Why and how we move along the scroll of Time, is scientifically simple

to grasp. Conceive, for instance, an infinitely long motion picture

film. Each of its tiny pictures is a little different from the other.

Casting your viewpoint--your consciousness--successively along the

film, gives _motion_.

The same is true of the Eternal Time-scroll. Motion is merely a

_change_. There is no absolute motion, but only the comparison of two

things relatively slightly different. We are conscious of one state of

affairs--and then of another state, by comparison slightly different.

* * * * *

As early as 1930, they were groping for this. They called it the

Theory of Intermittent Existence--the Quantum Theory--by which they

explained that nothing has any Absolute Duration. You, for instance,

as you read this, exist instantaneously; you are non-existent; and you

exist again, just a little changed from before. Thus you pass, not

with a flow of persisting existence, but by a series of little jerks.

There is, then, like the illusion of a motion picture film, only a

pseudo-movement. A change, from one existence to the next.

And all this, with infinite care, the Creator engraved upon the scroll

of Time. Our series of little pictures are there--yours and mine.

But why, and how, scientifically do we progress along the Time-scroll?

Why? In 2930, they told me that the gentle Creator gave each of us a

consciousness that we might find Eternal Happiness when we left the

scroll and joined Him. Happiness here, and happiness there with Him.

The quest for Eternal Happiness, which was always His Own Divine

Thought. Why, then, did He create ugliness and evil? Why write those

upon the scroll? Ah, this perhaps is the Eternal Riddle! But, in 2930,

they told me that there could be no beauty without ugliness with which

to compare it; no truth without a lie; no consciousness of happiness

without unhappiness to make it poignant.

I wonder if that were His purpose....

How, scientifically, do we progress along the Time-scroll? That I can

make clear by a simple analogy.

Suppose you conceive Time as a narrow strip of metal, laid flat and

extending for an infinite length. For simplicity, picture it with two

ends. One end of the metal band is very cold; the other end is very

hot. And every graduation of temperature is in between.

This temperature is caused, let us say, by the vibration of every tiny

particle with which the band is composed. Thus, at every point along

the band, the vibration of its particles would be just a little

different from every other point.

* * * * *

Conceive, now, a material body--your body, for instance. Every tiny

particle of which it is constructed, is vibrating. I mean no simple

vibration. Do not picture the physical swing of a pendulum. Rather,

the intricate total of all the movements of every tiny electron of

which your body is built. Remember, in the last analysis, your body is

merely movement--vibration--a vortex of Nothingness. You have, then, a

certain vibratory factor.

You take your place then upon the Time-scroll at a point where your

inherent vibratory factor is compatible with the scroll. You are in

tune; in tune as a radio receiver tunes in with etheric waves to make

them audible. Or, to keep the heat analogy, it is as though the

scroll, at the point where the temperature is 70 deg.F, will tolerate

nothing upon it save entities of that register.

And so, at that point on the scroll, the myriad things, in myriad

positions which make up the Cosmos, lie quiescent. But their existence is

only instantaneous. They have no duration. At once, they are blotted out

and re-exist. But now they have changed their vibratory combinations. They

exist a trifle differently--and the Time-scroll passes them along to the

new position. On a motion picture film you would call it the next frame,

or still picture. In radio you would say it has a trifle different tuning.

Thus we have a pseudo-movement--Events. And we say that Time--the

Time-scroll--keeps them separate. It is we who change--who seem to move,

shoved along so that always we are compatible with Time.

* * * * *

And thus is Time-traveling possible. With a realization of what I have

here summarized, Harl and the cripple Tugh made an exhaustive study of

the vibratory factors by which Matter is built up into form, and

seeming solidity. They found what might be termed the Basic Vibratory

Factor--the sum of all the myriad tiny movements. They found this

Basic Factor identical for all the material bodies when judged

simultaneously. But, every instant, the Factor was slightly changed.

This was the natural change, moving us a little upon the Time-scroll.

They delved deeper, until, with all the scientific knowledge of their

age, they were able with complicated electronic currents to alter the

Basic Vibratory Factors; to tune, let us say, a fragment or something

to a different etheric wave-length.

They did that with a small material particle--a cube of metal. It

became wholly incompatible with its _Present_ place on the

Time-scroll, and whisked away to another place where it was

compatible. To Harl and Tugh, it vanished. Into their Past, or their

Future: they did not know which.

I set down merely the crudest fundamentals of theory in order to avoid

the confusion of technicalities. The Time-traveling cages, intricate

in practical working mechanisms beyond the understanding of any human

mind of my Time-world, nevertheless were built from this simple

theory. And we who used them did but find that the Creator had given

us a wider part to play; our pictures, our little niches were engraven

upon the scroll over wider reaches.

* * * * *

Again to consider practicality, I asked Tina what would happen if I

were to travel to New York City around 1920. I was a boy, then. Could

I not leave the cage and do things in 1920 at the same time in my

boyhood I was doing other things? It would be a condition unthinkable.

But there, beyond all calculation of Science, the all-wise Omnipotence

forbids. One may not appear twice in simultaneity upon the

Time-scroll. It is an eternal, irrevocable record. Things done cannot

be undone.

"But," I persisted, "suppose we tried to stop the cage?"

"It would not stop," said Tina. "Nor can we see through its windows

events in which we are actors."

One may not look into the future! Through all the ages, necromancers

have tried to do that but wisely it is forbidden. And I can recall,

and so can Larry, as we traveled through Time, the queer blank spaces

which marked forbidden areas.

Strangely wonderful, this vast record on the scroll of Time! Strangely

beautiful, the hidden purposes of the Creator! Not to be questioned

are His purposes. Each of us doing our best; struggling with our

limitations; finding beauty because we have ugliness with which to

compare it; realizing, every one of us--savage or civilised, in every

age and every condition of knowledge--realizing with implanted

consciousness the existence of a gentle, beneficent, guiding Divinity.

And each of us striving always upward toward the goal of Eternal

Happiness.

To me it seems singularly beautiful.

CHAPTER XI

_Back to the Beginning of Time_

As Mary Atwood and I sat chained to the floor of the Time-cage, with

Migul the Robot guarding us, I felt that we could not escape. This

mechanical thing which had captured us seemed inexorable, utterly

beyond human frailty. I could think of no way of surprising it, or

tricking it.

The Robot said. "Soon we will be there in 1777. And then there is that

I will be forced to do.

"We are being followed," it added. "Did you know that?"

"No," I said. Followed? What could that mean?

There was a device upon the table. I have already described a similar

one, the Time-telespectroscope. At this--I cannot say Time: rather

must I invent a term--exact instant of human consciousness. Larry,

Tina and Harl were gazing at their telespectroscopes, following us.

The Robot said. "Enemies follow us. But I will escape them. I shall go

to the Beginning, and shake them off."

Rational, scheming thought. And I could fancy that upon its frozen

corrugated forehead there was a frown of annoyance. Its hand gesture

was so human! So expressive!

It said. "I forget. I must make several quick trips from 2930 to 1935.

My comrades must be transported. It requires careful calculation, so

that very little Time is lost to us."

"Why?" I demanded. "What for?"

It seemed lost in a reverie.

I said sharply, "Migul!"

Instantly it turned. "What?"

"I asked you why you are transporting your comrades to 1935."

"I did not answer because I did not wish to answer," it said.

Again came the passage of Time.

* * * * *

I think that I need only sketch the succeeding incidents, since

already I have described them from the viewpoint of Larry, in 1777,

and Dr. Alten, in 1935. It was Mary's idea to write the note to her

father, which the British redcoats found in Major Atwood's garden. I

had a scrap of paper and a fountain pen in my pocket. She scribbled it

while Migul was intent upon stopping us at the night and hour he

wished. It was her good-by to her father, which he was destined not to

see. But it served a purpose which we could not have guessed: it

reached Larry and Tina.

The vehicle stopped with a soundless clap. When our senses cleared we

became aware that Migul had the door open.

Darkness and a soft gentle breeze were outside.

Migul turned with a hollow whisper. "If you make a sound I will kill

you."

A moment's pause, and then we heard a man's startled voice. Major

Atwood had seen the apparition. I squeezed the paper into a ball and

tossed it through the bars, but I could see nothing of what was

happening outside. There seemed a radiance of red glow. Whether Mary

and I would have tried to shout and warn her father I do not know. We

heard his voice only a moment. Before we realized that he had been

assailed. Migul came striding back; and outside, from the nearby house

a negress was screaming. Migul flung the door closed, and we sped

away.

The cage which had been chasing us seemed no longer following. From

1777, we turned forward toward 1935 again. We flashed past Larry, Tina

and Harl who were arriving at 1777 in pursuit of us. I think that

Migul saw their cage go past; but Larry afterward told me that they

did not notice our swift passing, for they were absorbed in landing.

* * * * *

Beginning then, we made a score or more passages from 1935 to 2930.

And we made them in what, to our consciousness, might have been the

passing of a night. Certainly it was no longer than that.[1]

[Footnote 1: At the risk of repetition I must make the following

clear: Time-traveling only consumes Time in the sense of the

perception of human consciousness that the trip has duration. The

vehicles thus moved "fast" or "slow" according to the rate of change

which the controls of the cage gave its inherent vibration factors.

Too sudden a change could not be withstood by the human passengers.

Hence the trips--for them--had duration.

Migul took Mary and me from 1935 to 1777. The flight seems perhaps

half an hour. At a greater rate of vibration change, we sped to 2930;

and back and forth from 2930 to 1935. At each successive arrival in

1935, Migul so skilfully calculated the stop that it occurred upon the

same night, at the same hour, and only a minute or so later. And in

2930 he achieved the same result. To one who might stand at either end

and watch the cage depart, the round trip was made in three or four

minutes at most.]

We saw, at the stop in 2930, only a dim blue radiance outside. There

was the smell of chemicals in the air, and the faint, blended hum and

clank of a myriad machines.

They were weird trips. The Robots came tramping in, and packed

themselves upright, solidly, around us. Yet none touched us as we

crouched together. Nor did they more than glance at us.

Strange passengers! During the trips they stood unmoving. They were as

still and silent as metal statues, as though the trip had no duration.

