"The transparent ray is opening the top of the globe."
The clanging signal gong had stilled. The audience was hushed and
expectant. The white patch of light overhead spread until it
encompassed all the top of the globe. The whole area was glowing. The
people were white, spectral shapes, transparent! And the top of the
globe was transparent; I saw the night sky, with the gleaming reddish
stars.
It was, in a moment, as though we were staring up at a huge square
window orifice cut in the top of the room. A broad vista of cloudless
sky and stars was visible. Across it, like a shining sword, was a
narrow, opalescent beam.
"The Earth-beam which I planted," Molo whispered triumphantly. "Our
control station will contact with it now. The first contact!"
Earth was below our angle of vision, but the beam from Greater New
York, sweeping the sky with the Earth's rotation, was passing now
comparatively close to Wandl.
There was an expectant moment. Then into the sky leaped another ray,
narrow, luridly green. It swung up from Wandl and darted into space.
The hissing, agonized electrical scream from it as it burst through
the Wandl atmosphere was deafening. I saw it strike the Earth-beam,
grip it with a blinding burst of radiance up there in the sky,
clinging, pulling against the rotation of the Earth with a lever sixty
million miles long.
A moment of screaming sound in the atmosphere around us, and that
conflict of light in the sky. Then the screaming suddenly stilled. The
Wandl beam vanished.
The Earth-beam still swept the heavens like a stiff, upstanding sword.
But in that moment when Wandl gripped it, the axis of the Earth had
been changed a little. The rotation was slowed. By a few minutes, the
day and the night on Earth were lengthened.
It was the beginning of Earth's desolation.
11
"But when do we eat?" Snap demanded.
"Soon," said Molo.
"I hope so."
We were leaving the great room as we had come. Walking? I can only
call it that, though the word is futile to describe our progress as we
made our way to the lighted esplanade, across its side and into what
might have been called a street. Globular houses, single, or one set
upon another, or half a dozen swaying on a stick, gardens of
vegetables and flowers. I saw what seemed to be a round patch of
hundred-foot tree-stalks, like a thick batch of bamboo. It was laced
and latticed thick with vines.
"A house," Snap murmured. "That's a house."
Another type of dwelling. This patch of vegetable growth, so flimsy it
was all stirring with the movement of the night breeze, was woven into
circular thatched rooms, birds' nests of little dwellings. Staring up,
I seemed to see a hundred of them. Rope-vine ladders; flimsy vine
platforms; tiny lights winking up there in the trees.
On a platform twenty feet above us a group of tiny infant brains sat
in a gruesome row, goggling down on us.
We passed the tree patch; again the city seemed all a thin, flexible
metal. The ground was like a smooth rock surface, alternating with
small patches of soil where things were growing.
We walked in a slow, unsteady line. Molo led. Behind Snap and me came
the girls, ignoring us; and at the rear, the brown-shelled giant guard
stalked after us.
Molo stopped at a large globe-dwelling. "We rest here. I will go see
that our rooms are ready." He gestured to his sister. "Meka, you come
with me. Wyk will guard them."
We stood at an oval doorway. A worker came out, stared at us, then
went back. On an upper balcony, a brain was gazing down at us.