The Gathering of Earth's Forces
Staring ahead into space from the control-chair of our racing flier, I
heard Whitely's voice from beside me. "Seventeen days," he was saying.
"And in two more days we ought to reach Earth."
I nodded abstractedly, gazing ahead. "Two days at the most," I said.
"We're inside Jupiter's orbit now, and once through the asteroidal
belt, there'll be nothing to delay us."
For as Whitely and I gazed outward, Marlin and Randall sleeping
now in two of the space-flier's bunks, we could see that we were
approaching, indeed, that belt of whirling asteroids that marked the
division between the four inner and the four great outer planets of the
solar system. To the left, dropping behind us, gleamed the gigantic
cloud-belted sphere of Jupiter with its stately train of attendant
moons, as great a mystery to us as when we first had passed it. A side
force-ray was holding the flier out still from the mighty planet's
attraction, while ahead and to the right from us now gleamed crimson
Mars. Yet it was not these that held the eyes of Whitely and myself,
nor even the increasing fiery circle of the sun before us, but the
bluish-white little spot of light that was expanding slowly in size and
brilliance as we shot on toward it, the little spot of bluish light
that was our planet, Earth.
For days we had gazed toward that little light-spot as our space-flier
went on and on through the solar system's vast reaches toward it. For
seventeen days, now, even as Whitely had said, we had been racing
inward from Neptune at utmost speed on our desperate journey back to
our own world. The space-flier's great rear force-ray, pushing back
against giant Neptune, had hurled the flier in through the outer
reaches of our universe with an acceleration of velocity that was so
great as to prove almost our undoing. For more than once that terrific
pressure of that acceleration on us, despite our shock-absorbing
apparatus, had so affected our bodies as to overcome us with successive
fits of nausea and unconsciousness. And once, just after we had swept
in past great Saturn and its mighty rings, fearful of those great
rings after our former misadventure with them, I had awakened from my
sleep-period to find Randall and Marlin, in the control-chairs, quite
unconscious from the flier's terrific acceleration, the flier itself
speeding onward without any guiding hand on its controls.
Yet despite this we had grimly driven the flier to the utmost
acceleration possible, its speed steadily mounting toward the maximum
in those succeeding days that we flashed inward from Neptune.
For behind us Neptune's calm, green little disk of light, though
diminishing steadily in size as we receded from it, seemed like a
baleful signal of doom shining there behind us. For out from Neptune,
or rather out from its moon, Triton, the giant force-ray of the
Neptunians was still radiating toward the sun, thus shadowing all the
solar system with the cataclysmic doom to come. For, as we flashed
inward, Marlin had used his astronomical instruments to determine the
fact that the sun's rotatory period had now decreased to a little
over eight days, and was decreasing still by the same amount of four
hours each day, its spin accelerated each day by the same amount as
the colossal force-ray from Triton kept upon its side its unrelenting
pressure. And within half a hundred days more, as we knew, that
rotatory period of the sun would have decreased until its huge mass
would be spinning once in every hour, would be spinning then so fast
that it must inevitably be riven asunder into a new double star by its
own centrifugal force, engulfing all its planets save Neptune alone!
So it was that we spared not ourselves but drove the space-flier in
through the solar system toward Earth with a speed unthinkable, almost,
using an acceleration that was all but death for us. For the one hope
of preventing that colossal sun-cataclysm, as Marlin had said and as we
all knew, was to reach Earth soon and then at once fly back out from
Earth toward Neptune again with the great space-flier fleet, which, if
the World President and the World Congress had not failed us, would be
waiting on Earth for us. With that fleet we must sally back across the
solar system once more to its outer edge, to great Neptune, and must
fall upon Triton and the giant force-ray that was shooting from Triton
to the sun, with all our power. If we could vanquish the Neptunians
long enough to destroy the giant sun-ray's mechanism, to halt that
ray, we would have halted the acceleration of the sun's spin, would
have saved the sun and its planets from the cataclysmic doom that now
threatened them. But if we could not, if the Neptunians with their
countless cylinders and great weapons were too strong for us, then
we could but perish there in struggling with them, since in that case
nothing could halt the doom that they were loosing from Triton upon the
sun and the solar system.