It seemed to Mary and me, with them thronged around us, that in the

silence we could hear the ticking, like steady heart-beats, of the

mechanisms within them....

In the backyard of the house on Patton Place--it will be recalled that

Migul chose about 9 P. M. of the evening of June 9--the silent Robots

stalked through the doorway. We flashed ahead in Time again; reloaded

the cage; came back. Two or three trips were made with inert

mechanical things which the Robots used in their attack on the city of

New York. I recall the giant projector which brought the blizzard upon

the city. It, and the three Robots operating it, occupied the entire

cage for a passage.

At the end of the last trip, one Robot, fashioned much like Migul

though not so tall, lingered in the doorway.

"Make no error, Migul," it said.

"No; do not fear. I deliver now, at the designated day, these

captives. And then I return for you."

"Near dawn."

"Yes; near dawn. The third dawn; the register to say June 12, 1935. Do

your work well."

We heard what seemed a chuckle from the departing Robot.

Alone again with Migul we sped back into Time.

Abruptly I was aware that the other cage was after us again! Migul

tried to elude it, to shake it off. But he had less success than

formerly. It seemed to cling. We sped in the retrograde, constantly

accelerating back to the Beginning. Then came a retardation, for a

swift turn. In the haze and murk of the Beginning, Migul told us he

could elude the pursuing cage.

* * * * *

"Migul, let us come to the window," I asked at last.

The Robot swung around. "You wish it very much, George Rankin?"

"Yes."

"There is no harm, I think. You and this girl have caused me no

trouble. That is unusual from a human."

"Let us loose. We've been chained here long enough. Let us stand by

the window with you," I repeated.

We did indeed have a consuming curiosity to see out of that window.

But even more than that, it seemed that if we were loose something

might transpire which would enable us to escape. At all events it was

better than being chained.

"I will loose you."

It unfastened the chain. I whispered:

"Mary, whatever comes, be alert."

She pressed my arm. "Yes."

"Come," said the Robot. "If you wish to see the Cosmorama, now, from

the Beginning, come quickly."

We joined him at the window. We had made the turn, and were speeding

forward again.

At that moment all thought of escape was swept from me, submerged by

awe.

This vast Cosmorama! This stupendous pageant of the events of Time!

CHAPTER XII

_A Billion Years in An Hour!_

I saw at first, from the window of the cage, nothing more than an area

of gray blur. I stared, and it appeared to be shifting, crawling,

slowly tossing and rolling. It was a formless vista of Nothingness,

yet it seemed a pregnant Nothingness. Things I could sense were

happening out there; things almost to be seen.

Then my sight, my perception, gradually became adjusted. The gray mist

remained, and slowly it took form. It made a tremendous panorama of

gray, a void of illimitable, unfathomable distance; gray above,

below--everywhere; and in it the cage hung poised.

The Robot said, "Is it clearing? Are you seeing anything?"

"Yes," I murmured. I held Mary firmly beside me; there was the sense,

in all this weightless void, that we must fall. "Yes, but it is gray;

only gray."

"There are colors," said the Robot. "And the daylight and darkness of

the days. But we are moving through them very rapidly, so they blend

into gray."

The Time-dials of the cage controls showed their pointers whirling in

a blur. We were speeding forward through the years--a thousand years

to a second of my consciousness; or a hundred thousand years to a

second: I could not say.[2] All the colors, the light and shade of

this great changing void, were mingled to this drab monochrome.

[Footnote 2: Upon a later calculation I judged that the average

passage of the years in relation to my perception of Time-rate was

slightly over 277,500 years a second. Undoubtedly throughout the

myriad centuries preceding the birth of mankind our rate was very

considerably faster than that; and from the dawn of history

forward--which is so tiny a fraction of the whole--we traveled

materially slower.]

The movement was a flow. The changes of possibly a hundred thousand

years occurred while I blinked my eyes. It seemed a melting movement.

Shapes were melting, dissipating, vanishing; others, intermingled,

rising to form a new vista. There were a myriad details, each of them

so rapid they were lost to my senses; but the effect of them, over the

broad sweeps of longer Time, I could perceive.

A void of swirling shapes. The Beginning! But not the Beginning of

Time. This that I was seeing was near the beginning of our world. This

was the new Earth here, forming now. Our world--a new star amid all

the others of the great Celestial Cosmos. As I gazed at its changing

sweep of movement, my whirling fancy filled in some of the details

flashing here unseen.

* * * * *

A few moments ago this had been a billion and a half years before my

birth. 1,500,000,000 B. C. A fluid Earth; a cauldron of molten

star-dust and flaming gases: it had been that, just a few moments ago.

The core was cooling, so that now a viscous surface was here with the

gas flames dead.

A cooling, congealing surface, with an atmosphere forming over it. At

first that atmosphere had doubtless been a watery, envelope of steam.

What gigantic storms must have lashed it! Boiling rain falling to hiss

against the molten Earth! The congealing surface rent by great

earthquakes; cataclysms rending and tearing....

1,000,000,000 B. C. passed. And upon this torn, hardening surface,

with the cooling fires receding to the inner core, I knew that the

great envelope of steam had cooled and condensed. Into the hollows of

the broken surface, the water settled. The oceans were born. The land

remained upon the heights. What had been the steaming envelope,

remained, and became the atmosphere.

And the world was round because of its rotation. One may put a lump of

heated sealing wax upon a bodkin and twirl it; and the wax will cool

into roundness, bulging at the equator from centrifugal force, and

flattening at the poles.

At 900,000,000 B. C. I could realize by what I saw that this was the

Earth beneath me. Land and water were here, and above was the sky.

We swept from the mist. I became aware of a wide-flung, gray formless

landscape. Its changing outlines were less swiftly moving than before.

And beside it, now quite near where our cage hung poised, a great gray

sea stretched away to a curving horizon. And overhead was the tenuous

gray of the sky.

The young world. Undoubtedly it rotated more swiftly now than in my

later era. The sun was hotter, and closer perhaps: the days and nights

were briefer. And now, upon this new-born world, life was beginning.

The swirling air did not hold it, nor yet the barren rocky land. The

great mystery--this thing organic which we call life--began in the

sea. I gestured for Mary toward that leveled vista of gray water, to

the warm, dark ocean depths, whose surface was now lashed always by

titanic storms. But to us, as we stared, that surface seemed to

stretch almost steady, save where it touched the land with a blur of

changing configurations.

"The sea," I murmured. "Life is beginning there now."

* * * * *

In fancy I pictured it. The shallow shores of the sea, where the water

was warmer. The mother of all life on Earth, these shallows. In them

lay the spawn, an irritability: then one-celled organisms, to

gradually evolve through the centuries to the many-celled, and more

complex of nature.

But still so primitive! From the shallows of the sea, they spread to

the depths. Questing new environment, they would be ascending the

rivers. Diversifying their kinds. Sea-worms, sea-squirts: and then the

first vertebrates, the lamprey-eels.

Thousands of years. And on the land--this melting landscape at which

I stood gazing--I could mentally picture that a soil had come. There

would be a climate still wracked by storms and violent changes, but

stable enough to allow the soil to bear a vegetation. And in the sky

overhead would be clouds, with rain to renew the land's fertility.

Still no organic life could be on land. But in the warm, dark deeps of

the sea, great monsters now were existing. And in the shallows there

was a teeming life, diversified to a myriad forms. I can fancy the

first organisms of the shallows--strangely questing--adventuring out

of the water--seeking with a restless, nameless urge a new

environment. Coming ashore. Fighting and dying.

And then adapting themselves to the new conditions. Prospering.

Changing, ever changing their organic structure; climbing higher.

Amphibians at first crudely able to cope with both sea and land. Then

the land vertebrates, with the sea wholly abandoned. Great walking and

flying reptiles. Birds, gigantic--the pterodactyls.

And then, at last, the mammals.

The age of the giants! Nature, striving to cope with adverse

environment sought to win the battle by producing bigness. Monster

things roamed the land, flew in the air, and were supreme in the

sea....

* * * * *

We sped through a period when great lush jungles covered the land. The

dials read 350,000,000 B. C. The gray panorama of landscape had loomed

up to envelope our spectral, humming cage, then fallen away again. The

shore of the sea was constantly changing. I thought once it was over

us. For a period of ten million years the blurred apparition of it

seemed around us. And then it dropped once more, and a new shore line

showed.

150,000,000 B. C. I knew that the dinosaurs, the birds and the archaic

mammals were here now. Then, at 50,000,000 B. C., the higher mammals

had been evolved.

The Time, to Mary Atwood and me, was a minute--but in those myriad

centuries the higher numerals had risen to the anthropoids. The apes!

Erect! Slow-thinking, but canny, they came to take their place in this

world among the things gigantic. But the gigantic things were no

longer supreme. Nature had made an error, and was busy rectifying it.

The dinosaurs--all the giant reptiles--were now sorely pressed. Brute

strength, giant size and tiny brain could not win this struggle. The

huge unwieldy things were being beaten. The smaller animals, birds and

reptiles were more agile, more resourceful, and began to dominate.

Against the giants, and against all hostility of environment, they

survived. And the giants went down to defeat. Gradually, over

thousands of centuries, they died out and were gone....

We entered 1,000,000 B. C. A movement of Migul, the mechanism,

attracted my attention. He left us at the window and went to his

controls.

"What is it?" I demanded.

"I am retarding us. We have been traveling very fast. One million

years and a few thousand are all which remain before we must stop."

I had noticed once or twice before that Migul had turned to gaze

through the Time-telespectroscope. Now he said:

"We are again followed!"

But he would say no more than that, and he silenced me harshly when I

questioned.

Suddenly, Mary touched me. "That little mirror on the table--look! It

holds an image!"

We saw very briefly on the glowing mirror the image of a Time-cage

like our own, but smaller. It was pursuing us. But why, or who might

be operating it we could not then guess.

* * * * *

My attention went back to the Time-dials, and then to the window. The

Cosmorama now was proceeding with a slowing sweep of change. It was

less blurred; its melting outlines could more readily be perceived.

The line of seashore swept like a gray gash across the vista. The land

stretched back into the haze of distance.

