[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from
Weird Tales August and September 1928.
Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that
the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]
As the control-levers flashed down under my hands our ship dived down
through space with the swiftness of thought. The next instant there
came a jarring shock, and our craft spun over like a whirling top.
Everything in the conning-tower, windows and dials and controls, seemed
to be revolving about me with lightning speed, while I clung dizzily to
the levers in my hands. In a moment I managed to swing them back into
position, and at once the ship righted herself and sped smoothly on
through the ether. I drew a deep breath.
The trap-door in the little room's floor slid open, then, and the
startled face of big Hal Kur appeared, his eyes wide.
"By the Power, Jan Tor!" he exclaimed; "that last meteor just grazed
us! An inch nearer and it would have been the end of the ship!"
I turned to him for a moment, laughing. "A miss is as good as a mile,"
I quoted.
He grinned back at me. "Well, remember that we're not out on the Uranus
patrol now," he reminded me. "What's our course?"
"Seventy-two degrees sunward, plane No. 8," I told him, glancing at the
dials. "We're less than four hundred thousand miles from Earth, now," I
added, nodding toward the broad window before me.
Climbing up into the little conning-tower, Hal Kur stepped over beside
me, and together we gazed out ahead.
The sun was at the ship's left, for the moment, and the sky ahead
was one of deep black, in which the stars, the flaming stars of
interplanetary space, shone like brilliant jewels. Directly ahead of
us there glowed a soft little orb of misty light, which was growing
steadily larger as we raced on toward it. It was our destination, the
cloud-veiled little world of Earth, mother-planet of all our race. To
myself, who had passed much of my life on the four outer giants, on
Jupiter and Saturn and Uranus and Neptune, the little planet ahead
seemed insignificant, almost, with its single tiny moon. And yet
from it, I knew, had come that unceasing stream of human life, that
dauntless flood of pioneers, which had spread over all the solar
system in the last hundred thousand years. They had gone out to planet
after planet, had conquered the strange atmospheres and bacteria and
gravitations, until now the races of man held sway over all the sun's
eight wheeling worlds. And it was from this Earth, a thousand centuries
before, that there had ventured out the first discoverers' crude little
space-boats, whose faulty gravity-screens and uncertain controls
contrasted strangely with the mighty leviathans that flashed between
the planets now.
Abruptly I was aroused from my musings by the sharp ringing of a
bell at my elbow. "The telestereo," I said to Hal Kur. "Take the
controls." As he did so I stepped over to the telestereo's glass disk,
inset in the room's floor, and touched a switch beside it. Instantly
there appeared standing upon the disk, the image of a man in the blue
and white robe of the Supreme Council, a life-size and moving and
stereoscopically perfect image, flashed across the void of space to my
apparatus by means of etheric vibrations. Through the medium of that
projected image the man himself could see and hear me as well as I
could see and hear him, and at once he spoke directly to me.
"Jan Tor, Captain of Interplanetary Patrol Cruiser 79388," he said, in
the official form of address. "The command of the Supreme Council of
the League of Planets, to Jan Tor. You are directed to proceed with all
possible speed to Earth, and immediately upon your arrival there to
report to the Council, at the Hall of Planets. Is the order heard?"
"The order is heard and will be obeyed," I answered, making the
customary response, and the figure on the disk bowed, then abruptly
vanished.
I turned at once to a speaking-tube which connected with the cruiser's
screen rooms. "Make all speed possible to reach Earth," I ordered the
engineer who answered my call. "Throw open all the left and lower
screens and use the full attraction of the sun until we are within
twenty thousand miles of Earth; then close them and use the attraction
of Jupiter and Neptune to brake our progress. Is the order heard?"
When he had acknowledged the command I turned to Hal Kur. "That should
bring us to Earth within the hour," I told him, "though the Power alone
knows what the Supreme Council wants with a simple patrol-captain."
His laugh rumbled forth. "Why, here's unusual modesty, for you! Many a
time I've heard you tell how the Eight Worlds would be run were Jan Tor
of the Council, and now you're but 'a simple patrol-captain!'"
With that parting gibe he slid quickly down through the door in the
floor, just in time to escape a well-aimed kick. I heard his deep
laughter bellow out again as the door clanged shut behind him, and
smiled to myself. No one on the cruiser would have permitted himself
such familiarity with its captain but Hal Kur, but the big engineer
well knew that his thirty-odd years of service in the Patrol made him a
privileged character.
As the door slammed shut behind him, though, I forgot all else for the
moment and concentrated all my attention on the ship's progress. It was
my habit to act as pilot of my own cruiser, whenever possible, and for
the time being I was quite alone in the round little pilot-house, or
conning-tower, set on top of the cruiser's long, fishlike hull. Only
pride, though, kept me from summoning an assistant to the controls, for
the sun was pulling the cruiser downward with tremendous velocity, now,
and as we sped down past Earth's shining little moon we ran into a belt
of meteorites which gave me some ticklish moments. At last, though, we
were through the danger zone, and were dropping down toward Earth with
decreasing speed, as the screens were thrown open which allowed the
pull of Neptune and Jupiter to check our progress.