And as Whitely and I gazed out through the flashing flier's windows, we
knew that scant enough was the time left for us in which to do these
things. Even if we were safe on Earth in the next two days, as we
hoped, there would remain but little more than forty days before the
coming of the dread cataclysm that threatened, and it would require
half that time for the space-fliers of Earth to make their way back out
across the solar system to Neptune. So that now there lay over my mind
that deepening shadow of impending colossal disaster that had hovered
over all our minds during the strange days of our racing inward through
the solar system, making me gaze somberly enough toward the bluish
light-spot in the darkness of space far ahead that was our goal now. To
the left, though, Jupiter's great globe had dropped far behind now, and
as I saw that I cut out our side-ray, and turned toward Whitely.
"We're at the edge of the asteroidal belt now," I told him, "but I'm
not going to slow our speed. We'll just flash on through it and take
our chance."
He nodded gravely. "I'll wake Marlin and Randall now to help me keep
watch," he said.
A moment later, having done so, Marlin and Randall freed themselves
of the straps of the bunks and climbed across the flier to take their
places beside Whitely in watching for the great menacing asteroids. And
as we passed on through the belt of those whirling perils, Marlin and
Whitely and Randall watched for hour on hour there beside me, though so
vast was the maximum speed at which our flier was going now, more than
eight million miles an hour, that before they could more than get a
flashing glimpse of a nearby asteroid we would have passed it. We were
relying almost wholly on blind chance to take us through the asteroidal
belt at that lightning speed, yet so desperate was this grim race back
to Earth from the solar system's edge, that we preferred to trust thus
to chance, rather than to slow our speed or to delay by an hour our
arrival on Earth. And chance, for the time, favored us, for some hours
later we had won through the perils of the asteroidal belt without
more than a few split-second glimpses of the great whirling spheres of
peril. And then, as we shot across the orbit of Mars with the planet's
dull red shield still farther to the right, I began to slow our
terrific speed, for by this time the Earth was expanding rapidly before
us.
And now, too, the sun was flaming before us, in all the halo-like
glory of its great corona, with a brilliance blinding to our eyes
after the dim shades of Neptune and its moon. Yet even with that
brilliance dazzling us we could make out plainer and plainer the sphere
of Earth, seeming to our eyes a thin silver-blue crescent as it spun
there between our inrushing flier and the sun, its tiny moon-spot
growing brighter too. Marlin and Whitely and Randall watching tensely
beside me, I cut out altogether the great force-ray at the flier's
rear, which, even when our speed had reached its maximum, drove us
straight onward and kept that speed unvarying against the gravitational
influences from either side which were not large enough to require an
opposing side-ray. Snapping that rear-ray out, I sent another force-ray
from the flier toward the Earth-sphere ahead, and as that ray struck
and pushed us back with immense power, the space-flier's colossal speed
was gradually decreasing.
* * * * *
Once more we felt terrific upward and forward pressure in our chairs
as the flier's speed steadily slowed, dropped swiftly from eight
million miles an hour to six and then to five and then to three. And
as we shot in thus toward Earth, the millions of miles dropping slower
behind as our flier's great faceted ball clicked through space at
slower and slower speed, I knew the same question was in the minds
of my three friends as in my own. It was reflected in the tensely
anxious eyes of Marlin and the imperturbable eyes of Whitely and the
unwontedly grave eyes of Randall as the three stared ahead with me.
Would the space-fliers that the World President and the World Congress
had promised to build be ready? If not, we knew we certainly could not
venture out to Neptune and put an end to the great doom-ray that the
Neptunians were stabbing toward the sun. So that it was in a growing
suspense of spirit that we watched Earth's sphere, with its crescent of
bluish-white light at one side, expanding before us.
