The Electronic Space Ray
The story of Officers Frye and O'Madden was greeted at the station
with incredulous smiles. Evidently these two doughty old members
of the force had been drinking too heavily; or else, like so many
thousands, had gone crazy with the heat. Nevertheless, thanks to
their allegations, two of their brother officers were dispatched to
investigate Philip Dunbar's apartment.
An hour later, they returned. Their uniforms were rumpled; their hair
lay loose and dishevelled across their sweaty red brows; their eyes
popped from their heads, and their hands shook and twitched with
nervous palpitations. Their experience was thus reported to Captain
Donnelley by Officer Halloran:
"We went up to that hell's nest, and worse luck to us! Got in without
any trouble, didn't we, Jensen? Somebody pulled the door open, and said
in the doggonest funniest voice you ever heard, 'Come in, earthlings,
we want some sport!' We knew then there was bats in somebody's belfry,
but went in anyway, and would you b'lieve it, there wasn't nobody near
the door. We walked further inside, and saw a guy working over a lot of
tubes and bottles; he said his name was Dunbar all right, and yelled
at us, 'I warn you, get out, before it is too late!' ... 'We've got
a warrant for your arrest,' says I, 'so you'd better come nice and
quiet.' At that he just laughed, didn't he, Jensen?"
"You'd of thought it was something funny, being arrested, by jiminy!"
affirmed Officer Jensen.
"Well, nobody wouldn't ever believe it, but before I could get to the
guy, the handcuffs was knocked right outer my hands," went on Halloran.
"Not by that fellow Dunbar, neither, curse him! He was over on the
other side of the room. Somebody hit me right through the air, with
something I couldn't see. May I be boiled in tar if I lie!"
"You sure oughter be boiled in tar, if you expect me to believe that
tommy-rot!" growled the Captain.
"Well, b'lieve it or not, that ain't nothing to what happened to me,"
Jensen took up the story. "I felt something grabbing me by the hair.
Yes, so help me God! I reached up my hand, and felt something cold and
hard, like a lobster's claw. But you still couldn't see a damned thing!"
"Ought of heard what a yell Jensen let out," Halloran continued. "Sure
was fit to wake the dead!"
"Oh, gwan!" countered Jensen. "'Twasn't nothing to the way you hollered
when you was pitched plumb across the room!"
"Well, who wouldn't holler if they was batted hard against the wall by
some invisible devil? I ain't boasting when I say I'm a tough nut to
crack, but when that thing, whatever it was, began tweaking my ears and
nose and saying, 'This is the way we'll twist your necks, earthlings,
if the likes of you ever come back here'--well then, what in thunder do
you think I'd do? Stay to get my neck twisted?"
The Captain meanwhile was smiling cynically.
"You boys sure must think I like fish stories!" he remarked.
It may not be that any one took Jensen and Halloran quite seriously.
Yet was it not hard to believe that four trusty old members of the
force had all gone crazy? The fact is, in any case, that when the
Captain considered sending two more men to the mysterious apartment, he
could find no one who did not threaten to resign from the force sooner
than accept the assignment.
* * * * *
Eleanor meanwhile, as Dunbar had predicted, had regained consciousness.
Yet she could give only a confused account of what had happened. "When
the bell began ringing so furiously," she testified, "I thought I
heard Dunbar stealing behind me, but paid no attention till suddenly I
felt a sharp jab in one arm. By then it was too late even to cry out.
Everything went black around me before I'd even had time to realize
he'd stabbed me again with the hypodermic."
Thanks to her entreaties and the testimony of the officers, she was
granted a bodyguard of two detectives; for, as she asserted, "The
minute I walk out by myself, that fiend will re-capture me. And I have
work to do--very important work, if the world is to be saved!"
Every one smiled in half-veiled amusement. Yet no one could deny the
deadly seriousness of the girl's manner.
No one could deny, either, that she was in danger from some mysterious
source. On the day after her release, two men in a taxicab swerved
suddenly around a street corner, and came within an inch of snatching
her from under the noses of the detectives. The would-be abductors,
though unsuccessful, made good their escape; and, later that same day,
a still more ominous event occurred.
Eleanor was walking in a fog not far from one of the city's main
intersections, when suddenly she felt something clutching her. She
cried out in her terror; and the detectives, though seeing nothing,
fired into the mist. Evidently it was a mere lucky shot that struck the
unseen aggressor under the left shoulder, at his "middle nerve center,"
his most vulnerable spot. At any rate, an unearthly howl came from
the invisible--and, more significant yet, a spout of something thick,
sticky and golden-orange jutted to the pavement as if from nowhere.
And the girl felt the claws of the invisible relaxing.
"Another damned attack of nerves," Police Captain Donnelley called it,
when the incident was reported. Yet, being unable to account for the
golden-yellow liquid, he consented to double the girl's bodyguard.
Knowing that the time was exceedingly short--in fact, to take
Dunbar's word for it, but four days of grace remained--she worked
with desperation. Her first idea was to obtain possession of Gates'
infra-red eye, which might show the authorities the cobweb meshes
that entangled the planet, and so perhaps rouse them to eleventh hour
action. But how obtain this invaluable device? Neither a search of the
laboratory, nor a ransacking of Gates' home, revealed any trace of
the instrument. Eleanor remembered in despair how, on that memorable
evening on the roof, the inventor dropped the device just as the
Saturnians swooped down; and she concluded that it had either been
broken, lost, or snatched up by the invaders.
