Never had the mind of man conceived so horrible a
doom as was reaching for Earth. Never had a greater
need for Earth's valiant champions been needed.
And yet the only ones who could fight the menace--were
five futile humans, prisoners on another world.
[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from
Planet Stories Fall 1945.
Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that
the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]
My name is Robert Rance. You've heard of me, of course--through the
recent weird affair of the Crimson Comet, if for nothing else. It seems
to me rather ironic: for five years I have been reporting popular
science items on the split-wave band of non-visual broadcasting.
Station WANA-NYC--the main outlet of _Amalgamated Newscasters'
Association_, for whom I work. I struggled for personal publicity.
Then I was plunged--certainly entirely against my will--into the
blood-chilling, gruesome adventure which is now popularly known as "The
Death of the Crimson Comet." Out of it has come publicity beyond my
wildest dreams. And now that I've got it, I don't want it. I'm not a
hero, of dauntless, fearless courage. I'm not a scientific genius, who
has made possible to Earth the New Era of Interplanetary Travel. But
I've been called all that by broadcasting asses who are my friends.
I'm just a plain American, who, when his life is in danger gets
frightened as the devil, fighting to get himself out of a jam, and with
not much thought of anything else. I didn't relish that Crimson Comet
business, and I don't want ever to experience anything like it again.
I'm not alone in this. There were four others in it with me. They don't
like all this public fuss being made over them any more than I do. They
weren't heroic. They just tried their best not to get killed. So on
their behalf, and my own, I'm writing this narrative of exactly what
happened to us. Not the professionally glamorized version which you've
heard so many times. Just the facts.
The thing must have been brewing, under cover, for many months. Like a
smouldering, unnoticed fire. No one knows; we can only guess at what
happened. But looking back on it now, there were incidents, seemingly
unrelated at the time, which now I can see were significant. The first
of them was in August, 1985--about a year ago. I had just finished a
broadcast on some trivial, popular science subject, which I had tried
to make sound important to my listeners. And Dr. Johns of the White
Mountains Observatory telephoned me. I knew him quite well; he had
often steered me into little subjects for my broadcasts, but this, I
could see at once, was something different The tel-grid showed his
thin face without its usual smile. His grey hair was rumpled; his eyes
bloodshot. He looked as though he hadn't slept for much too long.
"I thought you might want to come up and see me, Bob," he suggested.
"Sure I will. I always appreciate your tips, Dr. Johns."
His smile was queer. "I haven't got anything--not that you can use,"
he said. "Certainly not yet. I guess I just figure I'll feel better,
talking about it. When can you arrive?"
"I'll come right away," I told him. "Not busy tonight. I'll be there by
midnight."
We disconnected. I was just about to leave when Shorty Dirk walked
in on me. Shorty was--and still is--connected with the _American
Newsprint Publishers_--a reporter in the Crime Division, specializing
in reporting the work of the Bureau of Missing Persons. He and I were
good friends, perhaps because we are so different. I'm big and rangy,
slow-going and easy-tempered. In college I was a good athlete, but now
this radio work was putting quite a bit of soft poundage on me which
didn't belong--poundage which, I do assure you, the Crimson Comet
business got rid of in a hurry. Like all of us five, I was something
like an undernourished greyhound when we got back.
Shorty isn't much over five and a half feet, thin and wiry and alert--a
sort of little human dynamo; a freckle-faced fellow with a shock of
bristly red hair and a good-natured grin.
"Where you going?" he asked.
I told him. "I'll go with you," he said. He grinned. "I'm only here,
Bob, because I haven't got anything better to do."
* * * * *
We took my small flyer from the roof stage and headed north. It was
a handsome night, warm and almost cloudless with the upper air so
clear that the stars were packed solid on the purple-blue vault of the
heavens. Shorty and I didn't theorize, during the brief trip up to the
White Mountains, on what Dr. Johns might have to say. Shorty wasn't
much interested in astronomy, anyway--to him, as he often said, it was
an uninteresting enigma. He mentioned that tonight.
"Good," I said. "Then, how is crime coming? Many people missing lately?"
Things were dull, he assured me. Nothing but the usual run of stuff
that you couldn't write up or broadcast because nobody but a few
relatives were interested. As it happened, the Crimson Comet affair
caused five mysterious disappearances, Shorty, myself and three others.
I think I can understand now why it happened that I knew them all. I
must have been marked, through my widely broadcast popular science.
That involved Shorty, because he was so much with me. And as for
the other three--looking back on it now I realize that each of them
vanished soon after having been with me. I was being trailed and was
seized last.
We landed on the private stage of the big Observatory about midnight
and presently were with Dr. Johns in his study. What he had to tell us
didn't seem very startling at the time. But in the light of what was
to happen, looking back on it now I can see its deadly significance.
Like a great pattern of evil, to involve disaster and death to all
the world! Grim, stealthy events creeping upon us--little things here
on Earth just involving me and those few others; and with them, giant
events mysteriously taking place out in the great vault of the stars.
"Here at the Observatory," Dr. Johns was saying, "we thought that
somehow we must be making miscalculations. A fraction of a second in
the axial and orbital movements of the Earth, which involved the visual
movement of all the starfield. But we checked and rechecked. And then
other observatories reported it."
The Earth's axial rotation, and its movement around the Sun apparently
were changing infinitesimally.
"Too bad," Shorty commented. "I'm sure sorry."