A touch of a button then brought a pilot to replace me at the controls,
and as we fell smoothly down toward the green planet below I leaned
out the window, watching the dense masses of interplanetary shipping
through which we were now threading our way. It seemed, indeed,
that half the vessels in the solar system were assembled around and
beneath us, so close-packed was the jam of traffic. There were mighty
cargo-ships, their mile-long hulls filled with a thousand products
of Earth, which were ponderously getting under way for the long
voyages out to Uranus or Neptune. Sleek, long passenger-ships flashed
past us, their transparent upper-hulls giving us brief glimpses of
the gay groups on their sunlit decks. Private pleasure-boats were
numerous, too, mostly affairs of gleaming white, and most of these were
apparently bound for the annual Jupiter-Mars space-races. Here and
there through the confusion dashed the local police-boats of Earth,
and I caught sight of one or two of the long black cruisers of the
Interplanetary Patrol, like our own, the swiftest ships in space. At
last, though, after a slow, tortuous progress through the crowded upper
levels, our craft had won through the jam of traffic and was swooping
down upon the surface of Earth in a great curve.
* * * * *
In a panorama of meadow and forest, dotted here and there with gleaming
white cities, the planet's parklike surface unrolled before me as we
sped across it. We rocketed over one of its oceans, seeming hardly more
than a pond to my eyes after the mighty seas of Jupiter and the vast
ice-fringed oceans of Neptune; and then, as we flashed over land again,
there loomed up far ahead the gigantic white dome of the great Hall
of Planets, permanent seat of the Supreme Council and the center of
government of the Eight Worlds. A single titanic structure of gleaming
white, that reared its towering dome into the air for over two thousand
feet, it grew swiftly larger as we raced on toward it. In a moment we
were beside it, and the cruiser was slanting down toward the square
landing-court behind the great dome.
As we came to rest there without a jar, I snapped open a small door in
the conning-tower's side, and in a moment had descended to the ground
by means of the ladder inset in the cruiser's side. At once there ran
forward to meet me a thin, spectacled young man in the red-slashed robe
of the Scientists, an owlish-looking figure at whom I stared for a
moment in amazement. Then I had recovered from my astonishment and was
grasping his hands.
"Sarto Sen!" I cried. "By the Power, I'm glad to see you! I thought
you were working in the Venus Laboratories."
My friend's eyes were shining with welcome, but for the moment he
wasted no time in speech, hurrying me across the court toward the inner
door of the great building.
"The Council is assembling at this moment," he explained rapidly as we
hastened along. "I got the chairman, Mur Dak, to hold up the meeting
until you arrived."
"But what's it all about?" I asked, in bewilderment. "Why wait for
_me_?"
"You will understand in a moment," he answered, his face grave. "But
here is the Council Hall."
By that time we had hastened down a series of long white corridors
and now passed through a high-arched doorway into the great Council
Hall itself. I had visited the place before--who in the Eight Worlds
has not?--and the tremendous, circular room and colossal, soaring
dome above it were not new to me, but now I saw it as few ever did,
with the eight hundred members of the Supreme Council gathered in
solemn session. Grouped in a great half-circle around the dais of
the chairman stretched the curving rows of seats, each occupied by a
member, and each hundred members gathered around the symbol of the
world they represented, whether that world was tiny Mercury or mighty
Jupiter. On the dais at the center stood the solitary figure of Mur
Dak, the chairman. It was evident that, as my friend had informed me,
the Council had just assembled, since for the moment Mur Dak was not
speaking, but just gazing calmly out over the silent rows of members.
In a moment we had passed down the aisle to his dais and stood beneath
him. To my salute he returned a word of greeting only, then motioned
us to two empty seats which had apparently been reserved for us. As I
slipped into mine I wondered, fleetingly, what big Hal Kur would have
thought to see his captain thus taking a seat with the Supreme Council
itself. Then that thought slipped from my mind as Mur Dak began to
speak.
"Men of the Eight Worlds," he said slowly, "I have called this session
of the Council for the gravest of reasons. I have called it because
discovery has just been made of a peril which menaces the civilization,
the very existence, of all our race--a deadly peril which is rushing
upon us with unthinkable speed, and which threatens the annihilation of
our entire universe!"
He paused for a moment, and a slow, deep hum of surprize ran over the
assembled members. For the first time, now, I saw that Mur Dak's keen,
intellectual face was white and drawn, and I bent forward, breathless,
tensely listening. In a moment the chairman was speaking on.
"It is necessary for me to go back a little," he said, "in order that
you may understand the situation which confronts us. As you know, our
sun and its eight spinning planets are not motionless in space. Our
sun, with its family of worlds, has for eons been moving through space
at the approximate rate of twelve miles a second, across the Milky
Way. You know, too, that all other suns, all other stars, are moving
through space likewise, some at a lesser speed than ours and some at
a speed inconceivably greater. Flaming new suns, dying red suns, cold
dark suns, each is flashing through the infinities of space on its own
course, each toward its appointed doom.
"And among that infinity of thronging stars is that one which we know
as Alto, that great red star, that dying sun, which has been steadily
drawing nearer to us as the centuries have passed, and which is now
nearest to us of all the stars. It is but little larger than our own
sun, and as you all know, it and our own sun are moving toward each
other, rushing nearer each other by thousands of miles each second,
since Alto is moving at an unthinkable speed. Our scientists have
calculated that the two suns would pass each other over a year from
now, and thereafter would be speeding away from each other. There has
been no thought of danger to us from the passing of this dying sun, for
it has been known that its path through space would cause it to pass us
at a distance of billions of miles. And had the star Alto but continued
in that path all would have been well. But now a thing unprecedented
has happened.
"Some eight weeks ago the South Observatory on Mars reported that the
approaching star Alto seemed to have changed its course a little,
bearing inward toward the solar system. The shift was a small one, but
any change of course on the part of a star is quite unprecedented, so
for the last eight weeks the approaching star has been closely watched.