At ever slower speed we were rushing in toward it, and at last, moving
at but a few hundred thousand miles an hour by this time, were driving
in out of the void and past Earth's shining moon, gleaming in space to
our right, its great ranges and strange craters clear to our eyes from
its airless surface. But now all our eyes were on Earth ahead, since
now through the drifting cloud-masses that floated in its atmosphere
we could make out the great bluish globe's surface features, could
see that western Europe and North Africa lay in the sunlight in that
crescent of light at Earth's side, but that the North and South
Americas lay in the shade of Earth's outer side, in the darkness of
night. It was toward the dark half-seen outline of North America that I
was heading the flier, for by this time, traveling still more slowly,
our velocity now being less than a thousand miles an hour, we were
entering Earth's atmosphere, the rarefied air of its outer reaches
roaring about the flier as it shot through it.
"Straight to New York--to the World Congress," Marlin was saying.
"There's not a minute to lose."
I nodded silently, at the same time snapping out the front-ray of the
flier that was slowing our speed as we shot toward Earth's surface, and
as its gravitation gripped the flier we were turning until instead of
rushing onward we were falling to its surface from high above, as it
turned in space before us, falling down toward the surface of the North
American continent, whose outline was visible from our great height
through the shifting cloud-screen. I felt my heart beating rapidly as
we shot thus downward, forgot almost the mighty import of the mission
on which we were returning in the mere fact of our return; for we were
first of all men to venture thus into the outer void and to return from
that void to Earth! And as we shot downward I saw the same thought
mirrored in the faces of the others, staring down with me.
Down--down--with an oblique ray I was making the space-flier fall
slantingly, more and more slowly, toward the northeastern coast of the
continent beneath, whose broad, brown surface stretched out greater
and greater beneath us. Moments more and as the roar of air about us
intensified, mingling with the throbbing of our generators, we shot
down from the sun's light into the darkness of this dark side of
Earth, this night of Earth's one side. But now its great surface was
changing from convex to concave beneath us, and now as we shot lower
still Randall pointed downward and northward with a low cry toward a
spark of bright red light, the beam of the great air-beacon of the
trans-Atlantic air-liners, at New York. Slower--slower--and in moments
more the vast mass of its towering cylindrical buildings, ablaze with
outlining lights, was coming into view, with midmost among them the
greatest of all, the huge mass of the World Government building.
As our space-flier dropped slowly toward that mighty structure beneath
my controlling hands, as it dropped toward the swarms of bright-lit
aircraft that were moving to and fro over the great city, so familiar
was the scene beneath to us four cosmic voyagers that almost did our
great journey, our mighty flight out through the sun's planets through
the countless leagues of space to great Neptune, and our grotesque and
dream-like adventures upon Neptune and its moon, seem to us indeed
no more than dreams. But as we shot lower we were startled from this
strange state of mind by one of the aircraft beneath, showing the
customary red and green position-lights along its hull, driving up
through the darkness toward our smoothly falling space-flier. We saw
the three men in the control-room of the craft gazing amazedly toward
the gleaming, faceted metal ball of our flier as they circled us, and
then from their craft had burst out a score of brilliant vari-colored
signal-lights. And as these blazed out there came a moment later an
answering blaze of lights from each of the swarming craft below, that
shot up now in hundreds toward our falling flier, crowding crazily
about it!
Down through the darkness we dropped still, those swarms of aircraft
almost jostling us as they seethed thickly in terrific excitement about
us. As we shot downward over New York's surface we saw that across all
the vast city, and far across the great air-docks to the south even,
signal-lights were blazing out, a wild panorama of bursting lights
stretching out in all directions! From beneath, too, there came up
to us now a terrific roar of mingled voices, the vast crowds in the
streets of the huge city sending their cheering cries up to us in a
great thunder-roll of sound as we fell toward them. And as I held the
space-flier to its smooth drop downward amid the swarming aircraft, I
saw that Marlin and Randall, and even Whitely, were gazing across those
vast, shouting throngs and across the swarms of madly-darting aircraft
that encircled us, with somber, thoughtful faces.
Now we were falling a few hundred feet above the roof of the World
Government building, on which a little knot of figures awaited us, and
as I gazed from it across the other roofs of the great city I uttered
a low exclamation. "On the roofs--you see?" I asked. "Those things of
metal--those space-fliers----!"
