap-planet waited—baited—through millennia—for a cosmic thief.

I

“There can be no doubt about it—our world is dying!”

Kil-Dio, the Venusian, uttered the words in the scraping diction that was his equivalent of language. His stalked eyes traveled solemnly over the assembly of five thousand Venusians filling the great columned administrative hall. Like him, they were all slug-like—nauseous-looking, dirty-gray creatures, propelled by a group of powerful feelers, with arms that were mere extensions of their bodies. But the Venusians were not merely intelligent—they were super-scientists, confronted now with the greatest problem they had yet been called upon to master.

“We are faced with a defunct world unless we resort to theft,” Kil-Dio went on, quietly. “It is a grievous slur on the nobility of science that we should be compelled to rob another world in order to rejuvenate our own—but I foresee no other way.” His stalked eyes turned from the assembly and looked in silent eloquence through the broad, floor-length window.

Beyond the main administrative hall was the view of a vast desert of sun-blistered sand, riven by huge gorges, soaked in the blistering heat of a slow-moving, unclouded Sun. Venus, revolving once in 720 hours, was a world without clouds, without protection from a sun only 63,000,000 miles away. A blazing eye which had long since evaporated the seas and slowly plucked away the once heavy atmosphere.

Far away on the horizon a whirling dust storm rose black against the brazen blue of the sky, settled, rose again. Kil-Dio made an odd sound—a sigh of deep regret.

“It requires no words of mine to emphasizc approaching doom,” he resumed. “I have been in consultation with Ri-Dathan, our chief astronomer, and he is of the opinion that our only method of escape is to steal the seas and atmosphere of a neighboring world—preferably that of the world which is fourth from the Sun—Rinia, as we name it. There, there is plentiful atmosphere and water. By the theft of those seas we can transform this world of ours into a youthful, thriving planet once more.”

“Can we not migrate to this fourth world?” questioned Bi-Tokar, self-appointed spokesman for the assembly.

“We could, but it might mean—in fact would mean—war. We would lose many of our numbers, and that we cannot afford. Further, I do not believe we could accustom ourselves to the fourth world’s far lesser gravitation without adaptation beforehand—and since adaptation must begin with birth that is obviously quite impossible for our particular generation. This fourth world is only forty-two hundred miles in diameter, whereas our world is nearly twice as large. Our gravitation is double. Only by adaptation could we tolerate half our present attractive pressure.”

“Then what of the third world?” Bi-Tokar persisted.

But again Kil-Dio shook his head.

“No. It is a young world, raged by tempests, and in many parts still steaming with poisonous vapors. Similar in gravity, yes—but that is all. As yet, its atmosphere and seas are too fetid for us, at least by comparison with the perfect offerings of the fourth world.”

There was a brief silence. Then Bi-Tokar spoke again. “Has the excellent Ri-Dathan considered the possibility of our own moon? Could we not migrate to—”

“Again, no. Our moon is only three thousand miles in diameter, and airless. But the main point is that it is infested with inert life spores, deadly indeed to us. Were we to bring an atmosphere to our moon, and warmth, those life spores would flourish and might even finally destroy us with toxic emanations. And also, we would again be faced with less gravity. No, our moon is definitely discounted. There is no way other than to attack this fourth world.”

Adamant in his decision Kil-Dio descended from the huge, stone platform by long slithering motions, passed through an adjoining doorway, and crept into the long passageway that led to his major laboratories and machine rooms.

* * * *

Kil-Dio’s speech had represented the consummation of plans the Venusians had not hurriedly made. They had known through generations that they lived on a world too close to the Sun for comfort, had known that one day the searing primary would absorb all the moisture they so needed for life. In itself, it had been a slow process, but, of course, far faster than on a less Sunward world.

At the first, Venus had had heavy clouds, but with the slow progression of ages they had gone. Little by little, the expanded gases of the upper atmosphere, open to the torrid rays every 720 hours, had leaked out into space. Rain had become less and less frequent and had now ceased entirely. The once soft, fertile land had dried up, until now it was split into arid plains and chasms under the eternally cloudless sky.

It was the same in every part of Venus. The whole planet was a scorched, dusty wilderness, its only life consisting of the five thousand who had grouped themselves together in their surface city at the base of a vast mountain range, its highest peaks soaring fifteen miles up into the cloudless, brazen skies.

Long days of saturating heat; long nights of bitter cold, for the thinning atmosphere held little of the scorching warmth of the daytime. During the dark hours, when their moon silently rode the starry skies, the Venusians sought the shelter of their underground honeycombs, deep under the mountain range, to emerge only when the Sun once more flamed in intolerable grandeur into the sky.

Heat they were accustomed to—it was their natural state—but lack of water and the presence of cold were their absolute enemies. The former they needed in copious quantities, both as free oxygen and hydrogen and the combined H2O form. For ages their synthesizing machines had done much to meet their needs, but now the time had come for definite action. Further delay would bring about the extinction of the race.

Kil-Dio’s emotions were not of the happiest as, in company with his chief scientists and Ri-Dathan, the astronomer, he studied the image of the fourth world in the flawlessly polished mirror of the X-ray telescope. In the merciless blue of the Venusian-day sky the fourth world was naturally invisible to the eye, but here in the observatory delicate fingers of light-gathering power reached through the rock that buried this underground place, and passed out into the endless deeps of space to repattern on the mirror exactly what they saw.

This time it was a thriving, prosperous world of green, clouds floating serenely in its atmosphere, cities sprawled amidst its emerald landscapes, the dots pf seagoing shipping scattered over its oceans. Rinia! Or, as it would come to be known in the dim future of a race struggling slowly up the third world’s evolutionary scale, Mars.

“They are intelligent, these Rinians?” Kil-Dio questioned, pondering.

“To a certain extent,” acceded the astronomer. “They have space travel by crude rocket propulsion, they understand radio to quite an advanced degree, and they seem well versed in all the ordinary sciences—but even so they are far behind us. In appearance they are rather queer, but then life on other worlds is very unlikely to take the same form as ours. The Rinians walk upright on two legs, possess round-shaped heads crowned with strange furry mats. Their eyes are set flat in their craniums and they have queer openings that are presumably for the purpose of food and speech. Revolting creatures indeed! And they are big—very big. I would definitely place them as eight feet tall.”

“Lesser gravity demands greater size,” Kil-Dio murmured. Then; “And their atmosphere?”

“Perfect for our purpose, Excellency. Oxygen and hydrogen in great quantities, together with nitrogen, argon and krypton. Their oceans are absolute combined oxygen and hydrogen with a heavy percentage of chloride of sodium.”

Kil-Dio was silent for a while, then seemed to come to a decision. He spoke quietly, regretfully. “Our plans must be acted upon. In a few more hours it will be night and time for our rest period, but afterwards we will all set to work with the scheme we have laid—the erection of the absorption-vacuum on the mountain range and its linkage with the machines in the adjoining laboratory. There must be no delays. Is that understood?”

The gleaming heads of the astronomer and attendant scientists inclined in assent.

II

With the coming of the next day-period activity began. Silent, faultlessly efficient robots marched single file to a point 2,000 feet up the nearby mountain range, bearing metal-synthesizing machines, tools, and scientific engines of all descriptions. They were nearly all day on the ascent, a long irregular line of metal figures on firm, jointed legs, gleaming in the sunshine, only halting when they finally gained a broad, natural ledge extending for an area of three miles before the mountain range began the second, upward thrusting to vast, unscaleable heights.

Kil-Dio and his immediate scientific colleagues reached the heights in a fast ascending levitator, operated by means of gravity-shields. They directed the operations of their robot servants efficiently, but they had only started when the intense cold of the night put a halt to work for another 720 hours.

Then, with sunlight again, the real work began. The huge ledge was disrupted in the center for an area of half a mile diameter, going down and down in the form of an enormous cylindrical shaft, sinking at last to a depth of a thousand feet, its sides lined with sheets of pressure-resisting alloy. Night came—day came.

The Venusians and their servants worked untiringly, watching the slow erection of a vast, latticed tower of metal, mainly comprised of four three-foot-thick girders held in position by crossed and lateral bars and struts. Twenty days later it was finished, rearing to a height of a thousand feet—huge enough, but seeming dwarfed by comparison with the vast range against which it stood. It commanded a view of the sun-soaked terrain below, stood over the Venusian city like a guardian presence.

At its top reposed a huge circle of polished copper, able to turn swiftly on massive gimbals, and within the center of the circle, suspended by electromagnets, was a curiously designed transmitter, fitted with numberless graded lenses. Both this instrument and the copper hoop were connected by stout cables dropping the length of the tower and thence passing through the supporting bed of now-hardened pressure-resisting metal in which the tower was embedded. From this point the cables continued their journey in a complicated switchboard deep under the city in the night quarters.

The most difficult part of the work was done—the rest was a matter of careful analysis and computation.

* * * *

In the course of another day, Kil-Dio and his entire race forsook the upper ground levels of their city and sealed themselves below. If their plans matured according to expectations a sea would finally roll where the desert now stood, obliterating their city beneath its waves. But against this possibility they had taken the fullest safeguard.

A network of tunnels and shafts passed into the mountain range from their underground habitat and emerged at a point 6,000 feet up the range. These served as air-purifying vents and could also be traversed and ascended in the levitators. From such a vantage point up the mountain the Venusians hoped to be able to take stock of their remade world when the tumult was over.

No possibility had been overlooked, nothing left to chance. The valves that dosed the roof of their underground city had been tested and found capable of withstanding an almost inconceivable water pressure, a pressure that could only exist on the bottom of an ocean. Certainly it was impossible for them to be drowned.

Kil-Dio had thrust most if his misgivings aside when the time finally came to take the last steps. His first regret at stealing a prosperous world’s life-blood had vanished before the realization that in nature only the fittest can survive, If he and his race were so much cleverer than their neighbors—so be it!

Standing in the vast laboratory, he looked silently round with his stalked eyes upon the gathered, interested members of his race. Vast electrical engines of every shape and design stretched around him in a wilderness of gleaming metal. Generators, vacuum tubes, enormous anode and cathode balls roped together by slender but incredibly powerful filaments, great bridges and ladders of insulated metal perched between titanic electromagnets—the whole gamut of nth degree electricity was present, some of it comprehensible to all those who watched, but much of it an enigma reflecting the prodigious intellect of its conceivers.

At length Kil-Dio spoke: “Gravity, as we well know, is as much a force as cosmic rays, light or heat. It has definable limits and its power can be increased or decreased at will—that we know from our levitators, which lift easily against the pull of gravitation. Also, we know it from our space machines, which shield gravity and hurl us away from any gravitational field. We know that, even as ordinary radio waves can be heterodyned, so can a correct force operate to ‘heterodyne’ gravitational fields and render the part in question entirely free of gravitation. This, then, is our plan:

“Across space, directly to Rinia, we shall project a heterodyning beam, which, when it strikes Rinia, will encompass some one thousand miles of surface area. This heterodyning beam will be in the exact center of what we might call a funnel of force. That is to say, this funnel will be a beam having walls of vibration solid enough to withstand the sudden uprushing vortex of water and air. Obviously, with part of Rinia degravitated and the force tunnel immediately over that part, the air and ocean will be sucked up our force tunnel by the normal process of following the line of least resistance. But for our force tunnel they would spew Sunward, hence the presence of the tunnel to hold them in one fixed path, until they deluge down on the surface of this world.”

“And the people and cities?” questioned Bi-Tokar gravely. “Will not they, too, be absorbed toward the tube and rain down upon us?”

“No, because the binding molecular forces that hold solid things together will be destroyed by our forces, but degravitated water and air can only reassemble into their original nonsolid form.”

Kil-Dio turned aside with Ri-Dathan and studied the elaborate computations built up by the clicking mathematical machines. In silence he checked the exact position of 73,000,000-mile-distant Rinia, together with the path the heterodyning beam and tube of force would have to take through space.

His stalked eyes turned and regarded the meters on the solar energy potential scate; they registered 86,000,000-volts potential energy. Almost in silence the energy-storing apparatus continued working under 30,000-volt pressure, catching on its endless series of brushes a constant flow of charges directly from the Sun itself.

Satisfied, Kil-Dlo slid his body along the insulated floor, moved by degrees to the region of the immense switchboard, nerve center of the mammoth machinery frowning around him. Delicately his quivering body tentacle closed a master switch, to release an instant babble of din.

Energies, terrific in their scope and power, leashed though they were, burst suddenly amidst the machines. The yellow-lighted laboratory became bathed in quivering, pale-violet flame, began to reek with ozone. Shivering purple threads lashed themselves like living things between the anode and cathode globes. With a crashing, crackling roar the energy blasted from them into the midst of swiftly rotating copper balls and whirling, humming governors. Tubes flared green; dynamos shrieked a deafening whine of song. In the distance, a group of gigantic turbines spun before the onrush of synthetic water, shot through with rippling filigrees of amethyst color. Bolt after bolt of energy slammed into the transforming chamber of the energy-projecting machinery, hurled thence through the cables to the complicated apparatus atop the external tower.

Kil-Dio squatted motionless before the switchboard, stalked eyes jerking incessantly from meter to meter, gauge to gauge, avidly following slender threads of red that quivered to a danger mark and then dropped swiftly as he closed switches with methodical movements.

The laboratory began to quiver with the intense, exultant thunder of that energy. Stifling heat beat along its length, but the Venusians were accustomed to that. They were not watching Kil-Dio’s intense efforts. Their attention was fixed alternately on two screens—the one giving a view of the tower outside by X-ray wave transmitters, and the other a view of Rinia, kept constantly in position by the clockwork motors.

The heterodyning wave working from the complex apparatus in the center of the copper hoop was invisible, only the jerking meter needles testified to its light-fast progress across the gulf of space. But within a few minutes there burst forth from that enormous copper circle a sudden dazzling lavender beam, stabbing into the star-dusted sky until it was lost in utter remoteness. The sandy, arid plain below became bathed in the alien glare of electrical fire. Dust storms gathered and whirled, eddied into sudden violence by the tremendous disturbance in the atmosphere.

The Venusians watched breathlessly, steeling themselves against the glaring, flashing riot of self-inflicted thunder and lightning. Their gaze was now fixed on the Rinian spacevizor. Since the tube of energy was traveling across the void at the speed of light it would take some 6.5 minutes to cover that gulf of nearly 73,000,000 miles.

The din remained constant; the energy-tube flared in unvarying pale purple fire from the copper ring on the tower— Seconds crept into minutes—three—four—five—

Six! A low sound, the equivalent of a sigh, passed from the Venusians as they saw that the gravity-heterodyning beam, slightly in advance of the force tunnel, had arrived. It struck that thriving, green planet clean in the center of its principal Venusward ocean.

The result was immediate—and cataclysmic! With gravity suddenly rendered of no account over a thousand mile area, all things within that area ceased to hold together. Ships caught in its midst flew apart, the very atoms pf their constitution no longer obeying normal attractive laws. They mushroomed out, visible on the mirror as blurs on the ocean.

The sea itself writhed and tumbled as though suddenly stirred by titanic submarine forces. A vast tidal wave shot to the zenith—and at that identical second the tube of force struck squarely over the area, a pale, enormously distended haze of lavender enveloping three-quarters of the ocean.

Degravitated, helpless to hold onto their native world, both sea and air thundered in a thousand incredible furies and spuming cataracts toward the vacuum of the force-tube area. The tube drew a hole in the ocean with the mighty force of a super suction-pump, drove deep down to the bed of the ocean—but there the range limit of the heterodyner ceased. On the ocean bed the law of gravity was still normal.

The whole face of Rinia changed, became covered with a tempest of unimaginable force. The clouds thickened, whirled madly, obscuring the vision below from sight, Only that purple beam probing relentlessly through the murk told how successful the scientists of Venus had been.

Those in the laboratory turned their attention away from the murky enigma and instead searched their exterior vizor. They had not long to wait.

Abruptly, the clear flickerless intensity of that empurpled hoop atop the tower was blurred by the arrival of the first conglomerated mass of air and water from Rinia, literally thrust through the hoop like water from a hose nozzle. A raging, gushing tumult of uncounted quintillions of ice shards slammed into the mountain range and rebounded in a mighty avalanche, whirled thicker and ever thicker, black against the stars. In a few seconds the entire view of the beam was obliterated by tumbling vortices of desperately twisting atmosphere and water vapor.

The din of a thousand Niagras and tempests reached to the ears of the buried scientists with a noise like distant thunder. The smashing of their external vizor by the impounded fury of waters and cyclone deprived them of viewing the consummation of their masterpiece. They could only guess—

There was nothing they could do but wait—through days, through weeks if need be, until Nature herself formed the balance and allowed them to take their first survey of a rejuvenated world.

III

Viranicus Petlo, of Mars, was deep underground when the cataclysm came. It was no coincidence that found him there—his work as an electrical and mining engineer kept him deep underground most of his life, in company with the scientists who represented his colleagues from the Mining and Radio Association.

Like the rest of his race, Petlo was massive in appearance, well over seven feet tall, broad-shouldered, yellow-eyed, with the flat face and broad nostrils of the true Martian. Otherwise, he was not very unlike an Earthling of the present day.

He was testing a seam of ore when he received the first warning of danger. The alarm clanged noisily down thé long, cold-light illumined tunnel. Figures came flying helter-skelter toward him; a babble of voices smote his ears.

The deep rumbling and booming of external thunders growled above the shouting. Fissures gaped and leapt avidly up the tunnel sides. Lumps of rock clattered down from the roof.

Petlo gripped one of his comrades as he came gaspingly up. “What is it? What’s happened?”

The man gulped for breath arid slanted his yellow head toward the screaming radio at the far end of the tunnel. “Earthquake or something on the surface! Sort of cyclone, tidal wave and landslide. Can’t quite understand it. Better stay down here until it stops. I think the shaft will hold.”

Petlo studied it grimly. “In thirty minutes of this vibration it will come through,” he said finally. “I’m heading for the surface.”

“Don’t be a fool, man!” the other cried hoarsely. “The conditions are far worse up there than they are here. I’ve just been through to the surface by radiophone and things are so bad I—”

“I’ve got a wife and son to think about!” Petlo retorted. “You can do what you like!”

He wasted no further time on words. On swift feet he raced down the tunnel’s length to the accompaniment of the growling and creaking of tortured, slowly cracking walls. A massive piece of ceiling dislodged itself not a foot behind his flying form. With a set face he raced along the last stretch of the tunnel and gained the elevator shaft.

Clearly to his ears down the 400-foot bore came the roaring and whining of a thousand furies, the scream of a super wind, the hammering madness of a raging atmosphere. A momentary frown crossed his dogged face. The thing was utterly abnormal. Storms of such extreme severity were practically unknown on this world of Jondol.

A deeper roaring suddenly replaced that of the wind. It rose louder and louder, developed into a scream that mingled oddly with the screech if voices— Faster—faster! Only just in time Petlo flung himself away as the shaft cage came slamming down in a cloud of dust and struggling, dying figures.

For perhaps ten seconds he stood appalled, then realizing he could do nothing, he vaulted onto the wreckage, seized the framework of the shaft wall and began to ease his body upward inch by inch.

It was a ghastly, nightmare ascent. The shaft quivered incessantly, more than once threatened to fling him down the ever-widening distance to the floor below. His fingers were bleeding, his body drenched in sweat, but little by little, finger and toe, he went upward, ever upward, only pausing once at the sound of vast concussions from the depths. He realized he had been right; the lower shafts had caved in.

He fought up the last hundred feet with brittle muscles and, more dead than alive, crawled over the edge of the shaft and lay prone, not daring to lift his head over the projecting rim into the screaming, insane tumult around him.

Dazed, incredulous, he watched a sky that was thick with boiling, swirling clouds, tearing toward the sea not five miles away. Buildings, trees, whole landscapes were shifting and whirling toward that unseen spot. It seemed to be centered somewhere over the ocean itself. More he could not discern. He felt his skin prickling with the sensation of electrical discharges; he could feel that his hair was crimped.

The only thought in his mind now was for his young wife, Nidia, and their son. What had happened to them? What could have— He began to crawl on hands and knees, lashed by a tempest of inconceivable power, drenched in battering rains, his way lighted by flashing bolts of insane thunder and lightning.

He crawled two miles through the thick of a seething hell—another mile and he’d be at the spot occupied by his isolated home on the outskirts of the city of Kilanton. As he struggled onward he caught glimpses of the city’s lofty spires and edifices tumbling and falling wildly before the onslaught. Other parts were utterly washed away in moving landslides as suddenly deviated rivers frothed and foamed seaward.

Still Viranicus Petlo did not understand. His mind was a whirling mass of tortured emotions. He crawled the last mile on knees that were cut and bleeding, clawed with fingers that had long since lost their feeling, listened like a dulled, hunted animal to the screams and shouts of the others of his fellow men and women as they were caught up in the hurricane and hurled helpless through the screaming air.

Stupidly, weighted down with the rain, Petlo pawed through the crumbled mass that had been his home, until it suddenly came to him what he was doing, where he was. With a sudden mad energy he began to hurl stones and boulders from before him, diving deep down into the debris, searching for the crumpled, maimed bodies that had been his beloved wife and son.

For thirty minutes he searched, defying the snatching fingers of the cyclone and the searing thunderbolts. Then suddenly he stopped his activities when his powerful hands closed round a ring of metal. It pierced his confusion that it led to the cellar of his home. Could it be possible that Nidia— Madly he tore on the ring, lifted the metal square upward and stared beneath with yellow eyes that were insanely glad. Dimly visible were the sprawled figures of a slim woman and a boy, unconscious.

With shaking legs Petlo went down the steps into the cellar, pulled the lid down after him and bolted it securely. Slowly, gently, he felt around in the dark and lifted the limp bodies in his arms, caressed them, thanked the Providence that had led them to hide down here.

In grim-faced silence he listened to the screaming insanity above—the rumbling and growling of a world in sudden death agonies. He listened and listened, through hours that were numberless—

* * * *

Eight days and nights of sheer, unparalleled horror came and went before the ghastly onslaught upon Mars showed signs of ceasing. Then, at long last, the wrenching and straining of a flogged world began to ease up—the titanic winds abated; the quaking and quivering of the quakes subsided into an aching, placid calm.

Half conscious, tortured by hunger and thirst, Viranicus Petlo began to move. His wife and son who had been conscious for part of the time had now relapsed again. The air in the cellar was stifling; the ventilators must have become partly blocked.

Petlo crawled to the trapdoor and pushed on it. He experienced but little difficulty in raising it—not many of the boulders he had moved from it in the first place had replaced themselves.

It was day, and the light stung his eyes for a moment. A day such as he had thought could never happen in his lifetime. Cold, biting wind, incredibly rarefied, cut around him. The sky was cloudless, of an intensely dark blue shade that spoke at once of a thinned atmosphere. The Sun hung at the zenith.

Shivering in his thin clothes, Petlo gazed blankly on a scene of profoundest desolation from which all traces of the things he had known and loved had apparently been blasted. Kilanton City was a shambles of smashed and tumbled stone. Hundreds of crushed bodies lay in every imaginable posture. Not a thing stirred, save that in the far distance a ragged flag had freakishly escaped disaster and stood waving drearily now in the icy wind.

Petlo stared out to where the sea should have been, but there was no sea—only a vast, incredible, yawning desert, puddled here and there where slight condensation had occurred. In the midst of it, rotted, unexpected, lay the hulks of ships that had sunk in a forgotten time.

“Gone!” Petlo whispered at last. “All gone! Our seas—our peoples—our progress. Everything that goes to make a world. But why?” He dumbly sought the heavens—then a twinge in his stomach and the dryness of his throat reminded him that food and drink were needed, and quickly.

Getting to his feet he staggered toward the major bulk of the city. Here and there buildings were standing—skeletal, parts of the interiors left untouched. There must be food somewhere—tabloid food perhaps. And water! There must be water somewhere. There had to be—

* * * *

Viranicus Petlo found food and water—quite a fair supply of it—in one portion of the city. Once he had revived Nidia and the boy, Ladima, they all moved to that portion and made their home in the basement of what had formerly been an enormous, multiple store. In his subsequent ramblings Petlo also found parts of the Mining and Radio Association Building still intact.

There were tools, precious oxygen and hydrogen cylinders still undamaged, machines, electrical equipment, and a hundred and one useful devices that came readily to his fingers. He made the store basement airtight against the frigid night cold and fixed up a crude, but satisfactory, system of waste-air disposal, mingled the oxygen with the hydrogen gases to provide water when necessary.

That was at first, but at the end of five weeks others came, bringing their children—others from every walk of life—engineers, scientists, laborers, miners, each of them bringing their own particular discoveries resurrected from the ruins. Little by little a basement city grew up in the ruins of shattered Kilanton, ruled over unquestioned by Petlo himself.

But Petlo had changed. His whole nature had undergone a metamorphosis. The first realization of the hideous wrong that had been done his beloved world were burning in his brain.

“It was deliberate! Deliberate!”

He made that passionate declaration on an evening when Halvan, a chemist, his closest new-found friend, called upon him. Halvan was a quiet sort of man, less fiery than Petlo, and devoted to the wife and young daughter who now sat beside him in the glow of the roughly erected cold-light bulbs.

“Somebody or something stole our water and atmosphere!” Petlo flamed, pacing angrily up and down.

“In that you are correct,” Halvan agreed thoughtfully. “During my recent wanderings I explored the Eastern Observatory. Part of the big reflector is still intact, so I made use of it—studied the heavens for a possible explanation of the recent catastrophe. And I found it! Jalva, the second planet from the Sun, now has an atmosphere of considerable density where formerly there was none! Clouds completely obscure its surface. Formerly, it was reckoned as an almost dead world.”

“Jalva!” Petlo cried, halting in his stride. “You mean then that—”

“I mean that it is probable that by a process of super-science the inhabitants of Jalva, whom we thought nonexistent, robbed us in order to rejuvenate their own world. Our science is not as good as theirs, and therefore—” Halvan shrugged moodily.

“We still have rocket ships which can be repaired,” Petlo said fiercely. “Can we not band ourselves together and raid these thieves? Destroy them?”

“Our little band against an entire race of super-scientists?” Halvan shook his graying head doubtfully. “I don’t think so, Petlo. There is nothing we can do but repair our shattered fortunes as best we can. At the best we can only wait for the end.”

“And a pretty depressing idea that is!” Petlo retorted. “The point is for us to revenge, not to take this lying down—”

“But Halvan is right, Viran,” interrupted Nidia quietly. “Just what can we do—we few on a world rapidly dying as the last air thins out? Our children will perhaps live their lives through in this underground place, and then— And then the world will be dead.”

Petlo did not reply. Scowling with thought, he seated himself and began to ponder, thinking, planning, his whole vigorous being concentrated on one end—vengeance!

IV

The complete metamorphosis of Viranicus Petlo was a slow but resolute thing. From the first he took command, was the leader of the remaining people in their constant expeditions amidst the shattered ruins of Kilanton.

Little by little, through tireless searching, they began to unearth more and mere scientific devices, or else the necessary materials for making them. Petlo, driven by one profound obsession for avenging his world, worked mysteriously toward an end.

At the end of a year the survivors had accomplished miracles. Part of the city had been rebuilt underground—was a passably comfortable region, quiet and law abiding. There were all the necessities of life now; resurrected synthesizing machines had seen to that. Amongst other things, Petlo had had the Observatory reflector remounted in his own laboratory, its nose poking inquisitively toward a dome of pure, undistorting, newly-blown glass. Save for a slight furriness of image occasioned by the glass, the instrument worked perfectly.

For endless hours Petlo studied the second world during the cold night, brooded over its atmosphere and now-consequent high albedo. With malicious care he studied its whirling little moon, brilliantly lighted by both sunshine and primary light. He made copious notes of what he saw in the valleys of that moon, smiled grimly, but held his counsel.

His main object thereafter was we reconditioning of one of the two surviving rocket ships. It took five weeks to fit it out in spaceworthy style, and once it was done he set off alone into space, headed directly for that brilliantly gleaming world and its moon so close to the Sun. He would do nothing rash—that was all he would promise to the anxious Nidia and his friends.

Sixteen long weeks afterward he returned from his sojourn, grim-faced, more resolute than ever, but still divulging little of his plans. Instead, hc set to work—after a series of private experiments—upon the construction of a highly sensitive remote-control radio transmitter. This was his special field, but to had to surmount constant obstacles due to lack of material and the necessity of having to make s»me of it firsthand. But in the end his ingenuity, untiring energy, and the assistance of his friends succeeded in creating an apparatus of remarkably delicate power, able to extend its influence across the void from his own world to the second one.

When Halvan or Nidia questioned him his only response was a cold, bitter smile. Instead of giving any information he turned next to the reconditioning of the retaining rocket ship, fitted it with automatic blast controls, carefully timed, and switchboard mechanism attuned by a complicated radio receiver to his own short-wave transmitter.

Then he spent three weeks loading the ship very carefully with loose ixion powder, perhaps the most powerful explosive known to the planet and used in the boring of mines and rocket-ship detonators. He had found the stuff still unharmed in the depths of its steel armory deep under the half-shattered Association Building.

“But what’s it all for?” demanded Halvan one night, when at last the ship had been loaded and the two families reclined comfortably within their basement. “What are you trying to do? Hurl that ship of ixion at Jalva? If so, it won’t avail you much. The dense atmosphere will explode it long before it reaches its surface, and at best you’ll only kill a few.”

Petlo smiled grimly. “Nothing so childish as that, Halvan,” he answered Steadily. “When I went on that space trip my object was to discover the reason for brown smears visible through the telescope in the valleys of Jalva’s moon. I found the smears were spores, and when I tested them here in warmth and oxygen and hydrogen they sprouted into plants—emitted a toxic, carbon dioxide, which is of course definitely fatal to an oxygen breather. The Jalvians are oxygen breathers. We know that because they took our atmosphere!”

“Well?” questioned Halvan quietly.

Petlo went on talking with fevered earnestness. “I plan to fire that second rocket ship to Jalva’s moon, guide it there by remote-control radio. Once it strikes, it will explode with devastating violence. There will be no atmospheric resistance whatever—the explosion of all that ixion in one mighty burst will shatter that three thousand-mile moon into absolute meteoric dust. The outcome is obvious. The dust and the spores will sift down in a dense carpet to Jalva’s surface. The spores will sprout! Time and time again the Jalvians may mow them down, try and destroy them—but one cannot forever defeat a thing of that nature any more than before the cataclysm we could utterly have destroyed all green stuff. These plants multiply with incredible speed and will thrive in that warmth and moisture. Finally, they will drive the Jalvians away from their planet by their very toxic emanations.”

“In generations to come, maybe,” Halvan acceded, thinking. “I am dealing with generations to come,” Petlo answered strangely, a far-away look in his yellow eyes. “I am dealing with a time that lies in the far future—so far away we cannot picture it, when by the natural law of inheritance and a reasonable supply of luck I expect to attain my revenge. When my son, Ladima, and your daughter, Esonia, reach maturity they must marry. It is essential! In the last stages of my plan, another world will play its part—the third world, the young one we call Kilbani.”

Halvan said nothing. He listened silently as Petlo went on.

“My next scheme is the hardest and mightiest of all. I plan to drive an irrigation system right across the face of our world—yes, from pole to pole—a network from the icecaps. For water, but also for another, profounder reason. For revenge! Later, you will see my point. First the rocket ship must be fired. Ages may elapse before the spores from that moon become sufficiently annoying to finally impregnate the Jalvian atmosphere with their toxics and render it too poisonous for the Jalvians to remain. I intend to dispatch the rocket tonight.”

“But how does this canal system fit in with the spore idea?” Halvan questioned. “What has it to do with it?”

“Everything,” Petlo answered, and smiled mysteriously.

* * * *

The rocket ship was fired from its 45-degree cradle two hours later, from a point situated in the lone area of the dead sea bottom. Petlo’s calculations, worked out to the last detail, had assured him that the automatic controls would work perfectly with his radio. The rocket tubes only needed the initial automatic blast to drive the machine out beyond the gravitational field and thinned atmosphere. In free space it would move by perpetual motion, guided by the radio waves.

Petlo set the time switch of the rocket-firing chambers, locked the airlock from the outside; then, wrapped to the ears in furs, he returned with Halvan to the position of their underground home and laboratory. By the time they had reached it the blasting roar of the rockets smote on their ears. The ship hurtled skyward in a long arc of flaming, vivid light, climbing into a remote, disappearing point that was swallowed up in the clear, motionless glitter of the stars.

Without speaking the two descended into the laboratory. Halvan took up his position before the telescope mirror. Petlo sat before his switchboard, hands tightly gripping the polished knobs that controlled, in conjunction with mathematical predictions, every movement of that hurtling, unseen flyer in the deeps of space.

Both of them sat hour after hour, the womenfolk bringing them food and hot drink at intervals. They dared not sleep; hardly dared to move, until their task was accomplished. They sat thus for nearly four days and nights, checking each other’s figures, charting and recharting the route the rocket must be taking. Halvan held the Venusian moon in the field of the great reflector by night, occasionally watching the flicking second hand of the chronometer.

Until at last, in a voice that ached with weariness, Halvan began to count, “Twenty-five—twenty-six—!” He stopped, smitten with awe. He was aware of Petlo and the others breathing hard over his shoulder.

Suddenly, amazingly, the calmly floating satellite of Venus spewed and belched outward in a trillion hurtling shards, broke up and splintered and smashed into boulders, stones, and vast swirling hazes of dust. The atmosphere of the mother planet writhed and boiled under the sudden alteration in gravitational fields. Somewhere under those clouds, oceans must have spilled over, convulsed into tidal waves, before they settled down to almost tideless seas.

The whole thing seemed to be over in minutes—but in those minutes a moon had died and settled into an enormous carpet of hazy fragments settling slowly toward the dense clouds. Petlo had been right in his judgment: the terrific explosion and inward thrust, together with the pull of Venus, had prevented the stuff forming into rings and, instead, forced it downward far enough to prevent the slightest suggestion of orbital formation.

Petlo drew a deep breath of relief, slumped wearily into a chair. In a few minutes both he and Halvan were sleeping heavily.

* * * *

For several weeks afterward Petlo and his people made no moves. They half expected a spaceship to arrive from the second world to retaliate for the thing they had done. Finally they began to realize that the Jalvians must have interpreted the death of their moon to some cosmic catastrophe and not to a deliberately planned act by minds on a world they fully believed now quite dead. Besides, they probably had their hands full in dealing with the disastrous effects of tidal waves and the sudden growth of toxic plant spores.

So, feeling secure again, Petlo set to work on his mighty canal scheme. The simplest and most direct method was to use high-powered blast-guns operated from the few remaining fast tractors. This was done, every one of the men survivors being pushed into service, whilst the womenfolk attended to their domestic needs.

Even so, progress was slow. To de-sign some thirty networking canals across a globe 4,000 miles in diameter demanded perpetual toil and work—by weeks, by months, by years. But Petlo still went doggedly on, ruthlessly determined to bring his strange plans to fruition.

At the end of a year ferric oxide was making obvious inroads on the planet. The old metal girders and skeletal walls of buildings were brightly red; the sea bottoms and vast devastated deserts crawled with rust. The air, too, was becoming dehydrated—the upper levels of hydrogen were leaking away into space, held only by Mars’ slight gravity. The essential mixture for life was vanishing. At the most, the planet had only another century of breathable atmosphere left.

Petlo worked with renewed vigor, driving his canals across the plains, linking them up with central oases around which there grew a new type of planet adapted to an air that was almost wholly thin oxygen. Ceaslessly, endlessly, red sand flew skyward before the battering blast-guns. An army of determined avengers gouged their planet from end to end, and only Petlo knew the purpose toward which he worked.

Two years—three years—five years, before the canal system was complete. Water flowed from pole to pole, to some extent irrigated the desert, but with the dehydrating air, life was still impossible on the surface. Petlo, however, seemed quite satisfied with his work, took a special care to initiate his son and Halvan’s daughter—now eighteen and seventeen respectively—into every detail of his plans, impressed upon their young minds the paramount necessity for vengeance—

Then, after two months’ rest, Petlo started his last and ultimate feat—one that demanded all the scientific instruments of which the planet was capable.

He set to work on the construction of an enormous turbine, shafted to a dynamo able to develop immense power. This machine in itself, executed in the Martian foundries manned by laborers, together with the attendant careful planning, took another year—and afterward more time was swallowed up in the making of two vast obelisks of pure copper coated with a rust-resisting and highly conductive alloy. Both of them were 300 feet long and 50 feet wide at their bases, their tips tapering to a point. Once these were finished, heavily insulated wires wound on massive drums were manufactured, together with numberless sheets of metal tested to withstand a pressure of 1,000 pounds to the square inch.

Most of this apparatus was then transferred to the south pole, accompanied by dredging and construction machines for the purpose of drilling a shaft beneath the icecap to a depth of 500 feet. The top glacier was removed for a square mile and the water constantly pumped away whilst the supporting sheets of metal were slid into position and firmly bolted and welded.

Lower the shaft sank, and lower still, until at the base it was made to widen out into a buried power chamber, likewise supported from the water and ice pressure by the prearranged metal sheets.

Two more years passed swiftly over in the construction of the power chamber. One of the massive copper obelisks was lowered to the exact center of the chamber and sunk inti a pit fifty feet deep, filled in with insulated material that cooled to the hardness of age-old granite.

Then the turbine and dynamo were lowered and assembled. The latter was wired up to the copper electrode, and the former so devised that it was directly under a subsidiary shaft in contact with the flood waters below the ice-cap—the shaft being so arranged that after the waters had supplied their rush to the turbine they would be turned off into the exterior again through sluices without any danger of flooding the chamber.

The vent hole of the turbine water shaft was in effect a huge metal cap, held in place by a massive bolt linked by a complicated contrivance of machinery to yet another of Petlo’s short wave, remote radio-control receivers. Once that remote-control apparatus was actuated, the shaft vent would dislodge itself and start the machinery, transmitting rising voltage of electricity in the dynamo and thence transferring the power to the copper electrode in the water outside.

The metal cap of the turbine shaft would remain open for sixty minutes, then an automatic spring actuated by a weight, would suddenly block the sluices and allow the chamber to flood. The whole idea was indeed a masterpiece of automatic engineering, capable of control from any distance—

And at the opposite Martian pole, during the interval, the other copper obelisk had been sunk in like fashion, but without a power house around it. It was, in truth, the negative pole of this astounding planet-sized battery.

Petlo’s work was done. By the time the various equipments had been gathered together for the return journey, the icecaps had frozen over the copper electrodes and hidden them from sight. Thus buried, unexposed to the activity of oxygen in the open air, and composed of highly resistant metals, they could by very reason of their toughness survive for uncounted generations, until the day when automatic control would release that flawless vent machinery and set the vast turbine and dynamo in action. To the coming of such a day, Petto had directed all his energies, and the energies of his people.

“There is little left for us to do,” was Petlo’s announcement to his colleagues, when they had returned to buried Kilanton. “The remainder is left to chance, to natural laws, which will work out their destiny with the passage of time. In the far future, as I see it, the Jalvians will seek another world—driven from their own by the attack of the toxic plants. They could go to the third world, but I don’t think they will, because it would mean involving themselves in battle with a race grown to scientific maturity, who would sadly deplete their numbers. No, I believe they will come here and try to repeat the heinous offence of stealing water and atmosphere from the third world. They will start to adapt their people for migration to this planet, will probably arrange that each succeeding generation can live in less gravitational strain. It can be done by a process of slow training. Upon their coming here depends the whole scheme upon which I have worked—”

“And now?” questioned Halvan.

Petlo looked across at the young man and woman whom he had seen grow from children—his own son, erect and tall, and the graceful dark-headed Esonia, herself a majestic figure seven feet high. They returned his look in silence as they sat close beside each other.

“The fate of a world probably hangs in your hands,” Petlo said at last, slowly. “You know what I have done, have followed his every move. It is impressed in your minds to the exclusion of all else, together with the absolute need for vengeance. A year ago you were married according to our law; your child, or children, when born, will likewise possess your inherited strains and much of your knowledge. On that I have built: That our race can inherit knowledge from generation to generation. Your children’s children will have it again, and so on through the generations until, when the time comes, a true native of this planet will appear and will know what is expected of him or her. Deep down in the brain of this unborn will be the memory of an object to be accomplished, a purpose to be achieved— You will go to the third world—tonight!”

Ladima started up. “But, father, it’s a poisonous world, full of strange gases, landslides, floods— We may die.”

“You will not die,” Petlo returned, with calm decision. “Parts of that world are poisonous, but not all of it. Telescopic observation reveals many rifts in the clouds to the north, even signs of men not unlike ourselves, but smaller. And there are beasts—monstrous beasts, which will fall swiftly before your modem weapons. You will go, live in your rocket ship if need be, teach your as yet unborn child all the things I have taught you, and he in turn must teach his child. And so it shall go on, until the final hour—”

“And you?” the girl questioned quickly.

Petlo smiled faintly and shrugged. “My work is done, my dear. The future belongs to you and Ladima.”

And at sunset, when the desert was like a lake of molten fire, the lone rocket ship bearing husband and wife swept swiftly toward the stars, turned in a huge curve, and headed for the distant orb of the third world.

The entire survivors of Kilanton watched it go and on the stern face of Viranicus Petlo there lurked the ghost of a smile—

V

But Petlo had been wrong in his assumption that his son and the young wife would survive the rigors of the third world. They landed safely enough, even ventured outside into the steamy, sweltering forest in which their vessel landed—but in ten minutes they were separated, attacked by a horde of savage men and women against whom they stood no chance. They tried to run, but the gravity held them down in its crushing load. They saw each other for the last time.

Months afterward, in the wild, primitive reaches of the forest, Esonia’s child was born—but in exchange for his life, the woman’s flickered out. Uncouth, savage eyes looked down upon the little mite that had come into their midst. Roughly, they began to care for it.

A thousand miles across the forest, forced to be a giant tribesman from the sheer necessity of living, Ladima Petlo forgot all the refinements of Martian civilization, sank swiftly into the strain of the savages with whom he hunted and slew—a mighty warrior indeed. One of the women he chose as his mate and it somewhat eased the dull ache in his heart for Esonia. Only one thing he never forgot—vengeance! And he died, thinking of vengeance whilst the daughter-child his wife had borne him grew slowly to savage womanhood.

The link so perfectly forged by Viranicus Petlo was broken. He, too, had died on Mars with the belief that all was well. On Venus, two thousand sluglike beings fought steadily with the encroachment of lofty, vicious plants that steeped the dense atmosphere in a gradual preponderance of carbon dioxide. Kil-Dio was thinking of preparing a migration for his descendants, just as Petlo had foreseen he would.

Kil-Dio saw to it that each newbom child was raised in a vast nursery, with a gravitational force fixed to that of the fourth world. Some day, he realized, these successors would have to migrate to that planet. Not the third. That might mean war. But its atmosphere and seas by that time would be well worth having. He had succeeded once; his descendants could do likewise. Anxiously, Kil-Dio wondered how many generations would pass before the descendants were adaptable enough to live a natural existence—

And on Earth, a boy who was a true Martian grew slowly to manhood, all unaware that somewhere in the savage tribes there roamed his half-sister, actually a half-breed, yet with the heritage of Mars as strongly developed in her mind as it was in his. They never met, these two.

When the time came, they mated Earthlings, became parents, but of necessity their children were removed half-breeds, dimly aware of some strange heritage, the government of unknown mental urges, of vengeance, of a plan to be fulfilled—

Matehood—offspring— Down through the centuries, and either by chance or inscrutable design, each child was, all unknown to its parents, a half-breed.

Age upon age. Generation upon generation. The Earth changed and Man changed. But down through the ages the memory of a great purpose still hovered. Down the corridor of Time there echoed the remembrance of a plan to be fulfilled…

* * * *

James Langton was born in 1996, of perfectly normal parents who had never excelled themselves in any particular way. His father was an engineer, and his mother, before her marriage, an office secretary. Both of them were killed in a stratoplane smash when James reached the age of twelve.

But he did not go to a recognized institution. Instead, his adaptability with radio, astronomy, biology and kindred sciences was so developed that he obtained a highly remunerative position as the world’s youngest technical adviser on all matters scientific.

He was a phenomenon, a genius, and knew it—but at twelve years of age he was not at all sure how he’d achieved that condition. So with characteristic thoroughness he set himself to find out the meaning for his knowledge, and why he was haunted by the ever growing conviction that he had a purpose to fulfill, some task to perform.

While he studied, he grew—with startling speed. At eighteen, he was seven feet tall, a massive blond-headed figure of a man, genial, thoughtful, only just on the fringes of discovery. The solution of the secret of his birth and strange abilities still eluded him.

To better pursue his astronomical studies—or so he believed—he gained an honorary position at the great Central California Observatory where a new 400-inch telescope had been erected and with it, brooding and silent, he searched the void night after night, studying moonless Venus and dehydrated Mars, trying to bring into his mind the reason for a purpose—something for which he waited.

He prospered with the years. At thirty he had made enough money to retire and study things out. Through ten more years, little by little, he pierced together his strange memories, the memories of a world lashed by tempests and flood, of a tube of force and bong oceans, of gouging canals, of buried machinery— Hazy, indefinite things at first, but gradually they grew in clarity under the perpetual concentration of his extraordinary mind.

Section by section he began to understand his heritage, realized by careful analysis the strange state from which he had been born.

Either nature, unwilling to let a plan go to waste, had stepped in and played a hand, or else the unseen Deity that rules all things had seen fit to produce James Langton. Whatever it was, Langton traced his memory and heritage through the soberly logical fields of biology.

Through generations the Martian recessive unit had lain dormant. And the genes, hypothetical submicroscopic bodies located in the chromosomes, are the unit factors of heredity. A change in the genes leads to the inheritance of new characteristics, better known as mutations.

In such a manner as two perfectly normal parents might give birth to an albino child, so, evidently, had Langton’s own parents both possessed, by chance, the recessive Martian unit—far-flung throwback to the days of Ladima and Esonia. The final combination had at last brought into being what the long-dead Víranicus Petlo had hoped for—a true Martian. Now Langton understood; it was so clear. His racial memory, his desire for a world apart from Earth. His incessant studying of the void—he had a purpose!

VI

One night he startled the chief astronomer at the Central California Observatory with a dry comment.

“Did it ever occur to you, my friend, that there might be a lot of Martian blood on Earth? That it might be the reason for a great deal of vindictiveness, revenge—even war? Perhaps Mars is called the God of War for a reason not entirely mythological.”

Ward Dent, the astronomer, was not impressed. He was a businesslike, bald-headed individual, entirely concerned with facts and figures.

“How do you figure that out, anyhow?” he asked bluntly.

Langton shrugged his vast shoulders and smiled mysteriously. “Just a theory. If we suppose that somewhere in the past the Martians sent some of their people to Earth, is it not possible that their children might have their parents’ ambitions in an unresolved form? If those ambitions were hate and vengeance, they might veer off into such channels as pettiness and vindictiveness, for no apparent reason. Normally, you know, a living creature isn’t vicious or vindictive because it wants to be. It is an evil force matured through generations and nobody knows how it started. Animals, patterning much of their ways from the stronger minds of humans, are affected in the same way.”

“May be something in it,” Dent admitted, then he pursued the topic no further. He felt, as did many other people, that because the gigantic Langton was a genius, he might also be mad.

Langton sat for a while staring into the telescopic mirror, then he asked quietly, “Have you ever tried to conjecture if there is life on Venus?”

Dent looked up irritably from his notes. “Of course—but it’s quite unlikely. There’s no oxygen or water vapor for one thing. There might, though, be some sort of life we don’t understand.”

“Suppose that the atmosphere of Venus is so dense that we can’t penetrate beyond a few layers and the oxygen and water vapor are at the lower levels?”

“Possible,” the astronomer shrugged. “Damned hot planet, though! Turns once in 720 hours. We used to think it turned one face to the Sun until we found that a thermopile directed at the supposed night side registered an appreciable amount of heat. That obviously couldn’t be the case with a planet turning one face perpetually to the Sun. Pity of it is there’s no moon. It would help a lot. Every other planet has one, save Mercury, of course. His went in the Sun long ago.”

Langton slowly nodded his yellow head. “Venus probably had a moon once, but the Martians destroyed it,” he murmured dreamily, and with that he turned back to the mirror, unaware of Dent’s startled expression—

Then suddenly Langton stiffened and became earnest in his attention. For a moment the immense polished surface revealed something on the edge of Venus that was not entirely normal—a faintly gleaming speck that distinctly caught the strong flash of sunlight for an instant, and then was gone.

Langton sighed deeply. He knew his years of vigilant watching were finished. Gravely he bade the astronomer goodnight and went majestically out—

* * * *

A week later startling news burst over the world. It was disseminated from every quarter by the news broadcasters. Stratoplanes bulleted to all compass points with newspapers hot from the presses; international television hookups radiated stills from the California Observatory showing the amazing proof of the fact that something was visible near the Ismenius Lacus Oasis, on Mar—something bright and glittering that held out a prospect of active life, or else in the nature of a signal.

Earthlings were interested, but only a few were really eager—mainly those who made science their hobby. The only man who could have explained it all, James Langton, was nowhere to be found. His home was temporarily dosed and he had left no forwarding address. Some said he was alone in an isolated laboratory somewhere in the upper Adirondacks.

In truth he was working on the final details of a remote-control radio instrument that was surpassingly clever in its efficiency, using for power the energy of a near by waterfall. He had started it on an impulse two years before. Now he knew he had to finish it. The memory of past ages burning vivid in his mind aided him in knowing something nobody else comprehended.

The adapted Venusians, last of their race, had forsaken the spore-smothered, toxic surface of their own world and moved to Mars. Ere long, they would set to work to upset this thriving world of Earth, as they had the red planet, steal clean air and the waters of its seas, unless—

James Langton smiled quietly as he worked on through the night and all the next day—until the following midnight. Then he was finished; his calculations complete.

Untired, strangely, subtly different from an Earthling, he surveyed the huge mass of the ultra short-wave transmitter, checked his figures for the last time, and closed the switches. He listened complacently to the droning of a powerful engine, pictured the radio waves leaping to the aerials on the mountainside above him, spreading out their energy through space, their frequency identical to that planned by one Veranicus Petlo untold ages before.

At the speed of light they spanned the gulf of forty million miles—unseen messengers of destruction. They passed undetected across rust-smothered deserts, went through the south pole icecap, reacted on their destination—a complicated mass of machinery still in fair condition, deep within a power room under the ice.

A long sealed bolt slid back, released a flooding cataract that boomed through a long vent and out through sluices. A massive turbine reacted instantly, spun its huge shaft and rotated the dynamo. The armature spun swiftly between its magnets, building up horsepower upon horsepower. Electrical energy surged to the copper electrode, as yet only a quarter eroded, and dispelled itself into the water, instantly slammed across the network of canals, even through the very thin air itself, to the negative north pole, which was partaking of the whole negative preponderance of Mars itself.

The canals, the air, became living fire, flaming energy. Five hundred Venusians, the last of their race, were instantly incinerated before they even realized what was upon them.

For sixty minutes the canals were deadly lines of force—then the sluice vent automatically closed, flooded the power room and, after a deeply sullen explosion, left only a dreary copper rod embedded lopsided in the ice.

Langton cut the power of his machine and flicked on the televisor. As he had expected, an anxious-faced announcer was already shouting hoarsely the news he had received from the Observatory.

“—and the canals of Mars, if canals they be, flamed blue for exactly an hour. The air, too, became blue, but now it is normal again. Can it mean a signal? The silver white substance is still visible near the Ismenius Lacus. Can it be life of—?”

Langton switched off and smiled faintly. “Silver white now—soon only rust,” he murmured pensively. “Rust is the only thing the Red Planet has left—

“But there will be no theft of air and water from Earth. No more men from Venus, because they must have been the last—”

Rising to his feet he went to the door, opened it, and drew a deep breath of the sweet mountain air, stood bareheaded gazing toward a red star low down on the horizon. In that moment he was lost in memories, dim and cloudy, of a man who had been his remote ancestor—

One Viranicus Petlo. But now Viranicus Petlo was avenged—

HE CONQUERED VENUS

Mark Tyme conquered the cannibalistic natives and deadly jungles of Venus, but the ‘civilized’ Earth conquered Mark Tyme!

The world was on its toes. People in every country were listening to their radios or watching their televisors as stratosphere commentators kept a keen look-out for the ovoid expected from the deeps of space. Newspapers splashed inch-high headlines—

MARK TYME RETURNS!

Captain Mark Tyme, Earth explorer, was returning from Venus after a five-year conquest. The first man to go into space and return in one piece. And what a piece! There had been endless photographs of the redoubtable captain, complete with bullet head shaven all over, pillar of a neck, and hairy forest of chest.

For five days now he had been expected, but to the people of 1980 five days was a drop in the bucket. It seemed like five minutes. Then at 2.30 in the afternoon of August 6th the world was alerted. Mark Tyme’s ship had been sighted!

Television cameras swung to the ready and upon millions of screens there appeared a battered, sunlit silvery object like a cheap aluminium cigar case careering through the void.

Londoners gathered themselves for a supreme effort. Massed in tens of thousands throughout the city they scanned the blue heaven. The mayor and civic dignitaries stood in an expectant, perspiring group on the bannered rostrum in the city centre—actually the main airport—where the captain had radioed that he intended to land.

When the ship did at last appear on flame-spouting jets it shot over the main marquee, igniting it in the process, and finally landed a mile away. The mayor sucked his teeth in annoyance at finding himself so far away from the point of welcome.

People, police, a couple of fire engines to deal with the marquee, and the mayor with his dignitaries, all swept in the direction of the grounded machine—to make the discovery upon arriving at their destination that the machine’s door had not yet opened. Which seemed to indicate that Mark Tyme was not going to be done out of his publicity by a premature appearance.

The mayor took up his position and with perspiration dripping from the end of his nose studied his speech. Then, the airlock opened and the great man appeared. He was over six feet tall and broad-shouldered, burned nearly ebony from the radiations of space and ultra-violet of Venus. He stood surveying the people.

His faded topee was cocked on one side. From under its brim stared two marble-like blue eyes, startlingly bright against the inky skin. He wore khaki shorts and open-necked shirt, and three belts. One for ray guns—of which there were six; one for gun charges—of which there were hundreds; and one to keep up his pants.

A lone voice cried out: “Three cheers for Mark Tyme!”

The captain shook hands with himself over his head and then released the bellowing words destined to go down to posterity:

“Hi ya!”

Microphones were superfluous as far as this conqueror was concerned. He could be heard half-a-mile away.

“Thanks one and all for turning up to meet me and my boys!” He jerked his thumb to sun-blackened companions behind him. “We’ve been to Venus and brought back plenty—”

“A moment,” the mayor edged in thinly. “May I make a speech of welcome?”

“No need for ’em!” the captain roared. “I’m just a plain man with no time for speechifying…”

“Hmm, I see. Well—er—” The mayor mopped his dripping face. “Cars are waiting, captain, to take you to the administration building. Will you come along, or—”

“Sure I’ll come. Okay, boys—” Tyme glanced back into the ship. “Bring the specimen cases.”

The crowd watched with interest as the captain’s three comrades emerged with heavy packing cases on their shoulders. They descended to the grass, then Tyme locked the airlock’s combination switches from outside and turned to head the procession through the crowd. To the rear stumbled the mayor and his men, striving to keep pace with the giant strides…

With complete disregard for upholstery Tyme had the cases dumped in the last of the six waiting cars. Then he took up his position in the first one. He remained standing, hands on his hips, gazing about him. He was still standing and shaking hands over his head when the Administration Building was reached. Here were gathered the Upper Ten and their lackeys, all giving frozen smiles and jerking their necks in tight collars.

Beyond his historic “Hi ya!” Tyme took no notice of anybody and thereby ruined months of careful rehearsal. Clanking like an armoured knight he took the granite steps four at a time and bounced like a track runner when he came into the entrance hall. Here he gave the impression of being a heavyweight about to have a world-title fight. Five minutes were lost whilst he sparred with the atmosphere.

“I’m feeling mighty fit,” he told the mayor presently; then catching sight of the coldly watching men and women he asked: “Who the hell’s this bunch?”

“The reception party, captain. Your rooms arc ready for yourself and your associates. Later, the banquet—”

“How much later? I’m darned hungry!”

“In about two hours.” The mayor was wincing.

“Oh, well, have to do.” Tyme glared around on the people, rubbed the end of his pug nose, then jerked his head. “All right, boys, up the stairs!”

“Captain, a few words—” the mayor pleaded.

“Out in the spaces men don’t talk!” Tyme boomed. “They look at stars, not faces. They look on the big things, not on people who smirk and smile with hate in their hearts. You people are here because it’s right procedure, not because you like me. You think I’m a vulgar barbarian, and maybe you’re right. But I conquered Venus, didn’t I? And that’s more than any of you lilywhites could do! Right, boys—up the stairs!”

“Mad!” the mayor whispered, as he saw the shocked faces, “The man’s man’s demoralised—completely! That’s what space does to you, I suppose.”

* * * *

Despite the misgivings of the mayor the captain turned up two hours later in the vast banqueting hall, companions on either side of him. In evening-dress he looked like a civilised west African, but from the way he ranted and expounded there were some who wondered if he were even civilised. He addressed all his remarks to his associates. The tables might have been empty except for them. Only when the mayor stood up to make a speech of thanks did Tyme look to the head of the table.

“In the past,” the mayor said shakenly. “we have paid tribute to men and women who have conquered the air, the sea, the mountains, and the stratosphere. But here we have a man—nay, men—of surpassing courage, men who braved the abysses of space to prove one can reach another world and come back alive. I give you the greatest hero in the world to date—Mark Tyme.”

Tyme sat in silence whilst the toast was drunk, then he was on his feet again, hitching at a belt that wasn’t there.

“I’m obliged for this welcome,” he bellowed; then suddenly realising something he moderated his voice. “Sorry, friends: I got that way from shouting in the Venusian jungles. Anyway, there isn’t really much to tell. You’ll read the full reports and see the films we took. Venus has heat that makes Death Valley seem like the Yukon in mid-winter. I could tell you of life that lives in trees; of weird animals just waiting to finish you. I could tell you the kind of guts a man needs to battle with such things, and get back to Earth alive. And for what?” Tyme looked around him. “To talk to a lot of frozen faces belonging to people who are mighty jealous I ever got away with it.”

There was a gentle clearing of throats, then a bewhiskered gentleman asked a question:

“Tell me, Captain, is Venus populated?”

“Yes,” Tymc nodded. “By a race of bipeds like us. They represent the ‘civilisation’ of Venus, and their social scale is about on a line with our cannibals. Cunning devils, worshiping pagan gods and bartering in old stones. I sold ’em a pair of broken field glasses for a handful of pebbles.”

“Perhaps,” said a hatchet-faced woman who represented the World Enlightenment League, “we might be able to educate these poor souls in the amenities of life?”

“You might—if you call it one of the amenities of life to sit around in evening-dress and eat burned meat.”

“I was thinking of the value of them learning Latin,” the hatchet-faced woman retorted. “Such an uplift! I must put the matter before my committee.”

“Well,” Tyme said, into the uneasy silence which dropped, “I’ve one more thing to say, then I’m going outside to grab a chestful of air. If any of you folks is interested in starting a new type of drink see me tomorrow. I’ve brought a chemical back from Venus which, when mixed with water, will knock your head backwards. I’d also be glad to see anybody who runs a flower shop. I’ve some Venusian roots, which give flowers shaped like dumb-bells. They smell of hundred per cent carnation. On Venus there’s a hundred-mile carpet of them, and you can take it from me the whole place around there just stinks.”

The Mayor coughed unnecessarily. Tyme glanced at him.

“Mr. Mayor, did I understand you to say that the rooms in this building are mine until I set off into space again?”

“Certainly, Captain. You have the freedom of the city.”

“I don’t want the city; only the rooms. Just so as you folks who want to do a spot of business will know where to find me. Make it tomorrow morning. And now,”—Tyme kicked his chair backwards forcibly—“I’m going to have a walk and plant my feet on God’s solid Earth for an hour or two. Thanks for the feast.”

He nodded briefly, glanced around him with his startling eyes, then went on his way. The mayor gave a sickly smile as he beheld the astonished faces around him.

“We must forgive the Captain’s eccentricities,” he mumbled. “Venus, you know! After all, great achievement.”

Nobody made any direct comment. The party began to break up, dividing into little groups to discuss the departed guest of honour. Fifteen minutes later Mark Tyme burst in again, attired in open-necked sports jersey and heavy tweed pants.

“Where’s my blasted hat?” he demanded, drooping a menacing eyelid.

“H-hat?” the mayor gulped, staring. “What hat?”

“My topee, of course! I always wear it. Worn it for five years. And don’t tell me it isn’t conventional—because I don’t give a hoot for convention. Somebody’s taken it! It was on the table by the door—”

Tyme paused and glared as a youngish woman emerged from the crowd of guests and looked at him demurely.

“I—I took it, Captain!” Her confession was humble. “I’ve always admired you. In your pictures and things, I mean. We wanted a souvenir!” she finished boldly.

“We?” Tyme bellowed. “Who the heck’s ‘we’?”

“The Mark Tyme Teenagers’ Association. I’m Monica Verity, the president. My father’s Dudley Verity, the banking—”

“I don’t want your history, girl; I want my hat! And what’s the Mark Tyme Teenagers’ Association? I never heard of it.”

“You won’t have,” Monica ventured nearer to the sun-blackened giant. “We formed it whilst you were away. Five hundred girls between fifteen and twenty-five. Of course, over twenty isn’t strictly teenage, but we’re not that particular. I took your hat because you had worn it. Venusians have touched it. It is something sacred! Whilst you were upstairs with that manservant of yours I watched my chance, bobbed in your room, and took it. See?”

“Where,” Tyme asked thickly, “is the hat now?”

“Enshrined!”

“’Struth!”

“Yes, enshrined! Our headquarters are a room in Talford Building, three-hundredth floor. Your hat is there. I gave it to my best friend to take away quickly. She was waiting. Right now, captain, your hat will be under a glass dome on top of a little pedestal. Now we can all bow down to it. You don’t mind, do you? There are plenty of sun helmets, but only one we can cherish… I want you to come and address us girls. We’d like to have our hero to ourselves for an hour.”

“Five hundred teenagers? Me?” Tyme was visibly shaken. “If you don’t mind, Miss Verity, just keep the hat… Best thing I can do is step out and buy me a new lid.”

He vanished into the hall then looked at the commissionaire.

“Can you beat it?” he demanded, “A kid pinches my hat and puts it under a glass cover so she and a lot of other kids can worship it. Shows what fame can do to you, doesn’t it?”

The commissionaire reflected. “I seem to remember my old lady kept cheese under a cover too,” he mused.

Tyme clenched his fists, then changed his mind. Big though he was the commissionaire was even bigger. For once in his life the great explorer chose discretion.

* * * *

The following morning Tymes slammed down a newspaper on the breakfast table and gave a snort of snort of wrath.

“Barrett, I don’t like these headlines! One says ‘Is Tymc a Nut?’ and another describes me as the ‘Admirable Piecan.’ Still another seems to think ir’s hellish funny to have a topee under a glass dome three hundred floors from the ground. Do you think it’s funny?”

“Let us say—er—a trifle unusual, sir,” Barrett murmured. “After all, you know what newspapers are! Jealous of the great…”

It was not by accident that Barrett had kept his job with Tyme for fifteen years.

“Sooner we take off on another expedition the better I’ll like it,” Tyme muttered. “All a matter of getting the money to do it. We’ve got to sell those plants and minerals, Barrett.”

“Yes, sir. Of course, you could make a vast fortune if you cared to sell the formula for your spaceship fuel and the unique design of the ship itself. You—”

“And have governments strangling each other to fly into space and clean up the planets? Not if I know it! I’m the only man with the key to the void at the moment and it stays my property.”

Barrett’s haggard look showed he was thinking, then at a sudden tap he turned to the door. In came a tall, elegant individual with hair matching his French grey suit.

“Ah, Captain!” He held out his hand. “I am Cornelius Vanhart, President of the International Beverage Corporation. I was at the banquet last night when you mentioned a chemical drink.”

“Right enough. Grab a seat.”

When Vanhart had complied Tyme paced slowly around the room. Barrett, understanding mystic signals, vanished in the neighbouring room and came back with a phial of salts and a glass of water.

“Here we are, sir!” Tyme swept them up and nearly spilt the water on the immaculate trousers. “Fizzwater of the gods!”

The water boiled like a devil’s brew as the salts were emptied into it. “There, drink that! It’s dynamite. If you buy the formula you’ll have every other fizzwater king by the ears.”

Vanhart sipped experimentally, smiled fatuously, and sipped again. He ignored the bubbles falling and exploding on his beautiful pants. He took longer sips—gulps—then complete drainage. After he had handed the glass back he slapped his thighs.

“I think I’m flying,” he decided at length.

“A bottle full of this and you’d believe yourself a rocket,” Tyme grinned.

“Amazing stuff, Captain— Ah, the telephone!”

“That’s no telephone; just bells in your ears. You’re dead drunk, and yet you’re not. Thät’s the advantage. What’s more, the more you have the more you want. Business without end!”

“And when this supply of chemical is exhausted?”

“It will never be exhausted. Basically, it’s carbon and on Earth here you can duplicate its make-up any time you want. It just happened to form in that combination on Venus and you’d work a million years here before you’d hit the right setup. I am willing to sell this chemical, and your own chemists can soon work out the formula. I’ve a rough formula made out by my own men which I’ll sell as well.”

“For how much?”

“A million pounds, and you can afford it. If you’re not interested I know plenty who will be.”

Vanhart smiled all over his face. “A million it is: I’m in no mood to argue. Pleasure! That’s my idea—give pleasure to everybody… Get me the rest of the mineral.”

Tyme pushed the phial into the swaying hand and Barrett retreated to return with a hastily written formula. In another five minutes the transaction was complete and a loudly singing Vanhart took his departure.

“So far, so good,” Tyme commented. “All legal and above board. We only need a bit more money, then we can get away. The public in general seems to have forgotten all about me—except to refer to me as a borderline case—”

Apparently, however, Tyme was wrong. Later that day he was asked to receive a deputation from the exhibitors handling his film of Venusian life. Would he make a personal tour with the film? A stratospherical fee would be paid. Would he mind being in full kit even to the portable stove?

Tyme agreed. Complete with three belts, shorts, khaki shirt, and several hundred-odd pounds of accoutrements—the old original, in fact, except for his topee—he appeared that night at the Astoria and was responsible for the first-aid men having to treat thirty-six young women for fainting. The moment the film was over he got back to his hotel by a quiet route, but before he could even shut the door of his suite Monica Verity came in slowly. At the back of her in the corridor were—presumably—four hundred and ninety-nine wide-eyed and sniggering girls.

Tyme glanced helplessly at Barrctt, then back to the girls. Automatically his gaze moved to Monica Verity’s hat. Now he came to ponder it he realised it was a topee—a small, ridiculously shapcd topee perched on one side of her blonde head. He just could not take his eyes off it.

“Captain, we wanted to express our appreciation for tonight.” Monica snuggled up to him gently and it made him wish he were a younger man. “You were divine—eyen more interesting than your film, marvellous though it was.”

Tyme laughed rather throatily. “Oh, it was nothing—”

“Oh, but it was! You looked so wonderful! We saw you sneak away so we decided to come and thank you privately. And there is something else. I’m—er—a sort of fashion-plate, and what I wear is usually copied. This hat, for instance, modelled after yours. All the girls will wear one soon. Wonderful, isn’t it?”

“Better than the usual soapdishes and poached eggs you girls usually put on,” Tyme agreed. “You mean all the Association girls will wear baby topees?”

“Oh, not just the Association—every girl and woman in the world, probably. We’ve done our part to commemorate you, so there is nothing for you to do but sign this letter.”

“Letter?”

Monica produced a typewritten sheet from her handbag. Tyme read it. It was similar to many others he’d signed for socks, suspenders, cigarettes and shirts…

“I think Topee hats are the last word and no smartly-dressed woman can afford to be without one. The fashion has my full and complete approval.”

(Signed)

“Simple, isn’t it?” Monica gave him a coy smile.

Tyme nodded, sighed, and added his signature. This done, Monica went out again with a wistful glance over her shoulder and the giggling, chattering teenagers followed her.

“Odd young lady, sir,” Barrett commented. “I wonder if—”

“You might well wonder!” A languid figure strolled through the still open doorway and pushed up his soft hat. “I’m Taylor of the ‘Voice,’ Captain. I’d like a personal angle on your reactions to Earth. And say, you know who that girl is, don’t you? That Monica Verity?”

“A socialite, or something.”

Taylor grinned. “In a way she is, but she’s also the chief buyer for a big millinery establishment. Always hunting for new ideas.”

“But she’s only a kid!” Tyme exploded. “A kid with a bad hero-complex.”

“Twenty-five years of kid,” Taylor said. “Bluntly, Captain, I’d say you gave her the exclusive right of using your hat for a model by signing that letter. Now you can sit back and watch the hat designers cross-eyed trying to keep up with things.”

“It’s an outrage!” Tyme exploded. “I won’t have my hat worn by women! It’s effeminate! I’ll force that girl to—”

“You can’t.” Taylor shook his head. “We’ve got laws. You signed away your hat and the admiration routine was just a stunt. There isn’t such a thing as the Mark Tyme Association. The girls are probably staff workers.”

Tyme sat down heavily, until the ironmongery he was carrying forced him to sit upright again.

“There ain’t no justice,” he muttered. “Now I come back to Earth I’m made a fool of.”

“Look, Cap I’m prepared to give you a break. I want to show the world the man, not the loud-voiced buffoon the world thinks you are—”

Tyme rose, his jaw set like a rock. “What did you say?” he asked, with frightening calm.

Taylor moved hastily. “That’s what the world thinks Cap—”

“Get out!” Tyme breathed.

“But I—”

Tyme’s hands shot out. Before he could get to the doorway Taylor found himself lifted by pants and collar and hurled outside like a cannonball. He crashed into the midst of the officials and scattered people who had gathered in the passage. Tyme himself appeared in the doorway a moment later.

“Well, what in heck do you people want?”

“You remember me?” A woman with a hatchet fare and gleaming eyeglasses squirmed out of the gathering. “The World Enlightenment League? We wondered if you would finance an expedition of ten spaceships to carry us to Venus. My committee agree that the Venusian natives need to learn civilised ways and means.”

“On how to trick an honest man doing his best for progress?” Tyme asked sourly. “Listen to this, Florence Nightingale! I wouldn’t finance a row of salmon tins, never mind spaceships, for you and your outfit. What’s more, if you were a man I’d kick you downstairs! Now get out! The whole two-faced lot of you!”

The effect of this was to send most of the gathering scurrying, Hatchet-Face included—but one remained, a smallish man with a huge flower in his buttonhole. He had floppy cheeks and eyes like a Peke. Tyme surveyed him and hitched his belts.

“Maybe you didn’t hear what I said?” he asked sweetly.

“Yes, I heard you, but I’ve come to talk business. Here’s my card.”

Tyme scowled at the pasteboard:

FORTESQUE J. GILLIBRAND

Horticulturist, Times Square, London

“You mentioned a plant at the banquet. I’d like to know all about it—and buy it if possible.”

Tyme hesitated briefly and then nodded. “Okay, Mr. Gillibrand. Come in, and I’ll show you everything…”

* * * *

To Tyme there was something repulsive about the way Fortesque Gillibrand finnicked around the flowerpot containing the Venusian weed. With hands like a manicurist he flicked the little tendrils, toyed with the delicate buds. He sniffed, squinted, and meditated—then said:

“One hundred pounds.”

Tyme laughed derisively.

“Well, a hundred and fifty—”

“One thousand, and not a penny less!” Tyme snapped. “Don’t you realise that this plant will grow like a grape vine in earthly soil? This is Venusian swamp soil in this pot, but put these roots in earthly loam and they’ll spread like chain lightning. I proved that on Venus when I transplanted some into a box of earth soil. Something to do with nitrates.”

“But a thousand pounds! A thousand for a weed!”

“Orchids and edelweiss are weeds, but their rarity makes them valuable. Compared to this stuff in the pot edelweiss is as plentiful as clover. For the exclusive right of using Venus dumb-bells I want a thousand pounds. And if I bring any more back you can have ’em free. Nobody else—just you. Take it or leave it.”

“I suppose I could graft…” Gillibrand meditated; then he looked up. “I’ll advise you in the morning. I must think.”

“Okay, but if anybody else turns up I shan’t hold it for you.”

Gillibrand swung to the door, and then he turned back.

“You make it too irresistible, Captain,” he decided, tugging out his chequebook. “I’ll take it…”

Tyme took the cheque whilst Barrett wrapped up the pot. With a beaming smile Gillibrand hurried out, holding his precious prize against him.

“Hell!” Tyme gave a sniff like a vacuum cleaner. “Open the window! The place smells all perfume. Well, Barrett my lad, that makes a tidy sum to date, and I don’t think there’s anything more to sell.”

“I still think something might be done about Miss Verity, sir.” Barrett pondered for a moment. “She’s got exclusive rights to copy your topee without it costing her anything beyond a roll of the eyes. I think by the exercise of legal strategy I could make her pay something. Have I your permission?”

“Go to it! Once that’s finished we’re taking off on another expedition.”

* * * *

When Tyme had dressed and arrived for breakfast next morning he found everything ready on the table, together with a brief note. Barrett had departed to execute ‘legal strategy.’ Tyme started on his eggs, glancing at the morning paper—then he forgot all about the eggs in a sudden rush of fury.

The paper—the ‘Voice’—had the headline devoted to reporter Taylor’s article:

WHY DOES MARK TYME MARK TIME?

Wading through a resume of the Captain’s fêting since his arrival back on Earth, the article went on with vitriolic bitterness to explain how Taylor had been kicked out the previous night. Taylor averred, just within the law of libel, that the Captain was a fraud, that he was a guest of the ratepayers and had openly insulted and double-crossed the citizens in return.

Matters like fizzwater, where he could be sure of a return, he had been eager to pursue—but where it meant him giving money for advancement, as in the case of the World Enlightenment League—he had threatened violence. And what sort of a trick was he trying to play on poor, innocent Monica Verity, a young girl who just worshipped him? Curious how Taylor had amnesia regarding Monica’s true profession.

The article concluded:

“And we have got to know why Márk Tyme continues to mark time. We are not keeping him if he is anxious to start on another expedition. The least a hero can do is be civil.”

Tyme swallowed rage and breakfast together. Then he snatched up the telephone and spent a busy fifteen minutes contacting the rest of his associates. In each case he got a similar answer. None of them was ready to follow out his orders and leave for space again in two days. They wanted a month’s rest and enjoyment before they would be at his service once more.

It was not surprising then that Barrett found a very disgusted he-man when he returned, rather sheepishly, around lunchtime.

“Well?” Tyme looked up despondently.

“I regret, sir, that I have to report failure.” Barrett looked crestfallen. “I saw a solicitor, but it seems you have no chance of forcing. Miss Verity to pay anything for the use of your hat. That endorsement you signed was sufficient legal guarantee of your approval of the whole thing. I’m deeply sorry, sir.”

“Oh, forget it,” Tyme growled. “Like the rest of ’em she’s a twister. They’re rotten, Barrett! Everybody’s rotten. The bigger you are the more you get soaked. Even our own boys aren’t anxious to take orders any more. I wanted to get away from Earth in a couple of days: they demand a month.”

“Frankly, sir, I can’t blame them. However, if you wish I will have the ship loaded up with five years’ provisions and give the necessary orders for fuel manufacture. We can afford it now. We may as well be ready.”

“Yes, you’d better do that.” Tyme lighted a cigarette moodily, then swinging round he snatched up the ‘Voice’ and ripped it savagely to shreds, finally flinging himself into a chair to brood over the ‘delights’ of being a conquering hero…

And if Taylor had sought to stir up public opinion against Tyme by his leader—which was followed by others of greater violence in the ensuing days—he certainly succeeded. Tyme found himself left alone in the Administration Building. The officials were perfectly polite, but they left no doubt of the fact that they would not object to the vacation of the suite. Which only served to make Tyme all the more determined to stay—at least for a month, until he could collect his crew.

Certainly he was convinced that fame was not worth having. He kept to his rooms most of the time, only seeing people who desired to add his name to advertisements. For such privileges he demanded stunning fees—and got them. He began to appear in all kinds of magazines, advertising anything from shoes to skyscrapers… He noted too, with a kind of detached interest, the furore being caused by the arrival of Venusfizz and topee hats simultaneously. In the smart magazines his endorsement of topee hats appeared with shameless frequency. He read too that because Monica’s firm possessed the original design it seemed likely that dozens of lesser designers would nose-dive into bankruptcy if the craze for topee hats did not let up.

Tyme began to receive shoals of impassioned entreaties urging him to give other designers the topee concession—to which he refused because he was legally bound. In the case of Venus-fizz he was faced with a different problem. Manufacturers of fizzwater, distillers, and brewers rose to heated action. The ‘Voice’ published the glaring facts that Mark Tyme had deliberately ruined the drink trade of the world. He had sold a secret to Vanhart of the International Beverage Corporation. Vanhart was likely to make millions out of it, and because of the drug-like effect of the drink, would continue to do so ad infinitum. Yet, by legal statute, Tyme had no right to sell his formula without first getting the consent of the Board of Beverages.

Far from having the assent of this body, he did not even know it existed. Before he realized what had happened he found a summons slapped in his hand; and an hour later he got a second one. The hat designers had found a clause whereby they could sue him for fraudulent conversion of trade rights. That was what they called it, anyway…

“And this,” Tyme bellowed, waving the summonses in the air, “is gratitude! First one, then the other. But they won’t get away with it, Barrett! If they want me that badly they can chase me into space. I’m having nothing to do with it! These cases will take all the money I’ve made! I’m going to make the boys see reason and leave early. You’d better come with me.”

He slammed on his topee and led the way to the door. Barrett followed discreetly behind him. Glaring as he strode along, Tyme went down the main street amidst the shoppers and walkers, thumbs latched by habit in the edges of his revolver belt. He ignored the looks cast towards him.

“We’ll try Chris first,” he decided. “No use talking to ’em by ’phone. They only understand one language!” And he clenched a hair-matted fist.

He stopped at the traffic lights, waiting for them to change, but before it came he was aware of a wild confusion to his left. It was followed by a smashing of glass and the shriek of a man.

“What the devil—?” His hands flew to his guns and his eyes slitted—then he turned and raced with Barrett and the pedestrians along the pavement until they reached a battered shop front. Women screamed, men shouted, police blew whistles. Tyme slid to a stop and gave Barrett an astounded look.

Thrusting through the broken window, the struggling form of a man in its tendrils, was a titanic green arm—the arm of a plant, its buds shaped like dumb-bells. Even as the baffled people watched, the arm grew.

“It’s Gillibrand!” Barrett gasped in horror, as the suspended man raised a limp and sweating face. “The plant you sold him. Earthly soil—!” Barrett stopped, looking at the name “Gillibrand” over the broken window.

“Hell!” Tyme whispered, watching the twining green. The thing must have grown like the devil in the passing days. Then at that moment Gillibrand caught sight of him and gave a shriek:

“He sold me this! Captain Tyme! It’s a mad plant—been growing ever since I put it in the conservatory! Can’t kill it—”

Gillibrand finished with a shriek as the sappy branch holding him snapped precipitately and dropped him with a resounding thud onto the pavement—but like dense ivy speeded up a hundred times the rope-like arm of vegetation began crawling steadily up the building block, exuding a sickening odour of acacia.

The people were now regarding Tyme with grim eyes. The police too prepared themselves and tugged out their guns—but in that instant Tyme’s hands flashed to his own weapons and he levelled them.

“All right,” he said bitterly, Barrett behind him. “Come one step towards me and I’ll blast the living daylights out of you! I mean it! How the heck was I to know the weed would do that? I knew it grew fast, but not that fast. You can’t blame me for it any more than you can blame me for bringing new drinks and new hats to public notice—”

“You’ve been a pest ever since you came back, Tyme,” one of the officers snapped. “It’s our job to run you in.”

“Try it!” Tyme grinned. “I’m finished, you hear? Finished!”

He backed away as he spoke and said briefly to Barrett: “The airport. Only half-a-mile away. Got to run for it.”

“But the rest of the boys, sir?”

“Forget ’em. We’ll manage. Return later maybe. You loaded up with provisions and fuel?”

“Yes. I—”

‘Right! Let’s go!”

Tyme swung suddenly, plunging into the midst of the crowd behind him with such force that they bowled backwards before the onrush. By the time they had recovered their balance he was streaking like a track runner down the sidewalk, able to move at demoniacal speed through long practice. He whirled Barrett alongside him.

Twisting and dodging, ignoring the blaring of traffic as he tore across main streets, the hero of Venus pelted like the wind away from the yelling throngs pursuing him. He was not even panting by the time he and Barrett had plunged to the airfield. Barrett was not panting, either: he was half dead.

Without a pause Tyne went straight on, reached the airlock of his spaceship, and twisted the combination screws. He hurled Barrett through the opening, then clambering after him as the yelling crowd surged onto the airfield. A police officer’s gun charge struck the massive door futilely as it closed.

One flick of the buttons and the rockets roared into life. Instantly the crowd pressed back before the blasting, searing discharge. Within the ship, Tyme stood looking down on the people as he hurtled the vessel into the clouds.

“Appear in court!” he breathed venomously. “Responsible for a mad tree! I’ve been made a sucker all along the line. Forced to leave all my money behind too—not that anybody can touch it. One day I may collect… The conquering hero! It’s the last time I’ll try and be a prophet in my own country, Barrett.”

Barrett nodded slowly, recovering himself. “I agree with you, sir. Though it will be difficult without a full crew, I do believe the solitude of space is preferable to the solitude of a cell.”

HE WALKED ON AIR

The conquest of gravity should have brought riches—instead it brought death!

Jarvis Downing, research scientist, quietly faced Doctor Adam Henderson, the world’s greatest brain-specialist.

“I’m going to need your assistance soon, Henderson,” Downing remarked quietly, then began to slowly pace the great library. “I’ve overtaxed myself through the years, and now something’s happened to my brain. I saw a specialist today.”

“Yes?” The pale, unsentimental eyes of Henderson turned to follow his pacing friend.

“I have an incipient tumour on the right frontal lobe of my brain. Only one man dare remove it—you, of course.”

“I see,” the specialist said slowly, and studied his cigar.

Suddenly Downing ceased pacing. “Henderson, do you think, if you operated, that I might live after it?”

“If you don’t, my reputation will be in pieces,” the surgeon replied quietly. “You have little to fear; I have operated with considerable success so far. Of course, there is always…”

“If there’s the slightest doubt about my recovery I feel I ought to confide in you the details of a discovery I have made, in order that my secret may not be lost to the world.”

“Certainly there is always a risk,” the brain specialist admitted. “Why not confide in me in any case? We’re old friends. You can tell me anything with absolute confidence; I won’t breathe a word to a soul.”

“I know.” Downing nodded, simply—in fact, too simply. Even through ten years of close acquaintance he had not fully pierced that strange diverse and even treacherous inner nature of his medical friend. Doctor Adam Henderson was not all he seemed on the surface; a streak of cruelty, and an inveterate desire for gambling, had more than once threatened to undermine his career. Only his amazing brilliance and the utilization of an alias had kept him at the pinnacle of fame as a brain-surgeon.

Diwning was a different type. Quiet, unassuming, oblivious to all glory, his main object in life the exploration into little known science. He had already amassed a considerable fortune by the medium of his inventions. Henderson, always in the hope that something would be discovered that would perhaps net him a fortune as well, had clung to Downing like a leech through the years—so far without any benefit…

“I’ve made a really remarkable discovery.” Downing began reminiscently, seating himself. “I’ve found how to stop the action of gravitation. “It’s a metal—Vonium, I call it; highly radioactive.”

“So you’ve added another element to the Periodic Table, then? That’s a rather out of my line, Downing. I know little of radioactive minerals.”

“In a way, it was an accident which led me to discover it. I was endeavouring, by firing neutrons into uranium atoms—to bring about a new metal—but instead of a transmutation into some new and inert metal, I brought about a substance, which instantly flew to the top of the vacuum-tube in which I was making the experiment! The top, mind you! The substance proved to be extremely radioactive, and in due course turned back into uranium. Once that happened it fell again to the base of the vacuum-tube.”

“Well?” Henderson asked, as a momentary silence settled on the inventor.

“I repeated the experiment and made a thorough investigation, finally arriving at the cause of this peculiar defiance of gravitation… You’ve heard of radiation?”

“Who hasn’t?”

“I mean, do you really understand its relationship to radioactivity? For instance, all radioactive substances emit radiation in the form of y-rays, and material particles in the form of alpha and beta rays are shot off, these latter being, of course, the protons and electrons of the original atom. Now, y-rays are not material particles; they’re merely radiation of a very special kind. Note the word ‘radiation’ Henderson, for that is the secret. Radiation from a normally radioactive substance is amazingly weak, of course, its wavelength being about the order of one ten thousand millionth of an inch, or about the hundred thousandth part of the wavelength of visible light.”

“Figures don’t impress me, Downing; I like visible proof.”

“Wait a minute; I have to explain it this way. I have shown how weak normal radiation is; yet even so that radiation had been proved by various scientists to possess a faint recoiling power; that is to say it has a slight, measurable mass, just as has light itself in a stronger form. This new element has a diffusion of energy that exceeds anything hitherto known to science. The radiation of the y-rays is strong enough to actually repulse the metal itself against the power of gravitation. You understand?”

The surgeon’s pale eyes were brighter now. “I see what you mean. Radio-activity is so extremely rapid that the y-rays are emitted with infinitely greater power than in a normal radioactive substance, causing the metal concerned to recede under its own power from gravitational force?”

“There you have it in a nutshell. Of course, extreme radioactivity of that kind limits the life of Vonium to one of extreme shortness; its weight vanishes as radiation goes on, naturally—that is law. Then it returns to the original element, uranium.”

“But surely, if the stuff is such a repulsor of gravitation, it would hang in the middle of the tube, not at the top, by reason of it exerting an equal repulsive pressure on all sides?”

“It would seem natural at first thought,” Downing agreed, “but you must not forget that the mass of the vacuum walls, as compared to the mass of the earth—the floor—is immeasurably slight. Vonium releases itself from the strongest attraction, which is earth itself; hence it goes upward until it meets the first obstacle—in this case the top of the vacuum-tube. I haven’t tried releasing it yet. I suppose it would go into space in a perfectly straight line so long as its life lasted—except where it repulsed itself from stellar bodies. One thing I do know; it won’t stop down!”

“It sounds too remarkable to be true,” the surgeon said thoughtfully. “I wish I knew more of atomic science.”

“So far, the world has never known a substance which can repulse itself by its own radiations, but that doesn’t preclude its existence. I’ve found it. Energy and radiation are one and the same, Henderson. Anything that goes forward has a thrust backwards—recoil.”

“And now what?” Henderson asked. “Space travel, I suppose?”

The inventor shook his head. “Not to commence with. There are thousands of other uses for the stuff, here on earth—such as in the erection of high buildings. Once I’ve got the stuff under proper control men can have boots made of the stuff, within lead-casings because of the harmful radiations, and then they can walk literally on air. Calculation will show when the stuff will revert back to inert metal… There are cranes, too, which can be replaced with Vonium. Sufficient quantities will lift any weight on earth. Uranium isn’t particularly difficult to secure these days, and the transmutation task is fairly simple. I’m sure boots are the simplest things to begin with.”

“I’d like to see how you do all this,” Henderson remarked, and at that Downing rose to his feet.

“You shall. It’s essential you should know what to do in case anything happens to me. Come into the lab.”

For nearly two hours the pale-eyed surgeon watched, mutely, the transmutation of uranium into Vonium. Unaccustomed to this branch of science, the giant vacuum tube in which the stuff was created, the humming of power, and the glowing electrodes and numberless electrical contacts held him fascinated.

“There it is!” Downing exclaimed at last, and pointed to the newly-created metal, visibly glowing, pressed immovably against the upper walls of the vacuum-tube. “Tomorrow I shall devise how to make boots.”

“And what of your operation?” the surgeon asked presently. “How long did the specialist give you?”

“A week at the most.” The inventor smiled dryly. “I can do a lot in a week, my friend—and then I shall entrust my body and brain to your capable hands. Between that time and now I will find how to harness Vonium and will write down a full formula, just in case anything happens to me. If anything goes wrong with me—you are to use and perfect the invention. You understand?”

“Yes,” Henderson said, and looked away into the tube. He felt unable to meet his friend’s steady grey eyes.

“I’m not leaving you a white elephant,” Downing resumed presently, as he switched off the various power-machines. “Three representatives of the Federated Alliance Engineering were here yesterday; they saw the possibilities of Vonium and offered me twenty million dollars for the formula. Naturally I turned it down.”

“You turned down twenty million dollars!” the surgeon breathed dazedly.

“Yes, because it is worth at least three time as much… Still, the offer was made, and I suppose it is still open for anybody who takes Federated the formula—thieves included! If the invention should fall into your hands, don’t let Federated have it for anything less than sixty million. Improve on it first. Promise me that!”

“I’ll do what I think is wisest, Downing—be assured of that.”

“All right,” the inventor smiled. “And now, if you’ll pardon me, I must get on with my work. Don’t think me discourteous, but—”

“I quite understand, Downing; I’ll be getting along. When anything important turns up let me know right away. I’ll keep a date open for your operation…”

“Splendid. Goodbye, Henderson.”

Doctor Henderson returned to his home to find a visitor waiting. Grumbling to himself at the presence, presumably, of a patient at so late an hour, he gave instructions for him to be sent into the surgery.

“Good evening, Doctor,” was the visitor’s greeting, and there was a hint of menace in his tone. Henderson looked up with a start; he knew the voice. When he beheld the man’s face he realised that he had seen it before, and not under pleasant conditions, either.

“So it’s you Holroyd!” Henderson murmured, essaying affability. “Well, what can I do for you? What’s your ailment?”

“The lack of one hundred thousand dollars, Doctor,” Holroyd answered grimly. “I’ve given you three opportunities to pay that sum, money which you owe me on gambling losses, and so far you’ve ignored me. I’m a just man, Henderson; I’ve refrained so far from ruining your reputation, but I’m not standing for it much longer. See?”

“Meaning what?” The surgeon’s pale eyes were malignant.

“Pay me the sum you owe—within fourteen days—or else I’ll expose you. It won’t look pretty, Henderson! World’s greatest brain surgeon’s double life—gambling under an alias; owing enormous sums to various people. Known to every gaming house, under a different assumed name each time!”

“You’re a fool. My private life won’t affect my profession. I shall still be the world’s greatest surgeon!”

“Yes?” Holroyd sneered. “You do other things besides gamble, Doctor. Drinking for instance. Oh. I know you take powerful emetics to rid yourself of the stuff before you ever attempt a case, but who’s going to trust themselves again under your knife, knowing that?”

“And where do you expect I’ll get one hundred thousand?” Henderson snapped. “Even to a man of my position that is a considerable sum.”

“I don’t care where you get it—but do it in fourteen days. Either pay me or I’ll revenge myself. The latter course won’t pay my debts for me, of course, but will appease me somewhat Goodnight!”

Henderson blinked as the surgery door slammed; he bit his thin underlip slowly. “One hundred thousand dollars! I knew that blow would fall sooner or later—and I’ve got to find it, too! And to think that that fool Downing turns down twenty million for the love of his art. Twenty millions! By heaven, I just wonder…” He paused, lighted a cigar and gave himself up to meditation…

Three days later Henderson was summoned by an urgent phone call to Downing’s home. He found the inventor jubilant when he joined him in his laboratory.

“Well, Henderson, I’ve done it!” Downing pointed to a pair of military trench-boots, possessing enormously thick soles of lead.

In the leg-part of each boot reposed a small dial face, marked from zero to maximum, whilst a delicate needle pointed to the latter reading. In each heel there appeared to be a small electric motor, connected to the boot-soles by wires, and controlled by long cables lying, at the moment, on the floor and terminating in hand sprocket-levers.

Quietly Henderson studied these details. The thought of twenty million dollars was in his brain; then he looked up.

“Well, they seem all right,” he said perfunctorily. “What have you done?”

“First I created Vonium as usual, but equipped my tube with a slide on the top so that the stuff could be released when made. Over the gap left by the moving slide I placed a box of lead, bottomless, and not unnaturally the stuff shot into it. I had, however, created a quantity large enough to lift me into the air, with the result that I would have been jerked to the ceiling had I not released my hold. The stuff hit the ceiling and stopped there, inside the lead box. Then arose the problem of how to control the stuff, which I solved by a remarkably simple means.

“The y-rays of Vonium, those responsible for this curious non-gravitational effect, are blocked entirely by sufficient thickness of lead and the stuff instantly falls to the ground. It appears, though, that when this happens, the Vonium inside the box fixes itself in the dead centre of the box, equally repulsed from all four side walls. See?”

Henderson nodded. “What then?”

“I fixed a lead sheath on the bottom of the box—by the simple expedient of standing on step ladders and reaching up to it—and when this was done, the y-rays cut off, the box dropped to the floor. From then on it was only a matter of fixing the lead sheath base so that all or little of the y-radiations could be emitted at will. I accomplished this by means of a shutter and a small electric motor attached to the side of the box. Later I made two motors and put them in the heels of those boots there, and two boxes also which I rivetted to the boot-soles. From the motors I lead the contact wires, at the end of which, held in the hand—one hand for one boot—are notched levers, which move the shutters in the sole-boxes. Naturally, the more radiations there are being emitted the higher you’ll go. When you’ve reached a certain height you’ll stay in mid-air. Then you can walk about in the air at that height. Close the shutter very slowly, and down you come to earth again. Very simple and efficient.”

“Apparently so,” Henderson agreed, “but I don’t quite see how you balance in the air. What is to prevent you turning circles round a kind of central axis—the boots?”

“The lead plays a three-fold part. One, it controls the power of the y-rays; two, it stops them entering the flesh and mortifying it, and three, its enormous weight keeps the body upright, just as do divers’ boots. In air one is like a ship with a heavy keel—quite impossible to turn turtle.”

Downing crossed over to the boots and began putting them on. “I’ll demonstrate to you.”

Before he laced them he pointed to the two small dials in the leg portions.

“These show when the Vonium is losing its efficiency and therefore is no longer safe,” he explained. “A very necessary attachment. It would be rather awkward to be five hundred feet up and find the Vonium giving out. As Vonium loses its weight by radiation, these meters here show, on the principle of a spring balance, when the weight of Vonium inside the boxes has touched zero. That means replace with more Vonium, of course. At the moment, as you see, there is a considerable amount of life left in the present charge of Vonium—enough for a few weeks, anyhow. However, here’s the demonstration.”

Downing quickly laced the boots up, stood up, and grasped the control-levers of the heavily insulated wires leading to the motors controlling the sole-shutters.

“Watch!” he bade impressively, and gently pressed the pincer-like levers towards each other, in either hand. Almost instantly he began to rise smoothly and irresistibly towards the high laboratory roof, pausing finally in mid-air ’twixt ceiling and floor, the notched levers fixing themselves in the small ratchets provided for the purpose. Then, without hardly any trace of clumsiness, he began to walk forward, albeit ponderously, but none the less certainly.

Doctor Henderson stood gazing upwards, astounded at the uncanny aspect his friend presented.

For a while Downing continued his mid-air stroll, then, lowering himself to the floor, he opened the laboratory door and went outside on the lawn. Five minutes later he was on a level with the treetop, presently alighting on the flat roof of his home close to the bedroom window of his manservant, Dawson.

Laughing, he returned to the ground.

“Achievement number one,” he chuckled, unlacing the boots. Later will come the construction of super-cranes, space travel—hundreds of things. Boots like these can be made for workmen on high buildings, thereby dispensing with ladders and clumsy, dangerous scaffoldings. Here.” He wrenched the boots off. “You try them.”

Rather gingerly Henderson put them on, and after one or two unsuccessful efforts, managed to get them under control. He found the air apparently as solid as the ground, and as he went around, accustoming himself, the thought of twenty million dollars rose up and stared him in the face.

At length he returned to earth, both in the literal and abstract sense.

“Suppose one opened the shutters to their fullest extent?” he asked, unlacing the boots.

“In that case one would shoot upwards into space, never to return,” Downing replied. “That won’t happen though; I’ve fixed the levers so they can’t operate to the full… Come along into the lab; I’ve something to tell you.”

Henderson replaced his shoes and obeyed, carrying the heavy boots with him.

“I’m giving those boots to you for the time being,” Downing said quietly. “Until after my operation—which God grant I survive—I’m doing no more work, and in case anything happens to me I want you to keep those boots so you can see how they work.”

“Thanks,” the surgeon said, his mind active.

“I’ve written out the formula for Vonium in invisible ink and also the method of its manufacture, and full directions of how to harness it. The formula itself is inside a massive gold watch, and the watch is in that safe there, on the wall. Heat will bring the invisible ink into view. I have also made a will with my lawyer, which, in the event of my death, bequeaths everything to you. Should you at any time wish to withdraw yourself from the bequest, everything passes to my brother Walter, who is an Australian farmer… The safe there has a combination lock, and Dawson is the only one outside me who knows that combination.”

“Dawson!” Henderson started. “You’re letting your manservant in on this?”

“He’s something more than that—he is, I think, a devoted friend. In withholding the safe combination from you I’m protecting you. Should anything happen to me as the result of your operating on me, and it became known that you knew the safe combination before you operated, it might appear that—forgive me saying this—that you killed me for the sake of the invention. If, on the other hand, you are found to be in ignorance of the combination until after my death, you’ll be absolved from all blame in the eyes of the law. Understand?”

Henderson tried hard not to reveal his displeasure. He inclined his head slowly.

“Thanks for thinking of my reputation, Downing! But why the invisible ink?”

“Dawson does not know I’ve written the formula in invisible ink—nor does he know it is concealed inside a watch. If he chose to act unworthily, which I don’t think he ever would, he’d probably pass over the watch as of no consequence—or, if he probed further and found blank paper inside it, he’d give up the task. That metal Vonium is for your hands alone if mine fail. By the plan I’ve outlined I’m protecting both of you.”

“And if anything happens to you I’m to ask Dawson for the combination?”

“My lawyer will instruct Dawson to give it to you. He understands the circumstances, and will exercise law in the right direction.”

“Well, I must admit you’ve made things secure,” Henderson remarked, though he could not completely disguise the bitterness of his tone. “Since you are ready for your operation I propose to get to work on you tomorrow morning. Be at my home tonight by seven, ready for the preliminaries. I will notify my assistants and have everything in readiness. Naturally, I shall operate on you in my own private theatre, not at the hospital.”

“Seven tonight, then, my friend,” Downing said quietly. “If I die—you must go on.”

“Yes—you have already made that very clear to me. Goodbye till tonight, Downing—and thanks for the boots!”

Henderson picked them up and slowly left the laboratory, his thoughts by no means of the sweetest…

Towards late afternoon, after a day’s hard medical work, Doctor Henderson returned for a brief space to his library. He was surprised to find Dawson, Downing’s manservant, awaiting him. He rose to his feet, as compact and composed as ever.

“Pardon my intrusion, Doctor. But I have something of considerable importance to say to you, regarding my master’s brain operation.”

“Well, Dawson?”

“If you killed him, entirely by circumstances beyond your control, of course—you would be the sole owner of Vonium—by the terms of his will, which I personally witnessed, would you not?”

“How dare you presume to question my ability, Dawson?” Henderson snapped. “If I fail, I fail—it cannot be helped.”

“It would be to your advantage to fail,” said Dawson calmly, never moving a muscle of his saturnine countenance.

“Why, you impudent…”

“It would mean you could pay off the one hundred thousand dollars you owe and so save at least one possible destroyer of your reputation, wouldn’t it?”

“How in hell do you know my private affairs?” Henderson grated out, glaring.

“Albert Holroyd, the man to whom you owe that sum, happens to be my cousin,” the manservant replied, and smiled winterily. “He needs that money badly; quite recently, in the strictest confidence of course, he told me all about you, and about the terms he made with you. But I warn you, Doctor, that my master’s life had better not be the means for you to pay your debts! If, by a—shall we say—professional error?—you kill my master, I will kill you. I hope you understand, sir?”

“And go to the chair for it!” Henderson retorted curtly.

“Oh, no, I am not such a fool, Doctor. I could provide an explanation by outlining your financial difficulties; add to that the worry at killing your devoted friend, which you believed had completely shattered your reputation, and provide suicide as the motive. If you take Mr. Downing’s life, you can count yours as ended too—whether you kill him fortuitously, or otherwise. I know it won’t be an accident, because you have never made an error yet!”

“The human element can always err,” Henderson panted; then cooling again, “Does Downing know you’ve come here?”

“No, sir; he imagines I’m posting an urgent letter to an ailing aunt of mine. Anyhow, please bear in mind what I’ve said. Of course, if you fail and do kill my master your reputation will probably be spoilt in any case; on the other hand that very failure would place a considerable amount of money in your hands, which would make failure well worthwhile. Don’t do it, Doctor—you might find it unpleasant afterwards.”

“Get out of here!” Henderson breathed dangerously. “Get out—before I ’phone Mr. Downing and tell him everything.”

“How very droll, Doctor. You won’t do that, it would ruin your own plans. Good day, sir—and don’t forget!”

The library door closed and Henderson sank down into his chair. He admitted now, quite frankly, that he had intended killing Downing by a slip of the knife, but now that scheme was quashed. Confound Dawson having Holroyd for a cousin! Donning’s invention and at least twenty million dollars on the one hand, but courting death to get it. Disgrace and ruin on the other hand if Downing lived…

Adam Henderson had reason to be worried—but as time passed another scheme formulated in his fertile brain.

When finally he left the library there was a smile on his face, a smile of frozen hardness…

By nine o’clock that same evening, Jarvis Downing was sleeping heavily beneath a narcotic; no ordinary narcotic, but a substance of Henderson’s own invention, capable of reducing the animation of the body to absolute zero by slow degrees, producing complete coldness and apparent death, and at the same time hardening the crystals of the blood so that no bleeding could possibly occur during the actual operation. Then, under the administration of an antidote, after the operation, the patient would return with like slowness to life…

Henderson stood for a while looking at his sleeping friend.

“You shan’t die, Downing,” he murmured to himself. “That would endanger me—but indeed it is good fortune that your brain tumour happens to be on the right frontal lobe. If I make a professional mistake I shan’t kill you; I shall merely destroy every vestige of your memory. The right lobe has no connection with muscular functions, but is entirely connected with the storage of memory impressions. How inconvenient for you if I remove certain cells, along with the tumour, and so destroy your memory but not your powers of perception and conception.”

The surgeon ceased his soliloquy, smiled significantly to himself, and quietly left the bedroom… He spent the night making his preparations; he felt he could not sleep, and at nine the next morning the operation commenced in the private theatre, with only a few trusted assistants.

They said nothing—indeed they did not understand enough—as they watched their master at work. His hands were steady; he wielded his instruments with the deft skill that had earned him his name, and when finally he washed his hands in antiseptic that same frozen smile of complacency had returned to his thin lips.

“Simple,” he murmured; then went into the adjoining room where Downing was lying, bandaged and still unconscious. At frequent intervals thereafter he returned, discussing the nurse each time, until towards ten in the evening the inventor revealed signs of returning consciousness. The surgeon took a rapid diagnosis of his bodily functions, and found him as healthy as could be expected in the circumstances, but—Jarvis Downing was a man entirely without memory. Everything he had ever known or learned had been completely effaced—as though he were born again as an adult man. He looked at Henderson with an empty, vacant stare.

A week later he was able to sit up, but still unable to even speak. Everything would have to be taught to him all over again. Even food had to be taken by the nurse, in pantomime, to show what was required of him…

Dawson arrived on one of the days and compressed his lips when the result of the operation was made clear to him. Grimly, the nurse being once more dismissed, he looked across Downing’s supine body at the surgeon.

“Well, what do you expect to gain by this?” he demanded coldly. “You have spared his life, but returned him to the state of a new-born baby. I can’t touch you now because you’ve destroyed my alibi. What’s your motive in this fiendish scheme?”

“There is a clause in law Dawson that relegates a person of mental deficiency, to the same class as that of a deceased. Downing is dead to the law; his identity has vanished, and any lawyer on earth will support me. Vonium is my property once I have seen Downing’s lawyer, and you will be required to hand over the formula. In fact you’ve retained it unlawfully as it is; you’ve known your master’s condition for some days. Hand it to me now, and I’ll see to it that the law leaves you alone—otherwise you will be summoned for unlawful retention of my property.”

Dawson’s urbanity vanished; a bitter smile curved his lips.

“A clever trick, Henderson—you think I know nothing of the law, eh? I know quite as much as you do—enough to realise, anyhow, that a will only becomes operative on decease. Naturally you planned to bribe the lawyer, I suppose. It might have worked, too—men will do anything for money, as a rule. It so happens, though, that I’m leaving this safe combination just where it is—in my wallet. And, if I can prove anything against you I’m going to, and take over Vonium myself!”

“You dare—” Henderson breathed venomously.

“I probably will,” the manservant answered calmly, passed another glance at the silent man in the bed, and then left the room…

For the remainder of the day after Dawson’s departure, Henderson spent the time thinking, leaving Downing in the charge of the nurse, ignoring, so far as he could, all cases that came to his surgery. In seven days, now, he had got to produce one hundred thousand dollars. Further, the determined Dawson might find a way to prove Downing’s condition to be the outcome of deliberate maltreatment.

Why not kill Dawson? No, that would probably raise enquiry.

The desperate surgeon knew his last card had failed. He had hoped that Dawson would have been ignorant of the law; unfortunately, he wasn’t. Presently Henderson recalled the manservant’s words to the effect that the safe combination was in his wallet. Steal it? It would be quieter than bringing in a third party to crack the safe open, anyhow. Suppose, by an accident, that Dawson did die? He—Henderson—would be eternally safe from then onwards. The recollection of the gravity-nullifying boots returned to the surgeon. At least the manservant knew nothing of these. They might be very useful.

Finally, Henderson had a plan in mind, and the thought of expulsion from his profession, or Dawson finding proof to convict him, was undoubtedly the prime motive behind it.

At eight o’clock he put on the gravity-boots, slipped a loaded revolver and diamond glass-cutter and suction-cup in his pocket, then with clumsy steps made his way to Downing’s room, curtly dismissing the nurse, but taking care she did not see his feet as she departed.

Downing looked at Henderson dully, mutely. He for his part pulled on washleather gloves, then, without uttering a word wrapped the inventor in two heavy blankets, raised him bodily in his arms, and finally managed to get the bemused man to link his arms round his—Henderson’s—neck, thereby leaving the surgeon free to use his hands.

This done the surgeon quietly lifted the window sash and climbed on to the sill, Downing clinging tightly to him. The hand-levers clicked in their sprockets, and in a few moments Henderson was walking in the air twenty feet above the night-ridden lawn below, making allowance as he went for the inventor’s extra weight. He walked on steadily through space, over the solitary window-lighted patch of Benton’s Farm, across the intervening meadows, and finally came within sight of the inventor’s own home, dimly visible in the starlight. Ten minutes later he had reached it, and laid Downing down gently on the flat roof. The dazed man made no effort to move; indeed it was doubtful if he understood the first principles of locomotion. He merely pulled the blankets further round him and sat as still as a mummy.

In utter silence, thanks to the emptiness in which he walked, Henderson moved along the bedroom windows until he came to the one that he knew to be Dawson’s, at a height of a sheer thirty feet from the ground. The manservant might be downstairs, of course or even out. Considering the valuable apparatus in the house the latter theory was hardly tenable… No—he was in bed, dimly visible in the starlight. Henderson could clearly see that now, for the curtains were not drawn.

With infinite care he brought out the diamond glass-cutter and suction cup from his pocket. In the space of a few minutes he had removed a section of the window glass, felt inside for and slipped back the catch, and then, carefully operating his hand-levers, climbed into the room beyond, keeping himself a bare couple of inches from the floor to negate all sound.

The manservant’s clothes were neatly spread at the end of the bed, and towards them the surgeon moved.

Be it said to his credit that he did not intend to use his revolver if he could avoid it—it was only a precautionary measure that would need Downing to substantiate the motive. The precaution, however, changed abruptly to dire necessity as Dawson suddenly awoke—indeed it was doubtful if he had ever been asleep—and his revolver, which manifestly had been close to his hand, blazed through the gloomy room.

Instantly, the manservant’s shot flying wide, Henderson swung round, whipped out his own weapon, and emptied all the chambers with ruthless deliberation into the already advancing manservant. He staggered, gave a short cry, and then fell his length to the floor.

Carefully, still completely cool, the surgeon went through the man’s clothes, finally located the wallet and the combination for the safe within it. Chuckling to himself he slipped the wallet in his pocket, and made an investigation of the sprawling Dawson. The briefest examination revealed to his professional touch that the man was quite dead, and bleeding somewhat considerably.

Rising again, his Vonium boots now temporarily out of action, he left the room and entered the next but one. Outside the window he found the still motionless Downing, lifted him inside, and carried him by main strength to the dead servant’s room, depositing him on the bed. Still without speaking, for he knew the inventor would never understand, he placed the expended revolver in the motionless Downing’s limp hand, taking care he still wore his gloves whilst he did so. Then, after a final glance round the room, he again departed locking the door on the outside, and went as fast as his heavy boots would allow him to the laboratory safe.

It was the work of a moment to open the heavy door and remove the gold watch. Sure enough the formula was inside it.

Henderson grinned as he slipped the watch in his pocket.

“Really very simple,” he murmured. “All a matter of judgment and precision.”

He did not return upstairs to the silent inventor. He left the laboratory, once assured that everything was as he had found it, and went by various air-routes to the nearest telephone kiosk. In a few moments he was speaking to the head-warder of the local asylum.

“Doctor Henderson speaking,” he announced, in his calm voice. “I operated quite recently on a patient, Jarvis Downing by name. He had brain trouble and seemed to be progressing quite Hell until tonight. Then I found he had vanished from his room at my home, taking with him my own revolver from my study. I’ve proved that fact right up to the hilt. However, I’ve traced him to his old home and he has murdered his manservant—filled the poor devil with lead. He’s clean homicidal. I think he had a grudge against his manservant, or something. Anyhow, I’ve locked him in the manservant’s room, complete with revolver. His memory seems to have gone utterly; doesn’t say anything or hear anything apparently. You’d better drop along and take him away at once. I’ll join you there. The Larches, Menison Road, is the address.”

“We’ll be there, Doctor,” the head-warder answered firmly, and with a grin of triumph Henderson hung up the receiver and left the kiosk. Outside he ruminated for a moment, patting the gold watch in his pocket.

“A clear twenty million for me tomorrow when I sell this formula to Federated; Dawson out of the way so he can’t prove anything against me; Holroyd paid up, and Downing no longer at liberty. Then a life of ease—and I’ve earned it. Monte-Carlo—the gaming tables… Yes—a good night’s work. I’ve just time to get home and be rid of these boots, make a substantiating tale for the nurse, and everything is settled. Splendid! I’ll be back in plenty of time for the asylum men.”

Again smiling to himself at his work, he seized the boot-levers and moved upwards into the darkness of the night, turning towards his own home to the south…

For some then strange reason the men from the asylum found Doctor Henderson absent when they arrived at Downing’s home. Finally, obtaining no answer, they took the law into their own hands and broke in, arriving ultimately at the locked bedroom door. This too they smashed down, to discover Downing still sitting there, completely silent, the revolver still in his hand.

“That’s him, all right,” nodded the superintendent. “Take him away; I’ll notify the police about this body.” He looked at Downing closely. “Why don’t you say something?” he demanded curtly, and for a space tried every means he could devise to make the inventor speak, without success. Finally he waved him away.

“O.K.—he’s our man all right. Guess Henderson got him in here pretty safe, too—couldn’t leave by the window with a thirty-foot drop below. Yet he got in by the window—see the glass is cut out. Guess he must have walked along that parapet there. Funny what a guy’ll do when he’s deranged… Queer where Henderson’s got to. Still he’ll turn up to verify things, I suppose.”

But Doctor Henderson did not turn up. Nobody could discover what had become of him. Downing was duly removed to the asylum and placed under the care of the institution’s medical expert, who gravely pronounced that only one man could possibly cure him—and that was Doctor Henderson himself. It was accepted without question that Downing had committed the crime of murder—truly not whilst responsible for his actions. All the efforts of the inventor’s lawyer to prove otherwise—to try and prove the vanished Henderson to be the culprit, failed. The law coldly bequeathed Downing’s home and invention to his disinterested brother Walter, who, rather than give up his prosperous Australian farm, allowed his inheritance to go to rack and ruin.

Poor Downing— He was ruined utterly—mentally, physically and financially. As week followed week he was gradually taught to do various things, but gone forever was the brilliance that had once been his.

And Henderson? A month after Downing’s admittance to the asylum the surgeon was found—stone dead! It appeared that Oscar Benton, who owned the farm between the homes of Henderson and Downing, had returned with his family after a brief holiday in the metropolis, and the farmer had been horrified to discover Henderson lying transfixed, nearly buried in mud—which probably accounted for the failure of search-parties to discover him—with a six-foot iron spike through his abdomen. The spike was the corner support of a net-fencing for the chicken run. It had passed slantwise through Henderson’s body, even passing through a gold watch he had had in his pocket, crushing to pulp some insignificant blank white paper within. Upon his feet were peculiar boots, and in his death-frozen hands reposed queer levers.

The world duly mourned the death of the great brain-surgeon, and Downing’s chances of recovery were simultaneously shattered. But there were many who wondered how on earth the surgeon had come to meet such a terrible yet peculiar death. How had he come to impale himself on a six-foot high spike, and with such force?

But then, how was the world to know that, in his excitement to get home with the Vonium formula, Henderson had forgotten to look at the radiation-registers on his boots. They had registered almost zero—the Vonium had practically transformed itself back during the passing days into lifeless uranium—hence the surgeon had been in mid-air when the stuff had suddenly come to the end of its life, dropping him down—with tremendous speed owing to the weight of the heavy lead boots and equally heavy uranium—to instant death!

THE MASTER MIND

At the Fantasy Club he was a being enshrined because he was the one man who had written a story and then proved it—word for word!

CHAPTER I

The Tibetan

It was at the Fantasy Club where the notion was born. Old Doctor Landhurst, retired professor of science, far wealthier than any one man had any right to be, shocked his fellow members one morning with a typical observation.

“They’re all alike! Every one of them! Dress the stories up any way you please, but it boils down to the same thing… Nobody will ever convince me that you can rule a world without guns, force, and menace.”