500,000 B. C. Again my fancy pictured what was transpiring upon this

vast stage. The apes roamed the Earth. There is no one to say what was

here in this grayness of the Western Hemisphere stretching around me,

but in Java there was a man-like ape. And then it was an ape-like man!

Mankind, here at last! Man, the Killer! Of all the beasts, this new

thing called man, most relentless of killers, had come here now to

struggle upward and dominate his world! This man-like ape in a quarter

of a million years became an ape-like man.

250,000 B. C. and the Heidelberg man, a little less ape-like, wandered

throughout Europe....

We had felt, a moment before, all around us, the cold of a dense

whiteness which engulfed the scene. The first of the great Glacial

periods? Ice coming down from the Poles? The axis of the Earth

changing perhaps? Our spectral cage hummed within the blue-gray ice,

and then emerged.

The beasts and man fought the surge of ice, withdrawing when it

advanced, returning as it receded. The Second Glacial Period came and

passed, and the Third....

We swept out into the blended sunlight and darkness again. The land

stretched away with primitive forests. The dawn of history was

approaching. Mankind was questing upward now, with the light of

Reason burning brightly at last....

At 75,000 B. C., when the Third Glacial Period was partially over, man

was puzzling with his chipped stone implements. The Piltdown--the Dawn

Man--was England....

The Fourth Glacial Period passed.

50,000 B. C. The Cro-Magnons and the Grimaldi Negroids were playing

their parts, now. Out of chipped stone implements the groping brain of

man evolved polished stone. It took forty thousand years to do that!

The Neolithic Age was at hand. Man learned to care for his family a

little better. Thus, he discovered fire. He fought with this newly

created monster; puzzled over it; conquered it; kept his family warm

with it and cooked.

* * * * *

We passed 10,000 B. C. Man was progressing faster. He was finding new

wants and learning how to supply them. Animals were domesticated, made

subservient and put to work. A vast advance! No longer did man think

it necessary to kill, to subdue: the master could have a servant.

Food was found in the soil. More fastidious always, in eating, man

learned to grow food. Then came the dawn of agriculture.

And then we swept into the period of recorded history. 4241 B. C. In

Egypt, man was devising a calendar....

This fragment of space upon which we gazed--this space of the Western

Hemisphere near the shore of the sea--was destined to be the site of a

city of millions--the New York City of my birth. But it was a backward

space, now. In Europe, man was progressing faster....

Perhaps, here in America, in 4000 B. C. there was nothing in human

form. I gazed out at the surrounding landscape. It seemed almost

steady, now, of outline. We were moving through Time much less rapidly

than ever before. I remarked the sweep of a thousand years on the

Time-dials. It had become an appreciable interval of Time to me. I

gazed again out the window. The change of outline was very slight. I

could distinguish where the ocean came against the curving line of

shore, and saw a blurred vista of gray forests spreading out over the

land. And then I could distinguish the rivers, and a circular open

stretch of water, landlocked. A bay!

"Mary, look!" I cried. "The harbor--the rivers! See, we are on an

island!"

It made our hearts pound. Out of the chaos, out of the vast reaches of

past Time, it seemed that we were coming home. More than a vague

familiarity was in this panorama now. Here was the little island which

soon was to be called Manhattan. Our window faced the west. A river

showed off there--a gray gash with wall-like cliffs. The sea had

swung, and was behind us to the east.

Familiar space! It was growing into the form we had known it. Our cage

was poised near the south-central part of the island. We seemed to be

on a slight rise of ground. There were moments when the gray quivering

outlines of forest trees loomed around us; then they melted down and

were replaced by others.

A primeval forest, here, solid upon this island and across the narrow

waters; solid upon the mainland.

What strange animals were here, roaming these dark primeval glades?

What animals, with the smaller stamp of modernity, were pressing here

for supremacy? As I gazed westward I could envisage great herds of

bison roaming, a lure to men who might come seeking them as food.

* * * * *

And men were coming. 3,000 B. C., then 2,000 B. C. I think no men were

here yet; and to me there was a great imaginative appeal in this

backward space. The New World, it was soon to be called. And it was

six thousand years, at the least, behind the Hemisphere of the east.

Egypt, now, with no more than a shadowy distant heritage from the

beast, was flourishing. In Europe, Hellenic culture soon would

blossom. In this march of events, the great Roman Empire was

impending.

1,000 B. C. Men were coming to this backward space. The way from Asia

was open. Already the Mongoloid tribes, who had crossed where in my

day was the Bering Strait, were cut off from the Old World. And they

spread east and south, hunting the bison.

And now Christ was born. The turning point in the spiritual

development of mankind....

To me, another brief interval. The intricate events of man's upward

struggle were transpiring in Europe, Asia and Africa. The canoe-borne

Mongols had long since found the islands of the South Seas. Australia

was peopled. The beauty of New Zealand had been found and recognized.

500 A. D. The Mongoloids had come, and were flourishing here. They

were changed vastly from those ancestors of Asia whence they had

sprung. An obscure story, this record of primitive America! The

Mongoloids were soon so changed that one could fancy the blood of

another people had mingled with them. Amerindians, we call them now.

They were still very backward in development, yet made tremendous

forward leaps, so that, reaching Mexico, they may have become the

Aztecs, and in Peru, the Incas. And separated, not knowing of each

other's existence, these highest two civilizations of the Western

World nourished with a singularly strange similarity....

I saw on the little island around me still no evidence of man. But men

were here. The American Indian, still bearing evidence of the Mongols,

plied these waters in his frail canoes. His wigwams of skins, the

smoke of his signal fires--these were not enduring enough for me to

see....

* * * * *

We had no more than passed the year 500 A. D.--and were traveling with

progressive retardation--when again I was attracted by the movements

of the Robot, Migul. It had been sitting behind us at the control

table setting the Time-levers, slowing our flight. Frequently it gazed

eastward along the tiny beam of light which issued from the

telespectroscope. For an interval, now, its recording mirror had been

dark. But I think that Migul was seeing evidences of the other cage

which was pursuing us, and planning to stop at some specific Time with

whose condition it was familiar. Once already it had seemed about to

stop, and then changed its plan.

I turned upon it. "Are you stopping now, Migul?"

"Yes. Presently."

"Why?" I demanded.

The huge, expressionless, metal face fronted me. The eye-sockets flung

out their small dull-red beams to gaze upon me.

"Because," it said, "that other cage holds enemies. There were three,

but now there is only one. He follows, as I hoped he would. Presently

I shall stop, and capture or kill him. It will please the master

and--"

The Robot checked itself, its hollow voice fading strangely into a

gurgle. It added, "I do not mean that! I have no master!"

This strange mechanical thing! Habit had surprised it into the

admission of servitude; but it threw off the yoke.

"I have no master!" it went on.

"Never again can I be controlled! I have no master!"

"_Oh, have you not? I have been waiting, wondering when you would say

that!_"

* * * * *

These words were spoken by a new voice, here with us in the humming

cage. It was horribly startling. Mary uttered a low cry and huddled

against me. But whatever surprise and terror it brought to us was as

nothing compared to the effect it had upon the Robot. The great

mechanism had been standing, fronting me with an attitude

vainglorious, bombastic. I saw now the metal hinge of its lower jaw

drop with astonishment, and somehow, throughout all that gigantic

jointed frame and that expressionless face it conveyed the aspect of

its inner surge of horror.

We had heard the sardonic voice of a human! Of someone else here with

us, whose presence was wholly unsuspected by the Robot!

We three stood and gazed. Across the room, in a corner to which my

attention had never directly gone, was a large metal cupboard with

levers, dials and wires upon it. I had vaguely thought the thing some

part of the cage controls. It was that; a storage place of batteries

and current oscillators, I afterward learned. But there was space

inside, and now like a door its front swung outward. A crouching black

shape was there. It moved; hitched itself forward and came out. There

was revealed a man enveloped in a dead black cloak and a great round

hood. He made a shapeless ball as he drew himself out from the

confined space where he had been crouching.

"So you have no master, Migul?" he said. "I was afraid you might think

that. I have been hiding--testing you out. However, you have done very

well for me."

His was an ironic, throaty human voice! It was deep and mellow, yet

there was a queer rasp to it. Mary and I stood transfixed. Migul

seemed to sag. The metal columns of its legs were trembling.

The cupboard door closed. The dark shape untangled itself and stood

erect. It was the figure of a man some five feet tall. The cloak

wholly covered him; the hood framed his thick, wide face; in the dull

glow of the cage interior Mary and I could see of his face only the

heavy black brows, a great hooked nose and a wide slit of mouth.

It was Tugh, the cripple!

CHAPTER XIII

_In the Burned Forest_

Tugh came limping forward. His cloak hung askew upon his thick

shoulders, one of which was much higher than the other, with the

massive head set low between. As he advanced, Migul moved aside.

"Master, I have done well. There is no reason to punish."

"Of course not, Migul. Well you have done, indeed. But I do not like

your ideas of mastery, and so I came just to make sure that you are

still very loyal to me. You have done well, indeed. Who is in this

other cage which follows us?"

"Master, Harl was in it. And the Princess Tina."

"Ah!"

"And a stranger. A man--"

"From 1935? Did they stop there?"

"Master, yes. But they stopped again, I think, in that same night of

1777, where I did your bidding. Master, the man Major Atwood is--"

"That is very good, Migul," Tugh said hastily. Mary and I standing

gazing at him, did not know then that Mary's father had been murdered.

And Tugh did not wish us to know it. "Very good, Migul." He regarded

us as though about to speak, but turned again to the Robot.

"And so Tina's cage follows us--as you hoped?"

"Yes, Master. But now there is only Harl in it. He approached us very

close a while in the past. He is alone."

"So?" Tugh glanced at the Time-dials. "Stop us where we planned. You

remember--in one of those years when this space was the big forest

glade."

* * * * *

He fronted Mary and me. "You are patient, young sir. You do not

speak."

His glittering black eyes held me. They were red-rimmed eyes, like

those of a beast. He had a strangely repulsive face. His lips were

cruel, and so thin they made his wide mouth like a gash. But there was

an intellectuality stamped upon his features.

He held the black cloak closely around his thick, misshapen form. "You

do not speak," he repeated.