But they too were gazing toward the roofs, toward the innumerable
crystal-like metal forms that we could half-recognize on those roofs in
the darkness. But a glimpse only we had of them before the space-flier
was sinking downward to the great roof itself, and as Marlin saw the
knot of figures on that roof he half-turned. "The World President," he
said, quietly, "waiting for us on the roof."
That roof's flat expanse was just beneath us, covered itself with
other great crystal-like gleaming fliers, but with a clear space at
its center where once had stood our space-flier's framework. There was
no framework there now, but smoothly I brought the flier down upon
that space, down to the roof, poised it a moment a foot above it, and
then let it sink to the roof's surface and opened a half-dozen of the
switches before me, the throbbing of the generators that had been
enduring for so long ceasing and giving way to an unaccustomed silence
that was strange to our ears. Then Marlin had turned, was opening the
inner door, and in another moment the outer one had swung open also, a
flood of cool, clean air rushing in upon us. Marlin leading, we stepped
out, stood unsteadily for a moment on the great roof's surface beneath
the brilliance of the lights that flared above it.
From beneath and above came still through the night the unceasing roar
of the great crowds in the huge city's streets and the hum of its
swarming, seething aircraft, and then we saw that the little group of
men on the roof beside us were coming toward us, the World President
at their head. His strong, keen eyes were steady upon us as he came
forward, his hands outstretched, and then he had gripped our own hands,
was holding them for a moment in silence. In that moment we were
all four swaying a little as we stood there, gazing about us at the
far-flung lights of the great city around us, at the men before us, at
the strangely-dulled stars overhead, as though never had we seen them
before. When the World President spoke, his human-sounding voice seemed
strange even to our ears.
"Marlin--Randall--Whitely--Hunt--" he said. "You have come back then
from your mission?"
"We've come back--from Neptune," Marlin said simply.
"The World Congress is already gathered--is waiting for you," said the
other, as simply, and then with him and the officials about him we
were walking toward the stair-opening in the great roof, were walking
through ranks of the great looming faceted things of metal that I saw
now clearly were replicas each of our own polyhedron-like space-flier!
Down through that opening we went, down stairs after stairs until we
were emerging through a high door on the raised platform at the end
of the great room in which the World Congress awaited us. Brilliant
white light flooded that room and in it, in silent row upon row, were
seated the twelve hundred members of the great Congress. As we four
entered, with the World President and his officials, there was turned
instantly toward us every eye, and a tense hush of utter silence
settled in which our own steps seemed loud to our ears. There were no
shouts or cheering cries from the Congress' members, in that moment,
for all knew that what they were to hear now from us was the word of
hope or hopelessness for Earth, the report of our great mission upon
which rested Earth's single chance for life. And as I stared across
the great, silent Congress in that moment, there flashed upon the
screen of my mind, strangely enough, a picture of that other silent,
solemn council before which Marlin and I had stood but a few days
before, that Council of Thirty of the strange Neptunians whose great
synthesizing globe-mechanism had spoken to us. Then, as we stood there,
the World President was stepping forward to address the Congress.
"There is no need for me to tell you who are the four men standing here
before you," he said. "Marlin--Whitely--Randall--Hunt--these four who
went out to Neptune on the Earth's behalf, and whom Earth has tensely
awaited now for weeks. I do not know, any more than you, what they
found there, what chance for Earth they found or failed to find. And
it is that that we, the representatives of the world's peoples, now
wait to hear from Marlin, the leader of this great expedition." Utter
silence held all present.
* * * * *
And as the World President stepped back, Marlin, unsteady still from
our unaccustomedness to Earth's gravitation, and with face drawn, but
eyes steady and bright, was stepping forward. Facing the great rank on
rank of members of the World Congress he stood, while we others slipped
into the seats behind him, facing them for a moment in tense silence
as he summoned his energies to speak. In that moment, as my eyes roved
across the great hall, I made out the faces of many there known to
me, the face, just beneath our platform, was that of my chief at the
Intelligence Bureau, Markham, the faces of many others, strange and yet
familiar, all turned now toward Marlin. And then, in a voice low at
first but gaining in power as he went on, Marlin was speaking to them,
his words sounding out through the great room in a hushed, unnatural
silence.