He slammed down the magazine he had been reading and glared round on the others. His white hair was nearly standing up with inner annoyance.

“Here are we, gentlemen, members of a club devoted to the pursuance of all things fantastic and scientific—literature in particular—and yet what do we find? We find dozens of authors, known and unknown, still churning out the same old stuff. They suggest control of the world by kindness, logic, negotiation—control by everything except the right medium—force! One writer here even says the people of the world are a bunch of suckers who can be forced into believing anything without any resort to force and without a single ray gun. I say it is impossible. The human mind is so balanced that it only understands a loaded weapon.”

“Doctor, you’re quite wrong, you know…”

Landhurst glanced round, surprised. A young man with fair hair was seated in the corner, his legs crossed easily, his firm young face remarkable for its expression of bland candour.

“Quite wrong,” he repeated. “I’m Douglas Harrigan, and I wrote the story you’re referring to. I wrote that story because I believed it!”

“So it was you!” The scientist narrowed his eyes momentarily. “You ought to be ashamed of yourself, Harrigan!” he went on bitterly. “Where is your manhood? Where’s the manhood of any of these writers these days, that they suggest such namby-pamby methods?”

“Force died out long ago, doctor. I maintain the world is populated by the kind of people who’ll believe anything, providing you tell it to them long enough and often enough.”

“Propaganda, eh?” Landhurst meditated for a moment. “Come to think of it, Harrigan, I don’t know you too well. New to this club are you not?”

“I joined last week—just to get an idea what sort of views you folks have. Now I know they’re mostly wrong. Most of you are getting on in years, working on the policy of the old days when power and force were considered the chief factors for progress. We know now how mistaken that idea was: but old ideas die hard… I believe in modern ideas. I believe, as I told in my story, that a whole world can be ruled by one man without a single application to force. Ray guns, space machines, death beams, and all the rest of it, are just props. All that is needed to master a planet is ingenuity and absolute calm of manner.”

Landhurst gave a harsh laugh. “You are very young, my friend. You would soon find out the difference if you tried to live your story in real life!”

“I don’t agree.” Harrigan lighted a cigarette calmly and gazed back with his light blue eyes.

“Good Lord, boy, you seriously mean—?”

“Absolutely!”

There was a silence among the members, the silence of stunned surprise. Anyway, nobody had ever dared to stand up to despotic Landhurst like this before. Then at last Landhurst said slowly:

“Listen to me, Harrigan. It has long been a moot point amongst us members whether any of the fantastic stories printed today are even remotely possible in truth. I assert they are all impossible, and your theory in particular. If you could master a world within, say, six months—as you do in this story—without a single recourse to force, I’d—I’d give you a hundred thousand pounds! And willingly! Because I know you cannot possibly manage it.”

Harrigan smiled. “A decidedly sporting offer. Doctor. I’m not a rich man, being just a magazine writer, and a hundred thousand might come in useful… I’ll take you up on that!” He sat up with sudden decision in his chair, turned to a grey-haired man on his right. “Mr. Beddows, you’re a lawyer. I want you to draw up this wager in legal terms. When I am ruling the world I don’t want any hitch… All a matter of business, Doctor Landhurst. You understand?”

“Of course, but— Dammit, man, you’re not serious?”

“I said I believed what I wrote—and I’m going to prove it. I wrote of a man from Tibet who ruled the world by application of logic. I had to study up a good deal about Tibet to get my facts straight, therefore I shall play a similar role in real life. I know just what a man from Tibet ought to do… I make only two stipulations, gentlemen. In the story there were three assistants. I reserve the right to have three—friends whom I know I can trust. The other clause is that, while I am building up my world-control act, not one of you must communicate with me or give me away. You will find how I am going on rapidly enough from the media… What do you say?”

“Well it’s fantastic and can’t possibly work, but I’m willing,” Landhurst chuckled. “Rule a world without force, starting from scratch, and you’ll get a hundred thousand from me.”

“And plenty of publicity besides for future use,” Harrigan smiled. “That may be useful when I start writing in a big way… All right, Mr. Beddows, it’s up to you to draw up the agreement. I’ll prove to you that there’s one born every minute…suckers, I mean, not agreements.”

The Fantasy Club hardly knew whether to take Harrigan seriously or not. In any case the fact remained that he had the agreement completed, and Landhurst retained a copy of it. The next day Harrigan was missing from the Club.

As a matter of fact he called on his three friends scattered around London, then went to a junk dealer’s and bought a second-hand steam boiler very cheaply. This he had removed to a small firm of engineers with whom he left definite and rather unusual instructions. Being a small firm and anxious for orders they raised no objections.

After that for nearly a week, Harrigan spent a great deal of time in the basement beneath his apartment—much to the amazement of his landlady, dabbling with chemicals, printing film, reading thick textbooks, and producing weird smells from gluey looking chemicals. This landlady, peering once down the steps, caught sight of him like some ultra-modern Faust. Once she could not be sure if it was him at all. Catching a glimpse of a dead-white face lined with a multitude of creases, she fled for her life…

Just the same it was still the normal Harrigan who came up the steps from the cellar with an amused grin on his calmly impudent face.

“Mr. Harrigan…” The landlady emerged from the rear regions, wrapped up in a huge apron and a good deal of wrath. “Mr. Harrigan, what have you been doing down in my nice clean basement?”

“Only laying plans for ruling the world, Mrs. Brown.”

Fortunately, Mrs. Brown, as Harrigan well knew was one of those beings whose orbit centred exclusively round a kitchen. She was blessed with a total absence of imagination.

“You can’t rule the world from my basement, young man!” she declared firmly. And what is more—”

“Mrs. Brown—please!” Harrigan held up his band solemnly. “My mind is full of four dimensional ideas: I beg of you not to disturb them. Like this…see.” He held out his handkerchief four square and showed the doubting woman both sides. Finally he gave it to her to hold tautly. She obeyed, watched as he drove his fist through the linen and took the shreds from her.

“Deliberate waste!” she sniffed. “I never saw—”

“Shake it out,” Harrigan suggested, beaming on her.

She snatched the shreds from him and shook hard, stared incredulously as a perfect handkerchief came into view.

“Fourth dimension,” Harrigan explained solemnly. “Now you know!”

Whistling, he turned to the door of his room.

* * * *

Exactly a fortnight after Harrigan had made his wager with Landhurst, Londoners were distinctly surprised to behold one morning, on their way to business, a gathering of people in Hyde Park. They were congregated round a battered cylinder of metal, sealed at both ends, with portholes of densely thick opaque glass on each side. The mass of metal lay unpicturesquely in the midst of trees and flowerbeds, had smashed down the railings leading to the road and to all appearances had dropped with considerable force.

At eight in the morning the crowd numbered about two hundred: by noon there were thousands. Despite the efforts of the police, traffic was held up in the main street and the park swarmed with the ordinary folk as well as newshounds, press photographers, television and movie experts. Then there were warnings to keep away from the cylinder as at 12.30 weird clankings came from inside it. At 12.45 the clankings ceased and a sealed operculum opened in the top. A deathlike hush fell on the massed watchers.

Through the opening in the top a head began to emerge slowly—a head of flowing white hair.

Then beneath it there became visible an even whiter face, chiseled by a myriad of wrinkles and giving the impression of unguessable antiquity. The eyes, pale blue and inscrutable, gave the impression of keen intelligence and still youthful reasoning… By degrees the whole figure emerged, attired in a long white garment with backflung cowl, rather reminiscent of a monk’s cassock…

At last Douglas Harrigan extracted himself completely and stood up on the old steam boiler—brought hither during the night by truck and rolled from the roadway through the railings—surveying the crowd.

“Peace!” he said gravely, raising his arm.

A murmur passed round the people.

“Say, who in blazes is he?”

“Looks like a Druid to me… You know those fellers in nightshirts.”

Harrigan rubbed his ear gently, the better to adjust the minute electrical pick-up therein.

Then he said:

“There are among you those who believe I am a Druid… No, I am not a Druid. I am a Tibetan, most high scientist of the Lamas of Tibet. Unhappily, by a mistake in judgment, my space machine dropped here instead of in the Himalayas; a mistake caused by a miscalculation as I returned from Mars…”

“Mars!” went up a gasp.

“Yes; Mars…” Harrigan’s ghastly white face wrinkled in sudden contemplation. “I learned so much…the power of a race with whom we have yet to reckon… I had intended returning to Tibet with warnings of what I saw on Mars—but the fates willed me here. I am prepared to believe that they did so in order that I might show you of the western world what lies before you…”

“Say, that was nice of the fates!” observed a laconic voice. Hodder, chief feature writer to the Clarion, was standing immediately below the cylinder. “How is it that you talk English so well, Mr. Tibetan?”

“What is mere language when you have mastery of thought?” Harrigan sighed.

Hodder was not convinced. His rat-like eyes searched the cylinder with ruthless care.

“For a man with the mastery of thought you made a horrible mess of your landing!” he shouted up. “Mistook England for the Himalayas! Don’t hand me that! Anyway, this thing here is a steam boiler!”

Harrigan’s eyes narrowed a little. The hatchet face of the journalist was irritating beyond measure. He looked like—and was—the world’s prize snooper.

“I have yet to see a steam boiler with port-holes, young man,” Harrigan said at last with due gravity—and earned himself a laugh. “This ship is battered and scarred from cosmic brick-bats,” he went on. “If, as I understand is often the case with Westerners, you doubt my veracity, please come up and look through the ship for yourself… All of you come and look! We of Tibet are natural masters of science and occultism, there is sometimes the necessity to convince the doubters of the west. Pray come up…”

Ladders were produced. The newspapermen and cameramen came first and the bulk of the people afterwards, together with one or two rather baffled police officers. One by one they lowered themselves into the cylinder’s peculiar inside. There was nothing visible save a small bed rivetted to the floor and one lead packing case. The porthole glasses were of the variety which permit a view from inside while none can be obtained from outside.

Hodder swung round with a malicious grin, notebook in hand, to find Harrigan behind him, a smile on his wrinkled, ancient face.

“This is a trick!” Hodder said bluntly, writing briefly on his pad. “This piece of old iron couldn’t fly anywhere—let alone Mars! No rocket tubes, no machinery, no control board, not even a map! What’s the big idea?” He thrust his book back in his pocket aggressively.

Harrigan gave a patient sigh. “You poor, ignorant western people! Have you not heard of how we of Tibet sit in the glaciers and by mind force alone cause the ice to melt around us? This ship was driven through the cosmos by mind power. Matter is subservient to mind.”

“You mean you lay on that bed and concentrated?” Hodder snapped.

“I do. I could even have gone without a ship if necessary—I could have hurled myself through the void like a petrified image—but I realised I might need to carry evidence back with me from Mars. Besides, I needed such a mundane thing as a camera to reveal the truth of my assertions. In that packing case there is the film and equipment. I could hardly have carried those without a ship.”

“No gravity in space,” Hodder observed acidly. “So I’m told.”

“Truly—but there is gravity on Earth and Mars to be overcome at the initial levitation…”

Hodder cocked his eye on the cases, scraped his jaw with a forefinger.

“I don’t understand why you came here instead of Tibet, even now,” he said. “Why don’t you move on to Tibet right now and prove you’re okay?”

Harrigan shrugged. “If you wish it…” He closed his eyes and said quietly. “We will go at this very moment. Prepare…”

“Hey, wait a minute—!” somebody shouted in sudden alarm. “We’re here too, don’t forget! We can’t go to Tibet. We’ve got businesses to look after!”

“Why, of course!” Harrigan opened his eyes with a sudden start. “I had overlooked that… Perhaps—some other time. Besides, now I am here I feel that you are entitled to explanations since I have upset the normal routine of your city.”

“Don’t worry—you’ll get plenty of publicity,” Hodder said cryptically. “In fact maybe more than you bargained for! I’ve got it all down in this notebook of mine.” He patted his pocket wherein lay the book. “Everything you have said; everything I have seen. I’m going to reason things out for myself.”

“So? You match your mind against mine?”

Harrigan stood looking at the reporter steadily for a moment, then he said briefly, “My friend, if you probe too far you will find yourself in the same condition as your notes! Just look what you have written…”

“Huh? Meaning what?” Hodder tugged his book out of his pocket, flipped it open—then he started violently. When he had thrust it away it had been half full of observations, both relating to Harrigan and other matters long past, but now the book was completely blank. Not a single page had a note on it. Yet it was still his book, with the Claríon stamped clearly across the front.

“How the heck—?” He stared blankly as the others crowded round him.

“Such a pity,” Harrigan sighed. “Mind over matter, of course. I did it just as a warning, my friend. Do not probe into a science you can never hope to understand…”

“Perhaps,” Hodder said slowly, his lips tightening, “I do understand! In any event I’ll go to any lengths to prove what I’m thinking…”

But nobody was taking any notice of him. They were too busy following the the ‘Mystic’ to the airlock again…

CHAPTER II

Martian invasion

Harrigan the Tibetan hit the headlines to no uncertain effect that evening. So far, his peculiar manner and dispassionate calmness, together with an inherent ability to twist conversation to his own advantage, had made quite an impression on the body of people at large. The papers gave the reactions of the masses exactly, complete with photographs of the Druid-like visitor in his long white cassock. Some said he was three hundred years old—a master scientist, an exponent of the occult, cleverer than anything the western world had ever known. Hodder got into a row with his editor through taking the opposite view to the rest of the papers. Hodder summed up his conclusions in a leader article, which, after a statement of the main facts, concluded with this:

“This being claims he comes from Tibet, has visited Mars, and hurled a cylinder of metal across space by the force of mind alone. This represents a kind of mind power utterly foreign to us. Are we supposed to credit it? Are we, as rational beings, expected to credit that even a Tibetan can do such a thing?

“Why did he arrive here? It was no accident! He came for a purpose—and a man with such knowledge as he claims will not be content with purely enlightening us. No; he will try to dominate us instead. He had spoken of a warning he brings us. What is this warning? If, on the other hand, he is a fake—as this writer fully believes—then he is treating the great British public as a bunch of fools and ought to be locked up! He has spoken of films. We demand to see them! This writer is firmly convinced that this so-called man from Tibet is a fake and will go to endless trouble to prove it. Watch this column from now on!”

Most of the readers were offended at the idea that they were a bunch of fools. It is a man’s or woman’s personal right to be proud of his or her own judgment… Harrigan himself, reading the notice in the privacy of his hotel—whither an admiring but uncertain body of civic authorities had whirled him—only smiled tautly and wondered what they were thinking at the Fantasy Club. After pondering for a while he started on the second stage of his scheme and demanded that in view of Hodder’s Insulting suggestions, a cinema should be appropriated for the exclusive purpose of permitting him to show his film of Martian life, and issuing at the same time a grave personal warning to the world.

The authorities arranged for his request to be granted the following night at the largest cinema in the metropolis, summarily cutting short the current hit. Not that the public minded. A first hand film of life on another world, personally commentated by a mystic from Tibet, would be infinitely better than the droolings of a Hollywood blonde.

Mob law reigned in the Strand the following night. Searchlights swept the sky; skysigns blazed out the one word of the film’s title— ‘Mars!’ Men and women, rich and poor trampled on one another in street and gilded foyer. No premiere had ever given the authorities so much trouble… In the best seats secured at fabulous prices, were all the members of the Fantasy Club. In the front row downstairs, travelling case on his knee, was Bob Shepherd, Harrigan’s closest friend and associate. A big blond fellow, he sat with a satisfied and rather mysterious grin on his face watching the house filling up around him.

In another part of the house was the Press, Hodder to the forefront with a cold, cynical grin on his vinegary features. His grin vanished and he became intent when at last the hubbub died down and the time arrived to commence. The curtains swept aside to reveal Harrigan, in his usual queer monk-like disguise, standing full in the spotlight, a microphone before him on its stand.

“Ladies and gentlemen…” Harrigan paused as a deathlike hush descended. “Ladies and gentlemen, because my real name is practically unpronounceable, it is better perhaps that you continue to refer to me through your press and among yourselves as ‘The Tibetan.’ I have been subjected to a great deal of criticism since I accidentally arrived here instead of my homeland. At home I would be understood and be acknowledged for what I am—the first man to conquer the void, a master of science and the occult, and one worthy to become the ultimate high Lama of my sect. To become that demands powers of the supernatural and scientific that you of the west cannot even guess at.… Later, I will show you what I mean. First there are other things of import—my experiences on Mars, for instance…”

The lights dimmed and Harrigan moved aside, taking the microphone with him. Upon the screen there appeared a colour picture of a vast desert, stretching as far as the eyes could behold. Slowly the view changed revealing a vision of dead canal bottom strewn with vegetation along its banks.

“That,” said Harrigan slowly, “is quite a representative example of what all Mars’ surface is like. Now here are some samples of the life that Mars possesses on its surface. Mars is not, as some believe, totally dead. It has air of sorts, thin—but sufficient for some forms of life. Like these… I was enabled to photograph without difficulty since I can either live in air or master the conditions to live without it— Observe!”

The scene faded into an astounding picture of monstrous slug-like beings crawling along a rocky defile, backed by a sandy cliff to the rear. Suddenly the white-garbed figure of Harrigan appeared beside them, incredibly dwarfed.

“From that you may see the comparison in sizes,” he observed. “The camera was automatic and went on turning…”

A woman screamed somewhere in the audience as the stalked eyes of one of the slugs turned to look at the unseen camera. Harrigan’s minute figure turned and ran for safety.

“That particular creature caught my scent,” Harrigan said, as the scene faded. “I found the visible surface of Mars populated by these queer creatures who apparently live on the canal products—on the vegetation, that is. They have only one abysmal intellect. Because of their profusion, however, I fancied that if there were any intelligent scientists on Mars they had probably moved themselves either underground or into another dimension out of reach of the creatures and of course hidden from prying eyes. I found nothing below surface—but in the fourth dimension, into which I can pass with ease, I found this! And here there lies menace in plenty!”

Even the hardboiled and suspicious Hodder gasped a little at what followed. The scenes were weird and unearthly. The picture showed a city shimmering with unearthly yet beautiful living colours—a city that was somehow within a city, and the whole mass of leaning edifices with vast bases and foreshortened summits. It was the kind of scene to make a trick camera turn handsprings. At the base of the buildings were people, but they came and went magically—stepping out of a demarcation of nothing into visibility, then walked back into nothing!

“This, my friends, is what I saw in Mars’ fourth dimension,” Harrigan said calmly. “The camera was set at the foci of three and four dimensions. As photographic experts have already testified, examination of my camera has revealed things about it that cannot be explained by normal photographic law. That is because it is designed for dimensional use. Through its lenses you see people walk in the fourth dimension then veer out of it as it crosses our own space. I saw other things too—such as this…”

Through eye-blurring, foreshortened angles there appeared power engines, dwarfing anything ever known on Earth, before which tiny beings worked and toiled. In shape they appeared almost earthly, and for that reason the vast scale of the engines they worked could be imagined. View upon view showed visions of power beyond the wildest imagination, and finally a whole mass of some thousand objects, which, even to the uninitiated, were plainly spaceships.

The twisting angles began to fade… The lights came up. It had been thirty minutes in wonderland.

“Before we continue with more normal, orthodox views of my adventures, there is something I must say,” Harrigan said gravely. “You are fortunate indeed in that circumstance led me to arrive here on my way home, otherwise you would probably not have known of the menace threatening your civilization—indeed every civilization. You talk of world war, of nation against nation, and yet never give a thought to the possible preparation by other beings on other worlds against you… You have seen vast engines of power being constructed on another world, in a dimension hidden from your eyes. With my superior scientific knowledge I probed the deepest secrets of these beings. They too are preparing for war—for onslaught upon this planet! Let there be no mistake about that. It is only a matter of months and against them you stand no chance because your science is not accurate enough.”

“But yours is!” shouted somebody.

“Quite true, but—” Harrigan shrugged. “I am disbelieved by certain people. I cannot place my powers at the disposal of unbelievers.”

Hodder stood up suddenly in the Press box. “I know quite well that your remarks are directed against me, Tibetan—but I have reasons for my disbelief. How do we know that these film scenes are genuine? How do we know you are genuine? Beyond making my notes vanish—which probably has an explanation far more mundane than mind force—you have done nothing. I assume that the master minds of Tibet can do better things than make writing vanish from a reporter’s notebook?”

“Aw, sit down!” bellowed a voice from the cheaper seats.

“Why should I sit down?” Hodder demanded. “This man here, a self-confessed mystic, warns us of approaching war from Mars—though he omits to mention exactly why the Martians should desire our world so suddenly—and our only proof of it is a collection of pictures which any skilled cameraman could fake.”

“Experts pronounce my camera totally unlike any they have ever seen,” Harrigan answered imperturbably. “It was made in Tibet—by me.”

“So what? Suppose you start putting yourself in the fourth dimension, like you did on Mars? Without machinery! Do it—now! That’s a challenge, Tibetan and one you can’t refuse if you’re all you claim.”

“And if I do this?” Harrigan asked gravely. “Will you believe?”

“I’m not promising anything because I know you can’t do it…”

Harrigan creased his aged, wrinkled face into a smile. Then he closed his eyes, folded his arms, and became motionless. From somewhere in the packed house a shriek went up as he slowly began to fade from sight. In sixty seconds he had disappeared, and the stage in front of the screen was totally empty!

Hodder looked nonplussed for a moment, then he vaulted over the gangway and finally gained the stage. He started searching hurriedly, ignoring the derisive cries of the audience. As he searched the draperies Harrigan slowly reappeared on the opposite side of the stage.

“Did you lose something, my friend?” he enquired politely.

There was a roar of laughter as Hodder swung round. He glared for a moment, then searched the Tibetan’s cassock hurriedly. Harrigan did not stop him; he only continued to smile blandly.

“I have nothing up my sleeve, young man,” he said solemnly. “But while you are about it you might like to witness something else, in case—in a sudden fit of impulse you should feel like killing me. Give me a match, will you?”

Hodder complied dubiously, then watched with his eyes narrowed as Harrigan took the flame and held it against his pale cheek, each in turn. Finally he held his fingers in it, then at last, threw the dead match away.

“If red hot bars were handy I could do the same with those,” he observed. “Like the rest of my race I am indestructible by ordinary means. I am a scientist and master of the supernatural.… Now go and sit down.”

“I don’t see—”

“Sit down!” Harrigan thundered, his eyes blazing suddenly.

Hodder turned away and resumed his seat in the press box. He was certainly baffled, but by no means quelled. The excited muttering died away as Harrigan took up the microphone again.

“Mainly to satisfy this young unbeliever I have exerted mental strain to get in and out of the fourth dimension,” he said gravely. “That at least ought to prove to you that I am in earnest when I speak of an invasion from Mars… I can save you, yes—but only if you all believe… Now let the performance resume!”

It did resume, but the films were merely photographed records of a space flight, and as such, of not over-impressive interest after what had been done. Most of the audience was thinking of that mystical demonstration on the stage and of the grim warning of approaching invasion…

In a few short hours Harrigan of Tibet had hit the mind of the world with more force than a cataclysm.

* * * *

Harrigan returned to his hotel surrounded by a clamouring mob, from which he only succeeded in escaping after a speech from the balcony of his hotel room. Then he closed the windows, threw himself into a chair, and relaxed. Finally, making sure the doors and window were locked and the shades down, he peeled off his fireproof synthetic flesh make-up and threw himself gratefully on the bed. He went to sleep fully assured of the conviction that there is one born every minute…

The next morning the papers handed him his biggest laugh for years as, with his make-up on again, he received the newspapers from an awestruck bell hop.

“IS TIBETAN A FAKE?” asked the Clarion. That was Hodder’s doing. Nasty piece of work, Hodder. The other papers took the thing seriously, and they were the papers that really dominated public viewpoint. The headlines were varied—

MYSTIC’S GRAVE WARNING. TIBETAN DOES A VANISH! IS MARS PREPARING WAR? And so on…

Harrigan had hardly finished his breakfast—it had been rather hard to convince the management that he ate as normal people do when in the west—before there came a knock on the door. Immediately he assumed his trancelike pose and said gravely. “Enter, my friend!”

It was a complete deputation that came in, mainly middle-aged men with thoughtful faces, headed by no less a personality than the Mayor of London himself.

“Your—er—Excellency,” the Mayor said, bowing uncertainly. “I have come in person at the request of various high officials who wish to know more about your alarming prediction of last night.”

“So?” Harrigan said softly. “You mean my warning of war with Mars?”

“Exactíy.” The Mayor looked relieved at finding elaboration unnecessary. “Such a thing, you must realise, cannot be taken lightly. The whole world knows about it this morning—and naturally the whole world is alarmed. The hardest thing is to understand how this can be true—your prediction I mean—particularly as our astronomers, these gentlemen here can find no trace of anything unusual on Mars dead surface. Not even with the new Mount Wilson reflector.”

Harrigan smiled wearily. “Gentlemen did I not make it impressive enough that Martian beings exist on Mars’ surface in another dimension? They cannot be seen: therein lies the subtlety of their plan. Only the slugs inhabit the normal surface, but they are far too small for telescopic observation in any case.”

“The facts,” said one of the astronomers rather uncomfortably, “were not given to us very clearly, Your Excellency. You must forgive us for doubting you…”

“Of course.”

“It is possible,” the Mayor went on, “that the Prime Minister may wish to see you in regard to your warning. We must take all possible precautions.”

Harrigan frowned very slightly. He felt he was getting into deeper waters.

“Whatever precautions you take will avail you nothing,” he said. “Only science such as mine—mind science—can conquer these Martians when they come.”

“But you would be willing to aid us? I may convey that promise to the Prime Minister?”

“Providing there is nothing but unswerving adherence to my wishes, yes,” Harrigan assented, thinking. “Not otherwise. Mind force cannot operate successfully against adverse elements.”

The Mayor nodded hurriedly. “Of course—of course. You may rest assured that all unwanted elements will be suppressed by the law… I will communicate your observations to the Prime Minister. Thank you, Your Excellency…”

Harrigan bowed them out, then stood pondering. This was hardly the move he had expected. Unless he was very careful he was likely to force a worldwide rush to arms and cripple all industrial pursuits. The Prime Minister! That would take some tackling… It gave even his sublime nerve a jolt. However, the thing was done now: only thing to do was to tighten things up a little.

He spent both morning and afternoon delivering speeches from the top of his ‘spaceship’ in Hyde Park, speeches in which he stressed the necessity for misguided western civilization to take this chance of heeding a supermind from the East. He was not quite sure how much of his talking went over—but from the expressions of those who watched him he judged he had cashed in again on the strength of his mystic feats at the cinema the previous night.

The evening papers said in the main—MYSTIC SPEAKS AGAIN, and all save the Clarion avowed allegiance to his warnings and predictions.

Hodder still maintained his obstinate stand but even he began to see he would have to change his views, not because of personal conversion but because of the fury of his editor and the public. Everybody had reared up Harrigan as a prophetic, scientific god. On every occasion he had proved his powers. It was not befitting that the Clarion should be the one dissenting voice…

But Hodder, scenting a scoop one day, kept on with private investigations just the same.

CHAPTER III

The test

A special train plentifully sprinkled with guards in plain clothes whirled Harrigan from London to the Prime Minister’s south country home the following day. He was deeply uneasy, but the synthetic make-up on his face prevented any apparent worry from showing itself. To the onlookers, and the authorities grouped about him, he was the same imperturbable mystic of yore.

When at last he was shown into the Prime Minister’s library his courage nearly deserted mm. The calm figure standing with his back to the window, hands behind him, stirred Harrigan to the realisation of the monstrous hoax he had perpetrated. He only went on for one reason now—because retreat was impossible.

Then he was alone with the man who was the leader of the nation.

“I understand,” the Prime Minister said quietly, that your name is too unpronounceable for us; therefore I will designate you as others have done. Won’t you sit dwn, Excellency?”

Harrigan obeyed, waited. Wondering when he would be discovered. But evidently his disguise was without flaw for presently the Prime Minister said:

“From various sources I am given to understand that you have definite first-hand information concerning an intended attack upon this world from Mars. However fantastic that may seem, these days of scientific progress demand that every possible contingency, earthly or unearthly, be taken into consideration. You yourself have so proven your powers that one must at least pay heed to your warning. You are absolutely convinced that this attack win come?”

“Absolutely, Mr. Prime Minister,” Harrigan said quietly.

“You have referred to the highly devised scientific powers of these invaders, which you alone can combat. How do you propose to go about such a combat?”

“Your armaments, vast though they are, are useless, Mr. Prime Minister. There is only one way to defeat these invaders, and that is by mass-hypnotism, such as my own people use to master every physical difficulty and every material barrier…” Harrigan felt himself perspiring as a silence followed.

“You believe we should not alter our existing armaments or army personnel in the least, but should practice this—this mass hypnosis system?” The Prime Minister sounded vaguely incredulous.

“I do, yes. You sec it is simply a matter of concentration. Thousands of minds, pooled to one particular thought wave, can produce a mental force sufficient to upset the finely balanced minds of the Martian invaders… I say frankly that I would be willing ‘to help the world follow out this system because, of course, we of Tibet will be as much at the mercy of the invaders as anybody else—and we alone are not sufficient in number to offset so many Martians. It will take vast masses of people—millions, all concentrating on one thing, to produce the right effect.”

“I think I understand, Excellency,” the Prime Minister mused. “But tell me, is it not possible for the heads of nations—or at least their representatives—to visit Mars in this machine of yours and see for themselves what you saw? It would serve as a better basis for conviction. After all, I have to convince others—many others…”

For one moment Harrigan thought he was lost: he thought furiously. Then at length he said calmly, “It would produce conviction, certainly, but to even project myself to Mars demanded a vast expenditure of mental effort. I could not possibly accomplish it with several people. Besides, none of you are trained to mastering space strain and lack of air by mind control, as I am…”

“I had overlooked that,” the Prime Minister admitted ruefully. “For myself I do not doubt your veracity—but there are many others, even in my own House of Commons, who may. If, to defeat these invaders, it demands the resources of a whole world’s minds, the heads of other Governments as well as my own must be convinced of your authority.”

“I have proved my ability to enter a fourth dimension: I have brought film records of the actual preparations being made.… What more can I do?”

“There is one thing which I think will provide satisfaction all round. You must demonstrate the full range of your power. Professor Meredith, for instance, one of the greatest living authorities on Tibetan lore, would set a few recognised tests for you at a public demonstration. If you responded to each test perfectly your undoubted ability would be proven. You understand, Excellency? Not for a moment do I doubt you, but for other countries to co-operate demands proof beyond a shadow of doubt The verification of Professor Meredith would be accepted without question. Then we can discuss with other nations whatever plans you have.…”

Harrigan nodded as calmly as he could. “Of course, Mr. Prime Minister. Any time you wish… Anywhere. I shall stay in London until I hear from you.”

“I rather think, Excellency,” the Prime Minister said gravely, as he shook hands, that the world will owe you a great deal in the long run. Let me assure you of the gratitude of the British for your co-operation.”

Harrigan bowed with dignity, but he walked out of the room on legs that felt like jelly…

* * * *

Back in London, studiously avoiding all pleas to address the army of adherents who had sprung up in the city, Harrigan spent an uncomfortable day or two pondering on approaching events. He made the excuse that he was ‘meditating.’ His bluff had assumed proportions of alarming size. Between him and the possible nominal control of the world—control enough at least to permit of him winning Landhurst’s bet—was Meredith, expert on Tibetan lore. That was the very devil.

At last Harrigan made moves, the only ones he could. Having left orders that he was not to be disturbed on any account for forty-eight hours—while he communed with higher planes—he removed his disguise, left the hotel during the night through the window and down the fire escape, thereafter proceeding to move about the city as an ordinary individual.

Immediately the day arrived he spent the time revising his notes on Tibetan miracles from the public library, crammed knowledge by the ton; then he made several purchases from different chemists and purveyors of magical equipment. Finally he rang up his friend Bob Shepherd and gave him implicit instructions, which he was to relay to his other two friends in different parts of the city.

Again by night, Harrigan returned to his hotel, somewhat easier in mind but by no means sure of the future even now… In the morning the Prime Minister forwarded his instructions through the Mayor once again. “Would His Excellency of Tibet be good enough to respond to the tests of Professor Meredith at a public demonstration at the Albert Hall at 8 p.m. in three days’ time?”

Inside a building? Not bad, Harrigan reflected. He accepted the challenge calmly—and again he slipped out at night and rang Bob Shepherd from a public call box. He chuckled to himself as he returned to his hotel through the night. That hundred thousand pounds was not far off now; he could see that quite clearly.

What he did not see was a man with a hatchet face and soft hat standing in an abysmally dark doorway, watching him sedulously.

* * * *

If the London film performance had brought a crowd it was as nothing compared with the invasion that attacked the Albert Hall on the appointed night. Spurred on by the terrific build-up of the press, realising that the Prime Minister himself had convened this demonstration to test the real powers of the ‘Mam from Tibet,’ the public rolled up in myriads.

There were free fights, near-riots, tripled police guards. If this thing went through successfully, the man from Tibet would become a virtual ruler—in essence if not in fact—of the policy of every country in the world. That was what the vast majority of people hoped for. A man with natural occult gifts ought to have plenty of sense—and would that be something! Besides, if there was anything in this Martian war possibility, he was the only man with brains enough to stop it. The papers had already hinted at that.

At 8.00 precisely, Harrigan walked calmly onto the dais in the centre of the vast amphitheatre, attired as usual in his cassock, his white hair flowing onto his shoulders. He looked like some ancient patriarch… Then came the Mayor, and lastly a bearded, blue-eyed, immaculate individual with a very incisive manner, carrying a small travelling case that he placed very resolutely beside him. The crowd did not need to be told he was Professor Meredith—that bearded face was familiar enough from newspapers.

The crowd hushed. Television transmitters went into action; floodlights came up, drenching that solitary square. The Mayor went through the preliminaries. Cameras ground in silence. Microphones swung into position under the blazing spots. The Press watched. Professor Meredith stepped forward at last as the Mayor retired.

“Excellency,” Meredith said, and his voice was as sharp as a razor, “of the three stages of learning ascribed to Tibetans-—namely, investigation, meditation, and understanding—I gather that you are the master of the third state, that you are complete controller of matter. In other words you have reached the point where matter of any kind is subservient to you? Where the minds of others are open books?”

Harrigan inclined his head gravely.

“The three supreme tests of Tibetan science are levitation, dimensional control and conquest of matter,” Meredith went on, flicking off the points on his fingers. “No matter what particular Tibetan sect you belong to, your control will be the same. Now let us commence… First, mind reading. I am thinking of three multiple numbers. What are they?”

“Two four six, seven four two and five four nine,” Harrigan replied instantly.

“Correct…” Meredith looked surprised. “Now—you placed yourself in the fourth dimension recently. Will you kindly do so again? I understand that in a fourth dimension you cannot be touched by anything in this plane? I want your word that when you have vanished you will remain inside this chalk circle…” Stooping Meredith drew a circle on the floor round Harrigan.

“You have my word,” he said quietly. “But to make doubly sure it would be as well to fasten me with rope and have it held at both ends.”

Meredith nodded and removed a length of rope from his case. Two volunteers from the front row fastened the rope in position round Harrigan’s waist and held both ends. Then he closed his eyes, folded his arms, and faded slowly from view. The rope trailed into nothing on both sides of the empty chalk circle.

Meredith, frowning heavily, moved his arms inside the space—first above then below. Finally he withdrew and stood pondering as Harrigan slowly merged back into sight again. With a calm smile he nodded to the knots and presently dropped-free.

“Excellent—excellent indeed.” Meredith observed. “Now here—” He pulled forth an ordinary piece of wood from his case. “Here is a plain piece of timber. By the power of concentration I want you to make it burst into flames. I believe it is a feat much favoured by you mystics.”

“Hold it up so everybody can see it,” Harrigan ordered briefly.

Meredith obeyed, a rather sceptical smile on his face. Then there was a long silence as Harrigan stood motionless, concentrating. It was positively startling when the whole mass of wood burst into smoke and flame, causing Meredith to drop it hastily and stamp on it. He gave a rather sheepish smile through his beard.

“I confess I came here to trip you up, Excellency,” he said quietly. “But I am afraid the tables are being turned. I am being made to look the fool… One more test, then I shall be satisfied. The most difficult feat even for an advanced Tibetan is the art of levitation by sheer will power opposing gravitation. It is hard enough for the mystic to force himself to rise from the ground but to make another rise from the ground is even harder! I challenge you to do that. If you succeed, I shall probe no further. It would be obviously futile…”

“You require me to raise myself into the air?” Harrigan asked.

“Not yourself. Raise me!” Meredith grinned cunningly.

“Very well—but I warn you I shall use hypnotism. Like this!” Harrigan shot out his fingers suddenly. In defiance of gravitation Meredith leaned backwards slowly, as stiff as a poker, gradually lowered to the floor and lay motionless. For a moment or two Harrigan stood pondering and the audience waited breathlessly.

Then he waved his hands at the head and feet of the obviously tranced expert. Slowly, gradually, Meredith began to rise, floating horizontally in mid-air. There he remained, two feet from the floor, with Hamgan’s hands poised over him compellingly.

For perhaps six seconds there was dead silence; then Harrigan made another gentle pass and in response the expert slowly went back to the floor again. A snap of the fingers before his eyes and he began to get dazedly to his feet.

“What did I—?” he began, then the rest of his words was drowned out by applause, reverberating from roof and walls.

Here, in glaring lights, without any apparatus—for the whole place had been searched not five minutes before the demonstration had begun—something had been done that made stage illusionists look like amateurs. And the cream of it was that the mastermind of Tibetan lore had been the victim. Meredith had been made to float. He was standing now looking incredibly bewildered.

Then at last, as the din died away, he held out his hand frankly.

“There can be no further doubt of your Excellency’s abilities,” he said quietly, his words relaying to everybody by the microphone. “This world-wide telecast, convened for the purpose, has proved to the world that we have in our midst a natural controller of material forces—one who has come to warn us of impending danger and upon whose undeniable ability and resource we now cast our allegiance excellency, I bow to your genius!”

Harrigan smiled faintly, but he said nothing. Inwardly, his chief anxiety was to get clear of the surging, admiring mob of people who looked perilously likely to assail him. He made a quick motion to the police guard round the dais and they closed immediately.

Even at that he had a rough and tumble journey back to his hotel. Not until he was at last back in his room did he breathe freely again, and turned to look at the Mayor and group of officials around him.

“It is more than likely that the Prime Minister will himself have seen your efforts over the television, Excellency,” the Mayor observed. “In any case a full film and sound record will be dispatched to him tonight, together with my personal reports… There can be little doubt as to the outcome,” he added smiling.

I’m entirely at the Prime Minister’s disposal, Harrigan answered. “And now, gentlemen, if you please…? The strain tonight…”

“Of course.” The Mayor nodded to the officials and they bowed themselves out of the room. Harrigan gave a faint, troubled smile when the door had closed. He waited around his room until long after midnight, smoking and pondering. Finally, shedding his disguise, he turned to the writing table and Denned a brief note—

“You did magnificently. Tomorrow I should get the okay from the Prime Minister himself. That will constitute the winning of my wager because it will make me virtual ruler of the world. I cannot go further than that. I shall simply vanish and become Harrigan again. Then, and only then can you release Professor Meredith. You’ll hear from me further. Thanks a lot. DH.”

Harrigan smiled, sealed the note in an envelope and tied it to a small paperweight. At one in the morning he saw what he was waiting for—the momentary flash of a torchlight way down in the deserted street outside. Immediately he opened the window and dropped the letter outside. The figure stooped and picked it up, moved silently away into the night…

* * * *

Next morning brought an official of the Government to the hotel, surrounded by the usual horde of eager newspapermen. The envoy refused to speak, was admitted to Harrigan’s room, gave a slight bow, then handed over a long, heavily sealed envelope.

Harrigan extracted the authoritative notepaper of the House of Commons and read the communiqué rapidly. His heart gave an extra beat. The note was signed by the Prime Mmister in person. It commended the vindication of the previous night’s test and requested the co-operation of ‘His Excellency’ at a conference of world heads, to be shortly convened—at which ‘His Excellency’ would perhaps be good enough to suggest ways and means of defeating the approaching Martian menace.

In essence, despite legal and technical phrasing, the letter was an admission of Harrigan’s mystical powers and was a request for him to become the shadow power behind the thrones of the world. It was the fulfilment of a hundred thousand pound wager.

Harrigan nodded and smiled, walked over to the door and handed the note to the nearest pressman.

“Publish this—facsimile,” he requested briefly. “It is not my policy to keep requests secret. I consider it in the public interest that they should know what is to be done… I am to be ruler of the world, my friends—and I assure you my one wish is to help you all to overcome this approaching invasion.”

He withdrew without further observations, turned to the envoy.

“I will communicate with the Prime Minister within the hour,” he said quietly. “I have other matters to attend to first…”

“Very good, Excellency.” The envoy departed with brisk tread.

Harrigan smiled rather ruefully as he was left alone. He began to think out loud.

“If I retire now I’m safe. I have not taken a cent from anybody; I have proved that there is one born every minute; and the press will advertise to Landhurst that I have become ruler of the world without any resort to force… Well, it was good while it lasted.” He began to peel off his disguise. “A brief note can say I was recalled to my ancestors in Tibet, or something. Then—”

He broke off and glanced round sharply at a sudden hubbub in the corridor, followed by a pounding on his room door. Frantically he tried to put his disguise back in place but it just would not stick.

“One moment—!” he called out anxiously; but to his horror a duplicate key grated in the lock. The door flew open suddenly.

It was Hodder of the Clarion who came stalking in first, his face sour with triumph. Around him were police officers and behind them the hotel manager and an inquisitive crowd.

“Douglas Harrigan,” the inspector said curtly. “I have here a warrant for your arrest on charges of fraud, kidnapping, and false representation. I must warn you that anything you say—”

“All right, skip that,” Harrigan interrupted, with a little sigh. He stripped off the rest of his disguise, then glanced at Hodder. “Nice going, Hodder,” he commented dryly. “But you’re just a shade too late. I’ve done all I need to do… Now gentlemen, I am at your service.”

CHAPTER IV

Confession

Possibly no trial in the history of British justice had such sensational angles as that of the ‘Tibetan Mystic.’

Throughout it all Harrigan remained perfectly at ease, answered every question truthfully, gave the details of his wager and of his intentions to step out before he did any real harm. The only thing he refused to say was his method of performing his feats. He had reasons for that: newspapers were bidding fantastic prices against each other for his personal revelations. All he had to do was sit back and wait for the highest bidder.

Hodder’s revelations were surprising. Suspicious from the very first, he had watched every move Harrigan had made. He had seen him leave and return to his hotel. He had seen him telephone. He had traced the call to Bob Shepherd, sorted out the details from the Fantasy Club—by joining as a member—and had gradually built up the evidence that had led him to see the actual kidnapping of the real Professor Meredith by Harrigan’s two friends, on his way to the Albert Hall demonstration. It had been simply accomplished by switching taxis.

For Shepherd to apply whiskers and resemble Meredith had been the easiest thing in the world. After the demonstration Hodder had taken it on himself to corner Shepherd and get the whole story out of him. Hence it had been Hodder himself and not Shepherd who had taken the note dropped by Harrigan from the hotel window. It gave the complete low-down—but it did something else too: it proved that Harrigan had really intended to step out before he got too involved.

Had Hodder had his way Harrigan would have been arrested the moment he had got the truth out of Shepherd—but it had taken time to get the law to believe him, even longer to arrange the legal details of the warrant; time in which Harrigan had got what he wanted—the admission from the head of the nation that he was to become the shadow ruler of the world. The thing was void now, of course—but that was not the point. Harrigan had achieved his object, to which Landhurst willingly testified on the stand, and further substantiated it by paying in a hundred thousand pounds to Harrigan’s bank account.

One by one the witnesses were grilled. The case dragged on. The judge was forced to Solomon-like wisdom to appraise the matter in its true light. In the annals of hoaxes there had never been one quite like this. No actual harm had been done beyond the ‘detention’ of Meredith and the absolute gullibility of people at large. It was a profoundly difficult problem to deal with. Harrigan had stolen nothing, hurt nobody, had even paid his hotel bill, and had intended to withdraw before precipitating a crisis.

The only clause the judge could work on was that of kidnapping—but here Meredith himself stepped in the gap with a self confessed admiration for Harrigan’s cheek. The result of it all was that Harrigan got one year’s imprisonment. He took it with a calm smile and advised the newspaper whose figure he had finally accepted—the Clarion as it happened—that he would forward a personal confession from jail. So Hodder got his scoop too and Harrigan’s hundred thousand pounds was doubled.

In jail, out of sight, he was not forgotten by those whose faces were still red at the thought of their gullibility. The Clarion’s circulation soared vastly as his confessions were published with perfect frankness. Skipping the main personal angles of the trial, readers read the ‘Secrets’ department with avid eyes…

“…and I have no doubt that reporter Hodder was much surprised when his notes vanished. He need not have been. Dimonitrine ethyl, if concentrated into a pill or tab-let, dissolves rapidly into the air but gives off odourless fumes that loosen the ingredients of ink, or graphite (pencil) and evaporate it. It is the basis of many liquid erasers on the market today. I dropped a tablet in Hodder’s notebook pocket, with results that astounded him a good deal. The fumes, in the confined space, went up between the book leaves and eliminated everything written therein…

“…my disguise was of course synthetic flesh, such as is used by modern beauty parlours to patch up defects in my lady’s face. The only difference was that mine was fireproof, simple enough by adding one chemical, whereby I could bum matches on hands and face without trouble. Again, synthetic flesh fits with such elastic tightness it is impossible to tell where it joins, ends or begins…

“…my films were perfectly normal but taken over a long period of time in preparation for such an event as this, and also to satisfy myself in regard to details of certain stories I have written. They were taken on a small camera and then enlarged to standard size in my own dark room: nobody save me ever saw them before. Microphotography of slugs on a stretch of sand, and superimposition of myself by what is called the ‘Dunning’ process, gave disparity in sizes. The four dimensional effects were done with prisms and mirrors. The Martian ‘City’ was New York done in this wise, and the giant power engines were photographed in an ordinary power house and human beings were superimposed afterwards in such a style as to look after them. The colour effects were, once again, entirely prismatic and 3-D.

“…my own apparent disappearance into a fourth dimension was purely the work of polarising light vibrations. Since these scientific machines are usually confined to sideshows or military headquarters, they are little known to the general public even though invented and proved as far back as 1937. I had long known the principle of these polarising machines. A professional one is rather large: I made a smaller one capable of fitting into a small travelling case.

“On the occasion of the premiere, Shepherd was seated with the case in the front row. He had merely to operate the mechanism at the desired time by buttons on the side disguised as a handle, and I came into the range of the beam. He did the same when in the disguise of Meredith he asked me to disappear. By ducking my head as he waved his hand over me, and by raising my feet one after the other as he waved his hand below, the impression was conveyed that I was not there. The invisibility machine was in his travelling case. Since he was virtually in the know with everything I did, it made matters profoundly simple…

“…in the case of the burning wood, the wood was of course prepared with chemical beforehand Shepherd had merely to press a concealed switch at the required time. Shops for magical apparatus sell these anywhere…

“…the system by which I levitated ‘Meredith’ was an ordinary illusionist’s trick. I had wire ready fixed in my hands. He had small invisible hooks on his shoes and the shoulders of his coat. All I had to do when making the passes was slip the wires on to the hooks, then cause him to rise slowly, first one end and then the other, until at last he floated in apparent contra to gravity. The trick lies in the angle at which you raise the victim, as any magician will tell you. Ju-jitsu relies on the same principle. It is possible by absolute accuracy to raise a man half as heavy again as yourself with perfect ease. That was all I did. Naturally, ‘Meredith’ and I took good care that nobody else came near us while the trick was done. It was the total absence of any visible apparatus that swung the thing…”

In plain truth: the readers of the world did not know whether to be offended, or whether to admire the ingenuity of a young man who by nerve a little magic, and a knowledge of Tibet and science—and above all a masterly conception of mass psychology—had hoodwinked an entire world into believing him. He was a showman, par excellence.

That was why, when he came out of jail a year later to use his fifty thousand he wrote the bestselling book ever and called it ‘There’s One Born Every Minute.’ At the Fantasy Club he was a being enshrined because he was the one man who had written a story and then proved it—word for word!

ISLAND IN THE MARSH

Hart Crozier uses earthman’s science to solve a Venusian mystery!

Hart Crozier was soaking himself in the undying beauty of La Boheme at the Metrocast when he was annoyed to see the red glow of the special warning light installed on the arm of his chair. He ignored its insistence as long as he could. Then, with a sigh, he arose and made his way out of the darkened house.

In the foyer he found his assistant awaiting him—Mary Douglas, trim, blonde, and razor keen of wit. She already had his greatcoat from the check-room.

“Come on,” she said briskly. “A queer murder-case in North New York.”

“You know, Mary,” he answered musingly as he jerked his arms out to struggle into the coat she held for him, “those top soprano notes of Madame Colbi are exquisite. Murder at a time like this is most inconsiderate. Who was the victim?”

“Sutton Willis, the interplanetary explorer!” informed Miss Douglas.

“Howling space devils! He retired a year or two ago to live out his life peacefully here on Earth, as I remember. Any data?”

“On Wills, none. I took the message on the televisor and promised to locate you at once. Superintendent Burns is awaiting you at the Wills home.”

As Crozier’s private car raced through the canyons of Greater New York on the elevated skyway for special emergency traffic, the scientific investigator settled back in the cushions.

The inevitable law of progress had brought Hart Crozier into being. Back in 1940 he would have been regarded as an eccentric and dabbling visionary; in the year 2070, with its mastery of space travel and advancement of science, he emerged quite naturally as the answer to the more complex criminal problems of the day.

For crime, as usual, had kept pace with progress. The old racketeer of Earth with his submachine-guns and illicit preying on individuals was as outmoded as gasoline-powered engines. In his place had come the subtle and scientific criminal who made his playground the depths of space and who preyed on nations, who used science as his weapon, and who matched his brains against the geniuses of criminology.

Such a genius was Hart Crozier, a mild and bland appearing man in his late thirties, athletic but inclined to stoutness, and firmly addicted to the comfortable slacks of the turn of the century instead of the present vogue of military style. Ostensibly an inventor of minor gadgets—a row of which interesting little things lined the breast pocket of his sports coat like a battery of fountain pens—he had no official post on the vast staff of the American Institute of Criminology, which institute was the logical outgrowth of all the cumbersome law-enforcement agencies of the past. But he was the first man to be called in when something new showed up on the crime calendar.

Crozier’s passion was music, especially the opera. His avocations were eating and solving the problems that the officers of the Institute couldn’t crack. When a world-acclaimed singer was giving a performance, Hart could always be found just off the left aisle, seventh row, central section, of the broadcasting theater. He never listened to great artists over televisor sets. He said that such instruments did not do the singers justice.

Now, soft hat tilted over his big nose, hands folded in his lap, he was apparently asleep as the young woman beside him crisply rattled off the meager details she had acquired about the explorer’s death.

“Wills was found dead in his steel-lined library, a room which has a steel door and a steel-shuttered window. Obviously he was in mortal fear of something. He was found slumped at his desk, his left arm missing to the elbow—incinerated into ashes—disintegrated. The desk was not marred in the least; that’s the queerest part of it all.”

“Remind me to look up the libretto on La Boheme when we get home,” Crozier murmured dreamily. “Who found Wills?”

“His butler—Rawlins, who immediately called the police. Rawlins’ record is clean. He is well off, in Class N-twenty, has been with Wills ever since the explorer came home from his last trip to Venus and built that fortress of a house on the Sound.”

“Any suspects?”

“Two—an ornithologist and his daughter, neighbors of Sutton Wills. They are being held for your questioning. Seems that the girl was on the veranda outside the library about the time Wills died.”

“Ornithologist, eh? We haven’t encountered a bird naturalist since we solved that stuffed pterodactyl case two years ago.” Crozier emerged suddenly from the depths and snapped on the driver-microphone. “Jackson, get moving, can’t you? Register here shows only ninety. Make it a hundred and twenty, I haven’t all night to waste.”

The chauffeur obediently increased the speed of the atomic motor.

“Odd to kill a man and then reduce his forearm to ashes,” said Mary Douglas.

“Damned peculiar!” snorted Crozier. “And I have to miss that last aria. How does it go? Tra-la-la-la…”

The girl folded her arms in resignation and closed her eyes. There were times when she wondered if the high salary Crozier paid her really compensated for what she had to undergo.

Ten minutes later the rocket car swept into the drive of the Wills place. The solidly built house had none of the graceful lines of modern architecture, being square and squat and grim. But there was a wide porch running around the sides of the severe stone walls. There was another residence immediately to the left, a more pleasing structure with an aviary at the rear.

Crozier helped his companion out of the car at the entrance porch where a couple of official cars were parked. A police officer admitted them to the Wills house, saluting respectfully. A second officer escorted them to the library.

Hart Crozier halted on the threshold, hands deep in his pockets, his mildly sleepy eyes taking in details from beneath his floppy hat brim. Superintendent Burns was in the room, his broad back to the huge fireplace. The square-jawed controller of the Institute’s outside jobs was interviewing a girl and two men in civilian dress. The medical and fingerprint experts were busily working over the corpse and the room with their infra-red and micro-electric equipment.

The girl was dark-eyed and tanned of face. The older man, obviously her father stood beside her, tall and bald of head, and wearing glasses. The third man was of middle age, with an inscrutable sunken face and eyes like black currants.

From them Crozier let his gaze stray to the figure of the dead man sprawled before the desk. Wills had been a large, thick-necked chap with forceful, rugged features, keen gray eyes, and blond hair. He lay now half across the desk, one cheek resting thereon, both arms out-thrust before him, a terrible expression of pain and shock and horror on his face. His left arm was missing from the elbow down. There was nothing extending therefrom save a little pile of ashes—not even a drop of blood.

“Come in, come in,” called Burns. “How are you, Crozier—and Miss Douglas? This is Professor Benson and his daughter. Seems an open and shut case, but the circumstances are peculiar. Anyway, the professor insisted that I call you before I arrested his daughter for murder.”

Crozier turned round. Plunging his fists in his untidy jacket pockets he strolled forward and eyed the girl in the chair. She looked up at him earnestly, twisting a handkerchief between her fingers.

“I—I wanted you, Mr. Crozier, because the Super here is sure that Dad and I are mixed up in Mr. Wills’ murder.” She jerked her head to the man with the glasses. “Honestly, it isn’t true. It’s just the way things look, that’s all.”

“You’re the ornithologist?” Crozier asked, glancing up.

The man with glasses nodded composedly. “I’m Alroyd Benson, collector of rare birds. My daughter and I live in the house next door. Because we quarreled with Wills over the exact amount of land we were each entitled to at the back is no reason for assuming that—”

“Who rang the police?” Crozier twirled round and finally fixed his eye on the man with sunken cheeks at the opposite side of the room.

“Yes, I rang the police,” the man nodded slowly. “I’m Rawlins, Mr. Wills’ manservant.”

“He rang us, yes,” Burns corroborated. “Seems he couldn’t get any answer from this library. No way in through the steel-lined door so only police could do the job. And this is what we found. But at the time we were on the way other queer things were happening. Constable Archer, who’s now on duty at the front door, was patrolling the shore road running along the bottom of the back gardens of these two houses when he saw Miss Benson here up a ladder. The ladder was against the veranda which runs over the top of this steel-shuttered window here. When he questioned her she said she was looking for a bird. He brought her in here for questioning. I sent for her father as soon as I arrived.”

Burns looked pleased with himself.

“I was looking for a bird!” the girl cried hotly. Then, looking appealingly at Crozier, “I went to bed early tonight, but I couldn’t get to sleep because of a constant scratching and whirring noise from somewhere outside. Opening my window, I saw a big bird perched on the veranda above this very window. Dad lost a huge stork from his aviary a couple of weeks back, and I naturally thought it might be it come home again to the wrong house. I got a ladder, came over the fence between the two back lawns, and then started to climb up and coax the bird. It flew away. Then that constable turned up and apprehended me. I didn’t know Mr. Wills was dead until the constable brought me in here.”

Crozier lighted a long cigarette and stared over the match-flame at the girl s father.

“Anything to add, Professor Benson?”

“Only that Joan is telling the truth. We’ve both been worried over losing that bird.”

“And you, Miss Benson, say that this bird looked like a stork?”

“Certainly it did. I’d have caught it but for that nosy flatfoot coming round.”

Crozier cocked his eye on Burns. The Institute man smiled bitterly.

“But,” he said sweetly, “she hasn’t told you everything. She had this in her hand when she was caught.”

From his pocket he pulled an object resembling an electric torch. Its bulbous end terminated in two electrodes and upon pressing the button a savage streak of fire instantly incinerated the paper Burns held experimentally in the air.

“Nessler atomic flame gun!” he proclaimed in triumph.

“So what?” the girl asked impatiently. “Dad and I each have one. When roaming around at night I always carry protection. I’m not making excuses for it.”

“No, but you could have fired this thing at Wills and incinerated his arm!” Burns snapped. He swung round to Crozier, “I’ve examined the roof for signs of bird claw-marks, and there aren’t any. But I did discover that there was a chink between those steel window shutters through which, from her position on the ladder, Joan Benson could easily have fixed this gun! Wills was dead, in line at the desk—what the hell are you grinning at?”

Crozier’s smile vanished. “Sorry,” he said politely. “I was just picturing you on the veranda looking for scratches. I presume Miss Benson killed Wills because of some trifling argument about the land at the back?”

“That,” said Burns grimly, “may only be the beginning of a deeper motive. Anyway, it’s a start. I tell you, Crozier, all these two need is a good grilling to make them open up.”

Crozier did not answer. He handed the gun back and then strolled round the room like a connoisseur inspecting an art gallery. When he reached the alcove near the main window he paused to stare at a curious plant in deep, black, loamy soil. The plant was not unlike a palm, save that it had onion-like knots on its stem. It stood directly in front of a specially constructed air inlet of misty glass.

“Ever seen a Venusian olipus plant?” Crozier asked briefly.

Burns looked puzzled. The scientist waved his arm to the plant.

“Study up on Venusian flora and you’ll find that the olipus comes from the Venusian Wetlands, semi-temperate belt. Hmmm—good specimen, too. What’s the idea pf the quartz glass?”

He looked across at Rawlins.

“I’m not entirely sure, sir, but I think Mr. Wills once said that the plant had to have certain vital radiations from the sun which don’t pass through ordinary glass.”

“Sounds logical.” Crozier started to hum to himself.

“What the heck’s a plant got to do with Wills being murdered?” Burns demanded.

“Maybe nothing,” said Crozier as he dragged out a footstool and looked at the plant at closer quarters. The topmost leaves were brownish, curled and lighted at the end. Crozier discounted, ignored Burns’ clearly growing exasperation and swung round to the manservant again.

“How did your master get hold of this plant, anyway?”

Rawlins hesitated. “He—he never told me sir. But I think he brought it back from Venus on his last trip I believe he picked it up in his travels. He once told me he had discovered that a war was going to break out on Venus. He didn’t say how or when. I’ve always understood the Venusians to be a very friendly race.”

“Why didn’t you tell me that?” snapped Burns.

“Meaning no disrespect, sir, but you never asked me.”

Crozier grinned broadly and winked across to Mary. He began stabbing his finger in the air.

“Olipus plant—interplanetary traveler—possible war. Make a note of those, Mary. Now, Burns, have a ladder put up where Miss Benson was found.”

“The ladder she used is still there,” Burns growled.

Crozier strode over to the window, flung back the steel shutters and scrambled outside. Those inside the room leaned through the window to watch him. Still humming to himself he pulled out a fountain pen torch and flashed it along the sloping veranda with its old-fashioned slated roof.

Evidently unsatisfied, he tugged out another instrument and sprinkled from it a fine yellow powder like mustard. He waited a moment or two while the powder changed color to pale blue, leaving black imprints in its midst; then he came back into the library and closed the window.

“Nothing, eh?” Burns eyed him in malicious satisfaction.

“On the contrary, the imprints of a bird’s feet,” Crozier said calmly. “This photonic dust of mine reacts like litmus paper used to react to poison gas. There are distinct prints of a bird’s feet.”

“Then that exonerates us!” Benson exclaimed. “There was a bird!”

“True, but did you ever see a stork with webbed feet?” Crozier looked round blandly. “For that matter, did you ever hear of a bird with webbed feet the size of a stork, flying as high as that veranda roof?”

Burns’ face began to darken a little. He caught the scientist’s arm.

“Listen, Crozier, you’re not seriously trying to suggest that a bird, web-footed or otherwise, had anything to do with Wills’ death, are you? I admit I missed the bird imprints, but I don’t see you’ve proved anything. What we’ve got to do is to find the real motive for these two killing Wills!”

“In spite of the fact that Miss Benson’s story now holds water? Be yourself, Burns!”

Crozier looked again at the plant in the corner, then at the desk with Wills slumped across it. Finally he studied the cindery stump of the shattered arm, brooded over the ash on the desk, looked beyond it in a direct line to where there was a distinct burn in the heavy carpet.

“As I figure it,” Burns said, “Wills had his arm raised in the air when that disintegrating force struck it. I’ve used a piece of string from that hole in the carpet to the top of the chink in the window shutters, and if he had been standing, his left arm outthrust, he could have got it right on the forearm. I’ve checked up on that already. It would explain why the desk wasn’t burned.”

Crozier nodded. “While you were playing games you no doubt accounted for the fact that the window was not shattered by the vibration from the gun outside it?”

“I admit that puzzles me. Maybe it was the sort of vibration that doesn’t affect glass.”

“Give me that gun of Miss Benson’s,” Crozier ordered.

Doubtfully Burns handed over the weapon. Calmly, Crozier took a wine glass from the sideboard in the corner, directed the gun on it and pressed the button. The splintered shards flew all over the carpet.

“Doesn’t affect glass?” he asked casually as he handed the gun back. “Better get Miss Benson out your mind, Burns. This goes deeper than you think. Now you, Rawlins. Did you ever see anything peculiar about your master’s left arm? Any tattoo marks or anything?”

“No, sir. Both his forearms were free of anything like that.”

“Did he always wear a white shirt like the one he has on now?”

The butler looked surprised. “Yes. Come to think of it, he did.”

“Is there one around that’s not yet been laundered?” Crozier asked quickly, and at the servant’s nod: “Tear out the left sleeve and bring it here.”

“I can’t begin to thank you enough for clearing Madge and me, Mr. Crozier,” Benson said warmly. “It was so absurd to—”

“The whole thing’s absurd!” snapped Burns, still fingering the girl’s gun. “It means you had some other method, and I’ll find it yet if I go gray doing it.”

“I know an excellent hair dye,” Crozier murmured. Then stroking his square chin, he wandered past the numerous bookshelves, finally pulled down a volume on Venusian life and flipped through the pages.

“Charming people!” he commented finally. “Bald as eggs, the whole lot of ’em. Hot Landers, Cold Landers—all living together in peace and quiet. And yet…that hint of a war.” His eyes narrowed for a moment. “I guess Wills was well up in Venusian lore.”

The other man snorted. “If you’re thinking of a Venusian being back of this you can discount it,” Burns grunted. “None of them are birdlike, anyway. And none of them have webbed feet.”

Hart Crozier smiled amiably; “Nevertheless, I may as well read up on olipus plants.” He tossed the volume over to his assistant and then turned to Joan Benson. “I think, Miss Benson,” he said gravely, “that you should hold no animosity toward Constable Archer for coming upon you in time to frighten your stork away. He possibly saved your life.”

“What do you mean?” the girl gasped, paling.

“That’s what I want to know,” added Burns impatiently. “First, you find tracks which aren’t there. Then you holler for one of the victim’s dirty shirts, and now you go nuts over a Venusian plant and want to read up on the flora and fauna—”

Crozier imperturbably waved him into silence as Rawlins came back into the library with a white shirtsleeve. The scientific investigator put it into his pocket and then cut out a small square from the dead man’s right jacket-sleeve with a tiny pair of scissors and placed this carefully in his wallet. He beckoned to Mary Douglas and then took down the olipus plant from its pedestal and started for the door.

“Carry on your routine work, Burns,” he called over his shoulder. “I’ll be back as soon as I do a little checking up.”

At full speed Crozier returned to his laboratory home on the Palisades. While Mary Douglas ordered a special dinner of steak and onions for them, he proceeded to scan through the book he had brought, study the olipus plant carefully, and then read through a file of information on the dead explorer.

After a sumptuous meal, Crozier struggled into a frock and hurried to his laboratory. His charming assistant followed him with the Turkish coffee pot.

“Madam Butterfly, please,” he flung over his shoulder as he began adjusting a weird-looking electro-microscope—one of his own inventions to study light.

Mary obediently started the electrical amplivox, and the music of the first disk recording of the opera filled the great room. Crozier contentedly bent to his work.

“We’ll try the Prober first, Mary,” he said.

This instrument was really a light trap. Light, science had long ago proved, expands outward at the rate of 186,600 miles per second. But it also moves inward at a mathematically slower speed into the microcosm. So Crozier had perfected the Prober, which could follow inmoving light rays into the microcosm, overtake, and pick them up, even though they be a thousand years distant from their original source.

The girl helped him place the square of cloth from Sutton Wills’ jacket in the finder and adjust the field.

“It’s almost a certainty,” the investigator said, “that among the countless atoms making up this piece of cloth there will be one series which will show us exactly what happened in that library tonight.”

He bent before the controls and operated the hair-thin line of blinding cold light vibration that focused itself on the cloth under the complicated lenses. The screen of the instrument came into life through prismatic devices. It showed all manner of things—the library, parts of New York, a boat, an ocean. That coat had been places.

Crozier gave a grunt and adjusted again with even more delicacy. For nearly thirty-five minutes he fished about. Then suddenly the girl gripped his arm. A vision of the library was there. From the position, Wills’ arm was obviously raised in the air. Part of him, seen from the position of his arm, was huge and overpowering in the right foreground. Behind him were the library shelves, the olipus plant in its alcove, the shuttered window.

“Looks like he was either stretching himself or holding up something to the light,” Mary breathed tensely, blue eyes on the screen.

They waited in motionless silence, but nothing unusual happened. All of a sudden the view whirled round as Wills dropped sideward into his desk chair. The scene became stationary on a pile of ash on the desk.

“Lousy!” Crozier said glumly. “He was killed all right, but by something that was never inside his library. Guess we’re no nearer, except for proving that he did have his arm in the air when that vibration struck him.”

He lapsed into thought, then presently he caught sight of the white shirtsleeve on the table.

“Obviously,” he said slowly, “Wills used an invisible dye—if he had any marks on his arm—something invisible in ordinary light. But the dye that can’t be seen by ultra-violet has yet to be created.”

“Hence the shirtsleeve?” Mary asked.

“How delightfully Madam Colbi sings—oh, yes, hence the shirtsleeve. Invisible dye is bound, if constantly pressed in almost the same place, to imprint itself into white fabric. Being unreflective to light waves it remains as invisible as on the arm, but the very warmth of the skin must impress it, particularly when a man rests his left arm down a lot as in writing, such as Wills did.”

“You’re taking it for granted Wills had something on his forearm?”

“Only logical conclusion. Stretch that shirtsleeve before the ultra-violet camera.”

Methodically Mary obeyed. When at last the linen was taut she snapped on the camera’s mechanism, waited a moment. Crozier still sat in silence, head thrown back, drinking in the trilling from the recorder. Then he looked forward again as the girl took the automatically printed and developed plate from the machine and handed it to him.

“So,” he murmured slowly, getting up, “I was right!”

The girl looked over his shoulder at a blurred but none-the-less distinguishable map, small but concise, with tiny lettering at various points.

“Neat idea of yours, Hart,” she murmured admiringly, taking the plate from him and placing it under the high-power magnifier.

“Dye did come out all right,” Crozier muttered, as he stared through the twin eyepieces.

Part of the map was blurred, but in the main the faint lines and writing were quite distinguishable, mainly due to the shirtsleeve having taken the same position on the forearm each time Wills had rested upon his desk.

“Looks like an island,” Mary said at length. “A Venusian island. See that arrow with ‘To Hotlands’ written after it?”

“I see it, but look below. Shaded portion indicating ziterbuk surface ores, fringed around with jungle and Wetlands.”

Hart Crozier straightened suddenly and pulled the book on Venusian life towards him, ran his finger down the index.

“Ziterbuk, page forty-two.” He flipped the pages, read for a moment, then looked up sharply. “Zíterbuk, my dear young lady, is a rich Venusian surface ore, difficult to find, but present in entire shingles in some parts of Venus. Worth thousands for a single ounce! Now we’re getting some place! Wills was indecently wealthy, he’d traveled a lot on Venus, he happened on ziterbuk ores. So careful was he to make sure nobody else knew the location, while remembering himself, he mapped out the position on his own arm in invisible dye, studying it by ultra violet light when necessary.”

“Check!” Mary nodded thoughtfully. “But somebody else knew he’d got this map, wanted to stop him, and so killed him and destroyed the arm with the map on it?”

“Um—maybe. Else Wills stole the location of ziterbuk ores and finally met up with his enemy.”

“Which doesn’t explain a web-footed stork.”

Crozier relaxed into the big chair by the bench and mused for a while, pulling at his hair. Record two of the opera started off in a burst of melody.

“Whoever killed Wills was a scientist of no mean measure,” Crozier muttered. “He used vibratory power to shatter that arm. Where is there a scientist on Earth with a power like that? Nowhere, or I’d know about it. On Venus? Possibly. But all Venusians are bipeds like us no matter what land they come from. Explorers have shown that by what they’ve written in that book.”

“Wills knew somebody was after him, otherwise he wouldn’t have taken such precautions to protect himself.”

Crozier frowned. “A bird. Why the hell a bird?”

“Did it ever occur to you,” Mary said, “that no explorer has mentioned ziterbuk ores in any quantity, certainly not in the Wetlands—unexplored territory which Wills penetrated. He must have done so, to have brought back an olipus plant!”

“Lord!” Crozier exploded, leaping up. “What a girl! I brought that plant just to look it over, but now I believe it has another use. There is still another type of life on Venus as yet unseen—the Wetlander. He’d have webbed feet, surely? Only Wills knew about it.” He stopped and stared at the black, loamy soil of the olipus plant.

“Straight from the Wetlands,” he breathed. “What cannot the atoms of that soil show us of the Wetlands? Quick, the Prober again! Maybe we can intersect a group of atoms and reproduce the light waves that must have been prevalent on Venus. We shall see the Wetlands, which only Wills had ever seen.”

He stooped to the controls again, brought forth a jigsaw of weird designs, crazy Venusian jungle, blurred trees, phantomic shapes. Again he adjusted, and again, until at last he and the girl were staring steadily at a typical Venusian Wetland scene with its vast sickly green trees and expanses of misty marshes. Evidently the atoms under observation had been in banked-up soil, for they gave a horizontal view.

But through the mist shapes were visible, moving through the air with terrific speed. Half-human, half-bird, they looked like something out of Dante’s Inferno. This in itself was interesting, but even more engrossing was the fact that as the mist cleared very slightly for a moment there was the transient vision of a pale yellow city, strangely designed, the embodiment of scientific achievement. There was a glimpse of titanic machines, ceaseless industry—and all around the city the dull gleam that pronounced ziterbuk ores.

“That city is on the self-same island as the ziterbuk ores,” Crozier breathed. “Those flying people live on it. There is where Wills got his rumor of war. War by them, the unknowns in the mist, on the rest of Venus. Now I get it!”

He fell silent, watching the reflected image of the nearest flying bird-man. When the creature came close enough for a decent study, the girl almost recoiled from her eyepiece in horror. The thing, two-thirds the size of a normal human being of Earth, glided to the ground and stood erect. It had a face like a gargoyle with the eyes of Satan.

“Notice its eyes through the mist,” cried Crozier. “Infra-red rays. It can see through the murk. It has webbed feet and rudimentary wings, but it propels itself by the ejection of force from that ray gun it carries. It probably slays by the same force, altering the wavelength by adjustment. Good grief, Mary, we’ve got to hurry! Maybe it’s too late already.”

They rushed madly from the laboratory. Instead of using his rocket car, Crozier led the way to the little private hangar where was housed his atomic-rocketed spaceship. The pair of them bundled in and took off in a silent flare of orange light—a tail like that of a young comet streaming out to die away behind them.

As they headed into the stratosphere above New York Crozier flipped on his electro-magnetic space-eye. Almost at once the vibrator picked up a foreign substance in the amplifier. Swiftly the girl adjusted dials, fishing, searching for the source of that noise. Suddenly, almost like magic, the image of a dully-gleaming yellow globe sprang into being on the visi-screen.

“That metal!” snapped the investigator. “The same as that used in the construction of the city on the island in the Venusian marsh.”

“That’s a Venusian spacecraft of strange design then,” Mary Douglas agreed. “Our murderer must be on board—escaping from Earth.”

“Right,” grated Crozier, all his laziness burned away in one of his terrific bursts of energy that few people ever saw. “But he won’t escape. Switch on the Prober attachment to view the interior of the globe.”

Wordlessly the girl did so, and the figure of a web-footed bird-man flashed on the screen, bent over a queer looking control board. It was almost as if he were conscious of being under observation, for his beaklike mouth parted in a snarling expression and his beady eyes glittered. He reached over and touched a stud in a row before him. A flash of blinding light obscured the screen, and Crozier’s little ship rocked mightily.

“Hart!” cried the girl desperately. “He’s firing at us with something.”

“Right,” said Crozier tersely. “I had hoped to take him alive, but I guess he’s too tough a customer.”

The dull globe came back into view on the screen. Rapidly Croziér computed distances and ratio of speeds. He suddenly swerved his vessel to one side and then back again. He threw his atomic power on full and flipped a switch. There was a crackling roar, a flash of bluish-white light which lit up all space outside, and the globe on the visi-screen seemed to explode in a glare of orange hell.

“My new electronic space canon,” Crozier explained to Mary’s strained face. “You helped me work on it. Well, that’s that. We must make sure and see that a warning is sent to the rest of the Venusians about the menace of the Wetlanders. Let’s go back and report to Superintendent Burns.”

The agent from the Institute was impatiently awaiting them when they reached the Wills house. Everything and everybody was the same as when Crozier had left a couple of hours previous, save that the corpse had been removed.

“Well?” snapped Burns. “Just what have you turned up? Whom am I to arrest?”

“Nobody,” said the special investigator, yawning. “Here’s your solution. In the first place, Sutton Wills discovered ziterbuk surface ores on Venus, easily carried in a haversack. No mining necessary. Probably he found them by accident; we shall never know about that. To remember the position he engraved a map on his forearm with invisible dye, drying insensitive to light.

“But he also knew that that island contained a city of scientific power, beyond anything ever imagined in other Venusian countries. He had no designs on that city, but he did want ziterbuk. For a long time he got the stuff easily enough, then one day one of the city’s inhabitants must have seen him.

“It is clear what happened. Wills knew his presence on the island would be misunderstood. To an Inhabitant of that island the ziterbuk ores were valueless. Wills’ presence there could only mean he was a spy, searching out the secrets to warn Venusian officials of war to come. Further, the Wetlanders have eyes able by nature to see through mists. This one must also have seen that map on Wills’ arm, invisible to our eyes. Wills knew that much.

“So he fled back to Earth and took what he thought were precautions. But suddenly things caught up on him. A Venusian Wetlander was sent to track him down. The queer creature succeeded.

“It saw him, I imagine, either clean through the walls or else through the chink in the window shutters. It fired its own deadly form of force through the only possible place—that quartz window behind the olipus plant. Quartz would permit the force to pass through without cracking. Wills couldn’t save himself. He probably died before he knew what was upon him, and so his plan and his life were destroyed.”

Burns remained silent, scratching his head. The Benson girl and her father were smiling in relief.

“My own line of research showed that the burn in the carpet could also have been made by a force fired through the quartz window,” Crozier resumed. “In fact, I knew that was the case from the beginning because the olipus plant’s top leaves were charred from the passage of such a force over the top of them. Outside, the quartz window was convenient to the veranda. Obviously, Miss Benton saw the Venusian, not a real bird. Unfortunately, I couldn’t capture the murderer alive. When you want the official evidence, Burns, they’re in my laboratory. You can find me either there, at the Black hat Restaurant, or at the Metrocast.”

“Yeah—thanks,” Burns said weakly.

He stood watching in sad admiration as Crozier turned to the door and caught Mary’s arm. She looked back once and winked a blue eye solemnly.

Back from the hall came a few badly sung bars of La Boheme.

SECRET OF THE MOON TREASURE

Why were these pallid moonweeds so important that cruel murder was necessary to recover them?

CHAPTER I

Death strikes twice

“Well, you don’t believe me, do you?”

Dr. Coratti was off on another of his tantrums. In fact, ever since he’d gotten back from man’s first trip, to the moon, the gray-haired, nervous inventor had been anything but a prize package.

“Now father, you mustn’t say such things. Of course we believe you,” said Beryl, his tall, dark, amazingly calm and collected daughter.

“Yes, father, we don’t doubt for a minute that you discovered a great secret on the moon.”

That was Lucy, his younger daughter. Lucy is blonde and pert, and besides she’s my wife, and I ought to know.

Dr. Coratti, however, was not mollified. He threw his napkin on the dinner table.

“And you, Curt Fowley,” he demanded, “what do you, as an attorney, think?”

I tried to be diplomatic. “Dad,” I said, “as long as it is a discovery on which you haven’t filed claim, there’s a possibility that the criminals you’re worrying about may steal it from you.”

“Steal, fiddlesticks!” Coratti snorted. “Nobody’s going to steal anything from me!” And he got up in a huff and strode from the room. Headed for his laboratory outside, we knew. The laboratory where none of us was welcome.

Well, Coratti didn’t show up the rest of the evening, so we three just sat around the lounge and watched a tele-play from New York; that is, when we were not wondering what the hell had got into the cantankerous inventor. The estate was not the sort of place to make one cheerful, either: old-fashioned, rambling, true enough, but there was too much gray paint on the buildings, too somber an overtone that hung over everything.

The laboratory was a large barn-like building, a kind of hangar for experimental and constructional purposes—there Coratti had built his rocket ship.

A river curled about the far end of broad acres.

The only inhabitants of the place, outside Dr. Coratti and Beryl, were the Butsons, manservant and housekeeper—a couple of hard-bitten old devils who had passed their golden wedding in service.

It was around ten-thirty when Lucy, who had been uneasy all evening, said she was going to find out what her old man was doing. In five minutes she was back, hurriedly, swinging the lounge door wide. Her cheeks were flushed, her eyes bright with alarm.

“Dad—in the laboratory!” she gasped out. “He’s dead! Dead…”

Beryl and I jumped up. I caught Lucy tightly.

“Wait a minute! Take it easy! He can’t be dead; it isn’t—”

“He is dead!” she shouted hysterically. “Lying there on the floor— Oh, Curt, it’s horrible…”

With my arm still about her we went outside. Beryl went ahead of us. She stood staring at Dr. Coratti’s sprawling form on the laboratory floor when Lucy and I came in.

“Yes,” Beryl said quietly. “He is dead.”

I still could not believe it. I tested the pulse, but there was not the slightest flicker; nor any respiration. I turned the doctor over gently and stared at his ashen face and fixed, staring eyes. His mouth was twisted into a sardonic grin, as though he had contemplated something grimly amusing as his last mortal act.

Thereafter I had my hands full. Lucy was utterly inconsolable, weeping and shuddering by turns. Coratti had understood her sensitive nature better than anyone else, and they had always been close. Beryl was different. The event had shocked her, it was true, but she was calm enough. While I tried to convince Lucy there was nothing we could do about it, Beryl went in and phoned for the doctor.

“Heart failure,” the medico said, when he’d finished his examination. “Not at all uncommon in a man of fifty-eight; happens suddenly. I’d say he had been undergoing tremendous strain of some sort… Well, I guess we all have these things to face. Good night.”

But the conviction of foul play persisted with me. I even went around the laboratory hangar outside to look for footprints, but of course there were none. When I got back to the hangar, Beryl had gone but Lucy was still there, seated on a chair, her tear-misted eyes gazing blankly in front of her.

“Well, did you find anything?” she asked in an absent voice.

“Find anything?” I pretended innocence. “Such as?!

“You went to look for signs of an attack, didn’t you?” she demanded, getting to her feet. “Didn’t you?” She caught my arm tightly.

I admitted it, and looked at her taut face. It was not grief-stricken now but set and hard.

“He was alone all evening,” Lucy went on. “Curt, it’s sheer nonsense to think that he died, just like that! Father was thin and nervous, yes; but he was wiry, used to strain and— Well, maybe he was right, after all. Maybe those criminals he worried about did steal his secret! Maybe they did kill him!”

I put my arm around her. “Take it easy, child. If something’s up, we’ll get to the bottom of it.”

Heart failure or murder, I wasn’t going to let my wife get hysterical. Particularly when Coratti’s corpse on a table, over which Beryl had temporarily thrown a sheet, stood out like a sore thumb.

So I tried to show concern and poked into this and that, not that it meant much to me, as I’m not much of a scientist. The hangar was stocked with endless jars of chemicals, machinery, electrical equipment, and at the far end there was even a botanical section. Lucy joined me at that point, and we stood looking in puzzled silence at a soil bed full of remarkably strange plants. Funny thing was, they were all dead.

“Queer,” Lucy observed, frowning. “I never knew Dad was interested in plants. Unless—unless he brought them back with him from the moon,” she added quickly. “That may be it.”

I looked at them closely. They looked as plants do when transplanted during hot sunshine. The soil around them was pretty loose.

“Your guess is as good as any,” I sighed. “Unattractive looking plants, too—rather like cactus. Don’t seem to be of much use.”

So that was that.

On the whole we passed a pretty bad night, but at least Lucy was calmer and more composed the following morning. I was prepared to give all the help I could to the funeral when an early phone call put a stop to my intentions. I was needed immediately in the city on legal business.

Ten minutes later I was in my car headed back to town. The law is a remorseless machine, and it kept me tied to a stuffy courtroom for more than three days before I was able to finish the case. I went to our city apartment to get my bag before heading out to the country again, when the telephone rang.

To my surprise Beryl’s voice came over the receiver—but it did not sound like the Beryl I knew. She was hurried, excited.

“Curt? Thank goodness I’ve got you at last. I’ve tried before—”

I interrupted her. “Anything happened? Lucy all right?”

“Yes, yes—she’s all right. Listen, Curt—this is urgent! I’ve just found something among Dad’s effects that explains that great secret he talked about. I don’t like being in the country here with Lucy and having this secret around. We might be attacked—criminals, I mean. Are you coming back or shall we drive in?”

“I’ll be right with you,” I said. “Meanwhile, hold tight.”

* * * *

It was an hour later that evening when I swept into the driveway of the old estate and pulled up with a shriek of brakes. I had only just got out of the car when I distinctly heard a revolver shot—and then another from somewhere in the rear of the old place. In another moment I was running under the trees along the shale path to the expanse of grounds at the rear.

I was just in time to see three heavily muffled figures go racing across the sweep of lawn in the starlight, to vanish in the direction of the hangar.

“Curt! Curt, is that you?”

I twirled around as I realized it was Beryl’s voice, full of anguish, half choking.

Running through the shadowy dark I found her at last, sprawled helplessly on the floor between the open French windows. She was trying to raise herself. I caught her in my arms, lifted her head and shoulders, and she coughed thickly. In the starlight I saw her light-colored dress was darkly stained across her left breast.

“Curt…listen. I haven’t much time.” She plucked at my sleeve with a quivering hand. “They shot me…twice. The secret…”

“What is the secret?” I panted. “Beryl—in God’s name—”

I raised her higher, and blood flecked her lips for a moment.

“The—the weeds…” She sighed; then with a tremor she relaxed and her head fell back.

I knelt there, too stupefied to move. Beryl was dead, shot by those damned—well, shot by whom?

I looked up sharply at a sudden blasting roar through the night; followed with my eyes a cream of sparks climbing into the darkened sky. Dr. Corattí’s rocket ship, obviously driven by the murderers of Beryl!

The killers had gone off into space in the only rocket ship known to Earthmen, and the secret of its motive power—as far as I knew—was locked in the dead brain of Dr. Coratti.

CHAPTER II

The Flying Horrors

It took me several seconds to gather my wits. Then I lifted Beryl’s dead body to the library divan and switched on the lights. There was a scene of infinite disorder. Chairs were overturned, rugs rumpled, papers scattered wholesale. It was obvious Beryl had made a desperate fight for her life.

After a while I got Butson and his wife to come in. The two caretakers seemed too appalled to speak when they saw Beryl’s corpse and the blood on her dress. And when they did, they couldn’t tell me anything.

“That’s a big help,” I snapped. “Well, where is my wife all this time?”

“She went out, Mr. Fowley, for a walk—about two hours ago, it’ll be, by now.”

So, naturally, that made me even more jittery.

Lucy had not returned by the time the police came. There was the coroner, one or two plainclothes men, and a shrewd-eyed little man who introduced himself as Inspector Davison. His questions brought forth nothing more than I had already learned. The coroner laconically observed that Beryl had died from bullet wounds through chest and stomach. After that he left, bag in hand.

By then I was all set to explode. I can stand just so much complacence, and then I blow up. I would have, in fact, if Lucy hadn’t come in just then through the open French windows.

She stood blinking, obviously dazzled by the light and confused by the presence of the police. I looked at her quickly. She was dressed in her fur coat and little hat, but she had rubber ankle boots on. They were stained to the tops with yellow mud, still moist.

“Curt—” She came over to me quickly. “Curt, what has happened here? What are these—”

She stopped, her hand going in horror to her throat as she caught sight of Beryl’s dead body still on the divan. She collapsed right there in my arms, and we had to spend about ten minutes bringing her round again.

I had to explain everything as gently as I could. She listened, taking it all in, and closed her eyes once or twice in horror.

The inspector got on the job then. “Where did you go, Mrs. Fowley? I’d like to know, if you don’t mind.”

“Why, I went for a walk by the river,” Lucy said. “I felt I wanted to clear up my mind a bit, after the funeral.” She stopped and thrust out her rubber-booted feet. “I suppose you want proof of what I say? Well, there it is. The river towpath is covered with yellow mud like this.”

Inspector Davison nodded slowly, his keen little eyes studying her face. For that matter, I was studying it too. Something had happened to Lucy since I had left her three days before. She seemed now to be laboring under a tremendous strain. Being accustomed to her every mood, I could sense it clearly.

Davison pondered a moment, then he turned away abruptly and signaled one of his men to accompany him. They went out of the room and started an investigation outside again.

“Lucy,” I whispered. “Lucy, dearest, what’s wrong? What’s happened to you since I saw you last? You’re different—so different!”

She looked at me directly then, and though her tongue again gave denials I saw terror—yes, terror—and with it a certain stubbornness in those blue eyes of hers.

“You’re being silly, Curt,” she said it rather sharply, getting to her feet. “What I want to know is what did Beryl find out that she was so anxious to tell you? When I left her she was reading. The minute my back was turned, she must have started snooping again.”

“Snooping? Oh, you mean going through your father’s papers and effects…”

I turned as the inspector came in again.

“Tell me, Mr. Fowley, have you any idea what those weeds are in the laboratory? Was your father a botanist, Mrs. Fowley?”

“We believe they are probably lunar plants,” I answered him quietly. “But what possíble connection could they have with the murder?”

“An investigation has many angles,” Davison said. “I’ll have a botanist here to look these plants over and classify them, if possible. In the meantime you will both stay on hand here. I shall leave men around the house on twenty-four hour duty.”

So again, that was that.

* * * *

Two nights after Beryl’s funeral things began with a vengeance! Lucy and I had gone to bed about midnight, and I must have fallen asleep immediately. But I was awakened suddenly by a strange rushing sound, accompanied by an unearthly wailing as from a dungeon of damned souls.

I stiffened, listening, awakening by degrees to awareness. There was not just a single cry but many of them—remote, unearthly. I sat up quickly and twisted around; then I got my second shock. Lucy had gone! I groped for the light switch, but before I found it I heard the dry leathery beat of giant wings momentarily against the great window of the bedroom.

Forgetting all about lights, I floundered out of bed and tore back the curtains. The night was a wild one, with a moon nearly at her last quarter riding the ragged deeps. It was an incredible sight I saw then. Some five or six things with mighty bat-like wings outspread—and bodies similar to those of an ant—paraded across my vision. Ants with bats’ wings! What the hell was this?

As I watched, they circled against the moon like something out of prehistoric times. They climbed up, flew down to the grounds, circled with their ungodly cries;

I snapped out of my trance and blundered for dressing gown and slippers, shouting Lucy’s name as I did so. There was no response. As I made for the door, I noticed her gown and slippers were absent too.

Then came a different sound—that of smashing glass and a sudden desperate scream, clearly Lucy’s. The noise seemed to come from the library downstairs. I went down the stairs like a madman, missed the bottom step and crashed my length in the hall. Up again in a flash I whipped up a medieval ax from the hall armory and charged into the library.

The light was full on, and I was paralyzed with shock for a second at what I saw. Lucy was fighting desperately with threshing arms and legs against the mighty pincered forelegs of a monstrosity that was now more antlike than ever. It had obviously crashed right through the glass of the French windows to make its attack.

In that second of horror I absorbed the things outlined. The mighty membranous wings, folded now like a cape, enormous eyes, pincered forelegs and powerfully jointed legs behind, leveled its armored body upward. It reared far above my wife, bending her slender body backward with spine-cracking force. Lucy gave a gasping scream and struggled with renewed desperation, screaming huskily.

I whirled my battle-ax then with blind fury, slashed clean through the leg that crushed around Lucy’s back. She sank senseless to the carpet, a watery ichor from the thing drenching her torn gown and nightdress. I struck again, and again, the ax blade flashing in each sweep.

I am pretty powerful and I worked to good effect, insane fury helping me plenty.—I caught the thing in a vital spot at last, struck it a blow in its underparts which sent it flapping in blind agony through the broken window. It rose unsteadily, sank down, then was caught by its hideous companions. They went sailing off into the ragged sky.

Drenched in sweat, I dropped my ax with a clatter and wheeled back into the room. I heard revolver shots as I did so. I was examining Lucy for injuries when two of the plainclothes men supposedly on guard burst in. One of them was named Lewis, I remembered;

“What in hell happened here?” he demanded, staring with wide eyes.

“We nearly got killed, that’s all,” I retorted, heaving Lucy’s collapsed weight into my arms. “Where the hell were you?”

“On the grounds, of course. We saw those things flying around, but we figured somebody would come out of the house to meet them. Then we heard the glass smash. Never reckoned one of the damned things had come in and—”

“All right, all right,” I growled. “Take a look around. That blasted thing half killed my wife.”

“But what were they?” Lewis scratched his head. “Looked like bats or something—Hello, what’s this?” He looked beyond the severed ant leg on the carpet and picked up a book.

I glanced at it. It was Jules Verne’s A Trip to the Moon, oddly enough.

“I dunno,” I grunted, shifting Lucy more securely in my grip. “Tell Butson and his wife to come up to the bedroom, will you? They’re around some place; I heard them as I came down here. Better have your men look around the grounds for some explanation for all this.”

“Yeah. You bet!”

With the help of the Butsons it took me ten minutes to get Lucy to her senses again. She wasn’t injured, thank heaven, beyond a few scratches and heavy bruises which bandages and ointment could take care of. She lay staring at me in vague wonder when she opened her eyes, then a look of appalled horror came to her face as she suddenly remembered.

“You’re all right, dearest,” I murmured thankfully, gripping her cold hands. “They’ve gone—whatever they were—”

“I didn’t even have a chance. I couldn’t sleep, so I went down to get a book—”

“Verne’s Trip to The Moon?” I put in briefly.

“Yes… I dropped it, I suppose. I heard what I thought was the wind rising—then the glass suddenly smashed in, and—”

“Wait!” I interrupted her quickly. “The curtains were not drawn and the light was on? The creatures could have seen you from the outside?”

“Yes, I suppose they could.”

“Hm-m. They must have had a reason for that attack, and I’ll find out what it is if I stay here forever!”

I thought for a moment, an odd idea chasing around my brain. Presently I asked her,

“What possessed you to read Verne’s To the Moon, anyway?”

Lucy shrugged. “Why not? It’s a good yarn—but my main reason was to pass the time in seeing how far Veme had anticipated Dad’s rocket-traveling secret.”

“But—but you don’t know your father’s secret of rocket travel.”

“What gave you that idea? Of course I know it! He told it to me and to Beryl when he discovered it—but he told us to let it go no further. So we did as he asked. Matter of fact, the duplicate plans are in the laboratory safe. Beryl came across them just after Dad was put in the mausoleum.”

That made me flush. “Holding out on me, huh?”

Lucy ignored that. “Why would you say they attacked me?” she asked irritably.

“I don’t know,” I answered slowly. “Those flying things were not of this world; I’m sure of that. Maybe they were Selenites.”

“Selenites!”

“I’m going to find out what I can,” I said briefly. I turned to Butson and his wife. “You two can go now, thanks. You’Il be safe enough while Fm gone, Lucy. I’ll be on the grounds within earshot, and I’ll see if anything unusual happens.”

She nodded and relaxed. I scrambled into a few clothes, a hat and overcoat, then went outside and caught up with the plainclothes men snooping around under the trees.

“Anything?” I asked Lewis.

“Nope—except for queer bird foot-marks where that thing landed near the French window. Nothing else.”

“The things came from the moon; I’ll swear to it,” I muttered. “They must be able to cross space somehow. I figured there might be somebody on the grounds directing them or something. We’ll keep on looking, anyway.”

“Okay. Maybe you’ve got something there.”

But it did not seem that I had. We wandered around for half an hour or more, flashing our torches at intervals. The estate covered a pretty wide area of ground, and it took us a considerable time to zigzag about. It was as we were slowly returning toward the house that Lewis caught my arm tightly. Immediately we all became still.

Through the thick undergrowth we could see a dim figure crouching down in a more open part of the grounds. The waning moonlight was quite inadequate to reveal him clearly—if it was a he. It had no shape, so heavily was it muffled up. The figure seemed to be on its knees, burrowing steadily into the earth, and using a torch very cautiously at intervals.

“On him!” rapped out Lewis suddenly—and we plunged forward.

But something happened. The unknown jumped up, whirled around, and fired something that sent a fine spray toward us. I caught a glimpse of the figure’s face—long, thin, pallid. Then it seemed as though the earth closed in on me from every side…

CHAPTER II

The Riddle Deepens

The next thing I knew, somebody was chafing my wrists. I stared dazedly upward in the reflected light of a torch, to see Lucy’s anxious face bending over mine. Behind her, less distinct, were Lewis and his men.

“Lucy!” I cried. “How did you get here? Ouch, my head!”

I got up dizzily, running my eye over her. She was fully dressed now, or appeared to be. Anyway, she had bundled on her fur coat, scarf and little hat.

Lewis said rather grimly, “She revived us, too.”

“What’s the meaning of this?” I asked her shortly. “I thought I left you in your room.”

“Sure you did—two and a half hours ago! I got worried at the lapse of time. I came to look for you, found you and these men out cold, so I rushed in the house to get some brandy and revive you.”

I looked at her steadily. I had noticed something peculiar. The flashlight shining into her face had failed to make the pupils of her eyes contract. They were wide, gaping pools of black, with a tiny little rim of blue around them.

“What are you staring at, Curt?” she asked suddenly.

“Your eyes. Looks as though you’re—drugged.”

“Oh, that! I took some sleeping tablets to settle my nerves, but they didn’t seem to have much effect—especially when I was worrying about you. But Curt, never mind me! What happened to you, and these men?”

“We were attacked, and somebody has got a mighty powerful scientific weapon with which to defend himself. It ejects a paralyzing fluid. It put us out like lights—” I gestured suddenly. “Let’s get inside. We can do no more out here until daylight. You boys sticking around out here?” I asked them.

“Yeah,” Lewis retorted. “Maybe we’ll find out what that guy was digging for.”

Lucy looked vaguely surprised at this last remark, but i caught her arm and led her into the house, back to the bedroom again. First thing I did was check up on the box containing the sleeping tablets. There were two short certainly. I distinctly remembered’ there had been half a dozen, because I’d intended buying more. Now there were only four.

“Curt, don’t you believe me?” Lucy asked quietly, watching me.

I turned to her sharply. She had pulled off her fur coat now, to reveal that she was still in her rent and torn night clothing.

“It’s getting so that I don’t know whom to believe!” I retorted. “I’ve no reason to doubt you—yet I felt I ought to check up. Beats me why two tablets of this strength haven’t even made you sleepy!”

“They have—now,” she said wearily throwing herself on the bed. “My fears for you kept me awake before— Curt! Curt, dearest!”

She gripped my arm and pulled me down to a sitting position on the bed.

“Please don’t keep looking at me like this, as though—as though you think I have something to do with all this. It’s as bad for me as it is for you. Just what are you thinking?”

“Just that whoever it was on the grounds is probably the murderer of your father,” I replied slowly.

Lucy looked at me steadily for a moment, then she gave a little sigh and relaxed. Her eyelids drooped, and in a moment she dropped into slumber.

Of course sleep is the easiest thing in the world to imitate, and had she wanted— Damn my suspicions! I got up, cursed myself for ever daring to suspect her at all.

I did not go back to bed. I finished dressing and spent the rest of the time until daylight seated in a chair, smoking and thinking.

* * * *

I could see from Lucy’s expression at breakfast that she resented my suspicions of the night, so I said little that would recall that matter to her mind.

Toward mid-morning we got a diversion, for Inspector Davison returned with a florid-faced, white-haired individual in immaculate attire, whom he introduced as Dr. Henry Stanson, an eminent botanist.

“Took me some time to locate the doctor,” the inspector explained. “We’ll go right down to the laboratory, if you don’t mind.”

I followed them leisurely, with Lucy looking after me rather wonderingly. In the lab I found Stanson on his knees, peering at the plants. Finally he yanked one out, jabbed a needle in the still moist root and extracted a quantity of sap. Getting up, he narrowed his eyes over globules of moisture that he tested in his portable equipment.

“What are they? New sort of dock leaves?” I asked interestedly.

The white head shook briefly. “This isn’t a plant that has grown on this world. It isn’t even a tropical one. In these days, they are all classified from pole to pole. This stuff”—he raised the glass phial—“is concentrated drug of some kind. A tremendously powerful sedative, I’d say. I guess bromides would be seltzer water by comparison.”

“Fatal?” Davison asked keenly.

Stanson mused. “Well, that depends. I can’t find out much from these few details. I’ll have to check over in my laboratory.”

“Inspector,” I said quietly, “would you object very much if I accompanied you and Dr. Stanson to his laboratory? I’d like to see what his tests reveal.”

He looked surprised. “Why no, there’s nothing against that. You evidently don’t think your wife will be in further danger, then? From flying monsters?” he asked grimly.

“Oh; so you know about them?” I demanded.

“My men told me everything when I arrived. Most interestíng sidelight. However, I think there is little chance of any danger during the daytime. We’ll be getting along to the car. Join us when you’re ready.”

I hurried back to Lucy. She gave me a rather chilly glance.

“I’ve got to go back to the city with the inspector,” I said briefly. “Just some routine questioning, you know. I’ll be back later.”

She got to her feet. “Curt, are you sure that is the reason you are going?”

“Eh? But of course—”

“Or is it to build up some filthy suspicion against me?” she blazed. “Do you think I’m blind, that I can’t see you suspect me of some rotten intrigue somewhere? You take the simplest little thing and twist it into a guilty motive to—”

“Lucy!” I caught her tightly. “Lucy, I never said anything yet to make you blow up like that! It’s your own conscience that’s doing it, not anything I’ve done! I’m simply following every lead I can to clear up this mess. Please understand that!”

“Then it’s not questioning you’re going for?”

“No,” I admitted quietly. “I’m going to get an analysis of those laboratory weeds… See you later.”

I left her with that, sat in morose silence between Stanson, and the inspector as we drove into town. Matter of fact, the thing that had propelled me on this errand had been the botanist’s reference to drugs. I was still haunted by the memory of Lucy’s eyes the previous night. And she was hiding something: her latest uncalled-for outburst made me reasonably sure of it. Pretty damnable business, to have to suspect one’s own wife!

* * * *

We lunched and then went to Stanson’s private laboratory at the Botanical Institute. He took about two hours making all his experiments, testing the sap on a white mouse from the adjoining experimental annex. At the end of it all, the inspector and I were still interested, but puzzled.

“Well, Doctor, how are we fixed?” Davison asked, his eye on the clock.

Stanson sighed. “I’ve got as far as I can. This sap, if we could only get it in large quantities, would present the medical profession with a most useful addition. It is a drug, as I said before, and reacts strongly on the nervous system according to the amount given.

“In extreme amounts it could kill. In other varying amounts, it might produce effects ranging from complete insensibility to pain, to a complete control over the nervous system. As some drugs can either benefit or kill—adrenalin, for example—so can this one, according to quantity.”

“Insensibility to pain, eh?” the inspector mused. “That wouldn’t be an addition to medical science. We’ve got drugs already that do that.”

“I know—that is only one of the effects, as I pointed out. The real usefulness would come in its ability to control the nervous system. If this drug were injected in given quantity into the bloodstream, a man could, say, control his nerves so accurately as to make his hair stand on end, move his eyes independently of one another, perspire or shiver at will, change the color of his eye pigment, alter his heartbeats—why, there’s no end to what he could do.”

“Hm-m,” the inspector muttered. “This is possibly the secret which was stolen from Dr. Coratti when he was murdered. Also, it is possible that Corattí brought the weeds originally from the moon.”

“I’m sure he did,” I said. “And it is possible that criminals would like to know where they could get more of these weeds. They could start a racket in medicine unparalleled in history, besides the things they could do with them themselves. They might even be able to change their appearance after a dose of the drug.”

“Quite possible,” admitted Stanson.

I said no more, for an astounding thought had stolen across my brain. Lucy had been drugged. Sleeping tablets? Quite possibly; but just as possibly—weed extract.

We had been attacked on the grounds and Lucy had revived us, stressing worry as to my whereabouts as her reason for being in the grounds at all. The indeterminable figure burrowing in the soil? Shapeless fur coat? Could Lucy have had the time to leave the bedroom after I’d left her? Sure—we’d wandered around for an hour and a half. But why would she have left the bedroom? And was it she, anyway…

“Something struck you?”

The inspector’s voice broke my meditations. I looked at Stanson.

“Suppose,” I said, “these plants were normal and strong. They could not give off their sap without its being extracted, could they?”

“Certainly they could. Look at the needles on the leaves. They would sting in the style of a common nettle. There are two possible reasons why these plants died—one, because they failed to take root property; or else because so much sap was taken out of them by somebody. The latter theory seems the more likely.”

“Well, thanks a lot,” the inspector said finally. “We’ve got to be getting along. Send in your account to headquarters, will you, Doctor? You satisfied, Mr. Fowley?”

“I guess so,” I nodded. “Doesn’t seem we’ve gotten very far, though.”

I think I threw Inspector Davison off the scent there. I wanted to reason this out for myself, before getting Lucy in a possible jam. So I effected an air of bewilderment over the whole proceedings as Davison accompanied me in the car back to the Coratti estate. He saw me inside and then departed about his business.

I walked into the lounge, slapping the newspaper I’d bought in town carelessly against my leg. Lucy tossed down her book and eyed me levelly.

“Well, did they ask you many questions?”

“I found out about the plants, anyway,” I retorted. “They’re able to produce change in a human body. For instance, you or I could change into something else under the influence of their sap.”

“So that’s what you’re thinking!” she said bitterly. “You think I drugged myself with plant sap, eh? That’s what you thought last night, too! You believe it was I who attacked you in the grounds!”

“Perhaps you’ve some idea who else it could have been?” I demanded. “Think how all this looks to me! Why don’t you come out into the open and explain things before I find them out for myself?”

“I suppose,” she asked dryly, “I shot Beryl, too.”

“I know you didn’t. I saw other people do that— But you do know something!” I caught her shoulders, forced her to her feet. “You little fool, Lucy, can’t you remember for a minute that I’m your husband, that I’m willing to go through anything to help you if need be?”

Her lips set. “I don’t want your help, Curt—and I resent your beastly suspicions. Anyway, the whole thing’s idiotic. You’re trying to suggest that under the influence of drug I can change myself like—like a chameleon…”

“Maybe. The figure that attacked could have been you—and so could its face, for that matter.”

“Oh, you’re impossible!”

She swung away, flushing, and stood gazing out of the window at the man standing idly about the grounds. I hesitated, about to say something to her. Then I shrugged and snatched up the paper I’d brought, and glanced through it for the first time.

The headlines smote me immediately:

MYSTERY CRIME RING AT WORK

I read the column with a frown. Though it was possibly miles apart from the mystery in which I was involved, it had nevertheless a reminiscent scientific tang about it. At my silence Lucy turned, came over and read over my shoulder. She was interested enough to repeat the column in a low voice.

The rapid development of a new criminal organization is causing police much concern. There are distinct evidences of a racket being waged against big industrialists. By some curious process of an undoubtedly scientific nature, the criminal behind the activity is able to learn the innermost secrets of big industries, which he then sells to commercial rivals.

Such a system is bound in time to undermine several big firms whose names are household words in this country. As yet the authorities cannot understand how the criminal is able to learn secrets that are inside four walls, or how he is able to find out what takes place at secret board meetings. A new style of radio detection is suspected, but has yet to be proved.

“So,” I murmured, “we’re not the only folks with a mystery!”

My attempt to be genial was lost on Lucy. She read the column again to herself, compressed her lips.

“What’s the matter? Know something about it?” I asked her bluntly.

“Of course not. I was just thinking that the criminals who shot Beryl and who possibly murdered father might be behind this.”

“Those killers went off into space,” I reminded her briefly. “And a ship like that could not return to any part of Earth without being noticed.”

“But—why should they be the only criminals?” Lucy demanded. “The ones that shot Beryl may have been only a section of a larger gang. The other members are possibly the ones who are doing this scientific work of learning secrets; the ones who probably killed father.

“One of them might even have been the person who attacked you in the grounds last night. Remember, he had a paralyzing gun, you said. That proves he was at least a scientist.”

“Yeah—that’s right,” I admitted slowly. I pondered it for a moment, then I made up my mind.

“Lucy, it seems to me that we can never know the truth about all this until we know why those crooks rushed off into space. It is pretty certain that they headed for the moon, and we can only know the answer by going to the moon ourselves!”

“We haven’t a space machine,” Lucy said quickly.

“We can have one. You said yourself there are duplicate plans in the lab.”

She looked startled for a moment. “Why yes, but— Well, how do you even propose to start? Think of the materials we’ll need.”

“Your dad managed it; so can we. We’re not short of money, and I think ít’s a good way to get things moving. We may stick here forever otherwise.”

I turned and strode for the door, but to my surprise Lucy caught my arm. The frozen coldness seemed to have gone out of her face. Instead she had become appealing, desperately appealing. It takes a lot of purpose to refuse a woman when they put on an act.

“Curt, I don’t think we should waste time and money doing this. It will take too long, and it can’t achieve any good purpose. Don’t forget the curse that flying to the moon brought to this house, and—”

“Lucy,” I said, “I am ordinarily a patient man. But right now, I crave action!”

I thrust her aside and strode across to the laboratory. The plans were there, sure enough, and the formula for the fuel; but I realized I was not engineer enough to understand them. All I could do was send them to an engineering firm and have them deliver the finished parts in sections. I rang up Inspector Davison and told him of my idea—that it would be better to go after the crooks than wait for them to turn up. He agreed and that was that.

That Lucy did not like any part of the idea I could see full well, though she did not refer to it again. In fact, it was her utter silence that showed me her displeasure so clearly. We sat like a couple of deaf mutes after dinner that evening.

But the voice of a newscaster snapped us to attention quick enough.

“Reports are coming in from various sections of the country about strange bird life which has appeared in both urban and rural districts.”

The teleplate revealed unmistakable shots of the giant monsters that had attacked Lucy the previous night.

“The birds resemble pterodactyls, prehistoric flying reptiles. Scientists are going to investigate in an effort to classify the creatures. They consider it possible that these birds may have escaped from some corner of the globe which has thus far escaped exploration.”

“So they’re still around!” I breathed glancing at Lucy’s drawn white face. “Wonder what in heck they’re looking for? We’ve got to keep our eyes peeled.”

She nodded slowly, but whatever she was going to say was cut short by the newscaster’s next words.

“As already announced in earlier bulletins, a new criminal organization has been uncovered in this country. Further investigation has shown that radio devices, at first suspected to be the criminals’ means of learning guarded commercial secrets, are not responsible! In rooms especially guarded and spotted with radio detectors, secrets have still been learned. Meanwhile, the investigation is continuing.”

I switched the set off. “More I think of this, the more I think you’re right, Lucy,” I muttered. “About the crooks being responsible, I mean. Is it possible that the great secret your dad found is this very one the criminals are using?”

“Possibly,” Lucy frowned. “But I still can’t see why you’re sticking your neck out! Haven’t we had enough grief already?”

CHAPTER IV

Space Ship Return

Altogether it was tough going thereafter. Nothing seemed to get things going, and my efforts to get Inspector Davison to let us return to town were unavailing.

All I could obtain was permission to go with a plainclothes escort into town, so that I could keep in touch with my legal affairs. This enabled me to become more friendly with Inspector Davison, also. But Davison still withheld permission for Lucy and me to leave the Coratti residence.

“Can’t be done, Fowley,” he said seriously, as I tackled him in his city office. “This case is unique, and you know enough of the law yourself to realize that suspects in a murder which involves scientific implications must be confined to the scene of the murder for a period of six months.

“If nothing happens by then and no culprit is found—if the rocket ship does not return to Earth, that is—you are automatically adjudged innocent, and your wife too. But by then you may have gotten your own space machine finished, and we can do something.”

I nodded resignedly. “Well, there it is. Have you got any leads yet?”

“Not many,” he sighed. “It’s so complex. Your wife is attacked by giant birds; you and my men are attacked by a person with scientific weapons—weapon, anyway. Now I’m inclined to think that there may be a connection between the mystery at the residence and the crime ring that is operating at the moment.”

“So am I,” I said slowly. “I believe that it might be the secret Dr. Coratti discovered, and which was stolen from him after his death.”

“You do?” Davison looked at me keenly. “Do you believe Dr. Corattí died from heart failure?”

“That’s what the medico said,” I answered him steadily.

“Hm-m—If this is Corattí’s secret—this power to look into secret meetings through solid walls—how is it that while they were about it, the criminals only stole that secret, yet left behind the plans for a spaceship—plans which you are now using?”

“Plenty of reasons for that,” I said. “The art of probing through walls may not have been in a written plan, nor might the plan have been in the laboratory safe, if there even was such a plan. Again, the criminals did not need the constructional designs of a spaceship. They had one already designed—and used it!”

“Hm-m—I see your point. Well, guess the only answer is to fly to the moon, after all. Any progress yet?”

I nodded. “I sent in the plans a week ago—and got the first consignment by freight yesterday. I’m going to spend the weekend putting parts together.”

“Good! Sooner you finish the job, the better I’ll like it.”

I left him soon after that. When I got back to the country house Lucy had nothing of moment to report, but at dinner she rather surprised me.

“You mean to go ahead with this insane idea of building a second rocket ship, I suppose?”

“Naturally. One consignment’s here already, isn’t it?”

“Two!” she retorted. “Some electrical machinery was delivered this afternoon. I had the men throw the crates in the hangar.”

“For the daughter of the man who invented space travel, that was damned considerate of you,” I commented dryly.

“It isn’t that—it’s just that I think you’re making a fool of yourself. Then there’s the money involved. And even if you finish the darned ship and get to the moon, how do you know what to look for?”

I smiled grimly. “I’m going to look for weeds.”

“Weeds!” Her blue eyes sharpened.

“Like those in the laboratory,” I went on slowly. “Beryl’s last words to me were something about weeds. We know they came from the moon—and since the crooks went there too, it all adds up. They went to the moon to get the weeds! What the weeds signify, I can find out when I reach there. Understand?”

That same evening I unpacked the crates, and during the next two days—Saturday and Sunday—I worked eighteen hours apiece, welding the plates together with the laboratory’s equipment, gradually getting some sort of shape into the cylindrical object in the hangar cradle.

It was not difficult. The engineers had returned the sectional plans for me to work with. Hardest part was working alone: Lucy did not raise a finger to help me.

But on that Sunday evening, when I was just about all in, Lucy came into the hangar slowly and estimated my progress. I saw her mouth tighten a little.

“Well, don’t you like it?” I asked her bluntly.

“Seems I’ve no say in the matter!”

But nonetheless she went around the section of work I had completed, surveyed the electrical engines, then her gaze wandered to the shelves of chemicals. I thought nothing of that—then. At last she shrugged.

“At least it keeps you out of the house,” she said sourly. “We’re all washed up, Curt, and when we get out of this mess I’m seeing my lawyer about a divorce.”

“Because I’m trying to find out who killed your father and sister, eh?” I asked bitterly. “Hell, that’s gratitude for you!”

“You’re not trying to solve anything!” she blazed back at me. “You are only trying to pin something on me to satisfy your infernal distrust! I never thought you could be such a beast!” And the venom with which she said it made me jump for a moment.

Then she was gone, leaving me scratching my head. I’m telling you, the man who sticks his head out nowadays is a sucker.

* * * *

When I went into the house an hour later, dog-tired, I found Lucy had gone to bed. I moodily ate the cold supper Butson had left for me, then went upstairs myself. During the day Lucy had seen fit to widen the gap between our twin beds, so that O was now several feet from her. She was sleeping deeply, or else simulating it to avoid conversation.

I got to bed in sullen fury, but I couldn’t keep up the bitterness for long, for my hard work had made me like lead. I must have gone to sleep almost instantly, to be literally shot out of slumber some hours later by something damned close to pandemonium.

I awoke to the roaring and exploding of a giant gun—or so it seemed at first. Then I saw wild and wavering lights flashing through the window. I stumbled out of bed half blind and stared outside. There was no moon, but I was in time to see a monstrous vessel at the end of its journey, cushioning down to the ground on its underjets.

The rocket ship had returned!

“Lucy!” I shouted hoarsely, swinging around and slamming on the light. “Lucy, the rocket’s—”

I stopped dead. Her bed was empty and her clothes had vanished. Confused, I went back to the window, stared out as I scrambled into my pants.

Suddenly I wondered why there was not more action from the boys around the grounds. There was only a momentary blaze of revolvers and then a surprising silence. I frowned, cursed the fact my pants legs were twisted and were holding me up. Savagely I straightened them, grabbed my coat and dashed downstairs. I heard Butson and his wife shouting inquiry as I went.