And during those weeks the effect of its shift in course has become
more and more apparent. More and more the star has veered from the
path it formerly followed, until it is now many millions of miles out
of its course, with its deflection growing greater every minute. And
this morning came the climax. For this morning I received a telestereo
message from the director of the Bureau of Astronomical Science, on
Venus, in which he informed me that the star's change of course is
disastrous, for us. For instead of passing us by billions of miles, as
it would have done, the star is now heading straight toward our own
sun. And our sun is racing to meet it!
"I need not explain to you what the result of this situation will be.
It is calculated by our astronomers that in less than a year our sun
and this dying star will meet head on, will crash together in one
gigantic flaming collision. And the result of that collision will be
the annihilation of our universe. _For the planets of our system will
perish like flowers in a furnace, in that titanic holocaust of crashing
suns!_"
* * * * *
Mur Dak's voice ceased, and over the great hall there reigned a
deathlike silence. I think that in that moment all of us were striving
to comprehend with our dazed minds the thing that Mur Dak had told
us, to realize the existence of the deadly peril that was rushing to
wipe out our universe. Then, before that silence could give way to the
inevitable roar of surprize and fear, a single member rose from the
Mercury section of the Council, a splendid figure who spoke directly to
Mur Dak.
"For a hundred thousand years," he said, "we races of man have met
danger after danger, and have conquered them, one after another. We
have spread from world to world, have conquered and grasped and held
until we are masters of a universe. And now that that universe faces
destruction, are we to sit idly by? Is there nothing whatever to be
done by us, no chance, however slight, to avert this doom?"
A storm of cheers burst out when he finished, a wild tempest of
applause that raged over the hall with cyclonic fury for minutes. I was
on my feet with the rest, by that time, shouting like a madman. It was
the inevitable reaction from that moment of heart-deadening panic, was
the uprush of the old will to conquer that has steeled the hearts of
men in a thousand deadly perils. When it had died down a little, Mur
Dak spoke again.
"It is not my purpose to allow death to rush upon us without an effort
to turn it aside," he told us, "and fortune has placed in our hands, at
this moment, the chance to strike out in our own defense. For the last
three years Sarto Sen, one of our most brilliant young scientists,
has been working on a great problem, the problem of using etheric
vibrations as a propulsion force to speed matter through space. A chip
floating in water can be propelled across the surface of the water by
waves in it; then why should not matter likewise be propelled through
space, through the ether, by means of waves or vibrations in that
ether? Experimenting on this problem, Sarto Sen has been able to make
small models which can be flashed through space, through the ether,
by means of artificially created vibrations in that ether, vibrations
which can be produced with as high a frequency as the light-vibrations,
and which thus propel the models through space at a speed equal to the
speed of light itself.
"Using this principle, Sarto Sen has constructed a small ten-man
cruiser, which can attain the velocity of light and which he has
intended to use in a voyage of exploration to the nearer stars. Until
now, as you know, we have been unable to venture outside the solar
system, since even the swiftest of our gravity-screen space-ships can
not make much more than a few hundred thousand miles an hour, and at
that rate it would take centuries to reach the nearest star. But in
this new vibration-propelled cruiser, a voyage to the stars would be a
matter of weeks, instead of centuries.
"Several hours ago I ordered Sarto Sen to bring his new cruiser here
to the Hall of Planets, fully equipped, and at this moment it is
resting in one of the landing-courts here, manned by a crew of six men
experienced in its operation and ready for a trip of any length. And it
is my proposal that we send this new cruiser, in this emergency, out
to the approaching star Alto, to discover what forces or circumstances
have caused the nearing sun to veer from its former path. We know
that those forces or those circumstances must be extraordinary in
character, thus to change the course of a star; and if we can discover
what phenomena are the causes of the star's deflection, there is a
chance that we might be able to repeat or reverse those phenomena, to
swerve the star again from the path it now follows, and so save our
solar system, our universe."
Mur Dak paused for a moment, and there was an instant of sheer,
stunned silence in the great hall. For the audacity of his proposal
was overwhelming, even to us who roamed the limits of the solar system
at will. It was well enough to rove the ways of our own universe, as
men had done for ages, but to venture out into the vast gulf beyond,
to flash out toward the stars themselves and calmly investigate the
erratic behavior of a titanic, thundering sun, that was a proposal that
left us breathless for the moment. But only for the moment, for when
our brains had caught the magnitude of the idea another wild burst of
applause thundered from the massed members, applause that rose still
higher when the chairman called Sarto Sen himself to the dais and
presented him to the assembly. Then, when the tumult had quieted a
little, Mur Dak went on.
"The cruiser will start at once, then," he said, "and there remains but
to choose a captain for it. Sarto Sen and his men will have charge of
the craft's operation, of course, but there must be a leader for the
whole expedition, some quick-thinking man of action. And I have already
chosen such a man, subject to your approval, one whose name most of
you have heard. A man young in years who has served most of his life
in the Interplanetary Patrol, and who distinguished himself highly two
years ago in the great space-fight with the interplanetary pirates off
Japetus: Jan Tor!"
I swear that up to the last second I had no shadow of an idea that Mur
Dak was speaking of me, and when he turned to gaze straight at me,
and spoke my name, I could only stare in bewilderment. Those around
me, though, pushed me to my feet, and the next moment another roar of
applause from the hundreds of members around me struck me in the face
like a physical blow. I walked clumsily to the dais, under that storm
of approval, and stood there beside Mur Dak, still half-dazed by the
unexpectedness of the thing. The chairman smiled out at the shouting
members.
