There was a glassite pane, but we could find no door. In our hands we
held small electronic bolt-cylinders, short-range weapons.
The hum and hissing was louder. It seemed to throb within us, as
though vibration were communicating to every fiber of our bodies.
Light was streaming through the glassite pane, and we glimpsed the
interior of the room. The light now came from a strange mechanism set
in the center of the metal cubby. I caught only an instant's glimpse
of it, a round thing of coils and wires. The metal floor of the room
was cut away, exposing the gray rock of Manhattan Island. And against
the rock, in a ten-foot circle, a series of discs were contacted, with
wires leading from them to the central coils.
The whole was glowing with opalescent light. It was dazzling,
blinding. Within in it the goggled figure of Molo was moving,
adjusting the contacts. He stooped. He straightened, drew back from
the light.
Only an instant's glimpse, but we saw the girls, crouching with black
bandages on their eyes. Meka, goggled like her brother, was holding
them. A tall shape carrying a round black box darted through the light
and ran. Molo leaped for the girls; the hum had mounted to a wild
electrical scream. Molo flung his sister back out of the light.
They all vanished. There was nothing but the light, and the mounting
dynamic scream.
Beside me, Snap was pounding on the glassite panel. I joined him.
Everything was dreamlike, blurring as though unconsciousness was upon
me.
Where was Snap? Gone? Then I saw him nearby. He had found a door, but
it wouldn't yield. I saw his arm go up in a gesture to me.
He ran; I found myself running after him, but I stumbled and fell.
Then over me the scream burst into a great roar of sound. It seemed so
intense, so gigantic a sound that it must ring around the world.
And the light burst with an exploding puff. The black metal cubby
walls seemed to melt like phantoms in a dream. A titan's blowtorch,
the opalescent light shot upward, a circular ten-foot beam, eating its
way through all the city levels as though they were paper, up through
the city roof.
Molo's cubby was gone. His mechanism was eaten by the light and
destroyed. There was only this motionless, upstanding beam, contacted
here with the Earth, streaming like an opalescent sword into the
starry sky.
5
I must paint now upon a broader canvas to depict the utter chaos of
this most memorable night in the history of the Earth, Venus and Mars.
From that point in the bowels of Greater New York, near the southern
tip of Manhattan Island, the mysterious light-beam shot up. It
screamed with its weird electrical voice for an hour, so penetrating a
sound that it was heard with the unaided ears as far away as
Philadelphia. A titan voice it was, shrill as if with triumph. There
were millions of people awakened by it this night; awakened and struck
with a chill of fear at this nameless siren shrilling its note of
danger. The sound gradually subsided; it seemed to reach its peak
within a few minutes of the appearance of the light, and within an
hour it had ceased.
But the light beam remained. Those who inspected it closely have given
a clear description of its aspect; but to this day its real nature has
never been determined.
It was a circular beam of about a ten-foot diameter. In color it was
vaguely opalescent, rather more brilliant at night than in the day.
With the coming of the sun it did not fade, but remained clearly
visible, with a spectrum sheen when the sunlight hit it so that it had
somewhat the appearance of a titanic, straightened rainbow.
From that contact point with our Earth, the inexplicable beam stood
vertically upward. It ate a vertical hole like a chimney up through
all the city levels, through the roof and into the sky. It had a
tremendous heat, communicable by contact so that it melted the city
above it with a clean round hole. But the heat was non-radiant.
I was found lying within fifty feet of the base of the beam. There had
been an explosion, so that Molo's metal room was gone; but from where
I lay there was only a warmth to be felt from the light.
Halsey's men found me within half an hour. I was unconscious but not
injured. I think now that the sound and not the light overcame me. I
presently recovered consciousness; for another hour I was blind and
deaf, but that quickly wore off. They rushed me through the chaos of
the city to the Tappan Headquarters. Grantline was there, but not
Snap. I sent them back when once I was fully conscious. They searched
all the vicinity at the base of the light. Snap, alive or dead, was
not to be found.
Anita and Venza were gone. I had seen Molo and Meka plunge away with
them as the light-beam burst forth. They were gone, and Snap was gone.
There was, by now, a turmoil unprecedented throughout all the
metropolitan area. The motionless light-beam itself had done little
damage, but its appearance brought instant chaos. Within a radius of
five miles of its base, the city was plunged into darkness. All power
was cut off. Every vehicle, even the aeros passing overhead, and, the
ventilating system stopped. Audiphones were wrecked; it subsided
within an hour, though, and after that, lights and instruments brought
into the area were not affected.