I raced into the grounds and then brought up sharp, falling back before a sudden monstrous concussion. It hit me like an earthquake, and my dazzled eyes beheld the whole mass of the hangar laboratory going sky-high in one terrible explosion. Flat to the earth I went, my ears ringing; I got up finally to behold a devastating, crackling blaze roaring into the sky, and silhouetted against it were four figures—three men, and a girl, undoubtedly Lucy.

“…mercury fulminate!” she was shouting. “I blew it up, I tell you! I—”

“Step on it!” one of the men shouted, and Lucy started to heave forward with them around her.

“Lucy!” I shrieked, leaping up and racing across to them. “Lucy, what’s happened? What’s—”

I got no further than that, for a mist shot suddenly from the air from the nearest man. Part of it missed me, but its inhalation brought me crashing to the ground, there to lie perfectly conscious but unable to move my muscles properly. It was a ghastly sensation chained there to the earth, with my nerves jumping like hell and my eyes following Lucy as she went into the darkness with the men.

Was she going deliberately—or being forced? That was what got me. She had admitted blowing up the hangar with mercury fulminate—and with it my half-made spaceship. Then it was I recalled her visit to the hangar and her glance around the shelves. So she had planned to do this thing—planned it to upset my efforts!

I made a mighty effort to break the paralytic spell and failed again. Then I lay still and watched with frozen horror as, through the light of the fire, I saw monstrous antlike birds sweeping down with demoniacal speed, giant wings spread. They missed me—or else took me for dead, just as they ignored the plainclothes men scattered prone about the grounds, obviously victims of the killer’s paralyzing guns.

I saw the birds settle finally at the ship’s open airlock. Their wings folded like giant capes as they waddled inside the ship. Six of them went in one after the other, and came out again with their mighty beaks filled with dead leaves! No—not leaves; weeds! Limp masses of moon-weed! There was definite intelligent purpose in the way they worked.

They gathered up all the weeds they could from inside the ship—and there seemed to be a bushel of them; then they took them over and dropped them in the blaze of the laboratory fire, which was dying down into a smoldering glare.

Evidently satisfied, the birds took to the air again and swept out of sight. I did not need to guess they were following Lucy once more. That settled it for me: I had to break free! I strained and sweated and struggled, and at last felt life coming back into my limbs. I had missed the full impact, anyway.

I got to my feet at last, stumbled to the ship and stared inside it. Firelight through the portholes showed that no weeds remained, but the floor was slippery with crushed sap.

Why the systematic destruction of the weeds? I could not stop to think it out then. Right now Lucy was my sole concern.

Off I went again, stumbling through the undergrowth of the estate, following the direction the birds had taken. I lost sight of them very rapidly but I went on just the same, until I found the trail ended beyond the boundaries of the estate and I was out on the river towpath.

I did not call for fear of giving my presence away, and I’d no wish for a second shot of that paralyzing fluid. Instead I struck matches and peered at the yellow mud on the towpath. A recollection of Lucy’s stained boots on the night of Beryl’s murder returned to me. Lucy had spoken the truth then.

There were clear imprints of men’s boots and Lucy’s shoes. Sick with anxiety for what might happen, though the lunar birds were still not in sight, I tracked the footprints until they brought me to a high bank of the river, and beyond it an old boathouse used only in the summertime. There was no sound beyond gurgling water.

I hesitated, then went down to the boathouse. Once I got to it, I froze into attention at the sound of a voice kept pretty low but nonetheless audible.

“Whether you die or not is of no consequence to us, so get that straight, sweetheart! We can easily chuck you in the river when we’re through, if you don’t come across. If you’re sensible you’ll speak.”

My skin prickled with mounting anger. Yet I had a vague relief too. Lucy was not associated with these mystery men, then: it had only looked that way. Probably they’d had a gun in her back to stop her calling out. Else she’d purposely kept quiet to save anything happening to me.

I crept closer, but I could not get all the conversation because of the noise the river water was making.

“…because of ants…” I heard that clearly and puzzled over it.

“And what did we get?” the voice went on bitterly. “We got a collection of damned weeds! Sure, they’ll be useful, but it wasn’t what we wanted. Your father had a different secret besides weeds. He knew how to learn secrets without using radio means. We went to the moon to get it and found we’d been tricked, see? We found weeds instead.

“We tapped the wires, heard your sister telling your husband over the phone that she’d found the secret we were looking for—only when we got it from her, it proved to be the wrong secret. But you know the secret we want—so we came back to get it. And you’d better act quick! You know as well as we do that those damned Selenites are here on Earth to avenge the theft of their secrets. So—spill it!”

A lot of things fitted into place in my mind at hearing those words. I edged closer and suddenly caught the pale yellow of a light streaming down a cracked board. I glued my eye to it, and I got a bad shock at what I saw.

The three men were standing in the light of a candle stump—all men whom I could not recognize with their stubbly merciless faces. They looked what they were—space-traveling renegades, with the appalling strain of the void still reflected on their ugly features. In the center of them was Lucy, bound with boat rope to a rickety chair. I could see her as she struggled vainly to free herself, looking up with terrified eyes.

“Well?” demanded the speaker savagely; and I noticed he was smoking. He waited a second or two, then blew the ash from his cigarette and eyed the glowing end thoughtfully. “You got nice eyes—” he murmured significantly.

“How can I speak when I don’t know anything!” Lucy screamed frantically. “I’ve told you over and over! I don’t know the secret you want! I—”

For answer the speaker caught her thick hair and forced her head back-ward. I saw his cigarette come close.

“You asked for it,” he muttered.

Realizing what he meant, I drew back my fist and drove it with blind fury into the rotten boarding. Then, just as my blow fell and sent blazing pain through my knuckles, I heard the whirring of mighty wings and the stench of reptilian flesh.

Like so many projectiles, three Selenite birds swept suddenly from the heights and slammed with terrific force clean into the roof of the place. I never saw anything like it. Armor-plated, sword-beaked, they went through like bullets.

From inside the boathouse came a desperate scream, and I distinctly saw one of the men go down with a mighty beak impaled right through his body. The candle vanished; mad commotion broke out. I made use of it and slammed my shoulder again and again into the rotten woodwork. It gave at last. I stumbled into the midst of slashing beaks and leathery wings. A pincered foreleg just missed me as I groped my way along.

I found Lucy at last, struggling to get free. My penknife finished the job; and hanging onto her tightly, I yanked her free of the melée, half dragged her up the bank to safety. Back to us floated the sound of men dying horribly under the onslaught of the appalling moon-birds.

“Lucy, you all right?” I gripped her tightly, anxiously.

“Yes—yes, I’m all right. Only bruises. Thank God you came when you did—”

“That secret,” I broke in, as I hurried her away through the dark from the hellish spot. “What did they want?”

“I don’t know,” she panted. “I told them that, but they wouldn’t believe it I think that man was going to blind me with his cigarette… They’re fiends Curt—desperate fiends, blind to everything because the thing they wanted is still beyond them. I guess they chose the boathouse as the safest, nearest place to get to work on me.”

“Guess they won’t anymore,” I said grimly. “The birds got ’em for keeps. But Lucy, what is—”

I stopped suddenly. Reaction to the ordeal had caught up with her, and she slumped to the ground and lay motionless. I picked her up and staggered through mud and field back to the house. I was met by the recovered plainclothes men.

“What happened?” Lewis demanded. “What’s been going on?”

I told him in sections as I carried Lucy into the house and up to her room. He stood scratching his head and he gazed at her limp figure.

“Can you beat it? We wait all this time for the rocket to come back, then the guys in it put us to sleep with paralyzing guns. Same way as that other guy did. What the hell was your wife doing down there at the hangar fully dressed, just when those men came?”

“I don’t know and I don’t care, so long as I’ve got her out of their clutches!” I retorted. “But I’ve got one or two ideas to talk over with the inspector. Get him on the phone, will you—and tell him to have some men take a look at the boathouse too. The Butsons are around the house somewhere—send them up here. I’ve got o bring my wife around.”

“Okay.”

In ten minutes, with the Butsons’ help, I’d made Lucy as comfortable as possible, patched up her bruises.” A little brandy accomplished the rest.

CHAPTER V

Ultrasonics

Lucy was completely conscious by the time Inspector Davison arrived. He nodded to me, then looked at her with a frown.

“What’s all this?” he demanded. “My men outside said something about an attack, a fire—”

I gave him the details as quickly as I could, as Lucy lay there listening.

“How did it happen, Mrs. Fowley, that you were at the laboratory at the very moment those men landed back here?” the inspector snapped.

“Coincidence,” Lucy said quietly. “I didn’t plan it to happen that way, if that’s what you think. I’d blown up the lab when I found they were outside. They asked me what I’d done, so I told them I’d done it with mercury fulminate. They said I’d done it to stop them examining the laboratory. Then they pushed a gun in my back and made me keep quiet.”

“Why did you blow up the laboratory?” Davison asked. “Answer me that.”

“I—I did it to save my husband from getting into danger. I know from what my father told me how space travel can drive a man to madness—and Curt was so dead set on flying to the moon, I considered it my duty to stop him by force. He wouldn’t listen to reason, you see.”

“These men tried to torture you into revealing a secret,” the inspector went on. “What was it? Or do you mean you do not know?”

“I don’t know,” Lucy answered wearily. “I know of it, but nothing about it. All I know the newspapers told me—about seeing through walls. These men thought they were getting the secret from Beryl, but all they got was weeds. So they returned and tried to get it out of me.”

“And the flying horrors are from the moon,” Davison mused. “We can see now, from what you say, Fowley, that they are trying to destroy everybody who has stolen stuff from the moon. They destroyed these criminals because they had brought back weeds from the moon. It is possible they destroyed Dr. Coratti, too. Beryl Coratti died by a bullet, and they tried to get you, Mrs. Fowley, because you are a daughter of Dr. Coratti’s.”

Lucy nodded tiredly. “Guess that’s right.”

“Okay!” Davison perked up a bit. “You get yourself well again, Mrs. Fowley, and leave the rest to us. I’ll see my men keep you safe. I’ve doubled the guard now.”

He motioned to me as Lucy closed her eyes and relaxed. I followed him down to the library. Daylight was peeping through the clouds.

“Fowley,” he said, “do you think—man to man—your wife is telling the truth?”

“I don’t know,” I answered him slowly. “I believe that she blew up the laboratory because she knew that if I went out into space, I would find out a secret which she is trying desperately to conceal. I don’t know what it is, but we’ll find it. Right now, I’ve one or two ideas to put forward.”

“Good! We could do with some original suggestions.”

“Consider this one, then. We were attacked on the grounds by somebody who used a paralyzing gun. In this later attack tonight, paralyzing guns were again used, but by men who had just come back from space! Doesn’t that prove that they alone are not the brains behind this whole set-up?

“It is the one with the first gun, who has been on Earth all the time that we’ve got to locate. He—or she, for it might be either—is probably the master mind.”

Davison said, “I see your point. And from the style of the gun, it is obviously somebody scientific. But how do we start? Those men who tried to torture your wife are out of the picture—dead, mangled to mincemeat. I looked in the boathouse with my men on the way up here… Ghastly sight!

“The only one who still had recognizable features was Joe Calvis, I’d say, a one-time racketeer who escaped prison and was never caught. Well, I don’t see how it all adds up.”

“Some things add up,” I said grimly. “We know that the theft of commercial secrets is somehow connected with this business—and we know Dr. Coratti had a method for getting secrets which he discovered on the moon.

“It is possible that the man who brought about Coratti’s death—or the woman—obtained that secret, and so forestalled the other crooks, Joe Calvis and friends. They, tapping phone wires, thought Beryl had the secret. Maybe she had; but either way, she knew about the weeds as well, and Calvis took that to be the secret.

“Therefore, it is this unknown that attacked us on the first night who caused the death of Coratti. That is the person we want!”

“And you think your wife may know who this person is?” the inspector asked shrewdly.

“It’s possible,” I admitted. Then I went on seriously, “We are dealing with a clever scientist—so we’ve got to be a bit cleverer. Did it ever occur to you, Inspector, that these Selenite things resemble ants?”

“Yeah—so they do.” He looked surprised. “So what? Don’t we know from astronomical data that a Selenite just couldn’t exist on the moon’s harsh, airless surface? Therefore they must come from inside the moon, where there might be air. And they would likely as not look like an ant, since the moon’s interior is pretty much like an anthill on a large scale?”

“Exactly—and therefore, any secret of theirs would like as not be antlike in principle! I heard a reference to ants at the boathouse when those devils had my wife, and from it I gathered enough to think that ants are in this somewhere—earthly ants. Remember, the person who attacked me and your boys that first night was burrowing for something. Could it have been—ants?”

“Well, from what Lewis told me, the guy certainly wasn’t planting radishes,” Davison mused. “Guess we can settle it best by looking at the spot again. Though I don’t see the connection, even now.”

“We may later,” I said. “We know precious little about the real capabilities of an ant. Corattí may have found something out about them. Won’t hurt to investigate.”

Out he went into the fast-waxing daylight to check over the spot. It had been examined before, of course, but with no particular result, since nothing special except footprints had been looked for—and those had been rubbed out. But now, as we prodded around with sticks, we unearthed a veritable anthill. Thousands of the busy little beggars were racing about in all directions on their interminable errands.

The inspector glanced at me grimly. “Guess your hunch was right, Fowley! Do you stop there, or are there more ideas?”

“You bet there are! We’ve got to drag our unknown enemy into the open, since we can’t find out where he is. Ants are highly intelligent, as we know: in their limited sphere they possess the gift of reason, which is supposed to be the prerogative of homo sapiens.”

“Skip the lecture hall and get to cases. They’re intelligent. “Ríght! So what?”

“Suppose,” I said slowly, “they learn the secrets from inside four walls, and hand them on to the criminal?”

He choked. “Huh? Ridiculous, man! Keep your feet on the ground, for God’s sake!”

“I am, though I admit I put that rather badly. Well, I don’t know how these ants do it, but I’m becoming damned sure that they do! And we can find out, too!”

“Well?” He was looking keen again.

“Can you arrange it so that the news of a very big secret meeting of industrialists is given out? Say they are to examine secret plans—say anything, as long as you bait the criminal. Broadcast it far and wide. Can you arrange it?”

“I guess so. What happens then?”

“The meeting takes place, plans are discussed, shown around, secret documents are handed out for reading—all the trimmings. The meeting doesn’t actually signify anything, but it will look to the outer world like the real thing. You will be at that meeting and so will I, if you’ll allow me. When we’re behind locked doors, we’ll see what is happening, and I’ll gamble my soul that there will be ants in the room somewhere.”

Davison rubbed his jaw. “Maybe—but it still sounds impossible to me.”

“That’s the point!” I exclaimed. “It is so damned clever and impossible that it has everybody fooled. Well, we’re going to find out.”

“And suppose there are ants? How do we get to the culprit?”

“Science again,” I grinned. “Ever hear of the Sonagraf?”

“Yeah—ultrasonic detector. We’ve one at the police department.”

“Then you’ll know it can detect sounds beyond audible range, such as the scrape of a match on a box fifty miles away, the crawling of a distant snail, the distinct rapid-fire movement of insect feet. You know that it can blanket every normal sound and detect only the ultrasonic ones beyond audible range?”

“Heck, yes!” Davison looked at me, startled. “I get it! You figure we can get the apparatus tuned to the feet of the ants—follow them and see where they take us?”

I nodded. “Right!”

“Right it is!” he cried. “I’m going back to headquarters right now and make the arrangements. I’ll be back for you the moment I’m all set.”

* * * *

In the two days that followed, the inspector did not communicate, but the media gave me enough to know he was on the job. In the news bulletins, Lucy and I heard of new thefts of secrets from industrialists—and also the announcement of a special secret conference of leading industrialists, to be held with every possible ‘precaution.’ It was a masterly bait for a secret-grabbing scientist.

I could not judge Lucy’s reaction to the announcement because, since her ordeal at the boathouse, she seemed listless and disinclined to discuss the matter any further. Frankly I was worried about her. She looked as though mental worry was causing her far more anguish than any physical ailment. In fact, physically she was okay again.

I did not question her because I knew I’d get nowhere, and I arranged with Inspector Davison that he should say he wanted me for questioning again, when he finally arrived to collect me for the secret conference.

Lucy smiled faintly when I told her, said she would be safe enough with so many men on guard. So off I went.

On the way to town the inspector gave me all the details. The conference was all set. Three ultrasonic mobile units were in plain vans outside the building, their detectors geared to the sound vibration of the world of the little.

Since every sound is different, even in ultrasonics, it was no more difficult for the crews to tune in on the distinctive noise of an ant’s feet than for a radio to tune in a given station. All other sounds were wiped out by reason of their vastly different wavelengths and the insulated interior of the mobile unit vans.

Altogether, there was something rather fascinating about this excursion into the world of the diminutive.

The conference room was on the ground floor of one of New York’s largest administration buildings. Inspector Davison had chosen a conspicuous, well-known place in order to aid the criminal mastermind, and the conference was on a ground floor for the convenience of the detector vans.

At the appointed time we were all present—industrialists, the inspector, and myself. Numberless plans and official data and documents were scattered around. I urged Davison to take special note of what the plans were about, so we could recognize them again if we saw them at any time in some other place.

All doors and windows were locked, and the conference began. It signified nothing, but as it proceeded the inspector and I went about the room. Barred doors and windows mean nothing to an ant, anyway… Then suddenly I found something. A motionless ant was poised on the window ledge, looking at the conference table.

Davison’s eyes widened unbelievingly as he gazed at it. Then he nodded, and we resumed the search. Altogether we located six of the insects, at different vantage points—overhead, on the level, at a distance.

The first part of our problem was solved…

The conference broke up thereafter, and we watched the ants gather into a body and pass through the room ventilator to the outside. In the open they were capable of detection. Down we raced to the mobile units and jumped into the first van. The engineers were tensed over their instruments, watching the detectors for direction and giving brief orders to the driver through signal phone.

So began the weirdest trip I have ever known, following scurrying ants—all six of them keeping together, fortunately—through the city in a soundproof van. Not another sound penetrated, except the distinctive tap, tap, scrape, scrape of the ants’ busy little feet.

At times we almost lost them in the detectors; then again we caught up. The journey took us through the back streets of the city and finally out toward open country. I gave a frown as we went on. It was slow going, a crawl—but we were definitely going back toward the Corattí estate! Again I wondered if my original guess about Lucy was right. Surely she was not the guilty genius…”

“It was evening, a thick misty evening, when we lost the sounds completely. Our vans stopped and we all piled out into the mist and gazed around. I recognized the spot after a while. We were about a mile from the estate and half a mile from the river. In fact, we could hear it gurgling in the growing night.

“They went due north, chief—then they must have gone underground, since the sounds stopped,” one of the technicians said.

“Due north? Okay, let’s go!”

“We pulled out flashlights and proceeded through the clumpy grass. We spent plenty of time searching, too—probably an hour and a half, before we came across an almost covered vent that was possibly part of an old sewer system emptying into the river. But it had doors on it now—comparatively new ones, they seemed—and what was more, dried grass was glued onto them to form a perfect camouflage.

Normally, I doubt if anyone could have found the place in ten years.

“Locked,” one of the men said, pushing against the doors.

“Wait!” I said quickly, as Inspector Davison raised his gun to fire at the locks. “Wait a minute! Douse your torch a moment. Isn’t that a crack of light?”

It was—but it was only a thin fragment, where our hands had torn away parts of the false grass and the wood had warped with incessant river damp.

The inspector peered inside, and a very strange spectacle we beheld.

There was a secret laboratory, not very brightly lit. The hum of a dynamo suggested the river was being used for power. But the devil of it was, we could not see our quarry even now—only the shadow! On the wall of the laboratory an indeterminate shape was busy with something, cast in shapeless silhouette.

Then suddenly everything was dark, and from an angle we could not see there sprang a beam like that from a motion picture projector—except that the beam had a distinct violet tint. Upon a screen near the wall there appeared a ‘still’—a slide, as it seemed—of a plan, perfectly photographed.

“It’s one of those plans from the conference!” Davison breathed incredulously. “What kind of devil’s witchcraft is this?”

“I’m more interested in finding out who is in there,” I said slowly. “And I believe I can. Listen, Inspector, will you trust me to go back to the house?”

“To find out if it’s your wife?” he asked grimly. “We can break in here and find out for ourselves, can’t we?”

“We can—but this lab is full of chemicals, and I seem to recall an adventure with mercury fulminate. It could happen again. Let me go and see first, Davison. You can stay on guard here and see what else happens.”

“All right. Standish, go with him for—er—protection.”

I did not want the company but I was forced to have it—until I gave Standish the slip in the fog. Then I beat it back to the house. Butson was the first person I encountered.

“My wife? She here?” I demanded.

“No, Mr. Fowley. The men in the grounds have been asking where she is, too. She went up to her room after you went out today; but when I went up to tell her about dinner, I found she was absent. She must have slipped out when this fog came down. I—”

“That’s all I wanted to know,” I said briefly, and tore outside again.

CHAPTER VI

Selenite Vengeance

The fog was the very devil. I found that despite my knowledge of the district, I was soon hopelessly lost. Easy enough to get from the river, but the deuce of a job to get back to it. I must have staggered in and around the estate for about thirty minutes before I heard the noise of distant water.

I went forward actively, slipped, and went my length in sloppy mud. I got up and directed my torch downward. I was covered in mud from head to foot—yellow mud!

Yellow mud! A remembrance turned in my brain. I was still some way from the towpath, yet the stuff was here, too, probably from winter flooding. I went on, searching the way, and presently a square, squat building loomed out of the reek. The Coratti mausoleum—at the far end of the estate.

I stopped again, hesitated, then hurriedly advanced. I hadn’t been quite sure, but now my torch left no doubt about it. The bronze doors of the mausoleum were slightly open! And there were the marks of a woman’s shoes—new and fresh marks—leading right to the doors. But why did none come out?

I blundered into the mausoleum’s silence, flashing my light. The place was quite empty, deadly cold, and the relentless calm of the grave descended upon me. I felt I was a desecrator—but I’d gotten this far and I meant to finish it! I gazed around the walls for a moment, on the sarcophagi of Dr. Corattí and Beryl Coratti in the center of the stone floor, side by side.

Thoughts chased through my brain; strange thoughts. Was it possible that on the night Lucy said she had been on the towpath, she had really been here? Was it here whence had come the yellow mud on her boots? Again, it was because of her that we had not seen Beryl’s body actually taken to the mausoleum here. Did Lucy have definite reason for wanting it that way?

I felt I was getting near to the truth at last. I cast aside all ideas on the sanctity of the dead, perched my flashlight on a stone and raised the heavy lid of Beryl’s tomb. I only needed to do it for a moment. Beryl lay there, all right—silent, hands folded on her breast, as if asleep…

I was feeling a bit unnerved, but I went on. I remarked how much lighter Dr. Coratti’s sarcophagus lid seemed than Beryl’s. It moved easily and I flashed my torch inside the space—but there was no Dr. Coratti there! I dropped the cover back with a gasp, my brain racing at furious speed.

Suddenly I was icy calm. I felt I had the last clue in my grip. I whirled out of the sepulchral, chilly hole and floundered through mud and fog toward the river. At last I came on the group gathered about the trapdoor of the secret underground laboratory.

But the light was flooding forth now, silhouetting a single slender figure in a fur coat, standing at the door with arm upraised. It was Lucy, all right, holding something aloft.

“Take it easy, Fowley!” Inspector Davison shouted as I blundered forward. “This wife of yours has got an explosive in her hand. She threatens to blow up this whole damned laboratory, and the river with it, if we go into this hiding place!”

“I mean it too, Curt!” Lucy shouted, as I came into the fan of light. “You’ve gone quite far enough!”

“Why the devil didn’t you catch her as she came up here?” I demanded.

“Couldn’t. She came from inside the laboratory—”

“From inside…!” I stopped, comprehension flashing into my brain.

I swung and vanished in the fog so suddenly that Lucy hardly had time to notice it. Like a madman I floundered up the bank and back again to the mausoleum. Of course! Of course! If she had come from inside the laboratory, there must be a secret way into it—through the mausoleum! Because the footprints outside the tomb were still fresh! And though they went in, they did not come out!

Lucy’s brandishing that explosive—if it was an explosive—was a stall, a stall while Dr. Coratti— Now I saw it! And I proved it a second later, as I heard the clump of running feet in the mud from the direction of the mausoleum.

At the same moment, I heard the leathery beating of wings in the mist and the shrill unearthly cries of the Selenite monsters, which had obviously been at hand somewhere. Evidently they worked by instinct, for their sense of direction was unerring. Their cries, the mist, the running figure, now blended into some eerie nightmare chase—

“Dr. Coratti!” I yelled. “Doctor, the game is up!”

Coratti never had a chance to answer, for at that moment two of the unearthly birds swept into view like projectiles. I threw myself flat—and they missed me! They hurtled straight on and slammed the running, slender figure to the ground. Again and again they dived, while I went sick with horror. Then off they rushed into the mist, screaming their weird triumph.

Feet were pounding behind me in the fog now. I went blundering forward again, reached the fallen figure and turned it over. It was Dr. Coratti, all right, horribly mangled—dead. I was holding his lifeless pulse when Lucy and Inspector Davison came up in the gloom.

“She followed you—and we followed, her,” he said briefly. Then my wife pushed him aside and threw herself regardless in the mud at her dead father’s side.

“Dad!” she screamed hysterically. “Dad… Oh, God! They got him after all. Those Selenites—Oh why, why, why? Dad—Dad!”

At last I dragged up her shuddering form by main strength. She buried her head on my shoulder and gave bitter convulsive sobs.

“Lucy—Lucy!” I cried. “Take a grip on yourself, child. Something like this was bound to happen.”

It was minutes before she could get some coherence into her words, some calmness into her manner.

“I thought Corattí was supposed to have died long ago,” Davison was saying. “How come he was running around—until now? Of course, he was the man we wanted?” he asked, glancing questioningly at me.

Lucy herself answered. “Yes…yes, he was the man—the scientist who was clever enough to defeat the best brains in the country. It took you, Curt, to break things up. You see what’s happened—and I hope you’re satisfied!” she said bitterly.

I said quietly, “Lucy, if a man insists on playing with fire, he’s going to get burned.”

“Dr. Coratti stole industrial secrets, and that’s a crime,” Davison interrupted bluntly. “And it looks as though you helped him. That makes you an accessory.”

Lucy said slowly, “I know that… But it did not seem wrong, the way father did it. His idea was to sell different industrial secrets to different firms at high prices—firms who can well afford it. Each firm had in the past refused to give him money to perfect his inventions. Check up and you will find each firm from which he stole secrets is one that refused him aid at some time or other…

“The lunar venture took practically the last of his money—he had been wealthy before, you know—and he had to have funds to further his work. So he used the moon-weeds to make him simulate death.”

“How?” the inspector demanded.

“He used the weeds’ sap to make a drug. He knew what it could do. After many injections—which made him especially irritable and nervous—he found he could control his heartbeat and respiration sufficiently to simulate death. He put himself into a cataleptic trance.

“Father had it all planned,” Lucy went on. “He knew he’d be put in the sarcophagus in the mausoleum—but the sarcophagus, built right into the floor, had a spring bottom which led to the underground laboratory he’d prepared. Matter of fact, he constructed that opening long ago against such a chance as this; when he found what the moon-weeds could do, he acted.

“He thought his plan the best way to avoid the Selenites, which were after him for his probing of their secrets. He thought his scheme the best way to avoid the criminals who were trying to steal his secrets…”

“And you knew this all the time?” I asked her slowly.

“No! No, Curt, I didn’t!” Lucy’s voice was earnest. “That night when I went along the towpath, I also went to the mausoleum here for a last look at father’s tomb. But I heard noises in his sarcophagus. I found the tunnel opening at the bottom and went through it to the underground laboratory.

“Father told me everything, warned me to watch for Selenites which might strike at me. I felt it was my duty to be loyal to him, as his daughter. I believed he did the right thing: those tight-fisted industrialists deserved all they got. That was why I was away from the house so long.

“When Beryl was to be brought here, I kept you away, Curt; because I thought that when you saw the yellow mud here, you might put two and two together…”

“What happened tonight?” demanded Inspector Davison.

“Oh, that. I left the house in the fog and kept near the main road listening for your return. I knew that conference was a fake—it was so obvious, and I wanted to keep Dad warned if you were about. I went to the secret lab via the mausoleum, of course. But I had no explosive in my hand. That was a gag—but Curt jumped to the truth. Dad didn’t escape…the Selenites got him first,” Lucy finished bitterly.

“And Beryl?” I asked slowly.

“I can only assume she found out the double secret of the Selenite ants and the method of inducing a trance by injection of the moon-weed extract. Beryl must have come across these secret papers in Dad’s laboratory safe—the one in the hangar. The data on the moon-weeds undoubtedly gave their exact location on the moon, also.

“The criminals—a tough bunch of gangsters looking for easy pickings—were anxious to get hold of Beryl or me after Dad’s supposed death. From newspaper accounts, they judged that he had discovered something very valuable on the moon; just what, he of course never admitted openly.”

Lucy clenched her fists. “Well, when I discovered Dad in the secret lab after his ‘death’ he said Beryl found the double secret in the safe. The gangsters killed Beryl—in order to keep the information to themselves—and then stole the rocket ship for the trip to the moon.”

I interrupted, “But why?”

“Because,” Lucy explained, “they thought that if father placed so much value on these moon-weeds, there must be something to them. With such a drug in their hands, there’s no telling to what ends the gangsters would have gone.”

That made sense. “Guess they learned how to operate the rocket ship from your father’s articles in scientific magazines,” I mused. “They knew it was right out here, waiting for them in the hangar.”

Inspector Davison stroked his chin. “It’s still not quite clear in my mind why Dr. Coratti got himself into that trance. Didn’t your wife say something about that a while back Fowley?”

“Yes. But I can understand how you would be confused. Well, Inspector, Dr. Coratti had two obsessions. He knew the Selenites would be coming after him, and he was afraid that criminals would steal his discovery. Unfortunately, he was right on both counts.

“So he thought he could get rid of both sets of enemies by pretending to die,” I explained.

Lucy’s eyes were tragic. “The Selenites must be a very jealous species of—of monsters. They wouldn’t tolerate anyone’s use of their precious moon-weed. Well, they ought to be satisfied now. Beryl murdered, Dad mutilated”—she shuddered—“and they were after me, too. And now…”

“They fly through space, then?” I put in quickly.

“Father said they exist in the thin air inside the moon, but they can fly in the void with equal ease. Something to do with radiations.”

“We still do not know how these damned little ants read secrets!” Davison broke in.

Lucy gave a bitter smile. “It was a masterly idea, Selenite in origin. Selenites are identical to earthly ants on a big scale, and ants have a reasoning brain; therefore, they are capable of being hypnotized. On the moon, Dad learned a secret whereby hypnotic commands can be electrically enforced—in fact, Selenites rule each other that way.

“On Earth here he duplicated the system and found it possible to order earthly ants anywhere he wanted. When they returned to the laboratory here, he killed them with gas, removed their eyes, and used the eyes as transparent slides in a projector.

“Ultra-violet light shining through these ‘slides’ reproduced on a screen whatever the ants had seen at their destination. The previous hypnotic commands had made them keep their eyes closed going to and coming from their objective; they opened them only at the place where they had been forced to go.

“Therefore,” Lucy explained, “only the things seen at the destination were imprinted on their retinas. With several ants doing this, Dad was really the owner of an inexhaustible supply of living, minute cameras.”

“I’ve got to hand it to him—that was brilliant,” the inspector said, shaking his head a little ruefully.

“Then on the night your father attacked us on the grounds, Lucy, he was digging for ants,” I said. “I guessed as much.”

“Right,” Lucy nodded. “He’d run out of ‘supplies’ and remember there was a good anthill on the estate. He took the risk, armed with a paralyzing gun. There were paralyzing guns in the rocket ship too, which the crooks must have found how to use. That explains how they had them.”

“How do the things work?” Davison wanted to know.

“The gun ejects a spray which, when inhaled, clogs the brain-centers indefinitely and halts physical and mental action,” Lucy told him. “That was Dad’s own invention—one of many… And whatever you think, Curt, I did take sleeping tablets that night noting more.”

“I believe you now,” I smiled. “But there’s one thing more—why did you blow up the hangar with its laboratory? What would I have found on the moon, that you were so anxious to stop me?”

“I told you the truth when I said I didn’t want you to venture out into space. It would have meant your death—if the Selenites hadn’t gotten you first… Believe me, Curt, that’s the truth.”

“And those Selenites may still try to get at you,” I breathed.

“Perhaps… Unless, having got father—to them, the original thief—they are satisfied…”

“Anyway,” said Inspector Davison, “you’d better come along with me to Headquarters and make a statement, Mrs. Fowley. You too, sir,” he added. “Got to have a record, you know!”

* * * *

Lucy made her statement all right. But of course the law had one or two things to say, for she had been an accessory to a crime against the state. As an attorney, however, not wanting to be active in my own case, I secured the services of the best legal brains available. Lucy was duly tried and convicted, but with a strong recommendation of mercy by the jury, which is what we had been fighting for.

As I have already said, Lucy is a beautiful woman in any man’s eyes. The judge whom she faced was no exception. He let her off with a suspended sentence.

After the trial, I sent her to the Berkshires to visit an old friend of mine and his wife. I wanted her to get away from everything, to become herself again.

In the meantime, I am clearing up the affairs of the dead Dr. Coratti, and preparing an audit of his scientific inventions, so that they will become Lucy’s property when Coratti’s will is probated.

It will not be long now before Lucy is back home again, in our snug little New York apartment. I will have good news for her when she arrives. Last night I drove out to the Coratti estate to arrange matters with the Butsons. As I came into the grounds there was a whir of wings overhead.

I looked up and sighted a flock of pterodactyls, heading for the full moon.

SUPERHUMAN

He was a giant among me, not only in stature but in brain power…and he planned to usher in a new era.

CHAPTER I

The Secret Experiment

Doctor Adison Boyd was recognisable to the outer world as a model husband, a consistent example of sobriety, tenderness and good spirits. Indeed, he had only two faults: one that he was a scientist, and the other that he was very dissatisfied with the world in which he lived.

His wife, Ena, tolerated his calculated, disapproving comments upon the world at large with due wifely detachment, until one day he burst upon her the most shattering bombshell of her young life.

“Ena, Teddy is two months old, isn’t he?” he demanded, almost fiercely.

She nodded, and cast a fond glance at the infant lying in the armchair opposite her own.

“Yes, Ad. Why?”

“I’ve been doing some hard thinking. Frankly, I believe he can save mankind!”

“Save mankind! Whatever is the matter with you, Ad? He can’t even talk yet; besides—”

Ena stopped. Her husband was pacing the drawing room with methodical steps, driving his right fist into his left palm with rhythmic precision.

“I’ve got it, I’ve got it!” he reiterated persistently. “I know I’ve got it! Listen, Ena…” He went down unceremoniously on his knees beside her chair and took her hand tightly.

“I want you to listen carefully,” he said, gravely. “I am a scientist, my main line being biology and pathology—you know that. For years, ever since I was eleven years old, I have struggled persistently to find a way to help humanity grow out of its appalling, humdrum littleness…this—barrenness! Expand its knowledge! And in our son lies the solution… Tell me, my dear, what do you know of the pituitary glands?”

“Pituitary glands?” she repeated, startled.

“I’ll explain to you; it is imperative that you know what I’m talking about. The two pituitary glands in the neck control growth; the thyroid gland keeps us firm and supple of body; the parathyroid gland controls the bloodstream’s lime supply; and the two supra-renal glands give strength and energy. These glands are the foundation of a powerful and well-developed body. You see?”

Ena nodded, but her face was still puzzled.

“Well, I propose to treat our son’s various controlling glands in such a manner—with a compound having calcium as its base—that he will ultimately grow to a gigantic proportion among men. A creature of as yet undeterminable height, possessed of colossal strength, unshatterable endurance, and a super-mind. It is all in the glands—and I can do it!

“Now do you see how our son can become a leader among men? How he can perhaps straighten out the muddles of life and leave the way clear for similar gigantic creatures to follow him? Until—who knows?—the entire world may be peopled by such beings!”

“It’s horrible!” Ena declared promptly, without hesitation, “You’ll play no such pranks on my child! Find something else to experiment on!”

But Adison Boyd was determined. He tried every means he could to obtain his wife’s consent, only to be met by stolid refusal. Finally he shrugged his shoulders and got to his feet.

“Very well, my dear,” he said with ominous quietness. “Like hundreds of others before you, you are making the mistake of hindering the course of scientific progress; and I, as a scientist and inventor of the gland-treatment, cannot be expected to stand for that. For the moment you win, of course…but I do not give up hope.”

Ena nodded contentedly and resumed her sewing. How she was to know that her husband had firmly resolved in his own mind that the experiment should proceed in secret?

Hinder the course of science? Heavens, no! Not even his own flesh and blood could do that…

The Drug of Destiny

Two nights later Ena Boyd received a telephone call from a friend who wanted Ena to accompany her to the theatre. Ena left the infant in charge of the nurse while she went out.

Half an hour after her departure, Adison Boyd returned from his daily round at the laboratory in company with his closest friend, Professor Bruce Kemphill, several years his senior. An air of innocent quietness hung over them as they ate a hasty dinner, but when the cigar stage was reached Boyd began to converse on more technical matters.

“My wife objected to the scheme, Bruce, so the only thing to do is to work without her knowledge. I’m rid of her for a couple of hours this evening on the strength of a fake telephone call from my secretary at the laboratory. In that time, while Ena is waiting for her ‘friend,’ we can do all we need.

“The initial operation won’t take longer than four minutes, if that. Years will pass before the results will begin to show. I don’t like this trickery, but I could see no other way. She’s with the baby night and day, and if he gets too old the experiment will be useless. Understand?”

Kemphill nodded. “Perfectly. Go on.”

“It may be just a dream; the whole thing may fail,” Adison Boyd went on grimly. “That is the chance we must take with such an experiment. This is my plan…

“I shall inject into the pituitary glands a drug, the basis being calcium, which by a process of natural expansion will cause the walls of these two glands to alter their natural dimensions, and so cause a different balance to be struck. The result will inevitably be giantism of enormous magnitude.

“It must be done with the greatest of care because a slight error might produce an excessive acromegaly. The injections will continue afterwards at three-month intervals and should, if I’m right, produce the desired effects.”

“It’s a risk, Adison,” Kemphill said pensively. “If you go wrong, you’ll never forgive yourself.”

“I won’t go wrong. I’ve spent too much time on preliminary experimentation to do that, Besides, I hope that the enlargement of the pituitary glands will produce a tremendous brain-power and endurance beyond the normal. The only thing I am afraid of is that it will bring a cruelty and callousness, just as the opposite will bring over-sentimentality. We must watch that carefully…

“The thyroid gland of course, will be treated the same way, and, we hope, will produce enormous energy, which in turn will feed the brain and produce—a genius! Linked to this will be the treatment of the supra-renal glands, and so on… Yes, I have great hopes!”

“When do we start?” Kemphill wanted to know.

“Tonight—now. Nurse is caring for the baby, but I think I can manage her all right. Just wait here a moment.”

Doctor Boyd left the room, full of purpose. Professor Kemphill rose slowly to his feet and stroked his chin. He was a much older man than Boyd; had, perhaps, more matured perceptions of the future, and to judge from his expression his present perceptions were none to sanguine. A troubled light rested in his kindly, gray eyes.

“It’s All Wrong…”

Presently Adison Boyd returned, bearing his son in his arms. The child was crying a little, hut at length its bright blue eyes alighted on Professor Kemphill’s heavy watch-chain. Immediately the crying ceased; an expression of intelligent curiosity settled on the infant’s cherubic face.

“I managed it!” Boyd said delightedly. “Come into the lab.”

The two men passed into the adjoining laboratory, where the baby was laid on a table-top upon a soft blanket. Kemphill fondled its head thoughtfully, then glanced at the child.

“You’re not going to use the hypodermic syringe, are you?” he inquired.

“Good heavens, no! My drug is taken in the ordinary way by the mouth, bat I could not administer the first lot—pure drug—without bringing the baby in the laboratory here. After this, at three-month intervals, small amounts of the drug in milk or food can be administered. Now, Bruce, keep him occupied and I’ll get busy.”

The professor complied, and amused himself playing with the infant while Boyd busied himself amongst test-tubes, jars and bottles, finally holding up a long, thin phial containing a liquid resembling very pale port wine. With great care he poured this into a small feeding-bottle; then, bracing himself in the manner of a man who plunges into an icy river, be very delicately allowed his son to swallow the liquid drop by drop.

“I’m sure it’s all wrong, Adison,” Kemphill muttered. “You’re messing in things far beyond the realm of your knowledge, man!”

“Oh, hell!” Boyd retorted, without turning from his task. “What’s come over you tonight? Where’s your love of scientific progress?”

Kemphill shrugged, but did not reply. Soon the feeding-bottle was empty.

“There we are!” the doctor chuckled, lifting the cooing child in his arms. “It didn’t take more than four minutes, Bruce, but it may change the destiny of mankind… Now, back to bed you go.”

The infant safely returned to its cot and the care of the unsuspecting nurse, the two men returned to the drawing room. They had hardly been seated ten minutes, when Ena returned, irritated arid sharp in her movements.

“I wish when people make appointments they’d keep them!” she snapped. “Would you believe it, Ad? Louisa didn’t come, and I’ve been, cooling my heels all this time. Next time I see her— Oh, good evening, Professor. I didn’t notice you behind the high back of that chair. How are you? Some time since you’ve been over.”

Kemphill rose courteously to his feet. “Ad and I have been discussing the progress of humanity.”

Ena smiled cynically. “Really? That’s Ad’s pet subject He had the audacity, a few days ago, to ask me to lend him my child to the cause of science! What do you think of that?”

“Science never accepts defeat, Mrs. Boyd,” the professor answered gravely. Ena drew off her gloves, shrugging irritably.

CHAPTER II

The Boy Hercules

The gland drug had been administered on the night of June 21st, 1940. But it wasn’t until the night of June 21st, 1943, that distinct evidences of the strange drug that Boyd had administered surreptitiously for three years began to become noticeable.

Throughout this period, Professor Kemphill was a constant visitor to the Boyd home, much to Mrs. Boyd’s growing puzzlement. She, however, gave no thought to a possible connection between her son and the professor. How could she? Besides, the presence of a now one-year-old daughter occupied much of her time, deflecting her attention a good deal from her first-born.

“It’s showing!” Adison Boyd breathed in Kemphill’s ear, on the evening of June 21st, 1943, as they watched the child playing on the rag. “Notice anything?”

“He’s big for his age—very big. He has a bright, intelligent face, too, and good cranial development. And look at those biceps of his! I wonder. Ad, if you’ve actually managed it? Beaten Nature at her own game?”

“I’m sure of it,” Boyd answered confidently. “I measured him today and he’s two feet nine inches, which is a lot for a child of three and a half years.”

Kemphill nodded slowly. The conversation assumed different channels as Mrs. Boyd walked in, bearing her daughter in her arms. For quite a while she sat in a chair looking at her son, as though some feminine intuition was deeply disturbed. Abruptly she looked up to find her husband’s eyes upon her.

“It looks as though Teddy will be big, doesn’t it?” she said with pride. “You know, there are times when he looks at me with an expression that almost scares me. His blue eyes are so wide and round and full of intent, as though he’s trying to read my mind. Somehow he never has seemed an ordinary, commonplace child, like Mary here.”

“He is merely a very healthy child,” Kemphill commented, with a saturnine and professional detachment. “You are both to be congratulated on so fine a son.”

Bigger and Bigger…

Ena nodded and studied the boy again, a puzzled frown on her face—a frown that deepened as the weeks went by and Edward began to grow with a rapidity which was nothing short of phenomenal. In the space of a month he added four more inches to his height. And three feet one inch was a remarkable height for a child of three years and seven months.

As he grew, his appetite increased, Adison Boyd, understanding chemicals and knowing the course his experiment would take, provided his son with all the highly vitamized products he could devise, with the result that the young giant grew steadily and expansively day by day, increasing not only in stature but in mental power and endurance as time passed.

Mary, his sister, seemed singularly microscopic beside him, pursuing a natural line of growth from babyhood to maturity.

“By Jove, he is growing!” his father confided to Professor Kemphill, almost in alarm, as middle-aged scientist arrived on one of his visits of inspection. “I never for a moment expected such terrific growth. It’s beyond all reason!”

“Well, I warned you,” Kemphill answered quietly. But even his calm was shaken when he beheld the youngster on the lawn in the early summer sunlight, spending his rime crushing small pieces of coal to powder by the sheer strength of his hands.

“What on Earth have we precipitated, I wonder?” Boyd muttered. “The boy has the grip of a Hercules already, and he’s not five years old yet! The ghastly thing is, now I’ve started the trouble with the glands I can’t stop it! Yet there is a way, I suppose, to turn the balance in the opposite direction, but I’ve never troubled to find it, I thought he might grow to, say, twelve feet, and be as intelligent again as a normal man… But this!”

Words failed him. He stood breathing hard, staring blankly at the huge child.

“Russian scientists making similar experiments have grown mice the size of donkeys,” murmured Kemphill. “On the same scale, I don’t dare to think how big a human being might become.”

The Confession

Thus started the beginnings of discomfiture. But if Adison Boyd was troubled it was nothing compared to his wife’s state of mind. She became almost distracted as her giant offspring to cultivate the habit of sitting for hours on end in utter quiet, staring at her unwinkingly, hypnotically, like a cat watching a mouse. And in those brilliant blue orbs there was such a kindled glow of intellect, such a suggestion of mental force and genius undreamed of, that her own normal will-power more often than not came near to breaking under the strain.

Hypnotized by a child of five! Only this astounding thought enabled her to overcome her son’s mental grip upon her…

The addition of another six and a half inches was too much! And at last she went and sought out her husband in his small study. She found him not walking, but sitting with his head in his hands.

“Ad, I want you to tell me something,” she said curtly. “It’s about Teddy. Something is wrong with him. A few years ago you said something about a fool experiment to produce a superhuman man, and I refused to grant your request that you should experiment on Edward… Did you experiment on him secretly?”

Adison Boyd rose slowly from his chair, took his wife’s shoulders in a firm grip.

“Ena, my dear, I have a confession to make,” he answered quietly, “I’ve been a fool—an idiot! That night you had a ’phone call and went to meet Louise—it was all arranged. You remember how, when you questioned her, Louise did not know anything about it? My secretary put the call through from the lab. That night I experimented on Edward, with the professor—and this is the result of it!”

Ena recoiled. “Ad, you don’t mean you—? You mean he will be exactly what you planned?”

“Maybe even more than that,” he muttered. “You see, he’s exceeding everything I expected. It is a well-known scientific fact that accumulation of bodily structure and the cells has no limit except that set by Nature, and when Nature is discounted, as in Teddy’s case, heaven knows what will happen. There must be a limit, but the varying metabolism and formation of cellular structure through which he is passing is beyond all calculation…

“I cannot undo the wrong I’ve done except in one way. That way, my dear is—death!” He said the word almost inaudibly.

“Oh, Ad, Ad! Why did you have to do it?” Ena’s face was suddenly wet with tears. “Why did you have to ruin him? Turn him into a caricature of a human being? Our child, a freak! You have defied Nature, Ad, and for that there must be a penalty.”

“I know—I know. But what can we do? Let him go on like this until he’s finished when he’s twenty-one years old, or stop him before it’s too late?”

Ena Boyd regained a grip on herself. “I can never forgive you, Ad,” she said brokenly. “All the same, as your wife, I shall stand by you, because Teddy is our child. For no other reason… Let him finish his course.”

And with her face bathed in tears, she went swiftly from the room.

CHAPTER III

A World Endangered

There being no need for further secrecy now, Boyd, Ena and Professor Kemphill viewed the progress of the gigantic child with more amazement on each occasion, until they reached the state when they were beyond expressing any words at all. To say that they were astonished, is putting it mildly.

Another year brought tremendous transformations in Edward Boyd. A few months added to that produced even more. Until, at six years of age, he was eight feet two inches, possessing a proportionate strength, and the mind and face of a fully matured man; indeed, a mind far superior to that of the cleverest. Childhood had never existed for him; adolescence had passed him completely by.

His gigantic powerful figure stalked about the fairly comfortable residence of his father as though he were constantly on the prowl for intruders. His baby sister, a little over two feet high, he regarded with a growing irritation each passing day. She, for her part, still half-formed in intelligence, considered him a lumbering enigma who often trod on her or lifted her playfully through space.

When he spoke, which was rarely, he assumed a very deep and pleasant tone, using perfect English, defying the usual restrictions of age.

“Father,” he said, on his sixth birthday, “for some reason I seem to have accomplishments which ordinary people haven’t. For one thing I can read people’s minds without any trouble, I have read your mind and Mother’s, and know all there is to know—and a great deal more.

“You’ve made me a giant, superhumanly strong and endowed with a high intelligence. Your purpose was for me to improve humanity, and I shall do so. Bat it won’t be for another fifteen years yet. Not until I become mature, I’ll have fifteen more years of physical growth and expansion of knowledge, I haven’t the slightest idea how big I’ll be then and I tremble to think of it. I curse the day your warped mind made you do this to me!”

“Why?” Boyd ‘demanded, “You have enormous advantages, Edward.”

“And enormous disadvantages,” the six-year-old voice growled back. “It is the same with all such experiments. You forgot to provide me with a companion—of the opposite sex! You forget that all my emotions now are those of a fully developed man.

“I have read from your minds that you hope to produce a race of monsters like me; but you did not provide the wherewithal with which to do it! You are an idiot, Father! I shall correct the error myself, that’s all.”

“How?” Boyd asked, paling slightly.

“I will find a female baby somewhere. She will be only five years or so younger than I at my maturity, I will give her an injection of the drug… Oh, yes, I know the formula. I read it from your mind long ago.

“Which reminds me. There is a baby girl at the house across the way—the Morgans’. I’ve seen her in her baby-carriage. She’ll do!”

“But Edward, for the love of heaven—” Adison began, then stopped, lost for words, as the giant turned and, stooping beneath the door, walked into the hall and out of the house.

The Giant Pair

Such was the beginning. An angry cry was raised when the baby daughter of Mr. and Mrs. Harvey Morgan suddenly disappeared one day from her baby-carriage. She was found again shortly afterwards, apparently quite unharmed, on the garage roof. How she got there remained an unsolved mystery to everybody, save Edward Boyd.

From then on, despite constant precautions, she was subject to mysterious disappearances at three-month intervals. Nobody guessed it was for the purpose of injections by Edward Boyd. And, though suspicion did rest on him, due to his abnormal height, there was never any proof.

And so, after a while. Grace Morgan began to develop the same astounding characteristics as the mighty Edward Boyd.

Within another year Edward was twelve feet seven in height—a colossal monster, likewise increased in intellect as in stature. Grace, of course, being so far behind him, was a mere four feet, but her intelligence, if anything, was even quicker than his had been. She held conversations with him on scientific topics over the adjoining garden wall, and Edward in tarn discoursed on subjects that were beyond the ken of normalcy.

The years rolled on. Edward took to sleeping outdoors, being too large for interior accommodations. He covered himself only with a huge blanket in the thickest frost of winter, and lay almost naked in summer.

Two sets of parents found their faces more deeply chiselled with worry as the years passed. They lived in a world where they had suddenly become miserable and unimportant. The Boyds, united again now by a common fear, and the quiet but speculative Professor Kemphill, were overshadowed mentally and physically by the stupendous Edward.

The Morgans tried in vain to conceive what had happened to produce about their home a full thirteen feet of massive-shouldered blonde-headed girlhood, shrewd and calculating, having claims even to beauty, and walking when outdoors with ramrod erectness. That was when she was nine, and Edward just over fifteen.

It came as a cold, stunning shock to Adison Boyd when he realized that the two young people, now almost constantly In each other’s company, compatriots in giantism, talking on topics so advanced that nobody could understand them, had still another nine years or so left to reach actual maturity—if maturity could be applied to such hypertrophied creatures.

The giant Edward now had some regard for his sister, and listened patiently on many occasions to her pleas. In some way she seemed to understand the trend of his nature toward coldblooded, merciless achievement, and tried to divert it into more useful channels. But her noble efforts to steer him right were wasted on him, on account of his wrongly balanced glands making him unable to appreciate a sentimental viewpoint.

It was odd to see them holding these discussions. She, four feet six, he nearly twenty-one feet, squatting on the lawn with her standing by his shoulder.

Doctor Boyd came near to weeping as he saw the sight. Ena actually did weep. They both felt their utter helplessness, and wondered how Mary managed to keep in her brother’s good graces at all. Evidently she had some strain in her nature that appealed to the young monster’s ruthlessly penetrating mind.

The Stalking Terror

Year succeeded year. Steadily and inevitably the young man and woman grew. Onward and onward, until a broiling June day in 1959. On the 15th of that month the leading London papers were bedecked with raging headlines.

GIGANTIC MONSTER INVADES LONDON

100-FOOT MAN TERRORIZES CROWDS

Subsequent details revealed that a gigantic man, all of one hundred feet in height, and attired in a suit of what appeared to be solid steel casing, had been sighted amidst London’s buildings, A creature so vast, so huge that the tallest prehistoric monster passed into insignificance by comparison.

True, he had done no harm as yet, picking his way with mammoth feet through the fleeing people. Where he had gone, what his object was, nobody seemed to know—except a grey-haired man and woman and their daughter, and an old professor, in the comfortable residence on London’s outskirts.

Adison Boyd, incredibly aged with the passing years, was talking with his daughter, now nineteen years of age. She was slim, intelligent, and possessed a great love of science and ability to utilize its limitless powers.

“Father, Edward and Grace Morgan begin their campaign for world-subjection tomorrow—you know that,” she said steadily. “Edward will be twenty-one tomorrow, and, we hope, at the end of his wild growth. Grace, of course, is fifteen, but possessing all the characteristics of a woman of twenty-five.

“Do not forget their intelligence. Between them they can crush the world! Do not forget their uncanny knowledge of dimensions, atomic structures, lightwaves, sound-vibrations and a thousand other astounding things. Nobody in this world will be able to stand against them!”

Her father shrugged. “Mary, you used to have some sort of influence over Edward, but since he went his own way four years ago that influence has been broken. What do you propose doing?”

Mary seated herself composedly and took hold of her father’s hand.

“I’ve thought of a way, father, but I must work fast and have your aid to do it. It will mean the death of Edward, but it has to be done if the world is to be saved. That woman Grace Morgan will also be extinguished…

“When I was a young girl I used to talk to Edward a lot, and during those talks I learned all about the formula that caused the trouble. He told me calcium was the basis. Is that right?”

Adison Boyd nodded dully. “Quite right, Mary—but what of it?”

“It will save the world from Edward and Grace,” Mary replied calmly. “That may sound wild, but it’s true—and ultimately you’ll see why. For the time being, we don’t need to keep on their track. I know where they are hiding because I’ve made it my business to find out. Then we’ve got to get through those steel coverings of theirs, and you can leave the rest to me.

“Before we start off to find them I have some calcium experiments, to complete, experiments which will speed up the known efficiency of calcium by something like one hundred times.”

“And what good is that?” Boyd demanded helplessly, “You talk in riddles, Mary. Which reminds me! Why do Edward and Grace wear those coverings, anyhow?”

“Because they are so stupendously tall. If they didn’t they would fall to pieces by their own weight. That’s why they have to have rigid, immovable support. Those suits, I presume, are hinged at the necessary joints, otherwise quite inflexible. I imagine that the only time Edward and Grace take them off is when they are resting. Lying down they would be all right…

“Now, Father, don’t worry me while I finish off my calcium experiment. Calcium it must be; I’d thought of poison, but it would have no lasting effect. And tonight well get busy… You know, Father, you ought to have checked this in its incipiency!”

“I know,” Boyd agreed in a low voice, “It was only for your Mother’s sake that I refrained…”

CHAPTER IV

The Battle With The Giants

In the depths of a wood, twenty-five miles south of London, a titanic figure laid himself flat on the warm, leafy ground, crushing down saplings and small trees beneath his stupendous weight. A moment or two elapsed, then another figure, less tall but still gigantic, came into view and lay down beside him.

Strange clicking noises sounded and the steel coverings fell apart along unexpected seams and dropped noisily to one side. The now white-garbed figures turned and looked at each other from their supine positions.

“Grace, we begin tomorrow,” rumbled Edward’s deep bass voice. “I have it all planned. We will begin with London itself and force the inhabitants to do our bidding. The mere sight of us will cow them into obedience. If they refuse, we’ll start a reign of terror that will force them to be our slaves. We have one weapon that should sway them without any trouble—remember? The one I made in my father’s lab. It is so powerful that it splits the atomic structure of light-mass by the use of force and causes instant disintegration of any object over any predetermined distance. I do not expect any resistance. We’ve easily managed to evade police so far.”

“And then what?” asked Grace, passing her mammoth hand through her jungle of golden hair, “Conquest of the Earth?”

“Why not? Who’s to stop us? Our knowledge, our size, everything is in our favor. The strongest shell made would bounce off our steel coatings like rocks hurled at a fast-moving express train. We’re normal human beings in a toy world, Grace. There’s nothing we can’t do! To reach countries across the sea, we will tie ocean-liners together and use them as a raft.”

Grace looked determined, “What about all those strange-looking weapons that we’ve built to destroy man? Are we going to use them?” Grace asked, her massive lips curling back in a hideous smile from eight-inch teeth.

Edward nodded. “Exactly. We begin tomorrow. Now we need sleep…”

So the two giant figures dragged themselves along the ground, by sheer muscular effort, to a clearing which they had chosen as their rendezvous many months before. There, impervious to cold or heat, they sank down on the grass at full length, to presently fall into deep slumber; chests rising and falling like small hills against the green sward.

While the Monsters Slept

The sun had been set half an hour when they went to sleep; and it was the closest approach to the darkness of a summer night when four tiny figures crept up with infinite caution through the trees, paused at the sight of the sleeping titans, and engaged in whispered conversation.

Dr. Boyd, Mary, Mrs. Boyd, and, as ever, Professor Kemphill, comprised the quartet.

“You knew their hide-out all right, Mary,” Adison Boyd murmured. “They’ve got those steel coverings off, too. That’s luck!

“No—judgment,” Mary answered calmly, “I assumed that they would discard them when lying down. Now is our chance!”

From under her coat she brought out an object resembling a garden-syringe and looked pensively at the needle-like point with the open-nozzle.

“Excessively energized calcium contained in liquid,” she said, in response to the questioning looks directed at her in the starlight. “Unless my scientific training is all wrong, this will bring about the end of these two, I don’t regard Ted as my brother any longer, but as a dangerous monstrosity. You see, bullets or cannons or poisons can never hurt them. Nothing normal can destroy them. It has got to be something abnormal—inside them. Now comes the difficult part of the job, Come with me.”

Silently, though still mystified as to the girl’s real intentions, her father, mother and the professor crept silently after her through the shadows, until they came within three feet of those stupendous masses of sleeping flesh. Edward’s right arm, a corded mass of iron muscle, lay stretched in the grass like the trunk of some pink-colored tree.

For a moment his sister stood looking at him, Then, steeling herself, she pushed the syringe instrument forward, pulling the long pressure-handle out to its fullest extent, Mary hesitated for an instant, then she sank the needle-pointed tip into a vein of his arm, distinguishable like knotted cable.

The giant moved slightly, but did not waken. His deep breathing drowned the sighing of the night breeze through the foliage of the trees.

By the united efforts of the four tiny figures, the pressure-handle was pushed down half-way, until a bulge appeared under the skin of Edward’s arms, to gradually disappear as the liquid assimilated itself into the bloodstream. At this point Mary desisted, withdrew the huge hypodermic syringe, and walked over to where Grace lay.

With infinite care, the same treatment was meted out to the girl Colossus. Perhaps because she was more sensitive than Edward, she felt the sudden sting of the needle, and a hand, as large as a full-grown man, came round and lazily investigated the spot. Then it relaxed as its owner continued to sleep.

“Our work is finished,” Mary breathed tensely. “We can only await results. Come, before we are discovered.”

Without a second’s hesitation the four conspirators made their way back through the trees until they reached the fast car in which they had come, parked by the side of the main highway…

Edward’s Ultimatum

The following morning London awoke to a reign of terror. At eight o’clock, when sleepy-eyed people were congregated on station platforms waiting for their trains to take them to work, Edward and Grace stalked into the city. Wading through the traffic about Trafalgar Square, the two monsters could be seen, their steel coverings glittering in the sun. Each carried a strange-looking weapon.

The hurrying panic-stricken crowds emerged from buses and trains and fled in mortal terror. But they were brought to a sudden, abrupt halt by a tremendous wave of mental force. The mighty brains of Edward and Grace, working in unison and possessed of five hundred times more power than the average person, produced a terrific effect. Everybody within radius was held spellbound, gazing up at the fantastic creatures subjecting them to their will.

“This is the era of the giants!” thundered Edward’s voice at length. “The time has come for the little people who dwell in the dark and small places of the Earth to be destroyed! The entire Earth is destined to become a habitation fit for monsters such as my companion and me. The day of the Little is over; it is now the day of the Big!

“You are little—unintelligent—incapable! We can, and will, transform the world. And unless we are voluntarily permitted to do this we will do it by force, which will mean war of a type you have never yet encountered. You will be crushed and obliterated into extinction, your homes and buildings torn down. Your friends and children ripped to shreds, until you learn! Learn that we are the masters!

“Because of the fact that our brainpowers, tremendous though they are, do not permit us to rule the entire world by mental force alone, we shall match the physical with the mental and thereby produce an invincible strength. Our first command is the relinquishment of London to us, and we shall determine what is to be done and choose suitable people to carry out our plans. The second command is the voluntary surrender of all babies, male and female, under one year old, to the care of laboratory technicians whom we shall appoint, and whom we shall instruct in the uses and effects of giantism and excessive hypertrophy.

“These two commands must be obeyed, and from your acquiescence there will grow up through the years a new era—the day of the Big, a world of strength, power and invincible formidability!”

As his words died away, Edward relaxed his mental forces that he might hear the people answer, and their voices floated up to him and Grace in a babel of unintelligible sound. Then came the answer—very effectively. Missiles of all descriptions began to hurtle through the air, glancing off the steel coverings, and at best hitting no higher than the knees.

“They refuse!” Edward snapped curtly. “Use force!”

Saying that, he strode forward, Grace by his side, and between them they crushed people by the dozen beneath their titanic, steel-shod feet. Pausing a moment, they switched on the instruments they carried. Immediately, stabbing blasts of force split the air—the instant disintegration of light-mass. In a vicious circle of destruction the invisible power beams swept round, razing tall buildings to the ground in clouds of dust and spreading immeasurable havoc over a wide area.

Swelling uproar rose to the giants as they went grimly on, striding over the smaller buildings, smashing some of them down like cardboard boxes. Because of their size, the movements of the colossal pair were slow and ponderous. Only their steel supports kept them upright at all, and even that was with great difficulty.

The orgy of destruction and massacre was halted for a time by the arrival of a brave army of police, who fired bombs at the monsters. But they exploded harmlessly, with no more effect than cheap fire crackers about the waists of the impregnable invaders. Later, as the uncanny battle raged, anti-aircraft guns came into play, and for a while shells whistled dangerously near the heads of the two giants. Until, with one huge hand, Edward bent down and snuffed the aggressors into extinction, as a normal man would a garden worm.

The End of the Giants

By noon London became a city of panic and destruction. The giants, only beaten in height by the tallest buildings, were wreaking incalculable damage on all sides. The whole western section of the metropolis was smashing visibly under the onslaught of light-mass destroyers and steel-clad, pile-driving fists. Even the airplanes that flew to the attack were reduced to wreckage, Edward and Grace dealing with them with their force rays as though the powerful machines were nothing more than slow-moving house flies…

Mary Boyd, her father, mother, and the professor, could distinctly see the huge figures against the skyline from their home, and watched with growing anxiety as they beheld building after building hurtle down to destruction. Through the entire day they watched, scarcely moving, binoculars glued to their eyes.

Then, towards sunset, when the red glare was flooding across from the battered silhouettes of the city, the two gigantic figures were seen to suddenly become curiously rigid. Both of them stood quite still with arms upraised in mid-air preparatory to destroying a building!

“I—I believe it’s worked!” Mary gasped hoarsely. “Come on. Get in the car and well go and see.”

At top speed they headed for the city, where they left the car and joined the milling multitudes of people who were gazing in awe at two rigid, immovable figures, each with one foot planted in one street and the other in a neighbouring one, mighty arms raised to the darkening skies.

“What’s happened to them?” Adison Boyd breathed at last, “Mary! What did you do?”

A light of infinite relief was in his daughter’s eyes as she turned to him.

“The calcium I used and energized to become one hundred times more effective than normal, entered the bloodstreams of Edward and Grace and following chemical law, turned their flesh and blood into the basis of lime. That went on until—well, surely you can see for yourself?”

“By Jove, yes!” Kemphill exclaimed, “I understand, Mary. Either these two will stand there forever, or they’ll have to be removed and destroyed. It depends how the people feel about it.”

“But I still don’t understand!” Boyd protested.

“They have been turned to stone!” Mary replied quietly. “It is a chemical fact that flesh and blood containing an abnormal amount of calcium will cause the limbs and organs to actually turn to stone with the passage of time. I could quote many instances. Death follows, of course, when a vital organ is affected.

“In this case I used calcium speeded up exactly one hundred times, by laboratory processes, and injected it into the arms of both of them. Until the stuff was equally distributed over their bodies they felt nothing. Then suddenly it took devastating effect, halting them in mid-action, turning them to figures of stone!”

Adlison Boyd gazed up once more at the rigid, glittering figures.

“Then they are dead?”

“Utterly,” the girl answered in a somber voice.

* * * *

The figures of stone, by popular assent, remained where they were, and London grew up again around them. Twenty years later they were still standing in the same position, mighty monuments to a strange and weird invasion—a stupendous man and woman whose heads seemed wreathed in clouds; carved, granite faces staring into the sky.

The world went on its way, the affair of the giants forgotten. Dr. Adison Boyd, the instigator of it all, his wife, Professor Kemphill and Mary, all grew old and died, Mary leaving a son who alone knew the rudiments of the story of the monstrous invasion.

But the figures still stood on, the steel integuments rusted with the elements; behemoth arms upraised as though poised ready for destruction, above the teeming, midget world below.

SEEDS FROM SPACE

A titanic weed whose seed came from Mars enveloped Earth in its grip… But the creeping menace saved mankind from a far greater disaster!

CHAPTER I

The Spore Doom

For several minutes Price Driscoll had been silent, eyes fixed on the summer dust at his feet. It seemed that he had forgotten the park in which he was seated, the warm sunshine, and the girl by his side.

A cough from the girl aroused him. He looked up with a guilty start to find her blue eyes upon him.

“Well, it’s not before it’s time!” she commented frankly.

“I’m sorry, Lucy.” He smiled apologetically. “I’m worried. There’s something coming to this old world of ours that never came before.”

“I know—but it has been before,” the girl answered promptly. “You mean war?”

“Good heavens, no—something infinitely more terrible than war! A menace that will make war seem like a child’s pastime by comparison. You see, it’s my job to know all about it. And because I dared to tell what I know to be the truth I have been asked to resign my position. A fine thing to befall a young astronomer full of ideals, isn’t it?”

The girl’s eyes went wide. “You mean you’ve—you’ve lost your post? Oh, Price, I’m so—”

“I know; you’re sorry. That’s all anybody can say. If only they would listen to me instead! Me, the only man in the world who knows what is coming, and I’m not heeded.

“The entire Earth is doomed to destruction! And, so far as I know, there’s no remedy. One can take precautions, of course; but since I’m discredited, what’s the use?”

Lucy Harridge compressed her lips. “Price, what is the matter?” she demanded. “Tell me!”

“Well, until I was dismissed, I was, as you know, a responsible young astronomer at the observatory. One night recently, I made a remarkable discovery in connection with the planet Mars, a discovery which would have been impossible without the aid of our giant telescopic-reflector… Briefly, I saw a colossal cloud of seed-spores literally spewed into space from the planet.”

“Seed-spores? Mars?” Lucy was clearly baffled.

“Let me explain. Mars, if you know anything of astronomy, is subject to terrific wind and dust storms. The planet also possesses a type of plant life, not unlike our ivy, which grows very fast in the Martian deserts. These markings, until the installation of our new reflector, were mistaken for water-channels. The famous ‘canals,’ you know…

“Naturally, this plant life casts off seeds, which immediately take root, but according to my observations the terribly dry state of Mars’ surface hinders growth enormously. That brings me to my second point…

“Whilst observing this wind storm on Mars I distinctly saw one vast mass of seeds blown into the Martian atmosphere with such terrific force that the relatively weak pull of the planet’s gravity did not bring them down again. They just scattered into the void. You understand?”

Lucy nodded slowly. “I see what you mean. I suppose that once they passed into space they would be seen no more because of the blackness of the void?”

“Exactly. Which brings me to the theory of the great scientist, Svante August Arrhenius.”

“Whom?”

“He was an eminent Swedish scientist who put forward the theory that life could, and no doubt did, travel from other worlds and germinate on entirely different planets. You see, seeds are absolutely impervious to the frightful cold of space, and after being blown from their native planet’s surface they move through space, to eventually fall on a neighbouring world, maybe. There, granting favourable conditions, they germinate and sprout. Our life probably began like that.”

“Go on.”

“I saw those spores blown from Mars about eight weeks ago, and whilst I was interested, I did not think a great deal more about the matter. But this morning I saw a small notice in the newspaper—a seemingly unimportant little thing, but it spells the approach of a grave menace to mankind. Listen to this.”

Price tugged a morning paper from his pocket, and after some searching began to read:

“The liner Baltic, just docked from New York, reports a curious occurrence in the Atlantic Ocean, two hundred miles from the shores of Ireland. According to the Captain, the liner ran into a mass of brown seaweed; but investigation revealed this ten-mile carpet to be actually composed of billions of tiny seeds, similar to those of the sweet-pea. The mass is apparently sinking to the ocean floor. After some delay, caused by the seeds entangling with the screw, the Baltic continued on her way.”

Price stopped, his face set. The girl’s eyes were upon him.

“Then, Price, you think that—that those seeds you saw—?”

“Exactly! This morning I told Professor Webster of my theory, and we had a group of experts consider it. The damned fools! They decided I was letting fancy run away with common sense, and I’m to leave in a month. When I ’phoned you and asked you to meet me down here, I knew that you, at least, would listen to me.”

“Of course; but are you sure there’s a connection between Martian seeds and Atlantic seaweed? How can you be so certain that those seeds would strike Earth, with all the other planets there are?”

“It’s mathematical law! We’re the nearest to Mars. I’ve checked up on everything: the direction the spores took, the positions of Earth and Mars, their comparative nearness—every detail.

“There can be no mistake! That ten-mile carpet of brown seed spells the dawn of humanity’s destruction. And to think that a few tons of dynamite dropped on them now could stop the whole business! It’s enough to make a man go mad!”

“That’ll get you nowhere,” the girl said quietly. “England will come to its senses when things begin to happen—never fear.”

Price grunted. “It doesn’t just mean England. It means the whole world! Those seeds will thrive in the salt water of the ocean, absorbing moisture. They once lived in a salty desert, the floor of what once was an ocean on Mars’ surface. Imagine them now—roots in the sea-bed, thrusting out their branches along the ocean floor until they reach land!

“Then indeed will things begin to happen!”

The Strange Paralysis

The furious heat of July changed into the close enervation of the London August. None in the metropolis gave a thought to the fact that the unusually hot summer also existed in mid-Atlantic, where now, according to report, the ten-mile carpet of brown seeds had diminished to one mile; and that, too, was rapidly vanishing.

To Price Driscoll the news was ominous. The heat was a deadly foe. It would hasten the trouble which he insisted was certainly coming.

Though something of his early fear had subsided in the interval. His new post in an analytical laboratory gave him little time for conjecture; and whilst he worked, the threat of World War hung ever more imminent above human activity. Mars was indeed influencing Earth, both in the literal and abstract sense.

Early in July of the following year, Price was able to snatch a week’s rest. With Lucy, now his wife, he chose a Somerset farm in a little village called Mandory, which they found distinctly suited to their taste after the noise and bustle of the capital.

“It is just eighteen months since you were worrying over that dead sea-wrack,” Lucy remarked casually, as they strolled, hand in hand, down a deserted country lane, hedged in on either side.

“Is it?” he said, in some surprise, and suddenly stopped in his stride.

“Yes; and it’s a good job for you that you found a steady job.”

“Perhaps you’re right,” he agreed, and fell into step beside the girl as they walked on.

Presently they halted again and sat down on the grass at the side of the lane.

“Not a bad view,” Price commented, approvingly. “Now the hedge has ended we can see it all. Lovely, isn’t it?”

“Indeed it is,” the girl murmured. “Oh, Price, how can men and women think of war in such a glorious world?”

“Men don’t think of that when they want something,” Price answered grimly. “They just seem to—”

He paused, and a puzzled look came into his eyes. Shielding his gaze, he stared fixedly into the distance for a space.

“What is it?” the girl questioned, lazily.

“A flash.” Price’s voice was strange. “H’mm; do you feel anything?”

The girl did not answer for a moment, then sat up with a sudden effort.

“Yes, I do,” she admitted slowly. “As though I’ve lost control over my limbs! I—I feel ill!”

She passed a puzzled hand over her forehead. Price slipped an arm round her shoulders and looked again into the distance at a square, massively built structure raised upon a hill, dominating the whole of this stretch of countryside.

It came to him suddenly that he and his wife were on an absolutely unbeaten track; and as he looked at the building another brilliant flash radiated from it, akin to a mammoth mirror reflecting sunlight. He felt himself become limp; his legs tingled queerly.

“Damned odd!” he muttered. “Lucy, there’s something strange here. Perhaps it’s the heat. Surely that mirror can’t have anything to do with it—?”

The girl lay back, her face pale. “I don’t believe my legs will bear my weight!” she said, presently.

“Mine aren’t much better,” Price answered grimly; then, with sudden determination, he struggled to his feet. “Come on, let’s get into the shade. We’ve got sunstroke or something. Ah! That flash again—! Come on!”

But the girl seemed quite incapable of standing up, despite all her efforts. She gained her knees, then rocked sideways into the grass again, to lie there without making any further attempts. Scarcely a whit the better, seized with that uncanny paralysis, Price staggered forward, clutched her, and dragged her with superhuman effort into the shade of the hedge a short distance away.

For perhaps ten minutes they lay there, then gradually strength returned, and at last they got to their feet. Puzzled, they dusted their clothes and looked about them.

“What was it?” the girl asked finally, baffled. “That was no sunstroke!”

“It certainly was not,” Price agreed grimly. “It was something else; something very different to anything we’ve ever known before. Perhaps some new-fangled weapon of destruction.”

He paused, then drew her to him, filled with a sudden impulse to protect her. “We’ll find out about it,” he murmured. “Tonight.”

“Tonight?” Her eyes were startled.

“Afraid?” he chided gently, and at that she shook her head vehemently.

“Not with you, Price. I wish I knew what it was, though.”

Price moved forward and looked round the end of the hedge towards the squat edifice on the hill. Thoughtfully he stroked his chin.

“I’m convinced it’s a weapon of warfare!” he declared again. “You notice how that building on the hill is fenced round with seven-foot high railings, and also has an inner wall of metal? Why such unusual precautions? If there is something in that building that is a menace to humanity it has got to be destroyed!”

“Yes, Price.” The girl’s reply was quiet and submissive. Then she shook his arm as he still stood gazing around. “Suppose we get on the move? This place isn’t particularly pleasant now, after what’s happened.”

“Yes—we’ll go.” Price drew her arm through his and held her to his side as they made the return journey up the lane.

It was as they walked, absorbed in their own thoughts, that their eyes suddenly became aware of something at their feet. Imbedded in the dust lay automobile wheel tracks. Once again perplexity settled on Price’s face.

“A car? Along here?” he muttered. “That’s strange! It leads direct to that building on the hill.”

“So it does!” The girl moved forward to look more closely, only to jump quickly aside as a high-powered car suddenly swept into view, coming away from the building on the hill, advancing amidst a cloud of choking dust.

In an instant it had passed, and went bumping away along the iron-hard ruts, lost in the clouds of dust it had created. Wind-blown and ruffled, Price Driscoll and his wife joined each other again and stood staring after it. Presently it became dimly visible again, heading for Mandory village, its yellow colour quite discernible.

“That’s what I call hogging!” Price snapped. “Never even saw the fellow at the wheel, more’s the pity. If we hadn’t have jumped we wouldn’t have stood an earthly chance!”

“I wonder who he was?” the girl murmured, thoughtfully. “Obviously he’s connected with that mysterious building. Do you think we should tell the police?”

Price shook his head. “No, it’s no ordinary matter; it requires personal investigation. We’ll stick to the original plan and look the place over tonight. Now let’s carry on—we’ll be back in comfortable time for tea.”

They resumed their trudging and, a considerable time later, topped the rise of the lane to behold sleepy Mandory before them, broiling in the sun. There was something else, too; a yellow car outside the portico of Mawson’s Farm. Upon the little portico itself sat a hardly distinguishable figure, drinking with apparent enthusiasm.

“Good Lord, there he is!” Price exclaimed, pointing. “The chap with the yellow car! Come on.”

“I Am Out to Stop War…”

A hurried run across the square and they were both up the portico steps, facing the man, who seemed not the least perturbed by their sudden appearance before him. He quietly finished his drink and laid down the glass.

Inwardly, Price and Lucy were willing to admit that he had no sinister appearance whatever. His face was calm, intelligent, and remarkably handsome. The hair was black, the forehead expansive, and the eyes a strange shade of grey. Even when seated, he was obviously a man of considerable stature and strength.

“Good afternoon,” he said presently, in a mellow voice.

It became increasingly hard to dislike him when he spoke. With feelings of discomfiture, Price and his wife slowly sat down and faced him.

“A little while ago you came along the lane,” Price said finally. “You nearly ran us down! Do you know that?”

“Did I?” The man’s face evinced surprise. “I am very sorry. Frankly, the lane was so dusty I didn’t see anything to either side of it. I am sure you will both accept my deepest regrets, won’t you? By the way, Benton is my name—Hugh Benton. I am a scientist.”

“Don’t think I’m inquisitive or anything,” Price went on, “but what sort of a place is that of yours on the hill? It is yours, isn’t it?”

Hugh Benton shrugged. “It is my home and laboratory.” He smiled, reservedly. “You see, I have strange ways of living. Perhaps you might call me a super-philanthropist as well as a scientist.”

“Philanthropist!” Price echoed, derisively. “If you call it philanthropic to make my wife and I thoroughly ill with some kind of paralysis, you certainly have strange ideas! What sort of a stunt were you up to this afternoon? You made the pair of us as weak as table, jellies!”

“Dear me, how very awkward,” Benton muttered. “That means I shall have to take you into my confidence. I had hoped that would never become necessary. However, I think I can trust you.,. I—er—I am out to stop war.”

“Men have tried that before, sir—and failed.”

“Truly, but I am privileged in that I have an infallible method. The only way to stop men warring is to stifle the minds and bodies of those who fight! I have that something—an all-potent weapon, with an all-embracing power.

“It so happened that you and your wife came within range of my apparatus this afternoon, whilst I was experimenting… Naturally, you want to know all about it?”

“All!” Price said unwaveringly.

“Very well, then. What I do is to use a machine which emits electric waves, these waves being identical with those issuing forth from the sun itself. They are known as inazan waves, and exist some distance below infra-red frequency. You will know that the sun can bring heat-prostration and sunstroke; popular belief is that the heat does it. That isn’t so; it is the pure inazan waves of the sun which are responsible, for they affect the brain and create mild paralysis.

“Now, my machine, issuing forth these waves, produces a paralysis that is entirely complete. Everything possessing active life falls beneath its influence, and remains so until I use my counteracter. Also, my machine has the power to encircle the entire world if necessary, or, if desired, it can affect any specific part of the world. So, should a war be in progress, I have merely to exert it over the offending parties and they will immediately collapse, to stay thus, apparently lifeless, until my counteracter is operated. You understand?”

“Perfectly,” Price nodded; “but if your power encircles the world why wasn’t everybody affected this afternoon when Lucy and I were?”

“Because, as I have said, it was a test. I was using only eight per cent of the power possible—and, unfortunately, I had no idea you were so near at hand when I experimented. I set the apparatus so that the village would not be affected, but I didn’t expect you would be in the countryside; it’s usually so deserted. Luckily I used my counteracter as well, otherwise you would still be paralysed.

“Really, I am sorry… Suppose, as a slight consolation, you come and view my machinery for yourselves tonight? I feel sure that you’ll be interested.”

“Well, thanks, sir,” Price said sheepishly. “That’s very kind of you. I’m awfully sorry to have made such an ass of myself. Forgive me, won’t you?”

“There is nothing to forgive, Mr.—. What is your name, by the way?”

“Oh—I’m Price Driscoll, an analyst from London. This is my wife, Lucy.”

“Charmed.” Benton smiled. “You see, up there in my isolated abode I make many experiments; indeed I never leave unless urgency compels me. That happened this afternoon when I ran out of some chemicals and had to come to the chemist’s here for fresh supplies. However, with so many walls and railings round my dwelling I fancy my apparatus is quite safe.… And now, how about a drink together?”

“No, allow me!” Price interjected firmly. “My wife and I are staying here on a short holiday. I insist that you accept my invitation, after all I’ve said to you.”

“Very well.” Benton smiled.

“Right; that’s settled then,” Price said in satisfaction, and went off in search of the husky farmer who owned the small establishment.

Between Lucy and Hugh Benton a sudden silence fell. For some odd reason the girl’s mind had reverted to those spores of seed that had been lying far out on the Atlantic…

CHAPTER II

Man or—?

Hugh Benton kept His promise, and that same evening drove Price and Lucy to his isolated abode. The two did not attempt to calculate how many gates and doors they passed through before they finally entered a large room equipped after the fashion of some super power-house. Upon every side reposed gleaming machines of unusual design, with Benton hovering in the midst of them, a calm and explanatory host.

For the second time he went through the exposition of how his apparatus worked, tapped this and that machine, and finally led the way to two machines standing side by side.

“Most interesting devices,” he commented. “Look at them, each in turn. Stand close and I’ll start them up for you.”

Deeply interested, Lucy and Price stood by as directed, watching the mysterious engines, fascinated by the display of electrical power actuated by the moving of a switch.

“And is all this apparatus necessary for inducing paralysis?” Price asked when the display was over.

“Not altogether; these machines serve other purposes as well,” was Benton’s ambiguous reply. Then, in a different tone: “Doesn’t it strike you as peculiar that I, one man alone, should be gifted with the genius to evolve all this apparatus? Apparatus to save a world from itself…”

“You must be wonderfully clever, sir,” Lucy remarked admiringly, her blue eyes very bright.

Hugh Benton shook his head; his answer was surprising.

“Not clever, young lady; just possessed of an intellect several times greater than any other being on Earth. That is not egotism; it is pure fact.”

The girl looked away, half frightened. His deep, mysterious, grey eyes were upon her. She felt in them a sense of terrific solitudes, of loneliness supernal, of coldness—the utter coldness of interstellar space itself. It came to her in a suddenly vivid thought that Hugh Benton was not a man at all. He was.…

But that was impossible. She straightened up to find him serenely smiling again.

“I hope you have both enjoyed the demonstration?” he asked politely. “Perhaps I am not altogether the perfect host, but it pleases me to show you my machines. I love them, take a pride and joy in their upkeep and maintenance.”

As he talked he led the way into a comfortable lounge, where he provided a light and palatable refreshment. During a lull in the conversation, Price looked at the strange scientist with a very direct gaze.

“Mr. Benton, there is something which I feel you ought to know,” he said quietly. “I am, of course, a scientist—though nothing approaching your cleverness ever happened to me—and I feel you ought to know that something far worse than any war is threatening the world. Namely, destruction by plant life.”

“Indeed?” Benton’s eyebrows rose. “In what way?”

Quickly and concisely Price related once more his theory of the spores from outer space, the story of how they had been seen on the Atlantic eighteen months before, and of the hot, scorching summer that undoubtedly must have aided their growth.

“Remarkable,” Benton said finally, thinking. “Your theory is, of course, correct; but you may take my word for it that no harm will befall the Earth. There is nothing to fear.

“I am sorry to hear that you were discredited by so-called experts, but it does not surprise me when one considers the narrow limits of the average human brain. I can only repeat: there is nothing to fear.”

“You are certain of that?” Lucy demanded quickly.

Benton shrugged. “Absolutely, Mrs. Driscoll.” Then he stood in silence for a space, and Price and the girl again felt that air of intangible mysticism, hanging over him.

“I—I think, Mr. Benton, that we’d better be getting along,” Price ventured at length. “Please don’t think us discourteous, but—”

“Quite so, quite so,” Benton responded pleasantly. “I’m to blame for having kept you so long. Come; my car is at your disposal.”

Again followed the curriculum of door-locking and gate-slamming, then the return journey along the narrow lane commenced. Benton sat in silence at the wheel, lost in thought, his driving purely mechanical. Price and Lucy watched him, fascinated.

Who was he? What was he? Just an enigma, with a personality as obscure and unplumbed as space itself.

The Alien Growths

Hugh Benton did not make his presence felt again at the farm, and Price and Lucy, as the days of their holiday slipped by, could not help but wonder why he had so suddenly and mysteriously come into their lives and then as suddenly vanished. Once they debated the idea of a second visit to him, but the memory of calm yet strangely friendless grey eyes made them decide otherwise.

Consequently, they spent the waning time in almost childish pursuits. On the day before they were due to return to London, they became explorers of forest undergrowth a mile away from the farm. With sandwiches in haversacks upon their backs, hatless and happy-go-lucky man and woman were suddenly transformed by the irresistible magic of perfect summer weather into a boy and girl again.

No sense of things unexpected touched them until, in a mad gambol for the shelter of a tree where they might lunch, Lucy tripped headlong over a hidden root and went sprawling into a mass of cool bracken and fern. In a moment Price was after her, had hauled her laughing to her feet.

Then, with solemn pomp, he returned to the offending root and kicked it vengefully. To his stupefied amazement, a brilliant, sickly green sap oozed from the abrasion to the ground below.

The sap’s colour was remarkable enough; but even more astounding was the fact that from its treacly unpleasantness there sprang up what appeared to be thousands of tiny weeds, exactly similar to the parent branch. There was something nauseating, repulsive, about its stupendous rate of growth.

“Good Lord!” Price said at last, in utter amazement.

“Whatever makes it grow like that?” the girl asked, wide eyes fixed on the now eight-inch high weeds as they quivered into more leaf and stem. “It’s uncanny!”

For a long time Price stood quite still, his eyes fixed on that tumultuous growth. Even as he looked the things spread. With another savage kick he broke four of them; they oozed sap, and more weeds sprang up to take their place.

“Lucy, it’s come!” he exclaimed at last, clutching her arm. “The spores from Mars!”

The girl looked at him, stupefied. He seized her by the shoulders and shook her, to bring her to her senses.

“Lucy! Lucy Don’t you begin to understand? All this time—these eighteen months—those spores that settled on the Atlantic have pushed their roots right the way to land, up through the soil of England. This great log here is but one of the roots.

“You can’t stop it growing! As fast as you break it, it drips more sap, and that in turn transforms into plants. Oh, God! Why didn’t I warn the world when I had the chance?”

With an effort, Lucy tore her eyes from the swaying, thriving weeds. “But, Price, Mr. Benton said—”

“Damn Benton! This convinces me! He didn’t know what he was talking about. These weeds will be everywhere before long… Come on; let’s get out of this confounded wood; it gives me the creeps!”

Clutching the girl by the hand, Price forced her along at a rapid pace. As they ran they realised for the first time that the plants on all sides of them were identical to the miniature ones they had seen growing. The place was a mass of the deadly weed!

Panting and hot, they arrived at last in the lane near which the wood was situated. Price’s face was grim and perspiring; the girl’s flushed and troubled.

“Well, what now?” she asked, breathlessly. “Even if we have found the weed, what can we do about it? See Benton?”

Price shook his head. “Useless, I’m afraid. Besides, he’s such a queer sort of chap… No, we’d better get back to London tomorrow—away from all this.”

So, the picnic forgotten, they retraced their steps to the village and farmhouse. On the way they beheld further evidences of alien growth. Here and there were outcroppings of the silently swaying, growing vegetation. At first it seemed it was the wind blowing them; then the two realised with a jolt that it was—expansion!

Everywhere, it seemed, the ground was infested with Martian plant life. The seal of danger and insecurity had settled upon Earth’s face…

War!

Back in London again, the memory of the holiday and Hugh Benton rapidly becoming forgotten, Price wondered whether the strange plant life that he and Lucy had encountered had not, after all, been something akin to the rapidly growing puff-ball. Once or twice he examined the saner aspects of the matter and finally decided that, even if the affair had been genuine, nobody would believe him in any case. Besides, he had a lot of work to catch up with.

So came the return to monotony. He went to and from his work every day, dreaming of ideals and vaguely realising that he had not the finance with which to mature them. Lucy, for her part, pursued an equally unremarkable course in keeping the little out-London bungalow presentable.

Then, like a bombshell, came—war! Two of the world’s principal countries had declared war against the remainder of the world. The outcome was inevitable. There would be a terrific, all-embracing battle. Nobody knew just what the war was about. It was just…well, war.

Price found himself called upon to enlist within four days. The news was half expected, but bitter. On the verge of securing for himself a sound position in life, he was now to be plunged into the welter of ruin and chaos…

Grim-faced, disillusioned, he stood in the drawing room two nights before he was due to depart for the front.

“And after all that fool Benton had to say!” he growled. “He was going to stop war! I don’t know what he wasn’t going to do! And look at the world—-just inside out! Civilisation against civilisation, Lucy, and there’s only one end to that! Wholesale annihilation! For years mankind has simmered on the brink of such an outburst as this, and now it has come I shudder to think of the results.”

“If only we could find Benton again,” the girl said, thoughtfully. “I feel sure, in spite of all you say, Price, that he spoke the truth. I read it once in his eyes. There was something in them that was…well, godlike! I can’t explain it.”

Pshaw!” Price snapped irritably. “Switch on the radio, will you? We might as well learn how much butchery is going on since I’m to be in it.”

The girl reached out and pressed the switch. Followed a few slight adjustments, then the early news bulletin from London came through. For a space the announcer rambled through irrelevant preliminaries, then—

“A remarkable state of affairs has arisen on the First Frontier. Reports from an official source state that the entire front line of infantry collapsed today whilst advancing on the opposing side. The opposers, believing they had an easy victory, advanced to the attack, when they too were overtaken by some strange form of paralysis which petrified them at their posts.

“Surgeons have conducted rigorous examinations and are quite at a loss to account for the malady. It seems to be a condition of advanced catalepsy, in which state the victim is alive, and yet apparently dead. The heartbeats drop to minimum, and there is only just enough respiration to keep the victim alive.

“How long the condition will last cannot be conjectured; the latest bulletin reports no chancre in the men’s condition, and the cause is equally unaccountable. A germ attack could be the probable cause, were it not for the fact that both armies are suffering from the same trouble. It is understood that the malady is rapidly spreading.…”

The announcer paused, and Price looked round amazedly.

“Benton!” he expostulated. “He spoke the truth after all! He’s stopping the war, and—”

“A further remarkable news item in this troubled world comes from Cornwall,” the announcer continued. “The inhabitants of the little village of Rendford reports the appearance of a strange type of plant life that seems to have its roots in the sea. It is rapidly growing, and the English Channel is green with the mysterious weed as far as the eye can see.

“According to accounts, nothing can be done about it. It seems impervious to fire; indeed, it extinguishes fire, and cutting only makes it grow the faster. The report has yet to be verified, but steps are being taken to ensure its authenticity. That concludes the—”

With a hand that shook slightly Lucy switched the instrument off and got to her feet.

“Price,” she said slowly, “that plant we saw wasn’t a dream. It was all too real. And you were right!! That thing we found must have been a root. Now the plant is appearing from the Atlantic as well, where the spores originally fell.”

“I know, and that might not have been the only place they fell,” Price replied, sombrely. “They may have been disseminated all over the world, for all we know.”

He stopped, thinking deeply, then resumed in a grim voice. “Lucy, I’m not going to the war, even though I’ve enlisted. For one thing, there will soon be no war to demand my presence; and for another, this weed is getting a hold. It will grow and grow…unless a means is found to stop it.”

“But what can stop it?”

“I don’t know off-hand, but being an analyst I can find out. Ultra-violet might do it, or germs of some kind…

“You know, I still can’t fathom why Benton said that weed meant nothing. He lied!”

“Perhaps he was only diplomatic,” Lucy corrected, quietly.

CHAPTER III

“It’s the End of the World!”

Paralysis, mysterious and complete, overtook all the armies on every battlefield the following day. Not only the soldiers, airmen and surgeons were affected, but also the sailors at sea. From every quarter of the globe flashed frenzied messages of universal paralysis creeping over the entire world. Nobody was dead, and yet nobody was alive!

The affair was taking on a deadly seriousness. War? What time was there for that now? Man had turned to fighting a common enemy, a mysterious disease that made life a perpetual sleep from which there was perhaps no awakening.

Whole countries began to get uneasy. Price Driscoll and his wife became uneasy, too, when they learned that the decision to cease hostilities had not stopped the paralysis.

It was rapidly spreading to affect everybody. Already the entire American continent was dead from Mains to California, and those liners which were midway between England and the United States had come to a standstill, passengers and crew somnolent, rigid.

“This is going too far!” Price breathed, the following evening. “One more day and the whole world will go under! What on Earth does Benton think he’s playing at, I wonder? I understood he was only going to stop war, not wipe out mankind. It’s—it’s unthinkable! Isn’t it?”

“Yes, I suppose it is,” Lucy admitted. “Why don’t we go and see him again? He could tell us something, no doubt.”

Price considered for a moment, then nodded quickly.

“All right, we will! Get dressed and I’ll get the car out.”

Fifteen minutes later they were on their way through London’s busy thoroughfares, a few odds and ends slung in the car’s rumble-seat. Knowing the drive was to be a long one, Lucy made herself comfortable in the corner of the two-seater, and alternately dozed and watched the darkening countryside.

The sun had been set for some time; darkness came with the slowness common to summer. Still the little car rattled on, its engine humming strongly, keeping up an almost constant speed of forty miles an hour along the deserted country roads.

Blackness came at last. The headlights flooded into being. Wearied, Lucy tried to compose herself for a brief sleep. Her thoughts had trailed off into dim channels when suddenly she heard Price give a sharp exclamation. Shot out of her doze, she jerked upright, then screamed in alarm.

A mighty wall of livid green was directly in front of the car’s bonnet, stretching across the lane. The steering wheel flew round in a circle, and the car veered off to the left. A second later, it slid down a bank, turned over, and crashed heavily on to its side.

Dazed, but not hurt, Price clambered from beneath the overturned vehicle, dragging Lucy after him. A quick examination revealed that they had suffered nothing worse than abrasions.

“What on earth was it?—a hedge?” Lucy demanded, pushing back her disordered hair and trying to see her husband’s face in the rising moonlight.

“Hedge nothing!” he retorted savagely. “It was a huge branch of that weed! Come back with me, and we’ll have a look at what’s going on.”

They scrambled up the bank to the slightly rising ground bordering the road. At the sight they beheld, horror clutched at their hearts, and they stood utterly dumbfounded.

The Moon was now clear of horizon-mist, and in its yellow light lay a scene never before witnessed by living creatures. From their slightly higher vantage point the two could see right across the countryside, and upon every hand, like a vast sea, there stretched billowing green—writhing, struggling green that swayed sickeningly in the silence. Leaves upon leaves, branches upon branches, countless millions of feet of tendrils. A plant, smothering the entire south of England in a steadily advancing blanket!

Even as the two stood, stunned, the nearer branches and shoots of the incredible stuff were coming down the road. Dimly, Price realised that it was the sea of vegetation with which he had nearly collided.

“Great heavens!” he said at last. “Now I begin to understand why nobody is recovering from the paralysis. Don’t you see? Benton must have been overwhelmed—killed, before he could use his counteracter. It’s—it’s the end of the world, Lucy! The end of the world!”

Tendrils of Death

The girl clung closer to him. Her voice broke. “What—what can we do?”

“Get back to London at top speed. It’s the only chance of survival!”

They raced back to the overturned car and set about trying to right it. It was only a small two-seater, but all the same its weight was considerable. Desperately they heaved and pushed. The engine, still in order, roared fitfully, but the frantic spinning of the one wheel remaining on the ground did nothing save move dirt.

At last, panting and drenched with perspiration, the two ceased their struggles. Price swore softly, while Lucy mopped her face.

Then the girl started at a light touch on her ankle. She glanced down, puzzled, then uttered a scream. A thin, whip-like tendril, similar to that of Virginia creeper, had securely noosed itself round her leg!

“Price! Price!” she shouted frantically, starting to run forward; but three more powerful tendrils reached out and clutched her flailing arms, her waist. She toppled over helplessly, unable to retain her balance.

“Good God!” Price gasped in horror, wheeling round, to behold in the moonlight a mighty streamer of the advancing weed cascading over the bank and smothering all before it.

He had a vision of his struggling, screaming wife in the midst of the frightful stuff, wrapping round her body like cotton round a reel… She moved within it, struggling feebly. It gained the car and rapidly began to bury it in bands of swelling green.

Price saw his wife in danger of death from strangulation unless he acted at lightning speed. Already she was difficult to see through the tangle of branches and speeding tendrils. Whipping off his coat, he snatched his penknife from his pocket, snapped open the largest blade, and charged to the attack.

In another second he was in the midst of the awful mass, fighting the most terrific and nauseating battle of his life. Branches writhed away to the ground as he cut them asunder. Brilliant green sap flew through the air, dropped to the smothered ground, and sprouted. Tendrils pulled at his legs, tore at his arms, curled round his neck.

Right and left he slashed, the keen blade cutting the stuff through in all directions, until at last he reached his wife’s side. She was unconscious, and yet, strangely enough, the stuff no longer tried to curl round her now that she was still. Six more cuts, and the main stems that clamped about her were slashed in twain. With desperate speed, Price cut the remaining coil that was twisted about her neck.

Glancing round, he was staggered to see how far the weed had travelled. It was hemming him in on every side. Tossing the girl over his shoulder, he battled his way back again, hacking and hewing like a madman, stumbling and falling, his clothes spattered with the evil, green sap. Until finally, utterly spent, he staggered through the edge of the advancing stuff and went reeling away, drunk with horror and strain.

Yet even now there was no respite. The plant was still advancing. He picked Lucy up once more and staggered on across the adjoining meadow, heart bursting with the exertion.

As he reeled crazily onwards he cast horrified glances over his shoulder towards that behemoth sea of vegetation, so silent yet so invincible, spreading through the moonlight. Then he found he had reached the road again.

Here, exhausted, he paused for a moment, then set about reviving his wife. It took him five minutes, but by that time she was able to stand on her feet again. It was curious to note that she had sustained but little physical injury; the awful shock had been mainly responsible for her collapse.

She stood now, panting and shaky, in the moonlight, drawing her torn clothes together.

“Now what?” she asked finally, anxiously. “We can’t outstrip it, Price.”

“That’s what’s worrying me,” he answered, breathing hard. “I’m about all in, and I can’t think of any—”

He paused and looked up with a puzzled frown as a sudden deep, beating hum came upon the air. It became louder, until at last two pairs of eyes were treated to the surprising sight of a silvery, peculiarly-shaped air machine—wingless, remarkably enough—speeding along close to the ground, not a mile away.

Presently it swung round and headed towards the road. It seemed to actually stop in mid-air, then dropped in a straight, vertical line to earth.

The two onlookers did not stop to consider the machine’s unorthodox behaviour; they screwed up all their remaining energy and raced towards the spot where it had alighted. As they reached it a door opened in the glittering side, and a tall, familiar figure became visible.

“Hugh Benton!” Price gasped in amazement.

“How well you remember names, my young friend,” the strange scientist responded. “Get inside, both of you. I’ll explain later. Hurry! The weed is moving fast!”

Without further ado, Price and Lucy tumbled into the softly sprung seats at the rear of Benton’s machine. The door closed by some automatic process, then the remarkable craft, quite different to an ordinary aeroplane, rose vertically into the air and swept over the billowing sea of vegetation.

Gazing down, Price and Lucy both shuddered involuntarily. One slip and it meant doom of the most horrible kind in the midst of that all-destructive plant. But Hugh Benton fid not seem in the least perturbed. He drove steadily towards the south, high above the seething life below, and never uttered a single word.

Drugged…

To the complete amazement of both young people, Hugh Ben-ton’s dwelling on the hill, when eventually they reached what had been the Somerset countryside, was the only place free from the all-embracing, wriggling plant-life. The sea of leaves reached to the railings of his abode and there stopped, as though an unseen power had bidden them advance no further…

With the same calmness of manner, Benton brought his strange air-machine round in a wide circle, then dropped direct to the flat roof below. A slight jolt, and the flyer was still.

Silently he opened the rear door, assisted the two to alight, then led the way down through a trapdoor into his familiar laboratory. Passing through this—and as they went Price and Lucy both noticed that the strange machines were now humming with power—he preceded them into the lounge, switching on an electric fire and light by a synchronic switch.

“Make yourselves at home,” he invited, cordially. “The sooner you get into practice, the better.”

“You mean—? You mean we’re prisoners?” Price demanded; but Benton shook his head.

“Not my prisoners, Mr. Driscoll—prisoners of the weed,” he responded quietly. “In fact…”

He hesitated, stood thinking for a moment, then shrugged. “It doesn’t matter now. Later, perhaps. I will bring you some refreshment. I am sure you must both be tired and nerve-racked after your ordeal. I’ll return in a moment.”

When he came back he was carrying a bottle in his hand.

“Champagne,” he explained, in response to the glances of the two. “It will revive you wonderfully after its first effects have passed off. My—er—champagne is different to most brands in that it leaves no after-effects the following morning. You really must try it.”

Without waiting for an acceptance, he crossed to the sideboard and filled two glasses to the brim; for some curious reason he omitted himself, and handed them to his two guests. A faintly amused smile hung about his lips as he watched them drain the glasses to the last drop.

“By jove, sir; it’s marvellous!” Price declared emphatically. “Sets you on fire! What do you say, Lucy?”

“Never tasted anything quite like it!” she affirmed, passing an uncertain hand over her forehead. “What—what brand is it? Do you mind telling us?”

“I have no objection to telling you; but the trouble is that it is quite unobtainable except by me. However, we can discuss that later. I would suggest that you retire now without having any food. This particular champagne does not agree with food. I had a very comfortable room in the south wing of this building which will amply suit your needs. It was just as well I knew you were coming and saved you from the weed.”

His strong hands helped the exhausted pair to their feet and piloted them down an adjoining corridor, up a broad staircase, and finally into a wide and expansive bedroom, tastefully furnished, the window draped in red velvet curtains.

“I feel sure you will be comfortable here,” he said, his face full of smiles. “You will find a bolt on the inside of this door. Lock the door; I shall not be offended. I’ll see you in the morning.”

“Goo’ ni’!” Lucy exclaimed, with a wild wave of her arm flopping on to the billowing bed; and Price’s response was a loud bass hiccup.

Quietly, Benton closed the door behind him, then locked two outer bolts as well. Manifestly, the fact that the two could lock themselves in did not prevent him from ensuring that they could not leave. The bolts moved very silently; then, with the same calmness, Benton strolled up the passage.

Within the bedroom, after a befuddled effort to move over the bolt, Price fell full length on the bed beside the stupefied Lucy. Almost instantly, they both fell into a deep, drugged sleep. So deeply did they sleep, indeed, that they failed to hear, for a period lasting from two until four in the morning, a persistent stabbing of powerful Morse from a super radio-transmitter, or the seeming echo of those messages in a strong loudspeaker somewhere downstairs.

Hugh Benton did not attempt to sleep; it seemed to be the thought furthest from his extraordinary mind. Instead he viewed the approaching dawn with a wakefulness and calmness foreign to the strongest man…

CHAPTER IV

The Creeping Menace

Price Driscoll awoke with a start. Why, he did not exactly know. He swivelled an eye round and found sunlight streaming through a niche in the red velvet curtains.

Remarking his amazement at finding no trace of stiffness or headache after the champagne of the night before, he scrambled off the broad bed and dropped to the floor. For a moment he was puzzled at finding himself dressed in the remnants of his previous night’s clothing; then, with a grim smile, he remembered.…

Suddenly recollecting his wife, he turned to find her face downwards on the heavy quilt, arms outflung, hands clutching the heavy material as though she were afraid of slipping off it—a silent revelation of her previous night’s thoughts.

She shook her head as Price tapped her on the shoulder, then twisted into a sitting position and rubbed her tousled hair sleepily.

“How are you?” Price asked.

“All right; never felt better. That champagne of Mr. Benton’s is about the best thing I’ve struck… H’mm!” She cast a disapproving eye down her ripped garments. “Wonder if there are any clothes anywhere?”

Price shrugged. “We can but ask. Let’s get moving; I’m hungry.”

He crossed to the window and flung back the curtains, then stood gripping them, staring transfixed with shock for a moment. From this high position he could see the entire countryside, and everywhere except the scientist’s lonely abode was buried in a turbulent mass of green.

It was as though an entire Sargossa Sea had arisen overnight. Mile upon mile of it, in every direction, swelling and swaying in the exuberance of bounding growth, increasing its pace now under the rays of the hot summer sun.

“We certainly were lucky to be picked up,” Lucy commented quietly, looking over her husband’s shoulder. “This stuff is smothering the world.”

Perplexity settled on her brow. “I still can’t fathom why this place is left untouched. See, down there by the railings it isn’t getting a hold at all. But out there there’s nothing but weed. Price, dear, do you think we’re in a dangerous position?” she asked worriedly, turning to him.

“Not inside here,” he replied; and, satisfied with the view, he turned to the door and slipped back the bolt. Timidly, like children, they both crept out into the corridor, ragged, dirty, and faintly apprehensive.

“Ah, good morning, my young friends. I trust you are feeling better?”

It was Hugh Benton himself, standing behind them, immaculate in a lounge suit. That faint suggestion of an amused smile still hung about his lips.

“Oh—er—good morning, sir,” Price stammered, and Lucy took refuge in a faint smile.

“You seem ill at ease,” Benton remarked in surprise. “I assure you that you have nothing to fear. I may be strange in manner, but I am the perfect host. Breakfast is awaiting us downstairs; after we have had it I will arrange clothing for you. Come along.”

At breakfast Benton ate little; instead he watched his guests detachedly, as though studying them. Not that this made the pair self-conscious; they were too hungry to care.

When they were satisfied, Benton looked at them thoughtfully.

“Today, my young friend, we will tour the world and see how far this weed has moved,” he announced. “We can be back before dark, and still have fairly long stays in London, New York, Berlin, and other principal cities.

“I am anxious to see how things are progressing. I could use television, but I prefer to see with my own eyes. Besides, I think you will enjoy the trip.”

“Did—did you say the world?” Price asked, incredulously. “Back before dark?”

“Easily.” Benton nodded, calmly. “My air-machine moves at half the speed of light itself; namely, ninety-three thousand miles a second, when at maximum. I rarely use maximum speed, of course. We can soon cover the globe at a slower rate. You will be interested, surely?”

“Oh, very!” Price agreed dazedly, almost convinced he was dealing with a lunatic.

“Very well, then. Run along and smarten up a bit; you will find several articles of clothing in your room, which have been put there whilst we breakfasted. I have a mechanical servant. You need fresh clothes. Also, if your faces are any guide, you missed the shower and washbowl in the corner of your room, behind the curtain. With all due deference to both of you, use it. I’ll prepare my ship meantime.”

The Smothered Metropolis

Half an hour later the two were seated comfortably in the rear of Benton’s amazing air-machine. He clambered up in front of them, flicked a button, and the engine purred softly. It had none of the harsh, blasting roar of an aeroplane; its smooth rhythm was something to wonder at.

A lever moved, then with easy grace the machine rose in vertical ascent, turned, and began to gather terrific momentum as it shot across the sea of vegetation below. Price and Lucy, enthralled by the view, forgot the mysterious personality of their host as they gazed down upon the massive banks of weed struggling and battling with each other to reach the hot sunlight.

With almost incredible speed—yet, strangely enough, without any unpleasant effects, despite the tremendous acceleration—the vessel ate up distance. The roar of the wind outside became distinctly noticeable through the immensely thick walls, a point which presently brought a question from Price.

“Mr. Benton, if you travelled at your maximum speed, surely the friction of the atmosphere would burn up your entire ship?”

“Not the metal of this machine,” Benton replied. “It is known as Oilian steel, and has a melting point several thousand degrees Centigrade above tungsten, one of Earth’s toughest metals. Besides that, Oilian steel is very light; and again, between the inner and outer walls of this ship is a perfect vacuum—or, at least, the nearest approach to one—which stops either cold or heat affecting the interior. The wind you hear is from the window-sockets, not the walls. Sound can’t pass through a vacuum.”

Price digested these remarks before speaking again.

“I can’t understand why, with such knowledge as yours, you don’t make money!”

“Probably because money doesn’t interest me,” came the grave response; and Price said no more…

Seven minutes later London was reached. Switches moved and clicked once more, and the air-machine became stationary.

“I use a radio-motor,” Benton explained, turning to read the wonder in the faces of the two passengers. “Generated from my abode is a special class of radio-waves, which propel my motor, the motor being attuned to those waves. Since these waves are powerful enough to encircle the world, I travel round the world in them. That is why my machine can achieve such terrific velocity, because radio waves move at the nearly same speed as light—one hundred and eighty-six thousand miles a second. I find, though, that half that speed is a safe maximum; once I get past it my automatic acceleration neutralisers and gyroscopic-seats behave faultily, being unable to cope with the excessive inertia…

“The radio-waves also explain why I can go up and down vertically, and why I can remain stationary in mid-air. Since this vessel has a radio-motor at each end, controlled from this switchboard, an equal pressure can be radiated from both ends; hence the ship remains still. You understand?”

“Vaguely,” Price said doubtfully.

“Well, why try?” Benton asked, smiling. “Look down there! Interesting, is it not?”

The three turned to the windows. The air-machine was hovering over Trafalgar Square, permitting a wide view of London on every hand. Never in their lives had Price or Lucy expected to see what they did then.

For London was already being attacked by the weed. During the night it must have moved at tremendous speed from the south country, besides having burst out in various other quarters of the city of its own accord. It was clear that, in the main, the mighty weed had come up the river, for from end to end the wide bosom of the Thames was choked with crawling, struggling green life.

It stretched forth its squirming tentacles on both sides of the river. The Westminster, Tower and Waterloo Bridges were already cloaked in green, making them appear oddly like medieval castles with a covering of ivy.

Directly below, people were lying prone in the streets, hundreds upon hundreds of them, obviously first stricken down by the amazing paralysis. And towards them, covering them, rolled and expanded the monstrous columns of Martian vegetation.

A colossal main branch, quite eight feet in diameter, lay down the centre of the Strand. The taller buildings, too, made excellent holds for the stuff. Big Ben had already vanished amidst the smother. Fleet Street, place of ink and news, had also succumbed.

A World Engulfed

Even as the trio watched, the weed continued to envelope the city with almost uncanny speed. The dark, natural green of Hyde Park was gradually obliterated as the mass crept over it. Building after building disappeared; streets and people vanished before that irresistible tidal wave of astounding growth.

Presently Lucy’s voice broke the silence.

“Those poor people down there! The stuff will kill them—choke them!”

“On the contrary,” Benton answered, shaking his head. “The Martian weed, from the tests I have made of it, will not strangle or even harm a sleeping or unconscious person or animal. It is the things which give resistance, like struggling people or animals, which it chokes.

“That is why you were in danger last night, when you tried to fight free from the weed. The instant you became unconscious and limp it ceased to try and overcome you. No buildings will suffer, either, because they offer no resistance. They will be covered, yes; but nothing more.”

“You seem to know a lot about it, sir,” Price ventured. “Why on Earth don’t you remove the paralysis from the world? You said it was to stop war, and you managed it. But why let the world go to pot?”

“When I realised that the weed would cover the Earth I decided to increase the power of my paralysis-machine and render every living soul unconscious. Dead, and yet alive. In that way the weed will grow over them, and they will not suffer because they offer no resistance.

“In perhaps sixteen or seventeen hours Earth will be covered from end to end. From here we will fly northwards and see how the rest of the world is faring. Those Martian seeds, contrary to your belief, were not confined to the Atlantic Ocean. They were widely scattered, some falling in the Atlantic, some in the Pacific and Indian Oceans, and others in various parts of different continents. Don’t question how I know all this…”

The controls moved again, and the journey across England to Scotland was covered at a stupendous rate. Central England had so far escaped the creeping menace, but it was rapidly approaching from the Irish and North Seas.

Then began the most amazing journey Price and his wife had ever known. Flying with unremitting velocity, they travelled over a weed-infested sea to Iceland, to find that country entirely obliterated, and so across a super-Sargasso to Greenland. Here, near the Arctic Circle, the weed was not so prolific. The cold was hindering it somewhat, but nevertheless it was growing inevitably, forcing great roots through the massive ice-packs.

The whole edge of the Arctic Circle, right into the misty reaches of the Arctic itself, was a pounding, beating mass of spray, ice and weed…and the weed was winning!

The air-machine turned, flew across the blocked Atlantic to North America, which was completely out of sight, there being no distinction between sea and land, so thick had the growth become. Touching the now vanished frontiers of Alaska, the machine swung back to the Pacific Ocean and across South America, which was just as thickly covered with the relentless plant.

So on and on, searching assiduously, across the Indian Ocean to Australia, then high above the Philippines to the vast continent of Asia. Here some parts were still visible, but manifestly doomed. During much of the journey the speeding flyers were enveloped in darkness, but powerful searchlights in the base of their machine made the scene of utter destruction below only too clearly visible…

Over Asia, Benton turned at last, flew back across buried Africa, and so to the British Isles again. The setting sun smote the hurtling air-machine as it neared the weed-infested shores of England. A slackening of speed, a vertical descent, and the journey was ended.

Some Mysteries Explained

“I feel,” Benton said, when dinner was over, “that you are entitled to some explanations. Some of these explanations I shall give you now, and others I shall reserve until a more opportune time.