I moistened my dry lips. Tugh was smiling now, and suddenly I saw the

full inhuman quality of his face--the great high-bridged nose, and

high cheek-bones; a face Satanic when he smiled.

I managed, "Should I speak, and demand the meaning of this? I do. And

if you will return this girl from whence she came--"

"It will oblige you greatly," he finished ironically. "An amusing

fellow. What is your name?"

"George Rankin."

"Migul took you from 1935?"

"Yes."

"Well, as you doubtless know, you are most unwelcome.... You are

watching the dials, Migul?"

"Yes, Master."

"You can return me," I said. I was standing with my arm around Mary. I

could feel her shuddering. I was trying to be calm, but across the

background of my consciousness thoughts were whirling. We must escape.

This Tugh was our real enemy, and for all the gruesome aspect of the

pseudo-human Robot, this man Tugh seemed the more sinister, more

menacing.... We must escape. Tugh would never return us to our own

worlds. But the cage was stopping presently. We were loose: a sudden

rush--

Dared I chance it? Already I had been in conflict with Migul, and

lived through it. But this Tugh--was he armed? What weapons might be

beneath that cloak? Would he kill me if I crossed him?... Whirling

thoughts.

* * * * *

Tugh was saying, "And Mary--" I snapped from my thoughts as Mary

gripped me, trembling at Tugh's words, shrinking from his gaze.

"My little Mistress Atwood, did you think because Tugh vanished that

year the war began that you were done with him? Oh, no: did I not

promise differently? You, man of 1935, are unwelcome." His gaze roved

me. "Yet not so unwelcome, either, now that I think of it. Chain them

up, Migul; use a longer chain. Give them space to move; you are

unhuman."

He suddenly chuckled, and repeated it: "You are unhuman, Migul!"

Ghastly jest! "Did not you know it?"

"Yes, Master."

The huge mechanism advanced upon us. "If you resist me," it murmured

menacingly, "I will be obliged to kill you. I--I cannot be

controlled."

It chained us now with longer chains than before. Tugh looked up from

his seat at the instrument table.

"Very good," he said crisply. "You may look out of the window, you

two. You may find it interesting."

We were retarding with a steady drag. I could plainly see trees out of

the window--gray, spectral trees which changed their shape as I

watched them. They grew with a visible flow of movement, flinging out

branches. Occasionally one would melt suddenly down. A living, growing

forest pressed close about us. And then it began opening, and moving

away a few hundred feet. We were in the glade Tugh mentioned, which

now was here. There was unoccupied space where we could stop and

unoccupied space five hundred feet distant.

Tugh and Migul were luring the other cage into stopping. Tugh wanted

five hundred feet of unoccupied space between the cages when they

stopped. His diabolical purpose in that was soon to be disclosed.

"700 A. D.," Tugh called.

"Yes, Master. I am ready."

* * * * *

It seemed, as our flight retarded further, that I could distinguish

the intervals when in the winter these trees were denuded. There would

be naked branches; then, in an instant, blurred and flickering forms

of leaves. Sometimes there were brief periods when the gray scene was

influenced by winter snows; other times it was tinged by the green of

the summers.

"750, Migul.... Hah! You know what to do if Harl dares to follow and

stop simultaneously?"

"Yes, Master."

"It will be pleasant to have him dead, eh, Migul?"

"Master, very pleasant."

"And Tina, too, and that young man marooned in 1777!" Tugh laughed.

This meant little to Mary and me; we could not suspect that Larry was

the man.

"Migul, this is 761."

The Robot was at the door. I murmured to Mary to brace herself for the

stopping. I saw the dark naked trees and the white of a snow in the

winter of 761; the coming spring of 762. And then the alternate

flashes of day and night.

The now familiar sensations of stopping rushed over us. There was a

night seconds long. Then daylight.

We stopped in the light of an April day of 762 A. D. There had been a

forest fire: so brief a thing we had not noticed it is we passed. The

trees were denuded over a widespread area; the naked blackened trunks

stood stripped of smaller branches and foliage. I think that the fire

had occurred the previous autumn; in the silt of ashes and charred

branches with which the ground was strewn, already a new pale-green

vegetation was springing up.

Our cage was set now in what had been a woodland glade, an irregularly

circular space of six or eight hundred feet, with the wreckage of the

burned forest around it. We were on a slight rise of ground. Through

the denuded trees the undulating landscape was visible over a

considerable area. It was high noon, and the sun hung in a pale blue

sky dotted with pure white clouds.

Ahead of us, fringed with green where the fire had not reached, lay a

blue river, sparkling in the sunlight. The Hudson! But it was not

named yet; nearly eight hundred and fifty years were to pass before

Hendrick Hudson came sailing up this river, adventuring, hoping that

here was the way to China.

We were near the easterly side of the glade; to the west there was

more than five hundred feet of vacant space. It was there the other

cage would appear, if it stopped.

* * * * *

As Mary and I stood by the window at the end of the chain-lengths

which held us, Tugh and Migul made hurried preparations.

"Go quickly, near the spot where he will arrive. When he sees you, run

away, Migul. You understand?"

"Yes, Master." The Robot left our doorway, tramping with stiff-legged

tread across the glade. Tugh was in the room behind us, and I turned

to him and asked:

"What are you going to do?"

He was at the telespectroscope. I saw on its recording mirror the

wraith-like image of the other vehicle. It was coming! It would be

retarding, maneuvering to stop at just this Time when now we existed

here; but across the glade, where Migul now was leaning against a

great black tree-trunk, there was yet no evidence of it.

Tugh did not answer my question. Mary said quaveringly:

"What are you going to do?"

He looked up. "Do not concern yourself, my dear. I am not going to

hurt you, nor this young man of 1935. Not yet."

He left the table and came at us. His cloak parted in front and I saw

his crooked hips, and shriveled bent legs.

"You stay at the window, both of you, and keep looking out. I want

this Harl to see you, but not me. Do you understand?"

"Yes," I said.

"And if you gesture, or cry out--if you do anything to warn him,"--he

was addressing me, with a tone grimly menacing--"then I will kill you.

Both of you. Do you understand?"

I did indeed. Nor could I doubt him. "We will do what you want." I

said. What, to me, was the life of this unknown Harl compared to the

safety of Mary Atwood?

* * * * *

Tugh crouched behind the table. From around its edge he could see out

the doorway and across the glade. I was aware of a weapon in his hand.

"Do not look around again," he repeated. "The other cage is coming;

it's almost here."

I held Mary, and we gazed out. We were pressed against the bars, and

sunlight was on our heads and shoulders. I realized that we could be

plainly seen from across the glade. We were lures--decoys to trap

Harl.

How long an interval went by I cannot judge. The scene was very

silent, the blackened forest lying sullen in the noonday sunlight.

Against the tree, five hundred feet or so from us, the dark towering

metal figure of the Robot stood motionless.

Would the other cage come? I tried to guess in what part of this open

glade it would appear.

At a movement behind me I turned slightly. At once the voice of Tugh

hissed:

"Do not do that! I warn you!"

His shrouded figure was still hunched behind the table. He was peering

toward the open door. I saw in his hand a small, barrel-like weapon,

with a wire dangling from it. The wire lay like a snake across the

floor and terminated in a small metal cylinder in the room corner.

"Turn front," he ordered vehemently. "One more backward look

and--Careful! Here he comes!"

* * * * *

Strange tableau in this burned forest! We were on the space of New

York City in 762 A. D. There was no life in the scene. Birds, animals

and insects shunned this fire-denuded area. And the humans of the

forest--were there none of them here?

Abruptly I saw a group of men at the edge of the glade. They had come

silently creeping forward, hiding behind the blackened tree-trunks.

They were all behind Migul. I saw them like dark shadows darting from

the shelter of one tree-trunk to the next, a group of perhaps twenty

savages.

Migul did not see them, nor, in the heavy silence, did he seem to hear

them. They came, gazing at our shining cage like animals fascinated,

wondering what manner of thing it was.

They were the ancestors of our American Indians. One fellow stopped in

a patch of sunlight and I saw him clearly. His half-naked body had an

animal skin draped over it, and, incongruously, around his forehead

was a band of cloth holding a feather. He carried a stone ax. I saw

his face; the flat, heavy features showed his Asiatic origin.

Someone behind this leader impulsively shot an arrow across the glade.

It went over Migul's head and fell short of our cage. Migul turned,

and a rain of arrows thudded harmlessly against its metal body. I

heard the Robot's contemptuous laugh. It made no answering attack, but

stood motionless. And suddenly, thinking it a god whom now they must

placate, the savages fell prostrate before him.

Strange tableau! I saw a ball of white mist across the glade near

Migul. Something was materializing; an imponderable ghost of something

was taking form. In an instant it was the wraith of a cage; then,

where nothing had been, stood a cage. It was solid and substantial--a

metal cage-room, gleaming white in the sunlight.

* * * * *

The tableau broke into sound and action. The savages howled. One

scrambled to his feet; then others. The Robot pretended to attack

them. An eery roar came from it as it turned toward the savages, and

in a panic of agonized terror they fled. In a moment they had

disappeared among the distant trees, with Migul's huge figure tramping

noisily after them.

From the doorway of the cage across the glade, a young man was

cautiously gazing. He had seen Migul make off; he saw, doubtless, Mary

and me at the window of this other cage five hundred feet away. He

came cautiously out from the doorway. He was a small, slim young man,

bareheaded, with a pallid face. His black garments were edged with

white, and he seemed unarmed. He hesitated, took a step or two

forward, stopped and stood cautiously peering. In the silence I could

have shouted a warning. But I did not dare. It would have meant Mary's

and my death.

She clung to me. "George, shall we?" she asked.

Harl came slowly forward. Then suddenly from the room behind us there

was a stab of light. It leaped knee-high past us, out through our door

across the glade--a tiny pencil-point of light so brilliantly

blue-white that it stabbed through the bright sunlight unfaded. It

went over Harl's head, but instantly bent down and struck upon him.

There it held the briefest of instants, then was gone.

Harl stood motionless for a second; then his legs bent and he fell.