"No need to ask if you approve my choice," he said, and then turned
to me, his face grave. "Jan Tor," he addressed me, his solemn voice
sounding clearly over the suddenly hushed hall, "to you is given the
command of this expedition, the most momentous in our history. For
on this expedition and on you, its leader, depends the fate of our
solar system. It is the order of the Supreme Council, then, that you
take command of the new cruiser and proceed with all speed to the
approaching star, Alto, to discover the reason for that star's change
of course and to ascertain whether any means exist of again swerving it
from its path. Is the order heard?"
* * * * *
Five minutes later I strode with Sarto Sen and Hal Kur into the
landing-court where lay the new cruiser, its long, fishlike hull
glittering brilliantly in the sunlight. A door in its side snapped open
as we drew near, and through it there stepped out to meet us one of the
six blue-clad engineers who formed the craft's crew. "All is ready for
the start," he said to Sarto Sen in reply to the latter's question,
standing aside for us to enter.
We passed through the door into the cruiser's hull. To the left an
open door gave me a glimpse of the ship's narrow living-quarters,
while to the right extended a long room in which other blue-clad
figures were standing ready beside the ship's shining, conelike
vibration-generators. Directly before us rose a small winding stairway,
up which Sarto Sen led the way. In a moment, following, we had reached
the cruiser's conning-tower, and immediately Sarto Sen stepped over to
take his place at the controls.
He touched a stud, and a warning bell gave sharp alarm throughout the
cruiser's interior. There were hurrying feet, somewhere beneath us, and
then a loud clang as the heavy triple-doors slammed shut. At once began
the familiar throb-throb-throb of the oxygen pumps, already at work
replenishing and purifying the air in our hermetically sealed vessel.
Sarto Sen paused for a moment, glancing through the broad window before
him, then reached forth and pressed a series of three buttons. A low,
deep humming filled the cruiser's whole interior, and there was an
instant of breathless hesitation. Then came a sharp click as Sarto Sen
pressed another switch; there was a quick sigh of wind, and instantly
the sunlit landing-court outside vanished, replaced in a fraction of a
second by the deep, star-shot night of interplanetary space. I glanced
quickly down through a side window and had a momentary glimpse of a
spinning gray ball beneath us, a ball that dwindled to a point and
vanished even in the moment that I glimpsed it. It was Earth, vanishing
behind us as we fled with frightful velocity out into the gulf of space.
We were hurtling through the belt of asteroids beyond Mars, now, and
then ahead, and to the left, there loomed the mighty world of Jupiter,
expanding quickly into a large white-belted globe as we rocketed on
toward it, then dropping behind and diminishing in its turn as we sped
past it. The sun behind us had dwindled by that time to a tiny disk of
fire. An hour later and another giant world flashed past on our right,
the icy planet Neptune, outermost of the Eight Worlds. We had passed
outside the last frontier of the solar system and were now racing out
into the mighty deeps of space with the speed of light on our mad
journey to save a universe.
2
An hour after we had left the solar system Hal Kur and I still stood
with Sarto Sen in the cruiser's conning-tower, staring out with him at
the stupendous panorama of gathered stars that lay before us. The sun
of our own system had dwindled to a far point of light behind us, by
that time, one star among the millions that spangled the deep black
heavens around us. For here, even more than between the planets, the
stars lay before us in their true glory, undimmed by proximity to any
one of them. A host of glittering points of fire, blue and green and
white and red and yellow, they dotted the rayless skies thickly in all
directions, and thronged like a great drift of swarming bees toward
our upper left, where stretched the stupendous belt of the Milky Way.
And dead ahead, now, shone a single orb that blazed in smoky, crimson
glory, a single great point of red fire. It was Alto, I knew, the
sullen-burning star that was our goal.
It was with something of unbelief that I gazed at the red star, for
though the dials before me assured me that we were speeding on toward
it at close to two hundred thousand miles a second, yet except for
the deep humming of the craft's vibratory apparatus one would have
thought that the ship was standing still. There was no sound of wind
from outside, no friendly, near-by planets, nothing by which the eye
could measure the tremendous velocity at which we moved. We were
racing through a void whose very immensity and vacancy staggered the
mind, an emptiness of space in which the stars themselves floated like
dust-particles in air, a gulf traversed only by hurtling meteors or
flaring comets, and now by our own frail little craft.
Though I was peculiarly affected by the strangeness of our position,
big Hal Kur was even more so. He had traveled the space-lanes of the
solar system for the greater part of his life, and now all of his
time-honored rules of interplanetary navigation had been upset by
this new cruiser, a craft entirely without gravity-screens, which was
flashing from sun to sun propelled by invisible vibrations only. I saw
his head wagging in doubt as he stared out into that splendid vista of
thronging stars, and in a moment more he left us, descending into the
cruiser's hull for an inspection of its strange propulsion apparatus.
When he had gone I plunged at once into the task of learning the
control and operation of our craft. The next two hours I spent under
the tutelage of Sarto Sen, and at the end of that time I had already
learned the essential features of the ship's control. There was a
throttle which regulated the frequency of the vibrations generated
in the engine-room below, thus increasing or decreasing our speed at
will, and a lever and dial which were used to project the propelling
vibrations out at any angle behind us, thus controlling the direction
in which we moved. The main requisite in handling the craft, I found,
was a precise and steady hand on the two controls, since a mere touch
on one would change our speed with lightning swiftness, while a slight
movement of the other would send us millions of miles out of our course
almost instantly.