“For one thing, I knew you were coming to see me the other night because, ever since I met you down here on your vacation, I have kept you constantly in range with a radio-televisor. This instrument is tuned to the frequencies of people, or objects, and follows them constantly if they be movable, no matter how far they may go, reproducing their movements upon a screen, even viewing them through solid buildings. All sounds made by these people are likewise trapped and reproduced through a loud-speaker. So, you see, I have watched over you both ever since that evening when you came up here to look round.

“You remember that I asked you to examine two machines? One of those automatically registered your frequencies—your electrical body-energy—and after that my radio-televisor had merely to be tuned to those frequencies in order to follow you everywhere. The other machine emitted, all unknown to you, a force which made you both incapable of being affected by my paralysis-machine.

“That is why you escaped the effects. I, too, being likewise treated, also came to no harm, although the rest of the world succumbed when I extended the waves, instead of concentrating them upon the warring armies.”

“But why did you bother to watch us?” Price asked puzzled.

“Because I admired you both from the first moment I met you. You were young and fresh, full of ideals and hopes. There was another reason, too. You knew about the spores from Mars; you two were the only ones who knew about them, and I felt it was only fair you should see your once despised theory bear fruit.

“I saw you find that root in the wood, too…”

“What amazing knowledge you have!” Lucy exclaimed. “You’re a genius!”

“Maybe I am,” Benton admitted with a faint smile. “As for our meals here, they are synthetic; practically everything here is synthetic or automatic. Everything you have found—beds, clothes, and so forth, I created specially for you. For my own part, I rarely sleep.”

“You think up all these things and yet rarely sleep?” Price breathed. “Then who on Earth are you, sir? What are you? There’s something about you—”

“All in good time,” the scientist interrupted, evasively. “I trust I have explained everything else?”

“Not altogether, sir. There’s that champagne of yours, and also why the weed has not attacked your home. Why, when you can stop the weed, do you allow it to go on?”

“In that, my friend, you probe too deeply. Later, perhaps.”

Benton took out his watch and regarded it. “At midnight precisely, according to my calculation, the entire Earth will be covered in the weed, buried under a dense, impenetrable blanket that no power can smash or break. A vast, super shock-absorber.”

“You sound as though you’ve premeditated it, sir!”

“Twenty feet thickness of rebounding weed,” Benton went on, his voice suddenly tense. “If everything has gone to plan, there is nothing to fear.”

He put his watch back, calm and serene again. “Another hour will bring midnight,” he commented. “I suggest that we adjourn to the laboratory, and there I think I can promise you the most astounding experience you’ve had so far… This way.”

CHAPTER V

“Earth is Saved!”

Benton closed the door of the laboratory softly and for a time inspected his gently humming machinery; then he crossed to a massive lever and pulled it over. From somewhere on the roof came a grinding roar that soon subsided.

“That was a thick metal sheathing covering the roof of my home,” he explained. “Only the windows are free, and they are unbreakable.”

“But what’s it all for?” Price questioned in bewilderment.

“You will learn only too soon.”

Benton hesitated for a moment, as though considering some inner thought, then resumed in a meditative voice. “I have something to tell you both…

“Millions of years ago—so long ago that earthly man has no record of the incident—Earth’s surface was rendered a pitted and scarred ruin by a bombardment from outer space. Geologists believe it was Earth’s internal upheavals that produced its mountains and sea-beds. They are wrong, as I have reason to know. The sea-beds were blasted out of the then fairly malleable Earth by showers of colossal stones and boulders from interstellar space, and the hills were created by the upward pushing of matter from the displaced areas, later to become the floors of its present-day oceans.

“At that period, millions of years ago, Earth, travelling in her orbit, happened to cross the enormously elongated orbit of a slowly-travelling mass of rock and stone. By mass I mean an area some million miles wide, consisting of the remains of a planet which once burst asunder and whose fragments, in the form of titanic rocks, still move through space. Earth became bombarded with these fragments as she crossed this broken planet’s orbit, and the upheavals I’ve mentioned, with several others, took place.

“Then Earth began to recover and man appeared, to invent other explanations for sea-beds and mountain ranges. The disintegrated planet passed on its way in its orbit, and Earth continued in hers. But calculation showed that millions of years later the same thing would happen again, when the two orbits crossed once more, and that unless steps were taken to prevent it, Earth would suffer something approaching annihilation—most certainly the destruction of all her cities and all her peoples.

“The time for this terrific second bombardment has now arrived. Thanks to the giant weed, however, the shocks will be reduced to a minimum. Being elastic and springy in nature, as well as amazingly strong, the weed now covering the entire Earth will cause this rain of missiles to rebound somewhat, and so break the tremendous force of their fall. Hence Man and his handiwork will be protected.

“Nor can the frightful heat of these missiles cause any damage, because the weed destroys the phenomenon known as fire and won’t burn. So Man, buried deep beneath twenty feet of vegetation, will be untouched. Being unconscious, he will know and feel nothing. You understand?”

“But—but how do you know what happened a million and a half years ago?” Price almost shouted. “And how did the weed happen to appear on Earth so opportunely?”

“Nothing happens in the realm of Science; everything is planned,” Benton replied calmly. “Now you know why I placed metal protections around this dwelling, to save it being destroyed in the approaching bombardment…”

The Meteoric Onslaught

For the remainder of the time until within a few minutes of midnight Benton hovered between the window and his machines. Then, at a minute to twelve, he became feverishly industrious. Seeming to forget the presence of the two young people, he busied himself with a switchboard, pulling over a number of two-pole switches with swift and dexterous hands.

As a result the humming engines in the laboratory became silent. Price shivered involuntarily; Lucy crept closer to him. The atmosphere seemed indescribably eerie.

His work done, Benton stood contemplatively by the window again, gazing out at the starlit sky. Sudden with an emotion rare to him, he gave an exclamation and pointed.

“Here they come!” he panted. “Calculation has been justified! Look!”

Price and Lucy went to his side, craning their necks. Then their gaze became fixed as, out of the blackness of the sky appeared colossal festoons of enormous falling stars, like titanic blazing hailstones thundering to Earth—planetary matter ignited by its terrific rush through the atmosphere.

A remote and persistent drumming became evident. Some of the boulders and stones were striking the roof above their heads.

The drumming became louder, while the skies grew brighter with the hurtling bolts. As far as the eye could see, the heavens were alive with darting, criss-crossing points of blazing effulgence—tens of thousands of gigantic meteors battering Earth’s vegetation-sheathed surface. Many of the celestial rocks fell in showers of white-heat, but the instant they touched the massed plant below they expired strangely into harmless darkness.

For nearly two hours the onslaught persisted, an onslaught which must have taken place in every quarter of the globe as the Earth moved along in its orbit. Then the meteoric rain became less heavy; fewer blazing bodies streaked across the heavens, and the stars, which had been blotted out, commenced to re-appear through the blaze. Presently the drumming on the roof ceased.

“Finished!” Benton breathed, thankfully. “We passed through the tail-end of the shower, instead of the central million-mile expanse. The time proves it. Earth is saved!”

He turned away from the window and seated himself before an immense radio-apparatus. In another moment he had switched on the power and commenced to operate the huge instrument. Immediately, terrific stabs of strange Morse pervaded the laboratory, and after an interval of several seconds, answering stabs, much fainter, came from a loud-speaker sunk in the wall above the transmitter.

Benton listened with the ghost of a smile on his face, and for quite a while the exchange of messages went on. Price, who understood Morse, vainly tried to comprehend the message, only to realise it was not a code with which he was conversant. At length, the communication was over.

“My transmitter is on the roof,” Benton explained. “Queer radio, mine; rather advanced. Works on the infrared principle.”

“But to whom were you signalling?” Price demanded. “The world is dead!”

“I know…but Mars is not dead,” Benton replied, quietly. “You see, I—I am a Martian.”

“A what?” Price and Lucy exclaimed, blankly.

“Is it so very strange? I’ll explain in a moment. I must first use the Ounteracter to stop the universal paralysis. Also, I must cut out the controls of the machines which force the Martian weed to grow.

“Yes, I know what you’re thinking. That weed grew by induced methods—from here. But now the danger is finished. Come with me into the lounge. I have much to tell you.”

The Martian’s Story

“It is, perhaps, a strange story,” Benton began, when they were all three seated. “On Mars I am a scientist, and, naturally, utterly unlike the man you see now.

“My laboratory companion on Mars discovered long ago that Earth was due to be again subjected to the terrific bombardment that ravaged her millennia ago. Martians, you understand, live immeasurably long lives, and my companion was a young man when the previous bombardment of Earth occurred.

“He showed me photographic records of the cosmic event, and we decided we must save our sister planet from a second disaster. Our ultimate experiments resulted in the discovery of a band of electrical energy capable of speeding up growth by some eighteen hundred times its normal rate.

“We tested this discovery upon a fast-growing weed which flourishes in the Martian deserts, and produced colossal growth from primary spores and seeds. We also produced a process which quickly destroyed the results of our experiments and withered the plants to atoms. Then we searched for, and found, a method of inducing harmless paralysis in living organisms. So, gradually, we evolved a scheme, with the consent of our ruler, through which we might save your world from destruction.

“As the time for the second swarm of meteors approached, we fired a vast cloud of plant spores into space and guided them to Earth by directional radio impulses. Then my brain was removed from my own Martian body and transferred to a synthetic one, modelled on terrestrial lines. The study of human beings through our powerful telescopes, which also possess X-ray properties, enabled us to duplicate an Earthly body almost exactly, both in appearance and organic structure.

“So, in human form, I came to Earth, making the journey in a spaceship, and bringing with me the machinery necessary for carrying out the rest of the scheme to a successful conclusion. Once here, I had no difficulty in learning your language, being some ten times as advanced in intellect as the inhabitants of this planet, whom we of Mars have safely delivered from a terrible menace.

“Until you came, nobody suspected that I was anything but a human being, slightly eccentric, perhaps. Knowing the value of the metal on Earth, I transmuted base metals into gold and became fabulously wealthy. I engaged men to build me this place, and installed my machinery, with which I promoted the growth of the weed and created hot summers to stimulate it further. On Mars, of course, we produce our own weather…

“You know the rest: how the paralysis-machines were put into operation, how they stopped the war and eventually paralysed the whole of humanity. I have now cut off the waves and started the machines which will destroy the weed in a very short time. My work is finished, and I must return to Mars, to resume my natural body.”

‘Hugh Benton’ stopped, and for an instant both Price and Lucy saw in his eyes that queer look which the girl had detected before—the light of infinite solitude.

“You were naturally curious,” he went on. “I told you I was out to stop war. I didn’t know at that time how you might upset my plans. To all appearances I was just one of yourselves, and even when I asked you if my knowledge didn’t seem unusual you didn’t grasp the point.

“There is little else to explain. That ‘champagne’ I gave you was a powerful Martian drug. I wanted you asleep whilst I radioed my planet for further information. As I told you, I never sleep, and I very rarely eat… What more is there to say?”

“I cannot believe I am sitting here talking to a Martian,” Lucy breathed.

“Why not? What am I but a distant foreigner? My name is not, of course, Hugh Benton, but Zal-Iked, First in Science of the planet Ralkan, or Mars…and I have something here that may repay you for my strange demands upon you.”

‘Benton’ dived into his pocket, and when he opened his palm there rolled on to the table two immense, glittering objects.

“Good heavens, they’re not—” Lucy began, hardly daring to say the word.

“Yes—diamonds,” the Martian nodded. “We have thousands of them on my planet and they’re valueless; but I find they are worth something on this world, so take them with my compliments.”

“But they’re as big as hens’ eggs!” Price protested. “We can’t—”

“Don’t be absurd, my young friend. Take them; all the better if they are big. They are the least I can offer after the way I’ve behaved towards you, and they will serve to remember me by…

“I shall never return to Earth. In the far future the same danger will again threaten your planet; but it is up to man to fight it for himself. If he has not the intellect to do it by then… well, he deserves to suffer.”

Man’s Awakening

Within two days the weed became a withered mass, crumbling to powder the world over. The power employed, so Benton explained, was similar to that which, used in a lesser degree, had prevented the plant from covering his home.

So, before the eyes of the two young people, now immensely wealthy for the remainder of their lives, the Earth’s face began to reappear from beneath the protective vegetation. The mighty branches wilted into the consistency of fine ash which was blown on the winds to the four corners of the Earth.

Then humanity, the counteracter having done its work, recovered from its insensibility, quite unaware of what had taken place, but utterly amazed at discovering thousands of stones and boulders in every civilised city. These, however, were soon disposed of. Only a few buildings were damaged; for the most part the stones were dumped in the sea.

With the memory of the strange paralysis hanging over mankind, for quite a time a subdued world went about his business; but it was not long before the old order of bickering, villainy and greed reared its ugly head again. Price and Lucy took their farewell of Hugh Benton with deep regret, though he viewed their departure with that calm detachment so common to him. Back in London, they could well have believed the whole thing a dream save for the massive diamonds, which ultimately netted them a huge fortune, and the vision of the countryside the world over mangled and twisted where the Martian roots had preyed upon weaker vegetation. Buildings had stood the strain, being immovable, but trees blowing in the wind had immediately offered that resistance that made of the plant a ruthless destroyer. But Nature took charge of the rest, and the following Spring, after the Martian plant had disappeared, was more redundant with green than ever before.

With the coming of Summer, Price and Lucy went again for their holiday to the farmhouse in Somerset; but when they looked for the massive building on the hill they saw that it was missing. One afternoon they travelled to the actual site, and found only a patch of new grass where the building had been.

Hugh Benton—Zal-Iked, the Martian—had returned to his native planet.

THE SILVER COIL

A startling thing came out of the weird box Bill Dawlish found on Venus. What was its grim purpose?

The fêting and speechifying were over—and Bill Dawlish looked heartily thankful for it.

“Damned good job I don’t go to Venus and back every day!” he grinned, seated at the head of our reunion dinner table. “Spencer got to the Moon and back in 1970; I’ve made this trip ten years later. And in another ten years…?” He shrugged off the speculation and went on with his meal.

There were four of us present—Bill Dawlish himself; his taciturn, strong-necked co-explorer Ralph Trent; myself—Bob Hansen, as the inventor of the machine that had done the trick; and Madge, my wife. Here we were in a little quartet, safe from the public gaze, in my quiet New Jersey home.

“If the truth were told,” Ralph Trent commented presently, “Bill here is holding out on us. He found something on the Dark Terminator of Venus that’s enormously valuable. So he says! But he won’t tell us what it is.”

Bill grinned. “Not yet. Somebody might want to frisk it, and I want to see what happens first. Nobody’s to know a thing.”

‘It’ was a steel-bound box, heavily combination locked, which had gone up with the rest of Bill’s luggage to his room. I remembered how I wondered at the time what the thing was…

“To be frank, I don’t like it,” Ralph persisted, his dark eyes smoldering rather resentfully. “I shared the dangers with you; Bob here sank his money in the venture— What right have you to keep back anything?”

I waited, rather surprised. Deep down I’d never really liked Ralph Trent. Courageous, yes—but aggressive, even sinister. That he was piqued by not knowing what was in the steel box from the Twilight Belt was plain.

“I have the right of discovery,” Bill said quietly. “Before I show it to the world I want to be sure of something. Believe me, it’s for everybody’s good.”

Ralph hesitated, then went on sullenly with his meal. Altogether, it seemed that Bill’s secret had cast a blight over the proceedings for the rest of the evening passed in merely matter-of-fact anecdotes instead of ribald celebration. And so, finally, tired with the events of the day, we went to bed early.

“Just what,” Madge asked me, yawning, “do you think he has found?”

“Lord knows! Mineral probably. If it comes to that, anything from Venus is enormously valuable because of its very rarity. I guess he’s making too much out of nothing…”

There the subject dropped and we composed ourselves for slumber—but about an hour later we were both jerked upright and awake by the most unearthly scream ringing through the quietness of the house. It had come from somewhere along the corridor where Bill and Ralph had their rooms.

In an instant I was in my robe and slippers, and racing to the door. On the corridor gushed a flood of light. Bill’s door was wide open. I hurried to it, then stopped dead just inside the threshold. It was an appalling sight which met my eyes.

There was Ralph Trent, fully dressed and pale as death, with a massive poker in his hand. On the floor in front of him, sprawled out with a ghastly wound across his forehead, lay poor Bill! That he was dead was instantly evident.

With an effort I mastered myself, turned just in time to push Madge back into the corridor.

“What—? Why?” she asked, startled.

“Something pretty bad,” I told her tensely. “Murder, maybe. Go back. to the room—for the moment anyway…” Then I hurried back into Bill’s room, slammed and locked the door, grabbed Ralph’s arm and whirled him round.

“In God’s name, Ralph, what have you done?”

“Eh? What?” He looked at me as though he were half stunned. Then he eyed the poker stupidly. “I—I didn’t do anything,” he whispered.

“Then what do you call this?” I snatched the poker from him, but as I gazed at it I noticed something. It was unmarked; not the least sign to show he’d committed violent assault with it.

“I—I came in here to smash open that steel box,” he said, getting a grip on himself. “I know Bill took sleeping tablets tonight to steady his nerves after today’s activities: I figured he wouldn’t wake. That was why I brought the poker, to prise the lock. But—but the room was dark when I got in. I switched on the light—there was a horrible scream—and I saw Bill lying there…just like that. It’s true! You’ve got to believe it!”

I never saw a man so desperately anxious to be credited. For a moment I stared at him grimly, then I dropped beside the poor mangled wreck that had been Bill. From this lower vantage point my gaze shifted under the bed—

A start shook me. That solid steel-bound box was blown apart! No other words can describe it. It looked as an old tin will look when hopelessly mangled. And something more—the lid had been ripped clean off its hinges and flung several feet away.

“Okay,” I breathed, getting up and clutching Ralph’s arm; “I believe you. You couldn’t have smashed the box like this anyway— But what in God’s name was in it? Certainly not explosive, else there’d have been a fire.”

I tugged the box out. Inside was a curious smell, rather like ozone. And now, for the first time, we both noticed it had tiny air holes drilled along the top!

“Whatever was in this was—alive!” I cried incredulously.

Ralph caught the box in his strong hands. I saw his face go grim and set.

“I never noticed the ventilation before, either. I figured that Bill had gotten some special carbon deposits or something, and I felt I was right in demanding a share. You, too. But something alive! I never even suspected… The strength the thing must have had!” He paused, staring down at the dead body of Bill Dawlish.

“We’d better send for the police?” he said finally.

“Not until we know what really killed him,” I snapped. “It must be around some place. We’ll put him on the bed and then take a look—”

The rest of my sentence froze off as from somewhere in the corridor we both heard Madge give a desperate scream. Like a shot I was through the doorway and pelting to our bedroom. I found her holding her throat in horror, struggling to keep herself from fainting. When she saw me, and Ralph right behind me, she sank weakly into a chair.

“What—what was it?” she questioned hoarsely.

“What did you see?” I demanded, shaking her forcibly. “Madge! What scared you so?”

“Something—something like a silver coil,” she panted. “It moved at an incredible speed—suddenly shot toward me from somewhere in the corridor, as I stood waiting for you to appear. I saw it gleaming. I screamed, jumped in here, and it went downstairs I think…” Fighting for composure she got to her feet again. “Bob, what was it?” she insisted.

I glanced at Ralph sharply.

“You know? You’ve seen Venus and we haven’t—”

“If it’s what I think it is we’ve got to find it damned quick,” he broke in anxiously. “I told you the light was off when I got into Bill’s room; I remember hearing a sound in the open doorway behind me as I switched the light on. It was this light in here that saved you, Madge,” he finished, looking at her. Then he hurried on, “No time for explanations now. We must track it down, and the first place to look is the icebox, I think…”

He swung away, and I followed him after stopping only long enough to grab a revolver from the dressing table drawer. I motioned to Madge to stay behind, but she isn’t that sort of a girl. She tailed along beside me as I followed Ralph down the staircase.

We went cautiously, all lights full on—but no sounds came to us from the lower quarters of the house. Not at first, that is—then as we neared the kitchen regions there was a distinct, odd buzzing sound. It was pretty close to unearthly, sounded like a strong-winged bird imprisoned in a tinder box. It made a noise that was crossed between a rattle and a whir.

“Easy!” Ralph cautioned, and edged his hand through the slightly open kitchen door, flicked on the light.

At that things happened—incredible things! From inside the kitchen came a whizzing, whirring din, the sound of smashing crockery and glass—then something struck the inner side of the door with staggering force and came clean through the woodwork! We fell flat automatically and over our heads sailed a long, twisted torpedo of iridescent silver.

In a sense it was beautiful, coiled like a corkscrew, and it moved with a bewildering rapidity which dazzled the vision. For a time it kept up its eye-numbing whirring flying—then it made a beeline for the darkness of the shadows near the door of my laboratory.

Then—Wham! And it had gone through the door into the dark laboratory interior.

I got up, my mouth dry, helped Madge to her feet.

“For God’s sake, Ralph, what is it?” I nearly shrieked.

“Blind force,” he answered enigmatically; then led the way into the kitchen. And we saw as we went the other hole the thing had made in the door upon its entry.

Madge nearly burst into tears at the chaos in her domain. Plates and glasses were smashed to hell. The solid steel of the ice-box was warped and bent and the food inside it, though untouched, was mixed in an unholy jumble.

“The silver coil, as you named it, Madge, is a denizen of Venus’ Twilight Belt,” Ralph stated grimly, turning. “It lives in eternally dark caves and extreme cold. Ordinarily, it torpid. On Venus, Bill and I explored the Twilight Mountains and found thousands of these motionless silvery. coils lying frozen stiff in the dark. We; figured they were dead or asleep, even as the tortoise hibernates for the winter. I warned Bill against having anything to do with them—but it’s clear what must have happened. Without my knowing it he took one as specimen; thinking to make a fortune from the, Earthly zoologists— God, if only he’d listened to me and kept away!”

Because I knew Ralph was a better scientist than Bill had ever been I believed him.

“Yes, blind force,” he repeated. “On Venus I found obvious signs that the lower classes of Venusian life, instead of being protoplasmic are of force, crystallized. Why? Because the energy of the Sun, so much closer to Venus than to Earth, is infused into all the life structures of Venus. The creatures of the Twilight Belt however are the lowest class, akin to our protoplasm. Of course, though the Twilight Belt is out of range of actual sunlight, the Sun’s energy permeates every inch of the planet… It’s obvious that the warmth of the bedroom stirred this thing into life. It burst its bonds, attacked and killed Bill and, I believe, was going to use him for food—though its normal food as I see it would be in our range of poisons. Then, as I guessed, sudden light chased it off and it looked for the coldest, darkest spot—the icebox. But definitely it is carnivorous and will try and attack us for food’s sake—it’s the only aim in its life. We’ll be unpalatable for it, but better than nothing.”

“But surely we can kill it?” I demanded. “Shoot it?”

He smiled bitterly. “Might as well try and shoot solid steel! It’s force, man! Darkness will quieten it but won’t kill it. Light will frighten it, but also won’t kill it. Yet we’ve got to nail it somehow…”

He thought, then braced himself. “We’ve a fight on our hands, Bob,” he announced, his jaw set. “Let’s see what we can do. You’d better stay here, Madge.”

She nodded, but I doubted if she’d obey…

Ralph and I started off from the kitchen and cautiously entered the laboratory. We advanced quietly, then, as hell had it, I stumbled. That loose board by the doorway had a habit of tripping me up. I straightened, sweating and listening. All was silent. Through the hole in the door streamed the light of the hall in a narrow cone.

“If we stay in the dark we can’t see to get at it!” I objected.

Ralph mumbled an assent and put the light on. Nothing happened, but some chemical jars had been overturned. Salts of lemon were strewn on the floor and some had clearly been consumed. Ralph gave me a significant glance.

“That’s the kind of thing it likes! Poison! Now, where is it?”

Gathering a little courage we advanced, only to swing round in alarm as Madge came in.

“Shut the door, quick!” Ralph blazed at her; and she did, fumbling with the key. We hadn’t told her to lock it, but evidently she thought the precaution necessary. Then she gave a horrified gasp, lunged forward— There was a remote clink.

“What?” I barked at her, tense with anxiety.

“The—the key!” she replied huskily. “I’ve dropped it— It went down this crack by the loose board…”

“Good God, Madge, do you realize we’re trapped in here?” I yelped. “This laboratory door has an inner lining of steel: we can’t smash it down, even if the Silver Coil can… And the windows are too small to get through—”

“Shut up!” Ralph interrupted sharply; then as we froze into silence his big hand closed round a girder-spanner on the bench. He advanced with infinite caution to a shadowy part of the laboratory in the corner. There, I remembered, I kept a lot of other loose chemicals some of which were ho doubt edible for this blind, merciless thing from Venus. I stood waiting, Madge clutched to me, both of us in thrall at Ralph’s iron nerves.

The door of the corner chemical cupboard, steel faced, was slightly ajar. In any case I never bothered to lock it— In a lightning movement Ralph suddenly flung himself at it, slammed it shut and swung the heavy bolt in place. Then he relaxed and mopped his dewed face.

“Got it for the moment,” he grinned breathlessly. “Now we’ve got to figure out something to put an end to it. It is afraid of light—that we know. I suppose there is a chance that a light intense enough might kill it. Got anything?”

“I’ve a two-thousand watt film projector,” I said quickly. “Carbon arc light. That might do it.”

“Good!”

He followed me as I hurried over to it. We swung it round on its tripod and directed the lens toward the steel door—but at that identical moment things happened again. The steel of the door began to warp and flake! Speechless with amazement we could only gaze at it, watching the outwardly bulging dents; then like an aerial torpedo that corkscrew of living horror slammed out to freedom, pieces of steel hurtling with shrapnel force in all directions.

“Get down!” Ralph screamed—and we all dropped flat, watching in desperate fear. And this time we saw the Venusian horror more clearly as it whirled round with dizzying speed seeking shelter from the electric light.

It had a face of sorts—a blind expressionless face with no eyes and seemed to be all tightly clamped mouth. It was for all the world like a perpetually coiled snake, only in the style of an earthly electric eel it gave off a silvery glow. More than that indeed, for it sparkled and crackled like a living bolt of lightning when it struck metal! Despite my horror, I found time to admire the diversity of Nature who had conceived such a mass of supernaturally powerful destruction, obviously with the intent of making it able to master its normal rigorous environment.

Finally it hurtled into a corner behind a workbench and was still again.

Gently Ralph got up, edged his way round to the film projector and fumbled with it. Madge and I could see his face was set in hard resolution. Finally he flicked the button on the machine. The motor started up and with it the blinding glare of carbon arc light casting a flour-white beam on the opposite wall.

“Here,” Ralph said, and slid across to me the wrench he had been holding. “If it dives this way lam out at it. Our only chance, I guess. I’m going to drive it out.”

He wheeled the projector forward on its rubber wheels, swung the beam so it flooded the corner. There was an instant response as that heinous thing was stung into action. It sailed through the air towards me.

I ducked, straightened again, then whizzed the wrench with all the power of my arms. It was like trying to hit a flash of lightning! I missed hopelessly and went flying. Madge wriggled under the heavy bench for safety. I recovered my balance and raced to Ralph’s side as he swung the projector -round, using it as a searchlight.

Tormented by the brilliance the Venusian horror hurled itself at the walls, the fittings, the glass bottles— Then it dived towards Madge! She gave a frantic scream—but thank God it missed her…

Ralph’s jaws tightened at the narrow shave, and with admirable courage he moved forward, slowly pinning the thrashing monstrosity into a corner of blinding brilliance.

“It’s obviously hungry,” he tossed out. “And but for this damned light it would make a meal off us right now, even if we are not right in its line of menu. Keep the light on long enough and it may die, like a fish but of water—”

He broke off with a gasp as the carbon light fizzed and flickered abruptly. The snowy effulgence changed to yellow, then deep purple. Savagely he adjusted the carbon points, struggling to rebuild the right resistance between them—but in those seconds of momentary diminution the thing was done.

Freed from its light prison the monster leapt. It hit me a glancing blow but it was like a wallop from a five-ton truck. I went staggering backwards helplessly and struck the wall with a force that nearly knocked me silly.

I straightened again, only to feel paralysing horror pump through me. For Ralph was struggling with the thing—and it was the most ungodly sight I’d ever seen! His coat and vest were practically torn off, to reveal gaping wounds where the monster had cleaved with the force of a welder into his flesh. It was only his iron strength that kept him going—and even that was failing.

Madge—small wonder—had fainted clean away. Sick with fright, I snatched up the wrench and dealt the thing a terrific blow. All I got for that was a backlash, half electrical, through my fingers that made me shout with anguish. It had been like hitting a steel wall with a steel rod.

And Ralph? He had relaxed now, moving weakly, horribly mangled. The ghost of a grin was on his dark, powerful face, then it froze into the granite-like grin of death. There was blood on the floor. Hardly conscious of what I was doing I groped my way to the projector and, being used to its tricks, had the carbons at full blaze instantly. Immediately the serpent flew to a shadowy corner for safety.

I looked at the mangled ruin that had been Ralph, took down a smock from the door and threw it over him. Then, breathing hard, I tried to get some sort of control over myself. This thing had got to be slain! But what methods? Light only scared it—immobilized it, but didn’t kill it. How about an electric shock? If I could remove the electrodes from one of my disrupter globes and attack it with them—

Not much use, probably. I didn’t even know if it were electricity as we understand it, or whether it was the embodiment of basic force which we definitely do not understand. Besides, attacking electricity with electricity might blow me to Hades!

Then as I stood thinking furiously a weak cry swung me round. I had almost forgotten about Madge. Gently I helped her to her feet and she clung to me tightly.

“Is it—?” she whispered hopefully.

“No,” I told her grimly. “It’s behind that bench at the moment, sheltering from these arcs— Good God, if only we could get out of here! We must!” I finished desperately. “Come on—we’ll rip up the floorboards and try and find that key. Should have done it at first…”

With my wrench we pried up the boards and I fumbled below. I could feel nothing. I got a torch and flashed it in the gap. I saw the key finally, a goodish distance away.

“Hang on,” I told Madge tensely. “I’ll go below and get it.”

“All right—but hurry up!” And her eyes went nervously towards that deadly corner still pinned by the projector beam.

Down I scrambled, edged along on my stomach with the floor beams pressing down on my shoulders—then just when I was within an ace of grabbing that infernal key there came a violent commotion from above. There was the sound of smashing glassware and a scream from Madge, followed by her running feet some place over my head.

Her voice screamed huskily. “Bob quick! Quick!”

I couldn’t even answer her. The dust from the flooring had choked and blinded me. I jerked my head up and caught it a resounding crack on one of the beams. The torch dropped from my hand and went rolling out on the concrete foundation. Desperately, I made a final grope in the dark for that key, and couldn’t find it— Then I wormed my way round and back to the hole in the lab. floor as quickly as I could.

Madge was out of sight, the bench was overturned, bottles were strewn in all directions. Some of them had had corrosive acid in them and now it was swilled smokingly on the floor. The Venusian horror was hurling itself with gigantic force at the only remaining steel cabinet where I kept my filing records. Since Madge was not in sight she’d obviously screwed herself in there for safety. As for the Thing’s escape—those damned carbon arcs had faded again!

I dived for the projector, forced them into action and hurled blinding light at the thing—but only for a second or so for the acid swirling on the floor suddenly nipped the flex cable right through and the light died out of the lamphouse! Sweat broke out all over me as I realized I was defenseless.

Almost involuntarily I picked up the entire projector and hurled it at the Coil. Evidently it was hurt for it flew away from the cabinet door. Instantly I jumped forward, yanked the door open and got Madge out—then we dashed for safety behind the overturned bench. Temporary safety, anyway…

I began to think desperately. Since that projector’s mass weight had hurt it, it might be possible to damage it with violent blows after all! My eye roamed from its present quiescence—no doubt while it recovered—to the heavy vice I often used. It was electrically operated too. If I could only get the Coil in that!

No sooner had I thought of the idea than I thought of something else. It had shown its liking for salts of lemon, and there was still some left on the floor. I wriggled towards the stuff, got a handful of it and sprinkled it on the plate in front of the vice, afterwards springing the vice-jaws wide open. Then I trawled to the switchboard whence it was operated.

“This may do it,” I breathed to the horrified Madge. “Worth a try, anyway!”

She watched, wide-eyed. Picking up; a bottle, I hurled it at the thing, stung it into life again. It flew round in circles, missing us—then as I had hoped its blind avidity drove it towards the salts instead of Madge and me. It settled—and, thank God, as we tensely watched it, it unwittingly lowered the back half of its corkscrew form into the open jaws!

It was a glorious moment! I was nearly chuckling with relief as I closed the switch on the board. In a flash those jaws closed with inexorable power, pinned the Coil mercilessly. It made no sound but its wild, frantic lashings instantly showed how much it was incommoded.

“Now!” I panted, straightening. “Here comes the showdown!”

For the last time, as I hoped, I picked my wrench up and moved towards it, no longer nervous. Instead a cool sort of bravado was upon me, and like a fool I paused a moment to study it now it was powerless to hurt me… The more I looked at its blind, ferocious little face the more I shuddered to think so beautiful a world as the Evening Star could produce such a thing of evil—

“Kill it, Bob!” Madge implored me weakly. “Don’t stand there!”

Her voice jerked me into life. I raised the wrench and swung it in preparation for the blow—but those seconds of idle curiosity had lost me the initiative, for with a sudden violent effort the thing literally tore itself in pieces—four distinct chunks that were as brittle as though soaked in liquid air.

But they didn’t snap as they fell. Instead they coiled up and writhed with life. Nothing was left but that one immovable piece clamped in the vise. Then as I stared in bewilderment the four pieces started swelling—growing—!

“Fission!” I yelped, understanding. “It’s—reproduced! Like a protoplasm divides into a new individual; this thing does it by breaking itself. Either because of the danger or else because it was ripe for it anyway after the food— Lord!”

I dropped my wrench with a crash as the four little devils swelled and grew with incredible metabolism. Hurriedly I gained Madge’s side.

“Bob, what on earth do we do?” she nearly screamed at me. “Now we’ve four of them to tackle—! We can’t do it! We’re finished!”

“Easy,” I panted; and my eyes flashed to the hole in the floorboards where I’d searched for the key. “Down there!” I said abruptly. “Only way— Come on!”

We scrambled forward and I bundled Madge down the hole first. Already those four children of the Coil were nearing adult size and would then start their endless blind search for food—human or chemical. I blundered into the hole after Madge, dragged down the boards as best I could. For a while we lay in the dark, shivering in fear, listening to the rising commotion above.

Then Madge began dragging herself away slowly, presently gave a little cry.

“What?” I panted, reaching her,

“Acid, on my hand,” she said. “Must have seeped through the boards.”

“Put your handkerchief round it; all we can do now. Damnation!” I exploded. “Where’s that torch I dropped?”

I floundered past her, searching for it. Over our heads there was now a veritable hurricane of energy going on. Bottles were flying, instruments being overturned—then, as I still searched for the torch, I stopped and sniffed. Smoke was distinctly noticeable!

“It can’t be—fire?” Madge whispered hoarsely; then she broke off with a horrified scream. “It is fire! Look!”

I was looking. Further away from us on our floor-ceiling was a smoky red glow. Either the fuming acid or else the fused electric cable had started it— What in hell did that matter? It had started and we were stuck down here!

“What do we do?” Madge cried, clutching me. “Bob, Bob, think of something! Those things above—and us down here— We’ll be burned to death!”

I never thought so furiously before. Then in the midst of it, putting my hand down, I landed right on the torch. Instantly I yanked it up, flashed it on. I don’t know if it was Providence that directed the beam to a wire running under the floorboards, but it certainly happened.

“What? What?” Madge implored, seeing I was frowning.

“That’s the fire alarm emergency wire,” I told her quickly. “As you know I have the lab wired in case of sudden combustion without my knowledge. It should go off and warn the fire station as the temperature rises— But we’re not waiting that long!” I snapped; and seizing the wire I pulled it with all my strength. Though we heard nothing I knew the alarm had gone at the fire station.

“That ought to fetch ’em,” I panted. “And we’ve got to chance those flying horrors just in case. A minute—the key…”

I found it, then held it in my teeth as we turned and inched back to the hole in the floor. It wasn’t so easy. Smoke was around us in choking clouds; I had to half drag Madge as she coughed and spluttered… But at last I gained the roughly covered hole and thrust my head against the boards.

Just as quickly I ducked back. The four flying coils, as large now as their parent had been, dived for my unprotected head. They struck the boards with rending impact—so I used my torch to keep them off.

Smoke was now suffocating me, filling my lungs. I dragged Madge up, half fainting, beside me, and she revived in the clearer air. The torch still kept them off somewhat. The ordinary lights had gone out, but the glare of the fire was sufficient to show me my way.

The door seemed infinitely far off—but I’d got to chance it. I left Madge directing the torch, blundered to the door and turned the key in the lock. At the same time the scream of the fire-engine’s siren came from somewhere outside. I remember opening the steel door—then I guess I must have fainted.

I came to myself to find J was lying beside Madge in an ambulance. A fireman was smiling at us grimly.

“Nice blaze you had there, sir,” he commented briefly. “But we got it under— Okay, take it easy. You’re all right, and your wife too. Only shock. Say,” he added, “we managed to save one of these from your lab. Figured it might be important.”

From his oilskins he pulled a twisted coil.

“Take it away!” I screamed involuntarily; then as he eyed me queerly and I saw it didn’t move, I added slowly, “Let me look…”

Madge, recovering, stared at it too. It was one of the four Venusian coils without doubt, but it was as useless as petrified stone and still damp. Damp! I began to laugh hysterically.

“Of course!” I yelled. “The water from the hoses! Why in God’s name did we never think of it? Electricity—water—short circuit— Death! A glass of water could have saved us!”

Madge stared at me for a moment, then she joined me in my laughing. The fireman stared at us dubiously, probably wondering if he’d saved a couple of lunatics. Well, maybe he had at that!

PHANTOM FROM SPACE

Space-death should have been absolutely final, but after what happened, the Venusian rulers of Earth in 2314 A.D. began to wonder…for Eward Hilto, whom they had executed for treason, came back to avenge!

The young man and girl, both of them in regulation uniforms with numbers blazoned on their breasts, sat in silence. They were alone here in one of the countless parks dotted about the lower quarters of the city for the convenience of the workers. Convenience! The workers never saw anything beyond the parks accept the mightiness of the city that held them in its grip—London, metropolis of Earth, master-city of 2314.

But no Earthman ruled the city. No dictator had brought it into being. War had begun to die in 1960. By 1970 it had become an abomination of the past. Then after thirty glorious years of freedom had come the menace from Venus with its panoply of vast armaments.

Invasion—a world undefended in arms and science—and die destruction of a world lay at the feet of the slug-like hordes. Rapidly the victors had commandeered the bodies of the newly-slain Earthlings, transferred brains into them, breathed life into them, and now… Hardly anybody knew which were true Earthlings and which were the children of the original Venusians. It was only known that the Venusians, under the control of the Presence, ruled the Earth.

“And what a rule!” breathed the young man as his thoughts followed the path of history. “Merciless subjection! No quarter, no chance! We’re held down here by those master-minds. Up there is power and science beyond our knowledge. Think what has been mastered, and what will yet be mastered… You and I, Lyra dearest, all in the world to each other, born down here, hardly remembering our parents, never knowing the great world that lies beyond. Why not? Why not?”

“Hush, Eward,” the girl murmured, glancing about her. “A spy radio may hear you, and it sounds so much like treason.” She shrugged slender shoulders. “After all, what can we do? We’re powerless! Remember, your father tried just after you were born to overthrow this rule. You have heard what happened to him.”

“Yes, exiled for life—to Callisto.” Eward clenched his fists “Rotting away his life for these filthy devils—”

“Hush!” The girl’s voice was sick with anxiety. “Please, please hush! That’ll do no good—”

Eward Hilto—Number LT 4516Z6—stared with bitter grey eyes towards the city. As always, that terrific expanse of buildings overpowered him. He put his hands to his ears as if to shut out the thunderous, everlasting roar of the machines in these lower quarters. He closed his eyes and visualised it all,,,

The eternal workers, working for they knew not what. It was rumoured that mastery over the entire Universe was the ultimate aim of the Venuisians. Everywhere machines of stupefying size. Mastery of the atom’s ultimate power, of space travel, of electrical intricacies, mind science. Had not the Presence picked the twelve finest brains on Earth, had them disembodied, placed in machines, from which he absorbed all the knowledge he needed and added it to his own? Nothing, declared the oppressed ones, could stand against that!

“And until somebody has the courage to fight these monsters, we’ll remain under their yoke,” Eward breathed, looking up again. “Lyra, why should we?”

Lyra Garfane smiled emptily. The lights caught the copper-gold of her hair as she glanced towards the city. “You’d defy that, Eward?”

“Yes.” He met her quiet blue eyes. “Lyra, we’re human beings, not animals. We own this planet. It’s our birthright, same as it is the birthright of millions of other rightful Earthlings the world over.”

The girl got suddenly to her feet. “It’s empty talk, Eward, and you know it! You can’t possibly—”

She broke off with a start as a shadow suddenly fell before her. A massive guard in official uniform stood grimly regarding both of them.

“Need I warn you,” he said slowly, “that such talk as yours is treasonable? This time you have been warned. Next time you know what the answer will be. Now return to your lodge-houses.”

“Why should we?” Eward demanded, getting to his feet. “It’s time there was a change—a revolt! We’re forever taking orders or else being spied upon by rotten little pick-ups hidden in the trees of these damned parks and relaying everything to your headquarters. I’ll see you in hell before I’ll obey!” he finished defiantly, and at the same time lashed out a powerful fist.

The blow never landed. Lyra screamed a hoarse warning. Eward was conscious of something smiting across his head with unbearable force. His knees gave way beneath him and he fell into darkness.

* * * *

Eward returned to his senses slowly, aware of the sweet-smelling fluids of the great workers’ hospital. He opened his eyes to dazzle-proof lights and found himself gazing into a face of considerable age—a mass of lines and seams from an apparent lifetime of concentration. The eyes were those of an Earthman, kindly and thoughtful. Very dark they seemed, unless it was the contrast of the white hair.

“All right,” the man murmured, putting an instrument back in his overall. “You’re okay now. I’m Elman Dalmer, the head surgeon,” he added briefly. “You got a pretty nasty knock from that paralyser-beam. You shouldn’t have resisted. As it is, I’m afraid I’ve only revived you so that you can be sent to your death…”

He turned away, and as his figure moved, Eward found himself looking at the dejected form of Lyra in the grip of a guard. The man came forward with a crooked smile, his deadly gun ready. “You were warned,” he said briefly. “Now the Council must decide the issue. Come! And try no tricks this time!”

Eward got up slowly from the long table, mastered his dizziness and then walked forward. He looked at the girl, but she averted her face—not so quickly that he didn’t see the tears, however.

Under enforced silence they marched steadily through the endless galleries between the stifling, pounding machine-rooms—into elevators, along more passages, into an area of growing opulence, and so at last to the places where the two had never been, the executive section of the giant city.

Finally they were thrust into an immense office with black-lined walls, its only furniture a mammoth control desk with three granite-faced men in dead black, direct descendants of the original Venusian conquerors, seated before it. Two were busy writing and did not even look up. The centremost raised a pallid, implacable visage and then spoke.

“Well?”

“Disobedience, sir, following deliberate statements intended to insult the Presence and his Council.”

“Both?” The eyes slitted.

“The man, sir— Eward Hilto. The woman, Lyra Garfane, agreed but tried to stop the man’s remarks. I thought it unnecessary to report direct to the Presence, so brought them to you.”

“Naturally the Presence must not be disturbed with such trifles. Very well, you know the rules. Space-death for the man; one week in solitary for the woman. That’s all.”

“You can’t do it!” Eward burst out desperately, dumbfounded at the callousness of the situation. “You just can’t! We’ve got to have a fair trial! I demand to see the Presence—”

“Take them out!” The centremost man returned to working on his papers.

The guard was far too strong to overpower. He whirled the pair outside as if they were children, then pressed a button in the wall and waited for a moment. When two more guards came up he thrust the struggling, kicking girl into their grip.

“Eward!” she screamed frantically. “Eward! Oh, God—!”

Her voice faded as she was half down the passage in the direction of the prison cells. Eward stood staring bleakly after her, then his dazed eyes turned back to the levelled gun of the guard.

“Move!” came the cold command.

Eward turned very slowly, fists clenched. Thoughts were tumbling through his mind—horrifying thoughts which he could not properly marshal. A week in solitary darkness for Lyra: death for himself! To be fired from that heinous space-gun without protection, without anything—a human projectile into space to meet instant destruction.

“No!” he screamed suddenly. “I’ll not go! You can’t do it to me—!”

“Keep going!” the guard snapped, and shoved him along brutally until at last he found himself in the projection room facing that devilish contrivance which had come to be looked upon as the guillotine of this day and age, though not half so swift in its effect.

Eward struggled with the ferocity of a madman as he was bound with manacles to the firing mechanism. He screamed threats, insults and abuse, all without avail. Then he subsided into mute horror as he saw the vent at the end of the machine’s chute gaping open—wide to the starry black of the night sky.

“Treason is its own reward,” the guard said stonily. Then he drew himself up and raised an arm aloft, muttering mechanically, “The Presence is just! All honour to the Presence!” His hand dropped and slammed home a switch. He watched Eward’s helpless body hurtle like a thunderbolt up the chute, impelled by irresistible force, until he vanished from sight at the end.

* * * *

Lyra Garfane knew better than to ask for reprieve. The officials of the city, and the Presence least of all, never granted mercy and never recanted. So she took the only other course, submitted to her sentence, and for a week lay in a pitch-dark cell, thinking and grieving by turns, only stirring to eat the food brought at regular intervals.

As she lay on her hard bed, accompanied by the eternal muffled thunder of the city, strange thoughts chased through her mind—thoughts which somehow she could not reconcile with any voluntary desire. She was acutely conscious of the death of Eward. She saw him pass into space. All around her she felt space’s crushing cold, saw the friendless, blazing stars and icy moon.

Time and again her attempts to sleep were disturbed by this vision; until after a day or two it was replaced by another one. She saw Earth with its teeming cities and busy seas, saw London in particular, pyramidical in design—pyramids of windows and in each window shone a light. Beacon-towers, mammoth aircraft, endless people, ceaseless industry. And over it all brooded one on whom no worker had ever gazed—the Presence. Him she could not see distinctly.

Indeed, she wondered why she should see these things at all, when never in her life had she had the opportunity to see anything beyond this drab quarter of the workers. Yet somehow, deep within her, she knew that what she saw was absolutely correct.

Only when she was finally released from solitary into the blinding light of day did the visions become dim, and finally ceased altogether. She returned to her work as a machine-minder, crushed and beaten in spirit, mourning the death of Eward. He had become known amongst his loyal friends as the man who had dared too much.

A dulled mind is of little use for concentration upon a complex machine. Lyra found this out. It was two weeks after her release from solitary: her thoughts had wandered to the dead Eward—then suddenly a fearful wrenching pain at her hands brought her back to agonised reality. She screamed and tore frantically at fingers already in the grip of whirling cogs. Fingers, hands, arms, crushing bone. The workroom spun in a mist of pain and disappeared…

Lyra came out of the darkness again with an aching head and immovable arms. Little by little she recognised the white cot of the hospital, the clean, fresh smell which always hung about the place. Before her was the face Eward had seen when he had recovered—Elman Dalmer, the chif surgeon.

“All right,” he murmured, patting her shoulder gently. “You’ll do fine now. Crushed hands and broken arms…” He smiled. “Soon put you right with our modern surgery, my dear. You should have been more alert.”

Lyra licked her dry lips. “I—I was thinking…”

“Of Eward Hilto?”

Lyra nodded slowly and closed her eyes to compress bitter tears. The master-surgeon patted her head gently.

“Poor child,” he sympathised; then more cheerfully: “But don’t worry. I am the master of this department and my orders are inviolate. I have decided that you need extra special care, and you know what that means.”

The girl reopened her eyes. “That—that I become a patient in your private sanatorium?”

“More than that. Until I see fit to release you, you will become my ward. Nobody save me knows the extent of your injuries, or even their nature. I have hinted at non-existent internal complications which will take months to heal…” Dalmer paused, his rugged old face still smiling. “I know the circumstances of Eward Hilto’s death,” he added softly. “I know the ruthless treatment which was meted out to him and you. I am an Earthman, remember, and my heart goes out to you, my dear. So young. So much you could do…”

He broke off, shrugged. “It’s settled then. You shall become my ward. Later I’ll try and use my influence to get you out of that infernal workers’ department. Now try and sleep.”

Lyra could only smile her thanks. Movement was impossible and words were inadequate. With eyes that were still moist she watched Dalmer get to his feet from beside her and resume his normal hospital routine.

And he was as good as his word, and of course his authority went unquestioned. In two weeks, her hands and arms healed, Lyra left the hospital—but she did not return to work. Under special orders a private car took her to Dalmer’s luxurious home in the influential quarter of the city, and here she was handed over to a matron.

Even so, Lyra could not fully understand it all. It was too unbelievable, too good to be true that Dalmer, for all his well-known humanitarian aims, should make such immense efforts to single her out for comfort and happiness. Her own rooms, good food, every want attended to… Incredible!

She spent the first day in an atmosphere approaching what she imagined heaven must be like—then when night had settled on the vast city there came a knock on her door and Dalmer himself entered, smiling, dressed in ordinary civilian clothes.

“Everything all right?” he asked, pulling up a chair.

“Nothing could disturb me, sir, if it were not for a memory,” Lyra answered. “The memory of Eward, horribly killed…”

Dalmer said nothing. Lyra looked at him steadily.

“Why do you do these things for me? Don’t think I’m not grateful: I am indeed, but I do wonder!”

“Of course you do, but you can rest assured I didn’t pick you out of thousands of unhappy souls purely for sentimental reasons. I had a definite purpose, and part of it I’ll make clear this very night.” Dalmer got to his feet. “Put on a wrap and come with me. I’ve something special to show you.”

Lyra looked her surprise for a moment, then she obeyed and preceded the surgeon out of the cosy room. He walked by her side down the spacious corridor, led the way down the broad staircase, and so to a panel which slid aside in the wall. Together they stepped into a brightly-lighted, cold laboratory.

“Surprised?” Dalmer murmured as Lyra gazed in astonishment.

“Well—yes. I don’t understand how—”

“My private workshop.” Dalmer motioned to the machines. “The work of a lifetime, known only to a trusted few, myself, and now you. Unless—” He paused, pondering.

“Unless what, sir?”

“Unless those infernal Venusian scientists have tracked me down with their instruments… They know so much!”

Turning, he led the way to a maze of machines until they came to a screen of ground glass supported within four huge magnets. In silence Lyra watched Dalmer finger an array of switches. By degrees the screen came to life until finally there was a view of the blackness of space, smudged with one grey speck. After a moment the speck came nearer as controls were adjusted.

“X-ray telescope,” Dalmer said briefly.

Lyra hardly heard him. Her attention was concentrated on that grey speck and her heart was thudding. For that speck was a man! A stone-grey man, crystallised, his clothes merging with his flesh. He was motionless, lying on his back in the depths of space, apparently in an orbit between Earth and moon. His arms were straight at his sides, his eyes closed. A phantom of a man—Eward Hilto!

“Eward!” Lyra whispered. “But—but it can’t be! Space would burst him apart—”

“Not so,” Dalmer murmured. “No breath in his body and no pressure outside. His body remains intact. So does his brain! Out there in space is Eward Hilto, the man who wanted to avenge this Godless Age, and if the fates permit he shall!”

Dalmer snapped another electrical machine into action. The tensity of electrical forces gathered in the laboratory. Lyra felt hcr limbs tingling. Fascinated, she watched the play of nameless forces, the lavender glow from a bar projector reaching to the roof.

“Stimulus!” Dalmer breathed. “Stimulus! Life current! Energy to bring the spark of life into that floating body, to give power to that superhuman brain—”

“Superhuman!” Lyra echoed.

“In time you’ll see why. Watch, as this power hurtles over the gulf of space to him—”

Lyra watched fixedly, her eyes wide. The figure of Eward Hilto had stirred! Then she swung round in alarm at a sudden tearing noise. Instantly Dalmer switched off his apparatus and turned to face a cordon of uniformed men as they marched into the laboratory, taking care to avoid the hot edges of the secret door their flame-guns had blasted open.

“You’re under arrest, Dalmer!” Lyra recognised the guard who had once arrested her. “And this girl too, since she’s with you. We’ve had both of you watched, and you’re obviously tied up with Eward Hilto, who was put to death. If you won’t tell us anything, Dalmer, the girl will. Now get out of here, both of you.”

Without a word, Dalmer and Lyra obeyed, eventually finding themselves in the prison’s dreary reaches—one special department thereof. Before she realised what was happening Lyra found herself thrust into a device closely resembling a modern version of the horrific Iron Maiden.

“Now,” the guard said calmly, fastening the clamps about the girl, “you had better realise that unless you tell us everything we want to know concerning Dalmer and his activities, this instrument will break your limbs one by one—”

“I’ll tell you all you want to know,” Dalmer broke in, his voice heavy with weariness. “I’ll…”

He paused, chiefly because the guard was not listening. In fact none of them were. They were staring at something grey and indeterminate moving out of the shadows.

“What the hell is it?” one of the other guards demanded, an edge of fear in his voice.

The object became clearer, the figure of a man of stone-grey, as though he were covered in chain mail. His eyes stared with baleful hypnosis. Though he did not speak his thoughts battered into captives and captors alike.

“I have come—to avenge!”

His two hands rose. What happened was not clear, but the bolts and bars of the terrible torture instrument flew apart like cotton and dropped the fainting girl to the floor.

“And to such as you—this\” came the thought.

The guards swung to run, but from the upraised hands there darted streamers of electric energy which brought the guards to their knees. Their writhing bodies were stabbed through and through, bringing instant death. Then the vision was gone, as though it had never been—but the foundation stone in a reign of terror for the Venusian dominators had begun. A Grey Avenger in the form of Eward Hilto smote down without warning or question.

Ships of war were mysteriously destroyed overnight. Armament dumps in the city became useless. One by one the sub-Controllers acting for the Presence died horribly. And then the Presence himself was struck down. With his passing, hell broke loose over the world in revolution, the workers finding that the Grey Avenger was always working with them. Even when victory was assured, the Grey Avenger did not depart. He appeared again in the secret laboratory owned by Dalmer. Lyra stood gazing at the grey, terrifying being who had been the man she had loved. But Dalmer merely looked thoughtful and moved a switch on the board behind him.

For a. moment a faint expression crept over the grey, inexorable visage—then Eward abruptly relaxed and crashed to the floor.

“Wait!” Dalmer ordered as the girl moved forward. “Leave him. My apparatus will lift him. He has the cold of space about him and that would be fatal to either of us.”

Lyra nodded and stood aside as a cradle device deposited Eward on the long table. Dalmer went to work with thermostatic instruments and then started on an operation in which the girl found herself compelled to assist. She saw scales removed and flesh grafted in place of them, saw the skull trepanned and brain surgery at its best. It seemed an endless task, but at last it was finished.

But even then weeks had to elapse before Eward Hilto opened his eyes and looked about him. From then on he recovered rapidly, until at last he was able to hear the reason for the strange memories which plagued him; and the girl too heard the explanation of countless things which puzzled her…

* * * *

“In the first place,” Dalmer said, seated in an armchair in a corner of the bedroom, “when I operated on you for that blow over the head with a paralyser-beam I trepanned a portion of your skull as well, fixing inside a metal connection between the normal and subconscious areas of your brain. That, by medical law, gave you a complete brain. Normally we use a fifth of our brains; the rest is there for development in the course of evolution. Also, I did something else.…

“I infused into your bloodstream a substance which I knew would so harden your body and heart that neither could be destroyed in your rush into outer space. I knew, of course, that you would receive the death penalty. Clear so far?”

“So far,” Eward assented. “What then?”

“I took a gamble with the cosmos. I knew that with that drug your body and brain would be intact though you yourself would be dead. I knew too that if your brain could be brought back to life you would be capable of tremendous powers, as also would be your body. I knew also that if the cosmos is what science claims it to be—the very structure of infinite power and thought itself—you would unquestionably, once revived, come under the influence of the thought-sea around you. I relied on the original theory of Jeans that the ether is mind, a theory proven to the hilt by later scientists.

“After you had finally reached a position where the gravities of moon and Earth held you in a neutral field, I sent across space a radiation corresponding to the one which begot life on this Earth in the first instance. My judgment was right, for it infused life back into your still-undamaged body. Shock alone had been the cause of your first death. Life returned. Little by little your body built itself up to stand spatial conditions, even as a man can stand increasingly powerful electric charges by slow acclimatisation. It was the law of adaptability, of course. You became a man of space.

“But with that return came knowledge and the remembrance of your fate. To your knowledge was added the even greater knowledge of the cosmos itself. An infinite knowledge of dimensions, powers, radiations—things denied to ordinary mortals. Further, your body was a medium for these forces and radiations, as a bulb is the medium for electric light. You could allow tremendous force to pass through you without harm, because with a mind like yours you mastered them, not they you…

“The Twelve Brain Computer made things easier for you. It made the plans of the Presence twelve times clearer to you. With your power to pass through solids and any dimension you accomplished the destruction of those beings you so bitterly hated, saved the girl you loved and the man who protected her—myself. Again because of your love for Lyra you returned to this laboratory when your work was done. I closed a switch to send forth a current powerful enough to heterodyne your powers for a moment. In that brief period I hastily trepanned and broke your brain connection. The rest was simply a matter of restoration to normal by synthetic grafting and so forth…”

“Then,” Lyra said slowly, “the thoughts I kept getting whilst I was in solitary were from Eward?”

“Of course. His mind was not dead. Mind cannot die.”

Eward pondered through an interval. “Slowly the memory of it is fading,” he muttered. “For a while I was a god, impelled only by vengeance. But now— You said you planned it all?”

“For twenty years and more,” Dalmer admitted. “I could not go into space because somebody was needed to control the instruments and only I had that knowledge. I waited for the right man to come. There came an accident with a paralyser-beam—and you.”

“And you also sought out Lyra and protected her,” Eward added. “Why? Why us particularly?”

Dalmer smiled slowly. “Because, Eward, you are my son.”

Eward and the girl stared in amazement.

“So strange?” Dalmer chucked, and then shook his head. “No! I was exiled to Callisto, but I escaped and came back. I fought my way with medical knowledge to the position of head surgeon, always with my plans of revenge. I knew where my son was. I knew one day my son should be the Grey Avenger. What more could a parent do than watch over his daughter-to-be whilst his son was destroying a Godless persecution?”

Dalmer said no more. He could not. Regardless of orders, Eward leapt out of bed and tore across to the armchair. Not a second later the girl was on top of him. Together they smothered the helpless scientist under the enthusiasm of their affection.

ARCTIC GOD

How could an English village be here in the frozen north? And what was the arctic god thy feared so much?

CHAPTER I

The Expedition

“Say, ever hear of this range on maps or things?” Jerry Marsden pulled off his helmet, rubbed his aching bearded face and drew a breath of the lung-cutting air.

Sid’s face emerged from the furs too—bewhiskered, beefy. He gave a puzzled frown.

“Nope.” Jerry looked round in the gloom: the weak Polar daylight was very near masked to twilight by the storm. “I’ve not the remotest idea where we are. And that’s kind of funny, come to think of it! We started this Expedition to find and claim new territory, then we have to lose our Omnibus and find the new territory on foot!”

He looked again at the gaunt, rocky interior of the cave then toward the tunnel that loomed back of it. Sid caught his thought.

“We might as well see where it takes us. Can’t do much on the outside until the storm blows itself out anyway. Come on.”

They made their way carefully along the rocky vista. The further they went and left behind the polar hell the warmer the air seemed to get. Jerry’s pedometer said they’d covered nearly two miles before the tunnel ended, and by this time the warmth was so oppressive they had to start pulling off their furs.

“Queer?” Sid looked his question, then stared at the barrier wall in the light of his torch.

“Volcanic activity probably,” Jerry replied. “Right now I’d give my life—what it’s worth!—to see what’s beyond this wall. First we get an unknown mountain range, then a natural tunnel through it—But what’s beyond that?”

“More tunnel and more storm I expect. We can try and find out.” Discarding their furs completely they set to work to pull away the mass of boulders and stones that blocked the passage. The more they worked the more evident it seemed that volcanic substance had created the barrier. But there was not a great deal of it. At the end of an hour’s heavy manual labor Jerry pulled clear a block of pumice-rock that allowed a pure, clear ray of light to shine through.

“Say, it’s daylight!” Sid looked amazed. “I thought the storm had blanked that completely!”

“Storm or no storm, it’s still daylight,” Jerry said briefly. “Anyway, we’re on the other side of the range by now and the storm may not be raging here— Come on, give me a hand. This gets interesting.”

They redoubled their efforts, clawing and pulling, at last managed to scramble through the gap they made. Then they sat down to a sitting position, astounded at what they beheld. It was like looking down into a medieval paradise…

They were high up on a completely encircling range of mountains. At the mountain summits frothed and fumed atmospheric vapors from the streaming cold of the Arctic: there was an incessant dull rumble of thunder as heat and cold locked in combat.

But down here in the cup made by the range was a great sweeping fertile valley, dazzling with flowers and pasture land. It reached right to the edges of a quaint town that looked like something lifted wholesale from the Middle Ages of England. There were thatched roofs, cobbled streets, overhanging gables, little mullioned windows—

Over it all a blue sky. The sun was hidden by its low angle and the further barrier of the mountains—otherwise the air was warm and spring-like, the wind a gentle caress.

Sid said finally, “Maybe we’re dead?”

“Dead nothing!” Jerry growled. “This valley is volcanic, hence the warmth. It’s shut off from the Arctic waste—an immensely fertile stretch all by itself. But I’ll be damned if I can figure out this little colony. Looks as though a chunk of England side-slipped in Time or something… Better go see what they’ve got. Maybe quaff a measure of mead,” he finished, grinning through his bearded lips.

They set off together down the mountain slope. It was a longer descent than they had expected. The flowers, when they reached them, turned out to be conventional daisies, buttercups and dandelions… Far away in the distance were cattle—perfectly normal sheep and cows, even horses. Once they glimpsed a pair of oxen yoked together and led by a man in a curiously old-fashioned costume.

“I still think we’re dead,” Sid muttered, as they went on knee-high through the grass. “Such peace and quiet as this can’t exist on polar ice— Maybe it’s Utopia!” His eyes gleamed at that. Then he pointed quickly. “Take a look! Men and women right out of ‘Pilgrim’s Progress’!”

Jerry grinned as he saw what he meant. Men and women were clearly in view now they had touched the outskirts of the town. They all wore the quaint Puritan-like garb of early England. The men wore billowy-sleeved shirts, jerkins, and tight breeches; the women tight-bodiced dresses with flowing skirts and, here and there, a conical hat. There were a few children—very few, Jerry noticed.

In some sort of market place, jammed with fruit stalls, oxen, shouting men and bargaining women, Jerry came to halt with Sid right beside him. There was an instant flurry among the populace at the presence of two strangers—bearded, dirty, heavily armed. Some ran to shelter in the heavily gabled houses, which in spite of their design appeared to be composed of still comparatively new material. Others of the people stood their ground, waited doubtfully. Jerry made a vague welcoming gesture with his arms.

“Hi ya, folks! Any idea where we are? What place is this, anyway?”

The people looked at each other. An old man wagged his grey head doubtfully.

“’Tis strangers thou art,” he breathed. “Only by witchcraft couldst thou have come hither.”

“Huh?” Jerry stared at Sid, then gave a grunt. “Witchcraft my foot! We walked it—pounding, pounding, through the snow-ways beyond this mountain range— Damnit, isn’t anybody going to give us a welcome?” he went on impatiently. “We don’t want to hurt you. All we ask is food, a chance to rest, and—and a shave.”

At that a girl edged her way from the crowd and looked at Jerry critically; then at Sid. She was very slight, possibly twenty-two, dressed in the simple Puritan style. Her flaxen hair reached nearly to her waist. Her face was oval, delicately flushed; her eyes gray and bright with intelligence.

“Perchance I—I canst help thee,” she said, coming forward and dropping a little curtsy. “I—er—”—she glanced nervously at her frowning fellow townsfolk—“I can help thee because my father is the town cryer. He knoweth much—”

She caught Jerry’s hand in impulsive quickness. “Come quickly, I beg of thee!”

“Yeah—yeah, sure,” Jerry agreed, surprised; and with Sid beside him they all three pushed through the gawping people to a tavern further up the street.

It was an ale-house of pure old fashioned sort, full of oaken cross beams, rough wood tables, brass ornaments, hide-backed chairs… The windows were cross-patterned in diamond-mullion.

“Please tarry,” the girl smiled, waving to chairs, then she went hurrying off to other parts of the tavern.

“Where’d they get this ‘thee’ and ‘thou’ stuff?” Sid demanded, sitting down and scratching his head. “Looks like we side-tracked ourselves someplace and finished up in medieval England. If that’s wrong how did this place get here?”

“Take a look,” Jerry said in response, and jerked his head. The populace was peering through the windows now, muttering and talking. They were in the doorway too, tramping on each others’ toes to get a better look—

Then suddenly the girl and a massive stomached man appeared—presumably her father. He took a look at the people, slammed the door in their faces and bolted it, clamped shutters across the window, then lit massive candles to relieve the gloom. He turned, red-faced, genial, massive armed, a huge apron round his immense middle.

“Marry, but thou art strangers indeed!” he exclaimed, staring at them. “And a comely crop of beard too—” He broke off as the girl nudged him, seemed to remember something. “I am Robert the Robust,” he explained. “Town cryer to his most Excellent Majesty Ethelbert the Red—and in spare time, forsooth, keeper of this tavern. Here ist mine only one—Hesther. But—” he frowned—“whom wouldst thou be?”

Jerry hesitated. “We’re polar explorers. Tell you what you do, Robert—bring us something to eat and drink and we’ll tell you the whole story. There’s plenty to it—both sides.”

“So be it—but thou talkest in strange vein—

“We’ve nothing on you, pal,” Jerry said; then as the rotund one went off with a mystified look he added to the girl, “Look, Hesther, what goes on? We don’t know anything about this setup, see? We’re from the outer world—New York. Ever heard of it?”

She shook her flaxen head, watched as Jerry eased off his accoutrements. “I knoweth only the England whence we came but a year or so ago.”

“Year or so?” Jerry looked at her sharply.

She seated herself. “Of a truth. The storm brought us hither and we wert lost. We slept. Then the Great God of the Mountain gaveth us life, and peace, and brought us hence…”

“But—but—” Jerry got a grip on himself. “Listen, you belong to an England that went phut some four centuries back at least— When did this valley come into being? Anyway, who’s the Great God?”

“None knoweth.” There was reverent awe in her gray eyes. “He giveth life as he willeth it. None hath seen him—but he liveth. Far up yonder mountain.”

“Gold in them thar hills, pal,” Sid grinned.

Jerry relaxed. “Your witness,” he sighed.

“Repeating the question, when did this valley come into being?” Sid demanded.

“Three years ago perchance. We buildeth it ourselves when the Great God of the Mountain sent us hither—”

The landlord suddenly returned, planked down plates loaded with wholesome fare and two tankards of foaming ale.

“This on the house?” Jerry inquired briefly. “We’ve no money to pay for it see—unless you’ll take American money.”

“American money? What badinage is this? No money—

“Father, it were better to let them tarry,” the girl broke in urgently. “They are not of us. They cometh from the outer world—from one York—”

“New York!” Jerry growled, wiring into the food. “Deal of difference! We came through a tunnel into this valley and we want to know what it’s all about. Listen, Robert, your daughter says you left England in a storm a year or so back…”

“’Tis true,” the landlord acknowledged. “We calleth this valley ‘Little England’ after the country we left. We set out for unknown parts as settlers with many children and many a head of cattle. Storm struck us. We wert driven into Polar ice and went to sleep. About three years ago the Great God of the Mountain waketh us and gave to us this valley. We buildeth our homes… everything.”

“A moment,” Jerry said quickly. “What ship was it you sailed in? From England I mean?”

“T’was the good ship Springflower—”

“Springflower!” Jerry twirled. “Listen, Sid, that ship is on the official list of mysteriously vanished ships—ranking with the Kobenhavn and Cyclops for mystical disappearance.… Lemme think! The Springflower sailed from England with a party of some thousand colonists aboard in June, 1542! Not sure of the month, but I know it was that year… Holy Cats, these must be the survivors!”

“Descendants, you mean,” Sid snapped. “How do you figure they lived in the odd four centuries between?”

Hesther caught the implication of the argument for she said, “Nay, not descendants. We—a thousand strong—art the original people who left England…”

“This has got me licked,” Jerry muttered. “Just what happened in the four centuries in between?”

“Mebbe the Old Man of the Mountain,” Sid mused.

Jerry looked up again. “Nobody’s seen this Mountain God of yours— How do you know there is a God?”

“’Tis there for all to see,” the landlord shrugged. “At times yon mountain range bursts with fire and from it there steppeth but more numbers of our people from the Spring/lower. One by one the great God of the Mountain is returning to us all those who wert aboard that ship. In time, perchance, we shall be all here…”

“Something screwy somewhere all right,” Jerry sighed, going on with his meal. Then presently, “When do the mountain fireworks start again? Any chance of seeing anything?”

“Of a truth!” Hesther broke in excitedly. “Even this day it ist time for yon mountain to bring us more people—”

“Today? How’d you reckon days with six months of continuous light this time of year?”

“We measureth by the candle,” she smiled. “I canst show thee this mountain if thou are desirous—”

“It’s a deal,” Jerry nodded grimly. ‘And later, Robert the Robust, I’ll borrow something to slice these whiskers.” Robert nodded, then asked, “Wouldst thou not care for an audience with Ethelbert the Red himself?”

“Can he tell us any more than you have?”

“Nay—”

“Oke, then we’ll leave Ethelred the Bert to his crown of glory and look into this for ourselves. Listen, you folks ever heard of radio?”

“Radio?” Hesther repeated the word in unaccustomed wonder. “What ist?”

“Or electricity, or atoms?” Jerry persisted. “Or explosives, stars, the universe?”

“Daughter, he talketh of devil’s tools,” Robert breathed.

Jerry compressed his lips. “Just as I figured. You folks don’t know the first rudiments of modern science. You never heard of movies or talking pictures or television, either?”

Father and daughter shook their heads mystifiedly. Jerry nodded, lifted up his portable radio and switched on the receiver portion.

“This may interest you,” he said briefly. “Later, when we’ve looked into the puzzle of this place we’ll call aid—Right now”—he tuned the dial—”you’re listening to a short-wave station from that New York I told you about. We call it twenty-nine meter band.”

Hesther jumped back nervously and caught her equally astounded father’s arm as the radio burst into sudden life. The announcer spoke briefly. Swing music began to come over the air, entirely free of all static jamming or atmospherics.

“Withcraft!” the landlord panted, eyes popping. “Devil’s witchcraft!”

Hesther however, her first shock over, looked at the radio more closely, her keen gray eyes studying it intently.

“Listen to it and hear what goes on in the great big world outside here,” Jerry smiled. “Call in the rest of the folks. Now, Robert the Robust, your razor— And afterwards, Sweet Nell of Old Drury, we’ll be with you to take a look at the Old Man of the Mountain himself.”

CHAPTER II

The Remarkable Captain

Cleaned up and shaved, fresh for the unexpected course their Polar expedition had taken, Jerry and Sid walked with the girl between them to a grassy knoll she chose facing the opposite side of the mountain range perhaps a couple of miles away.

She seated herself and waited solemnly, gray eyes fixed steadily on the cliff face, hair blown back gently by the breeze.

“Anybody ever tell you you got looks?” Jerry murmured.

“Nay… Have I?” She even colored slightly.

“Plenty. Get you in New York in modern duds and you’d knock the socialities for a loop—We’ll skip that for the moment though. Tell me, how’d you get the wood to build this town of yours? And the tools?”

“They wert here—awaiting us. The God attendeth to everything. As to the wood—There wert a forest here, waiting to be hewn.”

“Hm-m. And everybody, you included, just sort of came here—? Just like that!” Jerry snapped his fingers.

“Yea.” The girl looked reflective. “I remember falling asleep aboard the Spring/lower There wast dreadful cold. Then—then I woke, here in this valley. My father wert with me, and one other whom we knew. So… we joined yonder community in the town.”

“Somewhere,” Jerry said, “it begins to look as though four centuries have skidaddled. The medieval world has gone, Hesther. Today, beyond here, it is a world of radio, flying machines, wars, chaos, economic revolutions—Machine Age gone mad. Understand?”

“Nay,” she said, innocently. “But I believe thee— The radio, as you call it. Black magic indeed!”

“Yeah. Yeah, sure…” Jerry cocked a hopeless eye on Sid: then suddenly the girl caught each of their arms tightly, nodded her flaxen head. “Behold!” she cried.

Following her gaze they were just in time to see a sudden blaze of light in the distant mountain, for all the world like a giant flashlight.

A cloud of white smoke puffed upwards and drifted away on the warm breeze. As it cleared, some four people merged into view, mere dots against the mountain. They were motionless for a while then began to move slowly down towards the town.

“Well I’ll be twice damned!” Sid exploded. “It’s as good as a stage illusion!”

“We’re going to look into this,” Jerry said curtly, jumping up. “It’s no supernatural setup, I’ll wager. Come on.”

“’Tis folly to question the God of the—” Hesther broke off as Jerry swung on her.

“You don’t have to come, Hes, if you don’t want. But we’re going to take a look… It’d help if you’d show us the way, at least.”

She hesitated, then that bright light of youthful intelligence came again to her gray eyes. Definitely she was a girl who loved something out of the ordinary.

“So be it,” she said briefly. “Come.”

She broke into a tripping run through the thick grass, Jerry and Sid close behind her. With long accustomedness she found a beaten trail through the flowers, went across a rubbly slope, turned into a direct path leading to the desired spot on the mountain side— Then suddenly she stumbled and fell headlong, hands outthrust to save herself. Her fingers struck a terrific blow against an upjutting chunk of rock.

“Hesther! Hes, are you hurt—?” Horrified, expecting to see her right hand cut to the bone, Jerry dropped beside her with his handkerchief already out. He gathered her up, and she gave a faint smile.

“Nay, I am not hurt… See!” Her hand, as she stretched it out, was only slightly red from the impact but otherwise not even grazed. “I am never hurt,” she went on, as Jerry helped her to her feet. “None of us is ever hurt. Perchance that ist strange? Truly, when in England we wert often hurt— But not here.”

“Funny? It’s incredible!” Jerry exploded. “Let me look again!”

Again he turned her hand over, then he felt the stone. It was as rough as a barnacle. The first presentiment of the incredible drove across his brain. He looked at the girl queerly.

“Have any of you folks ever died since appearing in this valley?”

“Nay.”

“Ever been ill? Any of you cut or injured yourselves?”

“Nay—But I have said, it was not always thus. Before the sleep on the Springflower—”

“Yeah—you told me. Hm-m!” Jerry cocked a significant eye on Sid, then shrugged. “Okay, let’s keep going.”

They went on again with the girl to the front. Falling back a little way, Jerry said:

“This joint piles up mystery on mystery, Sid. First we get folks who come back to life after four hundred years—then we find out their flesh is so tough a blow can’t even graze it. And a girl’s at that!”

“A few of these folks would be an asset in a front line of infantry,” Sid commented. “Maybe the Old Man again…”

They fell into puzzled silence, following the girl’s slender form. She stopped at last on a narrow ledge and pointed to a smoke-blackened fissure on the sheer mountain wall.

“This ist the spot,” she pronounced. “Listen! Thou canst hear the roar of the God himself!”

They stood still for a moment or two and quite distinctly to their ears came the sound of deep internal rumbling, rather like the roar of a tremendous wind. Jerry frowned, studied the fissure carefully. It was jagged, a rough oval which traced out a massive piece of rock.

“Naturally pivoted rock,” he said slowly. “At intervals, I’d say, some inner pressure must swing it round and leave an opening—Like Old Faithful—always works dead to time. You are sure these folks of yours turn up at regular intervals, Hes?”

“Of a certainty!”

“Then I am right. Some bright guy on the other side of this range is playing games—and it seems to me we’d better see what he’s up to—”

“Look here!” Sid exclaimed, on his knees. “Here’s a black mass of discharged magnesium, and leading back from it two thin grooves in the soil—Looks to me as though a magnesium charge was fixed here and fired by electric wires. Then the wires were withdrawn. Happened a lot of times too to judge from the smoke-black on that rock. These valley folks know nothing of explosives, even less of magnesium, so it looks supernatural— We’ve got something, Jerry!”

Jerry nodded, then to the girl’s alarm threw his weight against the jagged line of black that marked the pivoted rock’s edge. He stood back with gleaming eyes as it budged slightly.

“We don’t have to wait for volcanic force to shift it: we can do it ourselves—enough to get through anyway. Come on!”

“This ist madness!” Hesther cried in anguish. “To probe too far into the secrets of the God—”

“We know what we’re about, Hes,” Jerry said briefly, patting her arm affectionately. “Tell you what—skip off back home and we’ll join you later. Right now we’ve got tough work ahead.”

“But I—I—” It was clear her adventurous spirit was torn between superstitious fear and the desire to explore. Fear won. She held back nervously, sat down. “I wilt wait,” she said seriously.

“Oke. Okay, Sid—push with all your power!”

They flung their united strength on the rock and it turned slowly, enough to give them ingress anyway. Jerry pulled out his torch and flashed the beam down the tunnel ahead. From the walls and floor spurted puffs of steam.

“Volcanic is right,” Jerry commented, moving along. “And some guy with a hundred percent brain knows how to turn it to account… Take it easy!” he finished suddenly, catching Sid’s arm.

The tunnel had ended at a mighty pit in the depths of which they beheld a volcanic heart of fire. Heat of overpowering force beat up and around them, set their bodies streaming. Clinging to each other they edged their way along the ledge that overhung the hell-crater, only breathed freely again when they got to the tunnel’s continuation beyond it.

“Obviously our unknown playmate figures that pit will keep the folks away,” Sid remarked. “Guess he’s not far wrong, either. But they must come up the tunnel in the first place to appear in the valley. Wonder how they got the nerve? There are old folks in the community too—”

He broke off. The tunnel had right-angled suddenly and brought them into daylight streaming through an open cave hole in the mountain side… But they were not facing an Arctic waste but another valley, warm and temperate as the one they had left. A broad swift flowing river passed through its center, and along its nearer bank sprawled a long, roughly constructed wooden building not unlike a military barracks. The valley was rockier that its neighbor and possessed no flowers.

Then there was something else the two saw as they went down the mountain slope. Something was moored in the river alongside the wooden building… A submarine!

“Now I know we’ve got something!” Jerry snapped, lips tight.

Their journey down towards the riverside sheds took them past several newly made excavations on the way. Jerry halted and surveyed the first one as they passed it: it was full of metallic veins which spelt something to his eye immediately.

“Wow, take a look!” he whistled. “That’s a gold vein of amazing richness unless I’m mistaken— That’s silver higher up! Good God, this valley’s an absolute crucible of wealth…”

They hurried on again, past further excavations which gave obvious yields of bitumen, bauxite, copper, zinc, lead…a veritable storehouse such as any nation would give its soul to own.

“No wonder some bright baby wants to keep this place bottled up,” Sid commented finally. “We’ll just see how much legal right he—or they—have to it.”

For safety’s sake they drew their guns as they neared the sheds. At close quarters it was revealed that there were not many sheds—but one exceptionally long one, a sectional building of the type common in the outer world…

From the center doorway as they approached it a tubby figure in soiled white ducks suddenly emerged, battered Panama-hat pushed on the back of his head of gray hair. He was a big man, his figure belied somewhat by his babyish face. It was weather beaten, dissolute of mouth. The eyes were blue and rather vague.

“This is really quite unexpected,” he remarked in perfect English. “Quite unexpected. Strangers are rare in my little habitat.” He straightened suddenly and saluted. “Captain Bilton at your service.”

“What navy?” Jerry asked briefly.

“Navy? My dear sir, I belong to no Navy. I am a scientist…a very great scientist. I am the master of life and death!”

“Yeah?” Jerry looked unconvinced.

“I’m Jeremy Marsden of the Marsden Arctic Expedition: this is my colleague Sid Calvert. Our traveling unit was lost and we’re the sole survivors. We got into the adjoining valley by accident.”

“Really? How unfortunate…” Bilton’s expression did not change, but his eyes wandered to the leveled revolvers. Then he smiled. “Come inside, won’t you? I am forgetting my manners.”

They followed into a fairly large and sparsely furnished living room. The furniture comprised mainly steel tubing chairs and a metal portable table, obviously from the submarine. Oddly enough the table was already laid for three people. There were fruits, canned meat, bread, and a light wine. Also cutlery, again presumably from the submarine.

“Modest, but serviceable.” Bilton shrugged. “Sit down, won’t you? And I assure you, Mr. Marsden, there is no need for you to keep pointing that revolver at me. I am quite harmless—really.”

“Apparently,” Jerry said, thrusting his gun away and sitting down. “You knew we were coming? Table all laid.”

The Captain gave his babyish smile. I saw you up on the valley side—through my telescope, so I decided to prepare a little welcome. Eat, my friends. The fruit is all from the woods atop this valley.”

He picked up an apple, bit into it with schoolboyish delight, then leaned back lazily and champed his flabby jowls.

“I’ll skip the eats and come to the point,” Jerry said briefly. “You are in possession of an exceptionally rich valley here. How come? Did you get here by accident or what?”

“Decidedly an accident,” Bilton said imperturbably. “I came originally to explore the Pole— The recent Bilton Expedition, if you recall? A trick of the current carried me under the mountain range into here. I stopped to look around.”

“I don’t remember your Expedition or anything about it,” Jerry said bluntly. “What happened to your crew? You can’t drive a submarine single-handed.”

“The poor fellows died…” Bilton spat out a piece of apple skin casually. “Poor unhappy boys!” he sighed. “Little by little they found this lonely place getting too much for them and their reason snapped…one by one they went. I was the only one who kept sane, so naturally I did the merciful thing and shot them, also one by one. At last, only I was left.”

“And being the only one left you then set about convincing the innocents in the next valley that you are a God, eh? Why?”

Bilton beamed “Why not?” He got to his feet, still munching his apple. “Suppose I show you exactly? Come with me …”

CHAPTER III

Powerhouse of the Earth

Jerry and Sid followed their host from the living room through a doorway that led into a long, well stocked laboratory. So well stocked indeed that Jerry found himself wondering how on earth Bilton had gotten all the stuff together, especially if he had come by accident.

Bilton’s next words helped a little to clear the puzzle.

“As you’ll know, for Polar exploration I needed a submarine fitted with all manner of apparatus. Most of it was machine-tool stuff which I have since utilized to make necessary instruments. The valley is rich in every conceivable element and raw material. The river works my turbo-generator: I have an electric blast furnace. In other words, a little scientific town all on my own… Quaint, isn’t it?”

Jerry and Sid glanced at each other. Bilton went on with his apple languidly.

“I don’t doubt you’ve seen some of my excavations,” he said. “I intend to advise the proper quarter in America when I can get out of this damned landlocked valley. Until then, I shall continue to experiment… As to the people in the valley, that is a matter of biological science. Know anything of if?”

“Try us out,” Jerry suggested briefly.

“Well, as I said I arrived here by accident—but as I was pushed through an underground stream in the outer ice I saw an ancient ship buried, virtually locked, in the ice. Possibly it had been there for centuries, overwhelmed, the people still on its decks, the cattle still in their pens—frozen, encompassed, solid… You know, it is a fact that life can be preserved in ice indefinitely—even for generations.”

Jerry’s eyes gleamed. “Yeah, I know. Go on.”

“I thought little of the incident at the time, but as my men died and I became lonely I wanted company. One day I recalled the statement of Darwin that life itself probably began in the Arctic—right here, in this very spot, might exist the catalytic elements necessary to beget life. I had already found the valley to be immensely fertile in its yield of raw material—but there were also other elements unclassified by civilized science. Suppose among these elements there existed in practical form the chemical reagents which Darwin had once theorized…? I found such an element.”

Bilton nodded his straw-hatted head to a bottle on the shelf, half full of deep green liquid.

“I call it Biltonis,” he said fatuously. “It exists in a mineral element and is Element 87, one of our missing numbers in the Periodic Table. No wonder, since it has been here all the time… It can be ground down, pulverized, and made into a potent liquid. When absorbed into the human system—or any organic system for that matter—it has the effect of super-adrenalin. It stimulates the heart first, then as it sweeps on through the bloodstream it checks the normal effects of cell-breakdown—ketabo-lism—and instead builds up the epithelial cells to granite toughness. Life is not extended, but mortality is reduced by the comparative imperviousness to injury. Even bloodless amputation is possible because of the instant coagulation of blood at the severed points.”

“Very interesting,” Jerry said slowly, glancing at Sid’s keen face. “What happened then?”

Bilton munched reflectively. “Well, as I tell you, I was lonely. I got around to figuring I might try and revive the people preserved in the ice. With Biltonis I might manage it… They had merely died from cold and the ice had built up around them, preserving them without harm. I recovered some of them, and the cattle, and injected the fluid into them, using also an artificial respirator to start the heart action. They lived! And the cattle! For an hour after revival however the people were vacant—perfect hypnotic subjects. No doubt due to the shock. I realized I could keep my little secret from them if I sent them into the next Valley. I knew from their vacant droolings they still thought themselves in the Sixteenth Century. So, while they remained capable of being hypnotized I gave them orders in post-hypnotism, which would be obeyed the moment they came to. I told them how to build houses, roads, set themselves up. I even took the tools there myself in readiness for them…

“Then,” Bilton chuckled, “I decided to preserve my little secret by building up a seemingly mystical power. After the first ones went to the next valley I sent others to the accompaniment of a magnesium flash. All hocus-pocus of course, but it looks Godlike to those poor innocents. A volcanic pressure opens the mountain and—”

“And hypnotism was the reason why none of those people feared to walk past that boiling crater in the tunnel leading between Valleys?” Jerry asked briefly.

“Correct, Mr. Mardsen. The hypnotic subject is never aware of his danger.”

“Hm-m! There are definitely no flies on you, Cap! And how many more have you got to revive yet?”

“No more. The last group went through not so long ago.”

“And you pulled away the wires which fired the magnesium afterwards?” Jerry asked slowly.

“Of course…” Bilton threw away his apple-core. “All very simple you see… And, I think, rather wonderful! Ultimately I plan to go and live among these people, spend the rest of my days in paradise, as their God. Happy sentiment, is it not?”

Jerry eyed him. “You seem dead sure there’s no way out of here.”

“Of course I am sure. You cannot get out, and neither can I— Oh you may try to leave by the way you entered, I know—but without a base camp you’d perish. And one cannot even radio for help because radio neither goes nor comes from this spot— Atmospheric disturbance, you understand.”

Sid gave a start. “But we—”

“It boils down,” Jerry interrupted him, “to the fact that you are playing God to a bunch of Puritans, captain?”

“I only desire to live in peace and be their benefactor. Have I not restored them to life, given them a valley, a town, even a king?”

Jerry gave a slow smile and a final glance around the lab. He shrugged.

“Well, it’s been good meeting you,” he said. “Maybe we can help you forget your loneliness now and again?”

“Maybe,” Bilton acknowledged gravely.

“Well—We’ll be getting along. We want to take a thorough look at that other valley—then we’ll probably drop around and see you again. Inevitable I guess—since we’re neighbors until death.”

“You put it very aptly, my friend.” Bilton smiled, then he accompanied them back to the living room door. They left him leaning against the doorway munching another apple, waving his hand now and again as they made their way back to the mountain tunnel.

“Well, any ideas?” Jerry put the question brusquely as they tramped along.

“Darned if I know. Seems to me that that guys only one jump ahead of a strait-jacket. Nuts, obviously.”

Jerry’s face was grim. “He’s not nuts, Sid. That’s a pose: at least I think so—to throw us off guard. He’d no doubt have killed us had it not meant that the people in this next valley would have come to look for us and make things awkward for him. No, he’s not insane: he’s damned clever, and scientific too. All that chatter about wanting to be a God was so much bunk to build up the insane angle… And besides, he’s a proven liar. He said radio could neither come nor go from here. We know that’s wrong from our own radio—and you, you mug, nearly let the cat out of the bag by telling him we have a radio. The less he knows of that the better.”

“Hm-m,” Sid said, pondering.

“Something else too,” Jerry mused. “He said his submarine crew died of loneliness. What is more likely is that he happened on the place not by accident but by design—He could have gotten the location of the place from some scientific treatise somewhere, like those approximate positions of Atlantis one often sees. It happened to be right. Once he knew that he still kept his crew beside him to return to civilization for tools and necessities. Then on the second return he killed them all off… Naturally there is a way out. I don’t credit his story that there isn’t. Probably under the ice…”

“And right here under his control is a wonder-mineral—a perfect medical miracle worth millions to civilized surgery,” Sid muttered. “Cutting without bleeding, hardening of the skin, revival from death… But underneath the whole setup is a deeper meaning, which we’ve got to find!”

“You’re telling me!” Jerry retorted. He looked back on the valley fromthe tunnel ledge. Bilton’s figure had gone now…

They turned into the tunnel, made their perilous trip back past the volcanic crater and so to the other valley again. As they pushed the pivot-stone back in place Hesther came up eagerly through the grass.

“Then—then the God didst not destroy thee?” she asked in relief.

“I guess not, Hes.” Jerry smiled faintly. “You’ve been waiting for us all this time?”

“Truly! Prithee, what didst find—”

Jerry took her arm affectionately. To his inner satisfaction she clung to him eagerly as they went down the valley side.

“We found enough to know, Hes, that you innocent folk in ‘Little England’ here aren’t half so safe as you think. Your God is a man—same as Sid and me. What is more, he’s a scientist.”

“Scientist?” The girl looked up inquiringly. “What ist?”

“I—I mean he makes things—dangerous things, I guess.” Jerry gestured vaguely. “Sid and I are going back later on to look at things more closely. Right now we’re returning to the tavern for a rest.”

Once they reached the tavern they found it jammed with the Puritan men and women listening in awe to a light orchestra from the same short wave station on which Jerry had left the radio. He gave a grin. “Well, folks, how’d you like it?”

“Marry, ’tis witchcraft!” Hesther’s father exclaimed, and a chorus of voices confirmed his assertion.

“No, it’s just—”Jerry started to say, then he broke off and looked at the radio sharply as it crackled violently. It was the sharp crackled burr of electrical interference, repeated at two second intervals.

“What ist?” asked Hesther in wonder. “Hast the wonder box broken down?”

“What do you make of it, Sid?” Jerry snapped, eyes narrowing. “No electricity in this town and no static, therefore—”

“Bilton!” Jerry snapped. “Some ultra-powerful electrical machine he’s using. He figures we haven’t got a radio otherwise he wouldn’t be so careless. Damn good thing you didn’t get the chance to spill it out there, Sid. We—”

“Bilton? He is whom?” asked the landlord.

“Your God, my friends! Your Old Man of the Mountain!” Jerry laughed shortly. “He isn’t a God, and this is the Twentieth Century, which breeds scientists like flies. This man revived you by scientific means—witchcraft to you. But he isn’t a spook, or a supernatural being. He’s just a menace—and unless my pal and I do something about it he’s liable to do something unpleasant to all of you in due course. So best thing you do is trust us and not this God of yours… This radio shows he is up to something and once we’ve rested, my pal and I are off to see what it is…

“Come on, Sid, time we grabbed some sleep. I’m about all in.”

* * * *

Three hours later, rested and prepared for anything this time, they took their leave of Hesther once more at the tunnel entrance. Once more the difficult trip past the volcanic crater, and so through to the adjoining valley. Remembering Bilton’s telescope they wormed their way out on their stomachs from the tunnel entrance, used the rocks as shields.

Then suddenly Sid gripped Jerry’s arm.

“Take a look!”

Jerry started at what he saw. Bilton was but half a mile from them, his arms full of various electrical gadgets. He came towards them, stumbling in the stones. They waited breathlessly, gave sighs of relief as he turned suddenly and vanished in one of the countless mountain caves.

“Something up in the cave obviously,” Jerry muttered. “Must be working there—went down to his shack to get some equipment…”

He thought for a moment, eased himself up and fingered his gun.

“This is where we break forces, Sid. I’ll follow him up while you go down to his hut place and ransack it. Find out whatever you can that might provide a clue. I’ll keep him away from you somehow. Join you here later.”

“Okay.” Sid went off, keeping the rocks to one side of him.

Jerry got up and moved slowly along to the cave entrance, peered inside. Nothing happened. He crept into the gloom and presently saw ahead of him a flow of steady white light. It resolved itself finally into a string of high-wattage lamps across a cavern roof. Inside the cavern to his amazement, were lathes, machine tools of every kind, carborundum wheels, grinding implements, metal drills, wire-wound armatures. On one side were completed masses of machinery, bolted up.

In the midst of all this was Bilton himself, at the moment inspecting a furiously working turbine fed by a pounding stream of water volcanic in origin, transmitting its power to the whirling flywheels. He turned at last and went to work on an instrument that sent out flarings of electrical energy. Apparently it was a welder. At any rate it explained to Jerry the curious static behavior of the radio set.

Several times Bilton paused to study a plan—then he went on again. For perhaps half an hour Jerry stood watching, trying to make up his mind what it was all about. Even if he went for Bilton with the revolver there was no guarantee the man would reveal the truth—and that was what really mattered.

The undoubted implication of scientific and electrical power worried Jerry not a little. More than ever he began to fear for those in “Little England”— Then he started violently at a touch on his arm. He swung, relaxed as he saw Sid, his face tense and grim as he looked into the cave.

“Nice setup,” he muttered, then glancing at Jerry sharply, “And I think I know what it’s all about… Come outside and I’ll show you.”

They retreated silently into the daylight again, ducked down behind the rocks.

“Well, what?” Jerry demanded.

“I had the free run of that place of his,” Sid said quickly. “I found plenty, but nothing half as important as this plan in his lab. See what you think. I can get it back before he knows anything …”

He pulled a roll of parchment from his inside pocket and Jerry frowned as he gazed at it. It showed the Arctic Circle and the northern half of the world. From a spot which was presumably this hidden valley radiated straight lines. The significant thing was that the spot they occupied was dead in the center of the absolute North Pole.

“Say,” he muttered, “these straight lines are given in terms of wavebands …”

“I know. That’s the odd part. What else do you see?”

“Plenty,” Jerry snapped. “It seems obvious from this that the North Pole is not all ice. The exact North central pole is here, right where we are, and around it—as any scientist knows—are all the swarming currents of Earth itself. The Earth-spin alone draws them here. From this plan it seems obvious that our apple-eating friend intends to build up a massive power station, a simple enough proposition since the valley contains all the raw material to do it with—and his submarine brought all the necessary machine-tools. Seems clear he intends to settle himself here in a spot where nobody in the outer world would suspect anything could even live…

“Then,” Jerry mused, “he seems to figure that by using the inexhaustible power of earth’s magnetic energy through a specially designed power house he can use the world’s ether-lanes for a variety of purposes. For one thing he could cripple world radio and radio-telephone by terrific interference. He could cut out airplane motors by the same process. He could even produce electric storms at will anywhere he wanted… And none could stop him!”

Sid nodded grimly. “Seems fantastic—but it looks to me like the domination of the world’s power from the Pole, by one man.”

“That’s just what it is!” Jerry retorted. “That’s just what Bilton is doing— But for such a colossal project he’d need more than himself and he’s wiped out his submarine crew—”

Jerry stopped, snapped his fingers. “The people!” he exclaimed. “That’s it! A thousand innocents right under his thumb! Labor! And they won’t know a thing of what’s doing.”

“And right now he’s building the machinery for the project in that cave!” Sid cried.

“Yes, I am,” commented a grim voice. “Get up, both of you!”

CHAPTER IV

Cataclysm

Bilton was standing right behind them, gun in hand. He was no longer innocent and inane looking. Indeed his eyes were blazing with unholy fire. He snatched the plan savagely from Jerry’s grasp.

“I expected you would return, but hardly so soon!” he snapped. “I intended to block the tunnel the moment I had finished important work on my armatures… Well, you’ve been smart enough to piece together my plan—but it won’t avail you anything. You’ve guessed my scheme—electrical domination of the world. Perfectly protected in the valley I can do exactly as I like, can know all that is going on through radio-television. I have agents in the outer world, and I can buy as many more as I need with the gold and silver at my disposal here. Those people I revived shall labor for me… By power of destruction I can blackmail the world into whatever I need— And two inquisitive polar explorers shall not stop it!”

Jerry snapped, “Kill us, Bilton, and you’ll darned soon have the rest of the valley people coming in to find out why. Cut them off and you cut off your labor too—”

“I shall blow up the tunnel: it is already mined. Later I shall clear it.” Bilton smiled faintly. “I have it all arranged, you see, and I—”

“Wait!” screamed a girl’s voice suddenly.

It came so abruptly Bilton looked up in surprise, and in that second Jerry hurled out his fist and struck the portly scientist under the jaw, sent him reeling. He got up again immediately but Jerry had him covered.

Hesther came forward hurriedly, and behind her were her father and some of the other valley people. They gazed wonderingly at Bilton.

“You came just in time, Hesther,” Jerry panted. “How’d it happen?”

“We decided to see what really lay beyond the mountain—”

“Damn you, girl!” Bilton blazed, quivering with anger. “You few may have got through, but no more will—I’ll watch it!”

Before the words were hardly out of his mouth he flung himself forward recklessly, arms flung wide. Catching Jerry and Sid violently around the necks he flung them both to earth. Jerry fired, missed: the bullet whanged rock. Stumbling forward Bilton raced for his cave. Jerry whirled around, aimed, fired—

Bilton halted in his tracks, red smearing into sight on his white coated back. He doubled up, stumbled into the cave, and vanished.

“Well, I guess that’s that,” Jerry snapped. “We stepped in and just managed—” He broke off, twirled with the others as there came a sudden titanic concussion from the tunnel leading to the next valley. Smoke and rocks came belting through the air. The whole mass of the mountain quivered.

Came another explosion—and another, rocking the valley with the reverberation.

“He must have lived long enough to blow the place up anyway,” Sid panted. “Damnit, we took that shot too much for granted— Now he knows he’s sunk he’s blown the whole lot— Take a look!” he yelled.

Hesther clinging to him, scared by the explosions, Jerry stared as a mass of gray viscid substance began to push its way from the blocked tunnel. It was followed by a core of red molten fire.

“That volcanic pit!” Sid shouted. “It’s overflowing or something. Quick! We’ve gotta get out of here…”

Even as he spoke the mountain quaked again and dislodged huge bolders that rained thunderously to earth.

“He started a cataclysm,” Jerry muttered, as they backed away. “It can happen easy enough when everything’s made of porous volcanic rock. Shift one rock and the lot comes down. Looks like ‘Little England’ is doomed—and this valley will be a molten quagmire in no time… Come on!”

“The submarine?” Sid questioned, as they ran down the mountain slope.

“Yeah—the only chance. We’ve got a makeshift crew. If there’s a way out we’ll find it…”

As they raced along that rolling flood of molten stone and lava pursued them. They reached the shed by the river and for a moment Jerry stopped, dashed inside and came out again with the bottle of Biltonis in his arm.

“Might as well,” he said briefly to Sid. “Probably duplicate it in the outer world—Come on, you folks!”

He caught Hesther to him and led the way to the flat deck of the submarine, clattered down into the control room.

“Fuel’s all set,” Sid said briefly, studying the gages. “But how much do you know about driving a sub?”

“Enough to get by,” Jerry retorted, slamming and shutting the conning tower hatch. “Our job will be find the way out—”

“We can do that all right!” Sid cried. “Look here! A map all laid out! Bilton had everything ready for a quick getaway if it was ever needed.”

Jerry glanced at it, nodded, turned to the baffled Englanders. The wilderness of machinery was something they had never known. None the less they turned to the tasks Jerry assigned them and the engines started up…

The submarine stayed on surface until the barrier range was reached—then it submerged. From then on it was a matter of gentle nosing through walls of ice, through the narrowest channel imaginable. Foot by foot—perhaps for hours, perhaps for days…

None aboard knew how long it took—but there came a time at last, when the air was fetid and the engines overworked, that the craft rose willingly without obstruction. It bobbed to the surface of the sea.

“We made it!” Sid cried exultantly.

Instantly Jerry flung open the hatch, clambered out on the deck. He stood breathing in gulps of the salt wind.

“Somewhere about two hundred miles off Greenland, as I figure it,” he said. He turned, Hesther clinging to his arm, her father and fellow Englanders staring round them incredulously.

“We’re going to a new world, Hes,” Jerry smiled. “And we’ve got a secret right here that’s going to make us happy and secure… Maybe you don’t even mind leaving the Polar prison behind?”

“Mind? Nay! It is as you say— Okay by me!”

“Okay it is!” Jerry grinned. He turned. “Sid, a ship hoving on the horizon— We head towards it. Come on!”

THE GHOST SUN

A dead Earthman saves an alien race from cosmic doom!

The spaceship, a gigantic ovoid of suprametal, the product of high intelligence, pursued its tireless course through infinity, far beyond the Earthly galaxy.

Within it were six remarkable beings, remarkable both in appearance and mentality. An Earthman would have considered them insectile, with their beetle-like bodies, delicate tentacles and single unblinking eye fixed in the centre of their heads…strange beings, fantastic even, but possessed of intelligence superseding anything ever approached on Earth in its entire history.

These six voyagers, Elders of the Tormah, held in sacred trust the entire germ plasm of their race; fleeing before a nova that threatened their home planet, they had covered light-years in their search for sanctuary.

Ahead of them hung the Ghost Sun, so large as to be incredible, so faint that its light scarcely reached them. A unique phenomenon! As they sped towards it, the Tormahere thrown into a state of great excitement as they saw, at no great distance, another ship—far smaller than their own but none the less space-worthy.

“Intelligence!” breathed the Master in a reed-like tone from an imperceptible orifice on his scaly back. “Intelligence! The meeting of two worlds! Perhaps they—”

He stopped abruptly, his single eye fixed to a lensed window. In a moment the Elders gathered about him.

“Strange,” he went on, more slowly. “It seems to change even as I look at it. What does this change mean? We must determine this immediately.”

Mathon, his deputy, fluted: “Observe that the ship comes from the direction of the Ghost Sun.”

The Master’s tentacles sought the controls, rapidly slowed the vessel. The great lock opened. Impervious to both absence of air and interstellar cold, the Tormah waited until their machine matched speed with the unknown ship. The silvered word—TERRA—inscribed on the machine’s scarred hull conveyed nothing to them.

The Master’s tentacles came up, holding a blunt lensed object not unlike a torch. Under the searing ray that sprang from it, the outer airlock melted into vapour.

“Strange beings,” he muttered, leaping the gap from his own ship to the alien. They have double airlocks—we must be careful not to harm them. Mathon, reseal the gap.”

Mathon drew from the glittering belt about his insectile body another instrument, moved it rapidly across the gaping hole. And everywhere the new ray touched were streaks of sealing matter. At last, the opening was resealed by the creation of suprametal out of pure space. That a feat beyond the comprehension of any Earthly mind had been accomplished was of no concern to the Tormah. To them it was a simple matter.

Satisfied that none of the strange atmosphere within the ship could escape, the Master vaporised the inner airlock door; then the Tormah adjusted their strange bodies to the sudden rush of oxygenated air that engulfed them. A mental effort closed all the external pores on their scaly forms, effectually proofing them against the absorption of the new gas. Quietly they stepped forward to gaze upon a scene that puzzled even their advanced minds.

One man sat alone at the control desk. Man? Skeleton rather, for only a grinning skull was visible under the transparent helmet of his spacesuit. Before him lay a thick wad of paper, held together by a primitive spiral of wire. There was writing on the paper and a writing instrument clutched in the dead man’s hand.

“He possessed two eyes,” Mathon marvelled.

The Master’s gaze travelled about the control room. “One man alone,” he said in amazement. “It is incredible, and yet—”

He stopped, snatched up the wad of paper in his tentacle. “Record this! I detect further changes still going on aboard this strange derelict.”

Immediately, Mathon took the paper, held it before a small cylindrical instrument selected from the equipment on his heavy belt; then handed it back. The recording took only a fraction of a second.

The Master took the paper mechanically; his solitary eye was fixed on the strange being they had found. New inexplicable emotions passed through him as he beheld the man from Terra—if that was his home—mysteriously start to fade from view. Slowly…slowly… then the spacesuit was empty.

Nor was that all of the amazing changes aboard that ship. The wad of paper faded in his tentacle and vanished too. The walls of the ship vaporised until space showed where they had been.

Before the Tormah had the chance to move, the entire ship, solid as it had first appeared, vanished from about them. Only their own suprametal seal was left. They floated in empty space and immediately made their way back to their own vessel.

“Very strange,” the Master fluted thoughtfully when they gathered once more in the control room. “You have the recording of that peculiar cipher the being wrote down?”

Mathon inclined a tentacle in assent. “Every cipher, Master, word for word, from the first page to the last. It only awaits reproduction after our translator-machine has studied the meanings of the words and transformed them into our own language.”

“Proceed,” the Master requested, and watched while the tiny plastic cylinder was removed from its casing and placed in a machine of tremendous mathematical complexity.

Here, for many hours of Earthly time, the manuscript was examined, checked word against word, reproduced; until at last the translator gave forth, in the language of the Tormah, the story of the vanishing man and ship they had unexpectedly found.

In complete silence, in growing amazement, the Tormah listened.

“My name is Adam Brett and I come from Earth. I know that I am dying and this, my last statement, is intended as a warning to whoever might find me—unlikely as that seems. I say, avoid the Ghost Sun!

“From the moment that my experimental ship was engulfed in the electro-magnetic vortex, I knew I had little chance. Succeeding events confirmed that I am lost beyond all hope of return.

“Swept up by mighty forces, I was hurled across the inter-galactic void, seemingly in but a moment of time. The stars appeared to rush together, coalesce in blazing fury; space itself seemed aflame with the light of a million suns. I rushed on, and on, headlong…

“Finally, when I came out of the vortex and saw no familiar star or constellation, I knew that I was indeed in another galaxy. And then I saw the Ghost Sun! A mirage I thought—mistakenly—at first. So huge it dominated the sky, so faint as to appear no threat to life. I should have turned back, but I was curious. Nothing like it had ever been seen in the skies of Earth.

“It is too late now. The damage to my body cells is irreversible. My instruments tell me the Ghost Sun is real—but not in any sense I would have understood before. Possibly the greatest scientific discovery of all time…wasted because I can tell no-one.

“The elements that burn deep in the heart of the Ghost Sun are not normal—they are composed of anti-matter! And the radiation it emits is in the form of anti-particles, fatal to any normal life. Already I feel the strength draining from my body… I must write it all down, ensure this testimony survives me, leave a warning… avoid the Ghost Sun!”

The Master waved a tentacle gently as the recording ended. “Turn back, Mathon. Let us leave this place of doom.”

The great ovoid turned through an arc, accelerated away from the peril of the Ghost Sun.

“So, all unwittingly, despite our great intelligence, we would have rushed headlong to our deaths. And with us, the entire germ plasm of our race!” The Master fluted, musing. “Only this lost spacefarer has saved us—and now he is gone, utterly vanished into a void beyond our understanding. So far he travelled that we cannot even let his own people know of the great service he performed for us. It is very sad.”

The Master roused himself. “But he shall not be forgotten! We shall create a memorial to him.

“Yes, yes,” chanted the Tormah, excited. “He shall have a memorial.”

And so it came to pass, in the days after a suitable planet had been seeded, that a massive satellite was constructed and placed in orbit around the Ghost Sun. Forever circling, forever broadcasting a warning to any who might venture that way—a warning to the living from a dead representative of an unknown race inhabiting a galaxy far across space and time.

WHITE MOUSE

The girl from Venus—the man from Earth. Would such a mixed marriage be a success— Even though they were both humans?

To those of you who wonder why the laws concerning interplanetary marriages are so strict, and to those others among you who have found yourselves captivated by the amazing music, writing and paintings of Lucia Veltique, let me tell a story.

For my own part, it is only because the memory of Lucia Veltique is still so fragrant that I feel inclined to dwell again on the events of twenty years ago, for, in recounting them, I can derive a sense of pleasure, in much the same way as one can detect the aroma of an exquisite perfume long after the bottle has been drained.

In those days I was a young man—twenty-seven to be exact—and space travel had been in being for many years. There had been blunders, of course, the inseparable accidents of enterprise and exploration, but gradually the inner ring of planets had been reached, investigated and either conquered or amalgamated with Earth.

With a thirst for adventure and no more sense of caution than one usually has at twenty-seven, I became Space-Engineer Jeffrey Haslam. My wanderings took me to every planet—to impossible Mercury, arid Mars and lastly to exotic Venus. And it was here where I first met Lucia.

The Venusians, perhaps because of their planet being similar to ours in size, are very like us, only frailer—as you will know for yourself these days. The perpetual absence of direct sunshine has deprived them of the tougher qualities which we, accustomed to the sun, have developed. It was this criminal lack of knowledge in those early days which brought about my own unhappiness. But I was saying—about Lucia. I first saw her at the trading station near Venus’ Half-Way Mountains—that titanic range which sprawls across the wild planet’s terminator and reaches to nearly five miles in the eternal clouds.

Lucia was small, slender and in the diaphanous draperies which most Venusian women wear, she seemed more like the popular conception of a fairy queen than anything else. Everything about her was tiny, yet perfectly developed. She was no more than five feet tall, her well-shaped head crowned with a wind-swept mass of light flaxen hair. This, with the delicate ivory white skin which all Venusians have, and the big yellow eyes with abysmal pupils, made her the most beautiful creature I had ever seen.

We came to know each other. I saw to that. Her father and mother were as delightful as she was, jointly controlling the trading station. Lucia and I learned each other’s language. For two years we met, every time my journeying took me to Venus.

We used to go for long walks in the dense, torrid jungles; we journeyed over the mud-flats together; we climbed the mountains. She was a carefree, happy soul, simple as a child in some things, mature as a middle-aged woman in others. And in bestowing talents upon her Nature had been generous. I discovered that she was a brilliant artist, that she could write prose either exquisitely funny or profoundly moving, according to her mood. Also she could play with a magic which held me spellbound—either on a Venusian instrument or upon the piano we had in the spaceship—and at times she composed pieces which for grandeur defeated anything I, or any of we Earth men, had ever heard before.

Can you wonder that I wanted to marry her? So much so that at the end of two and a half years-association with her I came to a decision, and the first person to whom I told it was old Henry Baythorp, our ship’s physician. He was a gnarled serious little man with wispy grey hair and an evil-smelling briar pipe. That is how I always remember him. To the stranger he probably appeared churlish but to an intimate like myself I knew him to be a man of frank opinions and, when necessary, immense courage.

He sat coiled up in his bunk while I told bin what I intended to do. With the energy of youth I raced through the details while he sat looking at me steadily with smoke coiling out of the crackling bowl of his pipe.

“Lad, you won’t like this,” he said finally, considering, “but my advice is, don’t! Yes, yes, I know Lucia is a lovely girl,” he went on, as I started interrupt. “As fair a picture as any man could wish to see—even at my age; but that’sn only the outside of the parcel, as it were. I think that if you marry that girl and take her back to Earth with you you’ll regret it—and so will she. Besides, marriage between people of different planets hasn’t yet been made legal. The eugenicists haven’t yet examined the possibilities of such unions.”

“But there’s no law against it, either,” I pointed out. “That is why I want to marry Lucia before some committee or other thinks up the notion of banning interplanetary marriages… Anyway, Lucia is quite willing.”

“Mmmm. What do you plan to do when you get to Earth?”

“I’ll give up space-roving. It won’t interest me any more, and I’m getting to the age that doesn’t make for a good spaceman. I’ve made a good deal of money in these last few years, so I propose to buy a decent home for Lucia and myself—somewhere in the country if I can—and then I’ll take up an executive position. My papers qualify me for that.”

He sighed, knocked the ashes out of his pipe on the bunk rail.

“Well, lad, if your mind is made up that’s all there is to be said. I gave up trying to reason with youth—or love—long ago. It can’t be done… All I can suggest is that you think very carefully, because I’m convinced that it won’t turn out as you expect. Nature, my boy,” he added solemnly, wagging a finger at me. “You can’t get behind the old lady. Lucia is a Venusian, born to this world: you are an Earth man, born to that world. Not much difference, you say? Well, we’ll see. You’d be better off preserving a friendship with Lucia than marrying her.”

I shook my head stubbornly. “I can’t do that. I’ve promised her—and her people. The marriage is expected. It’s the only logical outcome after our long acquaintance.”

Baythorp shrugged and reached for his tobacco pouch.

“All right, lad. And if you can’t find a best man and will take one thirty years older than yourself, remember me…”

* * * *

I will not say I forgot Dr. Baythorp’s advice. In fact, I couldn’t really; all I could do was push it in the back of my mind and try and pretend I hadn’t heard it. At twenty-seven, deeply in love, you are guided by your heart, not your head, and such things as differing birthplaces just don’t enter into your calculations.

So Lucia and I made all arrangements and it was decided that she should come back with me to Earth on our return journey, and when we arrived we could be married. Her parents would come for the ceremony only and then, tied to business at the trading post, they would have to leave for Venus again almost immediately.

On the day before we left Venus, Lucia and I found the time for one of our walks to the foothills of Half-Way Mountains. As usual, it was steaming hot, for during the 720-hour Venusian day the planet swelters in a hundred and twenty-five Fahrenheit degrees under its eternal clouds—and for me, anyway, it was too exhausting for much effort. So we selected a gigantic rock in the path of the hot mountain winds and sprawled ourselves upon it. Lucia, lithe and graceful, lay with her hands behind her head staring up at the creamy scum of clouds writhing far above.

Just for a moment an odd thought crossed my mind. She was a part of this hot world, with its sweeping winds and exotic jungle: she thrived and blossomed and lived with the sheer joy of living amidst this grey daylight. She fitted into the pattern with the exactness Nature had intended. Was I, a man of Earth—a man from a world of harsh contrasts—something of an interloper, a thief in a beautiful garden itching to snatch away the most perfect of all flowers?

“Jeff, is Earth very beautiful?” she asked me presently, in that gentle, pleading voice of hers.

“Depends,” I answered. “Some parts of it are very much like this world of yours—jungles, heat and sunshine…”

“I’ve never seen the sun,” she reminded me, turning her face so that I saw her smile.

It was an odd reflection to think that she had never looked upon the orb which gives life to the Solar System, and yet her planet is twice as close to it as Earth.