He began by reviewing in a few sentences the colossal peril that had
threatened and was threatening us, the increased spin of the sun
beneath Neptune's mighty ray that soon must result in its division and
the solar system's doom. Then, with a reference to that other gathering
of the World Congress at which our venture out to Neptune had been
decided upon, he came to the start of that venture. While they listened
in utter tenseness he told of our start, of our going out from Earth
first of all men into the outer void, out past the mysteries of Mars
with greater and greater speed. Our onward flight through the terrible
dangers of the great asteroidal belt and our narrow escapes in it, our
outward rush past mighty Jupiter--these he described in his steady
voice, and we felt the tenseness that held all in the great room in
dead silence. He told them of what doom had nearly been ours at Saturn,
of our fall toward its great rings of death and our narrow escape from
them.
Then, with a little pause, he was going on, was telling of our onward
flashing flight beyond Saturn out through the vast outer reaches of
the solar system, out past the orbit of Uranus toward Neptune itself.
In utmost suspense they listened as he told of our arrival at last at
Neptune, of our amazement at finding that giant world shielded with an
enclosing roof of metal, and of our greater amazement at finding that
world, the colossal city that covered it, utterly dead and deserted.
Low exclamations of surprise broke from his listeners then as he
narrated how he and I had been surprised in the dead city of Neptune by
the coming of the Neptunians in their cylinders, their attack upon and
pursuit upward of Whitely and Randall in the space-flier, their capture
of ourselves and their taking us from Neptune out to the moon-world of
Triton. And a low wave of uncontrollable excitement swept across the
great room as Marlin told those in it of the roofed and warmed world of
Triton and the countless millions of Neptunians on it, and above all of
the giant force-ray that was stabbing from Triton's sunward side toward
the sun and loosing doom upon us!
And that excitement intensified when he told of what else we had found
at Triton, of the other giant force-ray stabbing out from its other
side toward a distant star of Sagittarius, of our captivity there and
our learning of the Neptunian tongue, our being brought before the
great Council of thirty of the Neptunian races. I saw the hundreds
before us listening with abated breath as he told them that gigantic
epic of the solar system's past that had been told us by the great
globe-mechanism of the Council, that story of the Neptunians' past
history and of the great doom of increasing cold that had driven them
from Neptune to Triton and that now had caused them to seek to split
the sun itself to thwart that doom. How they had sent out toward that
star in Sagittarius another great force-ray years before, to brace
Triton against the back-pressure of the sun-ray and to keep it from
being hurled out into the great void, how they had finally sent out the
great force-ray toward the sun also, turning the sun ever faster toward
the doom of all the other planets, planning to wreck the universe to
save their own race. These things he told them through the hushed
silence that again had replaced their stir and murmur of excitement.
But excitement held them again when he told how he and I, desperate
at the doom we saw hanging thus over Earth, had made our wild attempt
to escape from Triton, had dared to cross its surface and had stolen
a cylinder, crashing up through the great roof and out from Triton
in that cylinder with their pursuit close behind us, how we had been
saved from that pursuit by Whitely and Randall in the space-flier,
who, although we had thought them dead, had managed to elude their own
attackers by a ruse and had hovered near Triton in hopes of saving us;
how in the space-flier we had fled back from Triton over Neptune and
had smashed our pursuers, while we and they were over Neptune; these
things, his voice deep now, he told to the hundreds of his listeners.
And then, swaying a little from sheer utter weariness of body and
spirit, Marlin told them how we, knowing that never alone could we halt
or even reach that giant ray driving from Triton toward the sun, had
headed back for Earth at the utmost speed of which we were capable, had
flashed back like some great messenger-meteor through the solar system
to Earth to carry to the peoples of Earth word of what we had found,
to gather the forces of Earth and head back to Neptune with them for a
last gallant attempt to halt that mighty ray of doom!
When Marlin's voice had ceased, when he had stepped unsteadily back
from the platform's edge, his words seemed reverberating still through
the hushed silence that prevailed among the twelve hundred massed
members of the World Congress. Then again the World President, his own
face as set and strange now as those of the massed members before him,
was stepping forward to face them.