At the end of two hours, however, I had attained sufficient skill to
be able to hold the cruiser to her course without any large deviations
or changes of speed, and Sarto Sen had confidence enough in my ability
to leave me alone at the controls. He departed down the little stair
behind me, to give a few minutes' inspection to the generators below,
and I was left alone in the conning-tower.
Standing there in the dark little room, its only sound the deep humming
of the generators below and its only lights the hooded glows which
illuminated the dials and switches before me, I gazed intently through
the broad fore-window, into that crowding confusion of swarming suns
that lay around us, that medley of jeweled fires in which the great
star Alto burned like a living flame. For a long time I gazed toward
the star that was our goal, and then my thoughts were broken into by
the sound of Sarto Sen reascending the stair behind me. I half turned
to greet him, then turned swiftly back to the window, stiffening into
sudden attention.
My eyes had caught sight of a small patch of deep blackness far ahead,
an area of utter darkness which was swiftly expanding, growing, until
in less than a second, it seemed, it had blotted out half the thronging
stars ahead. For a moment the sudden appearance of it dumfounded
me so that I stood motionless, and then my hands leaped out to the
controls. I heard Sarto Sen cry out, behind me, and had a glimpse of
the darkness ahead, obscuring almost all the heavens. The next moment,
before my hands had more than closed upon the levers, all light in the
conning-tower vanished in an instant, and we were plunged into the most
utter darkness which I have ever experienced. At the same moment the
familiar hum of the vibration-generators broke off suddenly.
I think that the moment that followed was the one in which I came first
to know the meaning of terror. Every spark of light had vanished, and
the silencing of the vibration-generators could only mean that our
ship was drifting blindly through this smothering blackness. From the
cruiser's hull, below, came shouts of fear and horror, and I heard
Sarto Sen feeling his way to my side and fumbling with the controls.
Then, with startling abruptness, the lights flashed on again in the
conning-tower and through the windows there burst again the brilliance
of the starry heavens. At the same moment the vibration-generators
began again to give off their deep humming drone.
Sarto Sen turned to me, his face white as my own. Instinctively we
turned toward the conning-tower's rear-window, and there, behind us,
lay that stupendous area of blackness from which we had just emerged.
A vast, irregular area of utter darkness, it was decreasing rapidly
in size as we sped on away from it. In a moment it had shrunk to the
spot it had been when first I glimpsed it, and then it had vanished
entirely. And again we were racing on through the familiar, star-shot
skies.
I found my voice at last. "In the name of the Power," I exclaimed,
"what was _that_?"
Sarto Sen shook his head, musingly. "An area without light," he said,
half to himself; "and our generators--they, too, could not function
there. It must have been a hole, an empty space, in the ether itself."
I could only stare at him in amazement. "A hole in the ether?" I
repeated.
He nodded quickly. "You saw what happened? Light is a vibration of the
ether, and light was non-existent in that area. Even our generators
ceased to give off etheric vibrations, there being no ether for them
to function in. It's always been thought that the ether pervaded all
space, but apparently even it has its holes, its cavities, which
accounts for those dark, lightless areas in the heavens which have
always puzzled astronomers. If our tremendous speed and momentum hadn't
brought us through this one, the pull of the different stars would have
slowed us down and stopped us, prisoning us in that dark area until the
end of time."
I shook my head, only half-listening, for the strangeness of the thing
had unnerved me. "Take the controls," I told Sarto Sen. "Meteors are
all in the day's work, but holes in the ether are too much for me."
Leaving him to his watch over the ship's flight, I descended to the
cruiser's interior, where the engineers were still discussing with Hal
Kur the experience through which we had just passed. In a few words
I explained to them Sarto Sen's theory, and they went back to their
posts with awed faces. Passing into the ship's living-quarters myself,
I threw myself on a bunk there and strove to sleep. Sleep came quickly
enough, induced by the generators' soothing drone, but with it came
torturing nightmares in which I seemed to move blindly onward through
endless realms of darkness, searching in vain for an outlet into the
light of day.
* * * * *
When I awoke some six hours later, the position of the ship seemed
quite unchanged. The steady humming of its generators, the smooth,
onward flight, the legions of dazzling stars around us, all seemed as
before. But when I ascended again to the conning-tower, to relieve
Sarto Sen at the controls, I saw that already the star Alto had
increased a little its brilliance, dimming the stars around and behind
it. And through the succeeding hours of my watch in the conning-tower,
it seemed to me almost that the red orb was expanding before my sight,
as we hurtled on toward it. That, though, I knew to be only an illusion
of my straining eyes.
But as day followed day--sunless, dawnless days which we could measure
only by our time-dials--the crimson star ahead waxed steadily to
greater glory. By the time we marked off the twentieth day of our
flight Alto had expanded into a moon of crimson flame, whose sullen
splendor outrivaled the brilliance of all the starry hosts around us;
for by that time we had covered half the distance between our own sun
and the dying one ahead, and were now flashing on over the last half of
our journey.
Days they were without change, almost without incident. Twice we had
sighted vast areas of blackness, great ether-cavities like the one
we had first plunged through, but these we were fortunate enough to
avoid, swerving far out of our course to pass them by. Once, too, I
had glimpsed for a single moment a colossal black globe which flashed
beside our path for an instant and then was left behind by our
tremendous speed. Only a glimpse did I get of this dark wanderer, which
might have been either a runaway planet or burned-out star. And once
our ship blundered directly into a vast maelstrom of meteoric material,
a mighty whirlpool of interstellar wreckage spinning there between the
stars, and from which we won clear only by grace of Sarto Sen's skilful
hands at the controls.