“You will,” I said. “It’s a treat in store. You’ll see it in space, and on Earth… You’ll like Earth, Lucia. There will be real scope for your talents—your music, your art, your writing. The people I live amongst will acclaim you. Especially in the big cities.”

“I’ve often wondered about cities,” she mused. “I’ve seen photographs of them and read about them. Everything about them is so different to anything I have ever known here. We only have the mountains and jungles, and the trading station and space-port. In fact, I suppose we’re—backward?”

“Certainly Venus is a long way behind Earth in development,” I agreed. “You have no radio, television, or atomic energy. You will wonder after a year on Earth how you ever managed to exist at all. It’s surprising how environment changes one’s outlook.”

Looking back I can see now how prophetic I was when I said that—but just then nothing mattered. Lucia was mine. She loved me with all her heart and soul, and I her. I recall how much like a child she looked when, her big tawny eyes upon me, she asked slowly:

“Jeff, you will look after me well, won’t you?”

“Look after you!” I echoed. “With my life if need be, dearest. You know that!”

She nodded as if satisfied, then looked about her at the wild landscape. “I wonder if I shall ever see this again?” she murmured, sighing—and she said it in such a peculiar tone I cannot quite describe it. It had somehow a fatalistic resignation, as though she were giving up everything that meant happiness to her—as though she had felt a presentiment cross her sensitive, happy mind.

* * * *

So we returned to Earth, and for two weeks Lucia had time in which to orientate herself. During these two weeks she had had but few comments to make upon my native planet. Rather, she seemed a little stunned by the enormity and power of a modern city after the wastes of Venus. But with her usual bright intelligence she spent a lot of her time examining the hundred and one new things which appealed to her, making friends readily by her happy laughter and total lack of guile.

As a man of some social position—for Space-Engineer was a high rank in those days—I attracted the newshounds. Lucia, the first woman of Venus—indeed, the first inhabitant—to ever come to Earth, became the target for photographers, magazine cover artists, dress designers, and all the usual avenues of publicity. I don’t think she quite liked being the star attraction, but there was no way of avoiding it. Even her wedding gown was presented as a gift by New Creations, with earnest wishes for her happiness. Later on, of course, New Creations hoped to cash in on being the first designers in the world to gown a Venusian woman for her wedding. Somehow this cheapening of our romance rather sickened me.

So we were married, and to please her we honeymooned in the blazing heat of Teheran, on the Persian Gulf. We were away a month and then returned to the home I had had prepared in the meantime. It stood some ten miles out of the city. For the first time it seemed as if we might be able to shake off the fetters of those people who meant well and yet were actually a damned nuisance.

I began to assess matters. Our lives together had really begun now. My executive position in the city was assured: I had seen to that. We had two servants in the house to attend to our every want. Lucia would not need to soil her fingers with any drudgery; instead, she could expand her talents and do whatever she wanted. As far as I could see, I had done all any husband could do. Yet she seemed to smile less frequently now. Inwardly, I was trouble at the strange, half-frightened expression I sometimes glimpsed on her face.

“Lucia,” I asked her quietly as we sat in the garden one evening in the mellow summer twilight, “is there something wrong? Is it that you’re not happy?”

Her big tawny eyes turned to me and she smiled faintly.

“With you, Jeff, I could always be happy. It’s just that—that I feel so utterly…lost!”

For a moment she was silent, staring into the sky. Her lips were parted in eager excitement and I followed her line of vision in some surprise. Far out to the west over the amber of the sunset was a solitary, gleaming planet.

“Yes,” I told her quietly, “it’s Venus.”

She smiled—a wistful smile that had the quality of intolerable longing. I could almost see into her mind’s eye and picture her wandering mentally through the torrid jungles or across the windswept foothills of Half-Way Mountains… The evening deepened into night as she sat gazing at that solitary glowing point of her homeland. Then at last she shivered, though the air was warm.

“I think I’ll go inside,” she said. “It’s cold out here.” She left me, ghostlike in the gloom, making no sounds. I said no word and was left alone, staring up into the night sky. For some reason I kept thinking of what Dr. Baythorp had said. When I went into the house Lucia was nowhere to be seen and I learned from the maid that she had gone to bed. It was only a little after ten, so I spent an hour reading and smoking before I followed Lucia upstairs. When I got into the bedroom I found her lying fully clothed on the bed, her slim shoulders quivering with the effort of sobbing.

“Lucia!” I sat down beside her immediately, drew her into my arms. “Lucia, sweetheart, whatever’s wrong? What did I do to you? What did anybody do?”

The tears were wet on her lashes as she looked at me. Her lips were quivering.

“You—you didn’t do anything.” She shook her head slowly. “Everybody’s so kind to me—that’s why it’s so awful! I don’t know why I’m unhappy, but I am. Oh, Jeff, I’m so dreadfully frightened—so alone—and I don’t know why!”

For a long time she sat with her head buried on my shoulder, crying and talking by turns. I held her to me, frowning and wondering. At last I spoke.

“You’re simply suffering from the transition to this life from your old one. Nothing more. It happens sometimes even when only moving from one town to another… We call it nostalgia. That means home-sickness, a longing for one’s own people and birthplace.”

“Yes, perhaps that’s it,” she, whispered, looking at me again. “I do so want to be happy with you, Jeff, because I love you so, and your world, terrifying though it is sometimes… I’ll try to like it, to understand it—somehow. I am your wife and you’ve the right to expect me to behave as such, instead of like a spoilt baby—I’ll try! I really will!”

“Of course you will…” I stroked her silvery hair gently. “And the best way to forget yourself is to use those gifts you have. You must write and paint and play… That will bring you in contact with others. There’ll be no more loneliness, no more longings. In time you’ll settle down.”

“Yes,” she said, low voice. “In time, dear one…”

* * * *

Certainly Lucia made a tremendous effort after her attack of nostalgia. She apparently became happier and immersed herself in the three arts over which she had such complete command. When I returned home from the city in the evenings I would either find her painting a genuine masterpiece on a giant canvas in the quiet room she had taken over for a studio, or else she would be sitting writing. At other times I encountered the crashing chords of the grand piano, rolling out some fantastic, breath-taking diapason of melody. How she could play!

To a great extent these pursuits seemed to calm her. Her talents soon brought her into constant demand among friends and public alike. Her paintings attracted the notice of wealthy buyers and netted her a small fortune. On the other hand, her writing was so startlingly arresting that, without any effort, she wrote three best sellers in a row in the space of two months!

Yet the money she made, making my own finances seem like a child’s savings by comparison, failed to interest her in the least. She smiled, she was lovable, ethereal—fascinating, yet somehow her eyes were always looking far away.

Then Miranti, the great Italian impresario, chanced to be at a gathering to which Lucia and I had been invited. He heard her play and went into ecstasies. Almost without realising it, she was launched on a musical career. Naturally, my business tying me, I saw less of her than hitherto, but on those occasions when she did come home I found her unspoiled by success—still like a fairy, a gossamer-being, becoming, I felt sure, even more fragile than when she had first attracted my notice in the wastes of Venus. Her eyes seemed larger and her face smaller. There was a touch of the languid in her movements, too, which I couldn’t altogether understand.

Then one evening, when she was away on a concert tour at the other end of the country, old Dr. Baythorp turned up. He was just back from a Mars-Venus trip, as taciturn and solid as ever, with his evil-smelling pipe more aggressive than usual.

Over the drinks in the lounge he looked at me critically.

“You married a brilliant woman, Jeff,” he commented. “Seems to have made herself famous.”

“How can she help but do so?” I smiled with the pride natural to a husband who has a clever wife. “She’s a genius, Doc—a genius with the heart of a child. It’s odd, really, to think of a girl with so fantastic and wild a soul having such lavish gifts.”

“Fantastic and wild is right,” he said, studying his drink. “I wonder if you have noticed something—well, odd, about her three gifts?”

“Odd?”

“I heard her most recent concert—made a point of it. She played her own compositions. They’re astounding, soul-moving, but they are reflections of spirit and heart. She’s a prisoner, lad, a soul drowning in a constricting world! Into her music she pours all the longing and futility she feels herself. Her fingers bring into magic actuality the Half-Way Mountains, the overpowering jungles, the hot winds of Venus. They are in her mind all the time. She’s on Earth, I know, and she’s your wife, but—her real being is on the world where she was born. Remember… I warned you of that.”

“She’s happy enough,” I said, thinking.

“Is she?” Baythorp looked at me frankly. “Have you studied her paintings in the gallery? I have. They’re fantastic—overloaded with tumbled concepts, the expressions once again of a fettered soul. And her books! Stories of people struggling vainly for existence against impossible odds. In every way, lad, she shows that she is fighting a losing battle against herself… For your sake she is trying to prove herself mistress over an intolerable situation. But it won’t work out. It never can work out. I believe two people of different worlds can never be entirely one in the sense that is really implied by marriage.”

“Doc, I think you’re off your course,” I said, smiling. “I know that Lucia is— Pardon me.” I broke off as the visiphone rang.

I went over to it and to my surprise it was the manager of the concert hall on long distance. His voice, reedy with miles, spoke the most incredible words.

“…I think it would be as well if you’d come right away, Mr. Haslam. I hardly like to say this, but your wife is—is hopelessly intoxicated! She can’t play. Else she is ill, but I’d say…drunk.”

The rest of his words blurred off so that I hardly heard them. I think I said I’d come immediately. Then, as I was putting the visiphone back I saw Doc. Baythorp’s expectant face.

“Lucia is … intoxicated,” I managed to say mechanically.

He looked at me, seemed to reflect, then he put down his glass and rose from the chair.

“Where is she? The Avalon Concert Hall?”

“Yes, at the other end of the country. I can get a ’plane.”

“Then I’ll come with you. Probably I can help.”

So we flew through the night and landed at our destination sometime after midnight. A much harassed manager who had awaited our coming showed us into a dressing room, where we found Lucia stretched full length on a couch, dressed in her concert gown. She was playing with a lace handkerchief and giggling to herself ever and again.

“Lucia, what on earth’s the matter?” I knelt beside her, put an arm behind her shoulders and raised her up.

“Nothin’ in the world,” she shrugged, running her words into one another. “Just that, for the fi’st time I’m really happy…”

Doc. Baythorp leaned forward, studying her keenly.

“They wouldn’t let me play,” she went on, sighing. “An’ jus’ when I felt in the mood too—”

“She isn’t intoxicated, Jeff,” Baythorp interrupted sharply. “Offhand I’d say she’s—gassed. No smell of drink, either.

“Gassed!” I stared at him. “But how can she be—?”

“Let’s get her home,” he said.

I nodded and Lucia got to her feet, but almost instantly her knees gave way. She would have fallen full length on the floor had I not caught her. I scooped up her light body in my arms and bore her outside to the waiting taxi.

She still giggled to herself as we were whisked to the airport, and now and again she broke into snatches of song. To me all this was distressing—embarrassing even, but to Doc. Baythorp it seemed to be a matter of profound interest. He kept his eyes on her, his professional instincts aroused. All I noticed was Lucia’s dead white face—as it always was—and the unusual brightness of her yellow eyes. The pupils had dilated so much they had nearly swallowed the irises. * * * *

When we got her home Baythorp saw that she went straight to bed. I didn’t stay while he made his examination, preferring instead to walk up and down the lounge and wait for him. When finally he reappeared his face was troubled.

“Well?” I asked him in a hushed voice.

“I was right.” He tapped his fingers restlessly on the table top. “She’s gassed. Atmospheric gas, I mean. Just as an aviator who goes too high suffers from mental blackout and intoxication from lowered air pressure, so your wife has got the same thing. It has taken several weeks in her case to make itself noticeable, because the change is produced by an alteration in the bloodstream, there being less oxygen in it than there normally should be for a Venusian. The result is extreme giddiness and all the symptoms of intoxication. You see, Jeff, the air of Venus is about twelve and a half per cent, denser than Earth’s, and that poor girl is just realising it!”

“Then what happens now?” I asked, my mouth dry.

“I’ve given her an injection which will gradually balance the missing oxygen ingredient in her bloodstream. She will then become normal again—but if she is to stay on Earth with you she will have to take an injection without fail every twenty-four hours. If at any time she fails to do so coma and death may result.”

I was silent, stunned by the thought of her being chained for evermore to a preventative against death.

“In the bedroom you’ll find the injector and the stuff itself,” Baythorp said. “It’s up to you to see that my orders are carried out. In case you don’t know it, lad, Lucia is a white mouse—the first inhabitant of another world to come to Earth. From her sufferings we can learn what to avoid in future.”

She isn’t going to suffer!” I snapped. “She deserves all that is best and beautiful in life, and she’s going to get them. As soon as she’s better I’ll take her back to Venus where she belongs.”

He sighed. “You can try… The chances are that her heart and constitution are weakened a good deal. You see, at a lesser air pressure the heart works more swiftly, as hers must have been doing ever since she arrived here. That may account for her incredible genius, which is far in excess of what it was on Venus. The faster the flow of blood through the brain the more stimulated the brain is… I really think that space travel on top of her present physical trouble would—”

Baythorp stopped and shrugged. “Don’t think of it yet, anyway. We’ll see how she goes on. I’ll be in the city for a fortnight before I’m due off again. If anything goes wrong send for me right away—the Apex Hotel.”

I hardly heard him leave. All I was conscious of at that moment was my own damnable selfishness and Lucia’s superb courage. For weeks, as Baythorp had said, she must have been battling against impossible odds, trying to fit herself into a foreign environment. And I had kept her beside me. Why? Because I loved her, because I was proud of her, because I liked Earth better than Venus—because I had been too infernally egotistical to realise that, torn from her home planet, she was like a tropical flower trying to acclimatise itself to frost.

I went upstairs and found her lying flat on her back in bed, staring at the ceiling. On the little table were the injector and bottle of fluid Baythorp had made up.

“Lucia…” I caught at her limp hand. “Lucia, sweetheart, this is all my fault. I should have realised…”

She turned her face slowly towards me, smiling wistfully.

“It isn’t anybody’s fault, Jeff.” Her voice was gentle and unaccusing. “Dr. Baythorp told me everything—why it is that I feel as though everything is whizzing round me like a Half-Way Mountain cyclone. Something to do with atmospheric pressure… Yours is a terrible world, dearest.”

She closed her eyes and I saw the wet glint of tears on her long lashes.

Sitting down on the bed beside her, I didn’t speak again. I remained holding her hand until she fell into a restful sleep—then I moved over to a chair and for the rest of that night I kept on the alert to attend to her slightest wish.

* * * *

Dr. Baythorp’s antidote did the trick. When she awoke Lucia was normal, as far as her intoxication was concerned anyway—but she seemed spiritless and she remained unsmiling.

Naturally I had my business to attend to, but the only thought in my mind was for her, and I returned home early in the evening. I found her coiled up on the window seat in the lounge, ghostly and silent, her great yellow eyes gazing out across the lawn. As I came in she turned and I could tell her smile was only produced by sheer effort.

“Everything all right?” I asked, trying to sound cheerful.

She shook her head, and with a shock I noticed that the sheen had gone from her silvery hair. It was dull…drab.

“Come and look at what I’ve done,” she whispered, taking my hand—and, wonderingly, I followed her into the room she used as a studio. With a tired wave of her arm she indicated one of her giant canvases. I stared at it unbelievingly. It was an incredible chaos of flowing paint streaks and eye-wrenching hues.

“I—I tried to paint one of my own home landscapes, just as I have so often done,” she said. “But this is how it came out… I can’t paint any more, Jeff!”

“But—why not?” I studied her white face stupidly.

“I don’t know. I’ve forgotten. My power of conception has gone. Besides, I— Look here, too!”

She picked up a manuscript from the table and I glanced through it. The words were a jumble of meaningless nonsense. I let it fall from my hand to the table again.

“Jeff, what’s the matter with me?” Her voice rose in sudden wild terror and her arms went about my neck in a desperate longing for protection. Troubled, I lifted her gently and bore her back into the lounge to the window seat.

“It’ll pass,” I kept on saying to her—without realising why I said it. “It’s a hangover from last night, that’s all.”

She looked at me seriously. “Dearest, do you really think that, or do you know, in your heart of hearts, that—” She stopped, forcing back tears; then she got off the window seat and went over to the piano. “I still have this,” she said, and began playing an unearthly melody which she had herself composed, ‘Breeze Across the Foothills,’ that abandoned, soul-stirring music which epitomised the wild glory of the foothills of Venus where she had been born and raised, until I—

Half way through the piece she stopped, pressed a hand to her forehead and got up from the stool uncertainly. Immediately I was at her side.

“You’re out of bed too soon,” I murmured. “Come along back upstairs.…”

She nodded weakly and again she was in my arms. She lay so heavily, so tiredly, I had a hard struggle to stifle back the gnawing fear at my heart. I knew I was watching her slide down the scale of life with diabolical swiftness, and I could do nothing to stop it!

The moment I had her in bed again I sent for Baythorp. He came from the city right away, and this time his examination took half an hour. When we faced each other downstairs he shook his head.

“Jeff, lad, if only you’d listened to me!” His voice was bitter. “This time the sun is the prime cause of the trouble. On Venus the sun never gets through and at least two of its radiations—which we experience all the time and are therefore immune against—are masked. On Earth here Lucia has had them beating down on her for over three months during this hot summer. The result is the same as if we had been exposed to naked cosmic rays… It’s affected her brain, hence her inability to paint or write anymore.”

“Doc, you don’t mean she’s going to—”

“You can’t defeat Nature, Jeff,” he said moodily.

“Not die!” I shrieked. “No—!”

I raced out of the room and up the stairs. Lucia turned her head as I came in. I saw it now—the naked cruelty of approaching death on her wan face. Her eyes were wistful, still without reproach.

“I’m an awful nuisance, Jeff, aren’t I?” she murmured.

“Lucia, we can’t be separated like this! Nature can’t do that to us! We love each other so…”

I put my arms round her, held her tight. Her slender little body hardly stirred in my arms.

“Jeff…” Her voice was dim and far away. “Jeff, I’m a white mouse, aren’t I? Dr. Baythorp said so. Other Venusian women won’t go through this hell. I’m blazing the trail for them. It’s been worth it—if only to know your love for me. But oh, dearest, how I long for home, for my beloved wild landscape, the great trees, the flowers, the hot winds, the soft daylight and moonless nights. Perhaps I’ll be there again—soon.”

I could not speak. My voice was choked.

“Jeff, open the window, please. I—I can’t breathe properly…”

I stumbled over to it and swung it wide. It was nearing twilight now. A warm breeze set the curtains flowing.

“Play to me…” I could hardly hear Lucia’s voice as she lay with her eyes closed. “Play ‘Breeze Across the Foothills’ please!”

“Yes.” I whispered. “All right.”

I went downstairs blindly and to the piano. Doc. Baythorp stood looking at me morosely. I could hardly see the music score for tears, and I am not a good player either—but for Lucia’s sake I did my best. For ten minutes I sent those wild, unearthly chords crashing through the house. Then I could stand it no longer.

In the dead silence after the last note had echoed away I fled from the room and upstairs.

“Lucia!” I cried, bursting in on her. “Did you hear it—?”

She was silent. A wistful smile was fixed on her small mouth. Her eyes were wide open, unblinking. Stupidly I followed their direction towards the open window, where the curtains stirred restlessly.

Over the sunset was a star, a glowing planet, brilliant and alone.

KNOWLEDGE WITHOUT LEARNING

He could read people’s minds; could take their knowledge from them. But it made life very complicated.

I was still at school when I discovered I had the gift. I won scholarships I had really no conceivable right to win. On prize day I was given the works of obscure authors for my phenomenal brilliance in mathematics, physics, composition and other fields too numerous to mention.

But actually, you know, I was a cribber! Yes, perhaps the world’s greatest cribber—a kind of human blotting pad for soaking up knowledge. Put me next to a student with a good grasp of mathematics and at the end of the examination you would find him chewing his penholder to shavings while I sat complacently with all the answers written on the dotted lines…

“Henry Parker,” the Head would say benignly, squinting through his glasses in that owlish way he had, “you are a credit to Mulhaven! You are one of the cleverest scholars we have ever had…”

I would stand before him full of meekness, and since I was pretty young then I took all the credit and wondered how in blazes I had done it. For it was an undoubted fact that I had a knack of stealing other people’s knowledge and secrets right away from them if I sat near them for long enough. I had only to concentrate—really hard—and the thing was done! It was quite disturbing…

When I was twenty my people died and that seemed to upset the whole routine of my life. I had a little money, but by no means a lot, and since my job in Birmingham did not appeal to me particularly I threw it up and came to London. It had become suddenly evident to me that I had to face the world.

I had forgotten all that I had ever cribbed at school. The immediate task then seemed to be to find a job—and that quite logically suggested it was time to bring my ‘kink’ into action.

For some reason I had always had a deep inner urge to either drive an engine or a motor omnibus. I think the urge can be traced back to my tricycle days: whatever the basic reason, I had never completely suppressed the urge. Suppose, then, I could get a sort of ‘on approval’ idea of how fascinating a bus driver’s life could be?

That decided me. Once I had moved into my London rooms I set about exploring the potentialities of the gentlemen who sit all day over a massive steering wheel…

I boarded my experimental bus in the Strand and took good care to get the seat immediately behind the driver. I do not think the girl on the same seat quite liked the idea, somehow. You see, the bus was almost empty, and that I should squeeze her up into the corner in order to sit beside her no doubt suggested sundry unethical intentions.

I caught a glance from her cold grey eyes—then, with a high-powered sniff, she went on reading her magazine. Me? I sat gazing at the back of the driver, taking in a view of white dust coat and sandy bristles margined by the back of his greasy regulation cap. I had to be near him in order to ‘absorb,’ you understand. But I could not explain that to the girl squashed beside me, could I? Not that she looked too unfriendly, only I’m modest…I think.

Off we went. Nothing much happened at first. We picked up a woman with three bawling brats, an Italian with a string of onions round his leathery neck, and a man who sat as erect as a gravestone and looked about as cheerful. I saw all these travellers in the reflection from the glass partition between myself and the driver. In a kind of sideways haze I saw the girl next to me was twisting her ankles round each other and generally shifting arid squirming. I knew why—and it was rather surprising.

A midge—an ordinary summer midge—was biting her ankle. I could not see the thing, but her mind was beating into mine and telling me all about it. I also appreciated that she thought I was the frozen limit and needed shooting without trial… Behind all this, in her mind, I saw a certain maze of complexity that seemed to hover between a beautiful flat full of mellow furniture and etchings, classrooms full of young men and women with earnest faces, and a laboratory with odds and ends of apparatus… She was twenty-two, single, a teacher of psychology, adored salads, and loathed young men who sat too close to her.

There was I, storing up all this information and did not want to! I even knew her size in shoes and gloves, that she had had measles, mumps and whooping cough. June Cranby—that was her name. Then, with -a deliberate effort, I switched her out of my mind and continued to concentrate on the back of the driver’s head. What was it like to be a bus driver? For me, the conception had a fascinating intrigue all its own.

At first I was disappointed. I saw betting slips and stop press news of what had won the previous day’s 2.30. Damnit, the man was not concentrating on the job of driving at all! Then it occurred to me that perhaps he knew the job so well he did it automatically. His mind shifted suddenly to a rather unlovely block of cheap lodgings. In front of the block was a mangy dog with a bone, children in grubby frocks and frayed jerseys playing with a whiskery skipping rope. His kids? Judging, from the beatific grin now on his profile, yes. But where was the glamour? Was he not proud to drive this great vehicle, to feel that hundreds of people a day trusted to him? Somehow I did not think he was. And I did not like his private life either.

Then to my delight he suddenly came to thinking about his job. I saw the bus gears in detail—the clutch, brake and accelerator. In a flash I knew the whole method of controlling this swift, fumy conveyance. I knew exactly how much pressure to put on that foot brake to stop the bus running into that taxi right ahead—

But at that identical moment something went wrong. The driver clapped a hand to his head and fell forward over the steering wheel. Instantly our few passengers gave hoarse shouts. June Cranby looked up in startled wonderment… Then the entire vehicle, missing the taxi by inches, slewed round on to the pavement, sending people scattering in all directions. Two inches from a plate-glass window we stopped dead.

The conductor started yelling out directions—then he subsided as there was a rush for the exit. I just sat where I was, staring mystifiedly, until June Cranby’s voice—and a very pleasing one it was too—floated to me from a great distance.

“When you have finished sitting there with your mouth open you won’t mind, perhaps, if I pass?”

“Eh?” I said, staring at her. Then I comprehended. I raised my hat in apologetic confusion and stood up. She brushed past me with obvious indignation and hurried outside to the pavement. I followed her, and I assure you it was pure coincidence which brought us together again in the gathered crowd.

“Cheeky blighter!” her thoughts were saying. “Not so bad looking, though. Looks sleepy—else scared. Never can tell with men…”

People were all around us, crowded into the hot glare of sunshine. A police officer, looking very greasy and officious, was taking notes and talking to the driver. The driver was waving his arms about like a prize-fighter.

“I didn’t faint!” was his indignant protest. “Something went funny. All of a sudden I forgot all I ever knew about driving this thing. The steering, brakes-and clutch didn’t even—even enter me mind. Me mind was a blank—a total blank.”

The officer closed one eye and said, “Yes?” It had a nasty ring about it too.

“You just couldn’t forget everything!” protested the man who looked like a gravestone.

The driver swung round to glare at him. “Swipe, me, mister, it’s the honest truth. I forgot how to drive! What’s more, I still don’t know how to drive. Call me crazy if you like.”

“Perhaps temporary amnesia,” suggested June Cranby surprisingly.

“You on the bus too, miss?” the officer asked sharply, then, as she nodded, he went on: “Better give me your name and address. All of you who were on the bus will be wanted as witnesses.”

So we gave our names and addresses. At the end of it the woman with the brats opined that we ought to send for an ambulance to take the driver away.

“The Company’s own ambulance will be here any moment, madam,” responded one of the officials, looking very stiff and very hot. “A fresh driver will take over this bus and—”

“But I tell you I’m well!” our driver broke in suddenly. “Never felt better—only I just don’t seem to remember how to drive… Funny, I don’t think I know me way home either.”

“Definitely neurotic amnesia,” said June Cranby’s thoughts. “Wonder if that mystical owl who calls himself Henry Parker knows anything about it? Hypnotism, maybe. He stared at this poor fellow an awful lot, right on his neck nerve centres…”

She turned to look at me and her words certainly did not match her thoughts. Her coolness had gone. “Amazing happening, isn’t it, Mr. Parker?”

“I suppose it is,” I admitted.

Her thoughts said, “He looks as though he might be capable of anything, but I don’t think he’s crazy. Eyes rather like a codfish, come to think of it. Drink perhaps…”

Aloud she resumed: “I have seen cases like this before, but in different circumstances. The brain centres suddenly refuse to act—a form of paralysis. I’m interested in this sort of thing: I teach psychology, you see. My hobby is telepathy, or anyway its possibilities.”

I smiled wryly. “Glad you don’t think I’m crazy, anyhow,” I murmured. “Sorry, too, my eyes look like a codfish’s.”

The amazement on her face was almost comical. “But—but you’ve read my thoughts!” she breathed, having the sense to keep her voice low. Far from being ashamed of her mental tabulations she went on: “It’s astounding! Revolutionary! How do you do it? Do you use the Branner or the Curt-Walford System?”

“I don’t use anybody’s system. It just happens—and it enables me to find out exactly what people think of me… So I’ll say good morning, Miss Cranby.”

I turned away with studied finality, but she caught my arm.

“My name, too!” she cried—then she gave a little gesture. “Of course, you heard me give it to the officer. … Wait just a minute, please. You’re too good to miss.”

“Am I?” It was my turn to be cool.

She stopped, thinking swiftly. Her mind went round ideas of lunch, so I said it for her.

“I could tell you a lot more over a café table if you are really interested…”

She said nothing to that, but we finished up with salad at Frascati’s.

* * * *

It was surprising how much June Cranby broke down under the influence of lettuce and tomato, or else it was the fact that she believed I was a freak and right in her line of attack. Anyway, after studying me for a time—time in which I had had the opportunity to observe that she had a plain, honest face and chestnut hair—she said:

“To look at you one would never suspect you have telepathic power.”

I knew she meant what she said, because her thoughts verified it.

“Well, I have, and there it is.… I’m just wandering round the city trying to decide what job to take up. I can take a job on a sort of trial, you see. See which job I like best by learning about it first… That bus driver, for instance…” I wrinkled my nose. “No, I don’t think I want to be a bus driver after all. I don’t like the background. No glamour, and a vast, frightening sense of confinement.”

“I suppose you realise you have done him out of a job?” she asked quietly. “You absorbed his knowledge, so what is he going to do now?”

That aspect of the matter rather dismayed me, for, to tell the truth, I had never given it a thought.

“Hmm, it’s a problem,” I. admitted ruefully.

“A bigger problem than I think you imagine. Do you realise that in running round testing jobs you are liable to put quite a few good men out of work? A gift like yours is only fit for examination by expert psychologists. I know plenty who could help you if—”

“No thanks,” I broke in hastily. “I don’t trust ’em… And anyway, I don’t see that a few more unemployed really matter. I’m unemployed myself, so it is them or me if it comes to that.”

She munched tomato reflectively. “Seems a selfish viewpoint. And anyway, why stop at being a bus driver or something like that? Why don’t you aim high? Become—become a politician or something.”

“I don’t want to be something high: it entails too much heavy responsibility. I don’t want to be a politician—I want to be something brainy, like—like an engine driver, a driver, a lion tamer or something… See?”

“Hanged if I do!” she said frankly. “You can have all the world—you are unique—and you either want to be an engine driver or go down in the sea and hunt wrecks. It just doesn’t make sense that a man with such mighty power should not want to use it… I know what I would do,” she added significantly, and her thoughts registered a vista of total franchise for all women, crushing of every male and to hell with wedlock.

“It’s serious, you know,” she added pensively. “I think I know what is wrong with you and how you could be cured—if you want. This kink of yours will get you into trouble sooner or later if you don’t watch out. Can’t I persuade you to let either myself or some other psychologist examine you?”

I shook my head adamantly. “I like my gift, Miss Cranby, and I’m sticking to it. What is more, I need a regular job and I’ll find it in my own way.”

“Perhaps he is crazy after all,” observed her thoughts. Then she got to her feet. “You don’t need my address,” she said quietly. “You have it already. If you ever want to change your mind come and see me…I’m glad to have met you.”

Before I could say anything more she shook my hand and was gone. I was left to pay the bill, and I cannot repeat what the waiter thought about me when I found I had no change left for a tip…

* * * *

I nust admit that June Cranby had done something to me. She certainly had precious little sex appeal, but behind her sharp, incisive manner I had detected a good deal of firmly grounded common sense, enough anyway to make me think about her quite a lot after our conversation. I liked her independence, suspected her motives for wanting to examine my grey matter, and inwardly smouldered at the remembrance of eyes like a codfish.

And was I crazy? That remained to be seen… As a matter of fact, I rather wondered if she could have explained my abnormal condition. At that time I was not prepared to forgo my ability, but I would have liked to know what made me able to soak up other people’s knowledge… I could have ruled the world, yes—but who in hell wants a world anyway? Only dictators and madmen. No: give me a steady job and I’d be entirely satisfied. I was sorry about that bus driver: the accident was reported briefly in the next day’s paper and it seemed they had whisked the poor chap off to a mental home for examination. On the other hand, here was I, knowing exactly how to drive a bus and yet quite uninterested in the accomplishment. I felt inclined for something harder—so I boarded a local train and sat in the compartment nearest the engine so that I could contact the driver’s thoughts from the cab.

Since the compartment was empty it was the ideal spot for good concentration. Rather too good, as a matter of fact, for I got the driver’s and stoker’s private lives as well, together with a knowledge of how to drive and coal a railway engine.

Did I like the knowledge now I had got it? I could not be sure. There was something fascinating about driving down that gleaming ribbon of rail, of course, about holding the power of steam under your fingers—but there, I felt, the fascination ended. No, engine driving was still not quite what I wanted. It had not that certain kick I was looking for…I lay back in my seat, deciding to get off at the next station. Being a local, the train would stop there anyway.

But it did not! The station whisked by at quite a smart pace and we rattled over the points to good effect. If anything, we were gathering speed instead of losing it. Vague, disturbed notions passed through my mind: they changed to positive alarm when we hurtled through the next station in a cloud of dust, whirling papers and shouts from the porters on the platform…

Dropping the window, I stared outside, wind and steam lashing my face. The driver was leaning out of his cab, staring ahead of him.

I bellowed at him, but it was no good, of course. I was trying to talk against the wind. Then he turned his head suddenly and caught sight of me. By pantomiming, I think I made him understand that I wanted to know what was wrong, for he shouted:

“Brakes! I’ve forgotten how to use ’em! Guard’s emergency brake not enough, and I can’t stop the damned train…”

I withdrew my head, stunned realisation pouring over me. Of course, I had taken all his knowledge, same as I had with the bus driver. This was darned serious—a runaway train. Up to me to put things right. … I do not claim my next actions represented heroism. I performed them through sheer fear of consequences if I did not do something quick.

I climbed out of the window on to the running-board, eased my way along against the wind and steam to the tender, while the driver and fireman watched me in baffled hope and alarm. It was hard going all right—toe and finger hold, but at last I managed to drag myself over the coal and down to the footplate.

The rest was simple. I closed the throttle, applied the brakes gradually, and we pulled up at the next station without mishap. The guard came running up, swearing, as the driver, stoker and myself dropped down.

“What in blazes is the idea?” the guard roared. “Don’t you even know that we—”

“I know that I’ve forgotten how to drive this train!” the driver broke in. “Let me alone, can’t you? Same with Jim, here,” and he nodded to the stoker. “We’ve both forgotten what to do… This gent here saved us by climbing from the first carriage.”

“Nothing. Nothing at all,” I protested.

But they would have none of that. It seemed that people collected from nowhere off the train, whirled me off into the general waiting room and started to thank me profusely. What happened to the driver and his mate I did not have the chance to discover. My main realisation was of being mighty thankful when I at last escaped.

* * * *

I took good care to take a bus back to London, and I did not try any fancy stuff on the way either. Matter of fact, I was getting alarmed. The drastic completeness of my knowledge-absorbing trick was getting startling to say the least of it. It would not have been so bad had I been interested in what I had discovered—but I was not. Bus and engine driving were now relegated to my not wanted department. I had got to try something else.

I wandered about the city most of the day, went into a café for tea and opened up my evening paper. The first column I read gave me the shock of my life. It was headed:

MYSTERY AMNESIA.

The report drew a significant parallel between the bus driver and engine driver and stoker. That was all right. The part that was so alarming was that which referred to me. Yes—to me!

“…and the police are anxious to discover if there is some connection between a Mr. Henry Parker—who today saved the 10.12 local by his timely action—and the recent strange happenings. This man Parker, it appears, was present on both the bus and train which met with mishaps. The coincidence is considered of value by the authorities…”

And so on. Things were getting awkward all right. It wasn’t so easy as I had thought to go about stealing knowledge out of people’s brains. And there was another thing, too. I had put such tremendous effort into absorbing knowledge from the bus and engine drivers that I seemed to have stimulated that queer kink in my brain. Anyway, I found myself instantly and automatically absorbing the knowledge of anybody within five feet of me… I left that café worriedly, knowing exactly how to be a waiter or a cashier.

It was obvious that I dared not go to my rooms. The police would be around there looking for me, and I could not explain my kink to them very convincingly. While I roamed the city I was not likely to be apprehended. Damned ticklish.

I marched along in the evening sunshine, picking up the most surprising knowledge as I travelled, cluttering up my mind with all manner of useless—or at any rate unwanted—knowledge. I found that by the time I had drifted into Hyde Park to sit down and think things over I knew how to be a stockbroker, a street cleaner, a mannequin, a dress designer, a banker, an actor and an auctioneer—as well as my earlier vocations. It filled me with cold horror when I came to think how many people had lost their occupations because of me.

Talk about a human magnet! For that was what I was, and the knowledge of the rest of them was steel filing drawn to my brain. I knew all their private lives—I could have blackmailed the banker and the actor with absolute security had I wanted. All this because I wanted to test out a job! It gave me a bad attack of nerves trying to foresee where I was going to finish up.

From being anxious to find a normal job, my desires swung right round to wanting to escape as far as possible from everybody. I had no wish to go on like this, disrupting the private and innermost thoughts of everybody I came across. I had got to travel—somewhere. I might become a sailor… That seemed a good idea. All I had got to do was find a seaman, use up his knowledge and set out for somewhere—anywhere. Tropics or Arctic, it was all the same.

* * * *

About midnight I found myself somewhere in the East End dock world, amidst an atmosphere that smelt of sea water, tar and thick ropes. Heavy mist had dropped on the calmness of the summer night, for which I was thankful. Pulling my hat well down over my eyes to escape any possible recognition, I plunged into the nearest dive I could find and sat down at a table amidst a fog of thick tobacco smoke, cheap drink and strong language.

One or two men glanced at me, but that was all the attention I seemed to merit. I ordered a drink, sat with my back to a massive blue-jerseyed seaman and started my absorption act while he went wet round the lips over the faded blonde on the opposite side of his table.

The man’s mind was a curious mixture of rolling oceans and obscenity. His background was cluttered up with endless fights, strong drink, storms and engine rooms. I realised by degrees that he was a stoker. That turned me against him. If I had got to go to sea I intended doing it above decks, not below… So I tackled a fellow two tables away, who, from his stripes, I judged to be a first mate.

He was quite an admirable sort of specimen, full of notions of hard work, and he had a good background. Only trouble was that he drank too much. But from his befuddled mind I learned all a first mate should know—and a good deal more besides—the name of his ship, the pier at which it was anchored. The ship—the Mary Lancer—would leave on the tide at 11.00 the next morning. He had not seen the vessel yet: only just signed up, I gathered. Suppose I went instead of him? I could be Martin Ward just as well as he could. Without his papers he would be helpless…

I waited, smoking, and watched him through my eyelashes. At last his drinking put him to sleep. Nobody took any notice of him sprawling across the table except me. It was simple to go over and clap a hand in apparent friendly greeting across his shoulder; even simpler to extract his papers from an inside pocket at the same time.

Ten minutes later I was out on the docks again. At length I found a doss-house, crept inside and paid my money, relaxed on a hard bed. My disturbing experiences put me to sleep in double quick time. At the crack of dawn I was off again, had a shave and a haircut, hired a first mate’s uniform and sat down to breakfast in an obscure café at exactly 8.30.

Then my treasured plans for escape suffered a sudden recession. The morning paper, presumably left by somebody before me, was at the end of the form on which I sat. The main words caught my eye—and headlines at that!

UNEMPLOYED SEARCH FOR KNOWLEDGE STEALER

“Dozens of unemployed men and women, together with the police, spent most of last evening and all of last night searching for Henry Parker, to whose efforts—probably hypnotic—they ascribe their loss of knowledge of how to do their work. Drivers, financiers, bankers, mannequins, waiters and others are all searching in their different fields—the higher ones using influential contacts and the lower ones aiding the police. Where is Henry Parker? He is an enemy of society and must be found! More, he is lunatic! This paper will pay £500 to anybody giving information leading to his apprehension, dead or alive. Henry Parker is about 5 feet 9 inches tall, dark, clean shaven, with vacant light blue eyes… He is offered protection if he will give himself up to the police for subsequent medical examination.”

The sooner I was aboard the Mary Lancer, the better I would like it.

I hurried through my breakfast and went off for Pier 8, but before I reached it, I halted at the sight of a familiar figure in first mate’s uniform talking earnestly to a weather-beaten individual whom I judged to be the Captain of the dirty tramp boat. The first mate was Martin Ward, whose papers I had stolen. Evidently I had not obliterated the memory of how to get to the ship from his mind, anyway.

What was more, he had a morning paper in his hand and was slapping it savagely, talking heatedly and saying something about hoping God would come down and swipe him if he wasn’t right.

I dared not advance. My seagoing notions evaporated. I felt a lot of metaphorical nets tightening around me… Where the devil was I going to hide from the eyes of those seeking me?

I thought fast. In my first mate’s uniform, I would not be easily recognised. But to whom could I turn? I felt like a murderer on the run.

Suddenly I remembered June Cranby. Of course! She would give me some protection: she had said as much. Instantly I swung round, pulling my cap peak well over my eyes, and headed away to the nearest bus stop. Fortunately I got a bus which was almost empty: I was far enough away from the other passengers to stop me absorbing their knowledge anyway. I lifted all the conductor’s knowledge, however, and could feel his eyes on me in rank suspicion when I reached my stop. I had to stop the bus myself by ringing the bell: he did not even know where it was.

I could still feel his eyes watching me as I ran down the main street, and so to June Cranby’s apartments. Everywhere, it seemed, was suddenly studded with watching eyes.

The maid opened the flat door, looked deeply puzzled as I stole all her secrets, and left her standing with her mouth open as I raced past her. There was June Cranby in the window, having her breakfast, looking rather less forbidding than usual in a negligée.

She started to her feet in surprise when she penetrated my naval disguise.

“Mr. Parker!

“Keep your distance, Miss Cranby!” I insisted, thanking Heaven the room was long enough to prevent me absorbing all her deeper knowledge on top of what I already knew concerning her. “I want help—and quickly. You’ve seen the morning papers?”

“I know you’re on the run, yes,” she admitted quietly. “I’m really sorry, Mr. Parker. If only you had taken my advice sooner I could have got you out of the mess. Now you have started something pretty bad.”

I suppose we looked odd, seated at opposite ends of the room, calling to each other, while the maid stood in silent bewilderment and glanced at each of us in turn.

“You don’t know what’s the matter with yourself, do you?” June Cranby asked me briefly.

I shook my head wearily. “Hanged if I do! I wish to God I were normal…”

“You can be, but it will necessitate an operation. You are in the class of people who have x-ray eyesight, bifocal vision, adding machine minds, photographic brains, and so forth. In technical language, your brain is linked up with nerve fibres between the frontal and temporal lobes. The fissure of Sylvius is the one thing which stops an ordinary brain—as yet—from performing instant telepathy and taking knowledge direct from another person’s brain. If there is a connection across the fissure of Sylvius, as there must be in your case, desire and realisation happen simultaneously. First it demands an effort—then, like breathing, it becomes automatic and you just cannot help soaking up thought waves. That’s what is wrong with you—but a brain operation can save you. The connection across the fissure can be severed. And if you’re interested I know just the right man for the job—Dr. Hall Storton, the brain specialist…”

“For which he would want hundreds of pounds, eh?” I asked bitterly. “I just can’t do it…”

“But I can,” she said quietly. “I can write a whole textbook concerning your brain which would be a best seller in the medical world. I can only do it if you will consent to the operation, so that I can be sure my judgment is correct. I’ll make the operation fee fifty times over. Now, what do you say?”

I nodded miserably. “All right, then. Heaven knows how I’ll finish up—but I’ll try it…”

“Good!” She turned to the bureau and threw over a writing pad and pencil. She said: “Write down in detail all the things that have happened to you. Take your time: you are safe enough here. I’ll have a talk with Dr. Storton on the ’phone while you do it.”

I took up the pencil and started to write. This manuscript is the sequel.

WORLDS WITHIN

A menace created by a scientist’s ambitions—wherein a sub-atomic universe reveals its power to expand.

The vast interior of the Martian hall of science was droning with the sound of eager voices, rising up to the mighty vaulted roof with its vitriex-filtered glass to seize its in fullest measure the life-giving radiations of the red planet’s distant Sun.

Tier upon tier, fifty in all, rose the serried lines of Martians—immense, red-skinned creatures, unclothed, queer body scales rising and falling evenly as they absorbed the essential solar radiations, Creatures almost fantastic in appearance, and yet masters of science and all it had to offer, staring now with huge, faceted eyes toward the shining metal floor of the colossal place, and at the complicated apparatus and dais that graced its extreme center. Mouths were open, talking rapidly, revealing triple rows of dangerous, backward-slanting teeth.

The hour of experiment had arrived. Every scientist of the red planet was present, anxiously waiting.

Then suddenly the talking died away; there came the solemn hush of respect and interest. With a slow and measured tread, Vaspus, master of the red planet, marched into view from the tremendous central doorway, accompanied, as ever, by Lothan, his chief adviser, and Ithos, attendant scientist.

The master’s faceted eyes glanced over the tremendous assembly as he walked; he inclined his big, scaly head slightly at the murmur of salutations directed toward him. Then, with the same impartial dignity, he gained the dais amidst the machinery and raised a powerful seven-fingered hand for silence. Immediately dead calm descended. Lothan and Ithos stood to one side.

Vaspus adjusted the minute microphone before him and spoke quietly.

“Fellow scientists, I have assembled you all here today for a very definite purpose: to behold a recent achievement in science. For a considerable time—in fact, ever since we arrived on this planet from our own doomed world of Aries— I have been irritated by the fact that we should have to die, and also that we do not use in our lifetime one tenth of the intelligence of which we are capable.”

Vaspus paused for a moment, studied his attentive listeners, then resumed.

“Let us first take the problem of age. We all suffer from katabolism; the cells of our bodies break down perpetually. These we build up with food, nutriments, solar rays—but in the end we find the breakdown is swifter than any process of anabolism we can devise. That, in its turn, is linked inevitably with fading mentality. In its last efforts, at the point of extreme age, to repair the perpetual waste the blood stream flows less readily to the brain. Concentration becomes erratic. Often on the verge of a masterful discovery we find senility has us in its grip. We die. Our normal life span of three hundred years is pitifully short in which to wrest the ultimate secrets of the cosmos.”

The multitude gave a murmur of assent.

“Therefore, to the end of defeating death and of giving us bodies that can live eternally, I have devised this machine,” the master went on, motioning to the apparatus grouped about him. “We have long known that cosmic radiations are solely responsible for the creation of life; but, hard though we have labored, we have never been successful in releasing life in inert protoplasmic elements. Since that is so, we shall, for the time being, have to accept that defeat with good grace. But out of the struggle there emerges one great truth: if we cannot create life, we can at least forestall death!

“With this machine I generate cosmic rays, called such for want of a better name. You may be aware of the exact nature of creating these radiations. Normally they occur at the explosion of a supernova in galaxial space, the resulting explosion generating hundreds of millions of electron volts. Recently such an occurrence happened in the constellation known as Ramino. Actually, of course, that event took place seven million years ago, the light only just reaching us. Our instruments were able to pick up the radiations and revealed a generation of nearly seven million electron volts.

“Knowing from our calculations that this would happen, we devised, in our laboratories, machinery capable of trapping these brief radiations, directed them upon seedlings, permitting different quantities of the radiation to seep through. The lesser the quantity of cosmic rays—measuring, incidentally, one tenth of a million millionth of a centimeter—the more the seedlings were stimulated; the greater the quantity, the more they were sterilized—proving, beyond doubt, that between the great and small doses there lies one—and only one—fixed degree wherein actual life is possible. Presumably, when life first began to spawn in this universe, when life first came to our own world of Aries, it was created by this one particular wave length, which has since been too strong or too weak to create further life.

“I repeat: we have tried to utilize these radiations to produce life, but there is something missing. No matter what percentage of power we use, we cannot excite living energy into inert chemicals; the reason is probably because the conditions of this planet are not conducive to life. It is so different to our lost, beloved Aries.” For a moment the ruler’s voice quavered slightly, then he went on again. “I shall, therefore, use it to prevent senility and decay, for it has been definitely proven that it operates perfectly on flesh that is already living, arrests katabolism completely. Within these spheres”—he indicated two gigantic reinforced metal globes—“highly energized blocks of metal will be disintegrated into free energy, allowed to release radiation that is precisely identical to cosmic rays, automatically adjusted to the required power by those triple rectifiers you see in the background. It is only owing to the untiring diligence of Lothan that this machinery has become possible.”

The adviser bowed his scaly head; an odd light was in his huge eyes as he looked up again.

Steadily, Vaspus continued. “I shall place myself between the two spheres, absolutely in line with the invisible radiation that will stream from one to the other. Earthing and neutralizing devices clamped to my feet and thence di-rected to insulating machinery will save me from being blasted into infinity and will instead allow my body to be charged with cosmic radiation, arresting for some hundred years or more all possible chance of senility. In another century it will become necessary to undergo the same treatment again. If it is a success, my friends, we know that we have defeated age and death—may continue our researches to eternity.”

“As always, you have courage, master,” murmured Lothan smoothly.

Vaspus turned to him. “Courage? It is not a question of courage, my friend, when the machinery has been tested and proved accurate. Let the experiment proceed! I, as ruler, shall be the first to test it.”

The assembled Martians became tense, every eye fixed upon their master as he calmly stepped into the complicated, machinery-cluttered area between the two immense generating globes. In solemn, absorbed silence the audience watched heavily insulated clamps fastened about his thick, scaly ankles, the massive, double-covered earthing wires leading back to the complex neutralizing plant. With calm patience Vaspus waited, then at last raised his queerly fashioned hand for the experiment to commence.

The safety lights in the glass roof, burning night and day, suddenly dimmed at the terrific drain on the city’s power resources; incalculable volts of electrical energy were created by the suddenly whining dynamos, rising up from a low and steady hum to a shrieking, ear-splitting din. Electrodes protruding from each of the massive spheres gathered the power unto themselves; strange, gas-filled tubes connected to them began to writhe internally with incredibly brilliant lavender light.

Lothan shouted a question and the ruler nodded. In response, the adviser threw in a tremendous four-pole switch on the complex control board. All the disordered rioting of electricity suddenly took on an understandable meaning. The seething electronic power fast disintegrating the metals within the spheres rose to an absolute pitch, brought about the annihilation of matter. The squirmings of electricity in the glass tubes became mere floods of unbearably brilliant flame, hurled their power into the electrodes.

The assembly watched stupefied, suddenly sprang to their feet in concern for their ruler as there abruptly streamed from the electrodes coruscating streamers of mauve flame—electrical energy that blazed and twisted with the vivid savagery of untamed lightning. And between these streamers stood Vaspus, unmoved, his scaly body painted by flickering purple and blackest shadow. Only the raising of his arm revealed that he was still unhurt, the neutralizing machines working faultlessly to save his body from being shattered into powder by the immeasurable powers hurled upon him.

For nearly ten minutes the amazing pyrotechnic electrical display continued, raised the temperature of the hall by nearly twenty degrees. Then Lothan cut out the main switch, followed it up by moving the others, and the shrieking dynamos swept down the scale and became still. The tubes flickered and expired; the red-hot electrodes turned into the blackness of fast-cooling metal.

Silence fell—the dead and astounded silence of a baffled multitude, broken only, at last, by a long exhalation of relief as Vaspus raised his arms in salutation.

“Age is ended!” he cried exultantly. “This day we of Mars, formerly of Aries, have conquered death! We are the masters of life and all it has to offer. Lothan, unfetter these clamps.”

Quietly, the adviser obeyed, stood back with a concerned expression on his ugly face. “My lord feels none the worse?” he inquired softly.

“Not in the slightest,” Vaspus answered complacently. “We have done well between us, Lothan—have given to our race a priceless heritage.”

Lothan nodded silently, watched as his master stepped forward amidst the now approaching multitude from the tiers. In Lothan’s eyes there reposed the light of strange knowledge, of a buried secret. Upon his thick lips was the faintest suggestion of a cynical smile.

“Eternal life,” he murmured to himself. “I wonder—”

He prepared to move and follow his ruler, then paused at a light touch on his shoulder. Turning quickly he beheld Ithos.

“The experiment has been a success, Lothan,” he muttered bitterly. “I thought you said it would destroy that old dotard. Do you realize what this means? Eternal life for him; the failure of possible dominance and leadership for, us. You—you blunderer!”

Lothan smiled twistedly, directed a glance toward the multitude seething round their ruler.

“You would do well, Ithos, to choose your words more carefully when in earshot of our fellows,” he answered coldly. “I knew Vaspus would live through the experiment. We cannot afford to take chances; you have got to remember that the people love him. Remember, too, that he trusts me implicitly—and you, too. Not for a moment does he suspect that our real aim—”

“That doesn’t interest me,” Ithos snapped with brutal directness. “You have given him eternal life—unless, of course, we deliberately murder him. It would have been so easy! One slip of the electrode switches and— Our ascension to the kingship would have been simple!”

“And the people eternally doubting us? Against us because we destroyed the king? No, my friend.” Lothan shook his head. “To-day I have given him eternal life—but also eternal death! Never was a man so surely doomed; never was a king so utterly deposed without knowing it.”

“I don’t understand you,” Ithos breathed. “How can he—”

“You’ll learn in good time, my friend. Just watch, make no false moves, and leave everything to me. That’s all.”

With that Lothan turned, and with majestic tread joined his jubilant ruler, immediately becoming the same subservient scientist he had always been. Lothan, besides being a scientist, was a first-class actor.

II

Through the days that followed, the normal, ordered course of science proceeded on the red planet. The twin dominant cities in the equatorial and north polar regions of the globe continued to throb with intellectual activity.

Mars, still a young world, blessed with pure air, mainly cloudless skies and all-the-year-round sunshine—weak as compared to the Sun of departed Aries—but enough for the scaly monsters to extract from it a high percentage of essential life-giving radiations.

Though the Arians had made a thorough study of the celestial bodies about them they were quite convinced that no other worlds held life. The four giant monsters in the deeps beyond the inner circle were desolate, utterly immature; the most advanced stage seemed to lie on the cloud-sheathed third inner planet, its atmospheric blanket only parting rarely to reveal beneath a rolling waste of ocean or landscapes in the throes of gigantic change and reformation.

Superminds in a young system. There was something paradoxical about having to leave a world in the last stages of collapse. Mars was a young and lovely world, and of all the inhabitants upon it, Lothan perhaps realized the fact with the most clearness. It stirred jealousy in his soul that Vaspus should be lord of it—a jealousy not even yet eradicated by countless years of scientific achievement. Within him burned ambition. To the end of becoming ruler he had labored unceasingly, not to give Vaspus eternal life, but infinite death. And, in the background of this strange intrigue there hovered Ithos, brutally efficient, but lacking the finesse and personality of his even more unscrupulous colleague.

The days following the cosmic-energy experiment found Lothan still inquiring after his master’s welfare, found his face becoming darker as he learned that Vaspus was in perfect health, pursuing with more avidity than ever his experiments into the realms of atomic science, the last state of nature to baffle his brilliant mind. Indeed, far from being ill, he was so satisfied with his condition that he gave orders for all the members of his race to be treated by the cosmic-energy machine at the earliest moment—orders which Lothan received with studied calm.

“I think, master, that it would be better to postpone such a benefit—at least for a while,” he remarked suavely within the immense experimental laboratory.

“Why?” There was surprise in Vaspus’ tone, but he did not look up from his machinery.

“Because, master, you are our ruler, and as such are actually the only one entitled to immortality. A thing of value is only such because of its rarity. Make us all immortal and we lose the greatness of our achievement.”

“A strange viewpoint, Lothan,” Vaspus commented, looking up at last. “We created immortality for the good of us all. Proceed with the arrangements for us all to receive the benefits.”

Lothan bowed. “I will do so, master. Before I go, however, might I inquire how your atomic investigations are proceeding?”

“Favorably. We are undoubtedly up against enormous difficulties. In constructing this apparatus for viewing the atomic universe one has to work with more than normal care. Manifestly, the only way to accomplish the feat of rendering the microcosm viewable is by vibration. Every atom in the microcosm emits vibrations of force, which in turn have to be amplified much the same as we now amplify a tiny sound to worldwide range. There are difficulties, but I think we shall overcome them.”

Lothan looked reflectively over the accumulation of machinery, reflected transiently on the years that had been spent on this particular branch of science.

“The last details still elude me,” Vaspus went on thoughtfully. “The very act of trapping the microcosmic vibrations creates strange and unpredictable electronic changes. It is, I think, caused by the vibrations emanating from the amplifying machinery itself. The slightest pressure, the slightest movement, even the pressure of a weak beam of light, produces the most unexpected results. I am working now on the principle of absolute dark and absolute steadiness. I have little reason to believe but what another two weeks will see success. Then, my friend, we shall solve the ultimate riddle of nature. The secrets of the infinitely small. We know the universe about us is almost empty, but are the worlds that teem about us in invisibility likewise empty? That I cannot believe.”

“Only the machinery can show,” Lothan answered quietly, and with that left the laboratory, bumped almost immediately into Ithos in the main corridor.

“Well?” he demanded roughly. “Is his death any nearer?”

Lothan frowned. “No—not yet; but it will come. Have patience. In the meantime, see to it that the cosmic-energy machine breaks down. You know its construction almost as well as I do. Burn out a series of wires; do anything you like, so long as you produce a natural accident. Under no circumstances is that machine to be used on anybody else—at least, not until we know the exact reactions on Vaspus.”

Ithos shrugged his mighty shoulders. “I’ll attend to it now.” He nodded, and swiftly departed, leaving Lothan in deep thought.

“It’s got to succeed,” he muttered. “If not, then all the laws of science must be in vain.”

* * * *

To Lothan’s intense satisfaction, he found Vaspus less convinced of his good health as the sunny Martian days sped by. Though the ruler spent his time perfecting the final details of his amazing atomic-penetrator apparatus, he was clearly a sufferer from some strange and inexplicable ailment.

For the first three days of the disease’s onset he refused rigidly to pay attention to it, mastered rising pain with a set face and firm mouth, wrestled steadily with his scientific problems. Lothan was ever by his side, outwardly concerned and inwardly jubilant.

“Master,” he said at length, “I feel that you should take a rest. You are obviously unwell, unable to proceed.”

Vaspus smiled twistedly. “It is nothing—cannot be. For hundreds of cycles ill health has been unknown amongst us. How can I possibly be unwell?”

“Perhaps—the experiment—” Lothan murmured, eyes on his work.

Vaspus looked up sharply. “That was two weeks ago, Lothan; it cannot have effect now. No—no, the thing is absurd! Maybe I have not been receiving my full quota of solar radiations, been working too long in this stuffy laboratory. I will be all right. I cannot afford to slacken my efforts now. Within the next twelve hours this apparatus will be complete. We will be ready to view the atomic microcosm that teems invisibly about us.”

Lothan did not respond, continued steadily with his work.

So, steadily, through the required twelve hours, Vaspus struggled, with iron determination, against his unknown ailment, refused all the assistance Lothan smoothly offered, ordered away all his assistant scientists who insisted that he should submit himself to a thorough examination. None the less, his assertion that he was really quite well began to carry less conviction. His external scales were drooping—a sure sign of bad condition. His breathing came with the sharp gasps of a man trying desperately to control pain.

Lothan made no comments, merely watched with a grim smile twisting his heavy lips, taking care, none the less, that his superior did not notice. When at length the instruments were assembled to Vaspus’ satisfaction, Lothan stood back for further orders.

Vaspus waved a weak hand. “Summon the leaders,” he ordered huskily. “There is not time for all to assemble. Something—something is wrong with me, Lothan. You were right.”

“Master, if there is any way I can help you—”

“No—no, not now. Summon everybody, quickly. “I—”

The master stopped, staggered a pace, clutched tenaciously to the mighty control board of his machinery. Then, without another sound, he pitched to the metal floor and lay still.

Only for an instant did Lothan stand gazing down at him, faceted eyes gleaming; then he lifted the ruler in his powerful arms and laid him on the long metal table against the wall. Turning, he snatched up the vibration communicator and summoned the leading medical and biological minds.

Within three minutes the experts were present—immense and ugly creatures possessed of the keenest physiological minds on the planet. Lothan stood to one side as they examined the ruler with their complicated instruments, watched keenly every little reaction of their gauges and testing meters.

At length Umyas, the chief biologist, looked up. His face was set in an expression of profound amazement.

“Whatever it is that has overcome our beloved master, it is something beyond our ken,” he muttered. “He is not dead—neither is he alive. The only course is for him to retire to his chamber, there to be watched and guarded until there is some development the will give us a clue.”

Lothan nodded and quietly summoned two robot machines standing behind him. With gentle metal arms they lifted the unconscious ruler and bore him out of the laboratory, laid him down, at last, on his own cushioned air bed within his immense private chamber. As they performed the action, Vaspus stirred for moment; his great eyes settled on Lothan’s impassive face.

“Lothan—the machinery!” he breathed weakly. “If—if anything should happen to me you must demonstrate. You—you take command. But show the machine—”

“Later, master,” Lothan replied quietly. “You will soon be with us again. It is your achievement, even though I understand it. I am not worthy to set in motion the creation of your mind.

Vaspus did not answer. His eyes closed again, and he relaxed gently. The assembled experts made motions amongst themselves, arranged about the bed the necessary automatic machinery that would attend to the stricken ruler’s every need during their absence. Then, satisfied they had done all in their power, they darkened the room and departed. Lothan followed silently in their wake.

In the corridor, Umyas turned to him questioningly.

“This machinery the master speaks of? What is it?”

“A revolution in atomic science, Umyas,” Lothan replied coolly. “With its aid the atomic universes can be seen; the worlds within them become clearly visible. For years, as you know, our revered ruler has labored to such an end. He was fortunate in that he defeated the illness long enough to finish his task. The machine waits—either for him or me.”

“You mean?”

The adviser shrugged superciliously. “If the master should pass away—and it is ill that such words should have to pass my lips—I shall rule in his stead. He made that fact perfectly clear, I think.”

Umyas did not answer. He had no regard for the quiet, sinister Lothan—never had had. Without another word, he turned and left, with his puzzled fellow specialists around him.

* * * *

Vaspus, lying on his bed, was in a physical condition that utterly baffled his trained and resourceful brain, matured as it was, through decades, to face any problem and solve it almost immediately.

His condition was paradoxical in that his brain was unaffected. He was crystal-clear in perception; had never been clearer. The trouble lay in his body. It refused utterly to respond to his will, was seized in some ironly immovable paralysis that all his strength of mentality failed to break. So far as he could determine, his body energy was undergoing some strange and subtle change, was in the grip of something outside his own normal energy that had plunged him into a blur of pain.

Even to open his eyes was an enormous effort. He beheld only the darkened bedchamber. The slightly parted curtains revealed the Martian night through the window, little Phobos coming into view ever and anon on its tireless wandering across the sky, casting its pale light on the attendant machines as they mechanically tended their master’s every conceivable need, injected into his bloodstream strong stimulants and pain-deadening sedatives. Normally they would have given him relief; this time, for some obscure reason, their powers were non-efficacious.

With a tremendous effort, Vaspus forced his eyes downward to look at himself. Had he not been so paralyzed he would have started with amazement; his body was bathed in lambent blue fire, lay in an aura of phosphorescence! Energy? Electricity? Chemical activity? Vaspus’ mind postulated all three possibilities and came up against a blank wall. He did not know. Besides, this effort of keeping his eyelids open— He closed them wearily and relaxed.

Not ten minutes later the door of the room opened very softly, so softly the pain-deadened ruler failed to hear it. The harshly cut face of Ithos obtruded into the opening, painted with the glowing fire from the master’s body. Almost instantly he retreated, fled through long, airy passages to the private domain of Lothan. He found the adviser seated at his desk, head sunken into his scaly paws in musing thought.

“Lothan! Lothan, come quickly! The master—” Ithos stopped, gulping for breath, waved a gesticulatory hand as Lothan gazed at him.

“Well, what of the master? Has he recovered, or is he dead?”

“Neither; I think he’s—he’s on fire! He is bathed in blue light. Lothan, what have you done to him? Don’t you realize that if this act of yours is ever found out you’ll be—”

“Quiet!” Lothan snarled, leaping up and flinging his powerful hand across his colleague’s mouth. “You dotard! Do you want everybody to hear you?” He stopped and withdrew his hand, smiled bitterly. “So the master’s body glows, does it?”

“As blue as an energy tube!”

“Seeing that it is energy, that is not surprising,” the adviser commented calmly. “Everything is working out exactly to plan, Ithos.”

“But, Lothan, what have you done? Can’t you tell me?”

Lothan sat down again, did not answer the question. Instead he asked one.

“Ithos, if the universe were suddenly flooded with energy from an external source, from some suprauniverse, exactly what do you imagine would happen?”

“Presumably it would be destroyed.”

“Ordinarily, yes. But suppose there came into it an energy of the exact type needed to create life instead of destroy matter? Would not every piece of matter in the universe, every planet, every satellite, even every star, momentarily increase its energy as it absorbed the sudden influx? Naturally, it would—and in the process it is also quite conceivable that the universe would turn blue with electrical energy. That, my worried friend, is a simile of what is happening to our dear, beloved ruler!”

Ithos gawped stupidly, stumbled over the strange theory the adviser had outlined.

“How can it?” he blurted out.

“Because inside of Vaspus, inside you, inside me—inside every being on this world or any other world, even inside the worlds themselves, are universes. Molecules, if you prefer—universes of the infinite small, but just the same—universes!”

“That is simple science, Lothan. Do you take me for a learner?”

“Candidly, yes.” Lothan nodded cynically. “Every scientist in this planet, even Vaspus himself, missed the main issue when this life-eternal system was promoted. Vaspus certainly couldn’t create life out of inert chemicals; he admitted that much. But he could stop death. That also was quite true. What he forgot was that, by allowing himself to be bathed in that cosmic energy he gave life to living worlds inside his own body! They were not inert chemicals, such as those we tried to stir into life. They were electrons, worlds in miniature, all packed within the atoms and molecules comprising Vaspus’ body. Very well, then. When he supplied cosmic energy and allowed it to surge through his body he gave to those electrons the energy of life, spawned upon them maybe living beings, beings of the microcosm.

“Maybe it only happened to one electron, one world—maybe it happened to thousands—that we don’t know. It all depends upon the different states of the worlds concerned. What we do know is that Vaspus has probably brought life to worlds within himself, and in so doing has replaced his own bodily energy with cosmic energy, the full balance of which has taken some little time to show. Now it has come, it will inevitably mean his death.”

“Why?”

“The people will demand it in their own interests.”

Ithos looked puzzled. “I don’t see that, Lothan. The people will never seek the death of our ruler.”

“No?” Lothan smiled amusedly. “You will see for yourself before very long. Another thing: keep as far away from Vaspus as you can. Better still, I’ll have the automatons erect an insulated screen around him. Then we had better summon the biologists and leading scientists. It is essential they see Vaspus in his present condition.”

He rose to his feet and strode purposefully to the vibration communicator on the wall.

III

By Martian dawn every important member of the scientific council had been summoned, stood in an interested but puzzled group around the softly glowing ruler. But between him and them there now reposed a heavily insulated transparent screen, erected by the automatons.

Quietly, in tones of most abject despair, Lothan made clear the nature of the master’s ailment, giving it purely as a theory, nor was he surprised at the storm of protest that greeted him.

“Life within life!” cried Umyas. “I refuse to credit it, Lothan.”

“Even though you admit that we are made up of microcosmic universes?” the adviser asked calmly.

“Certainly! We failed to produce life in inert chemical by the cosmic energy; how, then, do you allow that it happened to our ruler? Is he not inert chemical just the same? Composed of electrons which are precisely identical to those in the inert material we tried to enliven?”

“No, Umyas, he is not. It surprises me that a biologist of your undoubted eminence should even think so. Between molecules in a state of life such as those within a living being and those in an inert chemical aggregate there is an infinite difference. Pressures are different; temperatures are different, and most of all they are within a living being which of himself imparts something of life to the electrons within him. When he let that cosmic energy surge through him he produced the same identical effect that happened to this universe when a similar surge must have spread through it from a supra-universal source, begetting such life as ours. Inside of himself he has repeated creation, and in the doing has lost his own life energy by replacing it with infinitely stronger cosmic energy.”

“Then—” began Umyas dazedly, and stopped uncertainly.

“I will endeavor to prove it to you,” Lothan remarked quickly, and turned to the ever-attentive automatons. “The robots will transport our master’s body into the laboratory within his insulated case. It is purely a precaution against possible dangerous energy emanations proceeding from him that may affect us. In the laboratory we can learn, by the use of the atomic machine he himself constructed, whether my theory is correct. You agree?”

There was a slow nodding of scaly heads. Lothan smiled in satisfaction and stood aside as the automatons gently lifted the ruler and bore his screened case from the chamber, ultimately laying him down, under the adviser’s direction, directly beneath the focus of the enormous atomic projector. Once that was done, Lothan switched on the ceiling lights and indicated the masses of inexplicable machinery.

“Only our beloved master and myself know the exact process adopted with this instrument,” he announced superciliously. “That being so, forgive me if I merely explain that it is based on the principle of every atom-emitting vibration which can be transformed, through devious methods, into a pictorial version of the object originally emitting the vibration. Just as our super reflectors reach out to the ends of the stellar universe and pick up the weak light vibrations of the farthest stars, pass them through transformers and reproduce by amplification a clear-cut picture of the original star, so here we do the same with atoms and the electrons within them. The result is projected onto the screen which you see immediately before you.” He nodded to the twelve-foot square receptor near at hand, its surface at the moment composed of a metal as black as space itself.

The assembled scientists said nothing, but waited interestedly, trying as best they could to disguise their natural dislike for the sardonic scientist.

The laboratory became suddenly dark again; metal shutters closed over the windows and blotted out the dawn light. The only glow in the whole great place was from the supine ruler’s body. A creaking came out of the silence as the insulated lid of his oblong coffin was slid aside by a robot; then, his scale dimly glinting as he walked, Lothan moved to the control board which he had reason to understand so well.

A spotlight sprang into being. For a split second sparks flashed from the contact of the master switch blade; simultaneously the familiar hum of dynamos spread through the quiet. Vacuum tubes silently glowed into life; violet light sprayed from enormous condensers and transformers. Little by little the noise increased; the surgings of power were stepped up until, at last, the entire laboratory was bathed in glowing, mauve flame, leaving the still unmoving ruler as a solitary figure in the direct path of the projection machine. At last there stabbed from its lens a carved, ivory-white pencil of blinding, heatless brilliance, striking his supine body and passing clean through it into the floor, then down again into seemingly dimen-sionless depths.

The Martians watched in deathly silence. Lothan himself stared fixedly, a strange lavender-painted figure before the switchboard, massive seven-fingered hand flashing up and down the complicated controls. There came a sudden, deeper throbbing, an even greater mad crackling of incalculable power; then the broad screen changed from its jetty neutrality to a soft and delicate salmon pink. It deepened to scarlet; then, by imperceptible degrees, merged gradually toward violet, radiating a most bewildering but indescribably lovely array of colors in the process.

“Look!” breathed Umyas unsteadily, pointing. “Look!”

His colleagues did not need the injunction; they were already gazing in amazement at the portion of their master’s body revealed on the screen. Only for an instant was there visible the strange skeleton formation of his chest and ribs—a perfectly produced X-ray impression—then that changed and merged into a composite haze, as the bones themselves were penetrated, the great central breastbone becoming gradually wider until at last it filled all the screen. From that point onward the amazing penetration went through all the composition of the bone, revealed with a clearness never known before its actual constitution, laid bare the phosphate, carbonate, fluoride of lime and other materials, which, in turn, passed on into a common blur in which there was nothing understandable.

Once this point was passed the violet glow vanished and was replaced by black. For what seemed an interminable length of time there was nothing visible; then, slowly, there merged into view tiny points of light, incredibly small galaxies of stars and suns, identical on a small scale to those in the vast, external universe.

“Watch!” commanded Lothan, and stepped up the amplifiers to an even greater pace.

The laboratory became sickly in its heat; the air reeked of electric discharges and hung heavy with smoky exhausts. The metal floor quaked to the vibration of the thundering engines. Only the atomic mechanism itself remained steady, all traces of vibration overcome by Vaspus’ final accomplishments; the light-tight reproducing chamber was functioning flawlessly.

The smallness of the microcosmic galaxies increased at a tremendous pace, leaped from mere dusty hazes to enormous agglomerations of countless suns and nebulae, rotating slowly in empty space…

“This is but one molecule within the body of our beloved ruler,” Lothan commented quickly, but his voice was hardly audible above the din. “Think of it, my friends—one molecule! Therefore, inside him, there are untold millions of universes, each one of which has probably been imbued with life force. One universe is enough for our purpose, however. If he has indeed created life, it will be as evident in this one as in any of the others. Let us observe.”

More switches clicked under Lothan’s hands. In the screen there appeared a vision of a perfect solar system. Even as it swept into view the brilliant bluish-white sun changed to yellow and sank down to red. By the time the view was clear the sun had altogether expired. Irritably, Lothan changed his switches again, and presently located another solar system. Here again the sun was slowly fading from white to golden yellow, but its deterioration was less swift than the preceding one.

“Why the change?” called Umyas.

“Time,” the adviser answered curtly. “Time in the microcosmic universe moves with infinitely greater speed than our own.” Remember that a thousand million years on an electron is but one millionth of a second on Mars. The sun in this particular system is of vast size and therefore takes longer to expire. Even now, though, it is dying. Even as we gaze, life on one of those electronic worlds has pursued its course from prehistoric days to the end of civilization. Surely on one of them there might be life—”

He stopped, jolted with sudden amazement. The Martians moved nearer as the view steadied, and stared down on the largest of the group of seven planets. Six of them were deserted, but on this major one there was something distinctly bright and gleaming spread upon the surface; the outlines of a city couched deep within the towering mountains of a rugged, friendless landscape. Even as they stared the city began to crumble with age.

“Intelligent life!” breathed Umyas. “The work of thinking beings! Lothan, you were right! It proves to us—”

He broke off, gazed blankly with his faceted eyes as there suddenly leaped upward from that strange, inexpressibly beautiful city a gleaming, silver machine, plunging outward from the slowly dying world into the depths of electronic space.

“Space travel!” breathed Lothan. “They are escaping from their world, doomed by eternal cold. See, already time is moving so swiftly that their planet is caked in ice—and yet the space machine is becoming larger, must be covering intra-atomic space at a speed beyond compute. Larger— Larger it—”

He stopped, dumfounded, as the machine began to swallow up the entire cosmos, filled the screen with a common grayness.

Abruptly, the truth flooded in upon him; he shouted huskily.

“They are traveling to the end of their universe—intend to burst through it into the suprauniverse. Our universe!” he cried hoarsely. “Quickly! Stand back! There may be an explosion—”

He instantly deserted the switchboard, blundered away amongst his colleagues, went backward with them to the far wall. With startled eyes, they all watched the screen; it was an impalpable, swirling blur of gray. The engines went on thundering their song of power—

Then, abruptly, from the body of the silent ruler there was a flash of unbearably brilliant light; a sharp report followed, and that was all. The assembled scientists advanced again, cautiously, toward the insulated case. The master was unharmed save for a slight wound in his side from which there dripped a steady flow of brown blood.

“Quickly! Lights!” Lothan shouted to the automatons. “Lights!”

He went over to the control board and pulled out the switches, listened while the dynamos sang down the scale and became quiet. Even as they did so, light came into the laboratory—not from the bulbs, but from the windows, as the automatons threw back the shutters to the Martian day.

“Look,” muttered Umyas, standing with the others around the case.

Lothan came to his side and peered within the oblong. In the strong daylight the bluish glow from Vaspus had almost disappeared. But it was not that that concerned the adviser; his eyes were fixed on something he could scarcely believe—the sight of a microscopically small object of bright metal, reflecting the sunlight: a machine of infinitesimal proportions, tapered at both ends, lying still now on the soft air bed whereon lay the obviously unconscious master.

“What—what is it?” demanded Ithos blankly, staring over Lothan’s shoulder.

“A machine of the microcosm,” the adviser muttered back. “Those beings we saw left their world, but instead of seeking another one in their own universe they took a far greater chance—decided to burst the bounds of their universe and gain the supra one—ours—beyond. They succeeded. It has done little to the master, save create a wound which can rapidly be healed, but it has brought to us life from a world within him, a life originally created by his cosmic-energy experiment. Now, my friends”—-he looked up with a triumphant sneer—“perhaps you believe my theory?”

The assembly nodded quickly.

“Will not others come?” questioned Umyas. “Of all the teeming universes within the master there is surely the possibility—”

“Certainly there is, but for the time being we will be satisfied with what we have.”

“If there are beings inside that machine, why don’t they appear?”

“We’ll soon find out,” Lothan answered, and, turning to the robots, he issued instructions.

Gently, they lifted the machine out of the case and placed it on a nearby bench. With further quick movements they applied healing ointments to the ruler’s wound, cured it instantly, then slid the case lid back into position.

“The growth enlarger will settle our difficulty, I think,” Lothan commented. Accordingly, the minute vessel was moved into an adjoining section of the laboratory, placed in the center of the floor and there flooded with radiations which rapidly widened the electronic orbits of the ship and its contents, until it stood nearly one hundred feet high and three hundred feet long. Only then did Lothan switch off the machinery and wait expectantly.

Almost immediately the massive airlock of the vessel was mechanically unscrewed from within, swung aside in the grip of some form of magnetism. Through the opening there appeared men and women, so strange and bizarre that the Martians stared incredulously.

White-skinned people without scales! Possessing two legs each and two arms, these latter ending in five-fingered hands! For some reason that the Martians could not fathom the heads of these beings were not bald, but covered with peculiar fluffy substance, dark in some cases and fair in others—some long, some short. The eyes were the most remarkable, of various colors from black to blue or gray, and entirely without facets.

In absolute silence, Lothan and his contemporaries watched the people file out into the great laboratory. Mentally, Lothan counted a full three hundred of them of all shapes and sizes, some clearly female, if their lesser size and more rounded development was any guide. Nor were any of them naked; instead they had on strange substances—one-piece white garments with a brightly gleaming belt about the middle. In size they were diminutive. Not one of them was more than six feet high. Lothan drew himself up, proud of his eight feet of height. He towered over the high-foreheaded little being who was obviously the leader of the party.

“Who are you?” he demanded curtly in his own language.

The little man shook his head, replied in an unknown tongue. The Martian frowned and glanced at his colleagues.

“Obviously language difficulty,” he grunted, and motioned the strangers back into the main laboratory. Once there he prepared to place them all in the range of a brain-tutoring machine, when, to his surprise, the leader spoke fluently in the Martian tongue. In dazed amazement Lothan turned to gaze at him, met the leader’s inscrutable, calm black eyes.

“I am sorry, my friend, that I did not answer you immediately,” he apologized quietly. “It took us some little time to assemble your particular language into understandable form. I am Razak, former master of the planet Disep. But I see you know already of the fate that threatened our home world. We knew that ultimately our planet would die and, knowing also that no other worlds in our universe were exactly suitable for our purpose, we decided to come from the microcosm to here.

“By some chance, it appears, our world was within your ruler Vaspus. I trust, my friend, that we have your hospitality? Here are my people and children, a chosen few—indeed the only ones who were willing to take the chance of breaking into the suprauniverse.”

He indicated the men and women about him, and the wide-eyed children peeping nervously round their parents. Lothan stared at them blankly, turned back again to take in the details of the speaker—his high-domed forehead and, most particularly, those strange, un-faceted eyes, deep and unfathomable black pools that held within their depths a clear evidence of tremendous intellectual attainments.

With something of an effort the adviser found his voice.

“Why of course you are welcome to stay here until you put your affairs in order. Tell me, though, how did you defeat time in crossing from your world to this one?”

Razak smiled faintly. “Suspended animation, my friend, which set time at zero. Some day you may understand that condition. Our awakening was perfectly timed because we knew you would find us.”

“Knew?”

“Certainly. There are no secrets in time, or space when you understand them.”

Lothan frowned darkly. “You understand, of course, that you may only remain on this planet until you discover another planet whereon to continue your activities? We of this world have no room for permanent strangers such as yourselves.”

“At least you display the lack of courtesy common to the true scientist,” Razak commented dryly. “It may perhaps interest you to know that we of Disep are intellectuals. We gained your clumsy machinery stage aeons ago. When our world was dying we became masters of everything scientific. Our last achievement was the construction of the machine that brought us through interatomic space.”

“I understand.” Lothan nodded, but his great eyes were narrowed.

“I further understand from your mind that your ruler was really responsible for our being alive, by his use of cosmic energy. You realize, of course, that he is a deadly being to have on this world?”

“I imagined so,” Lothan said. “Is it your concern?”

“In a way,” Razak answered calmly. “You see, I happen to know that your main object in allowing your ruler to use cosmic rays was so that he would ultimately be deposed and allow you to rule in his stead.”

At that Lothan moved slowly forward, suddenly shot out his immense hand and grasped the imperturbable Razak by his slender throat.

“So you read thoughts?” he asked with minacious softness. “You burst into our world and the first thing you do is to poison the minds of my colleagues against me! We do not like such people as you, Razak. I was prepared to be tolerant until you straightened yourselves out; as it is I have no alternative but to imprison you until it is decided what we shall do with you. Maybe we’ll set you to work. In any event, you will learn that, intellectual or otherwise, it does not pay to insult the future ruler of Mars. I am powerful, remember that!”

Razak shrugged his slim shoulders. “I only speak the truth, Lothan. Imprison us all if you wish; it will not matter.”

“Not matter?” Lothan repeated suspiciously, releasing his hold on the man.

The little ruler did not explain himself further. Inwardly fuming, Lothan turned to his servants and gave swift orders. Then he watched grimly as the entire party of men, women and children were herded unceremoniously from the laboratory to the regions of the prisons below the city itself.

As he gained the doorway, Razak looked back. “Remember, my friend, that your king is a menace to all living beings so long as he remains on this planet. The life energy he has within him will communicate itself to other living beings once that screen is removed. He is neither dead nor alive, and will remain in that state until the cosmic life energy within him expends itself after innumerable centuries. Fire him into space away from this planet. Never allow him to touch anything that lives; never allow him to make contact with any planet again. Though he himself will die the instant he touches space, the energy within him will live on, being itself part of the cosmos.”

“Are you daring to give me orders?” demanded Lothan savagely.

“No, I am merely warning you. Do not forget that recently you were near to him when the lid of his insulating case was removed. So was your companion Ithos—as well as some of you others.”

“Well?” Lothan demanded, but his tone had obviously changed.

“That is all. You’ll learn more later. It is a pity your hospitality is so bad; you have much to learn yet of the ways of Razak of Disep.”

With that the strange individual turned and followed his people, leaving Lothan and his colleagues staring dubiously after him.

IV

Though Lothan tried very hard to reassure himself that Razak’s bald statements were merely empty va-porings, he could not altogether shake off a grim conviction of dread, a feeling that the strange little being from the microcosm had known exactly what he was talking about. Once he felt inclined to visit the man and learn more, then refrained. He was a prisoner, awaiting judgment with his comrades for treasonable assertions. That, at least, was how Lothan looked at it.

Ithos was frankly afraid and admitted it. Umyas was quietly suspicious. Razak’s remarks had not fallen on stony ground. Coupled with a natural dislike for the overbearing Lothan and the strange malady of the master, the biologist was inclined to believe that the intellectual from Disep knew exactly what was in the traitorous Martian’s mind.

What Razak had meant by imprisonment meaning nothing to him had not so far become evident. He and his comrades languished deep in the bowels of the equatorial city, within a steel-lined cell, permitted only the tiniest orifice for air. Machines brought food once and it was promptly refused. The intellectuals of Disep never ate. By some curious process of synthesis and mind control they were able to live on air alone, extracting its essences in a manner totally incomprehensible to the less intelligent men of Mars.

The night following the strange events in the laboratory Lothan found himself confronted with the frightened Ithos, his scales trembling with the obvious terror that possessed him.

“Lothan, I had to speak with you!” he panted. “I could not repose during the rest hour; I want Jo talk. Do you think the people suspect us?”

“Certainly not!” Lothan retorted coldly. “All along you have been a worry to me, Ithos—too jumpy, liable to betray everything in an unguarded moment. Calm yourself and leave everything to me. Our path is now entirely clear. We know that Vaspus will never recover, that the energy of life possessing him has destroyed his physical powers forever. Only his mind lives, and that will soon pass.”

“You mean you are going to take Razak’s advice and fire him into space?”

“I am taking nobody’s advice but my own. Certainly Vaspus must be fired into space, an isolated wanderer; otherwise he will pollute us all. I admit that Razak has borne out my theory to a certain extent—that the energy radiating from Vaspus is dangerous. Therefore, he shall be sent into the void before dawn. I have decided on that.”

“And the people? Will they permit it, do you think?”

Lothan’s expression was one of infinite scorn. “Permit it!” he echoed. “It is not a question of permission when I am the virtual ruler of this planet. Nobody understands so much of the control of this world as I. I was Vaspus’ chief adviser and acclaimed by him as successor—that is enough. Once I am actually in power I shall put into force the plans he always refused to execute. We will expand—conquer—master the far corners of the universe and become controllers of the microcosm, too.” He leaned forward tensely. “Do you not see, Ithos, what we can do? Razak brought a microship from the infinitely small. We will build other machines identical with it and so visit the atomic universes that surge about us. He has provided us with the one science we do not fully understand—intra-atomic travel. We have already conquered interstellar space. Yes, it is easy! There will come a time when this world will grow old; we shall need fresh fields in which to expand our activities. Maybe the third world in this system—”

Ithos nodded slowly, calmer now. “All that I am in agreement with, Lothan, but there is one thing that still worries me. Did being near the opened case of Vaspus have any effect on us.? The words of Razak are still haunting me.”

“Then dismiss them!” Lothan returned with supreme contempt. “Just a talkative, white-skinned fool from another world attempting to frighten us with so-called mind reading. There is nothing to fear!”. He rose to his feet with sudden purpose. “It is a good time now to dispose of Vaspus’ body. The others are at the rest period; by the time they awake Vaspus will be in space. Once that is done I am in control and can do exactly as I wish. Come!”

He led the way swiftly from the chamber and down the darkened corridors of the great edifice. The quietness of the rest period was upon everything—three short hours in which the scientists of Mars recovered from their scientific labors—three short hours, too, before the sun would again appear in the cloudless Martian sky.

Without a pause, Lothan led the way into the main laboratory and, Ithos beside him, softly closed the door. Vaspus’ body was exactly where it had been during the earlier events, still emitting its blue life-energy glow.

Lothan nodded contentedly and went on through the laboratory to the next great hall, switched on the lights and surveyed the colossal cannon device by which space machines were catapulted into space, afterward achieving continuous flight by means of the enormous initial momentum provided.

“Have the machines fetch Vaspus’ body here,” the adviser snapped. “I will prepare a projectile to receive him.”

Ithos nodded and went swiftly off. With calm and unhurried movements Lothan operated the vast machinery, watched in silence as mechanical arms raised one of a series of two hundred small freight projectiles from the cradles by the far wall. His faceted eyes were glinting with the light of grim pleasure as he watched the tiny ovum swing in the enormous wilderness of machinery, lower gently to the floor and become still.

Swiftly he unscrewed its air lock, unbolted the trailer apparatus by which it was normally fastened to a passenger space machine; then he set the guiding controls. He was still checking the proposed route carefully on mathematical calculators as the automatons appeared and laid the glowing ruler’s body within its insulated case on the floor of the machine.

Ithos waited in expectant silence, watched as his colleague made the final adjustments to the guiding mechanism.

“Elliptical orbit?” he asked quickly, and Lothan nodded grimly.

“Yes, with the Sun as the approximate center. This projectile will stay within the confines of the solar system, but will never touch any actual body, therefore there is no chance of this life energy every affecting any world, be it living or dead. The orbit I have charted will bring this projectile back within this region, between this world and the third one, at intervals of seventy-six years or thereabouts.”

Ithos nodded slowly and continued to watch as his determined colleague screwed up the air lock and then returned to his machinery. Slowly, the projectile was raised into the air again, dropped at last within the huge tunnel of the space gun. With a quick movement, Lothan set the automatic controls and moved rapidly toward the door.

“The observatory,” he said quickly. “We can view what happens for ourselves. Hurry! The gun is timed to release in seventy-seven seconds.”

At top speed, he and Lothan raced through the building, down the corridor that connected the laboratories with the astronomical rooms, and finally into the great observatory. Lothan slammed the door quickly behind him. Even as he did so the entire chamber, the whole vast edifice, quaked with the sudden force of a tremendous explosion. The gun had released its inconceivably powerful explosive, hurled the living-dead king of Mars into the eternal depths of space.

Only for a moment did Lothan hesitate, then he moved to the semi-circular area wherein lay the floor reflector of the powerful space reflector. Impatiently, he operated the various controls required to its management, stood gripping the rail that surrounded the screen, waiting anxiously as the huge device moved and slid gently into position upon immense gimbals, finally automatically fixing itself into position and reflecting a clear area of space.

Lothan’s breathing became labored with the strain of events. Ithos, beside him, gazed at the screen with eager eyes.

Then, suddenly, there streaked into view a brilliant ball of bluish-white light, bearing behind in an almost detached fashion a long, fan-shaped streamer of misty light, as elusive as a solar corona. Immediately the reflector responded to the light waves received from the object, held it steady on its outward journey into space.

“Is that it?” asked Ithos at length, in a puzzled voice.

“Of course it is! The movement through space has broken up the original ship and Vaspus into vaporized, extremely tepuous gas, given visibility only by the life energy which Vaspus carried with him. That of itself is indestructible. The farther that thing goes into space, the longer the tail part will become, may spread out by common attraction to a distance of millions of miles.” Lothan stopped and pondered, staring hard at the nucleus of the odd-looking object. “Already the central portion is expanding rapidly,” he went on. “As it travels it will become larger—maybe as large as this world, even more. And every seventy-six years it will return, a silent witness to our master’s endless journey. Never again will that life energy touch any world; my calculations have seen to that. But we have seen enough! Come.”

He turned away and prepared to leave the observatory, then stopped in amazement as the door quietly opened. Within it Razak of Disep stood framed, and behind him his own people, together with a tremendous number of Martians—Umyas, the biologist, at the front. Only for an instant was Lothan at a loss. Then he strode forward grimly—only to stop again as Razak commanded him to halt.

“You—you dare to order me!” Lothan burst out furiously. “What are you doing here? How did you escape from the prison?”

Once more he advanced purposefully, slowly came to a halt as his eyes met those of the little Disepian leader. Once again he read in those dark, unfathomable depths a strength of will far in excess of his own. He gazed stupidly, presently looked round to find Ithos, scales quivering, immediately behind him.

Umyas pushed his way through the Martians in front of him and faced Lothan from a respectful distance.

“Fortunately, Lothan, I placed a good deal of faith in the observations Razak made when he first arrived here,” he said grimly. “It was I who released him and his people. We arrived at the precise moment of the firing of the space gun. You have, of course, hurled our beloved ruler into the void?”

“What else?” the adviser sneered. “Would you prefer that we all be killed by the energy he was emanating? Razak himself advised such a move.”

“We all know that,” Umyas retorted. “For that we bear no malice; our beloved master has been released from a living death. What we cannot forgive is the fact that you permitted him to make the experiment knowing full well what would come of it. You did it purposely, in order to gain the mastery of this planet. I suspected it, but I had no proof. Thanks to Razak my suspicions were confirmed. A man created on a world within our ruler, who otherwise would have been unborn, has arrived to upset your entire scheme. It would have been better had you not dabbled, Lothan.”

The insolent Martian did not answer for the moment, but his face set in an expression of ugly fury.

“It is time you understood, Umyas,. that I am the ruler of this planet and nothing can alter it!” he said.

Umyas smiled twistedly. “It is not left to me to alter it,” he responded coldly. “Suppose you and Ithos look at yourselves!”

Simultaneouly with the words, his hand depressed the light switch, swamped the great observatory in absolute dark. With fear crawling through their vitals, Lothan and Ithos stared down at themselves, then shouted hoarsely. They were glowing, dimly, with the first unmistakable traces of life energy!

“You see?” Umyas asked, flicking the lights on again. “Again Razak was correct when he foretold that the open lid of the insulated case would permit fatal radiations to reach you. Gradually the incipient energy within you will grow, become a gripping paralysis, your bodies mere hulks for the living, spawning universes within you.

“Now you realize why we are keeping our distance—why Razak ordered you to halt. Had you seen yourselves in the dark before this you would have realized the fate in store for you. There is only one course to adopt.” Umyas’ voice became grim. “In the interests of the planet you must follow Vaspus into space!”

A stunned, dead silence fell momentarily on the two Martians. Then Ithos screamed hoarsely.

“No—no, not that! Umyas, I never really meant to do this! It was Lothan who—”

“Stand exactly where you are!” Razak commanded, as the two of them moved forward. “Stand perfectly still! Umyas, summon your servants to seize these two. Immediately!”

The biologist obeyed, and only when the automatons were holding the two traitors in a grip of iron did Razak relax his overpowering will. He smiled faintly and enigmatically.

“I am sorry, my friends, that my first task on this planet should be to bring to justice so traitorous a scheme, but since chance willed it I have no alternative but to obey.” He turned to the assembled Martians. “I would suggest immediate dispatch of these men,” he remarked, in his quiet and unassuming voice. “Delay will endanger all of us. Proceed at once, Umyas.”

The biologist hesitated for the briefest fraction of a second, rather taken aback by the intellectual’s calm order. Then he gave the necessary orders and a clear path was made for the fighting, struggling pair as they were driven by the relentless automatons to the projectile room. In silence, the Martians and Disepians followed at a distance in the rear. Umyas and his immediate followers got to work on the projectiles, calculating just as Lothan had done not an hour before.

Lothan became calmer as he watched. Such was his nature, absolute defeat revealed in him no trace of fear—only a proud and insolent arrogance against those who had proved cleverer than he. Ithos was different; his nerve had gone utterly. He stood muttering and panting to himself in the grip, of the machines, half insane with fright.

Lothan moved his contemptuous eyes away from him and surveyed the ticking calculators; then he looked at the small figure of Razak in the immediate foreground. The intellectual’s brows were down in concentrative effort, queer hypnotic eyes fixed on Umyas with a steady, unwavering stare. Suddenly and vividly the truth smote Lothan’s agile brain.

“Umyas!” he cried hoarsely. “Umyas! Don’t you realize that Razak is hypnotizing you? You are not master of your own will!”

The biologist and his comrades looked up sharply from the calculators, Razak’s face hardened from its normal expression of assurance—became fiendishly intense. For a brief moment Umyas seemed to recover a vestige of normalcy, then he shrugged.

“Such accusations will avail you nothing, Lothan,” he returned stonily, and went on with his task.

Lothan pleaded and shouted and clamored in vain. He was not thinking so much of himself now as of the planet he dearly loved—the world he had wished to make the master planet of the universe. Only his brain, not under the control of Razak’s superhuman will power, could detect the evidences of hypnotic control. Even so it was useless. He was still raving impotently as the automatons drove him and lthos into the space projectile. The airlock closed and their shouting was cut off.

Steadily, Umyas fixed the controls of the cannon, then departed with Razak and his colleagues to the observatory.

In silence, Martians and Disepians alike heard the titanic report of the space gun, saw in the reflector a bisected mass go hurtling into space, breaking into two separate balls of incandescence with sprawling tails expanding behind.

“They, too, will enlarge,” murmured Razak. “As they go onward, the life energy will become stronger; they will gleam more brightly. This world is practically rid of all traces of that dangerous energy—but even yet there may be others. We of Disep have gained our end—have removed all traces of opposition and become masters of this planet!”

He turned slowly in the bright lights and faced the surprised Martians. His implacable face was one of frozen hardness, eyes bright and keen. Umyas took a sudden step back amongst his fellows, swept his startled, faceted eyes over the steady array of white faces, male and female, grinning with sardonic amusement. Little people, yes—weak and ineffectual, and yet their minds—

The words of Lothan swept back into Umyas’ mind. Finding his breath with an effort, he gulped out, “Masters of this planet! What do you mean?”

“I mean that Lothan spoke the truth,” answered Razak smoothly. “I did hypnotize you, but only to a good end. They deserved to die, those two—they had to die. Not only because of energy, but because of the opposition they might have caused me. Understand this, Umyas, I am the ruler of this planet and nothing you or your people can do will alter it.”

“Then—then Lothan spoke the truth?”

“I mean that the law of the cosmos is survival of the fittest. We are more intelligent than you; we even forced you, mentally, to come and release us from the prison. We have no world on which to live save this one; therefore, we will take it from this moment onward.”

Umyas’ startled eyes swept the slowly nodding heads of the Disepian men and women. Three hundred of them, themselves almost approaching the inhuman mentality of Razak. The Martian suddenly felt utterly helpless, wished he still had the determined, even though traitorous, Lothan beside him. At least he was his own kin, not a white-skinned being of pitiless intellect. He turned weakly to his fellows and read in their faceted eyes a hopeless despair.

V

Razak of Disep clung immovably to the purpose he had outlined. With effortless ease he wrested all semblances of control from the Martians, even fired several more into space as they revealed unexpected traces of life energy, until, at length, he was satisfied the blight was completely eliminated. Umyas he promptly dispatched to the twin city at the North Pole, there to work in comparative exile.

The Disepians rapidly turned the Martian machines and devices to their own uses, mastered the planet from end to end. But to a mind like Razak’s that did not represent completeness. His insatiable desire for further achievement, that same restless curiosity that had led him to drive himself and fellows into this supra-universe, allowed him no rest. He realized the universe about him opened up immense possibilities for expansion.

He examined each of the surrounding planets in turn and found them impracticable. The nearest to the Sun was a blistered wilderness on one side and a frozen sepulcher on the other. The next nearest was still too young for con-sideration. The giant outer planets, too, were in the same state. But in the third world there lay opportunity. Night after night he sat beside the vast reflector with his two scientific assistants, studying every detail of the third world, watching the writhing of its clouds and the phantasmal visions of a tumbling landscape beneath—cruel and rugged terrain being molded out of the formless into a world of dawning shape.

“An empty world, young and fresh,” he murmured broodingly, and his assistants nodded. “A world without life, without greenery, without even the faintest spark of a living amoeba. There, my friends, lies room for expansion. There are three hundred of us. One hundred and fifty will depart forthwith for that world and commence the generation of a race. I will go personally and direct operations. You, Vildon, will stay here and take over control. You will find it simple enough now that these Martians are under subjection.”

Vildon inclined his head. “As you wish, Razak. Clearly, within several cycles that third world will be well populated. Our race can expand and live as never before, once the seed of life is taken to it.”

Razak nodded slowly, his eyes thoughtful. “We will take seeds from this world—plant seeds—cover that young and barren world with beauty such as our own world of Disep once possessed. Our readings have shown that that third planet is suitable for us in everything except gravitation. That is rather in excess of normal, but no matter. You will give orders for space machines to be prepared for departure at Sundown tomorrow. Within an hour you will receive tabulated lists of those whom I shall choose to accompany me. Now you may both go.”

The two departed, left their superior gazing musingly into the reflector.

“To that world shall come life,” he muttered. “Life from a world within a world. The power of long-dead Disep shall be felt throughout the length and breadth of this supra-universe.”

* * * *

There was one thing, however, that the implacable Razak overlooked in his anxiety during the hours preceding the departure of the ten space machines to the third world. During those hours, while he arranged for the ships to be fully provided, together with new high-power disintegrators for the leveling of mountainous terrain, the intellectual sway he held over the Martians was removed; his whole concentration and that of his fellows was trained on the difficulties and trials of the last hours.

In consequence, Umyas arose, with his fellows at Polar City, from the depths of a semi-mental stupor, realized clearly for the first time the tremendous dominance Razak and his fellows had been holding over them.

Reference to the television machines soon placed them in possession of the facts as to what Razak was planning to do. Immediately Umyas went into conference with his fellows and from the conference emerged a plan, a possible scheme whereby to overcome the deputizing Vildon once Razak had departed into space.

Umyas acted immediately. In the five short hours he had left to him whilst the Disepians were in the projectile laboratories, he got an army of automatons to work, formerly doing only the tasks planned for them by the white skins. Following the biologist’s directions they drove fast machines to the four corners of the planet, disintegrating beams in the base of their fliers gouging vast chasms in the landscape as they went, soundlessly cleaving mountains and plateaus alike, forming about the uninhabited parts of the planet a veritable network of 1,000-foot-deep valleys, all leading back to within two miles of the shores of the principal oceans grouped about the opposite poles of the planet.

In all, the automatons took three hours to accomplish their noiseless purpose, scored the Martian disk with regular parallel lines in all directions from the sea defenses, ending the channels at five miles distance from the mighty equatorial city wherein the interlopers were now watching Razak’s departure for the third world.

The Sun had been set some little time; darkness enveloped the planet. Before long Phobos would be above the horizon. This very fact of darkness, as Umyas had hoped, served to prevent Razak from observing the changed appearance of the planet’s disk, nor was his mind trained on Umyas, for he had all his mentality still directed on the successful maneuvers of the fleet into space.

Umyas, from his Polar City laboratory, surrounded by as many of his fellows as the place would hold, was smiling grimly. His massive hand twitched over a series of buttons and switches.

“Interlopers!” he breathed vengefully. “Razak has departed into space; that leaves only Vildon and his immediate contemporaries. They seek to master our planet, do they? Here under my hands lies a series of remote-control explosive switches. Whilst one sector of automatons carved chasms from the oceans to the chief city, another sector laid depth charges of space-gun explosive at the shore end of each channel. I am told the work is finished and the wiring is connected.

“Once I depress these buttons every channel at the sea end will explode, permit the twin oceans of opposite poles to deluge inward to the center—will utterly overwhelm and destroy the Disepians before they can do a thing to help themselves. Some of our own people will go, too—that is unavoidable. The point is that we shall be left with Polar City, fully equipped—ready to start again. If Razak ever dares to return with his fleet we will destroy them all before they ever reach this planet. Later we will destroy him on his third world and be rid of him forever. Is that clear?”

The assembled Martians nodded, eyes gleaming brightly with triumph. Umyas smiled grimly, depressed the multiple switches, then stood back. Almost instantly the entire bulk of Mars quaked and trembled to the force of titanic concussions. The explosive tore out the remaining barriers between channels and oceans. Inconceivable volumes of water belched inward along the given tracks—an inevitable, smashing deluge that reached the equatorial city and crashed in upon it from all four sides.

Vildon, about to take, over the control Razak had assigned to him, received warning too late. Before he or his fellows could make a move the flood was upon them. It crushed them to pieces in the tumbled ruins of the city, drove their remains deep down into swirling vortices of brine, stone and metal.

In an hour the entire face of Mars had changed. Slowly, gradually, the spent oceans started to reform themselves, thundering in raging torrents through the specially made channels that left only the poles high and dry, the northern one containing the exulting Martians.

“We win!” breathed Umyas, staring into the televisor that gave him a view of the ocean where the equatorial city had lain. “The Disepians have been destroyed! Our task now is to rebuild and chart the land. Once the oceans have established a new level and position we can start again.”

In his triumphant decision, however, Umyas had reckoned without Razak himself. The Disepian ruler, once Sunlight came to the red planet, saw immediately what had happened, realized suddenly why his efforts to get into touch with Vildon over the spatial radio had met with no response.

His expression scarcely changed as he stared down; only his lips set into a thin, bitter line of hate. About him his colleagues burst into cries of dismay, stared unbelieving into the reflecting screens.

“Razak, what’s happened?” demanded Cralo, his immediate attendant.

“Is it not obvious?” the ruler asked coldly. “Those Martian scientists at Polar City played a swift move that has utterly defeated Vildon. Umyas is responsible for this. He has destroyed the city by diverting the polar oceans. Our control over that planet is at an end.”

“We can return at once and reassert ourselves!”

“No.” Razak shook his head slowly. “You may take it for granted that if we tried to return, Umyas would be on the lookout for us—would destroy us completely. In Polar City he has all the devices necessary. I was a fool to send him there—an even bigger fool to forget to hold him under my will during the last hours. Umyas remains to build a new world—or so he imagines,” he concluded softly. “It occurs to me that we placed in these spaceships disintegrators similar to his own, for the purpose of mountain leveling.”

“You mean—” asked Cralo eagerly.

“I mean that at our present slight distance from Mars we can use them very effectually. Umyas shall not succeed; I will destroy him first. Give orders to the remainder of the fleet to train their disintegrators on the planet and to stand by for my firing order. We will see whether these fool Martians are so clever after all. Hurry!”

The attendant immediately obeyed. Razak waited through a short interval, during which the distance from Mars slightly increased. His face was set and hard as he received the information that every weapon was ready. The thought of allowing the victorious Martians to remodel the world they had recaptured never occurred to him; only the idea of extinction gained access to his ruthless brain.

“Fire!” he commanded into the inter-spatial transmitter, and the order was incontinently relayed to all other nine ships.

Simultaneously, the entire battery of ten disintegrators released their powers, trained exactly on the red globe some 100,000 miles distant. Calculated to he dead correct by mathematical machines, the terrific force struck the planet’s surface, instantly blasted Polar City into dust, scooped out great craters in the ground beneath it. The seas boiled furiously, evaporated in enormous clouds of steam and spume, left under their banked clouds of vapor great barren areas of new and sodden continent. Time and time again the disintegrators struck the planet, each time the recoil sending the ships farther away into space, until, at last, Razak gave the order to stop and stood looking down on the receding planet with a grim smile.

“A lifeless world,” he murmured. “A pity in some ways and yet very necessary in others. A lifeless and now waterless world, carrying the eternal mark of Umyas’ short-lived victory in the shape of those still visible chasms stretched across the disk like a network.” He turned abruptly. “Set the course back on a direct line with the third world; recoil has turned us aside. Proceed afterward as already instructed.”

Within 200 hours the Disepian fleet finally landed on the surface of the third world, settled gently down on the soft, lushy soil of that very young planet, upon an immense plateau washed by the foaming breakers of a tempestuous sea. Overhead there lay the densely heavy clouds begotten of eternal warmth and moisture.

“A world of great possibilities,” commented Razak, staring out through the window over the wilderness. “Everything except gravitation is suitable for us.” He drew a deep breath with an effort. “That is one problem that our science cannot altogether overcome. Here on this plateau we will erect our principal city.”

The others nodded slowly and stared at the distant end of the plateau, where the waters of the incessant atmospheric downpour had come together in foaming torrents, already cleaving vast gorges in the upflung mountain range.

“It will be a long time before this world becomes really climatically suitable,” commented Cralo doubtfully. “Do you think that it is wise to stay, Razak, or had we perhaps better journey—”

“To another world?” Razak interrupted him. “How do you propose we do that? We know all the other worlds of this system are useless. Mars, too, is no longer of use now we have blasted all the water from its face. No, we might wander through all eternity and never again find a world such as this. As ages go by it will settle down and become a lovely world. We will conquer it as we have conquered everything else. And we will name it—Earth!”

* * * *

Accordingly, by the untiring efforts of the scientists of Disep, there began the first colonization and control of the new world—a wild and terrible world in those early days, all but defeating their untiring diligence and labor. By degrees, with the aid of their scientific instruments, they were able to direct the immense rain clouds to areas where they could precipitate their moisture harmlessly. They gained for themselves a slowly drying landscape already flourishing with the germinated seeds that had been laid in the soft, warm soil. Trees and shrubs began to flourish in the enervating air, mothered by the vital chemicals of a planet still in its cradle.

The erection of a city was a tougher problem, but the determination of Razak to establish himself on the planet would accept no defeat. Little by little, braced against the tempests that almost constantly swept the planet, the city began to appear—composed of synthetic stone and gradually supplied with all the necessities of life. Slowly, inevitably, Razak was gaining his ends.

During the ten years occupied in building the city, his colleagues discovered many things, notably the formation of the planet they were on. So far as could be judged their city was erected on a vast plateau of land existing between two enormous continents, icebound to the north with the manifest approach of a glacial age. Nor was the plateau in a very secure position. The ocean, still in the throes of tempestuous upheavals, revealed distinct signs that it might ultimately sweep inward between the two continents and engulf the city in its depths.

To this possibility Razak paid surprisingly little attention. He had other problems on his mind. One was the exuberance of growth occurring on the plateau; the enormously fast germination and spread of plants and trees was worrying him. In every direction, save in the ice regions, there were vast jungles of interlacing green, sodden and crawling with a new form of small life, protoplasmic slime that he knew inevitably spelt the dawn of a beast age, destined to evolve through the ages into wild animals.

But that was not all. His principal worry was his increasing inability to concentrate or understand his own scientific machinery! It was a trouble that had spread to all his men and women and to the children of those whom he had ordered to mate. For some reason they were losing their grip.

Of the fifty couples who had mated and borne children, each child revealed distinctly atavistic tendencies, was far less intelligent than the parents themselves. Razak began to feel the grim portents of an impending Nemesis catching him up on this young, horrible planet spawning now with life.

It was typical of him that the trouble lasted for months before he finally condescended to notice it. Then he went into a close study of the problem and finally summoned all his people, children included, in the main room of the powerful, weather-insulated city.

“My friends,” he said steadily, looking round on their obviously degenerate faces, “we are faced with the profound problem of fading intelligence. I see it in your faces; you see it in mine. Our achievements are crumbling about our ears. We hardly understand our science any longer. I have at least managed to solve the mystery, but there is no cure for it. You have all known how for these ten years we have labored unceasingly against gravitation, that one terrific power we cannot overcome.

“Pathologically, as you know, the blood stream is entirely responsible for the condition of the brain. A poor blood stream begets a poor brain, and a good one produces brilliance. On our own microcosmic world of Disep the gravitation was normal for our bodies—even as it was on Mars. The atmosphere, too, was correct. Here the atmosphere is filled with unexpected toxics, in many cases from the rampant growths we ourselves started. The gravitation pulls perpetually on our bloodstream and prevents an easy flow to the brain. We struggle in the midst of incongruous conditions for which there must be a price. One is inevitably molded to environment. Atavism, mental and physical, has set in. It means the doom of our science; that much we must realize. Maybe it is retribution for the destruction of Mars’ rightful inhabitants.”

“But can we not leave this planet and find another?” demanded one of the men.

“We could, but as we said before it is doubtful if it would be of any advantage. It would mean constant traveling through space, deprivation of essentials of atmosphere, living in a tiny world for unnumbered years. Besides, our numbers are greater now. There are children; there will be children’s children—the very nucleus of a mighty race to come. Little by little they will atavise to a final point and become almost like the brutal, apelike beings that were the ancestors of our own race; then evolution will take its course and they will gradually ascend the ladder again, molded by the new environment, able to be happy in this world by the process of adaption. Finally, they will become intelligent thinkers; but throughout their life on this world they will never equal our own past brilliance. This world will not give that.”

“Then—then our race is ended?” demanded another.

Razak nodded sadly. “Ended in one phase, but just commencing in another. We know that this city cannot stand much longer against the mad storms that rage and fume over this world; ultimately it will be sent to the very bottom of the ocean that is seeking to sunder the two continents. We must scatter to all parts of this planet, live as best we can on the rank fruits these trees of ours bear. The art of consuming nourishment from the air is now unhappily a lost one. We must forget all this. Some of us may last long enough with our devices to build cities in other lands to keep science alive for a while. But finally fate will catch up. Our children’s children will be cavemen and women, seeking escape from the cold that is to come. Our city will be at the bottom of the ocean—”

Razak paused and mused. “Strange indeed,” he muttered. “Future man will find our remains and not know that he himself had us for ancestors—will invent reasons for life on his planet, invent reasons for the three giant comet-like objects that will appear at recurrent intervals in the heavens, all unaware that it is the life energy of the projected men of Mars still circling their eternal orbits. He will ponder on lost civilizations, on the markings of Mars, and its waterless surface, upon, perhaps, strange ruins in far-off lands. It would, perhaps, have been better had we never dabbled.”

He looked through the broad window at the raging ocean so near the plateau’s eroding coast line.

“Will even wonder if a city lies beneath the sea,” he concluded musingly. Then, with a shrug, he drew himself up, became the commander again.

“We scatter—and part, with our children,” he announced. “Come!”

Silently, the men, women and children followed him to the exterior. Under his directions they formed into a star with eight radiating points, then set off in eight different directions, bearing with them small mechanical devices for the possible construction of future habitats.

Some went toward the northern continent, some to the southern, others toward the mountains and still others toward the jungles. And as they went the ocean thundered and raged on the solitary plateau, strove with life-crawling brine to reach the deserted stone city, indescribably lovely amidst the tumult that had so long eluded it.

Only once did Razak look back, a silent and lonely figure in the lashing wind. His eyes took in the whole panorama—the far-distant vision of his men, women and children vanishing in the coming dark.

“To the future!” he muttered. “Someday man may understand—”

Then he turned and strode steadily into the night that yawned before him.

THE VOICE COMMANDS

After twenty years of wrongful imprisonment two men return to “civilization” to find it in ruins, yet populated by odd, childlike people who nonetheless seem to possess an amazing scientific skill…

CHAPTER I

After Twenty Years

“For such men as you,” said the Administrator of Justice deliberately, “there can only be one punishment. You knew when you undertook scientific espionage that you were gambling with death. You stand trial now for treason as a direct consequence of that gamble.”

Neither Arthur Cassell nor Hartley Moss said a word. The former was fair and thoughtful—plainly a scientist; but his colleague stood half a head taller, aggressive, his big fists beating a silent rhythm on the dock rail. Hartley Moss was a fighter, every inch of him, but because the game of scientific espionage demands both men of physique and scientific knowledge he and Cassell had worked together. And now…

“This day, on the verge of world war,” the Administrator continued, “your activities stand in a revolting light. It is the judgment of the Tribunal that you sold our country—your country too!—into conflict. Tomorrow at midnight, September 19th, 1960, the world will be at war because of you. You will both be exiled to Atlantic Island for life.”

Moss opened his lips to speak, but Cassell nudged him gently and shook his head. With an effort Moss remained silent; then he and Cassell both had to submit to being led from the packed hall, afterwards to take their place in the line with other offenders against the State…

* * * *

Atlantic Island, prison settlement of synthetic rock owned by America, created in 1958 by vast engineering enterprise, was definitely no place from which to try and escape. Around the mighty grey walls of the penitentiary itself was nothing but jagged rock eternally pounded by the ocean. The nearest land was a thousand miles away. It was Britain’s boast that no criminal had ever been known to escape.

But the government did not hold itself responsible for the inhuman methods used on the island. Criminals of a higher order were themselves warders—grim, bitter men as relentless as the stormbound surroundings they ruled. They instituted their own inexorable laws and found a good use for the dungeons deep under the penitentiary itself.

Into one of these dungeons went Cassell and Moss. That they went together was the only leniency permitted them, and this happened because one cell was vacant.

Thus they were left, totally ignored, save for the badly-cooked food and the flat-tasting water which was brought to them at intervals.

At first they hoped for last-minute release, but it never came. Hope gradually died. The beards grew on their faces; their hair crept into their necks. Arthur Cassell spent a lot of time thinking. Moss did little but rave—at first.

“Even if we had told the truth at the trial we wouldn’t have got anywhere,” Cassell said one day. “Who there would believe the truth of what we found—that the instigator behind the world war was a Venusian disguised as an Earthman? The fantasy of it! And yet the truth! No Tribunal would ever have believed it without proof, and that we could not give. If only Maralok had not escaped us as he did at the last moment!”