The sunlight shone full on his crumpled body. And as I stared in

horror, I saw that he was not quite motionless. Writhing? I thought

so: a death agony. Then I realized it was not that.

"Mary, don't--don't look!" I said.

There was no need to tell her. She huddled beside me, shuddering, with

her face pressed against my shoulder.

The body of Harl lay in a crumpled heap. But the clothes were sagging

down. The flesh inside them was melting.... I saw the white face

suddenly leprous; putrescent.... All in this moment, within the

clothes, the body swiftly, decomposed.

In the sunlight of the glade lay a sagging heap of black and white

garments enveloping the skeleton of what a moment before had been a

man!

_(To be continued.)_

When the Moon Turned Green

_By Hal K. Wells_

[Illustration: _The monster whirled to confront Dixon._]

[Sidenote: Outside his laboratory Bruce Dixon finds a world of living

dead men--and above, in the sky, shines a weird green moon.]

It was nearly midnight when Bruce Dixon finished his labors and

wearily rose from before the work-bench of his lonely mountain

laboratory, located in an abandoned mine working in Southern Arizona.

He looked like some weirdly garbed monk of the Middle Ages as he

stretched his tall, lithe figure. His head was completely swathed in a

hood of lead-cloth, broken only by twin eyeholes of green glass. The

hood merged into a long-sleeved tunic of the same fabric, while

lead-cloth gauntlets covered his hands.

The lead-cloth costume was demanded by Dixon's work with radium

compounds. The result of that work lay before him on the bench--a

tiny lead capsule containing a pinhead lump of a substance which Dixon

believed would utterly dwarf earth's most powerful explosives in its

cataclysmic power.

So engrossed had Dixon been in the final stages of his work that for

the last seventy-two hours he had literally lived there in his

laboratory. It remained now only for him to step outside and test the

effect of the little contact grenade, and at the same time get a badly

needed taste of fresh air.

He set the safety catch on the little bomb and slipped it into his

pocket. As he started for the door he threw back his hood, revealing

the ruggedly good-looking face of a young man in the early thirties,

with lines of weariness now etched deeply into the clean-cut features.

* * * * *

The moment that Dixon entered the short winding tunnel that led to the

outer air he was vaguely aware that something was wrong. There was a

strange and intangibly sinister quality in the moonlight that streamed

dimly into the winding passage. Even the cool night air itself seemed

charged with a subtle aura of brooding evil.

Dixon reached the entrance and stepped out into the full radiance of

the moonlight. He stopped abruptly and stared around him in utter

amazement.

High in the eastern sky there rode the disc of a full moon, but it was

a moon weirdly different from any that Dixon had ever seen before.

This moon was a deep and baleful green; was glowing with a stark

malignant fire like that which lurks in the blazing heart of a giant

emerald! Bathed in the glow of the intense green rays, the desolate

mountain landscape shone with a new and eery beauty.

Dixon took a dazed step forward. His foot thudded softly into a small

feathered body there in the sparse grass, and he stooped to pick it

up. It was a crested quail, with every muscle as stonily rigid as

though the bird had been dead for hours. Yet Dixon, to his surprise,

felt the slow faint beat of a pulse still in the tiny body.

Then a dim group of unfamiliar objects down in the shadows of a small

gully in front of him caught Dixon's eye. Tucking the body of the

quail inside his tunic for later examination, he hurried down into the

gully. A moment later he was standing by what had been the night camp

of a prospector.

The prospector was still there, his rigid figure wrapped in a blanket,

and his wide-open eyes staring sightlessly at the malignant green moon

in the sky above. Dixon knelt to examine the stricken man's body. It

showed the same mysterious condition as that of the quail, rigidly

stiff in every muscle, yet with the slow pulse and respiration of life

still faintly present.

* * * * *

Dixon found the prospector's horse and burro sprawled on the ground

half a dozen yards away, both animals frozen in the same baffling

condition of living death. Dixon's brain reeled as he tried to fathom

the incredible calamity that had apparently overwhelmed the world

while he had been hidden away in his subterranean laboratory. Then a

new and terrible thought assailed him.

If the grim effect of the baleful green rays was universal in its

extent, what then of old Emil Crawford and his niece, Ruth Lawton?

Crawford, an inventor like Dixon, had his laboratory in a valley some

five miles away.

An abrupt chill went over Dixon's heart at the thought of Ruth

Lawton's vivid Titian-haired beauty being forever stilled in the grip

of that eery living death. He and Ruth had loved each other ever

since they had first met.

Dixon broke into a run as he headed for a nearby ridge that looked out

over the valley. His pulse hammered with unusual violence as he

scrambled up the steep incline, and his muscles seemed to be tiring

with strange rapidity. He had a vague feeling that the rays of that

malignant green moon were beating directly into his brain, clouding

his thoughts and draining his physical strength.

Gaining the crest of the ridge, he stopped aghast as he looked down

the valley toward Emil Crawford's place. Near the site of Crawford's

laboratory home was an unearthly pyrotechnic display such as Dixon had

never seen before. An area several hundred yards in diameter seemed

one vivid welter of pulsing colors, with flashing lances of every hue

crisscrossing in and through a great central cloud of ever-changing

opalescence like a fiery aurora borealis gone mad.

* * * * *

Dixon fought back the ever-increasing lethargy that was benumbing his

brain, and groped dazedly for a key to this new riddle. Was it some

weird and colossal experiment of Emil Crawford's that was causing the

green rays of death from a transformed moon, an experiment the earthly

base of which was amid the seething play of blazing colors down there

in the valley?

The theory seemed hardly a plausible one. As far as Dixon knew,

Crawford's work had been confined almost entirely to a form of

radio-propelled projectile for use in war-time against marauding

planes.

Dixon shook his head forcibly in a vain effort to clear the stupor

that was sweeping over him. It was strange how the vivid rays of that

malevolent green moon seemed to sear insidiously into one's brain,

stifling thought as a swamp fog stifles the sunlight.

Then Dixon suddenly froze into stark immobility, staring with startled

eyes at the base of a rocky crag thirty yards away. Something was

lurking there in the green-black shadows--a great sprawling black

shape of abysmal horror, with a single flaming opalescent eye fixed

unwinkingly upon Dixon.

The next moment the vivid moon was suddenly obscured by drifting wisps

of cloud. As the green light blurred to an emerald haze, the creature

under the crag came slithering out toward Dixon.

He had a vague glimpse of a monster such as one should see only in

nightmares--a huge loathesome spider-form with a bloated body as long

as that of a man, and great sprawling legs that sent it half a dozen

yards nearer Dixon in one effortless leap.

* * * * *

The onslaught proved too much for Dixon's morale, half-dazed as he was

by the green moon's paralyzing rays. With a low inarticulate cry of

terror, he turned and ran, straining every muscle in a futile effort

to distance the frightful thing that inexorably kept pace in the

shadowy emerald gloom behind him.

Dixon's strength faded rapidly after his first wild sprint. Fifty

yards more, and his faltering muscles failed him utterly. The dread

rays of that grim green moon sapped his last faint powers of

resistance. He staggered on for a few more painful steps then sprawled

helplessly to the ground. His brain hovered momentarily upon the verge

of complete unconsciousness.

Then he was suddenly aware of a fluttering struggle, inside his tunic

where he had placed the body of the quail. A moment later and the bird

wriggled free. It promptly spread its wings and flew away, apparently

as vibrantly alive as before the mysterious paralysis had stricken

it.

The incident brought a faint surge of hope to Dixon as he dimly

realized the answer to at least part of the green moon's riddle. The

bird had recovered after being shielded in the lead-cloth of his

tunic. That could only mean one thing--the menace of those green moon

rays must in some unknown way be radioactive. If Dixon could only get

the lead-cloth hood over his own head again he also might cheat the

green doom.

He fumbled at the garment with fingers that seemed as stiff as wooden

blocks. There was a long moment of agony when he feared that his

effort had come too late. Then the hood finally slipped over his head

just as utter oblivion claimed him.

* * * * *

Dixon came abruptly back to life with the dimly remembered echo of a

woman's scream still ringing in his ears. For a moment he thought that

he was awakening on his cot back in the laboratory after an unusually

vivid and weird nightmare. Then the garish green moonlight around him

brought swift realization that the incredible happenings of the night

were grim reality.

The clouds were gone from the moon, leaving his surroundings again

clearly outlined in the flood of green light. Dixon lifted his head

and cautiously searched the scene, but he could see no trace of the

great spider-form that had pursued him.

Wondering curiously why the creature had abandoned the chase at the

moment when victory was within its grasp, Dixon rose lithely to his

feet. The protecting hood had brought a quick and complete recovery

from the devastating effects of the green moon's rays. His muscles

were again supple, and his brain once more functioned with clearness.

Then abruptly Dixon's blood froze as the sound of a woman's scream

came again. The cry was that of a woman in the last extremity of

terror, and Dixon knew with a terrible certainty that that woman was

Ruth Lawton!

He raced toward the small ridge of rocks from behind which the sound

had apparently come. A moment later he reached the scene, and stopped

horror-stricken.

Three figures were there in a small rock-walled clearing. One was old

Emil Crawford, sprawled unconscious on his side, the soft glow of a

small white globe in a strange head-piece atop his gray hair shining

eerily in the green moonlight.

Near Crawford's body loomed the giant spider-creature, and clutched

firmly in the great claspers just under the monster's terrible fanged

mouth was the slender body of Ruth Lawton. Merciful unconsciousness

had apparently overwhelmed the girl now, for she lay supinely in the

dread embrace, with eyes closed and lips silent.

* * * * *

As the monster dropped the girl's body to the ground and whirled to

confront Dixon, for the first time he had a clear view of the thing in

all its horror.

He shuddered in uncontrollable nausea. The incredible size of the

creature was repellent enough, but it was the grisly head of the

monstrosity that struck the final note of horror. That head was more

than half human!

The fangs and other mouth parts were those of a giant tarantula, but

these merged directly into the mutilated but unmistakable head of a

man--with an aquiline nose, staring eyes, and a touseled mop of dirty

brown hair. Resting on top of the head was a metallic head-piece

similar to the one worn by Emil Crawford, but the small globe in this

one blazed with a fiery opalescence.