Except for these few incidents, though, our days were monotonous and
changeless, days in which the care of the generators and the alternate
watches in the conning-tower were our only occupations. And a strange
stillness had seized us as we fled onward, a brooding silence that
fastened itself upon my friends even as upon myself. Something from the
vast, eternal silence through which we moved, some quality out of those
trackless infinities of space, seemed to have entered into our inmost
souls. We went about our duties like men in a dream. And dreamlike
our life had become to us, I think, and still more remote and unreal
and dreamlike had become the life of the eight worlds that lay so far
behind us.
I had forgotten, almost, the mission upon which we sped, and through
the long watches in the conning-tower my eyes followed the steady
largening of the red sun ahead with curiosity only. Day by day its
fiery disk was creeping farther across the heavens, until at last
everything in the cruiser was drenched by the crimson, blood-like light
that streamed in through our sunward windows. Then, at last, my mind
came back to consideration of the work that lay before us, for over
thirty days of our journey had passed and there remained less than a
hundred billion miles between Alto and ourselves.
I gave orders to slow our progress, then, and at a somewhat slackened
speed our cruiser began to slant up above the plane of the great sun,
for it was my plan to gain a position millions of miles directly
above the star and then hover there, accompanying it on its race
through space and using the powerful little telescopic windows in the
conning-tower for our first observations. So through the next two days
the giant sun, a single great sea of crimson fire to our eyes, crept
steadily downward across the skies as we slanted over it. Our outside
instruments showed us that its heat was many times less than that of
our own sun, for this was a dying star. Even so it was necessary to
slide special light-repelling shields over all our windows, so blinding
was the star's glare.
* * * * *
On the fortieth day of our journey we had reached our goal. Gathered
in the conning-tower, Sarto Sen, Hal Kur and I gazed down through its
circular, periscopic under-window at the mighty star beneath. We had
reached a spot approximately twenty million miles above the sun and
had turned our course, so that we now raced above it at a speed that
matched its own, like a fly hovering over a world. Below us there lay
only a single vast ocean of crimson flame, that reached almost from
horizon to horizon, all but filling the heavens beneath us. It was in
an awed silence that we gazed down into this tremendous sea of fire,
knowing as we did that only the power of the ship's generators kept it
from plunging downward.
"And we are expected to investigate--_that_!" said Hal Kur, gazing down
into the hell of flame below. "They talk of turning _that_ aside!"
I looked at him, hopelessly. Then, before I could speak, there came
a sudden exclamation from Sarto Sen, and he beckoned me to his side.
He had been staring out through one of the powerful little telescopic
windows set in the conning-tower's wall, and as I reached him he
pointed eagerly through it, out beyond the rim of the fiery sun
beneath. I gazed in that direction, straining my eyes against the
glare, and then glimpsed the thing that had attracted his attention. It
was a little spot of dun-colored light lying beyond the crimson sun,
a buff-colored little ball that hung steady behind the great sun at a
distance of perhaps a hundred million miles and that accompanied it on
its flight through space.
"A planet!" I whispered, and he nodded. Then Hal Kur, who had joined
us, extended his hand too, with a muttered exclamation, and there,
thrice the distance of the first from Alto, there hung another and
smaller ball. In a few minutes, using the powerful inset glasses, we
had discovered no less than thirteen worlds that spun about the sun
beneath us and that accompanied it on its tremendous journey through
space. Most seemed to revolve in orbits that were billions of miles
from their parent sun, and none of the others was as large as that
inmost planet which we had first discovered. It was toward this largest
world that we finally decided to head first; so with Sarto Sen at the
controls we slanted down again from our position over the great sun,
arrowing down at reduced speed toward the inmost world.
Its color was changing from buff to pale red as we neared it, and its
apparent size was increasing with tremendous speed as our craft shot
down toward it. Gradually, though, Sarto Sen decreased our velocity
until by the time we reached an altitude of a few hundred miles above
this world our ship was moving very slowly. And now, from outside, came
a thin shrieking of wind, a mounting roar that told us plainly that
we were speeding through air again, and that this world had at least
an atmosphere. None of us remarked on that, though, all our attention
being held by the scene below.
Drenched in the crimson light of the sun behind us, it was a crimson
world that lay beneath us, a lurid world whose mountains, plains
and valleys were all of the same blood-like hue as the light that
fell upon them, whose very lakes and rivers gave back to the sky the
scarlet tinge that pervaded all things here. And as our cruiser swept
lower we saw, too, that the redness of the planet beneath was no
mere illusion of the crimson sunlight but inherent in itself, since
all of the vegetation below, grassy plains and tangled shrubs and
stunted, unfamiliar trees, were of that same red tinge that was the
color-keynote of this world.
Strange and weird as it appeared, though, there seemed no sign of life
on the broad plains and barren hills beneath us, and abruptly Sarto
Sen headed the ship across the planet's face, speeding low over its
surface while we scanned intently the panorama that unrolled beneath
us. For minutes our straining scrutiny was unrewarded; and then, far
ahead, a colossal shape loomed vaguely through the dusky crimson light,
taking form, as we sped on toward it, as a tremendous, soaring tower.