“But he did!” Moss growled, from the shadows. “Maralok will finish his plans to create world war, though heaven knows what idea he has back of it. Seems senseless to me!” They fell silent again, lost in thought. The sea and the wind roared. Outside, a thousand miles away, a world gone mad had forgotten the two supposed traitors on Atlantic Island. War had become a reality. War to the death…

1960… 1970… 1980…The parade of endless years of insufferable carnage. Nation against nation.

1981. A cold inhuman peace brooded over the earth…

Far out on the Atlantic a solitary synthetic rock still stood, its mighty construction unharmed by the attempts of bombers to destroy it. Warders and criminals alike still lived, had forgotten anything existed save their own bitter little world. Deep down in the dungeons men still stirred, half starved, only given food when a provision ship happened to crash against the rocks and spewed forth its valued cargo.

Yes, deep down in the dungeons two men especially still lived, kept alive by the fire of vengeance. Twenty years of hardship and pent hatred was carved into their bearded faces. Their eyes were smoldering pools as they stared at the warder standing in the open doorway of their cell.

Open! Not for the usual exercise round the gaunt yard—but wide open! And that was not all… The guard was grinning, almost vacantly, his usually stone-like countenance split from ear to ear. His keys jangled in his hand.

“Well?” asked Moss’ deep, bitter voice at length.

“You can go,” the man chuckled. “We can all go. No sense in stopping here now a rowing boat’s been thrown up from a wrecked ship. Might as well go out and play…”

“Play?” repeated the voice of Arthur Cassell. He got slowly to his feet. His hair and beard were still blond. “Did you say—play?’

“Sure!” The guard grinned again, then tossed his keys away. “We’re all free. Your cell was the last one; no use for the keys anymore. Let’s go!” He turned away whistling.

The two men stared at each other stupidly. Then suddenly Moss started to laugh until the tears ran down his bearded cheeks.

“Play!” he screamed, pounding the wall. “My God—play! After twenty years of this he—”

“Take it easy, Hart,” Cassell snapped, gripping his friend’s rag-covered arms. “Don’t go off half-cocked! This is a miracle all right, and we’re going to take advantage of it. Something screwy about it all the same. Come on.”

Together they limped out of the cell into the gloomy corridor. Other prisoners, bearded and melancholy, glanced at them but said nothing. In silence they all trooped upwards to the open reaches of the prison yard, and so finally out onto the wild, spume-swept ridge that gave access to the sea.

The prisoners shivered a little in the cold, bracing blast, did their best to get into what sunshine there was. Cassell and Moss kept together, and at last Moss said:

“Take a look at that! They’re nuts, I think.” Cassell did not answer. Certainly something was wrong with the guards. They were singing songs—and incredible though it was, those songs were old-fashioned nursery rhymes! As they sang, they walked skippingly towards the steps leading down the cliff face. The grim-faced prisoners followed, stared down the dizzying stretch at the rowboat anchored far below.

“Certainly act as though they’re crazy,” Cassell admitted at last, frowning. Then he stared down at the boat. “Thousand miles in that, huh? Well, I guess it’s better than stopping here… Near as I can figure it, it’s summer time, so maybe we’ll make it.”

He started down the steps with Moss behind him, and presently they had joined the others—as bewildered as they were by their incredible good fortune. But most baffling of all was the asinine behavior of the warders—men who had been cruelty itself now as cheerful and considerate as it was possible to be. They seemed to take an actual delight in proving that the boat had some food and water enough to see them all through, if they shared alike…

The prisoners glanced at each other and gave it up. Then rowing began. Little by little the boat pulled away from that forbidding pile. The guards still whistled and laughed among themselves; the prisoners pulled on their oars, their faces set and hard within their beards, their exposed skin as white as a fish’s belly.

Once or twice Cassell gazed at the sky and frowned. There was something queer about it. It was a paler blue—and he could see one or two stars despite the sunlight. He wondered if his eyesight was defective from so much enforced gloom.

“No, it is paler, and there are one or two stars,” Moss confirmed, as the matter was put to him. “Can’t quite figure it out.” He paused in his rowing and stared around on the heaving waste of waters. “Odd there are no ships around,” he muttered. “Wonder if the war ended, or if they’re still at it?”

Nobody attempted to answer his question, the guards least of all…

More rowing. Endless rowing. Occasional sleep, occasional food. On and on, over the heaving deep…

CHAPTER II

A City in Ruins

Neither Cassell nor Moss remembered how many days and nights elapsed on the ocean. At times squalls hit them, but in the main, the weather was warm and sunny. Food, carefully rationed, lasted out—and the reckless generosity of the guards was a thing of wonder…

Then at last there hove from out of the blurred horizon that line they all longed to see—the coastline of America, growing slowly more distinct as the minutes passed.

Rowing went on harder than ever, with the desperation that only returning exiles can command. But the more they rowed the more puzzled they became… The coastline became clearer.

“That isn’t America!” breathed Moss at last, staring under his shading hand. “Or is it? England perhaps? No—not England…” He broke off, mystified. The guards too had ceased their singing and were frowning in perplexity.

“We ought to see the coastline of New York, Philadelphia, or Boston if we’ve followed the route correctly,” Cassell muttered. “And I guess we have. But—”

Silence again. More slap of the oars in water; then at length the coastline was quite close. It was America, yes, but the exiles stared now in dazed silence at where New York should have been. But instead of the towers of Manhattan were skeleton buildings, the shattered shells of once mighty edifices, fallen into utter disuse! The harbors were choked with rusting seacraft. Some of the vessels were half broken up in the mud. One giant transatlantic liner was a mass of barnacles and rust, a rag of a flag flapping in the breeze.

The moment they came within jumping distance of a deserted jetty, neither Cassell nor Moss waited for the others. They leapt out of the boat, swam the intervening few feet of water, and finally climbed to the jetty top, waved their arms to the little boatload as it continued its journey to the actual shore.

“Empty… Shattered!” whispered Moss in an awed voice.

Stupefied, they stared around them, at the smokeless remains of chimneys, the boulder-strewn streets, the grass crawling up the buildings, the collapsed subways, the twisted elevateds…

Without a word, they started to walk slowly forward. Beyond the slightest doubt, the old New York had gone. In fact, nearly all traces of civilization itself had disappeared. Everywhere the two moved were enormous craters, presumably from bombs, and tumbled masonry…

Then, turning a corner, they came uport something totally unexpected… Right in the middle of a square—its actual name and location forgotten—were people—men and women in makeshift clothes. Some of the men were heavily bearded with crudely-cropped hair; the women’s hair hung to their waists. Savages, apparently—and yet they were toiling upon a massive mechanical device of almost unbelievable complexity, whilst near to them was a one-time factory hastily restored, from the interior of which came the steady clangor of industry.

“War survivors; children of those who fought, perhaps,” Moss said thoughtfully. “Can’t be anything else…”

“But look what they’re building!” Cassell cried, pointing. “It looks to me like a projector of some sort… Guess we’d better look into this.”

He strode forward and touched one of the men on the arm as he turned to head towards the factory. Immediately he looked around, revealed a fresh, youthful face with honest blue eyes. A downy incipient stubble furred his chin and upper lip. For a moment he seemed a little surprised at the sight of the two bearded men in front of him—then he gave a broad, welcoming smile.

“Hello!” he exclaimed cheerfully. “Come to play with us?”

“Huh?” Cassel said amazedly; then the memory of the guard’s words on Atlantic Island came back to him. He gave a puzzled frown and shook his head.

“No; we’re not playing. What’s that you’re building there?”

“Oh, that? Nothing much. We’re just building because we want to, that’s all. Might as well. We get tired of just playing, you know.”

“Yeah; I suppose so.” Cassell scratched his matted head and the man turned away, went with a walk that was very close to a trip, towards the factory.

“They’re nuts!” Moss said flatly, clenching his fists. “They start on building a machine so complex we can’t understand it, and say they do it as a relief from playing… Art, there’s something mighty screwy going on around here!”

They stood watching the machine-builders for a while. The whole thing was a profound paradox—men and women, singing with childish glee, laughing with each other, as they constructed an instrument complicated enough to turn a trained engineer gray with worry… Where was the reason in that? And, now that the two came to notice it, some of the women had daisy chains around their hair; and the men argued with each other at intervals like schoolboys over a box of candies. They were childish—utterly childish!

Baffled, the two turned at last and stared in at the door of the colossal factory. It was working at full speed. Blast furnaces were in action; overhead belts were slapping on their flywheels—but again the vast industry of the place was produced by men and women with the bodies of adults and the manner of children. They skipped everywhere, laughed and played as they worked.

“Perhaps,” Moss said slowly, tugging at his beard, “they’ve gone simple-minded after the awful horror of the war?”

Cassell shook his blond head. “Simple, nothing. They would have horror in their eyes, tragedy stamped indelibly in their faces—like refugees. There’s none of that. They’re happy—gloriously, beautifully happy! Nor do they seem to realize what they’re really doing. All this is so much fun to them—and yet what they do is accurate! That’s what gets me… Gosh, what a homecoming!”

Dazed, they turned away, began to wander at random. Time and again they came across the groups of people building machinery, all of it extremely complicated and accompanied by the inevitable nearby factory. And through it all one factor stood out—the machines were definitely strange and terrible engines of war! Cassell could recognize that much with his scientific knowledge; so could Moss, to a lesser degree. Children were building engines of war, when they ought to be sickened by the very notion of the idea!

They had their habitations too, these happy, enigmatic folks. They used roughly-constructed tents. In every direction were communities of them—but, although the people knew how to build machines, their ideas on tents were appalling. Not one of them was properly erected, and the conditions inside them were close to pandemonium.

“But why tents when they could live in the ruins of one of these huge department stores?” Moss demanded, waving his arm to the rearing buildings around them—shattered at the tops, but still serviceable below. “They’d get much better protection from the night or the chance of storms… Maybe with it being summer, though, they’re not concerned.”

Cassell did not answer. He was staring down over the wilderness of ramshackle dwellings reaching right down in the still harbor waters. Men and women moved in and out, cooking over crude wood fires. Why wood fires, with all the forces of an electric factory at their disposal?

“Funny thing,” he said at last, “there isn’t a real child in sight! The adults are the children instead…” Again he brooded over the strange scene, glanced up at the pale sky with its faint smattering of stars; then at last he shook himself. “I guess that for the moment we can’t do better than have some of their food—play with them, as they term it. Then we’ll hunt up a piece of glass or something and take this fungus off our faces. I feel like Santa Claus… Come on.”

They turned, strolled through the hot afternoon sunshine, gazing around on the ruins as they went…

CHAPTER III

The Voice

The people raised no objection as the two invited themselves. They were accepted as friends without question, were given food—which analysis showed to be canned stuff evidently taken from what provisions the city still had left—and drink. Usually it was just hot water, sometimes flavored with an extract when one was lucky enough to find it.

For several days both men made no attempt to solve the mystery. They shaved with a broken bottle, cut their hair, exposed themselves by longer degrees to the sunshine, made makeshift clothes. By the time they were finished, they were fairly unrecognizable, save for those grim lines of twenty imprisoned years chiselled forever in their faces.

The childlike manner of the people never altered. They slept too with the blissful innocence of children. Sometimes, they gambolled about as no adult ever would, then they returned in droves to their machine building.

The more Cassell and Moss looked into the matter, the more baffled they got. There were infinite varieties of machines in all parts of the ruined city. In one quarter there were thousands upon thousands of small shells, obviously loaded with explosives infinitely more powerful than anything the intervening war had created.

“But where the hell do they get the knowledge from?” Moss yelled at last in utter exasperation, as he and Cassell stood in the evening light gazing down on this latest revelation. “Why are they doing it anyway? They’ve no more intention of starting a war than a bunch of kids on a Sunday school picnic… Listen, Art, are we batty or are they? Maybe that twenty years on the island did something to us, eh?”

“No,” Cassell answered quietly; “that twenty years did something to these people. Consider the facts— They perform these masterpieces of engineering, yet they don’t know the first thing about radio. They are children in mind, a fact which is proven by there being no genuine children. Though, physically, these folks are quite capable of marrying and producing children, they don’t. And why? Because, as in children, the sexual urge isn’t there.”

An amazed light spread over Moss’ rugged face. “Lord, you’re right! I never thought of that!”

“Of course I’m right. We don’t know how long that war lasted, but we do know that it left behind a race of people who are childlike in the ordinary way, yet gifted with a peculiar detached genius. Either they are deliberately planning a war on something or somebody, or else they are being ordered to do it…”

“Ordered? By what?”

Cassell shrugged, his eyes perplexed. “Search me! Point is, are other countries in the world similarly affected? Are the British, the Germans, the Russians and the French all doing the same thing? How to find out? Set to work to build an airplane, or else patch up one left from the war. Radio’s no use. We could build a receiver easily enough, but I doubt if anybody would be transmitting. So our first job is to get an airplane.”

“Might mention in to the young chap we first spoke to,” Moss said. “Seems to have stuck to us all along. Maybe he’d like to build us one for fun,” he finished, grinning.

But his jest met with a surprising response. The young man, when they had singled him out for questioning from the city workers, no sooner heard their suggestion than he led the way to a quarter of the city they had so far not explored. To their amazement they beheld literally square miles of oval objects glittering in the sunshine, some of them in the process of having machinery loaded into them.

“By all the saints, space-travel!” Moss gasped. He clutched at his friend’s arm. “Space-travel, man! We certainly had not mastered that when we got shoved on the island.”

“No.” Cassell’s blue eyes narrowed in sudden thought.

“So, the machines we see being built everywhere are for final inclusion in these ships,” he muttered. “I suppose they are spaceships?” He glanced at the young man quickly.

“Travel anywhere,” he answered, smiling. “Out into space, across the earth. Use atomic force recoil rockets.”

“Atomic force too,” Cassell muttered; then aloud, “You can control these things? Make them fly?”

“Sure. All of us can. We play games with them.”

“We’ll skip the games. Could you take my friend and I around the world and back here?”

The young man nodded, then glanced at the sun. “Sunset in two hours,” he mused. “We can be back by then… Come along in.” He gave another smile and led the way, whistling, to the airlock of the nearest machine.

“Around the world in two hours?” Moss breathed, as they marched after him. “Gosh! That’s traveling, huh?”

Cassell nodded, but made no observations. He seemed to be thinking. His frown deepened as he and Moss beheld the perfect interior of the space machine. It was replete to the last detail. Every instrument was flawlessly made; the seats were perfectly fashioned. There was not a piece of bad workmanship anywhere.

And it had all been made by childish men and women who cooked tinned meats into stews over wood fires and lived in broken-down tents! Moss gave it up and shook his bullet head, but Cassell stroked his chin. Once he glanced through the window at the curiously pale blue sky with its sparse stars, pondered again; then finally he gave himself up to watching as the man closed the airlock and settled himself before the control-board.

The machine answered with perfect ease, lifted with hardly any sensation of motion, curved high over the ruined metropolis and then headed out towards the gleaming ocean. Far below, men and women waved their hands cheerily; some of them threw flowers into the air—

Then New York was far behind as the incredibly fast machine tore with smooth rhythm out over the Atlantic. In a matter of minutes, as it seemed, Atlantic Island loomed up. Moss gave a grim smile as the rock began to retreat behind them, but Cassell stared after it until it was out of sight, debating something deep within his mind…

It seemed no time before England was reached. Without the necessity of landing, it was perfectly obvious that the conditions of America were being repeated here too. Men and women building. Thousands of machines; hundreds of spaceships in what had been Trafalgar Square. Tents, camp fires, waving hands… No cities; only ruins.

Same for France, Russia, Germany, vast parts of China, and numerous other countries. It was all very mysterious, strangely sinister, the visions of these shattered civilizations populated by men and women driving to perhaps a terrible end.

At last the young man turned the flyer around and headed back the way he had come.

“Tell me,” Cassell said thoughtfully, after a long silence, “why do you build these machines? What’s the idea?”

“We build them to play with,” the man laughed, turning a little from his controls.

“But damnit, man, that’s impossible! Don’t you realize that you’re toying around with incredibly complicated things? In the city I have noticed atomic force shells, heat-ray projectors, acid sprayers, energy screen devices, disrupter guns—all kinds of things for producing the most colossal havoc. And to cap it all, you are putting them inside machines that can fly through space or the air at thousands of miles an hour. Why?”

For just a second the young man frowned. “I never thought of it like that before,” he admitted frankly; then with a beaming smile, “We don’t mean it, of course. We don’t want to harm anybody.”

“I can believe that. That’s what makes it so baffling. Why do something you don’t want to do? Don’t really care about?”

“Because we’re told to. It’s the Voice, you know. We can’t ignore the Voice…”

Cassell gave a start. Moss leaned closer.

“What Voice?” Cassell asked very deliberately.

The young man shrugged. “The one that talks so often, that tells us just what to do. We’ve got to obey; we can’t help it. If we didn’t obey I suppose we’d be hurt…”

“But where the devil does this Voice come from?” Moss demanded. “Gosh, if I could lay my hands on it I’d—”

“Nobody knows where it comes from,” the young man broke in. “It just comes. We all hear it. We all obey. Children should obey, don’t you think?”

“But you’re not children!” Cassell yelped; then he immediately regretted the sharpness of his tone.

The man visibly winced. With obvious hesitation he said: “But—but we are children. You are too, aren’t you…? No; you are different. You’re like—like Gods. You’re not the Voice, are you?” he finished in awe.

Cassell shook his head patiently. “No, we’ve nothing to do with that. We’re not Gods, either—but we’re not children! Nor do we hear the Voice… Tell me, how long did the war last?”

“Fifteen years, I think. Nobody was left—not many, anyhow. And besides, at the end of it, nobody wanted to fight. We all made friends and started to do what the Voice commanded. We’re still doing it. But you see, though we do what the Voice commands, we can’t do anything without it—so of course we make our own little homes and live as best we can…”

“Suffering Cat, genius on tap!” Moss exclaimed, slamming his great fist on the chair back. “Turned on and off to make them work. When it isn’t in force they’re normal—or rather childlike. And they live that way.”

“Yeah.” Cassell nodded, then his keen eyes turned back to the young man. “What’s your name, feller?”

“Grant Felbury.”

“And your age and birthplace?”

“I don’t know my age. I was born in New York, I think.”

Cassell made a brief note. For a long time he sat musing, then as Atlantic Island loomed up again in the setting sunshine he leaned forward quickly. “Land on that Island,” he ordered briefly. “Think you can make it?”

Felbury nodded and brought the flyer down in an easy curve. The moment it stopped on the rocky tableland Cassell got to his feet and took down one of the several small disintegrating guns from the wall rack. He studied its mechanism for a moment, then turned to the surprised Moss.

“Be back in a moment,” he said. “I’m—”

“Don’t be long,” Felbury broke in anxiously. “At sundown the Voice usually ceases to speak and when that happens I shan’t be able to drive this anymore. It’s only while the Voice speaks in my mind that I can do it.”

Cassell frowned for a moment, glanced at Moss’ astounded face, then he turned sharply and opened the airlock. Through the window he was visible approaching the forbidding metal walls of the great, deserted penitentiary. He passed through the open gates… In ten minutes he returned, carrying a piece of gray metal in his hand.

“Aren’t things baffling enough without your slicing off chunks of metal and carting them around?” Moss demanded as he came back into the control room and closed the lock. “What’s it for, anyway? A souvenir of twenty years in hell?”

Cassell smiled faintly. “Just a hunch,” he shrugged. He hung the gun back in its rack. “O.K., Grant—let’s go.”

Again the machine took the air, and as the sun dipped into the calm ocean the vessel finally landed back almost in the place where it had started from.

“Only just in time,” Grant smiled, as they climbed outside. “The Voice has ceased now… See you again. I’m going to have some fun with the others.” He turned away, laughing, and for a long time the two friends; stood looking after him as he headed towards the tents. Cassell still had his piece of metal in his hand.

“Well, what now?” Moss demanded at length. “Where do we go from here? Hunt down the Voice and poke the eye out of the scientist who’s responsible?”

“What a child calls a Voice may cover a vast territory,” Cassell replied pensively. “We’re a long way from the solution yet.” He turned and looked back at a massive, half-shattered store some little way behind them.

“That’s going to be our headquarters from now on,” he said. “It’s large, and we won’t be interrupted. We’ll start in to equip it with whatever machinery or scientific tackle we may need—and from there, mingling with the people only for food or information—we’ll start in to track this mystery down. I believe I’ve got the first clue, too…” He held up the chunk of metal.

“I think you’re screwy,” Moss said sourly.

“Maybe I am. We’ll see. Also I want to know if there are any birth records left in the Public Statistics Building—what’s left of it. I want to know all about Grant Felbury. I want the date of his birth, and his name isn’t a common one by any means… The rest will be analysis, and finally maybe we’ll find out what the hell the Voice is… Now let’s go and look our headquarters over.”

CHAPTER IV

The Eternal Children

Cassell’s methods of tracking down the mystery were utterly complex to Moss. All he could do was equip the great ground floor of the store they had taken over with whatever crude necessities of life he could find, and thereafter assumed the role of housekeeper while Cassell prowled around the city putting together bits and pieces of the puzzle.

By degrees, he assembled pieces of equipment of an electrical nature, submitted the metal he’d brought from Atlantic Island to various tests. After that he proceeded to make notes—so many of them that at last Moss’ impulsive, restless nature could stand it no longer.

“Say,” he demanded one evening, as Cassell sat in the shadows before his equipment, “what exactly have you squeezed out of all this? When do we start fighting somebody or doing something? I’m going nuts for lack of some fast action.”

“Sorry, but you’ll stay housemaid till I’m through,” Cassell answered briefly. “I’m going to piece matters together…” He hesitated, then asked with a wry smile, “Does it surprise you to know that Grant Felbury is eighty-seven years of age?”

Moss stared blankly. “What! That young chap who drove us around the earth? The one with the fluff on his chin?”

“The very same. What’s more, several apparently young men and women whose names I’ve asked for and have afterwards managed to track down in the birth records, are clearly shown to be well over the age of sixty! There are younger ones, of course—thirty or thirty-five, but the great majority of these ‘young’ people should be on the verge of senility.”

“But are you sure?” Moss demanded in amazement. “Maybe you’ve got the parents, not the children.”

“No; they’re the right people. I’ve checked up on that. And in so doing I’ve got a bit nearer the solution of the mystery… Think back on the strange behavior of the guards on Atlantic Island. Without any apparent warning they went all friendly, behaved as childishly as these folks in the city here—or those all over the world for that matter. But were the fellows who’d spent their lives in the dungeons like us at all childish? They were not! They were grim, bitter, and very much mature. In other words—normal.”

“So what?”

“Just this. It proves, I believe, that whatever made people kiddish did not affect those who were buried nearly all the time in metal-bound dungeons. The guards were out in the open quite a lot—nearly all the time, in fact…” Cassell broke off and glanced at the piece of metal he had brought from the Island. “That piece of metal is from the wall of our cell,” he resumed slowly. “It’s mijutin, of course, and the walls of all the other cells were made of the same stuff. It was made impervious to all known methods of destruction—but not to the ultra-modern disintegrator gun I used to carve out this chunk. Point is, however, that in being made so invulnerable, it also blocked all known radiations—yes, even cosmic waves, which will normally go through eight feet of lead. It deflects cosmic waves utterly, according to my tests.”

“Wait a minute!” Moss breathed tensely. “You don’t mean that some sort of radiation from space produced these effects on these war survivors, and that we prisoners escaped it because of the mijutin walls of our cells?”

Cassell nodded slowly. “Exactly what I do mean.”

They sat looking at each other for a moment, then Moss began to scratch his bull neck. “Yeah, that’s all right, but how the heck do eighty-year-old people skip around like kids? What’s done it?”

Cassell got to his feet and moved to the glassless window. He nodded to the pale blue evening sky. “There’s the explanation,” he said slowly. “It occurred to me that the paleness of the sky and the one or two stars even in daytime might be caused by a thinning of the upper atmosphere. I asked myself what might cause that. I had dim suspicions, but I had to verify them by hunting up newspaper records. I dug some out of the vaults of the New York Sun offices and found several recordings on the progress of the war…

“Without boring you with the build-up, it is perfectly clear that the war fulfilled all the grave expectations of mankind in its viciousness—but outstanding of all facts is that bombs, incredible quantities of poison gases, incessant aerial explosions, consequent steady tumult of the air, combination of poison gases with the natural atmosphere, finally produced a remarkable effect. The upper layers of the atmosphere united in several places with the risen poison gases. Explosions took place time and time again—they’re mentioned in the newspaper records as sheets of flame miles long. Out of that there could finally emerge only one thing, a tremendous weakening of the Heaviside Layer—the ionized shield around the earth—and consequently a clearer view of the void beyond.”

“And also an increased supply of radiations poured in from space?” Moss demanded eagerly. “Am I right?”

“Dead right. Radiations which we and the other prisoners, protected by miiutin metal, escaped…” Cassell meditated for a moment. “That accounts for the paleness of the sky and the daylight stars. It also means that the special radiations responsible for evolution came to earth in ten-fold the quantity.”

“But that would mean rapid old age—”

“That’s what I thought, until I remembered that maturity, according to Mendel, is achieved in a human being at eighty-years of age. After that the scale swings the other way and, if death could only be somehow circumvented, the body would start to rebuild itself by slow degrees—even as universes rebuild from the shattered remains of their earlier existence. If you doubt the idea, consider second childhood—and when you do, remember that ordinary second childhood has all the limitations of a natural evolution and a normal atmosphere. With a changed atmosphere—as it is now—and fuller radiations, age strides rapidly into second childhood and life starts all over again.

“Remember too that in the days of the Biblical Ancients, the atmosphere was probably pretty similar to what it is now… Remember that Moses, it is recorded, was a young man at one hundred and forty! Many of the Ancients were eternal, only vanished when their minds mastered their bodies—but that’s beside the point. What we know is that these people should ordinarily be old, but thanks to evolutive radiation changes, they’ve attained maturity and at full speed have recaptured youth once more. That’s why Grant couldn’t give his age. He’s probably forgotten his earlier life entirely, like the rest of ’em.”

“Then—then at that rate they may never die?” Moss demanded.

“Definitely they won’t. They’ll rejuvenate each time—which is life as it should be. Eternal—happy—enjoyable. Only the slow thickening of the atmosphere once more with the course of centuries will produce the old conditions.”

“And we haven’t come under this influence?”

“Not yet, but we shall do so as time passes. These people have had years under the influence. The war ended ten years ago because they had come under the influence. We’ve only had a week or two.”

Moss stroked his chin, then shrugged. “Well, I guess that clears up the childishness all right—but it doesn’t clear up the mystery of the Voice that Grant was rambling about. I got the idea some scientist might have buried himself somewhere around and was using vibrations or something. How’s that?”

“Miles out,” Cassell sighed. “I’m on with the mystery right now. That Voice is nowhere on earth; I’m sure of that. Remember one dominant factor— If the atmosphere thinned enough to permit evolution radiations coming in, it would also permit other radiations to pass through. That Voice Grant referred to is, I think, somewhere in outer space, and because of our thinned ionized layer, it easily penetrates to Earth’s surface. Radio may locate it; I hope so, anyway, though how these folks pick it up I’ve yet to figure.”

Cassell stopped talking, meditated for a long time while Moss still rubbed his chin… then at last Cassell turned to his equipment and began a laborious building up of components…

* * * *

For days, Cassell labored on his radio equipment, at last had fashioned a powerful short-wave receiver—but the results were hopeless. He got nothing out of space save a continuous crackle and hiss of static and solar interference. Certainly there was no Voice…

After the fourth attempt, he sat in bitter silence before the instrument. Outside, darkness had fallen. Stars such as Earth had been previously denied were strewn in the calm, clear sky. Faintly on the soft wind the laughs and cries of the playing Eternals floated through the glassless windows.

“Nothing doing?” asked Moss disappointedly, hands in pockets.

“Nope…” Cassell’s brooding eyes stared out onto the distant lights of the camp fires. “Listen how they laugh and play,” he murmured. “Children, and we struggle and toil to understand what controls them because we are not children…” He paused and mused over that, said it again, “…because we are not children. Lord! I wonder!” he cried hoarsely.

“What?”

He swung round. “The child mind is receptive to ideas which a mature mind cannot receive. Think of the well-known innocence of children, the simple way they accept things, and then— Their minds are more receptive than ours! That’s it! It is not an actual Voice they hear, not a radio communication. That was our notion of the business. What they are getting is mind communication—telepathic thought-waves out of space which their clear, untrammeled minds pick up naturally. Besides, their minds are extra clear because of their fast evolution which has eradicated all old hide-bound beliefs, which normally blind the brain to receptivity.”

“Thought waves!” Moss gasped. “But who would send thought waves to earth, anyway?”

“Only one person would conceivably do it—the man we owe so much. Maralok, the Venusian—”

“You mean that dirty swine is back of all this—”

“It’s a shot in the dark, but I believe I may be right. If it is Maralok driving these people to make fresh war plans…” Cassell’s eyes narrowed vengefully; then suddenly he swung around. “You carry on as usual,” he said shortly. “I’m going to start on another track. First call is the observatory in what was Central Park. Still standing. I want to take a look at Venus, see if anything unusual’s in sight.”

He went out at a run. It was two hours before he was back, grimly smiling.

“Nice work,” he murmured. “The clearer atmosphere on Earth has helped things a lot. I used the X-ray analysis plates and they penetrated the Venusian cloud belt fairly effectually. The Venusian cities are going full blast… I’m pretty certain Maralok’s mixed up in all this somewhere. Rather queer things going on on Mars, too. The airlet valves to their underground cities, which we used to call canals, remember, are operating at top speed. Activity there too; but I’ll still back my bottom dollar on those Venusian devils, though why Maralok should want to drive a collection of people, whom he must surely know are childish, into yet another war, has me licked.

“However, I’ve now got my next move to make. I’m going to get Grant Felbury to come here and submit to a scientific test. I’m going to devise a brain-reader, such as our scientists used in 1950 for reading the minds of spies—outgrowth of the old lie detector, if you recollect? They tried using one on us at the trial, but we gave away nothing.

“The instrument will relay whatever thoughts pass through Grant’s mind to transformers. In turn, those vibrations will be transplanted to steel pick-up tapes, then I can listen in to those vibrations myself and interpret them with a radio device. Simple enough—and Grant’s mind will be as clear as a bell, because he’s nothing to hide. O.K.—you can give me a hand to start building… Come on.”

CHAPTER V

A New Order

So the work began, Cassell using all his skill and calling into being knowledge that had been enforcedly shelved in his mind for twenty years—but by degrees he built his mind-reader, a complicated contrivance of wires, tubes and magnets.

When at last he was satisfied, he summoned Grant Felbury. Unhesitatingly, the young-old man agreed to the suggestions put to him, took up his new quarters in the department store and only departed each day to obey the orders of the Voice. But those orders were noted down by Cassell.

By degrees, writing down every word given back to him over the recording tapes, he began to build up data—through days, through weeks, as the work of the men and women went on. Moss noticed that his friend’s face was usually either astounded or bitter by turns, then at last he came to the point where he decided to unburden himself.

“Incredible though it sounds,” he said slowly, “these thought-vibrations are not intended for the Earth at all! Yes, you can stare! They are intended for Mars, not Earth—and as I see it, the Venusians, with Maralok undoubtedly somewhere in the background, are using electromagnetic waves for the purpose of transmitting amplified thought commands, which of course interpret naturally into any language. Those electromagnetic waves penetrate through Venus’ dense atmosphere and thereafter spread out in ever-widening circles. They also penetrate the thin air of Mars with perfect ease, and it seems logical to assume that the Martian brain, being pretty advanced, is perfectly receptive to these thought commands… Now, normally the Earth would not get a vestige of those waves because the Heaviside Layer would deflect them—but because it is so badly weakened, and because these people have childish, receptive minds, the orders are being obeyed here as well!”

“Gosh!” Moss whistled. “The possibilities that may—”

“Let’s get it straight,” Cassell broke in, musing. “From all the notes I’ve made, I can arrive at only one possible solution. Before Maralok came to Earth, he had already defeated the people of Mars in their underground cities. That planet automatically became a vassal world to Venus, populated by beings utterly crushed. Maralok then came to Earth and started a world war, knowing from our piled up armaments that out of the carnage there could only emerge a race of demoralized savages. How, afterwards, to conquer those savages? By sheer weight of arms, against which they would be quite defenseless because their own materials had been used up…

“But Venus alone might not have enough armaments, already depleted from the Martian conquest. Therefore the Venusians decided to force the Martians, against their will, to build a supplementary armada… But in so doing, Maralok has defeated himself! He evidently has no idea of what has happened to our atmosphere, no idea that two men like us still have normal knowledge, no idea that instead of defenseless savages there is a race of people building up a vast armada as fast as he gives the orders…”

Moss gripped his friend’s arm. His eyes were shining.

“Man alive, do you realize what this means?” he yelled. “We can avenge ourselves. Avenge the war—”

“Yes, I know.” Cassell’s face was as set as steel. “We shall strike first! The people here look on us as something Godlike; they’ll do what we tell them. I’ve got to get the rest of the world’s peoples to see reason…”

“That’s my job!” Moss insisted. “I’m an expert in war organization, remember. I’ll lead the mightiest battle fleet any Venusian ever saw! By God—yes!”

* * * *

Thereafter it was Moss who became the dynamo of energy, using at last his long pent-up desires for fast action. He went into the midst of the people with all the flourish of an orator. By words and promises he explained the situation. He doubted if half the men understood what he meant, but they did at last express a ready willingness to do whatever he desired—to strike at this mysterious presence who called itself the Voice, who was oppressing them.

Moss could not pause at this stage. With Grant Felbury as his pilot, he started a world tour, explained by the use of Cassell’s brain-transferer to people of other lands exactly what was afoot. The brain-reader did away with the difficulty of foreign languages.

Then there were more difficulties, even when he had gained the co-operation of all the childlike peoples of the world. He had to make sure that the men who would be pilots would not lose the knowledge they possessed when the Voice was out of commission. The only way to do that was to spend hours in instruction, once he had himself learned the intricacies of spaceship control. Odd indeed to teach people how to control a vessel which they handled flawlessly when under telepathic orders.

But there it was. Moss worked with superhuman determination, instructed gun units, pilots, assistant-pilots, rocket fuel men, generally built up through the ensuing weeks an army that he felt he could rely on—while those he had not singled out went on with the Voice’s orders and continued building machinery and ships.

Not that Cassell was idle by any means. It was his task to make a second mind-reader and set out for Mars in an effort to get the Martians to understand what was controlling them and obtain their aid. Against two fleets, nothing Venus could provide could possibly stand. So, with Grant as his pilot, Cassell finally set out—was away for nearly five weeks.

Moss, in fact, was getting worried as to his friend’s safety. His own work was completed and he itched for final results. For days he mooned around, waiting—then at last towards sunset one evening he glimpsed the lone returning flyer far out over the Atlantic. Within minutes it settled.

Cassell emerged from the airlock, still looking a bit awed by his first experience of space. He gripped his friend’s big hand warmly. Silently they walked together through the massed rows of spaceships into the department store, had a meal while the gathered men and women around moved themselves without encroaching.

“It’s all set,” Cassell said finally. “Since I was a lone flyer to Mars, no Venusian astronomer spotted me, I guess. I had a bit of a job on, but finally I got down to the underground Martian cities, had an interview with the ruler. They’re queer people, but a mighty fine race all the same. Their armaments were practically nil when Maralok invaded them and took over. With the mind-reader I managed to explain things, and they were pretty astounded to find that their building was under orders. There was no hesitation in their agreeing to ignore the Voice from now on. Unlike Earthlings, their higher mentality has made it possible for them to retain plenty of knowledge; they’re not by any means childish… Anyway, they’ve agreed to join our fleet with theirs the moment we are sighted halfway to Venus. And then…”

“Oh, boy!” Moss breathed, rubbing his hands. “And am I ready! I’ve got every man fixed so he knows exactly what to do… We start at dawn.”

Cassell nodded. “O.K. I’ll turn in and get some sleep. One gets precious little in space…”

* * * *

Dawn. Every man ready. Short wave radio fixed by Moss between ships. No detail overlooked.

Women seemed to be everywhere to see the armada off. Many of them were throwing the wild flowers that grew in profusion in the streets.

Cassell and Moss both gave a final speech, then together with Grant they stepped into their machine at the head of the three thousand fliers. Without a pause, the moment Grant was settled at the control board, Moss snapped on the radio microphone; his order for departure passed the whole length of the armada.

One by one, the ships rose with the easy grace of birds, exhaust tubes flaring steadily. Up into the pale, rosy sky… Into the remoter heights… Out of sight of those below.

With a speed that seemed almost incredible, occasioned entirely by the terrific blasts of atomic power, the ships tore through infinity, out beyond the moon’s orbit—out into the emptiness that Cassell had already seen. Even so, the wonder of it gripped him again—and Moss. For a moment, the magnitude and incomprehensibility of space made them both forget the errand on which they had come.

Then at length Moss took a grip on himself again, giving orders. For endless hours, the ship flew onwards, then as they finally crossed the half way line between Earth and Venus, there spewed from the distant red ball of Mars a cloud of silver gray—more space machines, thousands upon thousands of them, equipped as were the Earth machines, in every detail.

By slow degrees, as Venus loomed larger in the cosmos, the Martian fleet caught up… Through the portholes, Moss caught an occasional glimpse of the men of the red planet—curious, fur covered beings they seemed to be, with big pathetic eyes and large dome cases. But their physical structure did not matter. They were united with Earthlings in a common cause—vengeance!

Venus became even larger, shining silver white with her cloud canopy. Then she filled all space. The vast armada altered position to sweep horizontally to the Venusian surface, plunged below the dense cloud belts…

Both Cassell and Moss caught their breath at the vision below.

In the main, the planet was steamy and hot, ridged with titanic mountains, but wherever there was solid land were squat, powerful cities breathing the very soul of scientific power. Everything was orderly, well planned. Here and there Venusians were moving along the specially designed tracks, but as they caught sight of the first of the ships, they started to run.

“We’ve caught them by surprise all right,” Moss breathed, hands clamped on the window frame. “That’s just what we wanted. They showed neither Mars nor Earth any quarter, and by Heaven they’ll get none from us…”

He swung around, snapped on the microphone.

“Release all weapons on all cities!” he barked out. “Leave no building standing and no Venusian alive!”

Then he swung back to the deadliest of the ship’s instruments—the disrupter, wheeled it around so that the sights were in line with the specially devised opening in the vessel’s casing.

“O.K.,” he snapped out to Grant. “Follow out Cassell’s orders from now on. He’ll direct the course…”

He closed the switches and the power leapt into the instrument. As his merciless eyes glared through the sights at the first of the great buildings below, his mind went back suddenly over twenty years on a stormbound island, of a world convulsed with a war that mankind, left to itself, could have diverted. Millions of lives drowned in blood… To appease Maralok!

He fired the gun. His action was enough—the fleet followed suit. The Martians, unable to understand his orders over the radio did at least understand this. They struck too—without question or mercy. The air became thick with blast rays; vicious acid sprayers rained corrosives down on the now thousands of Venusians scurrying in the streets below.

Too late they forced their own fleet into action. Gallantly though their numbers fought, there were not enough of them to combat the numbers that their own avarice had literally brought into being.

Time and again, Earth and Martian ships hurtled back and forth like silver shuttles over the city, tearing out huge pieces of the buildings with their weapons, blasting the very ground from under the feet of the would-be conquerors, burying them under up-belched tons of rock and earth. Smoke rose in clouds—smoke, dust and debris as entire buildings lifted from their foundations and then rained back on the decimated occupants.

Without a single pause, the twin armadas raced time and time again around the Venusian globe, omitted no city, spared no single spot of inhabited land. They exhausted their acids and supplies of bombs; they burned out their gun firing points, they seized up their smoking hot disrupters… But by that time, the Venusian landscape was a haze of drifting smoke from end to end.

There was nothing—nothing but a shambles lying in steamy, sickly heat…

Weak from strain, perspiration rolling down his face, Moss straightened his aching back. Wearily he gave the signal.

“Enough! Return home! Our work’s finished…”

He made a motion to Grant at the switchboard—then in a sudden rush the whole reaction caught up on him. He collapsed his length on the floor…

He returned to consciousness to find Cassell bending over him, discovered that he was lying on the emergency bed.

Cassell smiled faintly. “You’re all right now,” he murmured. “Just the strain, that’s all. But boy, did you wipe ’em up! I don’t think a single stone is left lying on another on all Venus… We’re on the way back now—and from now on it’s got to be our job to reconstruct. My job, anyway.”

“You can have it,” Moss said, sitting up and rubbing his head. “I’ve done my whack—but if you want anything military, call on me. Incidentally, what are you going to do when we arrive back? How do we finish up? Live like children…”

“No.” Cassell shook his head. “You and I are adults, old man—and so are several of the men we have trained. In time though, we’ll all be childish unless we take measures to stop it. We can do it by wearing light helmets of mijutin. If we always wear them, we will never slip into childhood. The others can choose… Maybe it’s only fair they have childishness again.

“With the knowledge that we have we can rebuild the world anew. The people will obey us; we’ve become endeared as Gods to their hearts. We’ll eliminate all causes of discord and create a perfect planet. We’ll make a deal with Mars too, and get their assistance. Mars and Earth will go hand in hand after this…

“But for this ideal, there will be a price,” Cassell finished slowly. “To become the masters we shall have to forfeit a chance of childish, carefree abandon and, more important, the gift of eternal life… But if we live our life span and leave a happy world for the others, does it matter so much? They may learn in time, for the atmosphere will thicken until there will be no more Eternals. Then they must choose for themselves, either use or destroy what we shall build up.

“For us—either peace and progress, or stagnation and eternity. Which?”

“You know me,” Moss grinned. “Life eternal hasn’t got much fascination for me, anyway. I’m with you in building a vast new empire…”

He held out his powerful hand. With a smile, Cassell seized it, gripped it tightly. At the control board Grant Felbury started to whistle his favorite nursery rhyme…

THE JEWELS FROM THE MOON

The huge fortune in gems that Bull Cassel finds on Luna undergoes a strange transformation in the atmosphere of Earth—a change that unlocks the past and brings forth a threatening horde that should have perished ages ago!

CHAPTER I

The Gems That Melted

Bulton—‘Bull’— Cassell, exile from Earth, stared out grimly into the gulf of space through the observation window of his lone flyer. For ten weary years he had wandered this hell-fired cosmos, driven to it by an extradition order—sent into space as a wanderer for a crime he had never committed… Now at last he could return—and with good effect! Money could buy anything in the ultra-modern world of 2714—even vengeance for his frame-up. That was what he was counting on.

A faintly cynical smile twisted the corners of his big, powerful mouth at the thought; his ugly, ruggedly hewn face lighted with anticipation. Ahead lay the moon, source of the wealth which he alone knew about. Lunar caverns… Rare gems… His thoughts went back swiftly to that day ten years ago when an accident had forced him to land on the moon. That was when he had found them.

“Guess it won’t be long now!” he murmured reflectively, and turning from the window, he sat before the controls and disconnected the robot steering mechanism.

His eyes fixed on the instruments, he drove the short, powerful little space-vessel downwards in a long arc, curving towards the moon’s brilliantly argent surface. He needed no experience in the art of landing on the satellite; struggles with the varied gravities of Jupiter and Mercury had given him judgment of uncanny accuracy.

Ten minutes later, he landed five miles west of the lunar Appenines and sat for a while gazing out into the sun-drenched lunar surface, raging at a temperature of 212° Fahrenheit. In the main, his attention was directed towards the lofty peaks of the Appenines. In the base of one of them was the cleft leading downwards to the cavern he had so fortuitously discovered. At length, he beheld it and a broad grin widened his face.

“Money, huh?” He spat eloquently on the metal floor. “Guess those money-grubbin’ swines of Earth’ll get all the gems their safes can hold before I’m through with ’em! This is going to be my turn! I owe you plenty, John Masterson, and the account’s goin’ to be paid in full!”

A momentary bitterness crossed his face as he remembered the cold, ruthless engineer responsible for his frame-up—then with a shrug he turned aside and scrambled into his heavily armored spacesuit.

Ten minutes later he was walking the ashy, scorching surface of the satellite, heading towards the range. Inside his suit the heat rose stiflingly and set the sweat pouring from his great, massively muscled body. He was thankful for the black, un-diffused shadow of the cleft when at last he gained it.

For a while he stood motionless, accustoming his eyes to the ebon gloom after the blinding glare of the sun—then at length he looked down at the rocky defile leading inward to the moon’s unexplored caverns—unexplored except by him. Luna was classed as a derelict by all spatial navigators.

With careful footsteps, judging as best he could against the sixth of earthly gravity, he traveled downwards, keen gray eyes studying every inch of the route. Presently he was forced to use his helmet torch. Its brilliant beam shone on dusty white pumice-like rock, aridly brittle moon-stuff, the same in these lunar tunnels as on the alternately scorched and frozen surface.

Tunnel after tunnel he followed, searching for and finding the undisturbed directional marks he had scored over ten years before. They led him at last to an immense cavern nearly three hundred feet underground, an unexpected and natural bubble in the strange, riddled mass of the moon.

Through his helmet glass, his face was a study in blank awe as he gazed upon a solid wall of scintillating gems, their facets catching the glare of his helmet lamp. Vermilion, green, saffron, purest violet—colors beyond spectral comprehension—stabbed outward in bars of bewildering loveliness from the stones’ lustrous depths.

He stepped forward, breathing hard, and stared closely at them. Even his ironly unsentimental heart was stirred for a moment by a sense of things transcendentally beautiful. Then the conviction evaporated and he was ruggedly himself again.

“Stones that’ll make diamonds look like shore shingle,” he breathed, “Untold millions in value, and only I know about it! Will this knock their ears off back on Earth!”

He speculated briefly on how the gems had ever gotten into such a strange place, then finding no solution, he shrugged his massive shoulders and set to work with his flame pistol. Ten minutes of steady burning work blasted a clean track around a six-inch square block of the stones. The rest was easy. He pried the block out, found it comfortably heavy in the slight lunar gravitation, then looked at the wall that was left.

Just plain pumice rock. The jewels must be sticking to it like barnacles to a boat. Again brief wonderment touched him, then with another shrug, he thrust the gems under his arm and retraced his steps to the blinding surface. Thirty minutes later he was back in his machine.

Beyond another glance at the stones, he paid them no further attention. The possibility of them cracking or becoming defaced through warmth after the eternal cold of the moon’s interior led him to put them in his storage refrigerator—then, satisfied that an incalculable fortune was within his grasp, he turned the bullet nose of his vessel towards the giant green globe hanging low over the ragged horizon…

Night had fallen when he reached Earth. The stratosphere police let him through, and down on the space grounds outside Great New York, his papers were found to be in order. His exile time limit had expired. He was free to roam the gigantic straddling enormity that had taken the place of the plain New York he had once known.

Once through the inquiry barriers, he debated briefly. It was too late tonight to have the bulge under his leather coat valued. Only thing to do was to head for Rocket Ike’s place over on the east side. He’d be able to drink and sleep safely for the night.

Immediately, he bent his steps in that direction, finding his way with some difficulty in the changed surroundings. Ten years ago Rocket Ike, the tough one-eyed ex-rocket man, had kept a questionable space-drifter’s abode in the city’s most squalid region—and, to Bull’s delight, he found the place still there with Ike himself apparently not a day older.

Bull wasted no time and gave away no secrets. The small sum of money he possessed was sufficient to guarantee him a room for the night. Rocket Ike was affable enough in his coarse, un-effusive way—readily showed Bull to a shoddy little private bedroom at the rear of the place when he had at last made an end of his drinking.

Bull grinned twistedly as he found himself alone. Once he had securely locked the door and removed his deadly flame pistol from his waist-belt, he pulled out the uncomfortable bulge from under his coat. The coarse quilt of the bed seemed a crudely worthless setting for the livid block of varicolored fire he tossed upon it.

“A few more hours and you’ll be a fortune, my beauty!” he chuckled, tossing his massive body down beside it and relaxing with a sigh of relief. “And woe betide the guy that tries to get in this room tonight!”

He clamped his hairy paw over his flame pistol and gave himself up to thought. The sounds of the harbor drifted to him through the slightly open window. He had no intention of sleeping—but before long, the sweet security of Earth, its absolute solidity, lulled him into slumber…

The noisy sounds of the den below began to quiet; rocket men and space-drifters—Venusians, Martians and Earthlings—rabble of the solar frontiers, drifted out into the dark, miasmic shadows. The main floodlights dimmed in the mighty metropolis, the solid bulk of raging power quieted into a brooding, beacon-studded monster awaiting the dawn. Great New York slept, and so did Bull Cassell.

* * * *

Rocket Ike made no attempt to enter his guest’s room. He had reason to remember only too well that Bull had a deadly aim and a fierce temper…but he did wonder vaguely about that bulge under the leather coat. Still, it was none of his business. No use risking his reputation and perhaps his life to satisfy a curiosity.

Three o’clock came and Bull Cassell still lay like a log in the gloom, the light having automatically shut itself off at one a.m.

But beside him something strange was happening to the jewel block! Had he been awake, he would have stared in stupefied amazement.

Each jewel, and there were about forty in all, was undergoing an astounding metamorphosis, losing its vivid flaring coloring and becoming milky and opalescent, oddly curdled. The glory of the radiations had gone; instead it was clear that the gems, whatever their nature, were now infused with a mystic form of inner life.

For an hour, the strangeness went on—for two hours—and at the end of that time the whole jewel block had divided itself into forty distinct slushy segments, no longer gem-like, but doughy. There was another long pause, then with the faintest sogging sound, something emerged from one of the side jewels—a figure of incredible minuteness, no more than an inch long, but none the less flawlessly patterned in the style of an earthly man, wearing minute garments that covered him from head to foot!

He stood for a time in the gloom, apparently attuning his eyes to the light of the turning beacon atop one of the nearer edifices overlooking the harbor. As though satisfied with what he saw, he finally turned to the pasty mess beside him and became active, pulling the viscid substance with little hands until he had freed more living beings like himself.

One after another they emerged, some men, some women, making hardly any impression on the quilt and certainly not in the least disturbing the heavily sleeping man. When at last the forty of them had emerged from their incredible prison, they turned, scrambled down the bed leg, and made for the open window.

Without a sound, they passed to the sill outside and lowered themselves to a telegraph wire. Mysteriously, their purpose unknown, they divided up in parties and vanished in the night—microscopic, perfectly dressed men and women, the majority of them classically good-looking… And Bull still slept…

CHAPTER II

Unseen Power

Bull Cassell became a raving maniac of fury when he awoke and found nothing left of his jewels except a sticky mess giving off an odor like rotten eggs. He jumped from the bed like an unwound spring, flame gun in hand, and charged to the saloon below. Rocket Ike was there, mopping the floor in readiness for opening.

“You blasted rocket-firing swab!” Bull roared furiously, seizing him by the shoulder. “You couldn’t get the damned jewels so you turned a flame gun on ’em to stop me doing it, huh? I’ll show you whether you’ll get away with a cheap trick like that!”

Ike’s one eye slitted viciously. “What in hell are you yammerin’ about, Bull? I never knew you had any jewels, and even if I did—”

“Be damned to that for a tale!” Bull’s tuft of short cut black hair seemed to stand up with the impotency of his fury. “You knew all the time! The door wasn’t open, but the window was! Well, there was a fortune in them gems and I’m going to take pay for you melting ’em! Stand up and take what’s comin’ to you!”

His paw clamped down on his flame gun, but he wasn’t quite quick enough in leveling it. With a vicious twirl, the powerful Ike twisted himself free and brought around his soaking-wet mop with terrific power. It struck Bull clean in the face and sent him reeling backwards with a string of oaths. His gun went off and the flame neatly bisected a row of liquor bottles and mirror behind the bar.

Before he could recover himself, the mop jabbed viciously again and again, struck him in the throat and made his head throb with pain—then fell to his stomach and winded him. He dropped his gun helplessly. Then before he could collect his wits, Ike clutched him by the collar and swung him across the saloon. With a slithering crash he collapsed helplessly in the dirty road outside.

“Come back if you dare!” Ike warned him ominously, the gun held ready in his hand. “Lucky I got my pay from you last night. Get outa here and don’t come back!”

Bull got to his feet, searing expletives rolling from his lips; then gradually a certain sense of coolness took possession of his outraged senses. After all, no man would surely melt a fortune in gems when he could just as easily have stolen them! Besides, Rocket Ike had no grudges to square. The thing didn’t make sense. That thought sobered Bull up a bit and sent him mooching along the harbour side, bullet head bent in thought.

And the more he thought, the more baffled he became. What in hell had gone wrong with the gems, anyway? Solid things like that could not melt, surely, unless… Unless leaving them lying in warm air, close also to his warm body, had done something? After all, they had come from the airless cold of the moon. He remembered his efforts to keep them cold on the journey to Earth.

“You blasted fool!” he said out loud, and more than one passing docker bristled at his truculence. “It must have been the warmth that did it! Like snow in the sun! Gems! Might as well bring home Jovian dirt and try and sell that!”

He scowled and marched on again, uncertain as to what to do. It rather queered his plans for vengeance. Of course, he could spend the time tracking down Masterson, or he could even go back to his ship and determine a new plan of action. But he needed some more Earth in his void-weary bones—plenty more drink and maybe a few women. They were always ready for the space-men.

That new thought momentarily banished the gems from his mind. Carnal pleasures were easier, too, than plotting vengeance. He still had some money. He brightened at the thought and turned his steps in the direction of the nearest liquor house, open in this foul, reeking quarter of the giant city from dawn until midnight. In half an hour, he was in the riotous weed-chewing company of two white-skinned Venusians and a scaly Martian—good guys all of them, and could they park their liquor…!

And while Bull became more and more gloriously drunk through the perpetual sipping of Venusian vermint root extract, the products of his strange gems had disseminated to various parts of the city.

Unseen, inch-high, they moved unnoticed into the offices of some of the city’s highest intellectuals. They invaded the chambers of three famous engineers and sat unseen concentrating upon them. They were present too in the private office of John Masterson, famous scientist—a gaunt, harsh-featured man malignantly crushing anything and everything that showed signs of blocking his path.

They were everywhere—in wall crevices, on picture rails, behind furniture, pursuing some inconceivable plan of their own, all the more potent by reason of its very unexpectedness.

The results were not immediate, but the tiny invaders were untiring. They seemed to possess the capacity for endless hours of profound concentration without the need for rest or food. It was the same with either the men or the women. And despite the smallness of their brains, judged from normal standards, they nonetheless issued a potent hypnotic effect that finally began to have real significance.

The engineers found themselves drawing plans which were quite at variance with normalcy, utterly unaware of the end to which they were working. John Masterson in particular found himself working out a problem in advanced electrical machinery—so profound, so intricate, that he was half frightened at the ease with which he did it. The conviction of unknown powers surged through his brain; he ascribed his new-found genius to an ‘inner force’ Had he raised his cold blue eyes from his notes he would perhaps have seen the ‘inner force’ represented in four pairs of tiny eyes watching him unwaveringly over the top of the great walnut bookcase. But he did not. He went on working deliberately, long after nightfall. His office staff only received curt insults when they reminded him of the time.

None save those few selected ones were aware of anything unusual, and even they were so mentally controlled they did not detect the utter incongruity of the work they were doing. Where normally they would have finished the day’s work and be at home, they were now working steadily, unmindful of food or drink, perpetually puzzled and yet half delighted by the incredible scientific ideas that sprang with easy facility to their brains.

Least of all to be concerned was Bull Cassell. By the time late evening had arrived, he was completely drunk, ready to fight the first man who crossed his path, ready to ray in twain any durned drifter from Mercury to Pluto. Yet deep in his mind was the soaked remembrance of his melted gems; every time they recurred to him, invective rolled freely from his vermint-stained lips.

He did not care what he did or where he went, once he left the saloon. Any alley would do. He moved arm in arm with a Venusian on one side—the second white-skin had got lost somewhere—and a Martian on the other. The three of them bellowed a raucous space shanty at the top of their unlovely voices, the Martian’s high-pitched falsetto blending wincingly with Bull’s basso-profundo.

Then suddenly Bull saw it! He stopped dead and blinked, the bright electric arc high overhead casting his bleared face into a ponderous mass of shadows. But he was not mistaken; his piercingly keen eyes, trained through years to be accustomed to the slightest movements on other worlds, distinctly beheld an inch-high object struggling desperately to free itself from the drainage percolator at the side of the alley, the percolator being a flat metal sheet perforated with tiny holes, self-disinfecting.

Bull whispered an oath. “I’ve got ’em coming on!” he breathed shakily. “Must have! Do you see what I see? That way!” he wound up impatiently, as his Venusian comrade squinted vaguely overhead.

The white-skin failed to see anything—and certainly the Martian didn’t. He was flat on his back, out to the world…

Bull moved forward jerkily and dropped down with a bump that stung his knees. Blankly he stared at the minute thing struggling in the drain. Sudden soberness descended on him.

Thrusting out a blunt finger and thumb, he closed them around the waist of the tiny thing, gave a little jerk and lifted it. Blearily he gazed at it; his intoxication was returning. He could have sworn that the object he was holding was a girl—and passing pretty at that, with fair hair and two tiny spots of blue eyes. She seemed to be dressed in a little silk garment. In the electric arc-light he faintly distinguished her terrified face…

Then, quite convinced that the vermint had been stronger than usual, he put the object gently on the road and headed off wildly into the shadows, unmindful of the Venusian who still gazed vacuously around him.

But the inch-high girl picked herself up, climbed the bordering curb, and also fled at top speed into the squalid darkness.

* * * *

Ceaselessly, week in and week out, while Bull Cassell roamed he cared not where in the city’s cheapest quarters, returning only occasionally to his ship at the space grounds, the little people continued their activities.

Engineers and scientists, gifted with suddenly supernal powers, set about the construction of strange machinery which they themselves did not understand. Nobody in the outside world had any real facts to go upon—but information did leak out three months later that complicated machines had been transferred to the Azores. Why, nobody knew—but determined air pilots scouting the Azores returned with the amazing information that gigantic structures and machines were scattered all over the nine islands and that all forms of normal agricultural life had been obliterated.

That started a veritable fleet of news and television hounds traveling eastward across the ocean, but the airplanes and ships thus employed never got within reasonable distance of the islands before they were blasted to atoms by an unknown form of energy radiated from lofty towers.

Immediately, the old familiar cry of war and invasion flashed across the world, until it became gradually evident that the tenants of the Azores made no attempt to be hostile unless they were directly or indirectly spied upon. Nonetheless, the destruction of American—and some British—boats and airplanes demanded some sort of reprisal. But what? Only fast-moving space-fliers could conceivably defeat those deadly energy rays and both governments were loath to risk such valuable machines when there was no real suggestion of impending war.

Finally, the various authorities went over the earlier photographs and studied in some perplexity the mechanical scenes they presented. From end to end, each of the nine islands was littered with fantastic machinery, together with numerous shed-like buildings and towers of gleaming metal. The study was followed up with an investigation of prominent people missing from New York. To their surprise, the police found that seven of the city’s most famous scientists and engineers had last been seen sailing for the Azores in charge of strange equipment locally constructed, and had not been seen since. To be aware of this fact was one thing but to do anything about it was decidedly another…

Then Bull Cassell heard about it. He was sipping vermint as usual in an east side liquor den when the news indirectly reached him through rocket-hand Johnson of the Earth-Mars line.

“It can’t be other-world invasion, anyhow,” Johnson averred reflectively, over the stained table top. “That sort of thing’s done away with—but it might mean that earthly scientists are getting sore at being controlled too long by boards and committees that don’t know what they’re talking about. If there is something starting from the Azores, it means trouble. They’ve got mighty powerful weapons there—things we’ve never ’eard of. Anyhow, the white-livered boneheads in control of our country and England won’t risk space-machines against ’em. That does mean power—mark my words.”

“Huh…” Bull grunted non-committedly.

Johnson drained his glass, went on talking pensively. “There’s some talk about those Azorians dredging off the coast of the southern island. Maybe it doesn’t mean anything, but maybe it means a lot. You’ve heard about the scientists and engineers missing from the city, of course?”

Bull shook his head. “Nope. Seen no papers or television—heard no radio.”

“I don’t like John Masterson being among the missing,” Johnson muttered depressingly. “He’s too clever by far to be against us. Besides, now he’s gone—”

He broke off, startled. Bull’s glass had suddenly dropped from his fingers to splinter on the table top.

“Masterson!” he shouted fiercely. “Did you say Masterson?”

“Sure, but what—?”

“That’s the guy that framed me ten years ago!” Bull stood breathing hard, veins swelling angrily on his thick neck. He went on talking swiftly, half to himself. “If there’s any menace around those Azores, he’ll be in it, sure as fate. But by Heaven, what a chance to get him! I was trying to figure some way, and now—”

“You’ll never reach the Azores,” Johnson proclaimed drearily. “Look what’s happened to airplanes—and they won’t use spaceships for the same reason.”

“No?” Bull laughed thickly. “We’ll damn well see whether a spaceship can get there or not. It won’t be a lily skin at the controls; it’ll be me— Bull Cassell!”

He spat the eloquence of his assertion, then with a grim nod of farewell, he strode amidst the groups of figures to the outer doors…

CHAPTER III

The Girl from the Jewel

Life felt good again to Bull as he entered his space-machine at the grounds. He had a purpose once more—a motivating vengeance.

Quickly, he closed the air-lock and settled to the controls. The powerful rocket tubes roared and he went off in a streaking line of exhaust into the night sky, curved high atop the huge bulk of Great New York, then sped seaward with ever-mounting velocity. In using his space-machine, he had certain advantages—terrific speed and the opportunity to gain a height denied to ordinary aircraft, excepting the airships of the stratosphere police. Thus it was that he zoomed upward to a ten-mile height before streaking like a silver bullet out across the heaving gray of the Atlantic.

It was impossible to see the Azorest at such a height and in darkness, but his numerous instruments, infallible to a hair’s breadth, told him exactly when he had covered the 2,000-mile stretch. Then he started to dip, exhaust throttled to minimum.

The air whined against the window sockets; he opened his large mouth and let forth a bellowing scream to ease the body tension created by his plummet-like drop—then he flattened the machine out, wiped a trickle of blood from between his lips with the back of his hairy hand. His keen eyes stared through the observation window.

There were lights on the Azores. He could see them distinctly as a haze of twisting dots…and he too had been seen! His vessel became abruptly hot as the edge of a powerful energy beam atop an invisible tower below scraped the bottom plates—then he was zigzagging with brilliant skill through the occasional clouds, moving at such a stupendous pace that he was an impossible target.

As he traveled, he caught glimpses of things he could not understand—of flood-lit machinery working busily on the south island, of immense globes resembling bathyspheres being hauled from the saline depths by cables depending from long-armed cranes. He dared not linger to watch, for fear of destruction. Accordingly, he swung around and shot downwards to the quietest portion of the island, dropped lightly on the shore.

With grim movements, he locked the controls, then patted his flame pistol.

“Now, John Masterson, this is where you get what’s coming to you!” he murmured. “You’ll come back with me to the authorities and give a full explanation for everything, including that frame-up…”

He pulled open the vessel’s airlock and stepped to the exterior. The warm moist air clung like a wet blanket about him. To his right were innumerable metal huts of all shapes and sizes, brightly lit by an illumination that he could swear was cold light—still unfound by the scientists of 2714.

For a moment, he stood frowning, then glanced up at the lofty tower far above him. Evidently, his landing had not been seen. Chuckling to himself, he went slowly forward along the shore line, hiding behind occasional rocks, little by little gaining the vantage point of mechanical operations he had seen from the air.

He gazed in utter bewilderment. His first guess had not been wrong. The globes were bathyspheres, of immensely tough metal; with steady regularity, they descended into the ocean, ascending again within a few minutes. There were other machines, too, resembling gigantic dredging machines, constantly plunging mighty scoops to unguessable depths which arose perpetually amidst boilings of muddy water.

In charge of the operations were four men, none of them recognizable by face, all of them remarkably well built and around middle age. They were attired in curious tight-fitting clothing and moved with a certain efficiency and purpose, controlling the operations of the machinery by a collection of flood-lit switchboards erected on metal pillars imbedded in solid rock.

Bull turned slowly to look around him. As far as he could see, both on this island and the others, there were evidences of industry and super-science beyond his comprehension—almost resembling, in efficiency at least, the highly intelligent work of Martian scientists. But then the Martians were ugly brutes, nor had they any desire or need for Earth conquest. It could not mean that.

“Damned if I—” he began muttering, then he stopped short and clamped his lips shut as something prodded him sharply in the small of his back.

“Keep your hands off your gun and stand up!” The voice was masculine, very clear and distinct.

Muttering under his breath, Bull obeyed, raising his hands—stood staring fiercely in the cold light at a massive man of uncertain age, almost god-like in his blond handsomeness, attired in a tight one-piece garment of dark purple.

“Strangers are not welcome on these islands,” he announced coldly. “Unfortunately, we missed you with the energy disrupters, but the ultimate result will be similar.”

“Yeah?” Bull’s eyes narrowed; his powerful muscles quivered in the desire to act. “Who the blazes are you, anyway? Where are the engineers and scientists that came here? Masterson especially.”

A brief icy smile crossed the man’s face. “In common with the others, he was put to death,” he answered implacably. “We alone are in control here. Once the engineers and scientists finished their hypnotically produced tasks, we exterminated them. A new dynasty has arisen, my friend, to take up the old threads where we dropped them.”

“What old threads? What are you talking about?”

“That is not your concern. You will be imprisoned pending the pleasure of our leader. Forward!”

Bull hesitated and clenched his upraised fists, but he was wise enough to refrain from action. That complicated gun in his captor’s iron-steady hand was no weapon to trifle with; it was obviously far more deadly than any flame pistol… He turned awkwardly and to the accompaniment of various proddings wound his way in and out between the lighted metal shelters, noting as he passed that they were stored with all manner of amazing machinery.

Some were veritable power houses utilizing the ocean for a continuous source of energy. Just glimpses, but they impressed on Bull’s mind that same conviction of science beyond his understanding.

Then, at a command from his captor, he stepped inside one of the buildings and found himself finally in the gloom of a great cage-like affair. Before he was allowed to turn around, his flame gun was whipped from his belt and the open end of the cage clanged shut.

“You will be studied from a distance by our ruler,” came his captor’s cold voice. “It will then be decided what shall be done with you.”

“I can hardly wait,” Bull growled sourly, and he watched bitterly as the door of the building slammed, leaving him in total darkness.

* * * *

Bull could not be sure how much time passed before his moody reflections inside the cage were finally interrupted. He sprang swiftly from his squatting position on the dusty floor as the shed door quietly opened and shut again. Followed the sound of light footfalls.

“Who’s there?” he demanded sharply, tugging at the cage’s tough bars. “Don’t crawl around there! Show yourself! Give me what’s comin’ to me and get it over with, you lily-bellied—”

“Sssh!” came an impatient injunction, and he noted in astonishment that it was a woman’s tone. “Don’t make such a noise!”

“Who—who are you?” he whispered, straining his eyes—and he descried a dim form moving in the gloom.

“I’m Lifania. Remember me?”

Bull puzzled. “Damned if I do; never met a dame of that name…”

He became silent, aware of her lithe body faintly visible by the cage door. In a moment the door was open. Gratified, he walked through the opening and her soft hand closed on his wrist.

“I’m releasing you for two reasons,” she breathed softly. “Just listen—you fool!” she burst out in alarm as he unthinkingly flamed a match in his fingernails. Instantly she dashed it to the floor and stamped on it.

But in that instant, Bull had seen that she was vividly blonde and apparently young, attired in softly rustling blue silk, a golden band gleaming in the halo of her fair hair. These evidences stirred no remembrance in his memory—only an appreciation of her charm.

“Say, you’re the goods!” he confided. “What about—”

“Will you keep quiet?” she pleaded earnestly. “I’m doing this because you once rescued me. I got trapped in a street drain when I was in miniature size. You pulled me out. I recognized your face tonight when my father had the infra-red screens tuned on you for the purpose of study. Remember me?”

“No; I guess you’ve been dreaming,” he answered. “I pulled you out of a drain? When?”

“Some time ago. I was joining my people and I got into the drain by accident—I should have looked where I was going… But I can’t tell you more here. Any minute now my father will have you released, and that means your finish. We’ve got to get away from these islands while your spaceship is still handy. I made sure that it’s still where you left it before coming here.”

He chuckled grimly. “So it ought to be. I locked the controls.”

“All the better. Come on…”

Bull hesitated on the questions that naturally rose to his lips, but before he could utter them, the girl had practically pulled him to the flood-lit exterior. For a time, she crouched in the shadows cast by the shed, looking about her, then with a little nod of her fair head, she began to advance.

Little by little, sometimes dropping flat on their faces, they managed to circumvent the occasional men and women they encountered. Dodging around the buildings, slipping through jet-black shadows, they at last gained the shore and clambered swiftly into the space machine. Once within, Bull quickly twisted the air-lock screws.

“Where to?” he asked briefly, swinging to the control board.

“Set your course for the moon,” the girl instructed in a curiously resolute tone. “I’ll tell you why later.”

“The moon!” Bull stared at her beautiful face for a moment, then he shrugged.

“O. K., sister, if that’s how you want it…”

He unlocked the controls, clamped his hairy hands down on the main switches. With a terrific zooming rush of power, the vessel catapulted upwards into the night sky, cleaved the stratosphere and hurtled into the outer moon-ridden dark.

Only when his course was definitely set on the gleaming satellite did he set the robot steerage in commission, then turned to the girl with questioning eyes.

She was seated now on the wall bunk, half smiling, half serious, swinging her shapely legs. She had the oddest Grecian appearance about her, as though she had been lifted bodily from the classics.

“Well, suppose you tell me a few things?” Bull questioned, setting the floor-gravitators to work. “Suppose you tell me what you and your playmates are doing on the Azores—where you came from in the first place?”

“It’s not a very difficult story,” she answered quietly. “And to clear up one particular point, I might as well tell you that I learned English, in common with the others of my race, in a trifle under two weeks by the expedient of mind-reading. You see, my people and I—the forty of us at least who are at present on the Earth, came originally from a block of gems you brought from the moon.”

“You—you what?” Bull yelled. “You don’t mean that those gems which I found melted—”

“Exactly that. We were inside each gem in miniature form, like—like flies in amber. One night when you were intoxicated, you unwittingly saved me from death. Since you don’t remember the incident, it doesn’t matter—but it enabled me, on seeing your face in the screens, to remember you had a reliable nature. What matters is that your whole civilization is in danger, threatened with extinction by my people. That menace will grow to invincible proportions when the rest of my people come from the moon, and are enlarged.”

Bull still stared. “After all, Lif, I’m only a plain man of space,” said ruefully. “I don’t get your angle at all.”

“You will soon,” she said steadily. “Actually, my race is from the city your legends call Atlantis. We lived in that city thousands of years ago before a gigantic rupture in the Atlantean continent—which was then volcanic—produced tremendous changes. At that time we were the most scientific race on the Earth—the virtual masters of it. The coming of the disaster demanded that we must leave hurriedly. The nearest place of safety was the moon. Once inside the satellite, protected by artificial air and warmth, we could continue our lives until such time as the earthly tumults and earthquakes ceased. So we buried our most important treasures in Atlantis in sealed containers, incorrodible by sea water and able to stand terrific pressures. The metal also was semi-magnetic, detectable by special instruments no matter to what depth it sunk in the passage of time. Then we set out for the moon just before the city was overwhelmed…”

“And then?” Bull questioned thoughtfully.

“Well, we domiciled ourselves in the core of the moon, erecting all manner of machinery within an enormous central cavern which must be standing even today exactly as we left it. But we were fighting a losing battle—one that led to no purpose. Another hundred years would see the end of our air supply. We debated whether it was better to spend that hundred years trying to prevent the seepage of air into the void, passing through the metal of our central home and thereafter through the pumice rocks of the moon—or whether it would be better to call a halt until something new should happen. Study of Earth revealed it still in the throes of great changes, overrun by hordes of savages, survivors of the fine races overwhelmed in the cataclysm. No other planet was suitable for us, and so we came to our decision.

“We possessed machines to produce contraction by narrowing the electronic orbits of any organic or inorganic body. We had also a peculiar type of crystal found on the moon—identical in many ways to the crystals that form the rays and streaks of the main craters. These crystals resemble gems so long as they remain in an airless state, but after exposure to oxygen for a period of roughly ninety-six hours, they break down and melt, mingling with the oxygen and visibly melting into shapeless masses.

“It was decided that we would leave our laboratory sealed until such a time as it would be needed again, and pass into a state of suspended animation until some chance brought us to life to take up the threads. We placed ourselves in the hands of robots, who had full instructions as to what to do. We were all shortened to an inch in height, clothed just as we were; magnetic fields rendered us dead yet alive, emptied our bodies of all life substance, leaving enough chemical deposits only to start life going if we ever contacted normal atmosphere again. Our clothes, too, were similarly treated. The crystals were divided by fusion, their interiors hollowed out, and our bodies placed inside them and sealed up—gem-like coffins. Then, still carrying out their orders, the robots took the whole lot of gems and affixed them to the wall of an upper cavern by cohesive powers. Putting them there made it probable that some day they would be found; deep down in the moon, there was hardly a chance.

“You know the rest. After thousands of years, we were resurrected by you. We hypnotized several Earth people to make machines for us and domiciled ourselves on the Azores so as to be close to the site of Atlantis for dredging purposes in order to recover our treasures. You understand?”

Bull nodded slowly. “Yeah—ninety-six hours would be just about the time that passed between my finding the gems and them breaking open in my bedroom. But where does the menace come in?”

“From my father. He was among the jewels you brought to Earth and is now making his final plans. But he can’t put them into full effect without the remainder of the lunar jewels containing the rest of our people. I know what that means. My father is a ruthless and brilliant scientist; he will stop at nothing to bring about the return of Atlantean dominance. Our science is still far in excess of yours. I for one do not agree with my father and never have. I’ll go to any lengths to stop him. Our race has run its course and there is no excuse for the subjection of a happy thriving world. I saved you for one very good reason, besides gratitude. You have a spaceship, and only you could unlock the controls. Also you’ll have the strength to swing open a piece of wall existing in the moon jewel cavern. Single-handed, with so slight a gravity, I could not do it. To you it will be simple. I intend, briefly, to destroy the rest of my race and all the machines that are still buried in the moon…”

Bull grimaced, glanced out of the window at the fast-receding Earth.

“Sounds ambitious! Pity is I haven’t my flame gun with me with which to do it.”

“You won’t need it,” she answered steadily. “The plan I have in mind is perfect. It will not only mean the destruction of all the moon contains, but it will cause the Azores to be wiped off the face of the Earth.”

“Suppose your old man chases you into space?

“He can’t. We haven’t built space machines yet…”

Bull gave it up. There was something almost frighteningly purposeful about this newly risen maid from an age long forgotten. Quietly he turned to the controls, took away the robot steerage, and settled himself to guide the flyer towards the enlarging moon.

CHAPTER IV

Sacrifice

During the moonward journey, the strange girl spoke but little; she seemed entirely absorbed in her own grim speculations. It struck Bull as odd that she never once attempted to eat or sleep until she casually explained she and her people had overcome such primitive necessities ages before.

Bull himself slept at intervals and always woke to find her lost in thought—then as the pull of the moon became evident, she began to issue brisk directions.

Not that they were really needed. Bull brought his vessel down near the Appenines once more—clearly the jewel cavern was to be their first point of call.

He was right. He loaned the girl a spare spacesuit and the pair of them headed across the blinding sun-drenched lava desert, gaining the jewel cavern fifteen minutes later. Once within its depths, the girl headed to its furthest wall and studied it for a while in the light of her helmet torch. Then her voice came through the phones.

“This is the movable portion just here—on a natural pivot—but it will take your strength to move it…”

She moved to a portion slightly rougher than the rest and pressed her shoulder against it—without avail. Then Bull swaggered forward, but even he had to add his weight to the girl’s against the weak gravity before the barrier gave. Then an immense oval pivoted around and left beyond a tunnel leading into the honeycomb that comprised the moon’s interior.

Still governed by unflagging purpose, the girl led the way, head-lamp shining on the pumice walls. She and Bull moved rapidly against the light gravity, traversed tunnel after tunnel, sometimes allowing themselves to float hundreds of feet down seemingly bottomless shafts.

Once Bull found himself conjecturing on how they were going to get back, until it occurred to him that perhaps the girl had no intention of them ever getting back! He could not decide whether that prospect was alarming or not.

Then his speculations were finally cut short as he and the girl entered the last and lowest cavern, nearly at the core of the satellite. With clumsy gloved hands, she operated a complex mechanism set deep in the rocky wall. There was no sound in that airless emptiness, but at length a portion of the wall slid back to reveal beyond a thick metal valve.

Presently this, too, slid aside, enabling them to enter, by means of three airlocks, the incredible machine interior beyond—a mighty natural cavern shielded by a tremendous dome of absolutely incorrodible and pressure-resisting metal. For a time, the girl fussed around, operating strange levers and valves—then, suddenly, light gushed forth from bowls in the lofty ceiling.

Her voice came through the phones. “We can take our spacesuits off in here. Air pressure, warmth and light are all normal.”

She set the example, and once she was unencumbered, set in action machinery which slid a mighty wall of metal across the closed door valve.

Bull stared about him in utter bewilderment. That such machinery could exist in the core of a dead hulk like the moon was something he could hardly believe. Machines were everywhere, from wall to wall of the great place, covering a floor area of some five acres. Much of the machinery he did not understand, nor did the girl attempt to explain it—until she led the way to two vast metal pillars supporting hooped magnets of truly enormous proportions, both of them connected by snaky wires to lensed devices resembling super television projectors. Beyond these again, connected by further myriad wires, were machines which Bull recognized as transformers, armatures, dynamos, and electrical equipment transcending the scope of his limited knowledge.

“You’ve heard of cosmic rays, of course?” the girl asked suddenly.

“I’ve done more—I’ve felt ’em,” he answered laconically. “The damned things penetrate eighteen to thirty feet of lead out in space.”

“Quite right, which is one reason why on the moon here, even at this depth, they penetrate freely and are unimpeded by atmosphere. These two pillared magnets are cosmic wave attractors. They gather cosmic waves and pass them on to the transformers and other equipment. After that, they pass into the projectors and focus directly into the center of this globe through specially designed apertures.”

She indicated the enormous sphere that reposed between the two projectors, composed of some metal of almost unimaginable hardness.

“The effect of the cosmic rays is to produce terrific heat such as exists only in the core of the sun itself,” the girl went on. “It is produced by increasing the pace of electron change to the point of actual coincidence with the nucleus. Inside the globe is a matrix, designed to hold a small piece of metal. As the metal is increasingly heated, the globe also contracts by the passage of an electrical field through its oddly fashioned atoms. It continues to contract with inconceivable power, producing a pressure that easily withstands the actual utter annihilation of copper itself… So far, my people have never really annihilated matter; they have only used the device for the fusing of very tough metals—such as the metal which gives this cavern its support. They refrained from absolute annihilation of matter because they knew it would bring about the very thing I’m hoping for.”

“What’s that?” Bull questioned—and she smiled vaguely; asked an odd question, yet somehow half expected.

“Are you afraid of death, Bull Cassell?”

“Me? Hell, no! I’ve been playing with it all my life. Why?”

“Because if you are, you’d better head back for the surface and leave me to work alone. After all, you’ve done your part of the work. Being human Bull was slightly afraid, but to admit it to a slim Atlantean girl with immeasurable scientific knowledge and courage? Lord, no! Besides, he mightn’t find his way back anyhow…

“Better get started, sister,” he growled. “I’m not heading back.”

She said nothing, only smiled gratefully. Bull watched while she opened the giant globe and made adjustments to the complicated matrix within, fixing inside it a selected four-inch square cube of copper.

Satisfied, she clamped the sphere shut and for a time contemplated the foci of the projectors, made infinitely delicate adjustments—then at last threw in the massive bladed power switches. The peculiar transformers and dynamos hummed a mounting song of steady power, concentrating two faintly visible violet beams through the sphere’s special apertures, focusing identically on the cube within.

Bull watched interestedly, and after a while the view through the open inspection plate revealed the block as a blinding mass of flame.

“Two thousand degrees Centigrade,” she said briefly. “The pressure, as it increases, will achieve that of two million tons to the square inch. That and the heat will destroy the copper utterly, blast its matter right out of being… Here, you’ll be needing these.” She handed him a pair of heavily smoked goggles.

In silence, they continued watching. Beating waves of tremendous heat began to enfold them. The huge machine cavern became intolerably hot as the temperature inside the contracting globe rose to terrific heights.

With startling speed, the temperature rose to 6000° Cent. The thing in the matrix was no longer safe to gaze upon, even through glasses.

Bull waited tensely, only glancing sideways ever and again at that searing, unimaginably hot piece of copper. Higher rose the temperature, switching over automatically to the tens of thousandths scale. The flaring energy that had been copper was forced to give up battering radiations of X-rays, and then gamma rays.

Bull turned and glanced at the girl’s face. She endeavored to speak, but her voice did not carry over the searing, crackling din of inconceivable heat and pressures.

The copper was being entirely annihilated. The nuclei of the very atoms themselves were collapsing—protons and electrons being forced conceivable heat and pressure.

The thousandths thermometer stopped at maximum, but the heat still rose—into the millions of degrees, building up into the inconceivably furious energy existing only in the cores of the hottest stars.

It must have ranged somewhere around 150 million degrees Centigrade when something abruptly happened. Bull only glimpsed it for a moment. At that identical point, the matter of the copper ceased to be, was changed absolutely into pure energy…but with it went the vast compression globe. Titanic shiftings of matter itself followed as a literal wedge of new energy was forced into the normal structure of matter gathered on every hand.

Instantly, following immutable laws, that matter partook also of the new energy—shifted and changed like the unstable presentations of a dream, stirred by new forces, newly released energies that ordered the things of existence to change.

Bull knew nothing of these things, but Lifania did. She had known this would happen and was smiling happily, peacefully…but before she could utter a word, the change was suddenly complete. The new energy abruptly assimilated itself with the basic electrons of the surroundings.

Bull felt his body snap backwards and then flow weirdly, form into fusion with suddenly slithering, crawling surroundings! Metals, rocks, lights—all of them were moving into a new union. The Atlantean girl, still smiling, was flowing too like golden honey, all shape and form and clothing one hideous plasma…

And beyond was the darkness for her and Bull.

But the thing the girl had started went on. It changed the entire matter formation of the moon, forced it to conform to the new energy level.

Rocks and mountain peaks sloughed and drifted into one another, changed the satellite into a globe 1000 miles less in diameter but of materials balancing exactly those of old in a smaller compass. But it did one thing—sealed and crushed forever all traces of any life, machinery or science.

On Earth, too, the girl had foreseen correctly. The wild changes of the moon during its metamorphosis wrought tidal havoc and earthquake in all directions. The American continent was rocked from end to end and thousands died in the smashing buildings—but the survivors far outnumbered the dead, as would certainly not have been the case had Atlantean science gained dominance…

As for the Azores—when the upheavals subsided and air and sea traffic resumed, it was reported that the Azores had utterly disappeared into the Atlantic, taking with them all traces of those malignant scientists unwilling to admit that their age belonged to a past long dead…

THE RED MAGICIAN

Solvius Vass might attribute his amazing powers to the mental science of the Martians, but to those who witnessed his miracles the magician from the red planet was a being enshrined

CHAPTER 1

A Martian Comes to Earth

It was ironical indeed that a Martian, when he did finally come to Earth, should do so unheralded and unsung; particularly after the years of speculation by scientists on the possibility of communication with Mars or the visit of a being from that planet.

Presumably, the Martian arrived in the night—but there were no streaks of fire in the atmosphere to announce his coming, no scream of superheated winds. In fact, all the circumstances of his arrival were shrouded in singular mystery. One evening the Sussex Downs were as empty as usual. The next morning one particular hollow was graced by the presence of a curious object, spherical and twelve feet in diameter.

A girl with a fresh-air complex saw it first, at five in the morning, lying smooth and deserted in the summer dawn. She told the farmer and the farmer told the recipients of his milk… By ten in the morning, an interested crowd of sightseers were prying around the metal globe, trying ineffectually to discover an opening. Some sagely observed that the thing was a meteor, until others with more scientific knowledge pointed out that, if that were so it would have dug out a crater for itself. And the globe had not done that; there was, in fact, hardly a dent where it rested on the dry, sun-withered grass.

Towards three in the afternoon, the crowd included policemen roping off the space, scientists who gazed with puzzled eyes on the globe and formed highly technical conjectures, reporters who scribbled frantically in notebooks, and a meteorologist who did nothing at all except shake his head gloomily.

None of which was very helpful. The fact remained that a ball of steel, so heavy that mobile cranes sent to the spot could hardly raise it, had mysteriously appeared to spoil the beauty of the Downs. The thing was an eyesore, a tantalising mystery.

Sir Gadsby Brough, who had the matter in hand, finally decided to bore through the thing with oxy-acetylene flares. Men arrived and got busy behind their blue shields. By five o’clock, a hole large enough to admit a man had been made.

The globe’s interior was even more perplexing—filled with all manner of strange devices, machinery which failed to make sense. Several engineers present in the small interior chamber could make nothing of the apparatus, and frankly said so… That was one problem; an even bigger one was; how did anybody get out of the globe from the inside when there was no door?

The globe was a perfect sphere without the least trace of a join or opening, and the more the experts studied it the more baffled they became. Finally, Brough decided the thing should be left where it was under police guard until some means could be found to remove it, or else to explain its complicated inner mysteries.

Mars? Had it come from Mars? A grand peg on which to hang the scientific hat! Young David Turner of the London Arrow heard that speculation drop from the petulant lips of Brough himself, and thereupon he returned to London at top speed, writing his copy in the train on the way. Next morning, the London Arrow scooped all rivals with its arresting question:

WHAT IS IT?

Artfully enough, the article did not answer the question it put—but did hint in no uncertain terms that the thing on the Downs was possibly a spaceship from Mars. The fact that it could not belong to Earth seemed sufficiently proven by its huge weight and the absence of all visible means to transport it to the spot where it had been discovered. The major riddle still remained. How had anything got outside it, and if a person, where was he now?

The scientifically-minded minority of the British public tried to solve the problem next morning in tube, ’bus and street. But it was too much like trying to picture something that does not exist, and they soon gave up the attempt.

But not Dave Turner. He had an inner conviction that he was definitely on to something interesting, even though he had a hard job convincing his news editor of the fact. It says much for Turner’s powers of coercion, however, that the London Arrow kept the subject warm long after the other papers had dropped it, or else were scathingly referring to it as the ‘Sussex Cannon Ball.’

* * * *

A week later, Turner’s grim persistency in plugging the globe in his paper brought results in a singular, not to say startling fashion. Arriving at his modest rooms in Bethnal Green one evening, he found a visitor awaiting him, a fact of which he had had advance warning from a surprisingly startled landlady.

The moment he saw his visitor he understood why the good woman had forsaken eighteen stone of complacency for almost girlish fright. Turner, himself, could do nothing but stare, rub a hand agitatedly through his black hair, and try to look unconcerned. Then he said, as coolly as possible:

“Good evening. I’m Turner, of the Arrow.”

His visitor did not answer. He remained seated, and even in that position he was obviously a small man, probably not more than five feet tall. His attire consisted of a dead-black suit, without even the relief of a white collar. Instead of a shirt, he had a tight black affair that swathed him to the neck. His back and chest bulged outwards in the fashion of a hunchback, yet clearly it was not a deformity; was, in truth, an apparently natural formation.

All this, and the yellow gloves and wide-brimmed black hat on the table, Turner took in at a glance. It was the man’s face and head he could not stop gazing at. The face was alabaster white, with square projecting chin and tight-lipped mouth. Pale green eyes on either side of a long thin nose stared unwaveringly across the room, lent added penetration by straight, deep black brows. And the forehead! Turner had never seen one like it. It went up a full six inches from eyebrows to the roots of the man’s glossy, tight-drawn black hair, an enormous dome that seemed as though it should contain all the genius of which a living being is capable.

“I believe you wanted to see me?” Turner managed to get out at last.

“Yes, my friend, I do.” The man’s voice was deep, slow, and well modulated, with just a hint of condescension. He got to his feet slowly and gripped Turner’s band with one that was cool and strong.

“Well—er—sit down,” Turner smiled, motioning him back to his chair and seizing one for himself. “What can I do for you?”

“I wonder,” the man murmured, his green eyes still staring. Then he said slowly, “Young man, my name is Solivus Vass. My home is—Mars.”

“Oh! “Turner sat in awed silence for a moment. Though he had half expected something like this, it came as a shock to hear it as a stated fact. “Er—strange name,” he ventured uncertainly.

“No stranger than David Turner is to me,” Vass answered calmly. “However, to business.” He leaned forward earnestly, clasping his lean, dead-white hands together. “I sought you out, young man, because you have revealed yourself as a man of intelligence and persistency. You have doggedly maintained the /truth of the Sussex meteor when all your ignorant contemporaries have discarded the affair with the sighting observation that my space-machine is a cannon ball… Fools!”

Vass’s mouth twisted harshly for a moment; there was a glint of white, even teeth—then again he was his calm, inscrutable self.

“My race,” he resumed slowly, “lives under the surface of Mars, deep down under the deserts. In appearance we are not really as Earth-like as I now am. I have been made this way through synthetic means, yet even so my Martian structure of large lungs has not been entirely obviated—as you observe… However, for years we have tried to solve the mystery of space travel, and quite recently succeeded. To visit Earth meant adapting the body to Earthly conditions, that I have done. A week ago I came to your planet.

“Your language?” he continued, forestalling the question on Turner’s lips. “A simple matter indeed. You will know that certain of your shorter radio wavelengths pass clean through your Heaviside Layer into outer space? Our apparatus, infinitely in advance of yours, picked up many of your radio speeches. It was simple to learn not only your language, but that of every country in this world… So I came, left my vessel by way of the fourth dimension, and for a week have been in hiding, seeking out one whom I felt I could trust. I have decided on you.”

“Well…er…thanks very much,” Turner said dubiously, turning from those boring green orbs for a moment. “But—but I honestly don’t quite know what to say. After all, you’re expecting me to believe rather a lot… Oh, I know I’ve played up your space machine in my paper, but that’s my job. I don’t always believe what I write, by any means.”

“I see.” Vass studied him for a moment, then shrugged. “After all, I don’t expect you to believe without proof—and, from what I have seen, Earth people require proof to the limit before they will believe anything. It is my intention, while on Earth, to reveal the powers of Martian science. To you of Earth it may seem like magic, but that it definitely is not. I want everybody to realise that Martian science can bring them untold benefits if they will only have it—want them to realise that I, a Martian, come as a friend and not an enemy.”

“And why should you wish to confer such benefits on us?” Turner asked quickly. “Is it just generosity, or what?”

“No—business,” the Martian smiled. “You may regard me as an ambassador if you wish. The feats I can perform all have their explanation in what we of Mars call mental science, by which clumsy methods are obviated and miracles of achievement produced entirely by mind force. Already some of your Tibetan magicians have the basic roots of the idea; we of Mars have developed it to a fine art. If, after a period, Earth people are satisfied that they too would care to have such powers, then negotiations with my race can begin. Secrets will be given in return for several things Earth possesses which Mars does not… Pure salt, for instance; certain carbon deposits; and there are other things.”

Turner nodded slowly.

“I think I understand,” he said. “And how do you propose to get Earth people to listen to you?”

“By gaining their interest. Merely to reel off certain scientific formulas would neither interest nor prove beneficial, but practical demonstrations of mind science will do all I need. Tomorrow I will show you, and the world… Can you, in order to obtain what I believe you term a ‘scoop,’ be present in Trafalgar Square at ten o’clock tomorrow morning?”

“For a scoop I can be anywhere at any time,” Turner answered. “In fact, you’ve given me one already. But I say, what are you going to do in Trafalgar Square?”

“The Indian rope trick,” Vass replied calmly.

Turner stared at him.

“But, hang it all, that’s impossible!” he objected. “Why, famous magicians from all over the world have combed India for some sign of this trick and have now come to the conclusion it just doesn’t exist. One famous magician has even offered two thousand pounds to anybody who can do it in the open air, and—”

“All of which does not interest me,” Vass interrupted with an impassive smile. “I have chosen this particular illusion as a good overture to my powers. Tomorrow you will see for yourself. Be under Nelson’s Column at ten o’clock in the morning.”

He got slowly to his feet, idly picked up Turner’s heavy cigarette-lighter from the table.

“If you will give me the aid of your paper I will give you the first information of all my demonstrations,” he murmured. “Here is a guarantee of good faith,” he finished slowly, and flicked the lighter into flame. Then he blew the flame out again, but from the wisp of dispersing smoke something dropped gently into Turner’s lap.

Slowly he picked it up and stared incredulously at a five-pound note!

“How the—?” he began dazedly, staring at Vass as he put on his broad-brimmed hat and yellow gloves. “It’s quite genuine,” Vass smiled.

Just a little proof by the wayside… Tomorrow—at ten.”

Then the door was closing silently behind him, leaving Turner staring fixedly at the note in his hand.

CHAPTER 2

The Great Trafalgar Square Mystery

Turner set all London talking with his story in the late editions of the Arrow concerning the Martian and his life history. Few believed it; other papers openly jeered; but there were many who prepared to visit Trafalgar Square next day, if only to laugh Turner and the Arrow out of business.

Turner himself more than half wondered if he had dreamed it all, until he studied the five-pound note in his wallet. That was real enough, even if a microscopic examination of his petrol lighter had failed to explain the cause of the mystery.

Ten o’clock the following morning found him wandering amidst the crowd in Trafalgar Square in the bright summer sunshine. In various directions he could see his rivals lounging about with apparent casualness. Some distance away he recognised his predecessor on the Arrow, the keen-witted Joan Wyngate, now of the Clarion. She beamed on him sweetly and he rewarded her with a scowl of annoyance.

Big Ben’s notes were echoing across the Square as he reached Nelson’s Column—and at that moment something happened. There was a sudden flurry among the pigeons and a familiar deep voice spoke quietly.

“Good morning, Mr. Turner. You see, I’m quite prompt.”

Turner swung round, blinked a little. He knew perfectly well that the Martian had been nowhere in sight a moment ago, and yet now— Well, there he was, attired as on the previous evening, but now holding a small attaché case in his hand.

“Oh—hello!” Turner acknowledged doubtfully, then he looked round him as his rivals drew in closer, and saw on all sides the mass of people who had gathered to see what was going to happen at ten o’clock.

“This is Soli—” Turner began, but the Martian cut him short.

“I rather think I can attend to this myself, my friend,” he said. “No doubt several of these people, particularly your contemporaries, are very surprised to find your newspaper statements correct…?”

Vass’s green eyes gazed round and Turner, catching the self-conscious look on Joan Wyngate’s face, started to grin. Not that he liked taking it out of the girl—it was the remembrance of her bland, sardonic smile that still clung to him.

“As Turner started to explain, I am Solivus Vass,” the Martian went on, removing his hat to excite cries of amazement at the view of his vast skull. “My reasons for coming among you are already known from Turner’s, excellent account in his newspaper. I shall now endeavour to give my first proof of mental science this morning by doing that elementary problem of yours, the Indian rope trick.”

He opened his case at the words and drew from it a length of rope stretching perhaps twenty feet. Casually he tossed it once or twice in the air, and suddenly it stopped upright some eighteen feet from the ground. With a faint smile, Vass removed his hand and gazed at the sea of astounded faces around him.

“Perhaps some of you would care to examine it?” he invited.

The invitation was hardly needed. People milled around in scores, pulled on the perfectly ordinary rope, studied it from every angle—but the miracle remained. Somehow, that rope was hooked on to nothing!

“Am I seeing things?” breathed Joan Wyngate, her blue eyes wide in amazement. “I almost think I—”

“None of you is seeing things,” Vass broke in quietly, waving the people back and making a clear space. “I am now going to ask one of you to suggest a spot at which I shall reappear. My intention is to climb the rope and disappear in space at the top. Then, wherever you wish to find me, I shall be there.”

“You mean it?” Turner cried in bewilderment, as baffled as the rapidly increasing throng of people.

“Certainly,” Vass nodded gravely.

“Well—er—suppose we say outside Victoria Station?” Turner suggested.

“That’s it! Give ’im a long ’op!” yelled somebody in the crowd.

“Victoria Station,” nodded Vass. “So be it.” And with a surprising agility he began to swarm quickly up the rope.

Yet, as he began to reach its mysteriously supported summit, he seemed to fade, nor was it entirely accounted for by the shadow of Nelson’s Column immediately to the rear. Fainter he became and fainter—then suddenly he had gone! The space at the top of the rope was empty, and less than a second later the rope had gone too, whisked utterly into extinction.

For perhaps ten seconds a stunned, dead silence rested over the crowd. Nothing like this had ever been known before. It was enough to open Nelson’s blind eye. Then Turner suddenly sprang out of his trance and started the movement out of the Square. Within five minutes u mob of shouting people was streaming down the Mall and through St. James’s Park. Some jumped on ’buses, others ran. Hurried references to an Indian rope trick did little to convince stolid policemen, but on this occasion they were ignored and forced along with the crowd. In the Mall there arose the biggest traffic jam for years as with incredible speed the news passed round.

Victoria Station was surrounded by a chattering crowd, growing larger with the minutes. A tremendous mob collected round the front entrance, to the despair of those trying to catch trains. But as yet Solivus Vass had not appeared. Here and there rose a cry of disbelief. Then suddenly somebody gave a shout.

Vass was on view, safe out of reach of the crowd, halfway up the slanting main entrance roof of the station. How he had got there was as mysterious as his rope trick.

“Friends, my thanks to you!” he shouted, and tossed down the rope with which he had performed his illusion—if such it was. “I have demonstrated to you one facet of Martian mind science. Others will follow. What I have done is not magic, but logical, applied science which, if you are willing, you can all understand. For the moment I leave you, but I shall appear again.”

Even as he spoke something was happening to him. He was becoming misty.

“Vass!” bawled Turner, in the forefront of the crowd. “Vass, wait a minute—”

He stopped, speechless. The space where Vass had been standing was totally empty!

The sensation caused by Solivus Vass’s single demonstration beggared even the descriptive powers of the reporters, Dave Turner among them.

In truth, there were no words to describe the thrill that passed through the public’s imagination at the knowledge that a Martian wizard was in their midst.

Turner, however, still managed to scoop his rivals to a certain extent by writing up colourful stories of the Martians possible future intentions—world bartering with world, salt in exchange for mind science, and similar matters of which his rivals knew nothing. Everything that had ever been written or discovered about Mars was jammed into every newspaper and magazine.

By newspaper, radio, and word of mouth the amazing feat of the Indian rope trick passed from country to country. America and Europe talked about it in the ensuing week. Scientists and psychologists respectively debated the logical aspects of the affair and finally declared, with exasperating pomp, that the whole thing was impossible and could not be done—that thousands of people had somehow been brilliantly hoaxed.

The suggestion made Turner boil with fury. He wrote stinging retorts to these so-called super-minds and used his paper as a channel for invective—until suddenly his private war was abruptly terminated by the reappearance of Solivus Vass one morning in Trafalgar Square.

The instant he heard of the Martian’s return, Turner streaked for the Square, and elbowed his way through the dense crowd to the front ranks. He found Vass had changed his attire now, replaced his black clothes with a flowing affair of red, to be more in keeping, according to his speech, with the colour of his native planet.

“I come among you to help you,” he said slowly, standing on top of a four-step ladder. “I want you to realise that all the strange things I do are scientific. I want you to follow me in the cult I am trying to establish, that of mind over matter. I want all of you who have troubles to bring them to me and I will do my best to help you.”

“Are you planning an Utopia?” called a reporter, and Vass shook his enormous head.

“No. It is not my aim to alter your ways of living, or to try and improve on nature. You can only progress as nature wills it, but I can do much in other directions. In sorting out difficulties, in feats of clairvoyance, even in telling of events taking place thousands of miles away, I can, I think, lay claim to absolute perfection. In time it is my hope to build a temple wherein my science can be entirely revealed to you. Until then I shall remain in the open, as I am now…”

“Say, if you’re so smart, why don’t you tell us about something that’s happening thousands of miles away at this moment?” demanded a lean-faced man to the left.

Vass shrugged.

“Why not?” he agreed. “Your later papers today will bring news of a vast earthquake in Peru; the total wreck of—” He broke off and concentrated for a moment. “Of a transatlantic air-liner called the Euphrates; the death just ten minutes ago of Silas Lattimer, the famous chemist, resident in Australia; and the finding of Dr. Karl Hemfrien, the German explorer, lost over a week ago in a Polar expedition, now safe and sound on an ice pack.”

A dazed silence followed the words. Vass stood calmly looking round and the people gazed back at him, convinced against their wills that this man was speaking the truth. Somehow he must have knowledge of these events, which so far had not come through even to the newspapers.

“Are you sure of all this, Vass?” Turner demanded, staring up at him. “Doing a trick like the rope trick is one thing, but just suppose one of these forecasts of yours is wrong?”

“Mind science is never wrong, friend Turner,” the Martian replied impassively, then glanced across the Square in some irritation as a fire engine came swinging into view, its bell clanging noisily.

In a moment it had overtaken the flood of traffic eternally swirling round the Square and raced on into the Strand.

Hardly a moment passed before it was followed by another.

“Look!” somebody shouted abruptly, pointing. “Fire over there—in the Strand!”

Faces turned from Vass to a rolling column of smoke drifting on the breeze.

Instantly a stir passed through the people; there was a general movement out of the Square that Vass watched with bitter eyes.

“So they find a fire more interesting,” he muttered to Turner, standing immediately below him.

Turner shrugged. “Can’t blame them, Vass. There’s something about a fire that always gets you. Just can’t help but watch it.”

“And does that extinguish it?” the Martian asked, climbing down the ladder and folding it up.

“Of course not. Water or foam does that.”

“Such antiquated methods.” The mystic sighed. “Come with me. I will give you another aspect of mind control.”

Puzzled, Turner followed the Martian out of the Square. In a few moments they had emerged into the Strand near Charing Cross Station and were walking amidst a litter of twisting hosepipes, while policemen with linked hands held back the crowds. Beyond, occupying the efforts of half a dozen fire engines, was a furiously-burning old building, untenanted and previously condemned, threatening the safety of the buildings around it.

There was a little stir in the crowd as the red-clad figure of Vass appeared. Policemen eyed him dubiously; one or two firemen glanced round from clutching their hoses.

“It’s that conjurer bloke,” one of them audibly muttered, and a little titter went through the people.

Vass’s green eyes narrowed a little, then with sudden resolve he opened his ladders again, mounted them, and stood over the heads of the crowd.

“Why do you not use the power of mind?” he demanded fiercely. “Force matter to obey you, as I do? For this occasion I will demonstrate for you; later, perhaps, you will learn for yourselves. Watch!” He held forth his right arm rigidly, fingers pointed at the blazing building. In his green eyes was a stare so intense that the people moved away uneasily: it was the intent glare of a hypnotist.

The firemen went on with their job unconcerned; then, gradually, there arose a general murmur of amazement as it became obvious that the flames round the upper part of the old building were decreasing. Vass still glared at it, and the longer he glared the less the fire blazed. Certainly it was not the firemen’s hoses that were responsible.

The flames gave way to smoke, thick dense clouds that gradually vaporised and became steam; then finally not even steam. There remained only the smouldering hulk of the building and a great pile of glowing ashes. Utterly bewildered, the firemen continued to play their hoses on the ashes until at last the fire was wholly extinguished.

Slowly then, they turned with the people to face the coldly smiling Martian. His arm was back at his side now.

“Now you see?” he asked softly. “Mental science—again.”

Firemen, sightseers, and policemen forgot their various tasks to group around the Martian and listen to the tale of science allied to mental magic of which he had to tell them. Turner only listened to part of it, then he rushed away to get the story into the Arrow.

Once again he scooped the board.

And that same afternoon a thrill of profound wonderment was added to the miracles of Vass as the news began to trickle through of an earthquake in Peru and the wreck of the Euphrates over the middle of the Atlantic, only discovered at 2.30 p.m. by a passing vessel, nearly four hours after Vass had described the occurrences.

Sure enough, too, the report of Silas Lattimer’s death soon followed, and, much later, a brief report to the effect that Dr. Karl Hemfrien had been found. All widely spaced events, all of them incapable of being known without visiting the actual spots concerned, which Vass certainly had not done. Events as far apart as Australia, the North Pole, and Peru.

The stock of the Red Magician, as he had become popularly known, soared to fantastic heights. He became a being enshrined.

CHAPTER 3

The Disappearing Scientist

Such an extraordinary person as the Martian magician could not for long remain the exclusive property of England: he was essentially international in appeal.

After his fire-extinguishing effort and the forecast of world events, he suddenly rocketed to fame in all the newspapers of the world. Vass cults sprang up in several countries. Europeans and Americans came to get a glimpse of the green-eyed, impassive wizard as, for a fabulous salary, he consented to make a tour of the halls and demonstrate his powers.

Quickly and apparently without knowing it, he turned the whole country inside out. People who asked his aid found it freely given when he was assured that money was a consideration with them; but in the case of the wealthy he charged enormous fees.

The main demand was for him to discover far-distant relatives, ascertain their state of health and position, which, when supplied with adequate descriptions of the people concerned, he invariably did. Others came with stories of lost articles, and with very few failures Vass stated the exact spot where they could be found.

One famous shipping magnate enquired if a ship sunk in a certain latitude twelve years ago, below the reach of divers, was worth making an effort to salve. Promptly Vass gave the answer that the vessel had a great deal of gold aboard—and, when the ship was finally brought to the surface, his prediction was found correct even to the number of gold bars.

Newsreel companies were quickly on the job, and commissioned Vass at tremendous fees to advise them the instant his mind detected an unusual phenomenon anywhere in the world. Not once did he fail, though he often saw occurrences in places inaccessible by human beings, except by tremendous labour.

Definitely, Vass was a wizard, though he explained it all away as mind power, a fact which caused several famous specialists and psychologists hurriedly to revise all their preconceived notions on the brain and its possibilities. Even though Vass was a Martian, he still had a brain.

Criminals were in mortal dread of Vass. His uncanny ability to probe unknown places proved an assistance to the law on more than one occasion, particularly in locating fugitives from justice. Crime in all branches began to drop to a surprisingly low ebb as the Red Magician gained power.

Inevitably he amassed money, opened a suite of rooms in the Strand, and had special hours for consultation. Scientists, psychologists, spiritualists, religionists, Yogi experts, and self-confessed illusionists from all countries spent hours in conversation with him, only to leave as baffled as ever. The illusionists, in truth, were distinctly annoyed. It was next to impossible for them to get a booking on the halls with Vass holding the field.

Month by month, with a tremendous total of mysteries and discoveries to his credit, Vass slowly mastered the entire interest of the public. He was important enough to oust international relations and air raid precautions from the front pages of the dailies and then, in December, he announced that his tour was going to cease and that he intended to build the Red Temple, to be devoted entirely to the interests of Earthly mankind.

Vass chose an appropriate site for his temple, the very spot whereon he had destroyed the fire several months before. Following his announcement, he dropped from sight for a time, but Londoners passing the heavily-boarded region near Charing Cross Station, trying vainly to get a glimpse of what was going on beyond, wondered what new secrets the Red Temple would have to offer.

Dave Turner was one of the reporters who tried to view the Temple while under construction, at first without success for even the roof of operations was covered with tarpaulin. When at length the tarpaulin was removed he beheld nothing unusual, merely a gang of workmen erecting girders across a waste of concrete floor. Of Vass himself there seemed to be no sign, though there was little doubt he was somewhere around directing operations.

From time to time Turner published long descriptions of the Temple’s progress, complete with photographs. He was, in fact, thoroughly determined to keep the Magician in the public eye, until at length, the Arrow’s editor began to get annoyed.

“Listen, Turner,” he snapped, one afternoon, after going through the copy, “this stuff about the Temple may interest you, but to the public it’s just getting to be the story of a lot of plaster. At first you turned in good stuff with a human angle, told us all about Vass from babyhood, his life on Mars. You’ve got to do it again or something like it. Get some—some zip into your column. Understand?”

“Such as?” Turner asked dryly. “I can’t even find him to—”

“That’s your worry—you’re the reporter. Why don’t you find out how he does his tricks?” The editor stopped, looked up with gleaming eyes.

“Gosh, that would be something!” he breathed. “He says he does it all by mind force or some such stuff—but just suppose he doesn’t? Suppose he’s a fake, for instance? What a scoop that would make!”

“A fake?” Turner echoed blankly.

“After all he’s done?”

“Well, anyhow, it’s an idea. Find out something or else take another assignment. It’s up to you. And why don’t you ask some of the experts, like Sir Gadsby Brough, what they think about Vass? Haven’t had many outside opinions lately.”

Shrugging his shoulders, Turner walked out slowly. He felt rather irritated by the fact that a doubt had been born in his mind. A fake? To his ordinary common sense it seemed unthinkable: besides, he rather liked Vass. But to his journalistic sense the idea of proving this supreme wizard to be a charlatan had a spicy appeal. A wild goose chase, probably, but—just suppose?

With a slow grin on his face Turner made for his office desk and took up the telephone. In a few moments the impatient voice of Sir Gadsby Brough was floating over the wire.

“Sir Gadsby? This is Turner of the Arrow. Can you grant me an interview to record your opinion of the Red Magician?”

“I certainly cannot!” came the cold retort. “I have a monograph on inter-spatial tesseracts to finish. So far as I am concerned the Red Magician is a cheap showman and there is no point in discussing him.”

“Cheap showman!” Turner cried. “But hang it all, Sir Gadsby, you can’t mean—”

“Don’t interrupt! I admit the Magician is clever, but I object to him turning the dignified profession of scientist into a cheap music hall entertainment—glorified conjuring tricks!”

“Well—er—do you believe he’s a Martian?”

“Lacking evidence to the contrary, I have to. His immovable space machine seems to make that point clear.”

“But is there any way in which his ship might be moved scientifically? I mean by—well, say, the fourth dimension.”

“Fourth dimension or otherwise the weight is the same,” Brough snapped. “No known means can yet explain that globe or its complex inner machinery.”

Turner, scribbling busily on his writing pad, had already got the interview details he needed.

“How do you account for the Indian rope trick?” he asked.

“I am not a Hindu fakir, young man.”

No, Turner reflected, he could hardly imagine the old boy prostrate on a bed of nails. Stifling a sudden desire to laugh, he continued his questioning.

“I know that, sir,” he said, “but could you—could the Magician—produce the rope trick scientifically?”

Brough seemed to consider.

“Well, possibly,” he replied, after a long silence, “by some trick with light waves, but— Look here, Turner, you’re wasting my time. I have work to do.”

“Sorry,” Turner murmured humbly. “You were saying about light waves—”

“I’ve no time to go any further. If you’re so anxious to know about light waves, why don’t you read Abel Karton’s observations on them? Your own paper published his views some two years ago, when he tried to interest the War Office in a new invention. Very clever treatise. I have the column filed…”

Another pause, then, “September 12th was the date. Now goodbye!”

“Thanks, Sir Gadsby.” Turner rang off, thought for a moment, and surveyed his notes. “September 12th?” he muttered. “Two years ago? That was before I came here—one of Joan Wyngate’s jobs. Abel Karton? Never heard of him.”

Jumping to his feet, Turner made for the filing room, turned up the issue of the Arrow in question, and searching through it, finally discovered the interview on the back page with Joan Wyngate’s byline.

The interview was of considerable length, and was, in essence, an indictment against Governmental red tape when it came to the consideration of really valuable scientific inventions. In the course of his statement, Abel Karton had touched with a highly technical accuracy on light-wave control, the fundamental states of matter, and synthesis, Turner was not a first-class scientist, but he did know enough to piece the interview together. It was not the science that really mattered, however, so much as Abel Karton himself.

Within ten minutes Turner was in the offices of the Clarion, searching for Joan. He found her at length in the canteen busy with her lunch.

“Well, light of my life!” she exclaimed in amazement, as Turner sat down opposite her across the table. “And what brings the Arrow’s mastermind into the enemy camp?”

Her blue eyes regarded him suspiciously under her pert little hat. Turner reflected it was a pity their rival positions precluded any demonstration of affection. Curiously enough, his collar always seemed too tight when he met Joan face to face like this.

“Well, well?” she prompted, as he sat gazing. “What’s the idea? Don’t mind me eating, will you?”

“Eh? Oh—no, go right ahead… Joan, do you ever remember interviewing a scientist called Abel Karton?”

“Do I!” the girl echoed with a whistle. “It was almost my last job on the Arrow. I spent one entire afternoon listening to him spout about light waves and planets and things. I was as dizzy as a top when I got back to the office.” She stopped suddenly, lowered her tea cup. “Why?” she demanded.

“Oh, I just wondered.” Turner tried to look casual. “You see, I’ve some work to do that may need Karton’s help. I came across your article and looked you up… What’s he like, this Karton? Where does he live?”

“Last I heard of him, a couple of years ago, he’d gone to France. I don’t know where he is now. He tried to sell some scientific ideas to the Government, you know, and when they didn’t bite he got the needle and went to the Continent.” The girl shrugged her slender shoulders. “Rather a funny old codger,” she murmured. “Short, white-haired, green eyed, and—”

She broke off suddenly at the change of expression on Turner’s face.

“Dave Turner, what are you driving at?” she asked coldly.

“Nothing, Joan—honest.” He got to his feet. “Since he’s on the Continent that rules him out for me. Pity! Well, thanks all the same. See you again sometime.”

Joan stared after his fast retreating form, then frowned at her plate.

“Now what did I say that might…” She looked up suddenly. “Good Lord! Dave Turner is a bright little boy after all! Maybe a bright little girl can do something too!”

She scrambled her things together and hurriedly departed.

* * * *

In the meantime, Turner was frantically searching Who’s Who. The current issue made no reference to Abel Karton, but an earlier edition referred to him at considerable length: Professor of physics, holder of the Mathematical Chair in the Vienna Scientific Institute, author of works on space, the phenomena of light, molecular fundamentals, and some subjects entirely unpronounceable. Residence: ‘The Willows,’ Littlehampton, Sussex.

That settled it for Turner. For the rest of the day he went off on the trail, rained inquiries on Littlehampton, tried every trick he could think of to extract information, and made copious notes. By late evening he returned to London in a complacent frame of mind.