But during that hour, south Manhattan was in panic. A multitude of
terrified people awakened in the night to find blackness and that
screaming sound. The streets and corridors and traffic levels were
jammed with throngs trampling and killing one another in their efforts
to escape.
This was in the stricken area; but everywhere else the panic was
spreading. Transportation systems were almost all out of commission.
The panic spread until by dawn there was a wild exodus of refugees
jamming the bridges and viaducts and tunnels, streaming from all the
city exits.
This was Greater New York. But from Venus and Mars came similar
reports. In Grebhar and in Ferrok-Shahn, doubtless almost simultaneous
with Greater New York, similar light-beams appeared.
"But what can it be?" I demanded of Grantline. "Something Molo
contacted there? He did it. That was what he was working for, and he
accomplished his purpose. But what will the beam do to us?"
"It's doing plenty," said Grantline grimly.
"He didn't intend that. There was something else."
But what? As yet, no one knew. I had already told the authorities what
I had seen. I was the only eye-witness to Molo's activities; and
heaven knows I had but a brief, confused glimpse.
The beam remained; it streamed upward from the rock. They thought,
this night, that Molo's strange current had set up a disintegration of
the atoms, and that electronic particles from them were streaming into
space.
The light-beam seemed impervious to attack. Within a few hours the
authorities were attacking its base with various vibratory weapons but
without success.
From where Grantline and I sat, we saw the dawn coming. But the
radiance-beam remained unaffected. "Gregg, look there at Venus!"
To the east of us there was a distant line of metal structures
surmounting the mid-Westchester hills; above them, in the brightening
sky of dawn, Venus was just rising. Mars had already set at our
longitude. Venus, fairly close to the Earth now, was the "Morning
Star."; it mounted now above that line of metal stages in the
distance.
And as Grantline gestured, I saw from Venus the same sword-like beam
streaming off almost to cross our own.
Grantline and I, with a mutual thought, ran around the balcony and
gazed to where Mars had set. A narrow radiance was streaming up among
the stars off there.
Three swinging swords of light in the sky! With the rotation of the
planets, they swept the firmament. The mysterious enemy had planted
them--but why? What was coming next?
And as though to answer us, from far to the south, over mid-Jersey,
came a new manifestation. We saw a speck rising, a distant mounting
speck of something dark, with streamers of tiny radiance flowing from
it.
"A spaceship, Gregg."
It seemed so. It came slowly from above the maze of distant
structures, gathered speed, and in a moment was gone.
But others, better equipped, had observed it. It was a cylindrical
projectile, with stream-fluorescence propelling it upward, an unusual
form of spaceship. Telescopically it was seen until well after dawn.
Speeding out in the direction of the Moon.
Molo and his weird allies had escaped, I thought. With their work
done here on Earth, they were off to rejoin the hovering enemy ship
200,000 miles out.
I stood gripping Grantline on that balcony, and gazed with sinking
heart. Were Anita and Venza prisoners on that mounting ship? And Snap:
I prayed he was there with the girls to lend them the protection I had
failed to give.
"Haljan and Grantline wanted below."
The voice of a mechanic on the balcony behind us roused us from our
thoughts. We went down through the busy building.
The workshops of Tappan Interplanetary Headquarters had for hours been
ringing with busy activity. The _Cometara_ rested upon her departure
stage outside, with a score of workmen conditioning her.
Newly-installed additional armament was aboard, ready to be assembled
after the start. The men to handle it were embarked. My half dozen
officers and the ten members of the crew I had already briefly met.
They were waiting for me.
"On we go, Gregg. Let's wish ourselves luck." From grim, silent
abstraction, Grantline had now sprung into his familiar dynamic self.
There was a solemn group of officers and a hundred or so workmen here;
they stopped their fevered labors now to watch the _Cometara_ get
away, first of Earth's ships speeding into space to confront this
nameless enemy. Grantline and I went past them with silent handshakes
and murmured good-bys. I saw the towering figure of Brayley. He raised
an arm for a farewell gesture to us.
We mounted the incline to the _Cometara_. She rested upon her stage, a
great, sleek bronze ship, low and rakish, with pointed ends and a
flattened, arched turtle-back dome of glassite covering the
superstructure and the decks from bow to stern. She lay quiescent,
gleaming in the glow of the departure beacons; but there was an aspect
of latent power upon her.
My ship! My first command! As we went through the opened port of the
domeside and I touched foot upon the deck, I prayed that I might
justify the faith reposed in me.