And involuntarily we gasped as our eyes took in the hugeness of its
dimensions. It consisted of four slender black columns, each less
than fifty feet in thickness, which rose from the ground at points a
half-mile separated, four mighty pillars which slanted up into the
crimson sunlight for fully ten thousand feet, meeting and merging at
that distance above the ground and combining to support a circular
platform two hundred feet in diameter. Our ship was hovering a few
thousand feet above this platform, and on it we could see the shapes of
what appeared to be machines, and other shapes that moved about them,
though whether these last were human or not could not be distinguished
from our height. And then, as my gaze fell toward the mighty tower's
base, my cry brought the eyes of the others to follow my pointing
finger. For gathered beneath and around the tower and extending away
into the surrounding country were the massed buildings of a city. Low
and flat-roofed and utterly strange in appearance were those buildings,
and the narrow streets that pierced their huddled masses were all of
the same smooth blackness as the tower itself--black, deep black, the
roofs and streets and walls, laced with crimson parks and gardens that
lay against their blackness like splashes of blood. And looming over
all, its four tremendous columns rearing themselves above the streets
and roofs and gardens like the limbs of a bestriding giant, the mighty
tower soared into the crimson sunlight.
Sarto Sen flung an arm down toward the tower's platform, beneath us,
and toward the shapes that moved on that platform. "Inhabited!" he
cried. "You see? And that means that Alto's change in course was--"
He broke off; uttered a smothered cry. A spark of intense white light
had suddenly broken into being on the platform beneath us, a beam of
blinding light that stabbed straight up toward us, bathing the cruiser
in its unearthly glow. And suddenly our ship was falling!
Sarto Sen sprang to the controls, wrenched around the power-lever.
"That ray!" he cried. "It's attractive!--it's pulling us down!"
Our ship was vibrating now to the full force of its generators, but
still we were falling, plunging headlong down toward the round platform
beneath. I glimpsed Sarto Sen working frantically with the controls,
and heard a hoarse cry from Hal Kur. There was a blinding glare of
light all around us, now, and through the window I saw the platform
below rushing up toward us with appalling speed. It was nearer, now ...
nearer ... nearer ... _crash!_
3
I think that in the minute after the crash no one in the conning-tower
made a movement. The blinding ray outside had vanished at the moment of
our crash, and we were now lying sprawled on the little room's floor,
where the shock of the collision had thrown us. In a moment, though,
I reached for a support and scrambled to my feet. As I did so there
came shouts from the hull beneath us, and then a loud clang as one of
the cruiser's lower doors swung open. I sprang to the window, just in
time to see our six engineers pour out of the hull beneath me, emerging
onto the platform on which our ship rested, and gazing about them with
startled eyes.
I ripped open the little door in the conning-tower's side, to shout to
them to come back, and even as I did so saw one of the men run back
into the cruiser as though in fear. The others were staring fixedly
across the broad platform, and in that moment, before I could voice the
warning on my lips, their doom struck. There was a quick sigh of wind,
and from across the platform there sprang toward them a tiny ball of
rose-colored fire, a ball that touched one of the men and instantly
expanded into a whirlwind of raging flame. A single moment it blazed
there, then vanished. And where the five men had stood was--nothing.
Stunned, stupefied, my eyes traveled slowly across the surface of
the great platform. Strange, huge machines stood close-grouped upon
it, great shining structures utterly unfamiliar in appearance. At
the center of this group of mechanisms stood the largest of them, a
great tube of metal fully a hundred feet in length, which was mounted
on a strong pedestal and which pointed up into the sky like a great
telescope. It was none of these things, though, that held my attention
in that first horror-stricken moment of inspection. It was the dozen
or more grotesque and terrible shapes which stood grouped at the
platform's farther edge, returning my gaze.
They were globes, globes of pink, unhealthy-looking flesh more than a
yard in diameter, each upheld by six slender, insectlike legs, not more
than twelve inches long, and each possessing two similar short, thin
limbs which served them as arms and which projected at opposite points
from their pink, globular bodies. And between those arms, set directly
in the side of the round body itself, were the only features--two round
black eyes of large size, browless and pupil-less, and a circle of pale
skin which beat quickly in and out with their breathing.
Motionless they stood, regarding me with their unhuman eyes, and now I
saw that one, a little in advance of the others, was holding extended
toward me a thin disk of metal, from which, I divined instantly, the
destroying fire had sprung. Yet still I made no movement, staring
across the platform with sick horror in my soul.
I heard a thick exclamation from Hal Kur, behind me, as he and Sarto
Sen came to my side and gazed out with me. And now the grouped
creatures opposite were giving utterance to sounds--speech-sounds with
which they seemed to converse--low, deep, thrumming tones which came
apparently from their breathing-membranes. They moved toward us, the
fire-disk still trained upon us, and then one stopped and motioned from
us to the platform on which he stood. He repeated the gesture, and its
meaning was unmistakable. Slowly we stepped out of the conning-tower
and descended by the ladder in the cruiser's side to the platform
itself.
Our captors seemed to pause for a moment, now, and I had opportunity
for a quick inspection of our ship. Sucked down as it had been by
the attractive ray of those strange creatures, it had yet fallen on
a clear space on the platform and seemed to have suffered no serious
injury, for it was stoutly built and our fall had been short. The lower
door in its side was still open, I saw, and now a half-dozen of the
globe-creatures entered this, scurrying forward like quick insects on
their six short legs. They disappeared from view inside the cruiser's
hull, returning in a moment with their fire-disks trained upon the
single engineer who had run back into the ship and escaped the doom of
his fellows. This man, Nar Lon by name, had been the chief of the six
engineers, and as his guards herded him to our side his face was white
with terror. Finding us still alive, though, he seemed to take courage
a little.
[Illustration: "They had their fire-disks trained upon the engineer."]