There was not the slightest doubt, to his way of thinking, that Abel Karton—now apparently disappeared nobody knew where—was actually none other than Solivus Vass, the Martian. The clue of the green eyes had been an obvious one, and the coincidence between the profound knowledge of Abel Karton, clearly a century ahead of his time, and the Red Magician was too obvious to be missed.

No, there was little doubt about Karton being Vass, mysteriously altered to look like a Martian, but the discovery by no means explained the full puzzle.

His motives? His astounding stunts? His immovable space machine?

Turner shook his head in bewilderment. In finding evidence of Vass’s real identity he had, if anything, got himself in a bigger pickle than ever, for until he had definite proof of Vass’s motives and an explanation for his feats, he dare not breathe a word.

CHAPTER 4

For a month after his discovery Turner found himself busy on trivial, irritating assignments, and did not take up the old thread again until Vass reappeared before the public eye in the early New Year with the announcement that his Red Temple was finished, and that he was now ready to demonstrate Martian science as never before.

The public swallowed his every statement with the same gullibility as before, and Turner permitted no hint of the real truth to escape. His main task now was to solve the reason for all this hocus-pocus. His request to be the first to examine the Temple was readily granted.

In shape it was circular, built in red brick, with a roof that went up to a triangle. This general architecture, the triangular windows, and the neon-sign— ‘Red Temple’—gave just the right hint of mystery top appeal to a credulous public.

Inside the building, Vass keeping him company, Turner wandered along the cool, circular hall entirely enclosing the central circle of the main building. The hall walls were liberally supplied with arresting-looking doors in burnished metal, designated as ‘Meditation Room,’ ‘Consulting Room,’ and so forth. Each of them was cool, light, and tastefully furnished. But Turner’s main attention centred on a doorway larger than the others, composed of material resembling polished jet, almost facing the entrance way.

“Something special?” he asked quickly.

Vass smiled.

“My demonstration theatre,” he explained. “Please enter.”

He swung the black doors wide and switched on clusters of yellow globes. Turner gazed over numberless orderly rows of raised seats, and walked slowly along the central aisle gazing at the heavy, ornate draperies on the walls, until at last he came to the raised platform with its black-velvet backdrop curtains.

He mounted the steps and regarded the smooth steel floor, then drew back the draperies and surveyed the metal walls.

“You mean you are going to perform feats in here?” he asked, frowning.

“Exactly,” Vass nodded. “Rather an interesting place, is it not? Entirely metal save for the ventilation grilles in the ceiling. On this stage I will perform all my magical feats, and I believe I will fully convince the world of the power of mind.”

“If you can do it with walls and floor like this you certainly will,” Turner confessed. “It’s as solid as the Bank of England’s vaults.”

“Do you doubt my prowess?” Vass asked slowly.

“Eh? Why, no, of course not. It’s just that I’m rather mystified as to how you do it… However, thanks for the story. I’ll splash it in the Arrow. When do you demonstrate?”

“Tonight at eight.” Vass gave a faintly cynical smile. “I have invited all the famous scientists in Europe to come along. They of all others are the hardest to convince… Strange indeed how obtuse the earthly mind can be.”

“So I imagine,” Turner observed quietly, then with a final nod of thanks he turned and left the stage, puzzling to himself as he walked out of the building.

He could not rid himself now of the impression that his theory had a flaw somewhere. Facing Vass again, sensing his compelling personality, surveying his mighty dome and odd shoulders and chest, he began to wonder. Martian or Earthman? Magician or fake? It ran as a tempo in his brain as he wrote up the story of the Red Temple and its impregnable construction.

The rest of the day was an annoyance to him: the evening was the only thing that interested him, and when he did step out of the Arrow offices into the biting east wind to head for the Temple he found the trim form of Joan Wyngate waiting for him in a nearby doorway.

“Ah, the scoop king in person!” she smiled, deliberately hooking her arm through his. “Do you mind taking a nice, attractive girl to the spook house? Otherwise the Red Temple?”

“Well, no, but—” Turner paused uneasily, looked at the girl doubtfully in the lights from the shop windows as they walked along. “What’s the idea, Joan?” he asked shortly.

“You have the idea that I’m an addle-brained girl who can’t possibly compete with masterful males, haven’t you?” she asked sweetly. “Well, that’s where you’re wrong. You gave yourself away all over the place when you questioned me in the canteen. I’ve not forgotten a single word you said, but my main recollection is your amazement at learning Abel Karton had green eyes. So, says little girl, has the Red Magician. Connection obvious. Is he a fake or is he a Martian? Joan Wyngate gets to work and decides to find out—without much success, so far,” she finished, sighing. “But think what a great scoop it will make for the Clarion when I do solve the mystery!”

“So that’s it!” Turner breathed fiercely. “You confounded little— Oh, well, I suppose it’s my own fault,” he growled. “I might have known you’d guess the idea. All the same, I wanted the story for the Arrow.”

Joan smiled.

“All’s fair in—in war,” she said. “We both want it and we’re both on newspapers. Since we’re rivals we can’t officially cooperate, but unofficially…” She smiled captivatingly. “I’m not a hard girl to take out to dinner sometimes,” she murmured; then, becoming serious again: “Honestly, though, I can’t quite identify Abel Karton with Solivus Vass. The size of Vass’s head for one thing. Karton had a pretty good one, but not quite like a top hat. Besides, if Vass’s head is false there’d be a join round his forehead, and there isn’t.”

“Humph!” Turner growled moodily. “I’ve got doubts, too, after what I saw this morning.” Briefly he related the details of the demonstration theatre, and when he had finished Joan wrinkled her nose in puzzlement.

“Must be a catch in it,” she commented; then they ceased talking as they reached the Temple, and went slowly up the steps with the crowd.

Inside the brightly lit hall Vass himself and a burly commissionaire were marshalling the people into order as they moved into the demonstration theatre. The scientists, with Sir Gadsby Brough well in evidence, were already in the front row. To the left, whither Joan and Turner moved, was the press section. The rest of the theatre was filled to the great doors with eagerly talking people.

“Creepy, isn’t it?” Joan whispered, tugging out her notebook and gazing across at the black-draped stage.

Turner nodded, then settled down to watch as the doors were closed and Vass slowly mounted the platform, holding up a hand for silence. The murmuring died away.

“My Earthly friends,” he said softly, “I have dedicated this Temple to you. The feats that will take place here are demonstrations of Martian mind science. Once you are convinced—once you are all convinced—my work is over. You can have my knowledge in return for certain valuable Earthly possessions, valuable, that is, to Mars. Now, shall we begin?”

He stood for a moment in silence, his huge head catching the yellow light of the globes. Gently he waved his right hand, then the audience gasped a little as a slender girl, clothed in Grecian style, began to merge out of the empty air, took on solidity, and finally bowed and smiled. Gradually, she walked forward to Vass, but even as she did so she became a wraith, then melted into emptiness. Vass clapped his bands sharply and a birdcage appeared to instantly disappear in a cloud of vanishing smoke.

The audience, already blinking at the rapidity of the first changes, became even more astounded as the Red Magician proceeded. He drove mysteriously produced knives into equally mysterious cubes of solid steel, vanished the lot abruptly, then produced two balls of some transparent metal which visibly passed right through one another, multiplied, subtracted, and finally disappeared in a flash of brilliant fire.

He went on to reproduce his rope trick, appearing out of a box secured with heavy chains. The same box suddenly became full of green water from which emerged the former Grecian girl, now in modem bathing-costume. Vass regarded her steadily. Very gradually she rose into the air, remained suspended upright without a trace of support.

“Mind power,” he smiled. “Sir Gadsby Brough, your reputation is beyond reproach. Please be so good as to come up here and satisfy yourself as to the absence of wires and gadgets.”

The scientist, driven on by curiosity, obeyed the injunction, and waved his hands and his walking stick above and around the motionless girl. He returned to his seat with a mystified expression on his face.

Vass gave a slow smile, waved his hand idly. As before the girl grew transparent, vaporised, and vanished. A deep intake of breath passed through the audience.

Hardly pausing. Vass went on and on, producing effect after effect. He produced dazzling backgrounds of India and the Orient, rolling oceans, screaming hurricanes, limpid lagoons, flaming sunsets of eye-wrenching colour—even convinced everybody they were staring down into the blazing maw of Vesuvius’ greatest depths. Then a flash and the stage was empty.

He stood smiling in the soft lights, bowing gently at the thunderous applause.

“Elementary mind science, not to be confused with hypnotism,” he murmured. “I do it merely to prove to you that my powers are in no way decreased. At various times other demonstrations will take place: in the meantime, every day, I am at your service.”

Again the applause raged through the theatre and he descended slowly from the stage. Little by little the people began filing out of the theatre into the hall, with Vass coming up in the rear. Out in the hall he smiled round on the talkative crowd, his back to the ebony doors.

It was then that Sir Gadsby Brough emerged from the press, his round, fleshy face frankly cynical.

“Vass,” he said slowly, “I don’t pretend to know how you do these conjuring tricks of yours. I don’t know how you produce distant scenes, make a girl float in mid-air and fade from sight; but I do say that I’m not convinced. I believe you’re a fake, sir—a fake!”

“So?” Vass’s black eyebrows rose questioningly. “I rather thought I had convinced you, Sir Gadsby.”

“Not a bit of it! Mystified me, yes, but nothing else. What is more, if you maintain you have nothing to hide, I demand to examine this theatre of yours.”

Vass smiled faintly, gazing round on the watching people.

“Friends, we have a doubter in our midst,” he observed. “Are there any others who would like to examine the theatre and satisfy themselves?”

“Yes, I would!” Turner moved forward resolutely with Joan by his side. Nor were they the only ones—several others advanced.

“How surprising!” Vass exclaimed. “At least I thought you were satisfied, Mr. Turner. However, please enter,” and he flung the black doors wide open.

Brough was clearly surprised at the ready acceptance of his demand. He went forward slowly into the theatre with Turner and Joan beside him. Vass came up in the rear with other people trailing curiously behind.

Brough made no pretence of being cursory. He pulled aside the draperies and thumped the wall, even went down on his knees and banged the floor. Turner and the girl divided their labours by covering the wall inch by inch, examining the metal closely for the least sign of a flaw. For nearly thirty minutes, helped by Sir Gadsby and other doubters, they examined the place from end to end. They reached the doorway again with somewhat ashamed faces.

“Well, I’m damned if I can understand it!” Brough snorted, rubbing his bald bead. “Floors and walls solid metal. No sign of apparatus or machinery—unless it was mass hypnotism!”

“Controlling all these people?” Vass asked quietly. “Really, my dear sir!”

Sir Gadsby shrugged and bit his lip.

“It’s clever,” he growled; “infernally clever, but you can do your tricks until Doomsday before I’ll admit you’re a Martian magician. Faker, sir! Blasted faker!” and swinging round be strode out with pouting lips.

Vass watched him go, then turned back to his adherents.

“Thank you, my friends,” he murmured. “You have satisfied yourselves. Tomorrow I shall be ready to help you in every way I can. Good night—good night…”

He herded the people slowly out. Turner and Joan went down the front steps together into the busy whirl of the night traffic. It seemed genuinely stimulating after the weird nature of the theatre. Wordless, they looked at one another.

“Joan,” Turner said presently, “we’re either a couple of prize idiots or else Vass is a genuine miracle worker with mind creations. What else but mind force could produce those effects in a steel theatre?”

“Don’t ask me,” the girl sighed. “Better try some supper and talk it over.”

But talking it over did no good. The more they examined the problem the more they saw the hopes of their joint scoop receding. They still faced that inexorable question—Martian scientist or brilliant charlatan?

CHAPTER 5

The Clue of the Needle

With the passing days it became an obvious, even a disturbing fact that the Red Magician had the capital of the country entirely under his sway. His extraordinary personality, his feats of wizardry, his uncanny occult powers at beholding things denied to ordinary men were quite sufficient to master the main bulk of London’s population, and those who travelled to see him were usually convinced after one interview.

Day after day his Temple was packed—endless streams of money flowed into his lap. Wealthy women in particular came in droves for him to satisfy their every little worry; which he did, for a fabulous price. His streak of generosity in giving poor people free opinions for their guidance was something that endeared him at once to the general public.

The Continent began to reveal interest. Vass invited a deputation of European scientific experts to London and thereby vastly extended the sphere of his subtle influence. The United States were less ready to accept him, more prone to scepticism; but at length even they succumbed and with typical fervour hailed Vass as the eighth wonder of the world. Why not make him President? Why not even make him World ruler and have his strange powers sort out the complex difficulties of a sadly-troubled planet?

England caught on to that idea. The Continent thought it was going too far—but for all that, so fanatical is hero worship in its extreme form, the possibility of Solivus Vass, Martian, becoming lord of the Earth grew less and less unlikely as time went by.

Some saw disaster in that possibility; others saw world peace. Dave Turner, far his part, did not know quite what to think. He and Joan, checkmated in the intervening weeks by lack of angles to work upon, had let things slide a little.

Now this new notion to make Vass a World dictator by popular vote started them off on the trail again. Somehow the relationship between Solivus Vass and Abel Karton had got to be solved, to be substantiated before he had the whole world in the hollow of his hand.

One great handicap was that Vass never left the Temple. He lived there all the time, so that any hope of examining the place without his knowledge was out of the question. Nonetheless, that did not prevent Turner from studying the Temple from every angle, and comparing the measurements he made with his mind’s eye recollection of that earlier tour and his notes on the subject. All of which only served to shatter his theory of false walls, hidden spaces, and other tricks. The trouble was that every scrap of space occupied by the Temple could readily be accounted for. And with that discovery the idea of hidden apparatus went to the winds.

Turner was nonplussed, even more so when he came to compare notes with Joan. She had taken a different line of attack, working on the assumption that Vass perhaps used electrical effects to produce his tricks. She had probed every radio shop for a mile round the Temple to discover if any electrical interference had upset reception. In every case she had drawn blank. Still baffled, she questioned the Metropolitan Electricity Board and in her capacity as newspaper reporter was given the information that Vass’s Temple required no more electricity than an ordinary theatre. Blank—blank. Everywhere.

There remained only one course, to induce Vass to give a demonstration under conditions that would be humanly impossible, and thereon let the evidence rest. Turner made the decision, got into touch with Sir Gadsby Brough, and gained his immediate co-operation.

To Turner’s irritation their visit was delayed until seven-thirty in the evening through the absence of Joan at a local radio and TV exhibition she was covering. When she did join Turner and Sir Gadsby outside the Temple, she was flushed with running and clutched an attaché case in her hand.

“Sorry,” she panted, coming up. “I got delayed collecting these confounded gadgets.”

Turner grunted and led the way into the Temple hall. The commissionaire ushered them into Vass’s private office.

“Well, my friends, this is a surprise!” Vass exclaimed, rising from his desk amidst the mellow glow of the lamps. “Is there some little thing I can do for you?”

“Frankly, Vass, we’re not here for pleasantries,” snapped Brough. “You know I disbelieve you, and before I can be really convinced of your powers I demand certain evidence.”

“Such as?” Vass murmured imperturbably.

“In about an hour you will be giving one of your theatre demonstrations. Right?”

“Perfectly.”

“Very well. We demand that we examine the theatre before you start and seal it with private markings known only to ourselves. Then, if those markings are undisturbed at the end of your demonstration we will believe you.”

The magician smiled.

“That is quite reasonable, Sir Gadsby,” he said. “You will forgive me if I do not accompany you to the theatre? You know where it is, along the hall? Splendid!” He paused and dived into his desk. “Here,” he said dryly, “is sealing-wax and a reel of black cotton. Do whatever you wish, wherever you wish. I will continue with my work whilst you proceed with yours.”

Brough slowly took the wax and cotton, disarmed as before by Vass’s unexpected willingness. Turner glanced at Joan, then towards the slightly opened window of the office…

“Come on,” Brough growled. “We haven’t much time,” and he marched out purposefully.

As before, Brough, Turner, and Joan found only solid steel everywhere they examined, but none the less they smothered the stage draperies with secret black cottons, leaving a clear space only where Vass would have to walk during his manifestations. Then, out in the hall, they covered the ebony door with strings, cotton, special markings and seals, making absolutely certain that no mortal being could get into the theatre without their being aware of it before the demonstration began.

“That ought to fix it,” Turner said, but he still looked a trifle uncertain. “If he does anything with all these traps I’ll jump into the Thames.”

He broke off, picked up the girl’s attaché case, and glanced at her in wonderment.

“What the dickens have you got in this thing, Joan? It weighs about a ton.”

“Don’t I know it!” she replied. “They’re radio gadgets—samples from the Exhibition. I’ve got to do a write-up on them.” She broke off, glancing at her watch. “Come on, we’ve got to move and tell Vass what we’ve done.”

Vass, however, seemed in no way perturbed when they returned to his office.

“This is really all very foolish,” he smiled. “However, if it satisfies you its object is achieved… And now,” he got to his feet, “I believe I hear the first of my audience arriving.”

He went to the door and opened it, greeting the people as they entered, with special smiles for his wealthier clients. Brough, Turner, and Joan could do nothing but look on, counting the society and scientific notables who had fallen under the wizard’s sway.

Little by little the hall began to fill up, and at length Vass moved along to the ebony doors and regarded the seals amusedly.

“We still have doubters,” he explained cynically, and watched silently as the three examined their seals. They were quite undisturbed.

“May we go in now?” Vass asked dryly, and a titter of amusement ran through the assembled audience.

“Not yet,” Brough retorted. “I’ve the stage to examine yet.”

He went inside the theatre, returning in a few minutes and pulling the ebony doors wide.

“All right,” he growled. “The traps are all set, Vass. Go ahead.”

“Thank you, Sir Gadsby,” Vass smiled and led the way into the theatre.

The commissionaire hove in view and marshalled the people to their seats. Brough, Joan, and Turner took the front row, Turner still holding the girl’s heavy case with obvious discomfort. Then he turned his attention to the stage as Vass quietly mounted it.

“A pity the powers of a Martian should be doubted,” he said softly, smoothing slender hands down his red clothing. “For, you see—” His hand waved slowly and a massive box suddenly merged into sight. It burst open suddenly, transforming itself into a mass of flags.

Sir Gadsby leant forward so far that he nearly fell out of his chair. Turner drew a sharp breath; Joan’s eyes opened to their fullest extent. The audience murmured softly to themselves.

Then Vass went into another of his amazing demonstrations, if anything surpassing all previous efforts. The mystery girl appeared again and disappeared as strangely, to be followed by still more amazing manifestations.

Turner gave himself up to watching until the Indian scenes came into view, then his attention was distracted by a soft, remote buzzing noise. Nobody else in their rapt attention seemed to have noticed it; but he sensed it distinctly. In fact he seemed to feel it more than hear it.

Baffled, he glanced round, seeing only the draped walls and the intent faces; then he glanced down at the case on his lap. Beyond question that was the source of the strange sound! He half-opened his mouth to speak to Joan, saw her eagerly gazing at the stage so, instead, softly opened the case and peered inside. It was filled with odd electrical and radio gadgets, but one in particular was showing a little red spotlight whilst a delicate needle quivered over a graded disc in the fashion of a stopwatch. For a long time he studied it frowningly, then a slow gleam came into his eyes. Quietly he pressed the stud on the instrument and the buzzing stopped. The needle became rigid at a number on the dial.

Softly he closed the lid and looked up just in time to see Vass receiving his usual thunderous applause.

“Can’t be any doubt about it, Dave; he’s a genuine magician,” Joan muttered.

Turner did not answer. Vass moved to descend from the stage, then stopped as Sir Gadsby leapt to his feet.

“One moment, Vass!” he shouted. “The final part of my test is to take place now! I believe in the possibility of trickery in this hall; why is it we always leave it before being permitted to re-enter? How do we know the stage does not revolve? Or even that you don’t switch halls in some trick fashion?”

Vass smiled coldly.

“You do me an injustice, Sir Gadsby!” he retorted. “However, if that is how you feel, pray come up here before I move and satisfy yourself. All of you—you, Turner, and you, Miss Wyngate. Come along.”

Brough led the advance, striding up on to the stage with the girl and Turner behind him. The audience watched in contemptuous silence: their faith in the Martian was complete by this time. Turner did not trouble to examine the draperies, and merely stood aside as Brough and the girl conducted the examination.

At last they turned. Brough gave an uncertain sort of smile and shrugged his fleshy shoulder.

“Well, you win, Vass,” he said quietly. “Not a cotton is disturbed or a seal broken. I’ll question you no more.”

“You certainly took a lot of convincing,” was Vass’s curt response. Then he strode down from the platform to mingle with the people.

Gradually the crowd began to file out into the hall. A strained silence fell as Brough, Turner, and the girl came into view.

“Sorry, Vass,” Turner remarked quietly. “We should have known better. Good night.”

Vass’s huge head inclined a little and the three turned and moved away.

Only when they were on the steps did Turner suddenly emerge from his apparent mood of contrition.

He handed the surprised Joan her attaché case and said briefly:

“Don’t let this bag out of your sight for a single instant and don’t touch any of the gadgets inside. Go ahead with Sir Gadsby to the Corner House Café and wait for me. I’ll be with you within an hour.”

Joan stared amazedly.

“But, Dave, what on earth—?” she began.

“Don’t ask questions—get going!” he breathed, then he raced to the bottom of the steps, swiftly climbed the railings encircling the building, and dropped into the narrow space between the railings and the building wall.

In three minutes he had made his way to where Vass’s office window was situated. As he had noticed earlier in the evening, it was slightly open. It was only the work of a moment to swing it wide, slip into the dark office, and replace it in position. Softly he moved to the door, listening to the murmuring of voices. Vass was still in the hall with his devotees.

Turner was working to no haphazard plan. He had taken careful stock of the office furniture on his earlier visit, particularly the tall filing cabinet at an angle across one corner. He moved to it in the gloom, dropped gently down behind it, and waited…waited until he was stiff with cramp.

It seemed an eternity before at last the office door opened and the lights came on. Turner, crouching low and listening intently, heard the creak of a chair. There was an interval, then the door opened again. Immediately the voice of Vass spoke.

“What the devil went wrong tonight, Elsie? There was a power leak somewhere: I got several mild shocks.”

Turner crouched in puzzled silence as a young girl’s voice answered.

“Sorry, Dad, but it was quite impossible to tell you anything, of course. One of the insulator banks developed a fault. You’ll need to fix it. We were losing power all the time.”

Dad? Turner tensed, longing to look over the cabinet. Breathless, he listened for more, but all he heard was a grunt. Then a long sigh—

“Ah, that’s better!” It was Vass’s voice.

Turner wondered what was better, then listened keenly to a faint creaking noise, the sound of hollow footsteps.

“Well, come on, Elsie, we’ll see what we can do,” Vass remarked. “Where’s Benson, by the way?”

“Locking up. I left him going round closing the windows…”

The voice of the girl faded strangely and finally ceased. Her footfalls and those of Vass also expired mysteriously.

Gently, Turner began to rise up, and the first thing that met his eyes over the top of the cabinet was the surprising sight of a great forehead, topped with smooth black hair, standing on the desk!

Turner stood blinking at it, then recalled Vass’s sigh of relief. So that was what had been better! Silently, he eased himself over the cabinet, and saw for the first time that a normally flawlessly-concealed section of the floor had slid smoothly aside. Metal steps led down into the gloom.

Swiftly he went to the false forehead and examined it. The thing was not metal nor rubber, it was actual flesh with an elastic consistency so identical with the real thing that no possible flaw could be detected in the matter of join. Synthetic flesh? So that was one of the magician’s secrets!

Turner swung round, looked uneasily at the door, then backed to the trap door. No sounds reached him from below. Gently he began to step down, taking care that his feet made no sound. As he went lower a faint reflection of light from somewhere below reached him.

He came at last within view of an enormous underground cellar, evidently stretching the entire length of the Temple base and probably much farther than that. In dazed astonishment he could do nothing but stare. He caught sight of Vass, amazingly different without his false head—white-headed and active—moving about among enormous electrical machines, accompanied by the slim form of a girl. Here and there were men in blue overalls obeying the inaudible orders the scientist snapped out to them.

Turner recognised enormous turbo-generators and dynamos, electro-magnets, banks of insulators, massive switchboards and, in particular, an incessant flooding stream of water racing through giant sluices. His eyes narrowed with thought.

“Of course! The Temple’s space is accounted for,” he breathed. “The trouble was nobody thought of a basement like this. Or the water for power…”

He smiled slowly, gave a final look round the wilderness of scientific achievement, then hastily retreated as the scientist and his daughter began to approach. Two minutes later he was through the office window and out into the night.

Rejoining Brough and Joan in the Corner House, Turner lost no time in recounting his experience.

“Then—then he is Abel Karton?” Joan asked breathlessly.

Turner nodded.

“No doubt of it now,” he said. “The girl’s his daughter—she looked to me like the one in the Grecian costume. However, that doesn’t matter at the moment. The point is this, he’s a scientist of the highest possible status, a literal wizard of electricity. But what he’s driving at we still don’t know. Tonight, though, something happened that he didn’t expect. There was an electricity escape, normally unnoticeable but detectable by instruments such as those in your attaché case, Joan. Hand it over, I’ve a few ideas to put forward. You, in particular, Sir Gadsby, can probably be the undoing of Karton, working from my basic plan. Now listen carefully…”

Brough leaned forward over the table, his expressions changing to a final one of profound interest as he studied first the contents of the girl’s case and then listened to Turner’s scheme.

“Of course I can do it!” he breathed. “Nothing simpler! And if you’re right Abel Karton will be trapped.”

“It can’t miss,” whispered Joan exultantly. “Thank goodness I brought this case along with me instead of dropping it at the office on my way.”

Turner smiled. “You can thank a leak in Karton’s apparatus for the entire thing,” he said quietly. “Otherwise I’m afraid we’d be his staunch devotees by now. Well, let’s be moving.”

CHAPTER 6

The Exposure of Abel Karton

During the ensuing week, Turner, Brough, and Joan were in almost daily contact, evolving their final plan for the downfall of the Red Magician. Turner was guarded in his hints to his editor, though he left him in little doubt that he intended to scoop the biggest story in hoax history before very long. Joan Wyngate told her editor the same thing, and it became an increasingly difficult problem for the girl and Turner to determine how their individual stories were both going to be scoops. One or the other would have to be first.

A good deal of time was spent by Turner in issuing invitations to the word’s greatest scientists—many of them believers in Vass’s powers—to be present at the magician’s next demonstration. In consequence, by the time the following Wednesday evening came around, every possible space in the Temple was packed with notables.

The scientist, as big-headed and suave as ever in his role of Vass, regarded the invasion with some delight, not entirely divorced from bewilderment, until Turner explained that he had felt it his duty to make amends for his previous doubts.

“Exactly that,” beamed Brough, disarmingly pleasant for once.

“I’m going to see that my paper gives you the space you deserve, too,” Joan put in, holding her attaché case firmly until Turner took it from her.

“Well, at least I am assured of complete co-operation this time,” the wizard smiled, halting at the theatre doors. “Even so, though, I’d be glad if you would enter and examine the stage as usual.”

The audience filed in, Turner, Joan, and Brough taking their former places on the front row. The stage having been proven solid, Vass quietly mounted it. As he did so, Turner idly opened the lid of his attaché case, shifted something inside, and closed it again. A vague, hardly detectable humming note began to proceed from it.

“Now, to begin,” Vass smiled. “Suppose we have the materialisation of a woman from empty air? Like this—” His slender hand waved quickly—but nothing happened! A slight frown crossed his face and he rapped out a sharp command. Still the stage remained empty.

“Really, I must apologise,” he said quickly, advancing. “For some reason I seem rather unable to concentrate tonight. I cannot understand it, in view of the entire accord of my audience. I will try again.”

He made a pass through the air and waited for something to appear. Nobody knew what. Nor did anybody learn, for nothing came into view!

A stony silence settled on the audience. The sea of faces stared at the stage. Vass coughed a little and looked around him anxiously; then he stood erect and snapped:

“Woman—appear! I command you to appear!” His vast forehead crinkled in a concentrative effort. It was of no avail. A low and uneasy muttering was creeping over the audience.

Vass swung round, clearly alarmed. His face was strained and drawn, his eyes staring to left and right. Desperately he flung up his hand to quell the rising uproar.

“Wait, I implore you!” he shouted hoarsely. “It is not always possible to produce mind creations. There are thousands of little things to take into account, and—”

Sir Gadsby Brough got to his feet, grinning in malicious triumph.

“We don’t want excuses, Vass, we want effects!” he shouted. “You have demonstrated before with dozens of sceptical people present. Now with everybody believing in you, you can’t possibly fail! Get on with it!”

“Hear, hear! Come on, Vass—let’s have it!”

“Per—perhaps a view of Egypt…” Vass stammered and frantically waved his arms at the black draperies. The view of Egypt failed to materialise. Stunned, he fell back, then stumbled round to face the shouting people.

“Come on, man, what’s the matter with you!” came a voice from the audience.

“Let’s get started!” called another.

Turner glanced round on the gesticulating men and women, gently put his attaché case on his chair, and then raced up on to the platform. Fiercely he held up his hands for silence and by degrees the roar began to die away.

“Wait!” he shouted. “Wait a minute! Hear what I’ve got to say!”

“What do you want up here?” demanded the scientist bitterly.

“You’ll find out quick enough.” Turner waited for complete silence, then said quietly: “I think it’s about time Abel Karton stopped play-acting and came from behind his disguise!”

At the same instant he swung round and knocked the scientist’s false head a couple of yards away with one swing of his arm. Karton stood gulping with amazement, a mass of white hair framing his haggard, perspiring face.

“You—you can’t mean—” he began hoarsely; then his words were drowned by the sudden uproar from the audience. Scientists, psychologists, experts in every branch, ordinary men and women, stood shoulder to shoulder and yelled out their contempt.

“Faker! Damned faker!”

“He isn’t a Martian at all!”

“Abel Karton—the scientist who went to France!”

Again Turner waved his hands, imposing a brief lull in the storm.

“Karton is a faker, yes,” he admitted in a grave voice. “We know now that all his tricks are electrical, though so far we have no explanation for them. But we do know this much: on the occasion of his last demonstration there was an electrical leak in his apparatus, which lies directly under this theatre and stage. Quite by chance Miss Wyngate of the Clarion had some electrical accessories with her from a radio exhibition. One of them was a wavelength stopwatch, used in testing radio wavelengths and electrical frequencies. It reacted under the influence of the electric escape and I pressed the stud that caused it absolutely to identify the periodicity and wavelength of the energy being used by Karton here. The rest was simple.

“From that basis of wavelength it was only necessary to work out an interference wave, a small amount of energy being quite sufficient to upset the balance of the electricity used by Karton. Sir Gadsby Brough worked it out, and in that attaché case on my chair is the small apparatus that did the trick—is still doing it, in fact. It stopped Karton’s electrical effects from working by issuing a heterodyning frequency, just as radio stations may be rendered unintelligible by specially arranged interference on the same wave. Outside the building no electrical escape is possible, because the walls are insulated. Even the electrical escape at that last demonstration would be undetectable outside the Temple.”

Turner stopped and turned to Karton, who had stood listening in dazed silence.

“You—you found that out?” he breathed. “But I—”

He broke off in visible terror at the angry surging of the people towards him. The knowledge of his trickery was sufficient to inflame his former devotees into an ugly mood. Men and women started moving ominously towards the platform, only to swing round as the ebony doors flew open violently.

“Police!” somebody yelled. “Police! Take it easy!”

The swirling, angry scene became somewhat calmer as a sergeant and constables strode grimly into the theatre. With them was a young girl in flimsy Grecian attire, a coat thrown hastily over her shoulders. Behind her, firmly, held, stood half a dozen men in overalls, sullen-faced and bitter.

“Dad!” the girl cried hoarsely, stopping in front of the stage. “What does it all mean? What’s happened?”

“I told the police to clean up your cellar then come on here,” Turner explained quietly. “Best way to protect you, Karton,” he added, and the scientist nodded very slowly.

“You expose me in one breath and protect me in the next,” he murmured, slowly regaining his composure. He turned to the police. “I’ll come along, gentlemen. Come, Elsie, we may as well get it over.”

Quietly he left the platform and joined his daughter. Turner took Joan’s arm and made a motion to Brough. Silently, as the threatening people milled around them, they passed down the centre aisle and out through the hall to the street.

The news had traveled fast, and people were already swarming round the Temple in their hundreds, held back by a strong cordon of police. Looking neither left nor right, Karton took his daughter’s arm and followed implicitly the directions of the stern-faced acting-sergeant as he directed him towards a waiting car.

CHAPTER 7

Such Powers are Dangerous

Half an hour later the entire party was seated in the private office of Detective-Inspector Willis at New Scotland Yard. Willis, his face thrown into relief by his desk light, regarded the silent, white-haired scientist steadily.

“You are aware, Professor Karton, that your arrest is purely based on the charge of false representation?” he asked slowly. “By that false representation you obtained money, a great fortune and hoaxed London and the world into thinking you were a visitor from another planet.”

Karton shrugged. “I have a fancy my dear Inspector, that those charges will be very difficult to substantiate in a court of law. I have been careful never to take money without giving full value for it. I have never done anybody any harm and never intended to. My whole scheme, in fact, was a carefully built-up plan to justify myself in the eyes of the world.”

“You mean you wish to make a confession?” the inspector inquired.

“I should prefer to call it a statement,” Karton corrected. “In any case I had intended to reveal my actual motives before too long a time. Turner here forestalled me, so I suppose there’s nothing more to hide. Yes; I’ll explain.”

“Right!” Willis turned aside to his clerk. “Take this down, Conroy.”

Conroy was not the only one who prepared his notebook. Both Joan and Turner sat ready with pencils poised.

“Some years ago,” Karton said quietly, “I tried to interest the Government, at the height of their rearmament programme, in various inventions of a scientific nature which I knew would be invaluable to this country and, indeed, absolute saviours in time of emergency. I am not blaming the laudable officials behind the campaign, but I do blame the dozens of people who hindered my efforts to get at the fountain-heads, who as good as threw me out of their offices and my inventions with me. To them it appeared I was just another old fool of a scientist.”

Karton paused, compressing his lips bitterly. Slowly, he resumed; “I could, of course, have perhaps got better treatment from a foreign power, but I happen to be a patriot. That would not do. I knew the public would want my devices if they only knew what they could do. How could I show them? The harmful way of demonstration meant a one-man war in which I would be the absolute master. That did not appeal to me. I did not want to hurt anybody. Instead, I gave a statement to the Press—to Miss Wyngate here, in fact—of the qualities of my inventions, hoping it would be seen by some powerful faction and my case taken up. Nothing happened.

“Embittered with my own country, I then left my Littlehampton home for the Continent and for several months worked out a scheme to attract the public and demonstrate to them my inventions at the same time. Out of my plans grew the idea of Solivus Vass, the Martian magician. If I could once capture the public interest, get the whole country—the World, if need be—to listen to me, and also could prove to them so-called miracles in the interval, they would demand that my powers and inventions be used for their own safety in case of attack.

“With that idea in mind, Elsie and I dropped from the sight of the world and returned to Sussex. We built a small isolated house with an underground laboratory on the Downs and from that point I started my scheme.”

“One moment,” the Inspector broke in. “Do I understand that workmen built this house of yours? Were you not afraid of them giving you away?”

Karton smiled faintly. “I laid my plans well, Inspector. Every man who ever worked for me is a fugitive from justice, as much in my hands as I was in his. You will find that my assistants from the Temple basement all have police records. It was not easy to find six wanted men, but I managed it, with patience.”

“I see. And then?”

“Then I made myself up as a Martian adding padding to my chest and back to produce the right effect and modelled a large head from synthetic flesh. Cellular material, the basic compounds of flesh and blood, is not difficult to create. The hard part comes when you try to make this synthetic material live! I haven’t managed that yet. Dead flesh chemically treated to prevent deterioration produced for me a perfect false head without a join. Then came the spaceship.”

Karton smiled a little amusedly at the recollection.

“The whole confounding point was the seamless nature of the globe,” he murmured. “It cannot fly, and never could. The interior machinery is so much bogus material, effective to look at but useless in application. Engineers could not fathom it because it was not intended to be fathomed. Its very haphazard nature made it a mystery. It was simply a straightforward bluff—and a good one! In its complete state it certainly represented a globe too heavy to be moved by ordinary methods but in fact, it was originally two hemispheres which were separately brought by night on wagons to the Downs by my assistants, from my home about three miles away. The two hemispheres were easily moveable by themselves.

“You see, the two hemispheres were welded together by one of my scientific devices, far superior and quicker than any known welding apparatus today. Oxy-acetylene welders, for instance, fuse two metals into one another, but they leave a distinct join. My device, which generates an electro-magnetic agitation, shifts the molecular paths of the two metals concerned and flows one into the other in a flawless whole, as perfectly as water added to water leaves no trace of entry. The molecules are combined so perfectly that two separate pieces of metal flow into a smooth oneness.

“Once one hemisphere had been brought to the appointed spot the wagon returned for the so-called driving mechanisms. They were placed inside the hemisphere, the other half was welded on in perhaps half an hour, and there it was…a perfect globe.”

“And you were not afraid of being caught in the act?” asked Turner, looking up from his notes.

“There are very few people on the Downs at two-thirty in the morning,” Karton answered dryly. “Of course, we removed all traces made by my lorries on the ground, and returned them to the private underground garage adjoining my home.”

“And the Indian rope trick?” Willis asked pensively.

“That involved technical science of a higher order,” Karton replied. “However, I’ll try and make it clear. I have, in truth, discovered the secret of invisibility, a first-class secret which the Government refused to credit. You may be aware that all perception is based on light waves. Reflection, that is. For instance, I see you, Inspector, because you are reflecting light waves to me: in truth you are a collection of molecules, so arranged that the light waves falling upon you produce what is called a man. So it is with everything, from cabbages to kings.

“Now, light waves travel in straight lines. They can be refracted by water, can be completely stopped by an opaque body, and can be polarised by tourmaline crystals, crystalline quartz, and other substances that came under the technical heading of stereoisomers, of which the well-known Nicol prism is one of the best examples.

“I have studied all fields of light, and arrived at the conclusion now accepted by most scientists that light is only a comparatively narrow band in the middle portion of the great range of electric waves stretching from those used in radio—which may have a wavelength of several miles—or to X-rays with waves of only a hundredth millionth of an inch. Light is purely electrical and, as Faraday showed, the plane of polarized light may be rotated by passage through a block of glass placed in a magnetic field, the rotation being reversed when the field is reversed. So, then, light is actually as easy to control as all other electrical fields once the right proportion of counteractive frequency is discovered. By counteractive, I mean a magnetism reacting directly on the basic electricity of light, able to move its waves at will as an ordinary magnet moves a piece of steel… You understand?”

“Go on,” muttered Willis, his brows down.

“By means of this counteractive magnetism the light from any object can be diverted completely. And light definitely has mass that can be turned aside—the fact is plainly evident in the stress fields existing around the sun, wherein the light of the stars is visibly bent and diverted by his enormous gravity. On a tiny scale my idea is similar. My first test with heavy apparatus revealed that any object in the range of my magnetism could be made instantly or gradually invisible, the power being graded to encompass either near or far objects. In my rope trick, of course, I took good care to limit the range to myself only.

“Finally, I got my apparatus into small and compact form, and devised a battery system which fitted inside the humps on my back and chest, the control wires passing down inside my sleeves and the switches being concealed under a synthetic flesh cap in my palms. These batteries, given power, discharged their particular output around my body, and at will rendered me gradually invisible how and when I desired it. The charge lasts for perhaps fourteen hours at a stretch.

“My rope trick was slightly involved, but effective. I needed an assistant invisible like myself. The rest of the explanation lay in Nelson’s column. My assistant—Benson, the commissionaire at the Temple—using a similar apparatus to mine, came to London from the Sussex laboratory early in the morning. Naturally, because he was invisible and because there are few people around the Square at that hour of morning, he had little difficulty in climbing to the summit of Nelson’s Column the night before I was to demonstrate. A piece of rope looped round the Column, a backwards angle of the body, and spiked boots were all he needed to reach the summit of the Column. Down below—and this explains the need for a quiet period—he had left a long length of steel cable and a stout, small steel girder. These he hauled after him to the summit of the Column.

“Naturally, the girder and cable were supplied with batteries and rendered invisible also, as the current passed perfectly through the metal. Benson had simply to secure the girder—just light enough for a strong man to handle with ease—to the top of the Column—the statue itself, in fact—and allow the cable with its hook on the end to hang down into the Square about eighteen feet from the ground and thrust some four feet or so from the Column itself by the girder’s length. In this way nobody could possibly run into anything, the invisible hook being far above their heads. Benson, of course, remained at the Column summit entirely invisible.

“I appeared in the Square invisibly and made myself suddenly visible, to the great amazement of Turner and several others. I tossed my rope experimentally in the air, to find the hook—knowing, of course, its approximate position. The sharp spike of the hook caught the loop of my silk rope and held it securely.

I climbed up, made myself gradually invisible as I seized the unseen cable, and hauled myself out of sight. Then, as I whipped the rope up into my hand, it naturally came under the influence of the power around me and vanished from sight.

“I clung to the cable until there was a clear space below me, then lowered myself to the ground and ran out of the Square. Another assistant had a car awaiting me. He rushed me to Victoria Station at top speed, though the crowd delayed me somewhat. Still invisible and dodging everybody possible—for of course I was solid enough had anybody run into me—I got on to the roof of Victoria Station entrance and made myself visible. Then I faded out again and returned home to Sussex to await results. Benson, of course, returned the moment it was safe for him to do so.”

“Well, I’m damned!” breathed Willis blankly. “You mean to tell me you have things like this and the Government won’t listen to you?”

“They probably will when this report is published,” Karton murmured speculatively; then he pondered for a moment.

“Oh yes—the fire!” he smiled. “I started it in the first place before beginning my speech in the Square. In the basement of that old building I placed four crystal globes, heat-proof and timed to explode when the fire got under way. I had an exact knowledge of the time to elapse, of course. Once they did explode they released an extremely powerful gas, basically carbon dioxide—used, of course, in foam extinguishers—together with a heavy gas that absorbs oxygen with its own molecules and therefore stops it getting at the burning material wherever the gas permeates. Four of those globes, as I’d calculated, were quite sufficient to kill the fire in record time.”

CHAPTER 8

Secrets of the Red Magician

There was a brief silence in the office, the silence of stunned amazement; then Inspector Willis spoke.

“It’s incredible,” he breathed. “Incredible, I mean, that a man of your genius should use showmanship to advertise his powers when you could have controlled the world with invisibility alone.”

“By terrorism and power?” Karton shook his white head. “No, no, Inspector, I want the people to enjoy their security, not to live in terror of a phantom.”

“And your incredible discoveries over a distance?” Turner asked quickly. “How the devil did you get to places where nobody else has ever been?”

“By television,” Karton replied, “and I mean television, not the half-hearted affair of scanning discs we use in ordinary life. My television is a supreme achievement. Until I moved to the Temple, I used it in my Sussex laboratory, of course. For my form of television no transmitter is necessary. Examination of my apparatus will reveal that it generates a carrier wave that pierces all solid matter in the fashion of an X-ray. The earth itself is no bar to it, hence the range of my straight-line carrier wave is not limited to horizon distance, but moves to any part of Earth through the earth itself. Its only handicap is a falling-back effect of things taking place almost directly beneath us in, say, Australia.

“Light waves react on this carrier wave only at its extremity, just as—to use a crude analogy—only the extreme end of a walking stick touches the ground. The light waves reacting on the extremity of the wave, and no others, pass back along the wave to the source in the form of vibration and are there converted back into the original light-wave formation, as simply as a radio converts the original transmission into sound or vision. Since, then, the impression only occurs at the wave’s extremity—the remainder of it passing through all solid matter, of course—it is only necessary to compute from a scale map the exact carrier wavelength required in order to extend it to any particular place, be it London or Australia. Thus, when people gave me adequate descriptions of what they wanted and full particulars, I was able, more often than not, to locate the spot. Nothing barred me, not even the deepest sea.

“On various occasions, particularly in the Square, my daughter was working the apparatus, choosing far-distant events. A short-wave radio of minute size was concealed in the hump on my back, its tiny earphone imbedded in my ear and connected to my back with concealed wire. The particular wavelength, of course, could only work with the apparatus we were using. Therefore, as she saw interesting events from the televisor in Sussex she relayed them literally to my ear by the spoken word—told me everything she saw. In consequence, my predictions seemed little short of uncanny because they were relayed at the speed of light. Events which normal telegraph and radio could not hear about until some time afterwards were rendered immediately available to me.”

Once again an amazed silence fell on the little office. Then Sir Gadsby Brough spoke.

“So far, Professor Karton, I have followed you with profound interest. Much that you have explained, based definitely on accurate basic scientific facts as we know them today, I can readily understand. But there’s still that damned Temple! How in heavens’ name did you do all those things on a solid steel stage?”

“That explanation brings me to my last invention, Sir Gadsby. The matter-through-matter machinery. You would say, perhaps, that it is impossible for two solids to occupy the same area at the same time, covering the same area, that is?”

“Definitely!”

“Because it would involve an explosion?”

“Naturally it would. Why? Surely you don’t disagree with that?”

“I will let the Temple’s stage be proof of that,” Karton told him. “Matter, as you surely know, is not solid. It is mainly made up of empty space, a mass of atoms and molecules in widely separated paths. The electrons of the atoms are, naturally, full of emptiness. But, supposing these haphazard atoms whose wild scurrying produces a piece of matter could be made to co-ordinate into a fixed path?”

“You mean force the atoms into fixed positions?” Brough hazarded.

“Exactly so. If that were so, another body could then pass smoothly through the space thus created with no more difficulty than passing through, say, a heavy wall of slush. There would be some drag from stray atoms, but in the main, with the greater bulk of the solid’s atoms marshalled into order, one solid could pass through another. That is what I did. My electrical machinery consists mainly of enormously powerful electro-magnets which force the poles of the molecules in the walls at the back of the stage and along the floor in a certain area, to face in one fixed direction—instead of flying in all directions as they normally do. The result is that anything can pass through the walls or special floor area while the influence is on.

“Nearly all my illusions were done that way. My daughter and the mechanics in the room below could hear all my commands by a concealed microphone in the theatre roof. My two metal globes that went through each other were of course a small-scale example of matter through matter by a small device in my clothing issuing the desired magnetism. The rest of the tricks were ordinary stage illusions with trick apparatus, all of which passed through wall or floor at the end of the performance. Behind the wall was a foot-wide partition, which, of course, was not enough to upset the measurements of the building in case of examination. Below the stage was infinite cellar space and machinery in oil baths to hide all trace of noise. Every bit of machinery was made by different engineering firms, none of them knowing the others’ business so that I could not be given away.”

“I recall,” said Sir Gadsby slowly, “that your daughter did a floating act. How was that managed?”

“Semi-neutralisation of gravitation, which one day I hope to use for the purposes of space conquest. At present it is only elementary and uncertain. Originally my daughter came up through the special floor area—matter through matter. In the basement below, directly beneath where she stood, powerful force fields were at work, strong enough to briefly and slightly straighten the curvature of space that forms the so-called gravitation of any body. It could not last long, but long enough to cut out gravity from beneath her for a little while. She immediately rose to the next nearest source of attraction, the roof, and remained poised between roof and floor. The idea presents a good illusion, but requires perfection before it can be used with a view to space travel. As to the slow fading, those were merely my invisibility batteries at work, of course.”

“And the scenes of other lands?” Joan enquired.

“Television reflected on to an immense screen which showed easily through the almost transparent walls. The instant the show was over the power cut out and the walls returned to their former constitution of disordered atoms, as did the floor. Naturally, all your seals and cottons made no difference. Anything near the walls came under the influence of the current, curtains as well.”

“Am I right in assuming that you used the Thames for power?” Turner asked quietly.

Karton nodded slowly. “It was a simple matter with the scientific apparatus at my disposal to drill the necessary sluices from a point far below my basement. We made tunnels which carried us well under the level of the Underground to the Thames Embankment, under the Thames itself, the tunnel being horseshoe shaped, so that the water, by means of special traps, was both received and returned, but in the process ran my turbo-generators and created all the free power I needed.”

Karton stopped with a quiet shrug.

“Well, I think that’s all,” he said quietly. “I’ve tried to prove that I can help the country with my scientific ideas and, at the same time, recoup myself for the money I’ve spent. To a certain extent I have succeeded in the latter objective—”

“And unless I’m utterly mistaken, you will in your other objectives,” answered Willis quietly. “Such genius as yours, Professor, is above—”

He broke off as Joan and Turner folded their notebooks and rose to their feet.

“Sorry, but we’ve got to rush if this is going to make the first edition,” Turner explained and, catching the girl by the arm, he hastened her from the office.

On the steps of the great building they paused for a moment and looked at one another.

“What do you think he’ll get?” Joan asked quickly.

“Honours, I should hope. The public will demand that his inventions be used for the nation’s benefit after the story we’ll give them. The Martian gag will be finished with, of course, but—”

“And which of us gets the story?” the girl interrupted.

“What story?”

I mean this scoop. We’ve both worked for it…”

“Oh, that. Well—” Turner pulled a special edition of the Arrow from his pocket, handed it over. In blank astonishment Joan stared at the flaring headlines:

ABEL KARTON—THE RED MAGICIAN

Television, Invisibility, and Other Great Secrets Solved

And underneath ran column after column of the story.

“Dave Turner!” she gasped. “You’ve stolen a march on me! You put this in a special edition of the Arrow for tonight instead of the first one tomorrow! I didn’t see this issue on the street.”

“It wasn’t on the street until we were in the Temple,” he said, grinning. “Mine’s an advance copy.”

“But bow could you know?”

“I didn’t, but it was too big a chance to miss. Television and invisibility were the only possible explanations, and Sir Gadsby gave me a good idea of what to expect. After all, the Arrow comes before the Clarion, you know. Unless—” He stopped, and smiled.

“Unless what?” she demanded.

Unless you’d like to marry the Arrow’s star reporter and have all the scoops in the family. After all, I can always learn that conjuring trick of Karton’s in producing a five-pound note from a cigarette-lighter if we get hard up—”

“Marry you!” she cried indignantly. “With all the notes I’ve made tonight? With such a story on hand?”

“Write it up if you like. I’ve still got to make my story check with Karton’s real confession. But I still have the scoop.”

“Only this one!” she retorted malevolently, and sailed off down the steps…

* * * *

A month later Joan took her revenge by scooping the Law’s verdict on Abel Karton. Far from condemning him, the Law stopped the case and rebuked the Public Prosecutor for his ill-founded charges. Hurriedly, the Government, urged on by public demand, placed Abel Karton at the head of the country’s scientific researches. Television, invisibility, and matter control were secrets that could—and would—make Britain impregnable, The Red Temple remained, headquarters of the cleverest scientist the age had produced.

Turner never could fathom how Joan scooped him on that verdict. She only told him when she had changed her mind and married him. She hadn’t known the verdict at all.

“But you see, Dave, it was too obvious to miss,” she said sweetly. “You guessed Karton’s confession because it was scientific; I guessed the verdict and wrote it before it was announced because I know human nature. So now we’re quits.”

To that Turner was forced to agree—but one day he’s going to find time to ask Karton how the devil he did that trick with the petrol lighter. All it does for the Turner family is light cigarettes.

FLIGHT OF THE VAMPIRES

Would you like to catch up on your rest in the warm velvety pouch of a modern day vampire? Neither did Jerry.

The propaganda and newspaper screamings attached to the Walters Lunar Expedition—the first determined effort by thirty men to reach the Moon—had no sooner taken on a forlorn note and the rocket ship been given up for lost, when a new and sensational happening was splashed across the front pages.

I’m a stratosphere pilot on the New York-Polar City route; my name’s Jerry Dodd, my age thirty-two. I was one of the first to see the announcement. So much for that. Now to that evening edition which a lot of you have seen. Banner headlines proclaimed: Vampires Attack London!

Vampires? Great Scot! Throw-backs to the old days of superstition and half-baked occultism—certainly not in tune with the keen progressive spirit of 1960 science… Yet, here it was. Outside Stratosphere Headquarters I read the columns quickly, with growing surprise.

Then they had made off, and there followed an assortment of speculations regarding the possibility of the birds, having come from some part of Earth still unexplored. This seemed to me to be most unlikely, since Earth is charted and mapped from Pole to Equator, and civilizations sprawl right across the planet.

Finally I came to the conclusion that somebody must have been having delusions, and went off to my favorite automat for coffee. I had hardly got started, however, before something close to panic swept the street outside.

The orderly procession of people in the summer evening light suddenly started dashing for shelter. At the same time there burst on my startled senses the sound of screaming brakes, the hoarse cries of men and women—then an avalanche of people came running in through the doorway with horror stamped on their faces.

I caught at a young fellow as he came dashing past me and forced him to halt.

“What in hell’s wrong out there?” I demanded of him.

He was gulping so hard for breath I could hardly tell what he said.

“Vampires! Huge things! Birds—! Killing folks—!”

Releasing him, I fought my way through the people to the door, and somehow got out into the street. It was a staggering sight which met me. The sun had set now, but against the orange flush between the rearing piles of buildings were some thirty enormous birds with a wingspread of perhaps two hundred and fifty feet. They looked like bats and dived with terrifying velocity, wings folded, filling the air with a leathery, beating rustle that somehow had a paralyzing effect on the nerves.

In places, they had come down to the street. Even as I watched, I saw men and women lifted helplessly into the air, to be dropped back with violent force. It was the most ghastly attack I had ever witnessed.

I hurried to the nearest fallen man and caught at him. He was pretty nearly dead, and in the back of his neck were two deep punctures about an inch across. He moved feebly in my grasp. Then, before he could utter a word, death caught up with him and he relaxed.

But I had had the time to notice that it was rather the shock he had received than actual injury which had killed him. His neck was not broken, nor had he lost overmuch blood. In fact, his only trouble seemed to be a broken ankle from the fall.

Then one of the things dived for me. I had my service raygun in my belt and I fired instantly. The vicious ray lashed the monster across the belly as it swept over to within a few feet of me. To my horrified amazement, the ray glanced off. Either the creature was armor-plated, or else of a constitution impervious to earthly destructive devices.

I took the only way out to save myself—dashed for a doorway. This saved me, for the thing whizzed past once or twice with a dank, moldering odor, and then flew off to join its fellows.

The confusion increased. Corps of militia arrived with their defensive weapons and set about the flying monsters in real earnest. I joined them, since of course I am experienced in campaigning as well as being a civil pilot.

Our efforts, though none too effective, at least harrassed the things badly, with the result that they finally flew off—but not until every window around us had been broken and scores of men and women lay dead or dying in the street. Night had fallen now, too, and the scene looked doubly horrible in the pallid glare of arclights.

I straightened up at last, sweating and breathless, watched the final monster hurtle upwards and vanish. The attack was over.

“For God’s sake, what are they?” panted a gunner, beside me. I shook my head.

“No idea. But I’ll find out soon enough. I’m going to Headquarters to see what they think.”

I made my way through the arriving fleet of ambulances, and so back to Stratosphere Headquarters. Within, I found an air of tense activity. Fellow-pilots were hurrying about everywhere; most of them in their rarely-worn battle kit, their faces grim. I went through the midst of them into the briefing room.

“What’s going on?” I asked the Controlling Officer, as he studied a list of notes anxiously.

“Plenty!” he snapped back. “Those damned birds came from London. It seems they didn’t return to London after flying around, but crossed the Atlantic to have a go at us! God knows where they originated. Some remote part of Earth, I suppose.”

“Things like those don’t belong to Earth,” I told him grimly. “Unless I’m dead wrong, they’ve come from another world!”

He shrugged. “Well, we’re taking no chances. A squadron of strato-fighters is taking off in ten minutes to search for them. They can stand raygun charges, but I think the protonic guns will put paid to them quick enough. So far, they seem to have limited themselves to attack—no kidnaping. And there won’t be either if we can stop it.”

“That means I go up too?” I questioned eagerly, but to my disappointment he shook his head.

“Not yet; you’re too valuable on the civil line. You’ll stand by for orders. Report back here in an hour.”

I had to take it, of course—but it was hard to see the others ready for action and departing from me with good-luck smiles. Finally, I wandered out of the building; then, struck with a sudden thought, I headed uptown. Might as well reassure myself that Eva was safe, anyway.

The moment I reached her apartment block, though, I saw that something was wrong. Not a window in the place had survived the onslaught of an hour before. I quickened from my leisurely pace and raced up the staircase to her apartment, rapped on the door.

“Eva! Open up! It’s me—Jerry!”

There was no reply from within; yet I knew Eva Grant must be at home, for her evenings were spent in studying for the Advanced Science Examination she was determined to pass before we were married.

Again I hammered. Then, as I got no answer, I hurtled myself against the door and sent it flying backward on its hinges. There lay Eva on the floor of the living room, shattered glass from the window all around her, blood smearing the back of her neck under her thick dark hair.

Hauling her up in my arms I carried her to a chair. She was alive, thank God, though her pulse was feeble. Bandages and restorative brought consciousness slowly back to her. Color began to creep back into her cheeks.

Weakly she turned her head, then winced at the pain in her neck. She looked at me and smiled faintly.

“Hello…Jerry.”

“You were attacked by one of those damned bird things?” I demanded, and as she nodded I hurried into the next room and snatched down a blood-test syringe—a small everyday devise used by most of us for determining physical condition.

She started as the needle stabbed her arm, then I gave a low sigh of relief as my worst fears were banished. Her blood was normal enough: no sign of venom from the thing’s jaws.

“Just what happened?” I asked her, as she began to recover.

“I—I hardly remember. I heard the commotion outside so I went to the window to take a look. Then one of the birds came shooting down, smashed the window glass in pieces. I dodged the splinters, thank goodness, but it didn’t avail me much. The bird came half into the room, got me by the back of the neck— Well, next thing I remember I saw you.”

I clenched my fist. “If only I knew what these birds are! What they’re after…”

“I don’t think they’re of this world, anyway,” she said, her voice quiet. “I’ve studied enough science to know that. I saw the bird at close quarters, and it was covered in a black, non-light-reflecting substance, utterly invulnerable. Nature doesn’t provide her creatures with a covering like that without a very good reason—and the only reason I can think of is protection against the cold of space. Just as a fish has extra bones to withstand the pressure of water.”

“I guessed myself that they don’t belong to Earth,” I said. Then I snapped my fingers. “What about the Moon?”

“I wondered about that,” she said, musing. “Their size is feasible then, since the Moon’s gravity is only a sixth of the Earth’s. But why they should so suddenly come to Earth like this I can’t imagine. Unless,” she finished slowly, “the Walters Lunar Expedition to the Moon did succeed after all, and furious at the invasion of their domain these creatures are trying to exact reprisal. Remember, Jerry, there are thirty birds, from all accounts—and thirty men went to Luna. It sort of ties up, doesn’t it?”

It was as god an idea as any—but it didn’t make things any easier. I debated for a moment, but before I could say anything further, there came to our ears through the smashed window that already grimly familiar sound of leathery beating and the whistle of cleaved air.

“They’re coming back!” Eva gasped hoarsely, leaping up from her chair, and at the same moment there came a miscellany of screams and shouts from the street below.

But I was not concerned with this: my gaze was directed to the window as bird after bird came hurtling from the heights. As though driven by some inexplicable instinct, one of them dived and twisted abruptly, hurtling straight for the shattered window. It came with such demoniac force it knocked me flying—but at least I had the time to see it.

It certainly resembled the old-time pterodactyl. There was the same evil head, the merciless scar of beak, the beady, heavily filmed eyes, as though for extra strong protection. The wingspread, huge though it was, was handled with easy grace.

So much I had time to note, then I was struggling with the thing for all I was worth. Firing my useless gun at it, I strove to prevent its settling on the fighting, screaming Eva—but again that steel-hard casing it possessed defeated all my efforts. Right before my eyes Eva was lifted in the thing’s jaws and borne swiftly towards the window.

I made one last desperate effort to save her, but a beating wing struck me with such force I went spinning six feet away and crashed half senseless against the wall. By the time I had recovered my balance and wits, Eva had gone, nor could I see any sign of her by the time I had rushed to the window.

In the street below there was pandemonium as several of the men and women not yet removed from the earlier attack were picked up and carried aloft like children seized by giant eagles. In all there were probably thirty of the monsters once again, and they gathered together almost like plane squadrons, carrying a man or woman each, and heading for the night sky.

By the time I had blundered distractedly downstairs to the street, there were few of them left. The defense guns were rattling again just as futilely as before. I didn’t even stop to watch them. At top speed I raced to Stratosphere Headquarters and hurried in to the Controlling Officer.

“I’ve got to go up and help settle these damned things!” I told him. “They stole my fiancée not two minutes ago and—”

“Hop to it,” he ordered briefly. “We want every man we can get right now. We were going to send for you anyway. Squadron K—Action Station Nine.”

I nodded and raced out.

* * * *

Within ten minutes desperation had hurled me into the air with all engines going the limit. I felt that there might be a chance even yet to overtake the flying horrors, since I reckoned that their speed would slow down as they reached the stratosphere, loaded as they were too.

In this I was partly right. As I climbed I saw a group of them against the full moonlight. By this time New York was a mere segment of spotted light infinitely far below me. Instantly I broke from my squadron and went streaking across the sky after them. They saw me, headed for the greater heights. I was after them immediately, climbing, climbing, with the motors thundering a steady, effortless song. But one thing puzzled me now. These birds no longer carried human beings in their jaws!

Two horrible thoughts flashed upon me. Had they dropped their captives, or was this another flock of birds entirely? Well, what did it matter now? Attack them anyway and trust to the rest of the boys to get whatever others there might be.

The moment I got near enough I opened up with my protonic guns. They shied! One actually blew to pieces, and that brought a hard grin of satisfaction to my face. At last I had a weapon they couldn’t stand. Sheer energy biting into their filthy bodies was more than they could tolerate, evidently.

The fate of this one, however, warned the others. To my amazement they suddenly folded their wings into their bodies and rose higher and higher with increasing swiftness! How they did it I could not imagine—and it was tragic too from my own point of view. There were definite limits to which my plane could ascend, and to go much higher would mean going beyond the atmosphere altogether.

Then, apparently annoyed by my pursuit, one of them deliberately stalled and waited, poised uncannily in space. I could not slow myself down in time, with the result that I hurtled straight at it. Instinctively, I dove out of my chair, and it was this which saved me, for the creature came smashing through the observation dome amid a shower of splinters.

Instantly, the frightful cold of these great heights surged into my cabin. I would certainly have died, but for the protection of my strato-mask and kit. I half knelt by the wall, clawing at the driving, battering mass of shell-encrusted leather overwhelming me. It mastered me in a few seconds, whirled me about, then tore the helmet from its studs at the back of my neck.

Savage pain went through the length of my body; then I must have fainted…

* * * *

I returned to consciousness aware of the most inexplicable sensation. Beyond having a stiff neck I was sublimely comfortable! I seemed to be lying in the midst of a feather bed, and every weight and pressure of normal existence had gone from me. I had air, warmth, and ease beyond all parallel. From those last conscious moments of horror to this paradise demanded a good deal of puzzled thinking.

When I had sorted things out, I got the shock of my life. I was lying in a kind of pouch, softly hair-lined, and composed of rubberlike skin. One section of this skin was slightly transparent, and through it I gazed upon the incredible vision of space itself—something I had never seen before.

Stars by the quadrillion; a Sun girdled with prominences; a Moon at the full and already swollen beyond normal dimensions, growing so fast I could see the shadows on the slight right-hand edge of the approaching wane.

As I took this in, incredulously enough, my eyes moved on to a flock of birds, wings tight-pressed to their sides, speeding in straight-line formation through the gulf. I counted thirty-eight of them altogether. On the nearer ones I beheld a bulging pouch after the fashion of a kangaroo.

Now I understood! Their jaws had been empty because the captives had gone into the pouches. I was inside the thing that had attacked me, then. Being carried without harm. From vague revulsion my emotion changed to wonder at this marvel of Nature defeating the void of space, yet keeping me safe, Air, I discovered, was entering from a natural sac at one end of the pouch and being expelled by the action of a steadily working muscle and natural vent at the other. Surely Nature in all her varied moods had never created so outlandish a creature as this!

But the reason for it all? I fingered my neck. Blood had dried there. Why hadn’t I been killed? Then it became obvious to me as the Moon increased in size that there was our destination—and at a gigantic speed, too.

The more I studied the birds the more I could see a faint stream of energy being projected from their tails. I think I guessed right in assuming that they utilized the radiations of space as an ordinary bird utilizes air, pushing against its different densities and cleaving through it, given just the right energy wavelength by Nature to expel against it and hurtle them forward. Obviously they could live either in air or out of it: the air I was receiving had evidently been stored somewhere and was now being released for my especial benefit.

And at the end of the journey? That was a grim thought. The more I pondered the more sure I felt that this was an act of vengeance for the desecration of their domain by the Walters Lunar Expedition. If so, then I was resolved to sell my life as dear as possible. I still had my raygun, anyway. Rather than fall victim to a lot of educated pterodactyls, I’d turn it on myself.

At intervals I slept in curiously drowsy contentment, an effect undoubtedly engendered by my cosy position and lack of restricting gravity. I believe the birds absorbed nourishment from the void somehow, probably using the very medium against which they thrust, or else they absorbed radiations unimaginable to a flesh and blood Earthman.

And each time I awoke the Moon was larger and had waned further—until finally we were dropping in perfect formation down to its powdery, blinding white surface.

Craters, glaring mountain ranges, dead sea bottoms—all reared up towards us at alarming speed. Trained as I was to maneuvering a plane, it seemed to me that a crash was inevitable—but at the last second, with easy grace, the whole flock swept over the nearest mountains and dove down into the depths of an extinct crater.

The sunlight snuffed out as though it had never been. We were plunging through abysmal, airless shadows into the very depths of the Moon. The darkness was so intense after the glare outside, I was almost blinded.

Then after a while it began to lighten. From somewhere below a deep pinkish light swelled into rosy glow. It lighted towering canyons, the pumice-like escarpments of this honeycombed satellite, until finally we broke free and landed in a vast central area which I judged must be the approximate core of the Moon. And here, unsupported as far as I could tell, blazed a circular red ball illuminating the colossal cavern from end to end. Judging from the soft shadows there was air here, of sorts.

Something pushed me—muscles I think—and I was ‘ejected’ from the bird’s pouch like a pea popped from a pod. I got to my feet, balancing with some difficulty against the lesser gravitation. Obviously we were not exactly at the Moon’s core, else the gravity would have been equal on all sides and I’d have been in mid-air.

That blazing ball, as far as I could judge, was some sort of radioactive material—possibly even one of the last natural energy minerals left in the Moon. But how it hung there without support I just couldn’t imagine.

Then, as I got over the eye-wrenching dimensions of the cavern and drew comparatively fresh air into my lungs, I looked anxiously round on my fellow-travelers. They too had been ejected—thirty of them—and among them, pale but unharmed, was Eva!

I rushed over to her right away and caught her arm.

“Eva! Thank God you’re safe!”

“Looks as if the guess about the Selenites was right,” she commented after a moment, looking round. “But what the idea is I’ll be hanged if I know.”

Evidently we were soon to find out for, waddling forward in penguin-style on their queer feet, the birds forced us, by no means roughly, to advance along the cavern floor. They did it by prodding us with their beaks, and when we showed reluctance they merely pushed the harder, without resorting to the terrible force they could have used had they wished. This at last seemed a hopeful sign. But back of my mind was the remembrance of the carnage and destruction they had caused back on Earth. Probably we were being led to the slaughter.

We advanced perhaps a mile, and in that time the red ball seemingly so near at hand came no closer to us. I was puzzling over it when Eva seemed to solve the problem.

“It must actually be enormously big and a long distance away, situated at the exact central core of the Moon. Therefore, it needs no support because gravity is pulling equally on all sides. It’s probably the final unburned-out core, and forms a sun of this inner world. I suppose that’s the explanation.”

We stopped suddenly on the edge of a long, sloping incline. Down at the base of it, three hundred feet perhaps, was the real floor of the Moon’s core. More than that: there was a city of sorts. It looked utterly crazy from Earth standards because it was composed of walls without roofs! There wasn’t a roof anywhere. But there was a definite impression of order, and everything was built to an obvious plan.

“Why, it’s a—a nest-city!” Eva rxclaimed, gazing down. “The Selenites must enter their homes through the roof—just as an Earth bird gets into its nest!”

I nodded as we gazed in wonder. The rest of the people gathered doubting and anxious about us. Then I directed my attention to something standing apart from the mass of square, roofless buildings. It was a tapering obelisk with a kind of platform at the top. Upon this, fastened down with massive cables, was a sadly battered and travel-stained rocket ship!

“The Walters Expedition machine!” I cried, pointing to it.

“And no sign of the thirty men who went in it,” Eva said, with ominous quietness. “And there are thirty of us here, too! It begins to look pretty bad—”

She couldn’t get any further for the Selenites pushed us forward again. We were forced to hurry down the sloping cavern side with them behind us—and the nearer we came to the roofless houses the more we could see how large they really were.

We were driven past most of them, but here and there we did catch glimpses that showed these weird creatures were anything but limited to a bird’s intelligence. There were many baffling machines in some of the buildings, queerly fashioned for ornithic instead of human appendages.

And so finally we were seized and lifted over the high wall of one of the largest buildings of all—set gently on our feet. Here I felt horror grip me completely…

The place was pretty well crowded with birdmen of varying sizes. Some were quite small and less like birds than those which had brought us hither, nor had they any sacs, so presumably they were of a different species. More, they had rudimentary forearms supplied with a humanlike hand. Most of them seemed to be busy with a variety of instruments.

But it was not this that horrified me. It was the sight of thirty Earthmen, motionless and deathly white, strapped to thirty immaculately clean tables! Every member of the Walters Lunar Expedition was there, from Commander Walters himself to the lowliest rocket-hand. Strapped down, at the mercy of these abominable things of a near-dead world.…

“What—what are they going to do?” Eva whispered, her startled eyes turning to me.

I glanced about me at the drawn faces of the others, then at the impregnable lofty walls. Certainly there was no retreat, for there were no doors. The only chance of escape, and that none too certain, lay in getting over the towering walls around us, but, on this I had little time to speculate, for Eva’s horrified gasp snapped me back to studying the scene confronting us.

Others of the Selenite scientists had come into the long operating theater now, pushing rubber-wheeled stretchers before them. And there were thirty of them! Straps were dangling from them in readiness for—? Nothing could have been more significant! They were meant for us!

We all shifted uneasily, but we couldn’t move far for the waiting flying Selenites were immediately back of us, prodded us with their beaks if we moved too far. So we were forced to watch the ghastly business.

To each pinioned Expedition man’s table there was run alongside a vacant trestled stretcher. Between stretcher and table was placed a machine which bristled cables and pumps. It looked rather like one of those old-time ticker-tape machines.

Once this was done, in all thirty cases, the chief operating surgeon made a signal. One of our party, a man, was seized and forced across the floor, fighting and screaming at the top of his strength. Ultimately, as the rest of us watched in quaking anticipation, he was forced down on the furthest stretcher and strapped into place. Delicate needles in the claw hands of one of the surgeons began to probe the back of his neck as he yelled and screamed.

This was getting too much! My rising fear began to spill over when one after another of our party was seized and similarly treated. Any moment now it would be the turn of Eva, and then me! But not if I could help it!

I ran my eyes quickly along the wall surrounding us. We had only a sixth of Earth’s gravity to defeat. If we could get away in one flying leap we might— Then what? No spaceship. Yes, there was one—the one on the pedestal! If only we could get to it, we could perhaps…

I confided my notions to Eva in whispers as she watched the slowly dwindling line of victims. Finally she nodded and waited for my signal. I gave it when the penultimate one to her was taken and bundled over to a stretcher.

“Now!” I shouted, and then ran and leapt with all my power.

The surprise of my move helped. I never put such strength into a leap before. Up I went, sailing high over the heads of the astonished bird-surgeons until I landed on the broad top of the wall. Not a second behind me came Eva. She would have overshot the mark, being lighter than I, had I not clutched her. With hardly a moment’s pause we leapt downwards to the street outside, then proceeded in gargantuan jumps towards that distant obelisk with the space machine atop it.

But we’d reckoned without the demoniac speed of those lunar birds! Inside a minute they were sweeping after us with projectile velocity. We leapt round the back of a building for protection and I snatched out my raygun, determined if we must be captured to give a good account of myself first.

So, covering Eva as best I could, I stood there blazing away as rapidly as I could press the button. One of the creatures I did damage, for I shot it through one vulnerable spot—the eye. It crashed to the street, twisting and squirming, but this did not deter the others. Again and again my ray glanced off their armor-plated bodies, until at last my gun was empty of charges and I had to throw it away.

In any case, the game was up now. Struggling savagely, we were seized in those mighty jaws, lifted into the air and borne back swiftly to the operating theater. Again it came to me with passing wonder that the creatures didn’t kill us there and then. Had they chosen to close their jaws, they could easily have cut us in half. But they didn’t. Instead, they finally deposited us on the two remaining stretchers, held us down by main strength while the straps were buckled into place.

I gave up struggling because I had to. I simply lay breathing hard, my head turned sideways to watch Eva. She was looking terrified, and no wonder. The rest of our party was motionless now, as dead-faced and immobile as the members of the Walters Expedition beside whom they lay.

Finally I glared up at the bird-faced surgeon studying the ticker-tape machine beside me.

“Look here, you, what’s the meaning of all this?” I demanded. “What’s the explanation? We’re entitled to that, aren’t we?”

Not a vestige of expression showed on his weird face. I doubted if he even heard me—and certainly there were no attempts at thought-transference. He simply went on calmly with his task, which consisted of fixing a sort of cradle so that my head was forced forward slightly. It was in no wise uncomfortable, but I was desperately afraid just the same.

Then I felt something stab my neck. Almost immediately my body seemed to float away from me and I lost consciousness of my surroundings…

* * * *

I do not know how long I was senseless, but to my surprise I found myself in a quite Earthly-looking bed. The implacable bird-like scientist who had gone to work on me was there too, and in the next bed was Commander Walters himself, the man next to whom I had been lying when I had lost consciousness.

He was sitting up, even smiling slightly. I looked beyond him down an immense ward. Everybody was conscious again, talking to each other, tended by Selenites. Far away, I could see Eva, apparently none the worse.

I turned my eyes back to Walters’ bronzed, amused face.

“What the devil’s the idea of all this?” I exploded. Then before he could answer me I went on hurriedly: “Look, we’ve got to think out a way of getting back to Earth. Some hellish sort of experiment is going on! These blood-sucking vultures—”

“Nothing of the sort, man!” Walters contradicted me abruptly. “They’re gallant scientists, all of them! The pterodactyl type are probably the bravest warriors of the race. They took an awful chance going to Earth as they did. Their methods must have looked like deliberate attack, I suppose—but that was not true. How many Earthlings died?” he asked me.

“Dozens, I imagine. But it was an attack—!”

“No,” he insisted. “It was necessity! Those who died must have succumbed to shock, nothing more. The flying Selenites, fitted by Nature for space flight, are natural chemical agents. Their task was to find people whose blood quota exactly matched that of we thirty men here, of the Expedition.”

I stared at him blankly. “You mean,” I whispered, “that when they were making their vampirish attacks, plugging people in the neck, they were actually making blood tests?”

“Exactly. Didn’t you see for yourself how marvelously their internal organs are constructed? They are living laboratories, and able to carry anything in a special pouch.”

I remembered this part, and it was just commencing to dawn on me why none of us had been really hurt.

“So,” Walters resumed, “when they had checked their results, they knew the exact thirty people they wanted, and the instinct of a bird—a power we do not possess since it is sixth sense—led them straight to the thirty they wanted when they decided to carry them back to the moon.”

“But what in hell for?” I cried.

“To save our lives,” he answered solemnly. “All thirty of us got to the Moon here, but we were badly smashed up in the doing, and we lost a good deal of blood. The Selenites—being differently constructed than we are—couldn’t supply the necessary life-fluid—so they did the only thing possible and dispatched agents to Earth to find blood-donors.

“Believe me, it has been worth it!” he finished. “The Moon, as you’ve seen for yourself, is not dead, and its race is very friendly towards us. We can give them much: they can give us much. The invasion of Earth was a. necessary evil, but out of it will come untold benefit. You should feel proud, you and your friends, that you were chosen. You’ve become a bridge between worlds, and have laid the foundations of an interplanetary union.”

I nodded slowly, gradually realizing the enormity of the thing that had been done. I caught Eva’s eyes in the distance and knew that she realized the truth too.

Then I look up as I saw a claw-like hand extended towards me. Something like a smile was on the face of the Selenite surgeon.

WEDDING OF THE FORCES

The strange power that flowed through the brain of Ralph Davis was not of earthly origin, and he soon finds his own personality submerged under the influence of an alien enemy with dire plans for the enslavement of a world!

BRIMSTONE POOL

Fortunately, Tarp Gregory was at home. I had never wanted to see anybody so badly in all my life. I had braved a wild night of wind and storm to reach my friend’s New York apartment…

As Chalmers showed me into the cozy study, Tarp Gregory looked up from the armchair in surprise, rose immediately and came forward with extended hand.

I had shaken hands with him before I remembered I should not have done it. Tarp jerked his hand away sharply and eyed me doubtfully with his coldly analytical blue eyes. It was obvious that he thought I had one of those buzzer things in my palm. But I hadn’t and I showed him as much.

“Hell!” he exclaimed in surprise, elevating sandy eyebrows. Then he frowned, “What’s started Ralph Davis playing tricks, anyway?”

He thrust forward a chair, automatically handed over cigarettes. I lit one with a hand that shook violently.

“What’s on your mind?” Tarp demanded sharply. “Nerves?”

He eyed his own right hand reminiscently, then his frown deepened as he looked back to me. I guess I looked in a sorry mess, my hair tousled, my eyes wild.

“Tarp,” I said slowly, breathing hard, “I think I’m going mad.”

“Rubbish,” Tarp retorted. “A perfectly solid electrical engineer of thirty-five has no need to go batty. Not on your salary.”

“I’m not joking!” I snapped. “Something’s gone wrong with me—something no doctor seems able to explain. You’re a scientist with nothing to do but spend your money on experiments. I thought that with your knowledge, you might be able to help me.”

“Sure, if I can. But what’s wrong?”

I hesitated a moment, then got to my feet. I saw Tarp’s look of surprise as I unscrewed the single-point electric light bulb from its socket and plunged the room into darkness.

“What’s this? A seance?” asked Tarp’s dry voice.

“No. This!” I announced, trying to keep my tone steady, and a moment later I became visible to him again holding the bulb aloft—and it was lighted! Yes! Every time I pressed my fingers on the lead contact, the lamp sprang into full radiance.

Gregory scratched his untidy head. “Nice going!” was his approving comment. “What else do ycu know besides the Statue of Liberty trick?”

“Dammit, man, it isn’t a trick!” I nearly screamed. “The bulb’s lighted by my merely touching it! Look here, too—!” I put the bulb back in place, then snatching the plug of the electric heater from its socket, I jammed the brass pins between my teeth. Immediately the cooling bars of the heater glowed red hot again!

“There!” I shouted hoarsely, replacing the plug. “That’s what is the matter with me! I’ve become a living dry battery—and I’m gathering power every day! Believe me, Tarp, it’s no joke!”

He had lost his flippancy now. He stared at me incredulously, then he said slowly, “So that’s what happened when I shook hands with you? I got an electric shock! Say, this is something!” He pulled up a chair and straddled it, leaned his arms on the back. “How’d you get this way?” he demanded. “When did it happen?”

I sat down again heavily, shook my head.

“I don’t exactly remember. Near as I can recall, it started some little time after I came back from my summer vacation with Eva. Began with cramp, then it passed off. Then later, when I was cleaning an electric torch of some two volts or so, I found I could light the thing! From then on things get fantastic! And now I’ve been sacked because my presence interferes with delicate electrical instruments… Gosh, Tarp, I’m in a hell of a mess!”

“But there must be a reason!” he insisted. “You couldn’t go off like this without a cause!”

I hardly heard him. “Seems to be affecting me mentally, too,” I went on dreamily. “Normally, as you know, I’m pretty sociable and even-tempered; now I find myself getting less and less considerate towards others. Odd ambitions are in my mind—things I hardly dare think about. Dreams of power…. All so weird,” I finished, pondering.

Tarp reflected for a moment or two, then he got to his feet and headed for a connecting door. “Come into the lab a moment,” he invited… I followed him into the cool, brightly lit expanse.

In passive silence, I submitted to the tests he made with various complicated instruments. At the end of it all, he rubbed his head and whistled.

“It’s got me!” he confessed blankly. “You’re generating about seventy to a hundred volts of electricity. Every part of you is alive with it, but because the build-up has been slow, you have adapted yourself to it gradually. That’s quite possible, of course. But how you got that way has me licked! Normally, a living body gives off a small percentage of electricity, sometimes enough to stop a watch. But as for lighting a lamp and starting up a heater— Hell, man, it’s downright uncanny!”

Uncanny! He was telling me! I got into my jacket in silence.

“You’re sure nothing unusual has ever happened to you?” he persisted anxiously. “I mean, have you ever come across anything strange, picked up anything queer, eaten something out of the ordinary, been stung by something, or—”

“Good Lord!” I interrupted him suddenly. Now I came to think of it, I had been stung. I wheeled around to him. “Now you mention it, something bit me during the holidays—” I broke off, smiled faintly. “Not worth mentioning,” I sighed. “Only a baby cuttle fish, or starfish, or something…”

“Be more explicit!” he snapped.

I did my best. I told him about the vacation. Eva and I had spent a day at Brimstone Pool, a little bathing place a few miles from Atlantic City. One of the days, while swimming, I had been stung in the arm, but I had thought nothing of it. Anyhow, the lump had soon gone down…

“Did you see a starfish or anything?” Tarp demanded, as I became silent.

That surprised me. “Matter of fact, no,” I confessed. “But then, I didn’t look very hard.”

“Hmmm…” He compressed his thin lips. “I don’t like it, Ralph,” he went on, “especially as your change dates approximately from then. I’m not well acquainted with Brimstone Pool, so the best thing we can do is go there the first thing tomorrow. Tonight you’ll stay with me. I’d like to get your general reactions.”

I looked at him gratefully. There was something always masterfully cool about Tarp Gregory.

“Thanks, pal,” I murmured. “I knew you’d help me.”

* * * *

At breakfast the next morning, Tarp told me that I had slept heavily and talked a lot, mainly about strangely intricate devices which ranged far beyond even his extensive knowledge. Certainly I had no recollection of such vaporings, and told him as much. He said nothing to that, but I guess he thought plenty.

By ten o’clock we were on our way. Sometime after dinner, we reached the deserted spot whereon, in summertime, pleasure seekers sought the sun and waves. Without speaking, I led the way down a rocky declivity to a narrow inlet left by the ebbed tide, finally indicated a deep, smooth pool banked around by curious, porous looking rocks.

“That’s Brimstone Pool itself,” I explained, glancing up to find Tarp’s lean face within two inches of my own. “I dived in from here, swam right across, and back again, Eva followed a moment or two afterwards…”

“Uh-huh, Tarp said pensively, then he stooped and stared into the Pool. It was perfectly clear, but it plainly had nothing in it beyond a few baby crabs and shrimps. Finally he wetted his lips with it.

“Normal sea water all right,” he sighed; then as he stared around on the rocks fringing the Pool, he began to frown. “Say,” he breathed, “these rocks aren’t normal. They’re—meteoric!” he finished, kicking one of them. “Large amounts of iron and pumice in them.”

I looked at him in surprise. “But I thought you knew that, Tarp! Don’t you remember the meteor of 1942 which fell near Atlantic City? It landed here and broke up—wasn’t very big. All around this Pool is where it dropped. These very rocks are the exploded parts of it—according to Doctor Grantham, anyway, Eva’s father. Hence the name Brimstone Pool.”

“Idiot that I am!” Tarp snorted. “I knew the damned name had a familiar ring. Now I remember… A meteor, eh?” he went on keenly. “And suppose something crawled out of this rockery into the Pool and happened to sting you? Suppose that something came from out of space, as it very likely might? Now do you see something forming?”

I certainly did, and the speculation wasn’t pleasant.

“You mean that perhaps an interstellar visitor bit me?” I asked him anxiously.

“It’s possible,” he said bluntly. “You say Dr. Grantham told you all about this meteor? Where does he fit in, besides being Eva’s father?”

I shrugged. “He’s a private geologist, writes all sorts of treatises on the subject. He was down here with us during the vacation and took some of this stuff home with him for his collection. He collects meteorite chunks, buried coins, old skulls, and all that. Goes abroad a lot too. Plenty of cash…”

“I get it,” Tarp nodded. “And he’s not the only one to take some of this stuff home…” Stooping, he picked up a loose piece and thrust it into his pocket. “Maybe worth analysis,” he said briefly, then turned and led the way back up the slope.

THE STRANGE OBSESSION

Tarp Gregory’s analysis revealed nothing beyond the fact that the meteoric chunk was iron ore. Where it had come from in outer space it was impossible to say. But he still clung to his original idea that the meteorite might have contained some strange form of life which, by sheer chance, had gotten into the Pool and bitten me.

The theory did not comfort me, I can tell you! It was all too possible for my liking. Besides, I was feeling stranger every day, though I said nothing to my friend. He was, I knew, doing all he could—but even he had his limitation. I had the feeling that all my natural, personal control was slipping.

One evening while Tarp was uptown on business, I came to a decision. I sat down and wrote a brief letter to him. In the interests of this history of my strange experience, I record it in full as best my memory serves me—

My Dear Tarp,

“Out of justice to you, I am leaving. In these past days my condition has grown steadily worse. I realize that I shall soon be a danger to have around. Any unexpected contact with me may, in time, produce fatal consequences.

“I am obliged to go away alone where nobody can find me, where I am away from living beings, there to work out my destiny as best I can until I am either released from this strange electrical bondage, or else die.

“Believe me, I do thank you for all you have done—but even you cannot save me.

“Always your sincere friend,

“Ralph Davis.”

I left the letter with Chalmers, packed my few belongings, and left. I was quite convinced in my own mind that I had taken the right course. I did not stop long at my own apartment in New York, either. I paid the rent up to date, then set off for the quieter regions beyond the city. At length, in the darkness of the winter evening, I walked up the drive of Dr. Grantham’s great, isolated residence.

As I had fervently hoped, Eva Grantham was at home—but as usual, her father was away, in Europe this time, hunting for fossils.

I kept well away from her as I followed her through the hall into the roomy, comfortable library. She looked at me curiously, the light catching the gold of her hair, sharpening somewhat the anxiety in her blue eyes.

“Ralph, what is it?” she asked quickly. “You haven’t been to see me for weeks—and now you have come you won’t speak. You didn’t even kiss me. What’s wrong? Are you ill—or what?”

“Nothing like that,” I muttered. With a burning stare, I gazed around the opulent room with its curio cases against the walls. It seemed an odd thought to me then that I was seeing the familiar room for the last time. The best thing was to be brutally frank.

“Eva, something’s happened,” I said slowly, looking at her steadily. “I’ve got to go away— No, don’t ask me why, please! I can’t give a reason. You’ll just have to trust me, that’s all.”

“But you’re surely coming back?” she demanded, amazed.

She stepped forward as she spoke. I saw her frown as I took a guarded step backwards. I could not dare let her touch me. She halted, eyeing me.

“Look here, what is wrong?” she demanded. “You can’t deceive me, Ralph. What have you done, if anything? I’ve the right to know.”

‘I’ve done nothing,” I said flatly. “It’s just that I have got to leave town—and quickly. Someday, perhaps, I’ll come back…”

I hesitated, looked at her young, sweet face gazing at me. I felt a mighty struggle, an intense bitterness at my fate, pass through me.

“Goodbye,” I said, as curtly as I could, and turned for the door.

But I never reached it. Before I realized what had happened, Eva had run forward and seized my hand imploringly.

“Don’t,” I screamed hoarsely. “Don’t touch me—!”

God! Shall I ever forget that moment! I saw her tear-dimmed eyes suddenly sharpen with pain. Her slender body stiffened— Then with a savage, frantic movement, I swept her backwards, tore free that prisoning handclasp. She slammed violently into the slender cases against the wall, collapsed motionless amidst a shower of glass.

For what must have been a full minute, I stood staring down on her fallen body. She was not cut… I was powerless to help because I dared not touch her in case life was still within her. I had, I knew, unwittingly done the very thing I had sought to avoid; I had driven at least two hundred volts of electricity through her…

Shaking, weeping so much that my vision was blurred, I thudded to my knees and leaned my ear towards her heart. I could not hear it beating. Nor was there any apparent life in her ashy face.

Mutely I stared at the shattered case, at the bits of stony metal lying about the carpet.

“Dead,” I whispered at last. “Oh, God, I killed her! The only thing in life I loved…”

I screamed at and reviled all creation. I do not know how long it was before I sobered up a little. Shaking, I got to my feet. I turned and ran blindly for the french windows, hurled them open and raced like a madman into the darkness.

I forgot everything. I must run, and run, and run… I was an outcast—a murderer!

* * * *

By no conceivable effort can I possibly recall what happened to me after I fled Eva Grantham’s home. I lost all track of my own personality and wandered like a dream-man in places which I can only recall as blurred and unreal. I believe weeks elapsed. At the end of that time, I felt the compelling urge of something that was not the real me, but which dominated me, nevertheless. I became, quite against my will, a dynamic personality about whom the whole of America was soon talking.

My methods were strange, inhumanly logical, surprising even me though I was the perpetrator. From a point in New York which I knew would effectually defy all efforts at location, I gathered to myself all the former big shots of the criminal world, and they—incredible though it seemed to my squashed inner personality, obeyed all my orders without question.

I had unquestionably become a master criminal, but with rather different ideas to the average criminal genius. I did far more than just destroy if my orders were disobeyed. I started to gain a hold over economic conditions, cornered markets, clamped down an invisible but ruthless hand on the freedom of the American people. My influence was everywhere, steadily growing, subtly taking over control of this and that business with a total disregard for the ruin and suffering occasioned thereby.

In a month I had gained a pretty good percentage of power in most walks of life, and my ability to destroy by the strange electric powers governing my body made my agents fanatically loyal to me… America began to appreciate that I was going to turn the country inside out before long unless they found a means of finding my whereabouts. That, somehow, amused me immensely.

From what I learned over the radio, Tarp Gregory was apparently the only man who knew the real truth—who knew that the Unseen Dictator—as I had come to be known—was really me, Ralph Davis… But not the Davis who had worried over his strange electrical powers. Here, declared Tarp Gregory, was a man who was relentlessly bent on mastering the world, who inevitably would do so unless a cleverer mind could defeat the aim.

Somehow I got the idea that Tarp was not sure of himself, that he needed mpre facts before giving the real troth. Strange indeed, that I should be as anxious to know the truth as anybody… Why had all this happened to me? What was it that was driving me on night and day to greater and more inhuman conquests?

In an endeavor to trace my experiences from the beginning, I set about writing this history at odd moments. The tale is not yet told. When at last it is, maybe it will become clear that I was in no way to blame…

It was inevitable that America should get to wondering what was going to happen next. Deputations to the White House demanded that something be done, that the powers that be get to work and apprehend the hidden genius strangling the life blood of a nation.

Congress, though, could do nothing. Neither could the law. I had tightened my hold; then, just as Americans were beginning to wonder where it was all going to end, there came a sudden change in events. An opposer to my regime appeared—or at least was known to be in existence! And this time it was a woman…a woman of inhuman fearlessness, I was told, but motivated by ideals similar to my own. She too wanted world control, and would go to any lengths to get it.

At first I was contemptuous, but that unknown woman had a way with her. I found myself compelled to listen to her demands. You see, she had powers just as powerful as my own. She too was electric in her makeup! Between us, we had a continent paralyzed. We had both cornered every market and launched parallel schemes for the absolute control of the Americas. For that very reason neither of us could move. It was stalemate.

I was debating the advisability of cooperating with this woman, when to my surprise I found that the morning papers all carried one glaring headline:

THE TWIN DICTATORS MUST MEET!

The context told me nothing I did not already know, but that same evening Tarp Gregory followed things up with a radio speech. I sat in my hidden abode listening to his fervent words…

“In the interests of humanity, of America, of the world itself, these two soulless dictators must meet!” he cried, in a fervent voice. “We demand it! And if they are listening to me now—the man dictator most of all—I say this to him…”

I looked up in sudden interest at the loudspeaker.

“Ralph, this is your old friend Tarp speaking. I’m still trying to help you. You shouldn’t have run out on me like you did. I have your whole case doped out and know exactly what has gone wrong with you. Listen… This woman who has risen against you is no stranger. She’s Eva Grantham! Meet her—I beg of you!”

That news brought me to my feet. For a long time, I stood fighting with that other self of mine, then for a while at least, Ralph Davis got the upper hand. I grabbed hat and coat, left my abode by the secret entrance and stalked out into the night. Naturally, not one of the thousands of people I passed, at a discreet distance, knew who I was.… Only one thought was mastering my brain at that moment—to find out what was wrong with me.

I reached Tarp’s apartment without much trouble, saw the amazed look in his eyes as he himself opened the apartment door. Quietly, I waved him back. He nodded understandingly, watched me from a little distance as I walked slowly to the center of the room.

“I heard your radio speech,” I said, trying to bring some tone of friendliness into my harsh voice. “I’ve risked a good deal to come here and find out the truth…”

Tarp smiled faintly, straddled a chair at the other end of the room. He sat looking at me for a long time. “If I didn’t know the facts about you, I’d say you were a different man,” he said quietly. “Anyway, here’s the low down.… When you left me I got to wondering where you’d go. I fancied you’d first pay a visit to Eva Grantham’s, so I hied myself there. I found the place empty of servants with the windows of the library swinging wide. Dr. Grantham is away in Europe, as you know…”

“I killed Eva Grantham,” I said stonily.

Tarp shook his head. “No you didn’t, Ralph. In the library I found lots of clues. A case against the wall was smashed, glass lay on the floor and on the hard rubberoid of the surrounding shelves. Pieces of gray metal were strewn about the carpet. Amongst those metal fragments I found the case’s identification card and it read— ‘Section of Brimstone Pool Meteorite, 1941.’ Among other things I found your hat. Hastily left on the library desk. Skipping the whole thing, I also found that the carpet had rubberoid underneath it…

“I pieced things together,” Tarp went on slowly. “You went to see Eva. You touched her, and Eva dropped under the terrific shock. You imagined you had killed her, but you were wrong. The rubberoid under carpet would absorb a great deal of the current. She was stunned. You couldn’t investigate for fear of making things worse. You fled. But in that library where you’d left Eva, there was a section of the identical meteorite that had effected you in the first place. Apparently, when Eva fell, she smashed open the case containing it. It broke apart along smooth, formerly hidden seams. Out of it there emerged a small creature similar to the one that had bitten you in the Pool, but of the opposite electric charge—negative! The thing bit Eva and she absorbed it. She recovered. Her less strong constitution reacted far more quickly than yours. As I see it, she must have dismissed the servants, then she left home filled with sudden mighty ideas, was motivated by schemes similar to yours…”

“But what bit Eva and me?” I demanded.

“In the first place, a meteorite came from a world unknown. It was not an ordinary meteorite, but some kind of space-machine. Inside it were two beings whom I can only assume were pure force—a type of life we cannot comprehend, though at root we too are motivated force. Anyway, male and female in these beings was expressed by what to us would be plus and minus electric signs. They were positive and negative…

“I believe something went wrong when they landed,” Tarp mused. “The meteorite—spaceship—exploded, but one of the creatures, the positive one I believe, escaped. It found a habitat in Brimstone Pool. It was, I imagine, extremely minute. You went into that Pool. The creature not only bit you—it assimilated itself into your system.

“By degrees that powerful positive charge was absorbed by you, in step-up stages, and with it was bound to come a certain percentage of the mind or brain force of this incredibly intelligent little being. You became obsessed with ideas that were not your own, that had formerly belonged to the creature you had absorbed!

“The same thing happened to Eva when the mate escaped from the rest of the meteorite in the Grantham library… Now do you understand?”

I nodded very slowly. “Yes, Tarp—I understand. And I need her as she needs me. Nothing can keep us apart…yet that very meeting will bring destruction,” I finished, pondering.

“It will destroy both of you.” Tarp said steadily. “Positive and negative will meet each other and cancel out in free energy. It is either that, Ralph, or this perpetual striving for a something you do not understand, together with the fight against Eva’s irresistible electric attraction. You wanted each other when you were normal. If you take each other now you can both be assured the world will be a better place without you…”

I got slowly to my feet. “You’ll find the records of my entire experiences at my headquarters,” I said quietly, and added the exact situation for his benefit alone…

* * * *

I write these words upon my return from Tarp. I have issued a request to Eva that we should meet. We shall, in an hour’s time, at a place well away from people and buildings, in case the explosion of our unity should produce far-reaching havoc.

I am not sorry I am going to die—perhaps start again. Nor, I believe, is Eva, who is now in possession of the facts… But I have added certain facts to Tarp’s analysis that I know, from the knowledge the being I have assimilated, to be correct. I state it here—

Originally, the beings were pioneers of their race. They planned to come to our world as the most likely place for starting life anew. Mischance upon arrival separated them. They entered living flesh to gain sustenance, but died in so doing because of the toxics therein, but not before they had passed on their grim heritage to the recipients. Normally, I understand, the unity of positive and negative in their own correct environment brings not a cancellation but a surge of energy, which becomes a new creature. But, housed in the fleshy structure of Eva and me, unity will bring cancellation… Possibly these two did not mate in space because of lack of room for more than one or two offspring…

I wonder, as I write these last lines, what Dr. Grantham will think of it all. I believe he is hurrying home from Europe. He will learn of the strangest marriage in earthly history…

But my tale is told. And the hour is up.

MARTIAN AVENGER

A baby born of two worlds was this Martian, but even after thousands of years, he remembered that revenge was his mission on Earth.

CHAPTER I

The Cell Cluster from Mars

“Mr. Halworthy is in the laboratory, Miss Crawford. Working late, I guess.”

Vera Crawford nodded her thanks as the old Institute janitor resumed his mop and pail. She strode on purposefully down the white enameled corridor, finally flung open the green door at the far end.

“Who the hell’s opened that door?” demanded Halworthy’s irate voice. “I don’t want any cold air in here, and— Why hello, Vera!”

The scientist broke off in surprised greeting as he came round a bench piled up with bottles and paraphernalia. Young, good looking after a fashion, his blue eyes became rather sheepish as he found the girl accusingly regarding him.

“Are you aware, Lance Halworthy, that you had an appointment with me tonight for the television theater?” she asked bitterly. “It may interest you to know I’ve got feet as cold as icebergs from waiting down town for you!”

“I forgot all about it,” he said solemnly. “Yes—seriously I did. I’m engaged on such an important experiment—”

“Experiment! When do I ever hear any other excuse?” The girl came forward and rubbed her chilled hands over the electric stove. Then as Lance said nothing further she turned a curious pair of brown eyes upon him. “Well, what is it?” she asked resignedly. “Might as well give me some reason for your neglect. And it had better be a good one else I’ll think twice about marrying you when the time comes!”

The threat was wasted on Lance. He merely smiled, took her arm, and led the way to a square case of glass bound around on three of its sides with strangely fashioned machines. There were tubes that contained a rose colored fluid, thermostatic heating devices, thermometers, and then a wired apparatus containing a spotless, wafer-thin piece of metal which beat to and fro with metronomic rhythm. Somehow, it resembled a heart.

Vera only glanced at these details: they were merely laboratory technique, Most of her attention was concentrated on an object repulsively like a large blood red worm, its substance shot through with veins of darker hue. It lay inside the case curled up in a semicircle, palpitating steadily.

Vera looked up sharply, vaguely horrified. “What are you trying to do? Cultivate a new species of snake?”

“Nothing like that,” Lance laughed. “That thing came from Mars, and it’s been entrusted to me by the Space Navigation Company. So you see I’m on an important job.”

“But I thought explorers had proven Mars dead long ago?”

“That’s so, but Valmerlik, who takes a delight in probing into places where ordinary space explorers have more sense than look, came across six preserved cell clusters buried near one of the Martian cases—hidden in an underground chamber which had unquestionably been made by intelligent means. Five of the cell clusters aggregates were useless: the Martian air, though mighty thin, had somehow gotten through to them and rotted them. The sixth cluster was in perfect condition, and here it is. We were stuck to know what to do, so we finally took the only course and fertilized it artificially on earth here. This is the result: life has begun. The cells have formed and produced fusion. Thanks to all this artificial incubation those cells are growing into a living thing…”

“Then—then it’s a Martian?” the girl whispered, fascinated.

“Not entirely. It’s a hybrid, born of two worlds. Martian life cells fertilized by earth sperm. Naturally, we can only reproduce the chemical substances we know on our own planet. We’ve no means of knowing what a Martian sperm would be like… Call it a half breed.”

To Lance’s surprise the girl gave a little shudder. The thing in the case had uncoiled very slightly. Dimly, she could already make out the vague details of head, shoulders, and arms.

“I think it is basically cellulose,” Lance murmured pensively. “Pure cellulose, wherein it differs from our own type of life.”

“It’s horrible!” Vera’s declaration was dimly emphatic. “It’s time you scientists stopped playing around with things like this! What good is there in it, anyway?”

“Plently! There will be certain strong hereditary tendencies in the full grown creature. From him we may be able to reconstruct the history of Mars, learn the red planet’s secrets, learn why his cell clusters, along with five others, were removed from female Martians to be buried in a vault. There’s no end to what we might discover. Notice his metabolism—it’s terrific.”

“He seems to be growing even as I look at him,” Vera admitted dubiously.

“In a week, at this speed, he’ll have reached maturity!” Lance’s eyes were shining at the speculation. “I think there is a reason for such speed, too. Martian cells mature at a terrific pace because they have an inherited strain to work against gravity far less than ours. Though the gravity here is of course earth normal, I believe those cells are constructed to work with terrific energy against that drag, producing growth far faster than anything we know.”

Vera sighed a little. “I suppose,” she said slowly, “I ought to be interested, but somehow I’m not. Despite the science of this year of 1987 I think some things are better left alone. It piques me to think that our theater date was cancelled because of a glorified worm.”

Lance put an arm about her shoulders. “Don’t take it too hard, honey. This experiment if properly conducted may put me right in line for being boss of this Institute. That means plenty of money for us. I’ve got to give this thing all the attention I can. I’ve even made arrangements to sleep in the building for the time being in case of sudden developments. In a week the experiment will be finished… I’ve got your penknife for good luck,” he finished, smiling, and pulled a much worn pearl handled knife from his smock.

The girl laughed a little. “You do rely on that, don’t you?” she said. “Still I appreciate the thought—that my present to you last Christmas should bring you luck. Better than rabbit’s feet and all that kind of old fashioned stuff…” She broke off and gave a little shrug. “Well, I think I know the truth now. Guess the only thing I can do is be a good little girl and not bother you for a week—but if you postpone me again after that I’ll walk out on you forever!

Lance hugged her gently to him. “I won’t do it again,” he murmured. “That’s a promise…”

* * * *

Vera went quite effectually out of Lance’s life during the week that followed—her business firm sent her on an urgent mission to Philadelphia, from which she only returned to New York late on the Saturday night. Before she thought of her own apartment she headed direct for the Public Laboratories, met the janitor as usual in the hallway with his bucket and mop.

“Just a minute, Miss Crawford!” He caught the girl’s arm as she made to pass by. Surprised, she stopped.

“What’s wrong, Briggs? I was going along to see Lance.”

“Ay, I know—but I don’t think you oughta.” The old man’s rheumy eyes searched her face. He glanced quickly toward the solitary laboratory door at the end of the passage.

“Mr. Halworthy’s been acting strange these last few days,” he went on anxiously. “This morning we found him in the lab. all bent up like a man who’s had a terrific disappointment. He’d smashed the case too that had that horrible thing inside it—I reckon the experiment failed and he got savage. That’s what the staff think. Several times today he’s been out, carrying stuff. Once he had a sack full of stuff on his shoulder—”

“Well, so what?” the girl asked, impatient at the old fellow’s rambling talk. “His car’s outside, I notice. What’s the matter, anyway?”

“I dunno…” Briggs ruminated. “He’s locked himself in that laboratory, and won’t come out. Now no man should do that—”

“I’ll get him,” Vera broke in quickly. “Thanks for the news, anyway.”

She swung round and headed for the laboratory door, rapped on the panels.

“Lance, let me in! It’s me—Vera. Open up!”

For a second or two there was no response, then came the sound of quick footsteps. The lock clicked and the door opened gently. The girl slipped inside and closed the door quietly, turned to face Lance…

To her surprise he was neither weary nor dishevelled. Instead he was remarkably neat, dressed in his best suit, his black hair brushed firmly into place. Only his face, deathlike in its pallor, seemed to indicate some hidden strain.

Vera glanced past him for a moment towards the smashed case wherein the Martian embryo had been growing. She turned back again, smiling sympathetically.

“Then it failed, Lance?”

“Partly,” he answered rather ambiguously, and frowned for a moment. Then his blue eyes turned to the girl with a brooding stare. Somehow she didn’t like that stare: it had not the calm, balanced intensity she usually admired. In some way it was furtive, yet in another, paradoxically enough, it was masterful.

“Well, I—er—” She hesitated, vaguely puzzled. Then asked as brightly as she could, “Well, what do we do now? No good moping around here, is it? Besides, you’re all dressed to go out. Maybe you were expecting me?”

He nodded very slowly. “Yes—I was expecting you.” Again he studied her in silence, then suddenly he seemed to make up his mind.

“I’ve something important to show w. Come with me.”

He put on hat and coat, then took her arm in a tight grip. Puzzled but submissive she marched beside him as they left the building: she noticed he completely ignored Briggs—went right out to his parked car and held the door open.

“Hop in,” he ordered briefly, then he settled beside her and started up the engine.

“But where are we going?” she demanded, as he drove away from the main street leading to the heart of the town.

“I’ve an experimental cellar over on the east side which you’ve never known anything about,” he answered shortly. “I’ve got something there that’s going to interest you…”

“Oh…” Vera became silent, inwardly perplexed. For a reason she could not understand she felt oddly afraid. Lance’s manner was so strange, his voice so cold and jerky. It seemed that some deep inner emotion was holding him…

Her wonderment deepened as he skillfully swept the car in and out of side roads, skirted the edge of the city center, and at last drove into the dingy regions of a deserted quarter of the east side. She gazed out frowning, on long disused graneries and almost windowless, obsolete factories… At length they came to a drearily lighted stretch of harbor wharf. Lance pulled up with a jerk and scrambled out.

He helped the girl to alight. Mist clung around them, full of the oily odor of the harbor waters slapping round wooden columns beneath their feet.

“Where on earth are we?” Vera whispered, turning up her collar.

“This way,” was Lance’s brief answer, and he led her down a gloomy stretch of alley way to a solitary, shadowy building. He stopped before an old and grimy window, raised the sash and climbed through, helping her in after him.

“Used to be a chemical storage warehouse,” he said curtly, and pulling out his torch flashed it around long forgotten supplies against the wall. There were straw wrapped acid bottles, coated in dust, crates falling to pieces from disuse.

“Useful place,” he went on, in the same short way. “Nobody ever comes here—that’s why I use it. My cellar is down below here.”

He strode to an iron ring in the floor and lifted up a square of stone, waved his beam down a flight of mildewed steps. Filled with growing doubts the girl obeyed his behest to descend, went down into a huge cellar, obviously long forgotten, its floor thickly coated with dust. Against the walls were tiny iron gratings for ventilation.

Carefully Lance lowered the stone back into place, waved his torch beam on the walls, allowed it to halt at length on a massive dusty chain stapled to the brickwork. At the end of the chain was a circle of metal with a heavy padlock in its center.

A little chill crept through Vera as she stared at it. She turned suddenly.

“What’s that for?”

“Dunno—unless perhaps wild animals were once stored down here. No telling.”

“And—and you experiment in this awful place?”

“I shall,” Lance answered very slowly, and in the reflected torch beam Vera saw his eyes very cold and clear watching her. His face too was different—set and hard, with a mouth compressed into a tight, cruel line. Her fear leaped suddenly to the surface.

“Lance,” she whispered, her throat dry, “what’s come over you? Why do you look at me like that? I—”

Then she broke off with a sudden scream as, dropping his torch to the floor, he suddenly seized her arms in a grip of iron, forced her backward relentlessly.

She kicked and struggled as she was lifted from her feet and hurled against the wall. Something of rigid hardness snapped round her waist with a sharp click. Once that happened, Lance released her and she stared dumbly down to see that circlet of metal round her middle, the padlock securely snapped in position… With a faint grin Lance dropped the key in his pocket, picked his torch up and stood surveying her.

“Lance, let me go!” she screamed hoarsely. “Lance, you—”

“Shut up!” he broke in curtly. “You’ll be safe enough like that for the moment. I’m not trying to hurt you—nor do I intend to. Just that I prefer you locked up for the moment. I’m leaving you now. I’ll be back shortly.”

“Not alone—like this!” she shouted desperately.

“Yes,” he said stonily, and with that he turned. Horrified, Vera watched him go with his torch up to the slab in the roof. Then it closed down and she was alone in the darkness.

CHAPTER II

Vera Learns the Truth

For several seconds the stunning shock of her position did not penetrate—then gradually vitality and awareness returned to her. With a savage desperation she twisted and turned on the chain holding her, tore at the manacle of steer round her waist—but nothing yielded in the slightest. The lock, what little she could see of it in the dim light filtering through the ventilators, was a brand new one, self-locking, only released by the key Lance had in his pocket. Then he had deliberately bought it to hold her!

Weakly she relaxed, sank down slowly to the stone floor and tried vainly to figure out what was wrong, what Lance was getting at, what had happened to him during the Martian experiment to make him behave so queerly. Solution failed her. She finally gave herself up to fearful waiting—then after what seemed eternities sounds reached her, the circle of the torch appeared in the roof.

Scrambling to her feet she called huskily.

“Lance, in Heaven’s name what are you trying to do? Release me—please! Please!”

He took no notice. She fell quiet, watching him as he moved around. He made several journeys up above, each time bringing down a piece of apparatus that glittered brightly in the light of the torch. He was engaged on the job for at least an hour, then apparently satisfied, the stone back in place, he came forward. With unwavering steadiness he pointed the torch beam at the girl and she slitted her eyes against the glare.

“Before you have something to eat there is something you must see,” he said, and his voice was very slow and gentle now. Gradually he turned the torch back towards himself, held it below his face so that the girl saw only his eyes thrown in relief.

“Look at me!” he commanded, going closer to her. “Look at me very steadily.”

She tried to look everywhere else but at those eyes. She tried to scream, and could not—tried to speak but her tongue was still. Everywhere was black: there was only those two eyes. She felt forced to stare into them, and the longer she stared the more she felt her senses were reeling…

The darkness became shot with bars of light. Her head began to ache intolerably. Then, with dazed wonderment, she realized she was somehow a detached observer of events unknown…

The cellar had gone. Instead she gazed, from a considerable height apparently, upon an ocher red planet—now not a dead world streaked with the lines of drying canals, but a world of seas and continents like Earth. It teemed with life in every direction, bore the mark of prosperity upon it—

Then out of nowhere came sudden cataclysm and destruction!

Writhing skies, hurtling bolts of electric energy, incredible flame and winds. Cities crumbled like decks of cards, oceans boiled and whirled upwards. Martians, weirdly fashioned, died by the untold thousands…

The view switched to a green world—Earth. Earth receded until it assumed its proper planetary perspective in the cosmos. Earth and Mars were both in view, but between them, clear against the ebony black of space, was a plainly visible green bar that seemed to connect the two worlds together.

From somewhere a voice was talking, low and droning.

“Centuries ago Earth was dry, even as Mars is today. It came about because a stupendous inner expansion of gases started a great fault across the world, which caused the mountains of the present day—otherwise Earth would be flat, as Mars is. The fault sent water pouring into the Earth’s hot interior. There was a conflict of titanic forces. Earth’s seas were converted into steam, blasted forth with such terrific power that they went far beyond atmospheric limits into space, never to return.

“There was rain afterwards, but utterly insufficient to provide the world with the seas it had lost. At that time life of a very high intelligence existed on the Earth, the cities of which people are still found in part today. Those minds understood the forces of the cosmos, moulded machinery and, to replenish the Earth robbed Mars of its seas and practically all its atmosphere. The Deluge of Biblical history refers to the coming of the Martian seas to Earth through electrically devised space tubes. Nearly every Martian was destroyed.

“A few survived. Someday, presumably scientists would come to the red planet and conduct a thorough investigation. It was decided that life cells should be removed from several chosen female Martians and be sealed in the tallest towers of the city. As time passed, the cities sank under the sand—but at last one set of cells was found, was artificially fertilized and brought to life.

But the deep rooted Martian hereditary strain remained—remembrance, and desire for revenge. To destroy Earth, even as in the dim past it had overthrown Mars for its own selfish ends…”

Vera felt herself slowly floating back to the consciousness of her own self. Lance’s eyes were still watching her, but their mesmeric power had gone. Incredulously she realized that he had literally hypnotized her into seeing those things, those visions of another long dead world. Hypnotism of a power beyond all normal bounds.

“Before the Martian died I learned these things,” he said slowly. “He changed me—willed me to perform a certain task in life. I was ordered to avenge, and nothing can stop me!”

For a long time the girl stood in silence. Strange thoughts were battering at the back of her mind.

“Then—then the Martian spoke to you in English?” she faltered.

“No: he hypnotized me just as I have just done with you, I saw what you have seen. Then something happened to my brain. I was given certain scientific secrets and commanded to avenge. It was an inescapable order… Then the Martian died. Atmospheric pressure was wrong—I think I went mad. I destroyed the corpse and smashed the case…”

“And why should I be fastened up like a criminal?” Vera demanded curtly.

Lance moved forward and unfastened the padlock, released her with a quiet movement.

“It was only while I was absent. I can’t allow you to escape until my work is finished. Had you done so you might have died with the rest of the people, and I don’t want that.”

“Died?” She stared at him blankly. He smiled coldly.

“I have rather an ingenious plan to follow out,” he explained. “The Martian outlined it to me. The atmosphere, as you may know is made up of oxygen and nitrogen, both retaining their ability to stay isolated. The nitrogen takes up four fifths of the atmospheric volume and it also prevents the savage burning of energy which would take place with only oxygen present.

“Now, under certain conditions, nitrogen will unite with oxygen to produce N2O, nitrous oxide—better known as laughing gas. But, fortunately for human beings, this unity does not take place in the normal atmosphere. The production of two atoms of nitrogen to one of oxygen can only be accomplished as a rule by terrific heat or a lightning flash. The latter means obviously indicates electricity—but it is not the strength of the voltage which is so essential to produce a unity but the length of the ether wave disturbing the basic atoms to a common unity.