Men crowded the narrow, covered deck. I saw the space-guns at the deck
pressure-ports, partly assembled. My chief officer, a young fellow
named Drac Davidson, who with his twin brother had been in the
Interplanetary Freight Service, rushed up to me.
"We're ready, sir."
"Very good, Drac."
He hurried me to the turret control room. Grantline instantly had
plunged into details of assembling the weapons.
"Her ports are all closed," said Drac. He spoke calmly, but his thin
face was pale and his dark eyes glowed with excitement. "The interior
pressure is set at fifteen pounds. You can ring us up at once."
No formalities to this departure! With pounding heart I entered the
small circular turret and mounted its tiny spiral stairs to the upper
control room. But as I touched the levers, calmness came to me with
these familiar tasks at which I was skilled.
I slid a central-hull gravity-plate. It went smoothly, perfectly
operated by the magnets. The vessel trembled, lifted; outside the
enclosing dome I could see the dawn-light of the sky and paling
floodlights of the stage. Figures of men out there, made silent
gestures of farewell, dropping slowly beneath our hull as we lifted.
The bow gravity-plates slid into the repulsive-force positions. The
bow lifted. The _Cometara_ responded smoothly. We went up, poised at a
forty-five degree angle. I saw the outer beacons on the stage swing
upward with their warning to passing traffic in the lower lanes.
"Light our bow-beacon, Drac."
We lifted through the lower thousand and two thousand-foot lanes. The
lights of Tappen were dwindling beneath us. The interior of the
_Cometara_ was humming with the whirr of its circulators and
air-receivers, mingled with the throb of air pressure pumps. At three
thousand feet I started the air-rocket engines. They came on with a
gentle purring. The fluorescence from them streamed along our hull and
down past the stern, like twin rocket tails.
With gathering speed we slid smoothly upward through the highest
traffic lanes, out of the atmosphere, through the stratosphere and
into space.
Leaving the stratosphere, I cut off the air-rocket engines, slid the
stern gravity-plates for the Earth's repulsion and the bow plates for
the attraction of the Moon and Sun. The firmament swung, in a slow
arc, and steadied with the Earth behind us and the Sun and Moon in
advance of our bow. We were on our course, plunging through space with
accelerating velocity toward the unknown enemy ship hovering two
hundred thousand miles ahead of us. My orders were to find the ship
and maneuver us close to it; and Grantline's orders were to assail it.
I gazed down at the convex North Atlantic with the reddening coastline
of North America spread like a map.
What was the nature of this strange enemy whom we sought? That
opalescent beam from Greater New York mounted with its radiance into
the dome-like starfield; the one from Venus and the other from Mars
seemed crossing overhead amid the stars.
Three swords crossing the sky! What did they mean?
* * * * *
"Will you swing east or west of the Moon?"
"We haven't decided."
Drac Davidson and I were alone in the _Cometara's_ control turret.
We were some ten hours out from Earth. Over such short astronomical
distances it was impossible to attain any great velocity. When once we
were clear of the Earth's atmospheric envelope, the rocket-stream
engines were useless. The _Cometara_ was equipped also with
tail-streamers of electronic nature. They exerted a slight pressure,
useful for sudden curving and turning; but they had only negligible
influence upon the main velocity of the vehicle.
I used the repulsion of the Earth upon our negatively charged stern
gravity-plates; and with those of the bow electronified to the
positive reaction, we were drawn forward by the Sun and the Moon.
For three or four hours I held to this combination with steady
acceleration; but then I had to retard. In close quarters such as
this, the retarding velocity must be calculated with a nicety many
hours in advance.
We hung now, very nearly poised, within some forty thousand miles of
the surface of the Moon. Bleak and cold, sharply black and white, it
hung in a gigantic crescent in advance of our bow. The Sun, whose
attraction I had ceased using some hours back, was visible sharply to
one side now. Its great gas streams of giant flame licked up into the
blackness of the firmament. The sunlight caught the lunar mountains
with a white glare, and left the valleys black with shadow; moonlight
and the mingled sunlight painted our bow. Behind our stem the great
disk of Earth hung somber and glowing.
And everywhere else was the great black enclosing firmament. The stars
blazed with a new white glory never seen through the haze of an
atmosphere. Like a little world in the vastness of this awesome void,
we hung poised.
Grantline came into the turret. "I've got everything ready, Gregg. By
the gods, once you can lay telescope upon that accursed enemy ship,
I'm ready to open fire on it."
"Good," I said.
But the thought of hurling our bolts at this enemy ship had struck
terror into my heart for hours past. I was convinced that the three
who in all the world were dearest to me--Anita, Venza, and Snap--were
upon that enemy vessel.