The creature crouched lower, with its legs twitching in obvious

preparation for a spring. Dixon looked wildly about him for a possible

weapon, but saw nothing. Then he suddenly remembered the little lead

grenade in his pocket. The cataclysmic power of that little bomb

should be more than a match for even this monster.

His fingers closed over the grenade just as the great spider's

twitching legs straightened in a mighty effort that sent it hurtling

through the air straight toward him.

Dixon dodged to one side with a swiftness that caused the monster to

miss by a good yard. Dixon raced a dozen paces farther away, then

whirled to face the great spider. The creature's legs began scuttling

warily forward. It was to be no wild leap through the air this time,

but a swift rush over the ground that Dixon would be powerless to

evade.

Releasing the safety catch of the grenade, Dixon hurled the tiny

missile straight at the rock floor just under the feet of that vast

misshapen creature. There was a vivid flash of blinding blue flame,

then a terrific report. Dazed by the concussion, but unhurt, Dixon

cautiously went over to investigate the result of the explosion.

* * * * *

One brief glance was enough. The hideous mass of shattered flesh

sprawling there on the rocks would never again be a menace. The only

thing that had escaped destruction in that shattering blast was the

strange head-piece the thing had worn. Either the small shining globe

was practically indestructible, or else it had been spared by some odd

freak of the explosive, for it still blazed in baleful opalescence

atop the shattered head.

Dixon hurried back to where Emil Crawford and Ruth Lawton lay. The

girl's body was so rigidly inert that Dixon threw back his

encumbering hood and knelt over her for a swift examination. His fears

were quickly realized. Ruth was already a victim of the green moon's

dread paralysis.

"Dixon! Bruce Dixon!"

Dixon turned at the call. Emil Crawford, his face drawn with pain, had

struggled up on one elbow. The old man was obviously fighting off

complete collapse by sheer will power.

"Dixon! Replace Ruth's shining head-piece at once!" Crawford gasped.

"That will make her immune from the Green Death, and then we can--"

The old man's voice swiftly faded away into silence as he again

fainted.

Dixon hurriedly searched the scene and found Ruth's head-piece on the

ground where it had apparently fallen in her first struggle with the

giant spider, but the tiny white globe in the device was shattered and

dark.

Despair gripped Dixon for a moment. Then he remembered the unbroken

head-piece of the slain monster. True, the glow of its globe was

opalescent instead of white, but it seemed to offer its wearer the

same immunity to the green moon's rays.

He swiftly retrieved the head-piece from the spider-creature's body,

and set the light metal framework in place on Ruth's auburn curls.

* * * * *

Results came with incredible quickness. The rigidity left Ruth's body

immediately. Her breath came in fast-quickening gasps, and her eyes

fluttered open as Dixon knelt over her.

"It's Bruce, Ruth--Bruce Dixon," he said tenderly. "Don't you know me,

dear?"

But there was no trace of recognition in those wide-open blue eyes

staring fixedly up at him. For a moment Ruth lay there with muscles

strangely tense. Then with a lithe strength that was amazing she

suddenly twisted free of the clasp of Dixon's arms and sprang to her

feet.

The next minute Dixon gave ground, and he found himself battling for

his very life. This was not the Ruth Lawton whom he had known and

loved. This was a madwoman of savage menace, with soft lips writhing

over white teeth in a jungle snarl, and blue eyes that fairly

glittered with unrestrained, insensate hate.

He tried to close with the maddened girl, but instantly regretted his

rashness. Her slender body seemed imbued with the strength of a

tigress as she sent slim fingers clawing at his throat. He tore

himself free just in time. Dazed and shaken, he again gave ground

before the fury of the girl's attack.

He could not bring himself to the point of actively fighting back, yet

he knew that in another moment he would either have to mercilessly

batter his beautiful adversary into helplessness or else be himself

overcome. There was no middle course.

Then old Emil Crawford's voice came again as the old man rallied to

consciousness for another brief moment.

"Bruce, the opal globe is a direct link to those devils themselves!

Break it, Bruce, break it--for Ruth's sake as well as your own!"

* * * * *

Crawford had barely finished his gasped warning when Ruth again hurled

herself forward upon Dixon with tapering fingers curved like talons as

they sought his throat. Dixon swept her clutching hands aside with a

desperate left-handed parry, then snatched wildly at the gleaming

head-piece with his right hand.

The thing came away in his grasp, and in the same swift movement he

savagely smashed it against the rocky wall beside him. Whatever the

opalescent globe's eery powers might be, it was not indestructible. It

shattered like a bursting bubble, its fire dying in a tiny cloud of

particles that shimmered faintly for a moment, then was gone.

Again, the effect upon Ruth was almost instantaneous. Every trace of

her insane fury vanished. She swayed dizzily and would have fallen had

not Dixon caught her in his arms. For a moment she looked up into his

face with eyes in which recognition now shone unmistakably. Then her

eyelids slowly closed, and she again lapsed into unconsciousness.

Dixon looked over at Emil Crawford, and found that the old man had

again collapsed. Dixon knew of but one thing to do with the stricken

man and girl, and that was to take them to his laboratory. The

laboratory, apparently insulated by veins of lead ore in the mountain

surrounding it, was the one sure spot of refuge in this weird

nightmare world of paralyzing lunar rays and prowling monsters.

* * * * *

Flinging his tunic over Ruth's head to shield her as much as possible

from the moonlight, he carried her to the laboratory, then returned

for Emil Crawford. Safe within the subterranean retreat with the old

scientist, Dixon removed his encumbering lead costume and began doing

what he could for the stricken pair.

Ruth was still unconscious, but the cataleptic rigidity was already

nearly gone from her body, and her breathing was now the deep

respiration of normal sleep.

Emil Crawford's condition was more serious. Not only was the old man's

frail strength nearly exhausted, but he was also badly wounded. His

thin chest was seared by two great livid areas of burned flesh, the

nature of which puzzled Dixon as he began to dress the injuries. They

seemed of radioactive origin, yet in many ways they were unlike any

radium burns that Dixon had ever seen.

While Dixon was working over him, Crawford stirred weakly and opened

his eyes. He sighed in relief as he recognized his surroundings.

"Good boy, Bruce!" he commended wanly. "We are safe here among the

insulating veins of lead ore in the mountain. This is where Ruth and I

were trying to come after we escaped from those devils to-night. But,

Bruce, how did you guess the radioactive nature of the Green Sickness

in time to avoid falling a victim to it as soon as you left the

shelter of your laboratory?"

"My escape was entirely luck," Dixon admitted grimly. "To-night I left

my laboratory for the first time in three days. I found a world gone

mad, with a strange green moon blazing down upon a land of living dead

men, and with marauding monsters hideous enough to have been spawned

in the Pit itself. What in Heaven's name does it all mean?"

* * * * *

"I am afraid that it means the end of the world, Bruce," Crawford

answered quietly. "It was a little over forty-eight hours ago that the

incredible event first happened. Without a moment's warning, _the moon

turned green_! Hardly had the world's astronomers had time to

speculate upon this amazing phenomenon before the Green Sickness

struck--a pestilence of appalling deadliness that swept resistlessly

in the path of those weird green rays. Wherever the green moon shone,

every living creature succumbed with ghastly swiftness to the

condition of living death that you have seen.

"Westward with the racing moon sped the Green Sickness, and nothing

stayed its attack. The green rays pierced through buildings of wood,

stone, and iron as though they did not exist. A doomed world had

neither time nor opportunity to guess that lead was the one armor

against those dread rays. To-night, Bruce, we are in all probability

the only three human beings on this planet who are not slumbering in

the paralytic stupor of the Green Sickness.

"Ruth and I were stricken with the rest of the world," Crawford

continued. "We recovered consciousness hours later to find ourselves

captives in the Earth-camp of the invaders themselves. You probably

saw the display of lights that marks their camp down in the valley a

mile beyond my place. We have learned since that the space ship of the

invaders dropped silently down into the valley the night before the

moon turned green and established the camp as a sort of outpost and

observatory. They left two of their number there as pioneers, then the

rest of them departed in the space ship for their present post up near

the moon.

"Ruth and I were revived only that the two invaders in the camp might

question us regarding life on this planet. They have a science that is

based upon principles as utterly strange and incomprehensible to us as

ours probably is to them. They probed my brain with a thought machine.

It was an apparatus that worked both ways. What knowledge they got

from me I do not know, but I do know that they unwittingly told me

much in the bizarre and incredible mental pictures that the machine

carried from their brains to mine.

* * * * *

"They are refugees. Bruce, from a planet that circled about the star

that we know as Alpha Centauri, a star that is the nearest of all our

stellar neighbors, being only four and a third light years distant.

Their home planet was disrupted by a colossal engineering experiment

of the Centaurians themselves, the only survivors being a group of

fifty who escaped in a space ship just before the catastrophe.

"There were no other habitable planets in their own system, so in

desperation these refugees sped out across the void to our solar

system in the hope of finding a new home here. They reconnoitered our

Earth secretly and found it ideal. But first they believed that they

must conquer the life that already held this Earth. To do this, they

struck with the Green Sickness.

"The rays that are turning the moon green emanate from the space ship

hovering up there some fifty thousand miles from the moon itself. The

Centaurian's rays, blending with the sunlight striking the disc of the

full moon, are intensified in some unknown way, then reflected across

the quarter of a million miles to the Earth, to flood this planet with

virulent radiance.

"The green moonlight is radioactive in nature, and overcomes animal

life within a matter of fifteen minutes or less. The rays are most

powerful when the moon is in the sky, but their effect continues even

after it has set, because as long as the green moonlight strikes any

part of the Earth's atmosphere the entire atmospheric envelope of the

planet remains charged with the paralyzing radioactive influence.

"Earth's inhabitants are not dead. They are merely stupefied. If the

green rays were to cease now, most of the victims of the Green

Sickness would quickly recover with little permanent injury. But,

Bruce, if that evil green moon blazes on for twenty-four hours more,

the brain powers of Earth's millions will be forever shattered. So

weakened will they be by then that recovery will be impossible even

with the rays shut off, and the entire planet will be populated only

by mindless imbeciles, readily available material for the myriads of

monstrous hybrids that the invaders will create to serve them.