“It does not require vast machinery to unite oxygen and nitrogen in the proportions of two to one; it merely requires the electric energy of a specified wavelength. That wavelength was given to me by the Martian. Right here I have the machinery necessary for the job, brought from the laboratory. That was where I went when I left you. Deep under this cellar is a sluice from the harbor, strong enough to-run that small turbo-generator there…”

“But what are you going to do?” Vera cried.

“Isn’t, it obvious? An electrical wavelength generated from here will pass through the intervening concrete and affect the atmosphere in whatever direction it is aimed. More than that—the atmosphere is never still. It moves ceaselessly, with a circular whirlpool motion. Imagine then that part of the atmosphere immediately over us is altered in its basic elements—the nitrogen combines with the oxygen. The changed area drifts onward and another atmospheric area floats into position to be likewise changed. Gradually an increasing expanse of nitrous oxide will be on the move. Around New York there will begin to settle an atmosphere that is actually anaesthetic…and which will never alter once the combination is effectually started.”

Vera could only stare in dazed horror. The words she uttered were scarcely audible.

“You mean poison the atmosphere of the whole world?”

“The whole world will take a long time,” Lance said, brooding. “I propose to wipe out city after city. First, this great metropolis—then unless the atmosphere has drifted to other cities, I shall attack them as well. Little by little I’ll destroy them all—wipe out humanity entirely.”

“But it’s fantastic—impossible!”

“Not at all. I have the apparatus and I know the wavelength. The rest is merely continuing the duty the Martian assigned to me.”

“You can’t do it, Lance!” The girl seized his arms in sudden desperation. “Lance—you can’t do it! You’ve gone mad, or are hypnotized, or something… Besides, even supposing you tried to get away with this, don’t forget that humanity will wear gasmasks for pro-tection. They’ll go underground…” she wound up desperately.

“Gasmasks were ruled out with the Peace Pact of ten years ago,” he answered grimly. “Humanity will fly underground, I agree—but in time the gas will reach them. In five years not a thing will be alive on the planet, except you and I. Then we’ll talk further. We have masks,” he finished quietly, nodding to them as they lay on the floor. “They’re laboratory masks, and quite effective.”

Vera stared at them, frowned momentarily. “But there are three masks there—not two—”

“I believe in being prepared…”

CHAPTER III

Vera Makes a Discovery

Lance turned suddenly, and motioned the girl across the cellar.

“Better eat something,” he said briefly, picking up a tin of corned beef from the supplies he had brought along. “I’ll bring some more tinned stuff later. This will do for now…”

Vera took the tin from him, began to twist the key in her slim fingers. The strip of tin snapped off. Impatiently she swung on Lance as he stood surveying his machinery in the torchlight.

“Here—you open it,” she said brusquely. “You’ve a can opener on that pocket knife of yours…”

He felt in his pockets and shrugged.

“Guess I’ve left it behind…”

“What! Your lucky mascot, and on an occasion like this!” Vera stared at him incredulously. He failed to return her look, took the tin, then picked up a short, blunt bar of steel from his equipment and rammed it into the gap—rather too vigorously, for he misapplied the pressure and slashed his palm along the jagged tin edge. Vera winced in sympathy with him, knew instinctively that that cut had gone to the bone. Almost automatically she tugged out her handkerchief…then it dropped from her fingers as Lance merely shook his hand a little and went on pulling. At last he had the tin open, threw away the lid.

“Didn’t—didn’t you cut yourself?” Vera stammered, dumbfounded.

He shook his head slowly as he handed the tin to her. She saw quite clearly his hand was not even marked.

She took the tin absently, was hardly aware how she started to eat. She had a remembrance of raking out the stuff from the tin and of drinking some unpleasantly fizzy pop—but it was not her physical reactions that were concerning her. She was thinking—hard, fitting together certain little odd incidents and remembering half-forgotten facts.

The three gasmasks, the missing penknife, and now a hand that should have been cut, and was not. And the memory of that all-powerful hypnotism: the even remoter memory of something about cellulose…

Say, any objections if I walk around?” she asked suddenly.

“None at all—but don’t try and escape.” Lance was too busy with his machinery to take much notice of her.

She turned and strolled casually enough along the length of the cellar, going further and further into the deeper shadows at the remote end. Once or twice she glanced back to behold Lance still busy with his apparatus. Then suddenly she stopped, her heart beating faster. The cellar was not complete in itself. At its remoter end was a massive, ancient door, obviously leading to yet another underground place beyond. The girl regarded it thoughtfully for a moment, then stared at the dust ridden floor. She stooped, stared fixedly at two long troughs gouged into the film, troughs such as heels might make if a body were dragged! And they vanished right at that door.

The sack Lance had carried from the laboratory which the janitor had seen…? Vera’s eyes narrowed in thought. She tried the door; it was locked. Just in time she turned back to Lance as he stood regarding her suspiciously.

“Satisfied?” he demanded bluntly, as she came up to him.

She nodded slowly, glanced at the short metal bar he had used to open the tin. Then she stood in silence until the interest of his machinery got him again. Slowly, without distracting his attention, she picked the bar up. It was comfortably heavy in her hand…

It took all her courage to perform the next action. With every ounce of her strength she whirled the bar through the air directly on the back of the head in front of her. Lance dropped instantly, to the floor.

In a moment the girl was down on her knees, searched through his pockets and pulled out every key she could find, then holding out the one that obviously fitted the cellar door she raced towards it, torch in her free hand.

The lock turned under the key. She saw as she swung the door wide that it was of tremendous thickness—clearly explained why no sounds, if her guess was right, had penetrated through.

A figure against the far wall turned slowly as she flashed her torch before her—a figure only half dressed and shackled to the wall by chain and waist manacle, even as she had been.

“Lance!” she screamed. “Lance! It is you! I was right…”

Instantly she flung herself forward, searched through the keys until she found the right one to the manacle. Lance tore it aside, flung the tumbled hair from before his eyes.

“What—what on earth are you doing here?” he demanded. “Did that devil capture you as well, then?”

“I walked into it,” she answered quickly. “But tell me, how are you? O. K.?”

“Considering everything, yes—but how’d you find me?

“A hunch, I guess—in fact several hunches. Finally I was convinced that that thing in there wasn’t you—but a perfect imitation. It’s the Martian, isn’t it, and it carried you from the laboratory in a sack?”

Lance nodded grimly. “When it reached maturity it smashed open its case and attacked me. I tore out my knife to save myself but I wasn’t quick enough. It hypnotized me, drained my mind of every thought, learned the language—everything. I was shown its whole scheme of vengeance. It told me it would preserve my life because it had more to learn from me. Then, completely under hypnotic control, I was forced to provide the thing with clothes. I went home and got them for it. Then it took me away in a sack, and I couldn’t raise a finger to help myself. Some kind of instinct led the thing to this out of the way spot. I got chained up and—” Lance broke off, shrugged. “That’s all there is to it.”

“For my part,” Vera said, “I remembered you saying the thing was pure cellulose. I also remember from my science school days that cellulose can do almost anything from imitating any known object to adapting itself to any known condition. I was finally convinced the thing was cellulose when it cut itself and almost instantly healed itself by adaption to the circumstance. Somehow, I realized, the thing had imitated you—”

“Exactly,” Lance broke in quickly. “It has Martian intelligence of terrific power: it patterned itself after the nearest living object because of its earthly fertilization. I was the object… But—but how did you escape from it?” he demanded in amazement.

“I hit it on the head so hard and so suddenly it hadn’t the chance to adapt itself. It’s planning world destruction and—”

“I know,” Lance broke in seriously. “We’ve got to…”

He broke off suddenly and gripped the girl’s arm. The Martian was standing in the doorway, set faced, eyes glittering.

“Run!” Lance commanded suddenly. “We can’t fight this thing. Follow me!”

Simultaneously with the words he hurled the torch straight at the creature: it took it off guard, sent it reeling to one side. In that split second Lance and the girl were through the doorway, stumbled across the black cellar and up the steps to the stone trap. Behind them the Martian’s footsteps were pursuing.

Desperately Lance pushed up the stone, flung it to one side, then dragged Vera up behind him—almost hurled her to the open window giving egress to the wharf outside. She got through, but not so Lance. A terrific pain stabbed through his skull as the tremendous hypnotic power of the Martian smote on his nerve centers. He reeled dizzily, came up hard with his back against bellying masses wrapped in straw.

Dimly a thought revolved in his mind. No ordinary weapons would kill this infinitely assimilative creature— But acid? Acid and cellulose…? With a last desperate effort he hurled over the bottle nearest to him and forced himself back.

Fuming, spurting smoke rose on the air, thick with acrid fumes. At that same moment the Martian came forward. He slipped in the sizzling liquid on the concrete, fell face down into it…

Sickened and half blinded Lance staggered round the dry portion to the window, scream after scream ringing in his ears as the deadly stuff decomposed the cellulose hybrid far faster than its assimilative powers could build themselves up to the sudden change.

Somehow, Lance realized he got through the window, stood sucking in great lungfuls of air. The girl’s arm was on his shoulders. Things were quieter now: the screaming had ceased.

“Naturally, cellulose dissolves almost instantaneously in nitric acid,” Lance muttered, when he got his breath back. He stared into the dark space through the window. “Whoever forgot those acid jars didn’t realize they’d saved the world,” he went on slowly. “And you, dearest… Beyond question the Martian only spared your life with ideas of later mate-hood. He meant to save me too to drain my mind of all earthly knowledge. Hence the three gasmasks and—”

“Forget it,” the girl whispered. “It’s over. The car’s round the corner. Drive home and I’ll slip in and get you an overcoat. Then we can come back and throw that machinery into the harbor or somewhere…”

THE OTHERS

“One moment I was in my father’s laboratory, and then I was here.”

The inter-phone buzzed insistently for the fifth time in an hour. Douglas Milton, resident surgeon of the Karoneth Hospital for Nervous Diseases, reached out a claw of a hand and snapped the switch.

“Well?” His voice was brusque; his dark eyes tired. He had been so overworked recently he felt as though he could do with a course of treatment himself.

“Have you a moment, Douglas?” It was the voice of Dr. Meadows in the loudspeaker, and Meadows was one of the specialists in neuronic ganglia.

“No,” Milton answered briefly. “Not even for you, Harry. I’m up to the eyes in this case of Joseph Baxter. I think that he’s—”

“Joseph Baxter has nothing on this, Douglas! It’s the most amazing thing that ever happened. A woman totally different from all the women I’ve ever seen.”

“Oh!” Milton neither looked nor sounded impressed. “What’s so unique about her?”

Well, her blue hair for one thing.”

“That isn’t unique. Women will do anything these days.”

“But it isn’t dyed! She has genuine blue hair—and there is something odd about her eyes too. Just as though she’s wearing contact lenses. She isn’t, though. Frankly I’m out of my depth. All my specialised knowledge doesn’t apply.”

Milton reflected, his interest becoming slowly aroused. After a moment he asked a question: “Where does she hail from?”

“No idea. She doesn’t talk English. A passer-by found her fainting in the gutter and sent for an ambulance. General Hospital couldn’t make head nor tail of the business and decided she might be a nervous sufferer, so sent her here. I think you should have a look—as resident surgeon.”

“All right,” Milton sighed. “I’ll come.”

“Ward Four. You’ll find me there.”

Milton switched off, surveyed the notes upon which he had been immersed, then murmuring things about women in general and this blue-haired one in particular, he left his sanctum, to arrive a few moments later in the spacious cleanliness of Ward Four. Here and there a patient acknowledged his tall, spare frame as he strode actively down the main aisle-way between the beds. His response to the acknowledgments was brief—as usual. He knew his job but his bedside manner had never been very remarkable.

Observing Harry Meadows’ white-coated figure standing beside a distant bed, Milton headed in that direction. Meadows was a rotund, genial, extremely thorough man and it more than surprised Milton to know that he was, for once, at a loss.

Meadows did not speak as Milton reached him. He merely pointed to the young woman lying motionless in the bed. Milton eyed her fixedly, unable to avoid staring at that mass of blue hair; then he lifted the graph at the bed-end and studied it.

“Nervous exhaustion; partial blindness,” he murmured, half aloud, then slurred the professional references into a jumbled undertone. “Mmmm—Unique enough, Harry.”

“No doubt of it!”

Moving forward, Milton leaned over the young woman, studying her. He was not given to emotion; it rarely found expression on his cold, sardonic face—but this time there was certainly a light of profound amazement in his eyes as he scrutinised the extraordinary sky-blueness of that bushy hair, startlingly contrasted by the white pillow.

The girl’s eyebrows and long lashes were the same shade. The face in itself was heart-shaped with a sensitive mouth and well-bred nose. Unusual too was her skin—the colour of dull bronze, as though she had been exposed continuously to ultra-violet or else intense sunlight.

“Very peculiar,” Milton confessed, puzzled; then he stood erect as the girl seemed suddenly to become aware of his presence and opened her eyes. Now here was a shock, and it sent all Milton’s medical knowledge into jeopardy—for here was the unexplained. The girl’s eyes were not those of a normal human being.

In colour they were aluminium-grey, surprisingly beautiful somehow and yet utterly devoid of pupils! The effect was of huge, diamond-bright irises, reflecting multicolours from infinitesimal points, just as if they were prismatic or else made up of finely powdered diamond-dust.

“I told you her eyes were peculiar,” Meadows remarked, as Milton stood like an eagle and gazed fixedly. “I don’t think she can see very well. At first I thought she had some queer form of cataract, but now I— Well, I don’t know what to think!”

“No; I shouldn’t think you do! She’s without parallel in medical history— What about the rest of her? How does she check up on female anatomy?”

“Normal, except for the bronze skin. I think it may be that shade because of her low ebb of health. Her height is five feet four and her weight seven stone six. Her language is foreign, as I told you.”

“What country?”

“None I can place and I have knowledge of twelve languages.”

Milton frowned, then looked back at the girl and spoke in his peremptory voice.

“What is your name, young woman? Where have you come from?”

Her response, though weak, was extremely quick—so much so it seemed hardly possible that her tongue could form the words so rapidly. Her strangely beautiful face changed in expression with sensitive quickness as she talked, passing through all the stages from complete bewilderment to hopeless despair. Milton kept thinking all the time that her speech sounded exactly like spoken shorthand.

“I don’t understand you,” he said at length; and then he tried vainly to look professionally unconcerned as he turned to Meadows. “She’d better be removed to a private room until she is completely recovered. I’ll make her my own special charge. Ask Sister to step over here, will you?”

Meadows nodded and raised a ringer to the night-Sister two beds distant…

* * * *

With care and attention the blue-haired girl returned gradually to normal health. After several weeks she was able to be left almost to her own devices in the quiet, sunny room which had been assigned to her. Her only companion was the poker-faced Nurse Dixon, who privately regarded her as a painted hussy.

This viewpoint was probably born of jealousy, however, for in returning to health the beauty of the unknown girl became something to wonder at. The dull copper of her skin changed to a satiny yellow. This, coupled with her perfect features and well brushed hair—to say nothing of the strange eyes—lent an effect which was breath-taking.

For hours at a time she would try to convey some kind of message, moving her expressive hands quickly, her wide, intelligent forehead wrinkling in despair as Nurse Dixon only shook her white-capped head and stared with level blue eyes.

This went on until Milton, by now at his wits’ end to know what to do with his queer charge, hit upon the idea of taking her to his friend Hugh Nelson, scientist and mathematician. The razor-brained Nelson might be able to throw some light on the situation since most of his life was spent in dabbling in scientific matters off the beaten track. Since money was no object with him he could spend his time doing exactly as he liked.

So one morning the girl found herself led into the untidy laboratory at the rear of Nelson’s London home, Douglas Milton towering up beside her. Whether she could see or not was still a moot point, but she certainly appeared to be watching the figure of a young man in shirtsleeves as he slid from before a paper-littered desk and came quickly forward.

As he beheld the blue-haired girl he stopped abruptly, then with an effort at composure he glanced towards Dr. Milton. The girl watched him with her extraordinary eyes.

“Mr. Nelson will be with you in a minute. Doctor… Have a chair…”

The young man produced two chairs from amidst the general untidiness and pushed them forward. Milton nodded an aloof thanks. He had little patience with this blond young man. He seemed altogether too self-assured to be a good assistant to a scientist.

“I’m Eric Temple,” the young man volunteered, looking at the girl. “I’ve heard plenty about you, through the papers and on radio and television. So I—”

“I am afraid,” Milton put in coldly, “that you are wasting your time, Mr. Temple. This girl cannot understand your language. Maybe you’d better confine yourself to your work… I assume Nelson knows we’re here?”

“Certainly, and he’ll be here at any moment.” With which Eric Temple muttered something about “frozen sawbones” under his breath and then returned to his task at the desk.

Several times he glanced up in thought and found the girl’s eerie eyes fixed immovably upon him from under the brim of her big hat. He found his mind straying away from his mathematics to the far pleasanter contemplation of her beauty. Girls like this did not drop into the rather drab Nelson laboratory every day! He did his best to look casual as he noted the perfect symmetry of her young body, the golden hue of her face and slender hands… Then catching the sardonic eyes of Milton fixed upon him he coughed slightly and continued with his work, only to pause presently in irritation.

“Definitely it matches up to forty-five degrees,” he muttered, scratching his head. “That makes it—” He broke off with a snort of disgust, bunched the paper up and hurled it on the floor. Then he went on again, executing quick mathematics.

“Something wrong,” he told himself out loud. “That figure can’t fit there because—”

His sentence trailed off and he jerked up his head in astonishment at the sudden sound of crisply rustling paper. The girl had risen from her chair and was studying the creased figuring closely. If it did not prove anything else it at least showed that her eyesight was normal enough—in this respect anyhow.

Dr. Milton sat watching in interested silence. Eric Temple himself drew back sharply as the girl suddenly came towards him. She took the pencil from his hand and began to figure rapidly on the half blank sheet in front of him.

“What the—” He watched in amazement, then his eyes really began to goggle as he saw figures and mathematical symbols piling up on the paper before his gaze, the pencil held firmly in the girl’s golden fingers. She was figuring and computing with the speed and skill of a mathematical genius. In two short minutes she had not only worked out the angle which had been bothering him, but also the entire construction of a machine about which she could not have had the least advance knowledge. The design was there, sure enough, in figures: the only thing was that the figures were peculiar in their manner of totalling.

“Great heavens!” Milton exclaimed, gazing over the girl’s shoulder as she tossed the pencil down. “This is positively uncanny! She may not be able to talk our language, but she certainly knows what figures stand for.”

“Uh-uh.” Eric nodded weakly and glanced at her exquisite smiling face so close to his own. “Hell’s bells, you’re beautiful,” he blurted out, and was rewarded by a puzzled frown and a quick shrug.

Milton glanced at his watch impatiently. “How much longer is Nelson going to be, do you suppose? It’s about—”

“Still as short-tempered as ever, eh Milton?” enquired a chesty, good-humoured voice—and Milton turned to see a short, stumpy figure advancing from the laboratory’s exterior door. It was Hugh Nelson, attired as ever in an untidy navy suit, a row of different-coloured pens clipped to his breast pocket.

His podgy little hand endeavoured to flatten a stray wisp of hair on his semi-bald head as he advanced. His round, good-tempered face tried to look unconcerned as the girl turned from Eric Temple to study him.

“Well, you old buzzard, what’s on your mind?” Nelson asked haltingly. “You sounded pretty worried over the ’phone.”

“Kindly do not refer to me as a buzzard!” Milton retorted. “I have a reputation to maintain, even if you haven’t. I wish to consult you professionally concerning this young lady here. In a way she’s my—er—ward. I’m providing everything for her at the moment, purely out of interest in her case.”

“Don’t blame you,” Nelson said, studying her thoughtfully. “Where does she come from?”

“That’s what I want you to find out. In my capacity as resident surgeon—”

“Oh, stop being high-hat, man! One would think we’d never been college mates. I’m a busy man, Milly—” And, as Milton winced, “What do you want me to do?”

“Find out all about her,” Milton replied. “You can see for yourself that she isn’t a normal girl. She doesn’t even look Earthly—not about the eyes and hair anyway. And in these days of flying saucers and interplanetary travel just around the corner she might have come unnoticed from another planet—”

“If she’s a sample of the people on another planet, count me in for the first journey!” Eric Temple enthused, only to cool off again at Milton’s stony look.

“With your many accomplishments, Nelson,” Milton presently continued,” you might find out something. You’re a mathematician, linguist, general scientist.”

“True, but I’m not a detective—”

“Look here,” Eric Temple interrupted, thrusting the sheet of calculations into his employer’s hand. “She worked this lot out in two minutes! That’s faster than an adding machine!”

“She did, eh?” Nelson frowned and shrugged. “Well, maybe she is a good matheatician in her own land, wherever that is, but she is all wrong here. These figures are not the same in meaning as ours, though the principle is similar.”

“But she’s worked out every detail of that air pressure machine we’re working on!” Eric insisted. “All from a waste sheet of figures which I threw on the floor!”

“Yes, I suppose that does represent supreme mathematical skill,” Nelson admitted, musing. “At least we know we have something in common to commence with, anyhow.”

He turned to look at her and found her smiling.

“Figures? You understand them?” he asked slowly, jabbing a fat index finger to the crumpled paper—but she only raised and lowered her slim shoulders.

“Her language and ours are completely different,” Milton said. “I told you that over the ’phone. What suggestions have you?”

“The only obvious ones. Leave her with me: she can stay with my housekeeper. I’ll diagnose her thoroughly, test her mental power in every way I can, and try to get to the bottom of her origin. She obviously is highly intelligent, and certainly very beautiful. Soon as I get an angle I’ll ’phone you. How’s that?”

Milton nodded. “Do splendidly; but take care you keep a close watch on her. Movie men and theatre scouts have been trying to grab her for weeks.”

“Can you wonder!” Eric exclaimed, gazing at her. “She’s got all the film beauties laid out deader than mutton…”

* * * *

Hugh Nelson, absorbed by the unusual problem entrusted to him, promptly abandoned all other scientific dabblings in the days which followed and subjected the strange girl to all the tests he could conceive. Also he examined her physically with the numerous ordinary and extraordinary instruments he had in the laboratory.

X-ray plates revealed that her physical formation was the same as any woman’s. Eye tests showed that she could see with perfect clearness in some lights, but hardly at all in others. Also, she seemed to mistake various objects for something totally different, as though she were suffering from some curious visual refraction.

Most difficult of all was the language problem. Nelson, despite being a capable linguist, found himself stumped when it came to understanding her swift, fluid speech. The only thing he discovered was that her name was Onia. Finally he adopted the only course and taught her English, becoming gradually amazed at the speed with which she mastered it. Her memory was uncannily retentive and accurate. Once she made a mistake—which was rare—she never repeated it.

In a week she had mastered small sentences; in a fortnight she could talk haltingly and intelligently in a clear, bell-like tone, always to the accompaniment of pretty gestures. Highly satisfied with his progress to date, Nelson ’phoned Milton to come over and hear for the first time whatever story of origin the girl might have to tell.

The girl herself sat coiled up on the library chesterfield as Nelson, Milton, and Eric Temple sat quietly about her. She studied them for a while, and then began—

“You have all been very kind to me, and for that I want to thank you. I find myself faced with so many difficulties that I perhaps appear vague at times. I assure you that is only because of my surroundings. They are so different from my own.”

“Do you know where you are, Onia?” Nelson questioned, and her head, with that amazing blue hair, nodded quickly.

“Yes. From what you tell me I am in a city called London, in Great Britain.” Her face clouded a little. “I cannot properly remember how I got here, but I think it was my own folly which caused it. I did something wrong: I was too venturesome. My father was experimenting with atoms and molecules, converging them on to a mosaic screen. I remember that there was a misty gap in that screen and I walked through it. My father tried to call me back, but… Well, I was too self-willed and disobeyed him. Next thing I knew I was wandering around in a strange land—half buildings and half trees. I think I must have wandered for many hours, then fatigue overcame me and I collapsed, waking up in the hospital.”

“I gather that you know what atoms and molecules are?” Nelson asked quickly.

“Only from the language you have taught me. We have other names for them—”

“This is getting us nowhere!” Milton interrupted, glancing at his watch. “I’ve a major operation to perform tonight and I want to hear everything before I go… Where is this place you came from, Onia? Is there a race of people like you?”

“Why, naturally!” She looked surprised. “Tens of millions of them! And it is on this planet, too. There was no spatial projection: that I do know. One moment I was in my father’s laboratory, and then I was here. Just as though I’d… I’d fainted,” she finished vaguely.

“Fourth dimension?” Eric volunteered, thinking—but Nelson shook his head.

“No; Onia isn’t a fourth-dimensional being. If that were the case only part of her would be visible. Besides she conforms in anatomy to any other woman on Earth, except for the eyes. Tell us, Onia, what do you see?”

“That’s hard to explain! You build in such a queer fashion. You have walls where there should be emptiness; you have nothing hardly anywhere to block the lavender glare of ultraviolet rays. I can see those—and infra-red. And they’re painful! Then again you have many forests in this city where ought to be buildings… To me it’s all such a hopeless confusion!”

“Forests?” Nelson repeated, astounded. “Forests!”

Onia nodded slowly and Milton gave a snort of disgust.

“This gets ridiculous! The girl’s a practical joker!”

“Don’t be too sure of that,” Nelson told him. “There are more things in heaven and earth, my friend…”

Apparently struck by a sudden thought, he got to his feet and from a table nearby raised a dried shrub in its art pot. Taking it over to the girl, he allowed her to study it. “What,” Nelson asked seriously “is this?”

“A piece of queerly fashioned stone. And that is something I can’t understand. Why do you people have so many stones inside your homes, and in places of prominence, too? I’ve even seen them inside big buildings, but with the plant underneath and the stone on top, mysteriously defying the pull of gravity.”

“Inverted vision,” Milton decided brusquely. “Not uncommon by any means.”

“Inverted nothing, Milly,” Nelson told him. “She is describing exactly what she sees. She describes this shrub as a queerly fashioned stone. Also she fully believes that the palms and things we have in public buildings have the pot on top and the plant underneath. We’ve got to find out why!”

Nelson returned the shrub to the table and then wandered back to the girl. He asked a question very deliberately: “Onia, what do we look like to you?”

A merry smile curved her lips. “Very funny! Your blue hair and animal skin clothes are most unusual!”

“What!” Milton gasped, shaken. “You—you mean to say our hair looks like yours? That we dress in pelts?”

“Hair like mine!” Onia echoed. “Why, that’s absurd! I—”

“Wait a minute—wait a minute!” Nelson waved his podgy hands fiercely. “Let’s get some order. What colour are our skins, Onia?”

She hesitated a little. “I—I don’t know the word for it, but I should say like—that!” Her hand swung and pointed to a massive brass shield hanging on the panelled wall.

“Golden—like hers!” Eric cried in amazement. “Has she got a looking-glass mind, or what?”

“Nothing like that.” Nelson shook his head slowly. “The first thing we have got to realize is that she belongs to a different space from ours, yet for some reason we look like her—to her, that is—and vice versa. One last thing, Onia; do cities and buildings and furniture and clothes look like those things to you?”

“Sometimes,” she replied uncertainly. “At first I had a terrible task to accommodate myself. For instance, in the hospital you covered me with hide instead of cloth. You never used sheets. And that nurse in her vivid pink animal skin—”

“This,” Milton broke in sourly, “is a cheap hoax! Pink animal skin indeed! Hide sheets! Young woman, what sort of a joke do you think you’re perpetrating?”

“It’s anything but a joke!” she declared passionately. “Just look at this skin you have made me dress in!” And her slender hand pulled at the soft silken gown she was wearing.

“This is an affront!” Milton shouted. “That gown is of the finest silk money can buy. I ought to know!” He relapsed into simmering silence for a moment, then suddenly started. “By Jove, I wonder! That passer-by who found her referred vaguely in his statement to the animal skin this girl was wearing—”

“I know,” Nelson said calmly. “I’ve had that pedestrian under cross examination, and I also have the skin in which Onia made her debut. Meadows obtained it for me.”

“Oh, he did!” Milton looked ominous.

“Don’t start flying off the handle, Milly. You’re a busy man and so I didn’t bother you.”

“All right—and don’t call me Milly!”

“That skin,” Nelson proceeded, “belongs to some animal quite unknown to us, but to Onia it probably represented the finest fabric. Am I right, Onia?”

She nodded quickly, her face brightening with dawning understanding.

“Quite right. It was similar in texture to all the garments worn by the younger women of my race. And it was not skin!” Onia finished indignantly, pouting at Milton.

“I give up,” Milton growled. “She must be insane. Perhaps a severe case of reversed conception—a kind of egocentrical belief that everything is different from what it really is. Really most interesting. She must be examined by the greatest brain specialists in the land. Amnesia producing contrary conception! Never been anything like it!”

“Amnesia be damned,” Nelson said politely. “Whoever heard of amnesia producing supreme mathematical ability, even if the figures are queer? For instance, Onia, what is the fourth dimension?”

“A property that is to volume what volume is to area,” she replied promptly. “It is entirely theoretical, cannot be mastered, and cannot be travelled. Nor is it Time.”

“It isn’t?” Nelson asked quickly.

“Time is a state or condition of thought—nothing more. My father is a master mathematician and he has definitely proved that fact. Since Time is a mental concept it cannot be travelled physically; that is obvious. If you are thinking that I perhaps have come from some other Time-state you are quite wrong. The date in my world corresponds exactly with the one I discovered here when I arrived, so the two Time-states were—and are—in existence synchronically. The only thing that can be travelled is the space existing between atoms. That, I think, is how I came here. It’s all very strange,” Onia finished wearily, relaxing amidst the cushions. “I wish I could find the way back.”

“You will,” Nelson promised, smiling.” Well help all we can…”

With that he turned aside and looked at the puzzled Milton and thoughtful Eric Temple.

“I believe I have it, Milly!” he exclaimed. “And you listen to this as well, Onia: it’s right up your street. You, my dear girl, are the living proof of Positivism!”

“What the devil’s that?” Milton growled. “Talk English, man! And time’s getting on!”

“Positivism,” Nelson said slowly, “was discovered and explained by August Comte in eighteen-twenty-four. It is probably the most important and yet the most neglected ramification of the pure scientific thinker. It asserts that there is no other source of knowledge except within the range of our limited senses. It even states that the external world does not exist at all—except through sensory impression.”

“Farfetched!” Milton decided brusquely.

“On the contrary! Take one Positivist example as laid down by the famous scientist Max Planck: It asserts that a tree is nothing but a complex series of sense impressions. We see it grow; we hear the rustle of its leaves; we inhale the perfume of its blossom. Take away all those sensory impressions which flow together to suggest a tree and what is there? Nothing! There is no tree!”

“In the same fashion,” Eric put in, “as a blind man builds up a world of his own impressions and sometimes gets the shock of his life if sight is regained?”

“A good simile, Eric. You have it exactly. Further, the Positivist outlook cannot be accused of logical inconsistency because when we come to apply it as the exclusive foundation on which scientific research is built, we find that all science is nothing more than an inference from sensory experience. Our entire creation, our entire world, is built up of certain lines of sensory impression which have endured since the dawn of Time. We have learned to call a stone a stone—and we do. Our very brains have been moulded that way through interminable generations. Here and there one goes wrong and we call him—perhaps unjustly—a lunatic. Others do not interpret colour wavelengths correctly and are called colour blind. Definite proof of Positivism!”

“Then—this girl—?” Milton hesitated and looked at her as she leaned forward interestedly.

“I think,” Nelson said, “that she comes from a place fairly identical to our own, only with a Positivist outlook which is totally different. She proves that an external world is only sensory impression. Her race has schooled itself into believing that a certain aggregate of atoms and molecules represent a stone instead of a plant, a skin instead of a fabric. To them it is real: to us it is false. Onia’s conceptions of colour are different from ours. She has an added advantage of being able to see beyond the limits of the spectrum… In other words, a different evolution entirely but, in its own way, just as accurate as ours.”

“But where is this place?” Milton insisted. “Never mind the Positivist conception! Let’s have facts!”

Nelson shook his head dubiously. “We can’t get at that all in a few minutes, Milton. It may take a long time—may even mean opening up fields of science hardly suspected. You can take it for granted, though, that I’ll find Onia’s world if it’s the last thing I ever do. With her knowledge of mathematics it may be an easier job than it looks.”

“Which means another delay,” Milton sighed, rising to his feet. “Still, I appreciate the circumstances. Let me know the moment you discover anything… And now I must be getting along.”

He bowed formally to the thoughtful girl and took his departure, leaving three independent minds wrestling with a most complex problem.

* * * *

It was one thing to attempt to mathematically trace the origin of Onia and distinctly another to do it practically. Though her mathematics were without flaw, evidencing the high scientific knowledge of her race, she was constantly at a disadvantage because her outlook was so completely different.

Distances, colours, aspects of time, underwent variations which placed them hopelessly out of true with normal conception—or at least so-called normal conception. She toiled with a tireless energy, spurring both Nelson and Eric to achievements in figures which surprised even themselves.

Even a line of self-analysis was tried, tracing back in the true Positivist fashion into the girl’s own history, determining which particular incidents in her life had led her to certain convictions and actions—but none of them led anywhere. Her world was too much at variance to provide a convincing basis.

At the end of a fortnight of feverish endeavour, with nothing to show for it except a mass of brilliant but useless calculations. Nelson was decidedly irritated. He paced his laboratory, abstractedly fingering the row of pencils in his breast pocket and scowling at the floor.

Eric and the girl were both seated in thought, all lines of reasoning temporarily exhausted.

“You are sure your father used some sort of mosaic?” Nelson demanded at length, halting. “It really was a device that somehow altered the paths of atoms and molecules?”

“Of course,” the girl replied quietly. “That is why I cannot understand why my figures do not work out correctly. I know most of the metals he used and all their specific atomic weights—yet all we get out of it is a mathematical jigsaw! It’s all so completely—”

“Say, wait a minute!” Eric exclaimed suddenly, his face brightening. “Suppose you are right, Onia, and we are wrong? Suppose you have been working on the figures of your atoms and molecules—not ours. The figurative basis is different in our respective worlds.”

“What are you driving at?” Nelson asked curtly.

“I’m suggesting that the Positivist outlook has been letting us down. Onia has tried to work from her viewpoint in this world. That’s all wrong. She’s not been educated to understand our atomic bases. We’ve got to undergo a complete reconstruction of figures and find the corresponding ones. Translate her figure conceptions into our meanings.”

“I believe you’re right,” the girl herself said. “I also begin to think that my world and this one exist in the same place.”

“That’s impossible!” Eric protested. “Two things cannot occupy the same space at the same time.”

“Why not?” Onia asked. “Between the atoms of apparent solids there are spaces as comparably vast as those between this world and the nearest galaxy. How do we know that my world or your world are the only ones? Suppose Nature has ordained it that the atoms of countless worlds fit exactly into the spaces which are left between? A great interlocking process.”

Nelson’s face was beaming with delight. “Indeed, why not! Rutherford and Nils Bohr have both proved that solids are, paradoxically, all space! If we assume that other atoms fit into the spaces in flawless mathematical symmetry it means that there is no space at all in the Universe—only one vast composite of solids.”

“But oughtn’t we to be able to see the aggregate effect of those other atoms?” Eric asked, puzzled.

“Anything but it!” Onia exclaimed, taking up the scientific thread with sudden eagerness. “The very fact that your world seems insane to me—that I look incredible to you—is because our outlooks are so utterly at variance. That very fact proves that we are limited to the fundamental conceptions of our particular worlds. We only see that which sensory impression directs: beyond that we cannot go. I could no more see this world from my own than you can see mine from here. The whole outlook is changed; that’s why… If we do start to work by transposing my figures into your own mathematical principle we may be able to get somewhere.”

“No question about it!” Nelson declared, and snatching out a green pencil from his pocket he began to compute rapidly, to be presently joined by Eric with the girl herself as exponent of the examples…

From that moment onwards the former difficulties were entirely absent. Equations began to balance, though Nelson and Eric could only guess at their ultimate meaning. Their task was solely to transcribe the girl’s calculations into normal meaning. Once this was done she continued her own activities, ultimately producing the basis of a machine which she averred was identical with the one her father had constructed.

The actual assembly of the strange machine took two months’ time in which Dr. Milton bobbed fitfully in and put, usually snorting impatiently and demanding to know how much longer. He could see neither sense nor object in the oddly fashioned metal apparatus growing in the laboratory, nor did a gigantic oval of composite metals—a flawless mosaic—convey anything tp him. Not that Eric or Nelson were much the wiser either until the machine was finally finished and linked up to the control panel. Then Onia took it upon herself to explain.

Milton, taking a morning off from the hospital in order to be present, stood in critical silence, too independent to admit he was completely at sea. Nelson was dusty and sceptical; Eric thoughtfully interested. He was perfectly satisfied in his own mind that Onia could not do anything wrong.

“Through this mosaic we can, I think, gain entrance to my world,” the girl explained slowly, walking round it. “It is a replica, as far as my memory serves me, of the device my father made. If we accept the theory of our worlds being interlocked it is obvious that we can only cross from one to the other by re-patterning the atomic configurations existing between. This mosaic is made up of the basic elements of my world, all of which exist here but under different mathematical meanings. A field of force passed through the mosaic will cause the various metal atoms to change their configurations into the order existing in my world.”

“Why?” Milton asked bluntly. “How do you know that will happen?”

“Because the force will be mathematically predetermined in both effect and efficiency to duplicate the force used by my father. Force is the same in any space; only the method of using it is different. Now we have our figuring straightened out the matter presents no complexity. These mosaic atoms will be compelled to undergo great changes.”

“Then what?” Nelson questioned.

“Then, unless I’m tremendously out in my reckonings, we shall be able to step from one plane to the other. The barrier between will be temporarily broken down.”

“Sounds rather too good to be true to me,” Eric commented. “Besides, if that really be the case, how is it that your own particular mosaic wasn’t visible to you when you came through it? Surely it ought to have been? Like a doorway in the air?”

Onia’s face clouded a little. “That is the part I cannot quite understand,” she confessed, her voice troubled. “Of course, I got here through an accident of my own making. The machine might have been destroyed. On the other hand…” She stopped and shrugged, as though afraid to say what she really thought. “I have often considered it rather strange that my father did not build another mosaic and try to find me.”

There was an awkward silence; then Milton coughed himself into being noticed.

“This—mosaic,” he said, wandering round {be skilfully constructed oval, suspended by shining metal brackets to the main framework of the contrivance. “When exactly do you intend to use it?”

“Now,” Nelson replied promptly. “Why else do you think we summoned you so urgently? Onia’s mind is made up and everything is set to go. Isn’t it?” He glanced at her enquiringly.

“Everything,” she agreed, hovering before the switchboard, and she indicated a haversack of provisions, water flask, and revolver on a nearby chair. “I’m all prepared, you see. There is no knowing how far I may have to travel when I get to the other side. Granting I ever do, that is.”

“You are quite sure you wouldn’t prefer us to come with you?” Nelson urged.

“Not until I have proved that my figures are right, otherwise I might plunge you into some kind of atomic chaos from which there would be no escape. Once it is definitely established that we can pass between worlds without trouble—or at least between planes—the great step will have been made… Now let us see how things are.”

Her hand closed the switch which started the generators. The massive gauge tubes on top of the switchboard suffused with a curious multi-coloured energy, predominated by twisting streaks of vermillion. With a dull crackling roar the intricate wiring of the amazing mosaic came into life, setting each little facet glowing with different colours as the atomic construction underwent sudden and extreme changes.

In complete silence the four watched, their gaze fixed to the amazing display as colour interwove with colour in a fashion both beautiful and incredible. The heavy smell of ozone began to permeate the electrically-charged air.

“It’s melting!” Milton exclaimed suddenly, his bony face outthrust.

“Not melting,” Onia corrected him. “Just changing its composition.”

Again silence fell. Nelson stood tightly clutching the pencils in his pocket, perspiration glistening on his bald head. Eric was all eyes, half crouching.

The multicolours swirled and twisted off into apparent vapours. From the extreme diamond-pointed centre of the mosaic the queer effect spread in a rippling circle through every facet, leaving finally a misty oval with a perfectly solid frame around it. And beyond that oval there was no sign of the laboratory fittings—only a blank, incomprehensible grey, uninviting and mysterious.

“Is that your plane?” Milton jerked out at last, glancing towards the girl.

“My world—my plane—lies beyond that mist,” Onia replied soberly. “Or at least I hope it does. Beyond the mist should be the daylight of my own plane. Since it is morning here it will be morning there. The times correspond.”

She turned about suddenly and slipped the haversack and flask over her shoulder. Then she took up the revolver into her right hand.

“Well, I’m going to try it!” She said the words quite simply, as though she were trying to disguise a certain deep-felt regret. “I can only repeat my eternal thanks to you for the help you have been to me. You won’t go unrewarded if this works out right, believe me…”

With a faint smile she turned and moved towards the oval, only to pause as Eric jumped forward and gripped her arm. She turned in surprise.

“Listen, Onia, I can’t let you walk out just like this!” Eric’s voice was quiet but determined. “It’s meant something so different to me to have you around and— Well, I can’t picture myself going on working once you have gone!”

“Silly!” she chided, colouring a little.

“I mean it, Onia! I want to come with you… Suppose you should walk into a world which isn’t your own? Just think what you might be up against! You might need a man beside you who can tackle things.”

“I had never thought of the possibility of not finding my own plane, Eric, but now you mention it—”

“Look. Eric, I don’t agree with this at all!” Nelson strode forward, his face concerned. “There’s a lot of work to be done once Onia’s gone. You just can’t walk out on me.”

“I’m afraid I can, even though I apologize for it. Laboratory assistants are ten a penny, sir, and there’s only one Onia. That’s how I look at it. If there are dangers I want to share them with her. If there are not—well, all the better for both of us.”

Milton laughed shortly. “Great heavens, the man’s in love! Better let him go, Nelson. The scientist who lets romance upset his emotions won’t be a scrap of use.”

Nelson said nothing. He thrust his hands in his jacket pockets and looked at the two young people moodily. They looked back at him, then at the sardonically smiling Milton.

“Ready?” Eric asked finally, taking the gun from the girl’s hand. Her response was to step forward into the oval, and instantly she disappeared. Eric did not hesitate a moment. He strode forward into the unknown—following her, and at that same moment he found himself punched and pummelled with unknown forces, finally pull up short and discover the girl was only a yard or so away.

Her beautiful face was distraught, pale with worry, as she surveyed the rocky, unfamiliar wilderness into which they had come. The sky was green, to Eric anyway, and the morning sun bluish.

Eric turned stupidly. To the rear there was no sign of the mosaic through which they had come. They had irrevocably burned their bridges behind them.

“Is—is this your plane?” Eric whispered at last, his arm about the girl’s shoulders.

She shook her head in dismay. “No! No such wilderness as this is in my plane. Somewhere there must have been an error— It means,” she continued, thinking, “that there must be others! Maybe tens of millions of planes all parallel in the spaces between the atomic aggregates, and to find one amidst them all would perhaps take a lifetime. Perhaps, even, it can never be accomplished!”

Eric was silent. Then he tried to smile. Onia gave him a hopeless look.

“No way back, Eric. Only forward! No chance of trying again for my own plane unless we find mathematicians in this plane.”

“We have no choice but to try,” he murmured, holding her against him. “We’re in this together, Onia. We’d better see what we can find.”

They began moving and overhead the blue sun blazed down in impartial brilliance…

LATER THAN YOU THINK

The clock had never stopped before and its mechanism was undamaged. Why then would it not go?

Martin Wilson had been repairing clocks for as long as he could remember. He was quite sure he would always be repairing clocks. He did not mind if he died repairing clocks.

His small shop in a street off one of London’s busiest thoroughfares was inconspicuous, even medieval. It had windows that belonged to a forgotten time. They bowed out and were small-paned, like something Dickensian. Behind them was a conglomeration of clocks, some going, some not, but all of them valuable for their very antiquity.

Had he wished, Martin Wilson could have netted a small fortune from his collection, but money simply did not interest him. All he wanted was to make and repair clocks, to fondle them, to take them apart and put them together again. From the busy little ticking of a watch to the stately beating of a lordly grandfather he knew every pulse and throb. The sound of clocks comprised his world, his everything. His customers brought clocks to him for two reasons: some because they were—quite mistakenly—sorry for the grey-haired old man who was apparently too frail to make a living any other way; others because of his superb workmanship.

This September night he was, as usual, busy, and also—as usual—he had forgotten to draw the blinds over the window or lock the door. Outside, it was drizzling gently and the air was stifling warm with a hangover from summer. The few lamps that lighted the narrow street were casting back from the glare of wet flagstones. At the far end of his shop Martin Wilson worked under an electric bulb hanging low from a length of flex, putting the finishing touches to a recalcitrant marble timepiece. He smiled as he wound it and then listened attentively to its steady ticking.

He glanced up at the master-clock on the opposite wall. The master-clock’s big pendulum was swinging deliberately. It was exactly ten. Martin Wilson adjusted the hands of the marble clock and then stood it amongst the half dozen other timepieces he had repaired during the day.

For a moment there was something unexpected. Martin Wilson felt as though he were not looking at clocks but at something dark. It was like a shadow interceding between the clocks and the electric bulb. Their bright, burnished glitter faded and became opaque and meaningless. The clicking and ticking and tocking faded into a jumble of sounds, which became discord… Then everything was back as it had been.

Martin Wilson was puzzled. He leaned forward in curiosity, pressing hard against the edge of his workbench. He felt something grind in his pocket but he was too confused for the moment to pay heed.

“Good evening.”

Martin Wilson straightened in surprise. He had not heard the shop door open or shut.

Indeed he had never anticipated a customer at such a late hour. The man was standing at the other side of the bench, a black raincoat turned up about his ears and a dark soft hat pulled well down, so that it was difficult to see his face. Raindrops gleamed like sprinkled diamonds as he moved into the diagonal radiance of the low-hanging lamp.

“Good evening sir,” the old clockmaker wiped his oily hands on a rag and came forward.

“Something I can do for you?”

The stranger seemed to reflect and Martin Wilson fancied he saw a ghostly smile.

“It may sound rather silly,” the stranger said, “but I’d like to know the time. I have no watch, nor have I seen a clock in quite a little while. I’m wondering how late it is.”

“It’s just on ten o’clock.”

The old clockmaker stopped; staring at the pendulum clock on the far wall. The pendulum had ceased swinging, for the first time since the clock had been constructed.

“It is later than you think,” the stranger murmured. He had a low, pleasing voice with a curious alien rhythm in it.

“I don’t understand it,” Martin Wilson stared hard at the silent master-clock with its motionless, vertical pendulum.

“That clock has never stopped before…”

“Perhaps,” the stranger suggested, “you might have some other clock by which I may learn the time?”

“Surely!” The old man smiled at the absurdity of the idea. “Outside of my master-clock, though, there is only one other time piece I trust—my watch.”

He pulled it out of his waistcoat pocket and gazed at it. His frown deepened. The glass had been crushed to powder, blocking the second and minute hands. The watch too had stopped at exactly ten o’clock.

“You are unfortunate,” the stranger murmured, leaning forward so that the light made the raindrops scintillate.

“I remember doing this,” Martin Wilson replied, musing. “I leaned on the bench here. I must have crushed my watch. It was just before you came in… I must repair it when I have the chance.” He returned the watch to his pocket and surveyed the busily ticking clocks on the workbench. “It’s seven minutes past ten,” he said finally.

“Thank, you,” the stranger said, but he made no effort to go. The old man looked at the master-clock again and sighed.

“You shouldn’t have done that, William,” he said seriously.

“William?” the stranger repeated, and Martin Wilson smiled. “My master-clock, sir. I have names for all my clocks. They are my children. You see, I never married. I have never known the love of a woman or of children of my own. Always it has been clocks.”

The stranger said nothing. The deep silence of the drizzling night was outside and the quiet of the shop was only broken by the pedantic rhythm of a grandfather’s pendulum and the busy little ticking of an alarm. In varying degrees of enthusiasm the other clocks were keeping in step. The stranger seemed to listen to them for a while and then stirred slightly.

For a moment the light caught his face and was gone. Martin Wilson did not quite know what to think. He was trying to fathom what it was like to expect to see a face and yet not see one. There did not seem to be a face at all, only some kind of indeterminate shadow which, as he unconsciously moved towards it to look more closely, became all the darker.

“You are curious as to my identity, my friend?” the stranger asked, in his mellow, cultured voice. Martin Wilson shrugged.

“I admit I’ve never seen you before,” he mused.

“I have come a long way, and I am somewhat tired. Would you consider it a liberty if I were to sit down and rest for a while?”

“Please do.”

The stranger turned and pulled forth a chair from his own side of the bench. He settled on it, his back to the light so that his face was thrown into an even deeper shadow than before. A chiming clock struck the quarter hour. It aroused Martin Wilson from a spell of thought. His eyes moved from the glistening drops on the stranger’s hat and shoulders to the still silent master-clock.

“Since you wish to rest, sir, and I am in no hurry, would you mind if I worked?” he asked.

“My dear friend, please do,” the stranger urged. “Not for a moment do I wish to delay your industry. Men with your touch are so rare.”

“Are they? I’m—I’m sort of glad to hear you say that. I take myself so much for granted—Excuse me, but I must see what is wrong with William.”

Martin Wilson shambled out from behind the bench and searched amongst the lumber of the shop until he had unearthed a pair of steps. He straddled them, climbed up to the penultimate step, then shoved and heaved until he had the wall clock free of its massive nail.

As though the clock were a sleeping child he cradled it in his arm and descended slowly to the floor again, laying the clock face upward on the bench.

“I never knew I had that much strength,” he remarked, surprised. “This clock is heavy—solid mahogany frame.”

“Sometimes,” the stranger said broodingly, “we do not realise how strong we really are.”

There was again that glimpse of something where a face should have been and was not.

Martin Wilson wondered if he ought to be frightened by his extraordinary visitor. For some reason he was not. He felt he accepted the occurrence as the most natural thing in the world.

The complexity, the mystery of it, did not trouble him in the least.

Reaching to the tool-rack over the bench he took down a screwdriver and began to detach the clock from its frame. It looked as though the stranger was watching his activities. At last Martin Wilson had the clock free, and detaching the pendulum, he laid the clock face down and gazed at the polished brass works.

“Beautifully intricate,” the stranger commented. “Obviously constructed by an expert.”

“I made it,” the old clockmaker responded. “Thirty years ago. It was an old Swiss model. I took it to pieces, rebuilt it, and since that time it has never varied more than a few seconds either way. I just don’t understand why it should have stopped like this. There doesn’t appear to be anything wrong with it.”

He contemplated it, his slender fingers testing the cogs and escapement. Finally he shrugged. With a pair of forceps he unfastened the clamps holding the back in position and lifted it gently. Cogs and pinion-wheels, their supports gone, fell askew. One little spindle rolled forth, a glittering line under the light, and tottered to a standstill.

“You are going to try and repair it?” the stranger inquired.

“If it takes me all night!”

The stranger moved again, ever so slightly, and seemed to be preparing to watch. Martin Wilson glanced towards the door, entirely from force of habit. It still seemed to be drizzling.

Nobody was passing—which was odd. It was as though he and the stranger were the only two people in the universe. So quiet, except for the endless chorus from the clocks.

Shadowy, too, save just in this one spot where the naked glare smote on the clock that would not go.

One by one Martin Wilson took the parts and placed them on the bench, until at last he had the bare frame of the clock and a heap of wheels and spindles. He had forgotten what time it was. For some reason he did not even care. The stranger was still watching absorbedly, and presently he made a comment.

“You know my friend, I have the strangest conviction. I do not think that clock will over go again.”

“With my workmanship,” Martin Wilson told him, with reasonable pride, “it cannot fail to.”

“Workmanship, yes, but you are forgetting a deeper issue. What does a clock do? It measures time. It has to work in that advancing time in order to register it. Right?”

“I—suppose so,” Martin Wilson agreed, putting a spring into a small receptacle filled with paraffin.

“It is so,” the stranger insisted with quiet firmness. “When you have repaired the clock it will not go, for the simple reason that it can never again catch up on the time it has lost. That time has gone—forever.”

The old man paused in his work and looked troubled. “How so? If I put the fingers to the correct time and start the pendulum swinging, the clock will go. It cannot fail to.”

“It can fail to, and it will. It stopped at ten. Very well, let us suppose it will be two in the morning before you have assembled it ready for going again. How many hours will have passed during the repairing?”

“Four,” answered Martin Wilson mechanically, removing the saturated spring and wiping it.

“Four hours gone that can never be recalled. To simply adjust the fingers four hours ahead does not mean a thing. You are asking the clock to tell a lie. It has not lived through that time, so how can it register it? It is like asking a dead man to come back to life after four hours and carry on as though nothing had happened.”

There was a long silence then Martin Wilson said: “It will go, I’m convinced of it.”

The stranger said nothing further. He watched the old man’s hands at work. The clocks chimed. The hours sped. It surprised Martin Wilson to find that it was striking two when he had the clock reassembled once again. Cradling it in his arms, the pendulum in his free hand, he mounted the steps up to the nail in the wall. Gently he slid the clock back into position and hung the pendulum carefully. With a delicate finger he touched it. It swung to and fro.

“There!” he exclaimed, smiling.

The stranger had risen from his chair and was in the deep shadow cast by the grandfather. It was hardly possible to see him as he gazed upwards. “It is not going,” he stated quietly.

“It’s not—?” Martin Wilson looked at it and then started.

The stranger had spoken the truth. The initial swinging of the pendulum was slowing down. There was no steady ticking from the escape mechanism.

The old clockmaker opened the front of the clock and peered up into the works. He could see the escapement working perfectly, and yet the clock was not going. Its fingers were still at ten o’clock and the pendulum was slowing—slowing—stopped.

“This is impossible!” the old man declared. “Am I not a master clock maker? Why should this one defy me?”

“It does not defy you, my friend. It is as I told you: You are trying to make it operate in a time that does not exist.”

“But surely, if I advance it to seven minutes past two, which is the time now, it will then go?”

“No; to get the fingers there you will have to make a record of the intervening hours on the dial, hours which the clock has never truly registered. It cannot do it, anymore than you could reach Tuesday morning by being dead on Saturday, Sunday and Monday.”

“But clocks are things of metal,” Martin Wilson protested. “They do not think! They cannot reason the passage of hours!”

“My friend, the intervening time has not existed, either for the clock…or you.”

The old man blinked and stared down at the shadowy figure. “Or for me?” he asked.

“I am trying to tell you that Time is not yours to do with as you wish, my friend. Like anybody else you merely borrow it as an intangible medium in which to perform certain acts. To you, to everybody, there comes a moment when the supply of time must run out. It has run out for you—and the clock.”

Martin Wilson descended slowly to the floor. “These other clocks are going,” he remarked.

“Exactly—because they did not stop. There is no reason why they should not continue to go since they are recording time faithfully. They are living through normal time: you are not.”

The old man scratched the back of his neck. “Y’know sir, I haven’t the vaguest idea what you are talking about. Do you mean to tell me that my master-clock will never go again?”

“Not whilst you and I are here.”

The silence seemed to deepen even more, muting even the ticking of the clocks. Martin Wilson spoke in so low a voice he was hardly audible. “Who are you?” he breathed.

The stranger moved and came slowly into the light.

For the first time Martin Wilson looked on the face which was not a face but a— He took a sharp step backwards, appalled.

“Don’t be alarmed my friend. Now you know the truth. You have not feared me so far. There is no reason why you should do so now.” The stranger paused and then asked quietly, “Well, shall we go?”

“Yes,” Martin Wilson muttered. “Yes, we’ll go. Now I know what you mean by the clock never going as long as we remain.”

The stranger moved and the old man fell into step beside him. They went across the shop to the front door and it had never seemed so far away. The nearer they went to it, the more it appeared to recede, until it was lost in a vast corridor, almost a tunnel in space, becoming darker and darker in which every sound of the living world was swallowed up.

FIRST OF THE ROBOTS

“You’re not going to like this, Ralph. In fact you’re going to dislike it very much! But it’ll show you that you can’t stand in the way of the greatest scientist of the age, nor can you win his intended wife away from him! Damn you!”

Stanley Lang leaned over the strapped man on the long table, smiled in vindictive triumph.

Ralph Marson made no move because he could not. He was stretched full length on the table, strapped down with arms at his sides, his whole body bathed in the violet, shadowless radiation from the globes above him. In the glare the face of Stanley Lang seemed blurred and unreal, leaning forward with that sadistic grin twisting his strong mouth.

Lying there, helpless, Ralph Marson’s mind flashed back over events. He and Stanley Lang had been friends since childhood—but where Ralph had kept his feet on the ground Stanley Lang, by far the more brilliant and discovering easy riches as the reward for scientific inventive power, had sickened of the commonplace.

Together they had loved Enid Massey. Overwhelmed by the dynamic personality of Stanley Lang on the one side, and the quiet, but honest, persistence of Ralph Marson on the other, she had so far failed to indicate her choice. This—and because he had tried to balk his erstwhile friend’s ruthless ambition—was the reason why Ralph lay strapped down now in the private laboratory, having walked right into the trap in response to a telephone call.

“You’re a fool, Stan,” Ralph said presently, shifting his blond head comfortably in the cradle where his neck rested. “If you do anything to me the law will catch up on you—”

“The law!” Stanley Lang sneered. “What has a scientist to do with the law? Anyway you’ve got the wrong slant on things. Remember some time ago you signed a charity donation list?”

“Yes?” Ralph’s voice was puzzled.

“Well, I transplanted the signature to a document stating that any sudden disappearance on your part would be entirely voluntary, for the purpose of scientific experiment. Good, eh?”

Ralph stared at the thin, coldly clever face and its cliff-like forehead. For the first time he felt real fear. Stanley Lang had never gone to such lengths before: to do so now he must have a very urgent reason.

“Puzzled, eh?” Stanley Lang gave a thin-lipped grin. “All right, I’ll tell you what’s going to happen—I’m going to repay you in full for your blasted interference in my affairs—both in science and in connection with Enid. At the same time I’m going to make a scientific experiment of the greatest value…”

Turning, he walked over to a corner and from amidst a jumble of apparatus pulled forth what looked to be a suit of armour. Ralph knew better than that. This was the Lang Robot, the most efficient organism of steel mesh and electric network ever devised. For ten years Stanley Lang had poured all the genius of his powerful brain into its construction.

The finished product was not a clumsy, cumbersome, jointed mass of metal walking with mannequin-like jerks, but a perfectly flexible metal man, equipped internally with a multitude of reactive electric centres which corresponded to the nervous system; and possessing a face of carven, powerful immobility.

But for all its miraculous perfection of detail and similarity to a human being, there was one thing—a vital thing—wrong with the robot. It did not always obey the summonses of its brilliant master. There were times when the mesh of sensitive reception plates and impulse-feeders failed to react. It was not the fault of Stanley Lang or of the robot: it was the irreconcilable obstinacy of electricity to the dictates of man.

“There is much,” Stanley Lang said pensively, “to still be learned concerning electricity and basic forces before my robot can respond infallibly, and perform every command instantly. To solve these intricacies, with all the other work I have to do, might take me ten years. That is too long for me. I want instant results, for when I get them Lang’s Electric Robots are going to make me a multimillionaire…”

Ralph eyed him contemptuously as he lay motionless.

“For God’s sake, Stan, don’t you ever think of anything else but the money science can make for you? Isn’t there something in science for itself alone?”

“Something—but not enough.” Stanley Lang shrugged. “However, I had better outline my scheme to you. Since the solution of all electric laws, and the basic telepathic impulses which are needed to make my robot operate, are too profound to be solved hurriedly, I believe that a human brain is needed…”

“You—you what?” Ralph gasped incredulously.

“Surprised, eh? I thought you might be. But thank Heaven,” Stanley Lang went on, “I had the idea. Listen to me, Ralph—Listen well! This robot has electrical filigrees which correspond to the nervous system. After all, human nerves are only the same as wires carrying electrical current. Now, at the summit of this robot’s spinal column is the magnetic brain pan, that obstinate electric unit which sometimes obeys and which sometimes, unfortunately, does not.

“If I were to remove it and put a human brain in its place I would have a supreme, infallible unit. I would have a flawless servant, instantly responsive. The slave of my will…!”

“I don’t agree,” Ralph said, trying to keep his voice steady. He knew he was fighting for his life now.

“Why not?” Stanley Lang’s grey eyes glinted at being contradicted.

“Because a human brain, even detached from the body, has the power to reason. Give it an indestructible housing, like that of the robot, and it will master the world!”

Stanley Lang smiled. “You’re right, of course; but I forgot to mention a point. If a capsule of negative energy—or insulation if you prefer it—be imbedded in a certain area of the brain the power to reason is destroyed! There remains only blind, implicit obedience with all initiative gone for ever, or at least until the capsule is removed.”

“But good God, man, you wouldn’t dare to—”

“I’ll dare anything to succeed, Ralph—understand that! I’ll dare anything to show meddlers what it costs to balk me!”

“But—supposing you did get away with it,” Ralph went on urgently; “it would only be for one robot. You couldn’t supply them by the thousand with human brain units.”

Stanley Lang was silent, staring pensively at the robot.

“That,” he said slowly, “is a problem for the future, and I have no doubt of my ability to solve it.” He turned back to the table suddenly. “But you see what I propose doing to you, don’t you?” He leaned forward, his eyes gleaming. “Think of it, Ralph! Your brain inside this robot, and nobody knowing it except me! The first of the robots—Ralph Marson! Isn’t that good, eh? Isn’t it? And your worthless body destroyed by electricity down to the last shard of bone! And me with your signed legal exoneration of all blame. And Enid…”

Stanley Lang dwelt on her name thoughtfully, grinned as he saw Ralph’s powerful arms strain uselessly against the straps.

“Stan, for God’s sake, come to your senses! You’ve gone stark mad!”

“Mad? No. I’m simply achieving an end, and using the man who called himself my friend for the purpose.”

“But, Stan—”

Ralph’s words were cut short as an anaesthetic cone was rammed down over his face. Stanley Lang waited, watching, no sound in the pin-quiet laboratory save his own harsh breathing and the rasping sighs of Ralph as he relaxed into unconsciousness.

* * * *

Ralph Marson stirred dully, as though rising from a deep and nightmarish sleep. He moved his legs—or at least he intended to do so—but instead it seemed to him that his limbs were encased in plaster-of-paris. They moved certainly but with laborious effort. And what had gone wrong with his eyes? Everything was savagely, glaringly sharp, the clear-cut detail only possible to faultlessly ground lenses. And his ears! How noisy everything seemed—

“Stand up!” commanded a harsh voice.

Ralph obeyed, with immense effort, and stood motionless. Only dimly, because the brain capsule was rapidly destroying the powers of memory and initiative, could he remember what had happened. Something about a robot, hadn’t it been? Ah! Even that slipped from his grasp as he thought of it.

He started to ask a question, but the words simply would not form. Dumbly he stood at attention, staring at the strong, resolute face directed towards him. He seemed to recall having seen it before somewhere.

“You will take your orders from me. Understand?”

“I understand,” Ralph said, wondering why he should be able to speak when ordered to do so, yet not of his own volition.

“You are marvellous!” Stanley Lang breathed, studying him. “The masterpiece of the age! And I made you…!”

He broke off and looked up sharply as the door opened. His face lighted in grim pleasure as a slender girl in a brown costume, with chestnut-brown hair poking under her saucy hat, came in.

“Any admittance?” she asked uncertainly. “Clements let me in and said it would be—”

“Yes, yes, it’s all right,” Stanley Lang nodded. “But Clements takes too much upon himself. Had you come a little earlier you might have been in danger, might have upset a vital experiment.”

Then as Enid Massey looked awkward, Stanley Lang added decisively, “I shall get rid of Clements, and that nosy old housekeeper. I shall replace the pair of them with—it!”

He nodded to the robot and Enid looked at it earnestly, then back to Stanley Lang’s openly gloating face.

“But, Stan, it doesn’t work! You admit that yourself— And anyway, I’m not very much interested in it. I only dropped in to see if you know where Ralph is.”

“Ralph?” Stanley Lang looked at her sharply. “Why should I?”

“Well, he rang me up this evening to say you had something important to talk over with him—had just rung for him to come over. So naturally I came on here as the time had got on. You see, he was going to keep a supper date with me.”

“Oh, he was?” Stanley Lang looked thoughtfully at the girl as he saw her questioning eyes upon him.

“Has he left, or what?” she asked finally.

Stanley Lang’s eyes turned to the robot. He spoke in a voice that was half to himself.

“I rather think, Enid that Ralph has kept his last supper date with you, and spoken with me for the last time. It’s a horrible, deadly business is science…”

Enid stared at him. “But—but what on earth are you talking about, Stan?” She suddenly gripped his arm fiercely. “Stan, what do you mean? Where is Ralph?”

Stanley Lang turned to face her. She read nothing of the deceit and treachery in his grey eyes.

“When you arrived I mentioned a dangerous experiment, Enid. I said it had just been completed. I meant it. I called Ralph here tonight to help me with the final details—”

“Well?” Enid demanded, as he stopped. “Go on!”

“His body was—disintegrated—”

The girl turned away in dumb anguish, groping for a chair.

“I—I remember Ralph telling me something about an experiment,” she whispered. “But I never for a moment thought it—it would—”

“No more than I,” Stanley Lang said quietly. “I insisted that he wrote a letter before the experiment, exonerating me in case of an accident. I’ll need it when I’ve notified the authorities…”

Ralph, hearing all this, had a mental struggle to reconcile it with himself. Also he was trying to fathom what this distracted girl meant to him. Somewhere—somehow—he had known her…

Then at last the girl put away her handkerchief and looked up with tragic eyes.

“What—what are you going to do now, Stan? What are we going to do?”

He shrugged and rested a gentle hand on her shoulder.

“You know I’ve always loved you, Enid: doesn’t this seem as good a time as any to admit that the rivalry between Ralph and me has been solved for us by this unhappy accident? After all, there was only him or me for it, and since circumstances have—er—eliminated him…”

Enid was silent, staring at the robot absently. After a while Stanley Lang glanced in its direction.

“In the general excitement, Enid, I forgot to mention that I have perfected my robot at last. Look!” He gave a few orders, and of course Ralph was forced to obey them. Enid’s surprised eyes shifted back to Stanley Lang’s face. Aware of it, he took good care no sign of gloating triumph appeared upon it.

“Good, eh?” he asked laconically.

“Why, Stan, it’s wonderful! How did you ever manage to—?”

“This is no time to talk of deeply scientific matters,” he said gently. “I merely show it to you so you may realise what I can offer you if you’ll only marry me. Don’t you understand? The Lang service-robots, like this one, can turn in millions! Millions which I want to share with you…”

Enid hesitated a moment, breathing a little faster as she thought of the vistas Stanley Lang could open for her. Even so she still demurred a little. Finally she looked up at him again.

“You’ll give me a little time to think about it, Stanley? At least until tomorrow?”

“Of course,” he answered, smiling. He knew he had won.

* * * *

Stanley Lang was right. Within a month he and Enid Massey were married. It had been a period in which Stanley Lang had been eager to gratify her every little wish. Until at last she was installed in his magnificent home and he knew that it didn’t matter now how soon he let his mask drop. With Enid now firmly in his grip for lighter moments he could attend to pressing matters of scientific achievement.

For Ralph it had been a month of unsupportable anguish. His brain had been, and still was, besieged by a multitude of inexplicable thoughts. These, and a dim, desperate yearning to attain unity with a flesh and blood framework, had created an agony such as he had never known—mental, not physical.

And this girl about the house? As he paraded the great rooms, sleepless, obeying every order day and night, his isolated brain constantly fed by electric currents, he would notice her vaguely puzzled eyes watching him. It was as though she were trying to recall something, even as he was…

Then there was the mocking, sardonic face of Stanley Lang. Who were they, these people? What did they mean…?

Enid, as a matter of fact, had noticed something—and it had obviously escaped Stanley Lang. This something was the robot’s curious habit, ever and again, of raising his pincer fingers to a point just below his metal chin. It was a purely reflex movement, some relic of a personal flesh and blood mannerism which had not been entirely eradicated by Stanley Lang’s magnificent surgical work.

But it impressed Enid for a very vital reason—for Ralph Marson, she remembered, had had the trick of pulling his tie nervously in moments of excitement or indecision. Surely to God it was not possible that Ralph—

“What’s the matter?” demanded Stanley Lang abruptly, as he caught Enid’s fascinated gaze on the robot one evening at dinner, just as he had performed the little action.

“Matter?” Enid caught a grip on herself. “Why, nothing. What should there be?”

“You were staring at my robot as though it reminded you of something. That right?”

“You’re getting imaginative, Stan,” Enid said briefly, determined not to express the horrified suspicion that was in her mind until she was absolutely certain. Just the same, the mysterious disappearance and supposed death of Ralph Marson could stand a little investigation…

“Marvellous, isn’t he?” Stanley Lang muttered, staring at Ralph’s lensed eyes. “The slave of my will, Enid—the first of the robots. Forced to do every little thing I tell him…”

“Him?” Enid repeated. “I thought a robot was sexless—neuter?”

“Purely a figure of speech,” Stanley Lang said, but for a moment his face darkened angrily. Then turning to Ralph he snapped out a sharp dismissal order.

So Ralph went—silently, rhythmically, with all the oiled precision of his mechanical joints, and as usual he retired to the laboratory, his usual rendezvous between periods of service.

* * * *

It ws just after midnight, an hour after Stanley Lang’s departure on a business trip, when Enid silently entered the laboratory. She paused for a moment, listening to the drone of power, then she gave a little start of surprise as she beheld the robot gripping the main power wire and apparently concentrating. He stopped his activities suddenly as he caught sight of her.

As she advanced he slowly stood up. Her dark eyes searched his inscrutable metallic face earnestly.

“Can you—speak?” she asked slowly. “I mean, can you do anything except repeat orders?”

“I can tell you how deeply I love you, Enid, and how much I am aching for vengeance for the ghastly thing Stanley did to me!”

“Ralph!” Enid’s voice was a horrified whisper. “Then—then my guess was right! There wasn’t an experiment! You were not killed—”

“Is that what he told you? No, Enid; he took my brain and turned me into a robot, purely to gratify his fiendish jealousy and to stop me getting you. He imagined he destroyed my power to reason, my initiative. But there he was wrong. Let me tell what has happened to me—what has still to happen…”

He drew up a chair for the girl, then as she sat down he went on.

“Turning me into a robot enabled me to make discoveries only possible to a robot. I have found out, for instance, that Mars has been trying for untold ages to communicate with us on Earth here by electric telepathic influence, appreciable only to the electrically stimulated brain of a robot. That is why human beings have never sensed Martian signals, beyond interpreting them as static, that is. I, with my electrically stimulated brain, the keenness of which I can increase by letting direct voltage flow through my body, understand everything they have communicated.

“You see, the Martians are robots. Long ago, their world being more or less useless for supporting a physical structure, they took to robot bodies, housing their brains much as mine is now housed. Naturally they are master scientists. The first thing they did, once in touch with me, was to ask for all possible details regarding Earth. I gave them, and what I told them convinced them that we are too underdeveloped for it to be worth their while visiting us, a fact they had already suspected, hence they have never come here. Naturally they have conquered space travel, but it is a hazardous, difficult business—far too much so for a useless trip to be attempted…

“In return for my information they showed me how, by using the apparatus at my command in this laboratory, I could affect the total neutralisation of the capsule in my brain. This I did. For over a month now I have had my normal reasoning power… I have seen and learned much. Much that is grim—deadly.”

Ralph paused for a moment and Enid waited intently.

“Stanley has let his ambition get out of hand,” he went on presently. “Just as I always expected he would in the end. You know as well as I do that he has recently been engaged on a study of gases. But do you know why?”

“No. I tried to find out, but he wouldn’t tell me.”

“I’m not surprised! He has perfected a gas which can destroy the power of the body but not the brain, which can produce utter paralysis of the limbs and organs—if not their total destruction—while the brain remains unharmed.”

“But Ralph, why has he done such a horrible thing?”

“For one reason only. He believes that he has found the secret of the perfect robot; he knows he can make a fortune if he makes them by the thousand. But to do that he needs thousands of human brains, all subjected as he thinks mine is. This gas can give him those brains!”

Enid looked puzzled. “But I don’t see how—”

“Revolution! Crime on a gigantic scale!” Ralph said savagely. “He’s talked his plans over to himself in here often enough, and I’ve heard them. These men he has gone to see are the biggest men there are among America’s enemies, men who, given a sufficient guarantee, can start industrial havoc overnight. For an idea like these robots you can be pretty sure they’ll start something quickly.”

“You mean an attack with these gas bombs?”

“With the intention of overthrowing the Government. But—I think it can be stopped,” Ralph finished quietly.

“You—you do?” Enid cried, in sudden hope. “But how?”

“Mars! The moment I realised what Stanley was aiming at I communicated with the Martian scientists telepathically. If he starts anything—as I fully expect he will—he’ll get the shock of his life. It is over a week since I contacted Mars and got their promise of help. At the speed at which their spaceships move they must be somewhere near Earth—”

Ralph broke off and Enid watched his robot face intently. It was quite devoid of expression, but there was an urgency in his movements as he turned and picked up the power cable, held on to it tightly.

“They near!” he exclaimed at last. “Just inside Earth’s atmosphere, waiting for any signal I may give.”

“They are! But—but—” Enid got to her feet, suddenly confused. “But what can we do? If by any chance Stanley finds out he’ll kill us—”

“You, yes but he can’t do anything to me. He made me pretty well invulnerable, and my strength is equal to that of ten human beings. But we’re both going to get out, though. I still have a hunting lodge near the Adirondacks: you go there immediately and wait until you hear from me. I’ve special work of my own to do. Go on—hurry off and get your bags packed…”

* * * *

Trouble began quickly enough. This was not a hurried scheme which Stanley Lang was putting into effect. For long enough he had been in contact with the powerful factions awaiting the chance to start a cataclysm with every chance of success.

So, within a few days of Stanley Lang’s departure from his home America became aware of the fact that an industrial disaster of first-class magnitude was hovering on the horizon.

And suddenly, without real reason or pretext the blow fell! From their various hidden bases there rolled forth the whole equipment of terror and destruction, ready to move to the indiscriminate shattering of all civilian morale at the chosen hour.

Stanley Lang, in charge of operations at his underground headquarters, stood surrounded by instruments, intelligence officers, and the three men who had made this heinous betrayal of a united people possible. Stanley Lang was smiling grimly.

“So we see what science can do for us, my friends,” he murmured, glancing at the resolute, harshly set faces of his collaborators. “Within twenty-four hours—less than that even—we will have all the bodies and brains we need. I have seen to it that picked squads have everything ready to rush the required number of paralysed people to our robot headquarters. At the same time we shall have accomplished a double stroke— The people will capitulate against the onslaught of this new gas. So we rule America, and by the use of our robots can, no doubt, in time rule the world itself!”

The others nodded slowly, studying him, just a trifle awed by the grandiose sweep of his baleful imagination. Then he turned away, his eyes on the electric clock, his hand ready to open the microphone in contact with all operational bases.

The second finger crept through the final segment. The hour was up. Stanley Lang opened the microphone.

“Action stations!” he said curtly. “You have your orders. Advance. Expect no mercy, and give none!”

Immediately teleplates flashed into action, most of the scenes being transmitted from the fighter and bomber squadrons who were to launch the attack on the various defenceless centres—

But something was wrong! Not one ’plane was moving in any sector, nor was a single land tractor advancing! The machines began to disgorge worried crews as they attempted to discover what was wrong.

“What the devil’s the matter with you?” Stanley Lang roared. “Get moving, damn you! Do you want to blow our whole schedule to pieces—?”

“Look!” interrupted one of the intelligence officers tensely, pointing to the screen nearest him. “What’s that—?”

Stanley Lang twisted round and his face went livid in a mixture of fear and amazement. The screen—in fact several of the screens, located in various centres—were picturing darting hordes of machines, grey, incredibly fast, some of them spouting forth blue and yellow rays.

“They’re—they’re spaceships!” breathed, Tsu-Li, the Asiatic traitor, staring incredulously.

“Spaceships? Don’t be a damn fool, man! That isn’t even possible—”

“Oh yes it is, Lang!”

The group twirled round. So intent had the men been on watching the screens, and on the sudden hitch in operations, they had not heard the door open gently. Now they stood staring at a massive robot, slowly advancing towards them. The guards were trying to stop the intrusion, but with one shake of his arm Ralph sent them spinning against the wall.

“Is this-—your robot?” asked Calmere, the European, a bit anxiously.

“Yes. My robot.” Stanley Lang was staring fixedly. The rest of the men had their hands on their weapons, though what use they would be against this thing of solid metal they had no idea.

“Get out of here!” Stanley Lang ordered at last, his voice hoarse with fury. “Go on! I order you to get out! Go!”

He stared in dumbfounded amazement as Ralph came on, stopping at last a foot or two from him.

“I take no more orders from you, Stanley Lang. You take them from me—and my friends.”

“Friends? What friends?”

As Ralph didn’t answer Tsu-Li gave a splutter of protest.

“This is impossible, Lang! The robot does not obey blindly as you led us to believe. It reasons! It’s dangerous! What use could such a creature ever be to us? My God, if a whole flock of them started to reason…”

The thought was too much for Tsu-Li. He cast a hurried look at the screens, then dashed for the door. Ralph made no attempt to stop him. Calmere went next a sudden dive. The intelligence officers began to back away, leaving Stanley Lang by the switchboard, his cold, merciless eyes staring into Ralph’s lenses.

“You’ve failed,” Ralph said slowly, at length. “And you can thank only one thing for it—the fact that you made me a robot. I’m not going to explain the details. I can have scientific secrets the same as you can… I’ll tell you only one thing—Mars is the cause of your failure.”

“Those—spaceships?” Stanley Lang hazarded, his eyes wandering beyond Ralph for a moment to the instrument bench.

“Exactly. There are nearly two thousand Martian spaceships guarding Earth at this moment—spaceships armed with scientific devices more devastating than anything even you could ever devise—spaceships controlled by indestructible robots, masters of a science two thousand years or more ahead of ours, who have decided through my help to enter into scientific alliance with Earth and destroy avaricious, ruthless barbarians like you… You have seen how it can be done. Every one of your points of potential attack is known: everyone is covered with a core of neutralising energy which had completely jammed all the electrical apparatus on those war engines you were intending to use. Other ships, invisible to you, directed me to your headquarters here and destroyed the guard before any resistance could be made—”

Stanley Lang dived suddenly for the bench and whipped up a long surgical knife from its case. Being the creator of this robot he knew exactly where the vulnerable points lay. With all the power of his arm he drove the glittering blade into the faint line of cleavage where lay the top of the skull, and behind it the brain. There was the sharp rasp of steel upon steel, then Ralph reeled giddily for a moment as an anguishing pain shot through him. It was only transitory but he knew a vital injury of some sort had been delivered.

Yanking up his arm, he snapped the blade in two and the handle with its broken shaft fell to the floor. Then he dived forward with his pincered hands. Against them Stanley Lang stood no chance.

The steel clamped about his throat, constricted… He fought for air, his features purpling. Slowly he sank to his knees… Ralph held on as long as he could, then the damage to his brain overwhelmed him. He went down into darkness beside the fallen scientist.

* * * *

Ralph was surprised at the ease of his movements when he recovered consciousness. Slowly he opened his eyes, stared about him into the inscrutable faces of robots. They had just finished a surgical operation of some kind.

Ralph jerked himself up, astonished to discover he had a flesh and blood body. And it looked like the body of— He snatched at the mirror one of the robots held out to him, then stared into the feat-tures of Stanley Lang in the polished glass!

“What in hell—” he whispered—then his eyes sought the robots again.

“You are—Martians?” he asked slowly.

“Yes,” one of them responded, in a tone that betrayed his mechanical control and lack of knowledge of the language. “We saw in our screens what had happened to you, so came immediately to your aid. We knew you wanted a flesh and blood body again so we gave you the only one handy. It was dead, yes, but devoid of injury. Death had merely come from asphyxiation. The body of your enemy, yes, but your brain ruling it His we destroyed. And your brain we healed of its injury.”

Ralph was silent, reflecting on the incredible Nemesis which had overtaken Stanley Lang. There were other things to face too.

“How am I ever to convince people that I am not Stanley Lang?”

“That will hardly be necessary, will it? Nobody knew what Lang was really aiming at. He was simply known as a brilliant scientist, so far as the world is concerned. He can still be that, with you in his body. All the credit, power, and position which he owned can be yours. More! You will become the great Lang, collaborator with other worlds, for, for that purpose we saved you, so that our contact should not be broken.”

“And Enid?” Ralph muttered.

At that a figure came from behind the robots.

“Enid!” Ralph gasped, staring at her. “How on earth—”

“They found me, brought me here,” she said quickly, looking at the Martians. “Knowing what they intended doing, and knowing too that we love each other, they made me watch their work so I could know what was going on…”

“But dearest, I have the body of Stanley Lang. You married him…”

“I know,” she said quietly. “At the Bureau of Marriages—but there is no law against a private ceremony as well, and that is what we’re going to have. To all the world I’m still the wife of Stanley Lang—but to ourselves…to ourselves, I’m the wife of Ralph Marson…”

SECOND GENESIS

There is no bar to the immense powers of science, but when a man, however benevolent, tries to play God he must take the consequences.

Valno emerged from the darkness of the photographic room. His ugly face was frowning. Ugly, that is, from Earthly standards: by his own race of Ixonians he was considered fairly handsome. “Well, was I right?”

Valno looked up. In the midst of the complex equipment of the huge observatory stood Jus, the chief astronomer. He looked at his ruler anxiously.

“Quite right,” Valno conceded. “It is almost unbelievable that a distant star should break away from a point of the cosmos and move towards this System of ours—but there it is, We must take immediate steps to protect ourselves.”

In these few words Valno expressed the cold fatalism of his race—their calculating, scientific knowledge; their almost complete lack of fear, destroyed through years of refinement.

“It won’t be simple to protect ourselves,” Jus commented. “That runaway is a high-temperature star measuring over a million miles in diameter. In fact, it’s almost the twin of our own sun. There lies danger. Nothing we can devise in time can prevent this invader passing close to our sun, close enough to disrupt portions of his mass. Even create another Solar System,” lie finished, pondering.

“Another one?” Valno’s expression changed. “But we—”

Jus smiled slightly. “We know science, yes, but even yet we do not thoroughly understand Nature. At any moment Nature may decide to create another Solar System and wipe out an old one—ours. We live in a System of five worlds, our own planet being the second nearest to the sun. Of these five worlds only ours has life which may reasonably be called intelligent. Our sun at present is only eighty million miles from us. But beyond the area of our System is empty space extending for untold light-years, clear to the First and Second Galaxies. Do you not see that this invader, which will probably miss the orbits of the three outer worlds, will smash this one and the one nearest the sun into dust?”

Valno nodded broodingly. “Yes, and such an event is even more likely in view of the fact that our world is the heaviest of all, has a diameter of over eight thousand miles and materials of extreme density. Between our world and the sun many things may happen.”

“Will happen,” the astronomer corrected gravely.

Valno moved slowly. “How long have we?”

“A year; perhaps a trifle more. A year isn’t going to be long enough to save us.”

“I disagree. In a year we can do much. From the com-putators we can find out how our System will react, which portions of our world will come into the danger area, the stresses and strains—everything.”

“True, but what good will that do us? Even a child can see that diis invader will upset our sun. How do you propose to go on living during and after such a catastrophe?”

After a brief reflection Valno said: “Seventy-five per cent of stars, runaway and otherwise, possess certain radiations and emanations which affect different forms of life. We proved long ago that our own life came into being through active radiations at the birth of our System. Here again the same thing may happen on worlds as yet unborn. If such a thing does come to pass and we can survive this disaster, we may have the opportunity to watch an evolution. That will be of profound interest.”

“Admitted,” Jus said dryly. “But you still evade the vital issue. How do we survive?”

“There will be a way. Whilst I devise a plan I want you to find out what dominating life-radiations this invader possesses, then we can determine if there is a chance of future life on unknown worlds to come. I’m going to the Computing Room: give orders that I am not to be disturbed.”

The astronomer nodded, but there was profound doubt on his face as his ruler went on his way.

* * * *

Once within the Computing Room Valno locked himself in. Seating himself in a specially designed chair he fingered the banks of switches on all sides of him. Here indeed was the Brain of Ixonia. Machinery of bewildering complexity all of it operating from the basis of pure mathematics, built up flawless prognoses of future time with an accuracy forbidden to a human brain.

Actually, the machinery forecasted Time, patterning the future as far ahead as desired. The Ixonians had proved that Nature is not a random concourse of atoms flung hither and yon—but an ordered pattern, a mosaic, every molecule fitting into its predestined place. Thereby, mathematically, the change of even one molecule must have predictable consequences.

Valno thrust a switch. Floodlights expired. He moved switches—then from his almost horizontal position in the chair he was able to watch on the huge screen the composite impressions of all the calculating projections focussed into a moving whole. He saw the glowing, bright invader from the depths of space. Then the machinery, working from this fact basis, passed its computations on to a multiplier, which in turn mingled with the mixing device for sorting out the correct path amidst myriads of predictions.

Valno watched fixedly. The invader came sweeping inwards in a gigantic arc, speeded up by the machines. The whole Ixonian System of five planets came into view swinging majestically around their blue-white sun. Perturbations began. The pressure waves set Ixonia and his neighbours reeling. Asta, nearest the sun, split into fragments. Fissures of titanic size began to disembowel Ixonia. Impassively, Valno took note of these happenings; then he watched in alarmed amazement as the invading sun, by far heavier than the normal one, took that body in its terrific onward rush and tore it away into space.

It travelled a distance of four thousand million miles before it finally broke loose, but in doing so it ruptured and gave forth spouting filaments of searing matter which painted the cosmos in ribbons of blinding flame.

The view switched back to Ixonia as Valno shifted a button. The planet had split in two. One half, glowing red, had shrunk amazingly. In its close approach to the invader its satellite electrons had been stripped off by the terrific heat, condensing it by nearly a thousand miles of diameter—but the original weight was still there, packed into a dense mass which would rapidly cool with the removal of the luminary.

The remaining half of Ixonia, some four thousand miles across, had escaped condensation and was reeling in a wild orbit held in the field of the remaining three scorched, but otherwise unharmed, planets.

“Worlds—to come,” Valno muttered. “Eight of them—four small and four large, then one small one again of considerable weight. Half of our own Ixonia. And Asta!” He smiled wryly. “Asta reduced to a far-flung group of asteroids between inner and outer worlds. So that is our destiny.”

Finally he switched off and sat thinking, presently voicing his thoughts aloud.

“It is possible that this invader is the self-same star that brought our system into being. On its second visit it will bring this new system into life. What is to prevent it coming again and again, wreaking havoc over time? Yes, an interloper which must be tamed!”

Rising, he went across to a smaller calculator and set a cosmic scale chart in position. Linking the machine to its huge brothers, he switched on the power and watched intently as the tracery needle gave an exact predicted path of the interloper through space. The needle moved through an arc, zig-zagging at the moment of its conflict with the sun; then it passed on into the depths of space. Moving practically unimpeded through the void, its path taking it beyond the huge gravitational fields of the greater stars, the voyager pursued a comparatively straight path. A straight path, and yet of necessity a circle, bringing it back in time in a huge circular orbit that fell only a little short of the total circumference of die Universe—back to its starting point.

“The paths cross!” Valno exclaimed, “Three thousand million years in the future. Exactly the same time since our System came into being. The genesis of life does repeat, again and again.”

He paused at a rattling at the door. Touching a switch he released the lock, and Jus came in, metallic record sheets in his hand.

“The calculations on the invader’s radiations,” he said, putting them down. “They react on only one composition—carbon.”

Valno nodded quickly. “I’ll go into them later. I too have been busy—” and he explained to the astronomer what he had been doing. When he had finished, Jus was looking serious.

“Then this interloper will reappear at intervals, always with the same train of disaster?”

“Unless we trap him, my friend! Three thousand million years in the future he will come again. This time we are too late, but on the next occasion—”

“But how—?”

“I must think it out. I must determine at what point this world of ours is going to break. One portion of it will be of considerable size, a dense asteroid about three thousand miles in diameter. It will form the outermost of a System of Worlds as yet unborn. If the point of fracture can be determined—”

He went to work with the calculators, and in fifteen minutes the answer had been given. Valno snatched up the calculations.

“See! Our world will break almost dead across the equatorial belt. One piece will hurtle away from the moving sun, and the other towards it. The latter will be restrained by the gravitational pulls of the remaining planets. It is four thousand miles wide, but loses one thousand miles of surface area by the action of heat and condensation. It becomes plasmic and forms into a globe. The other half retains its former size of four thousand miles diameter and is formed into a globe through the passage of ages.”

Jus nodded, but said nothing. He had no idea what his ruler was driving at.

“You observe?” Valno went on, studying the charts. “The condensed half is left with no revolution. It turns one face perpetually sunward, has only the very slightest libration from side to side, follows a vast orbit round the moved sun which takes three hundred years to complete. But with the half we intend to use it will be very different. The cataclysm will impart to it a revolution of three hours fourteen minutes, lengthening to ten hours by the time Genesis comes round again. That, my friend, is ideal.”

Valno picked up the reports the astronomer had brought in.

“Reacts on carbon. That’s not very surprising. Our own life is basically carbon. The life which will come to these other worlds will also be carbon, I expect. That means that if we are ever to restore light and warmth to our particular shattered System we shall have to steal their sun and destroy them. That is neither just nor necessary. I have a better plan, but it can only be put into effect when Genesis comes on its next trip—countless ages in the future.”

“And in the meantime?”

“In the meantime we shall be deep inside the uncondensed half of our world, in suspended animation. We shall awaken when the first radiations of returning Genesis—as we will call our star—strike the light-reaction cells near our abode. The radiations will precede Genesis itself by some four years, which will give us ample time to act.”

“But what do you intend doing?” Jus asked testily.

“I intend that we shall trap this unwelcome visitor and bend it to our needs. We will use the forces of the cosmos not only to save the life that will then be flourishing on at present unborn worlds, but also to provide our sun-desolated System with light and heat once more. Tonight I shall broadcast to the people and inform them of my plans for the future.”

* * * *

Within two hours every man, woman and child on the planet knew what was coming—and also what was proposed. By Valno’s orders, all normal work ceased and everything was concentrated into a mighty effort to get the populace underground and safely housed against the onslaught when it should come.

As come it did—inevitably, within the space of a year. But by this time everybody was below. They saw through the specially-devised screens the chaos taking place on the surface, ending in the planet being torn in half. The actual cleavage took only ten minutes, and in that time the populated half was hurled far away from the two raging suns and sailed into the comparatively cool darkness.

Still the chaos continued, and out of it—by the juxtaposition of the two suns—was born the Solar System, as yet only visible as streamers of flaming gas. It was at this point that the view of the exterior was cut off by Valno’s orders. The time had come for all to sink into suspended animation until that time, millions of years hence—when Genesis would again be abroad, this time to sail into a trap, if Valno’s mysterious scheme worked out as intended.

So, by degrees, the buried population began to relax into sleep. It became deeper—and ever deeper—until at last it was false death.

* * * *

Valno stirred slowly. The black abyss in which his mind had been immersed for untold ages began to resume life. Memories—ambitions—plans. They floated gradually into his returning consciousness. He was breathing. His heart was beating. He opened his eyes and raised himself on one elbow. In silence he watched a small army of robots moving efficiently amongst the vast machines, busy with their tasks of controlling the air and temperature regulators.

“It seems but yesterday,” he muttered. “Yet no less than three thousand million years must have elapsed! Genesis is returning.”

He got up stiffly, then turned as Jus came forward. He bowed as he beheld his ruler.

“Greetings, Valno: I have been revived for nearly an hour. The visi-screens reveal the people reviving everywhere, resuming their interrupted tasks. Many things have happened. Here and there some machines have broken down. However, no matter. There are scenes in the observatory I think you ought to see.”

“I’ll join you immediately.”

Valno turned to the stimulating apparatus, absorbed a given quantum of radiation, then accompanied the astronomer through a maze of warm, brightly-lighted passages to the observatory. In silence Jus motioned to the mirrors of the X-ray telescope. The lights dimmed. The two stood silent, surveying the scene.

“So, eight worlds,” Valno said finally. “Four large and four small, and between the orbits of the inner and outer groups lie the remains of Asta. That third world there! From its appearance it looks as though it might possess life.”

“It does,” Jus responded. “Of all these planets it is the only one with intelligence upon it. Comparatively inferior intelligence. Educated bipeds. See!”

He fingered the huge controlling switchboard. The third world leapt suddenly from a cloudy ball into a world of land and water, clouds drifting lazily in the atmosphere.

“You see?” Jus asked. “Cities—ocean-going vessels—airplanes. Here and there traces of war, an atavistic throwback. They understand radio and television. Our spatial radio system is successful in picking up their electro-magnetic waves. Naturally their language is odd.”

“The language expert will soon interpret it,” Valno answered absently. “I would rather like to know the reactions of these odd people to Genesis, when it comes.”

“I will attend to it, Valno. Meanwhile, the present facts concerning our System are these: we are four thousand five hundred million miles from the sun; we spin at a revolution of ten hours twelve minutes in relation to him. We circle him every five hundred years. The outer three worlds of our System are dead, being so far from the sun. They could come back to life if we could get warmth to the life spores.”

Valno smiled. “If my calculations are correct, my friend, we will have a sun again—that wanderer Genesis will be turned to good account. In fact, we have got to have him. We cannot forever live down here. The moment Genesis comes within telescopic range, advise me. In the meanwhile, have the language expert keep a close check on all radio messages exchanged on the third world. Tell him to record anything he thinks important. I’m anxious to judge the intellect of these people.”

Jus inclined his head, then after a final glance at the mirror Valno turned and went swiftly out.

* * * *

Once recovery was complete throughout the underground city, Valno gathered his people for action once more. He set them to work on the building of machines which were vast, even for Ixonia. Mammoth blast furnaces began to work ceaselessly, casting the moulds for machinery, the details of which were only known to Valno himself.

Most of the time he studied the behaviour of the condensed half of Ixonia, watched it proceeding on its three-hundred-year circuit of the far-distant sun, noticed the intricacies of its orbit—then he studied its relationship to rapidly-twirling Ixonia. He smiled at what he saw, smiled even more when his laboratory tests revealed that Ixonia possessed unlimited quantities of natural electric current, begotten of the time when for ages it had twirled on its leisurely way in comparatively close proximity to the now removed sun.

“Force and power, planet-sized,” Valno murmured. “It only needs to be harnessed—”

He broke off, surprised by the arrival of Jus. With his usual impassivity the astronomer placed a small sound-recorder on the bench and switched it on.

“Here, Valno, is an interpreted record of third world communications. You may find it interesting.”

“—and I say there will come a time when the very forces which brought our Solar System into life will return! That is inevitable because space curves in a perfect circle. Only one thing can prevent the return of the force or the star which tore filaments of gas from our sun, and that is some distant catastrophe which might destroy the wanderer completely. That chance is remote.

“That such a catastrophe occurred in the past is beyond cavil. We have the asteroids, the remains of a world far in precedence to ours. We have Pluto, a misfit on the remote edges of the System—a dense world obviously afflicted at one time by vast heat which, from the present position of the sun, could only have occurred by the presence of a hot body in outer space. Then again, we know today that the views set forth by Dr. Baade in 1931 are correct: Pluto is not a broken fragment or satellite of Neptune. It is the outermost world of another group of worlds beyond visual range.

“A System, my friends, that at one time had a sun. Maybe our sun. We have proof of other worlds by the strange perturbations of Neptune, outlined by Professor Lowell, and quite unaccounted for by the mere size of Pluto alone. There are other worlds beyond, but until we have enough telescopic power we shall never view them. None the less, we can assured that at one time these worlds had warmth. Pluto alone indicates that. What happened once can happen again, though I sincerely trust it will not be in the course of Man’s evolution—”

With a click the record ceased. Jus switched off and said:

“There was nothing else of importance, Valno. Clearly, these third-world people don’t know yet how accurate this astronomer of theirs is. Pluto? So that is what they have called the condensed half of our world. I wonder what they’ll do when Genesis becomes apparent to them?—which it will before very long. It is already visible to us because we’re nearer to it—”

“It is?” Valno interrupted sharply. “Then we must get to work at once and swing Pluto round to act as a snare.”

Jus gazed blankly. “Do what?”

“This Pluto—as the third worlders call him—is practically equal in weight to our own half world here, is he not?”

“Certainly, but less in size. Contracted.”

“Exactly. For that reason it can be contracted to an even smaller size, turned into a tight-packed core of neutrons.”

“But how? And even if you accomplished it its weight would be just the same no matter how small you made it.”

“Quite so—unless a battering ram of neutrons were projected at it after it had been contracted. Then its weight would increase rapidly without much change in size. Am I right?”

“Well—yes, but where do you propose to get the enormous power necessary for such a feat?”

“I propose to use this half world of ours as a natural dynamo. I have been experimenting recently and, as I anticipated, it has huge stores of natural electricity at the North Magnetic Pole. To this pole swarm billions of tons of nickel iron, neutronic material of which the core of any world is fashioned. Now you see? Fields of force generated by this world’s natural spinning against ether, or space-time, or whatever it may be termed.”

“And you propose to tap this supply of energy?”

“That is what our workers have been engaged upon recently—constructing the necessary machinery. We shall be able to use this energy in whatever manner we wish and have an inexhaustible supply. At will we can project a beam of pure force, or of neutrons, or of compression.”

“True; but do you believe that dense matter can be compressed as easily as the more rarefied state?”

“Of course! In the long run, dense matter is not less compressible than rarefied matter, only its compression is more jerky. The apparent incompressibility of solids and liquids is due to the fact that the ridiculously small pressures science can produce are unable to get over the first jerk. With this new source of infinite power we shall accomplish it—place a controlling shell of energy around Pluto, then move him as far towards approaching Genesis as we can. Increase his weight until he is strong enough to drag Genesis aside towards him.”

“Then?”

“I see nothing to stop Pluto becoming the neutronic core of Genesis.”

Jus was silent for a while, then he shook his head doubtfully.

“I can only hope you’re right! Since the Computing-Room was destroyed we have no means of checking your reasoning.”

Valno laughed. “Pessimism, Jus! Figures cannot lie. We would merely have seen what I have outlined.”

* * * *

The visible reappearance of Genesis lent a spur to the activity of the Ixonians. The high-pressure work already in force was increased two-fold. Every member of the race was pressed into commission for the construction of the intricate machinery Valno had devised.

As fast as it was completed he and Jus took charge of the proceedings, accompanying armies of workers up the twenty-mile shafts-to Ixonia’s cold, airless surface, directing operations from within their transparent, air-tight tractors which wandered over the torn, rocky wastes which had once been fair countryside.

They set up their temporary headquarters at the North Magnetic Pole, which, since Ixonia revolved almost on its side, directly faced the vastly distant sun. Here the light was equivalent to two full moons on Earth. Pluto too, with his relatively high albedo, added his percentage of light, moving slowly across the star-dusted sky like a distended satellite.

By degrees, directly over the North Polar Cap, a fantastically large projector was erected, rearing nearly one thousand feet in to the ebony dark, strengthened and supported by mammoth girders sunk deeply into the rocks. From it, penetrating down into the underworld city, led the myriad cables for its controls, all leading back to the special laboratory wherein were housed power-magnets, transformers, incredibly complex induction coils, rectifiers and numberless other devices all essential for the tapping of the stupendous energy stored within Ixonia.

At last Valno was satisfied and returned below with his workers. A brief interval was granted for relaxation and stimulus, then he went direct to the power laboratory accompanied by Jus and a few of the more important members of the race.

Upon three sides of the power-room were X-ray television screens, all giving different aspects of the magnetic pole. One viewed the projector; another charted Pluto’s movement across a graded scale; still another was able to give a vantage point of any part of the heavens.

Moving to the control board, Valno raised his hand. Instantly forty attendant workers performed their tasks. Forty multiple switches slammed into position; engines thundered into life. Ixonia quaked to its depths with the impact of devastating energy probings.

His hands flitting over the major keyboard, Valno began his task, every move checked by Jus as he watched the small mathematical machines which balanced the figures. One slip and the elemental forces would blast Ixonia asunder. The din mounted. The electrical machinery became enveloped in a weird aura, a play of natural electric forces which was almost terrifying in its majestic promise of supernatural power. Then to the pre-calculated second Valno’s fingers suddenly raced across a higher set of keys. The power note changed and was converted into an electro-magnetic beam of inconceivable strength. It stabbed suddenly from the tower top and flashed out into space, invisible, traceable only by highly-sensitive instruments, hurling itself directly at Pluto.

The dense little world visibly staggered in its orbit under the terrific impact—but only for a matter of seconds. Again the power changed. Along the electro-magnetic beam surged another energy form—a binding globe of pure force, expanding as it hurdled the gap between worlds, until by the time it had reached Pluto its distension was over three thousand miles in diameter.

Within minutes the little world was ensnared within it, like a ball inside a soap bubble. Pluto ceased to obey the control of the distant sun and instead wavered loosely at the behest of the magnetic shackles holding it.

Slowly, straining under the colossal load, the movable head of the projector began to turn. The electro-magnetic beam and Pluto moved in consequence, starting the commencement of a vast circle round the heavens. Valno’s hands dropped from the switches. He snapped automatic controls into position and then smiled.

“So far we have succeeded,” he announced, satisfied. “Unfortunately, our planet has no bracing supports to hold it whilst Pluto makes this arc across space. Not that that will matter seriously. Our calculations show that we cannot shift more than eighty thousand miles out of position: also we have slightly heavier weight. Down here in this reinforced underground we’ll come to no harm.”

“What effect do you imagine Pluto’s removal is going to have on that other System?” Jus asked. “My calculations did not embody that factor.”

“Hardly any effect at all. It is not a major planet like its young giant neighbours. I doubt if its removal will even be felt, though, of course, it will be noticed that it is moving in the sky.” Valno turned to the language expert. “Resume contact with the third-worlders and notify me of their, reactions.”

The expert bowed and departed. Valno looked at the humming machinery.

“Whilst we wait through the weeks for Pluto to turn in an arc far enough to bring him directly in the track of Genesis we can begin the process of rejuvenation on the surface. Firstly we need the basis of our atmosphere, and new oceans—oxygen and hydrogen. Later we will add the nitrogen, argon and other gases. Release the valves on quarter pressure.”

He sat watching as the order was obeyed. The twin gases emerging from different giant storage cylinders began to filter up through pipes to the surface. Once there, the utter cold of space immediately froze them both into separate congealments. But by degrees, as Pluto drifted across the sky in the ether-beam grip, a solid carpet of basic atmosphere and water crept over the rocky crags of Ixonia, ever expanding, held to the planet by its gravitation.

Later, when this carpet covered the globe—perhaps a matter of years at its slow, careful rate of progress—would come the other gases. Then, as Valno hoped, a free mingling under the warmth of a new sun. A new world. Life!

* * * *

For three months Pluto continued its travelling, crossing over from the side of the sun to the opposite side of the heavens. Then the force beam was gradually extended, forcing the dense planet further and further away into space at constantly mounting velocity, following a course timed to cross the path of approaching Genesis at a distance of eighty million miles, Ixonia’s former distance from the sun before the catastrophe.

Valno and Jus watched the progress of their captive with untiring vigilance, found considerable amusement in the recorded translations of third world broadcasts that were occasionally brought by the language expert.

“The third-worlders have actually come to the conclusion that intelligent life is guiding the destinies of Pluto,” Valno remarked with a smile, switching the machine on for Jus’s benefit. “Their imagination is profounder than I thought. They will be interesting indeed to watch as they evolve. Listen to this—”

“—and three months ago Pluto suddenly behaved like a madman’s world! It ceased to continue in its normal orbit. Instead it moved rapidly across the heavens and then started to recede from us. Now it is scarcely visible! It cannot be that k has been drawn by that deadly approaching star from space, otherwise other small bodies would have been affected too. Our only assumption is that life of an incredibly high scientific order exists somewhere beyond Pluto.

“Yet, even if that be so, it does not make our position any the less grave. In eighteen months that fast-approaching star will pass close by our sun. Creation will repeat itself. Unimaginable disasters will overtake us! Somehow we have got to have protection. Descend into the earth, build shelters, do everything that can be done.”

“Foolish of them,” Valno murmured, switching off. “They will have no need. In any case, I doubt if they could save themselves. They are a remarkably childlike lot. So far, I understand, they have only penetrated about five miles into their world, and that only after vast and primitive labour. Five miles down would certainly not afford them much protection if Genesis did attack them. But it will not.”

He turned and locked into the screens, at the dazzling point of the invader. It had lost the blue tinge of its earlier visitation: it was yellow now. Much of its vast heat has dissipated in its long journey through the depths of space. To its left far smaller, far nearer to Ixonia as yet, Pluto was slowly moving amidst the backdrop of stars, still held in the electromagnetic beam.

“Another hour, Valno, then the contraction process can begin,” Jus commented.

Valno turned aside to the communicator and summoned his intellectuals to the power laboratory. Then with Jus by his side he made his way to it, took up his customary position at the switchboard with its triple screens, disconnected the robot guiding machinery, and prepared himself.

“Everything in readiness?” he asked Jus, without turning.

“Everything. At Pluto’s present distance of seventy million miles you may increase his gravitational field without it having any determinable effect on this planet—certainly not on the other third world System. The only difference will be that instead of pursuing a five-hundred-year orbit round the existing sun, we shall form into a new one around trapped Genesis, and of course receive the benefit of light and warmth. Again the vast distances separating Genesis and the other sun will be amply sufficient to prevent any interplay of gravitational fields. A double-sun System is manifestly inimical to intelligent life because of the erratic orbits of the planets it possesses. Strange too that nearly all the galactic Systems are infested with double suns.”

“Is it?” Valno asked quietly. “If we assume that there have been other wandering stars like this, does it not seem likely that at some time or other a preponderant sun would trap the invader, turn him into a white dwarf, and thereafter the gaseous sun and immensely heavy former wanderer would gravitate round one another? I do not believe that Genesis is the only wanderer: he is the first to be tamed, that’s all—”

“It is nearly time!” Jus interrupted.

Valno turned his attention back to the controls, fingering them swiftly under. Jus’s directions. The beating rhythm of the engines changed suddenly as the shell of energy cast round Pluto began to narrow down, tightened itself into an inconceivably tough globe of power through which nothing material could ever break.

No form of matter could withstand that cramping, crushing power, steadily increasing, a vice made of elemental forces that squeezed the dead hulk of Pluto inwards and inwards upon its own core, forcing the uncounted myriads of electron orbits in its atoms to come nearer and nearer to their nuclei.

The engines whined under the increasing strain. With every yard that Pluto compressed, the effort of pressure proportionately increased. But there was an infinity of power—the power of an entire planet whirling against the ether of space-time.

Pluto became visibly smaller. The telescopic lenses were changed to hold it in visible range. It shrank again; once more the lenses were changed. Then at last Jus gave a cry.

“That’s the limit, Valno! Decreased to fifteen hundred miles from three thousand. You have a densely heavy world retaining all its original weight, but only an approximate third of its original size.”

Valno nodded complacently. “That’s what I wanted. Now for the increase of weight. The balance-graphs are ready?”

Jus waved his hand to the delicate needles swinging in their vacuum flasks. Operating from cosmic vibrations they were capable of deducing the weight of any given stellar body. At the moment the Pluto-needle was quarter of the way round the graded dial, whilst that of Genesis quivered at the exact centre, giving an approximate weight of four thousand quadrillion tons, nearly balancing that of the distant sun.

Working with infinite care, Valno began to remove the force beam, weakening it by imperceptible degrees, and as he had calculated contracted Pluto continued on his way by natural momentum through the non-resisting emptiness, nonetheless slightly altering his former course to drift more surely and steadily towards approaching Genesis.

“The converters! Neutrons!” Valno ordered.

A new group of engines started into life, adding their droning to those of the still-operating electro-magnetic beam. The huge laboratory became a hell of sound as the converters grappled with the task of supplying a beam of pure neutrons. No eye saw what was going on in those complex engines of destruction; no eye dared to behold the assault of man-tamed forces on the basic laws of matter, the tearing out of neutrons from energy streams, which were in turn hurled on to the projector’s electro-magnetic beam.

In untold millions they flung across the gulf from the magnetic pole, slamming into tiny drifting Pluto in a battering ram. Others, drifting in space in invisible swarms, joined company and piled their incredibly heavy masses upon the contracted world. Weight equalling that of sixty million tons to the cubic inch passed clean through Pluto and went down into his core. His weight began to increase by leaps and bounds as his core became filled with ever-increasing matter possessing no atomic space whatever.

Genesis, now no more than five million miles distant from the snarer—not far as cosmic distances go—was already beginning to feel the gravitational fields reaching out towards him. His speed was slowing slightly: he was moving a little to one side towards advancing Pluto.

Another hour passed. Pluto’s weight was three-quarters that of Genesis. Not a human sound was heard in the laboratory. It was a matter of waiting and watching for the consummation of this audacious effort to tame rampart Nature.

“In another hour and a half they will come into collision,” Jus said finally. “When that happens there will either be a double sun, with Genesis going around Pluto, or else Pluto will become the core of Genesis by reason of his immensely dense material being absorbed by him.”

“That is what I anticipate,” Valno acknowledged. “Unfortunately the Computing-Room is useless, so we do not know in advance what will transpire. But figures cannot lie,” he finished confidently. “They are bound to give the correct result.”

“But sometimes even the result has far-reaching aftereffects,” Jus commented, frowning. “For some reason I am uneasy.”

Valno shrugged and glanced across at the Pluto balance-graph. It balanced. The weight of Pluto and Genesis was equal. He gave the order for the neutronic stream to be cut off. The energy beam returned, again holding Pluto in its grip, guiding it inevitably so there could not be the least chance of it missing Genesis.

Jus watched the screens, brooding. He studied the viciously bright disc of Genesis as he swung far out of his appointed course towards the smaller, faintly gleaming mass of Pluto.

“Even if there were some mistake,” he muttered, “even if the impact were insufficient to halt Genesis and he went onwards into space, he would not again cross our path. His orbit has been forever changed. Pluto has pulled him to one side.”

“There will be no mistake,” Valno stated without turning. “There can be no mistake. Genesis will be our sun: that is the purpose of this entire struggle. That and to save the childish third-worlders from absolute disaster.”

Silence fell again, save for the droning engines. In the screens it was possible now to behold vast streaming tides of gaseous matter rising from the Plutonian side of Genesis. The attractive field was tearing savagely at his photosphere.

Valno frowned. “Strange!” he whispered. “Can it be—another Solar System? I had reckoned that the speed of approach would prevent such an occurrence—”

He stopped, staring blankly. Jus joined him. A titanic arm of incandescent flame spouted from Genesis, broke close the surface and went whirling off in globes of superheated gas.

“More worlds to come!” Jus cried. “For all your calculations creation has repeated itself, Valno. Before Genesis has been able to strike Pluto, a System has been born—a System which may—”

He gripped the ruler’s arm tightly. Pluto and Genesis were almost in coincidence. The distance between them shrank to zero. They collided—and with that collision something happened.

Genesis did not close around Pluto! It did not turn it into an unthinkably heavy core of flaming, dense material. Instead, the wandering interloper exploded into a myriad blinding pieces which hurled themselves to all sides of the Infinite.

Valno leapt to his feet in alarm.

“Shattered!” he cried hoarsely. “Our intended sun blown into fragments—fragments to become dead hulks of the future! Oh, why did this have to happen? Why did I not foresee that the hurling of Pluto into that body would cause such an uprush of interior matter as to stop Genesis holding together? The speed—the sudden change in temperature as ice-cold Pluto plunged—”

He fell silent, staring bleakly around him, listening to the now uselessly-humming engines of the electro-magnetic beam. In those few seconds all the strength seemed to have gone out of him.

“I failed,” he whispered. “I failed!”

“Not entirely,” Jus said quietly. “Your calculating was superb. You worked everything out right up to the moment of impact. Beyond that you couldn’t go. Only the Computing-Room machinery could have done that, and without it—”

Valno made an effort. “Well, at least we saved that other System from disaster. We’ve destroyed the interloper forever, but we have not given ourselves a sun and surface life. All we can do is go on living below. Those shattered fragments will become innumerable asteroids. That other System born of Genesis will never contain life: it is too far from any source of warmth.”

He turned wearily from the control board and surveyed the despondent faces about him. Then suddenly he looked up sharply at an intrusive note clearly audible above the engines—the sound of a mighty, thunderous roaring from somewhere overhead.

He swung round in surprise; then Jus shouted—”Look! Look!” He jabbed a finger towards the screens. They were glaring—eye-searing with brilliant fire. The projector tower had utterly vanished. In its place was a roaring fountain of staggering flame.

The thundering increased. The laboratory began to quake. Shouts of panic dinned above it.

“What’s—what’s happened?” Jus demanded helplessly.

Valno stared straight in front of him. “It is the basic material of our oceans and atmosphere! The oxygen and hydrogen, frozen up there on the surface. No trace of other gases as yet: that was to come later. The vibrations of heat from that awful explosion in space have somehow passed down our electro-magnetic beam, ignited the oxygen and hydrogen, helped by the water vapour from our outlet ventilation shafts. Our planet is on fire!” he finished desperately. “Biting down through the rocks, down the shafts, down here—to us!”

He could no longer make himself heard. The laboratory was a jammed mass of struggling figures. Science, dignity, years of defeating fear—these attributes had gone to the winds. The whole planet was in the grip of devouring flame.

Jus twirled round from the panic-stricken, stampeding mob and clutched his ruler by the arm. “Valno, listen to me! Do something! There must be some way out of this. There must—”

“There is none,” Valno answered him. “In a few minutes the remaining traces of oxygen and hydrogen, frozen into innumerable sub-surface cracks and crevices, will ignite. Then—”

He stopped talking and wheeled about as a fountain of fire roared from the oxygen and hydrogen tanks. A split second, then they spewed outwards in a deluge of shattered metal. Flame spouted into the laboratory, transforming it into an inferno, seizing on the countless inflammable chemicals in their containers.

“So it ends!” Valno clenched his fists. “I can imagine those childish third-worlders jumping for joy because they are saved. I can imagine them wondering what has brought a new star into being, wondering even more when it flickers out. I can imagine them trying to discover whither went Pluto—”

He turned, that he might not see the flames racing towards him.