Now the thrumming conversation of the creatures about us broke off, and
one turned to the edge of the platform, touching a stud in the floor
there. At once a circular section of the metal floor, some ten feet
across, slid aside, revealing a round dark well of the same diameter,
which apparently extended down into one of the great tower's four
supporting columns. At the top of this shaft hung a small, square metal
cage, or elevator, and into this we were shepherded at once, two of our
captors entering the cage with us and keeping their fire-disks trained
still upon us. There was the click of a switch, then a sudden roar of
wind, and instantly the cage was shooting downward with tremendous
speed. Only a moment we flashed down through the roaring darkness, and
then the cage came to rest and a section of wall beside it slid aside,
admitting a flood of dusky, crimson light. At once we stepped out,
followed by our two guards.
We were standing at the foot of a mighty column down which we had
come, standing on the floor of a great, circular, flat-roofed room,
in and out of which were moving scores of the globe-creatures. From
the very center of the room, behind us, rose the fifty-foot thickness
of the huge pillar, soaring up obliquely and disappearing through the
building's roof, two hundred feet above. Except for the pillar and the
hurrying figures around us the great room was quite bare and empty,
lit only by high, narrow slits in its walls which admitted long,
shafting bars of the crimson sunlight. I heard Hal Kur muttering his
astonishment at the titanic scale on which all things in this strange
world seemed planned, and then there came a thrumming order from our
guards, who gestured pointedly toward a high doorway set in the room's
wall opposite us. Obediently we started across the floor toward it.
Passing through it, we found ourselves in a long, narrow corridor,
apparently a connecting passage between another building and the one we
had just left. There were windows on its sides, circular openings in
the walls, and as we passed down the hall I glimpsed through these the
city that lay around us, a vista of black streets and crimson gardens
through which thronged other masses of the globe-creatures. Then,
before I could see more, the corridor ended and we passed into a large
anteroom occupied by a half-dozen of the globe-men, all armed with
fire-disks which they trained instantly upon us.
There ensued a brief conversation between our guards and these, and
then they stood aside, allowing us to pass through a narrow doorway
into a smaller room beyond. Its sides were lined with shelves holding
what seemed to be models of machines, all quite unfamiliar in
appearance. At the far end of the room stood a low, desklike structure
whose surface was covered with other models and with white sheets of
stiff cloth or paper covered with drawings and designs, and behind this
sat another of the globe-men, a little larger than any we had yet seen.
As we halted before him he inspected us for a moment with his large,
unwinking eyes, then spoke in deep, thrumming inflections to our two
guards. The latter answered him at length, and again he considered us.
During the moments that we stood there I had noted that Sarto Sen,
beside me, seemed intensely interested in the models and design-covered
sheets which lay on the desk before us. Now, as the creature behind
the desk seemed to pause, my friend moved forward and picked up one of
the sheets, and a metal pencil which lay beside it. In a moment he was
drawing on the sheet some design which I could not see, and this done
he handed it to the monster behind the desk. The latter reached for
it, inspected it closely, and then raised his eyes to Sarto Sen with
something of surprize apparent even on his unhuman features. He uttered
a short command, then, and instantly one of the two guards motioned
Sarto Sen aside, while the other herded Hal Kur, Nar Lon and me again
toward the door. As we passed out of the room I glanced back and saw
Sarto Sen, still under the watchful eyes of his guard, bending over
the desk, intensely interested, sketching another design.
Again we were in the anteroom, in which there lounged still the guard
of armed globe-men. Instead of returning to the corridor through which
we had come, though, we were conducted through a door on the room's
opposite side, and passed down a similar long hall, halted at last by
our guard before a low door in its side. This he flung open, motioning
us to enter, and as the death-dealing disk in his grasp was trained
full upon us we had no choice but to obey, and passed into a square,
solid-walled little room which was but half-lit by a few loopholes in
one of its sides. Behind us the door slammed shut, its strong bolts
closing with a loud grating of metal. We were prisoners--prisoners on
the planet of a distant star.
And now, looking back, it seems to me that the days of imprisonment
which followed were the most terrible I have ever known. Action, no
matter of what sort, gives surcease at least from mental agony, and
it was agony which we suffered there in our little cell. For with the
passing of every day, every hour, the crimson sun above was drawing
nearer toward our own by millions of miles. And we, who alone had power
to find the cause of the red sun's deflection--we lay imprisoned there
in the city of the globe-men, watching doom creep upon our universe.
* * * * *
Hour followed hour and day followed day, remorselessly, while we
lay there, hours and days which we could measure only by the steady
circling of the sunlight that slanted through our tiny windows. With
each night came cold, a bitter cold that penetrated to our bones, and
for all the red splendor of the dying sun above, the days were far
from warm. Twice each day the door opened and a guard cautiously thrust
in our food, which consisted of a mushy mixture of cooked vegetables
and a bottle of red-tinged, mineral-tasting water.
We spoke but little among ourselves, except to wonder as to the
whereabouts of Sarto Sen. We had heard nothing of him since we had left
him and could not know even whether our friend was alive or dead. What
our own fate was to be we could not guess, nor, in fact, was even that
of much interest to us. A few months longer and we would meet death
with all on this planet, when Alto and our own sun crashed together.
Whether or not we lived until then was hardly a great matter.
Then, ten days after our capture, there came the first break in the
monotony of our imprisonment. There was a rattle of bolts at our door;
it swung open, and Sarto Sen stepped inside. As the guards outside
closed the door my friend sprang toward me, his face eager.
"You're all right, Jan Tor?" he exclaimed quickly. "They told me you
were unharmed, but I worried--"