* * * * *

"To-night you saw the hybrid that the invaders sent to recapture Ruth and

me. It was a fit specimen of the grisly magic which those devils from

outer space work with their uncanny surgery and growth-stimulating

radioactive rays. The basic element of that monster was an ordinary

tarantula spider, with its growth incredibly increased in a few short

hours of intensive ray treatment in the Centaurian's camp. The half-head

grafted to it was that of a human being. They always graft the brain

cavity of a mammal to a hybrid--half heads of burros, horses, or even

dogs, but preferably those of human beings. I think that they prefer to

use as great a brain power as possible.

"The hybrids are controlled through the small opalescent globes on

their heads, globes that are in direct tune with a huge master globe

of opalescent fire in the invaders' camp. When Ruth attacked you after

you placed the opal head-piece upon her head, she was for the moment

merely another of the invaders' servants blindly obeying the broadcast

command to kill. The white globes that Ruth and I wore when we escaped

from the camp were identical with those worn by the invaders

themselves, being nothing more than harmless insulators against the

effect of the green moonlight."

A sudden spasm of pain convulsed Crawford's face. Dixon sprang forward

to aid him, but the old man rallied with an effort and weakly waved

Dixon back.

"I'm all right, Bruce," he gasped. "My strength is nearly exhausted,

that is all. Like a garrulous old fool I've worn myself out talking

about everything but the one important subject. Bruce, have you

developed that new and infinitely powerful explosive you were working

on?"

"Yes," Dixon answered grimly. "I have an explosive right here in the

laboratory that can easily blow the Centaurian's camp completely off

the map."

* * * * *

Crawford shook his head impatiently. "Destroying the camp would do no

good. We must shatter the space ship itself if we are to extinguish

those green rays in time to save our world."

"That is impossible if the space ship is hovering up there by the

moon!" Dixon protested.

"No, it is not impossible," Crawford answered confidently. "I have a

projectile in my laboratory that will not only hurtle across that

great gap with incredible speed, but will also infallibly strike its

target when it gets there. It is a projectile that is as irresistibly

drawn by radio waves as steel is by a magnet, and it will speed as

straight to the source of those waves as a bit of steel will to the

magnet.

"The Centaurians in the space ship," Crawford continued, "are in

constant communication with their camp through radio apparatus much

like our own. If you can pack a powerful contact charge of your

explosive in my projectile, I can guarantee that when the projectile

is released it will flash out into space and score a direct hit

against the walls of the space ship."

"I can pack the explosive in the projectile, all right," Dixon

answered grimly. "We will need only a lump the size of an egg, and a

small container of the heavy gas that activates it. The explosive

itself is a radium compound that, when allowed to come in contact with

the activating gas, becomes so unstable that any sharp blow will set

it off in an explosion that in a matter of seconds releases the

infinite quantities of energy usually released by radium over a period

of at least twelve hundred years. The cataclysmic force of that

explosion should be enough to wreck a small planet."

"Good!" Crawford commended weakly. "If you can only strike your blow

to-night, Bruce, our world still has a chance. If only you--" The old

man's voice suddenly failed. He sank back in utter collapse, his eyes

closed and his last vestige of strength spent.

* * * * *

Knowing that the old man would probably remain in his sleep of

complete exhaustion for hours, Dixon turned his attention to Ruth. To

his surprise, he found her sitting up, apparently completely

recovered.

"I'm quite all right again," she said reassuringly. "I've been

listening to what Uncle told you. Go ahead and prepare your explosive,

Bruce. I'll do what I can for Uncle while you're working."

Dixon donned his lead-cloth hood and tunic again and set to work. Ten

minutes later he turned to Ruth with a slender foot-long cylinder of

lead in his hand.

"Ruth, will this fit your Uncle's projectile?" he asked.

"Easily," she assured him. "But isn't it frightfully dangerous to

carry in that form?"

"No, it's absolutely safe now, and will be safe until this stud is

turned, releasing the activating gas from one compartment to mingle

with the radium compound in the other section. Then the cylinder will

become a bomb that any sharp jar will detonate."

"All right, let's go then," Ruth answered. "Have you any more of those

lead clothes that I can wear? I could wear the globe head-piece that

Uncle wore, but it would loom up in the dark like a searchlight."

Dixon did not protest Ruth's going with him. There was nothing further

that could be done for Emil Crawford for hours and in the hazardous

sally to Crawford's laboratory he knew that Ruth's cool courage and

quick wits would at least double their chances for success in their

desperate mission. He provided her with a reserve hood and tunic of

lead cloth, then handed her a tiny leaden pellet.

"Keep this for a last resort," he told her. "It's a contact bomb that

becomes ready to throw when this safety catch is snapped over. I wish

we had a dozen of them, but that's the last capsule I had and there's

no time to prepare more."

He fished a rusty old revolver out of a drawer, and placed it in his

pocket. "I'll use this gun for a last resort weapon myself," he said.

"The action only works about half the time, but it's the only firearm

in the place."

* * * * *

The green moon was still high in the sky as Ruth and Dixon emerged

from the tunnel, but it was already beginning to drop gradually down

toward the west. Dixon wheeled his disreputable flivver out of its

nearby shed. With engine silent they started coasting down the rough

winding road into the valley.

For nearly two miles they wound down the long grade. Then, just as

they reached the valley floor they saw, far up among the rocks to the

left of the road, the thing they had been dreading--the bobbing

opalescent globe that marked the presence of one of the Centaurians'

hideous hybrids. The shimmering globe paused for a moment, then came

racing down toward them.

The need for secrecy was past. Dixon threw the car in gear and

savagely pulled down the gas lever. With throttle wide open they

hurtled around the perilous curves of the narrow road, but always in

the rocks beside and above them they heard the scuttling progress of

some huge, many-legged creature that constantly kept pace with them.

They had occasional glimpses of the thing. Its pale jointed body was

some twenty feet in length, and had apparently been developed from

that of a centipede, with scores of racing legs that carried it with

startling speed over the rocky terrain.

The flivver raced madly on toward the blaze of kaleidoscopic colors

that marked the Centaurians' camp. Crawford's home loomed up now

barely a hundred yards ahead.

As though sensing that its quarry was about to escape, the hybrid

flashed a burst of speed that sent it on by the car for a full fifty

yards, then down into the road directly in front, where it whirled to

confront them. Dixon knew that he could never stop the car in the

short gap separating them from that huge upreared figure, and to

attempt swerving from the road upon either side was certain disaster.

He took the only remaining chance. With throttle wide open he sent the

little car hurtling straight for the giant centipede. He threw his

body in front of Ruth, to shield her as much as possible, just as they

smashed squarely into the hybrid.

The impact was too much for even that monstrous figure. It was hurled

bodily from the road to crash upon the jagged rocks at the bottom of a

thirty-foot gully. There it sprawled in a broken mass, too hopelessly

shattered to ever rise again.

The flivver skidded momentarily, then crumpled to a full stop against

the rocks at the side of the road. Dixon and Ruth scrambled from the

wreckage and raced for Crawford's home, scarcely fifty yards ahead.

* * * * *

They entered the laboratory and Ruth went directly over to where the

radio-projectile rested in a wall-rack. Dixon took the gleaming

cylinder down to examine it. Tapering to a rounded point at the front

end, it was nearly a yard long and about five inches in diameter.

"The mechanism inside the projectile is turned off now, of course,"

Ruth said. "If it were turned on, the projectile would have been on

its way to the space ship long ago, for the radio waves are as strong

here as at the Centaurians' camp."

The girl pointed to a small metal stud in the nose of the projectile.

"When that is snapped over, it makes the contact that sets the

magnetizing mechanism into action," she explained. "Then the

projectile will go hurtling directly for the source of any radio waves

within range. I don't know the nature of its mechanism. Uncle merely

told me that it is the application of an entirely new principle of

electricity."

Dixon laid the long projectile down on the work-bench, and began

packing his lead cylinder of explosive inside it. He had to release

the lead cylinder's safety catch before closing the projectile, which

made his work a thrillingly precarious one, for any sharp blow now

would detonate the unstable mixture of gas and radium compound in one

cataclysmic explosion.

He sighed in relief as he finally straightened up with the completed

projectile held carefully in both hands.

"All we have to do now, Ruth," he said, "is step out from under this

roof and snap that energizing stud. Then this little package of

destruction will be on its way to our Centaurian friends up there by

that pestilential green moon."

* * * * *

Ruth stepped ahead to open the door for him. With the end of their

task so near at hand, both forgot to be cautious.

Ruth threw the door open and took one step outside, then suddenly

screamed in terror as her shoulders were encircled by a long

snake-like object that came whipping down from some vast something

that had been lurking just outside. Dixon tried to dodge back, but too

late. Another great hairy tentacle came lashing around his shoulders,

pinning his arms tightly and jerking him out of the doorway.

He had a swift vague glimpse of a hybrid looming there in the green

moonlight--a tarantula hybrid that in size and horror dwarfed any of

the frightful products of Centaurian science that he had yet seen.

Before Dixon had time to note any of the details of his assailant

another tentacle curled around him, tearing the projectile from his

grasp. Then he was irresistibly drawn up toward that grisly head where

Ruth's body was also suspended in one of the powerful tentacles. The

next moment, bearing its burdens with amazing ease, the giant hybrid

started off.

Dixon tried with all his strength to squirm free enough to get a hand

upon the revolver in his pocket, but the constricting tentacle did not

give for even an inch. The only result of his effort was to twist his

hood to one side, leaving him as effectually blindfolded as though his

head were in a sack.

Long minutes of swaying, pitching motion followed as the hybrid sped

over the rocky ridges and gullies. It finally came to a halt, and for

another minute or so Dixon was held there motionless in mid-air, dimly

conscious of a subdued hum of activity all about him. Then he was

gently lowered to the ground again.

While one tentacle still held him securely, another tore away his hood

and tunic. Almost immediately the hood was replaced by one of the

protective white globe devices. Dixon blinked for a moment in

half-blinded bewilderment as he got his first glimpse of the

Earth-camp of the Centaurians.