"You have heard the report of Dr. Marlin and his three companions,"
he said, quietly, "and you, and I, and the peoples of Earth listening
now, know what situation faces us, what last necessity, even as was
foreseen, has arisen before us. That giant force-ray of which Marlin
told you, that colossal ray which these Neptunians are stabbing toward
the sun's edge from their far moon-world of Triton, is turning the sun
ever faster, as all of you know, is decreasing its rotatory period by
four hours each passing day. Within hardly more than forty days it will
have decreased the sun's rotatory period to that fatal period of one
hour, will have increased its spin to that critical fatal speed, at
which the sun must inevitably divide into a double sun, a double star,
engulfing our planet, and almost all others, in fiery death in that
cosmic cataclysm. This is known to you and you know, too, that it is
only by halting that giant force-ray from Triton that we can save our
sun, our world, from that tremendous cataclysm.
"This much we have known, indeed, and now with what knowledge these
four men have brought back from their unparalleled venture out through
the gulf of space to the solar system's edge, to Neptune itself,
you know also what lies before us. We have, indeed, built during
the absence of Marlin and his three friends that great fleet of
space-fliers, which we had decided to build. Using the plans of their
original space-flier and applying all our efforts toward achieving a
quantity production of space-fliers on those plans, we have been able,
as you know, to construct in their absence no less than five thousand
space-fliers exactly like their own, space-fliers that rest now upon
the roofs of New York's great buildings around us, complete now with
trained crews and ready to start! The gathering of Earth's forces has
thus already taken place!
"And upon this great fleet of space-fliers rests now the fate of the
solar system! For that fleet must go out through the solar system now
to Neptune and halt the giant ray radiating from Triton's sunward
side toward the sun, if the solar system is to live. What perils,
what opposition that fleet will meet, Marlin has made clear to you.
These Neptunians, most ancient and mighty of the solar system's
peoples, are of colossal powers, such powers that they are scrupling
not at splitting the sun itself! They have thousands of their great
space-cylinders that can whirl through space as swiftly and as well
as our own space-fliers. They have as weapons their concentrated
force-rays, which we must provide for the fliers of our own fleet
before it leaves. They have an ancient science and might that can
produce we know not what weapons against us, and they know that our
four first venturers escaped back to Earth, and will be expecting now
an attack from us, will resist that attack with all their powers,
undoubtedly, since they are fighting for the existence of their races,
their world, even as we are fighting for ours!
"Thus this great fleet of five thousand space-fliers of ours goes out
to battle, to battle between the races of Neptune and Earth that must
decide the fate of the solar system for all time. There can be but one
fit to lead this fleet out to such battle, and that is Marlin himself,
who was the first to discover this peril that hangs over us, who was
one of the first to suggest a means of struggling against that peril,
and who has led this first daring venture out through a thousand perils
to Neptune, and back again to Earth with the knowledge without which we
could not act. So that it is he, with these three companions of his,
Whitely and Hunt and Randall, who dared all with him and who have done
for Earth what he has done, as his three lieutenants, who must command
this great expedition of ours which we are sending out to halt the
oncoming doom, these gathered forces of all the Earth!
"For it is this great fleet of space-fliers, with Marlin at its head,
which alone can halt that doom now! If that fleet can win safely out
through the perils of the interplanetary void to Neptune, can win to
Triton's sunward side against the opposition of the Neptunians and can
destroy the controls and generators of their great sun-ray, can halt
that ray, the sun's spin will cease to accelerate and our planet and
the other planets will have been saved. But if our fleet cannot do
this, if the Neptunians prevent it from reaching the great sun-ray's
source, and from halting that ray, then the sun will spin on ever
faster and within two-score more days will split at last and engulf in
the diverging fires of its two new suns, all the planets save Neptune.
For it is this great space-fleet of ours, heading out now toward the
last great battle of Earth's and Neptune's races, which alone now can
prevent the accelerating speed of the sun and the consequent wrecking
of our universe!"