But Dr. Johns didn't smile. "There seem to be many unrelated things,"
he said. "You can shrug any of them off. But then, if it once occurs to
you that they might be connected--"
"What other things?" I asked.
Meteorologists were admitting that the weather was peculiar. Nothing
which had not occurred before, of course--unusual, freakish storms in
many parts of the Earth.
"And for a month now," Dr. Johns went on, "there has been noticeable a
peculiar purple radiance in the air at night."
"Purple radiance?" Shorty echoed. "Hadn't noticed it."
"Because it isn't visible to the naked eye," Dr. Johns retorted. "But
it has disturbed the exposure time of our photographic work. Slowed it
down. And our spectrograms show it, or at least they show its effects
so that we know if we could see it--it would be a purplish glow."
And there was a new comet which several of the observatories recently
had located. I had heard that much--had mentioned it in one of my
broadcasts.
"We call it a comet," Dr. Johns explained, "because there's a crimson
radiance streaming back from it as it comes in toward the Sun. But
its nucleus seems sizable--five hundred miles in diameter possibly. A
planetoid, with a radiance. You might just possibly call it that."
"And it's just about now crossing the orbit of Mars," I said. "That was
the last report made public, wasn't it?"
Dr. Johns nodded. "Our calculations of its orbit--made a month
ago--showed it would pass within about twenty million miles of Earth.
But that's all changed now. It's erratic."
I was beginning to see why he was startled. This new Crimson Comet
wasn't obeying the normal laws of Celestial Mechanics. It was swimming
erratically in Space. Could it be a solid body as big as five hundred
miles in diameter? Solid enough to be the cause, by its proximity, of
the Earth's axial and orbital disturbances?
"And this purple radiance," Dr. Johns said soberly, "we've just been
wondering if that could be coming from the comet."
* * * * *
I need not specify all the weird theories that Dr. Johns and I talked
of that evening. With me, a broadcaster of popular science as lurid
always as I could make it, weird, gruesome theories came natural. But
with him, a man of cold logic and careful science--well, it must have
been a premonition. Was this Crimson Comet hurling a lethal radiance at
us, attacking the Earth? A tiny, inhabited world of diabolic science
enabling it to direct its own course through Space, peopled with weird
enemies coming at us now, bent on destroying us?
You couldn't make such speculations public. People would laugh. But
some wouldn't. Some would believe you, and go into a wild panic. And
Dr. Johns had sent for me--a sort of kindred spirit in the concocting
of wild tales.
"You two, say nothing of this," he warned us. "And if it goes on,
you can announce it, Bob." He shrugged again, and tried to laugh
lugubriously. "I feel like an idiot, talking about the end of the world
with a couple of news-hounds. And yet, somehow, I also feel that maybe
everyone of us on Earth is in more deadly danger than he ever was
before!"
And we certainly were!
That was the general gist of our talk that night with Dr. Johns. I
never found out more from him--I had no time. The thing struck at me
four days later. During those four days, it happened that quite by
chance I met the three other people who were destined to be plunged
with Shorty and myself into adventure. The first was Peter Mack. I
was walking at night in Washington Square, in New York City--small
remaining tradition of little old New York. To me it's like a Monks'
Garden, flowered, tree-lined rectangle enclosed by the massive building
walls with the canyon of Fifth Avenue running into it.
The night was hot and clear. The little tent of blue over the Square
was star-filled. I chanced to sit down for a moment on a bench.
"Got a light?" There was a young fellow on the bench with me. He
shifted toward me. He was a thin, lanky fellow about my own age,
hatless, with the starlight on his sparse, rumpled sandy hair. A
slack-jawed fellow, with shabby clothes. He had a grimy cigarette butt
between his fingers.
"I can do better than that," I smiled. I gave him a cigarette and
lighted it for him.
"Thanks." He would have turned away, but I stopped him. I don't know
why, but there seemed something about him that was likable. He needed
a shave badly; his clothes were torn. I had a look at his eyes,
red-rimmed, bloodshot. Just a down-and-outer on a park bench. But you
don't see many of them these days.
"Maybe you haven't got a job," I said. "I can tell you a dozen
places--easy work too--in case you're a stranger in town."
"I'm not," he said. "Thanks for the cigarette. I'm just minding my own
business."
I shrugged; and as he gave me a resentful look and shifted back to his
own end of the bench, I let him alone.
I know now a lot of things that were the matter with Peter Mack, but
he has asked me not to go into details. It isn't important anyway;
resentfulness at a girl; the escape mechanism of too much drink;
trouble with the authorities in a lot of minor ways. And then a sort
of sullen resentment at everything and everybody. A derelict who could
salvage himself but he didn't want to.
* * * * *
Anyway, that was Peter Mack. And then there was Vivian La Marr. I met
her back stage at the _Gayety_ with Shorty who was there to see the
stage manager who was to be a witness in some trivial crime-affair that
Shorty was reporting. This Vivian La Marr was the main reason why the
_Gayety_ was having trouble with the Anti-Vice League and was about
to lose its license. She came up to me back stage--a lush, artificial
blonde, heavy with makeup; with an amazing expanse of flesh smooth as
satin, and a negligible tinseled costume that the Anti-Vice League did
not like at all but which pleased the _Gayety's_ customers very much.
"You're Robert Rance," she said. "I saw your picture an' wasn't you
televized a few times."