* * * * *
Therefore she turned to her one other hope. For almost a year,
during spare hours in the laboratory, she had been working on what
she called the Electronic Space Ray--a beam designed to pierce and
dissolve the upper cloud formations. This ray, a modification of the
X-ray, engendered by an application of several hundred thousand volts
of electricity, had the power of cutting like a knife through any
mist, causing the vapors to disperse as though blown aside by a gale.
Its range, apparently, was enormous; Eleanor believed it capable of
bridging the gulf from the earth to the moon, and held that it would be
highly effective at several hundred miles.
Therefore the question arose: if the rays could dissipate a cloud,
could they not penetrate the gelatinous envelopes of the Crystal
Planetoids? Was it not conceivable that they could rip the Planetoids
apart, as a balloon may be ripped by a bullet? She did not know, but
the chance, however fantastic it seemed, was not to be ignored.
Surrounded by her four guards, she hastened to the laboratory of the
Merlin Research Institute; and, requiring solitude for efficient work,
busied herself from dawn to dusk and even through the early hours of
daylight to perfect her invention. Formerly she had expected to be able
to finish the contrivance at her leisure. But now with what feverish
haste she labored, scarcely taking time to eat, to sleep, to think
except of one thing only!
At first the fear haunted her that the Saturnians would break in, and
steal her away despite her bodyguard. But was it that the one lucky
shot, which had spilled the golden-orange blood of her attacker, had
deterred the invaders? More probably, they did not think her worth
bothering about--what could she, one poor feeble woman, do to avert the
doom that had been so well plotted, and that was so soon to descend?
The heat, as she worked, had risen to furnace intensity. Temperatures
below a hundred were now rarely found near sea level in the so-called
temperate regions; all breezes, except those engendered by electric
fans, were memories of the dear departed days; while so many areas were
parched and browned, so many people were perishing on all sides, that
bureau of statistics no longer kept records. That the long-awaited Day
of Judgment was at hand; that the destruction of the earth and all its
inhabitants was a matter but of weeks or at most of months, was now the
theme of preachers and laymen alike; millions, ceasing to hope, passed
their days amid a long mumbling of lamentations and prayers.
* * * * *
Meanwhile few knew or cared about the young woman who, with eyes red
and strained, with fingers deft yet nervously hurried, with skin and
apron mottled with chemicals, yet with a spirit that refused to give
up, labored amid the motors and ray-spouting tubes, the flasks and
crucibles of the steamy hot laboratory. Nearly five days had gone by
before she had put her machine into working order--five days which, in
view of the time lost under the spell of the hypodermic drug, should
bring her beyond the deadline set by Dunbar. Already, perhaps, he
had turned over the containers of compressed air to the Saturnians!
Already they were making their last deadly assault! Already it was too
late--too late to save the earth!
Nevertheless, if but one chance in ten thousand remained, that chance
must not be tossed aside.
Her machine, when ready, was a monstrous-looking affair, somewhat
resembling a siege-gun in appearance. The fifteen-foot steel snout,
shooting upward like a spire from the central mass of lenses, prisms
and radio-like tubes, was attached by wires to several huge dynamos. A
telescope, fastened to the side of the main tube, connected with the
range finder; while the whole could be moved hither and thither on
wheels, a little like a great gun on its carriage.
Three skilled mechanics, who had helped to construct the apparatus on
Eleanor's instructions, shook their heads doubtfully over the completed
instrument. "The lady must be crazy," they muttered in private, "if she
thinks such a rigamagig can save the world!"
The skeptics were, it is true, just a little impressed by the first
demonstration. The machine was wheeled into a courtyard adjoining the
Research Institute; and its mouth was pointed upward into the mists
that precluded visibility above a hundred feet. At a signal, the power
was turned on; there came a low whirring, accompanied by blue flashes;
and almost instantly, as if some unseen fist had thrust its way through
them, the vapors disappeared from a circle of sky about ten degrees
across, and the azure of heaven appeared for the first time in many
days.
Equally impressive was the next experiment. A number of open jars of
gelatin were placed against the walls of the building, and the machine
was pointed toward them. For half a dozen seconds they were bombarded
by the rays; then, upon examination, the gelatin was found to have
vanished--to have dissolved despite the intervening glass of the jars,
which themselves had seemingly been unaffected!
A faint glow of hope came to the girl's mind as she witnessed these
results. Could it be that, after all, not everything was lost? A
machine that could work such miracles might also perform wonders
against the Planetoids!
But even as this thought flashed over her, there came another
realization--a numb, dull realization that struck her like a hand of
lead. On one of the Planetoids, hundreds if not thousands of humans
were held--at least, so she judged from the reports of the many that
disappeared mysteriously after setting out to see Gates dangled
from the web of the invaders. Worst of all! The man she loved was a
prisoner! If she destroyed the Planetoids, she would destroy Ronald!
And after that, though the world lived on, what meaning would life have
for her?
But only for a moment did she hesitate. They had reached a point where
the fate of individuals did not matter. The sacrifice of all the
captives, lamentable as it would be--the sacrifice of her lover--the
sacrifice of herself--what did all this count beside the future of the
human race?
Gritting her teeth and clenching her fists, she turned back to the
Electronic Space Ray. Her eyes were desolate but her manner was
determined as she picked up the range finder and revolved the telescope
through a newly cleared circle of blue sky.