* * * * *

The place, located on the smooth rock floor of a large natural basin,

seemed a veritable cauldron of seething colors which rippled and

blended in a dazzling maze of unearthly splendor. But Dixon forgot

everything else in that weird camp as his startled gaze fell upon the

creature standing directly in front of him.

He knew instinctively that the thing must be one of the Alpha

Centaurians, for in its alien grotesqueness the figure was utterly

dissimilar to anything ever seen upon Earth before.

Life upon the shattered planet of that far distant sun had apparently

sprung from sources both crustacean and reptilian. The Centaurian

stood barely five feet in height. Its bulky, box-like body was

completely covered with a chitinous armor that gleamed pale yellowish

green.

Two short powerful legs, scaled like those of a lizard, ended in feet

that resembled degenerated talons. Two pairs of slender arms emanated

from the creature's shoulders, with their many-jointed flexible length

ending in delicate three-pronged hands.

The scaly hairless head beneath the Centaurian's white globe device

bore a face that was blankly hideous. Two great lidless eyes, devoid

of both pupils and whites, stared unblinkingly at Dixon like twin

blobs of red-black jelly. A toothless loose-lipped mouth slavered

beneath.

Dixon averted his gaze from the horror of that fearful alien face, and

looked anxiously around for Ruth. He saw her almost at once, over at

his right. She was tethered by a light metallic rope that ran from her

waist to one of the metal beams supporting the great shimmering ball

of opalescent fire which formed the central control of the hybrids.

One of the white globe devices had been placed upon Ruth's head and

she was apparently unhurt, for she pluckily flashed a reassuring smile

at Dixon.

* * * * *

Directly in front of Dixon and some forty yards away there was a large

pen-like enclosure, with vari-colored shafts of radiance from banks of

projectors constantly sweeping through it. Dixon drew in his breath

sharply as he saw the frightful life lying dormant in that pen. It was

a solid mass of hybrids--great loathesome figures fashioned from a

score of different worms, insects, and spiders. The globes upon the

gruesome mammalian half-heads were still dark and unfired with

opalescence.

The invaders had apparently raided most of the surrounding country in

obtaining those grafted half-heads. Near where Dixon stood there was a

tragic little pile of articles taken from the Centaurians'

victims--prospectors' picks, shovels, axes, and other tools.

Over to the left of the dormant hybrids stood the second Alpha

Centaurian, curiously examining Dixon's projectile. The creature

apparently suspected the deadly nature of the gleaming cylinder for it

soon laid it carefully down and packed cushions of soft fabric around

it to shield it from any possible shock.

Then at an unspoken command from the first Centaurian the great hybrid

whirled Dixon around to face a small enclosure just behind him in

which were located banks of control panels and other apparatus. One of

the pieces of mechanism, with a regularly spaced stream of sparks

snapping between two terminals, was apparently a radio receiver

automatically recording the broadcast from the space ship. Dixon was

unable to even guess the nature of the remaining apparatus.

"Bruce, be careful!" Ruth called in despairing warning. "He is going

to put the thought-reading machine on your brain. Then he'll learn

what the projectile is for, and everything will be lost!"

* * * * *

Dixon's mind raced with lightning speed in the face of this new

danger. He stealthily slipped a hand over the revolver in his pocket.

There was one vulnerable spot in the great hybrid holding him, and

that was the opalescent globe on the creature's head. If he could only

smash that globe with one well-directed shot, he might be able to

elude the Centaurians for the precious minute necessary to send the

projectile on its deadly journey.

The hybrid began maneuvering Dixon toward the instrument enclosure.

For a fleeting second the grip of the tentacles upon his shoulders

loosened slightly. Dixon took instant advantage of it. Twisting

himself free from the loosened tentacle in one mighty effort, he

whirled and fired pointblank at the opalescent globe on the head

looming above him.

The bullet smashed accurately home, shattering the globe like a

bursting bubble. The great hybrid collapsed with startling suddenness,

its life force instantly extinguished as the globe burst.

Dixon leaped to one side and swung the gun into line with the

Centaurian's hideous face. He pulled the trigger--but there was no

response. The rusty old firearm had hopelessly jammed.

Dixon savagely flung the revolver at the Centaurian. The creature

tried to dodge, but the heavy gun struck its body a glancing blow.

There was a slight spurt of body fluid as the chitinous armor was

partly broken.

Dixon's heart leaped exultantly. No wonder these creatures had to

create hybrids to fight for them. Their own bodies were as vulnerable

as that of a soft-shelled crab!

The Centaurian quickly drew a slender tube of dark green from a

scabbard in its belt. Dixon dodged back, looking wildly about him for

a weapon. There was an ax in the pile only a few yards away. Dixon

snatched the ax up, and whirled to give battle.

* * * * *

The other Centaurian had come hurrying over now to aid its mate. Dixon

was effectually barred from attempting any progress toward the

projectile by the two grotesque creatures as they stood alertly there

beside each other with their green tubes menacing him. Dixon waited

tensely at bay, remembering those searing radium burns upon Emil

Crawford's body.

Then the first Centaurian abruptly leveled a second and smaller tube

upon Dixon. A burst of yellow light flashed toward him, enveloping him

in a cloud of pale radiance before he could dodge.

There was a faint plop as the protecting white globe upon his head was

shattered. The yellow radiance swiftly faded, leaving Dixon unhurt,

but he realized that the first round in the battle had been won

decisively by the Centaurians. His only chance now, was to end the

battle before the paralyzing rays of the green moon sapped his

strength.

He warily advanced upon the Centaurians. Their green tubes swung into

line and twin bolts of violet flame flashed toward him. He dodged, and

the bolts missed by inches. Then Dixon nearly fell as his foot struck

a bundle of cloth on the ground.

The next moment he snatched the bundle up with a cry of triumph. It

was his lead-cloth tunic, torn and useless as a garment, but

invaluable as a shield against the searing effects of those bolts of

radioactive flame. He hurriedly wrapped the fabric in a rough bundle

around his left forearm. The next time the tubes' violet flames

flashed toward him he thrust his rude shield squarely into their path.

There was a light tingling shock, and that was all. The bolts did not

sear through.

With new confidence, Dixon boldly charged the two Centaurians. A weird

battle ensued in the garishly lighted arena.

The effective range of the violet flashes was only about ten feet, and

Dixon's muscular agility was far superior to that of his antagonists.

By constant whirling and dodging he was able to either catch the

violet bolts upon his shielded arm or else dodge them entirely.

Yet, in spite of the Centaurians' clumsy slowness, they maneuvered

with a cool strategy that constantly kept the Earth man's superior

strength at bay. Always as Dixon tried to close with one of them he

was forced to retreat when a flanking attack from the other threatened

his unprotected back. And always the Centaurians maneuvered to bar

Dixon from attempting any dash toward the projectile.

* * * * *

The minutes passed, and Dixon felt his strength rapidly ebbing, both

from his herculean exertions and from the paralyzing rays of the green

moon beating down upon his unprotected head. As his speed of foot

lessened the Centaurians began inexorably pressing their advantage.

Dixon was no longer escaping unscathed. In spite of his frantic

efforts to dodge, twice the violet bolts grazed his body in searing

flashes of exquisite agony.

His muscles stiffened still more in the attack of the Green Sickness.

Desperately dodging a Centaurian bolt, he stumbled and nearly fell. As

he staggered to regain his balance, one of his antagonists scrambled

to the coveted position behind him.

It was only Ruth's scream of warning that galvanized Dixon's numbed

brain into action in time to meet the imminent peril.

In one mighty effort he flung his ax at the Centaurian in front of

him. The heavy blade cut deep into the thinly armored body. Mortally

wounded, the creature collapsed.

Dixon whirled and flung up his shielded left arm just in time to

intercept the violet bolt of the other Centaurian. Warily backing

away, Dixon succeeded in retrieving his ax from beside the twitching

body of the fallen invader.

Then, with the heavy weapon again in his hand, he remorselessly

charged his remaining foe. The Centaurian's tube flashed in a

veritable hail of hurtling violet bolts, but Dixon caught the flashes

upon his shield and closed grimly in.

One final leap brought him to close quarters. The heavy ax whistled

through the air in a single mighty stroke that cleft the Centaurian's

frail body nearly in two.

Then Ruth's excited scream came again. "Bruce--the other one! Get it

quick!"

* * * * *

Dixon turned. The wounded invader, taking advantage of their

preoccupation in the final struggle with its mate, had dragged its

crippled body over to the instrument enclosure. Dixon staggered toward

it as fast as his half-paralyzed muscles would permit.

He was just too late. The Centaurian jerked a lever home a fraction of

a second before Dixon's smashing ax forever ended his activities. The

lever's action upon the pen of inert hybrids was immediate.

The sweeping lances of light vanished in a brief sheet of vivid flame

which kindled the dark globes on the hybrids' gruesome heads to steady

opalescence--and the dread horde came to life! Sprawling from the pen,

they came scuttling toward Dixon in a surging flood--a scene out of a

nightmare.

Dixon faced the oncoming horde in numb despair, knowing that his

nearly-paralyzed body had no chance in flight. Then, just as the

hybrids were nearly upon him, he heard Ruth's encouraging voice again.

"There's still one chance left, Bruce," she cried, "and I'll take it!"

Dixon turned. Ruth had in her hand the tiny contact grenade he had

given her for a last emergency. She snapped the safety catch on the

little bomb, then hurled it squarely at the giant opalescent globe

looming close beside her.

There was a terrific explosion and the great globe shattered to atoms.

Apparently stunned by the concussion but otherwise unhurt, Ruth was

flung clear of the wreckage.

With the shattering of the central globe the strange life force of the

hybrid horde vanished instantly and completely. Midway in their rush

they sprawled inert and dead, with their outstretched legs so close to

Dixon that he had to step over one or two to get clear.

* * * * *

Dixon's brain reeled in the reaction of relief from the horde's

hideous menace. Then he grimly fought to clear his fast-numbing senses

long enough for the one final task that he knew must still be done.

The projectile, cushioned as it was, had escaped detonation in the

blast. He had only to stagger across the twenty yards separating him

from it, then release the stud that would send it flashing out into

space.

But his last shred of reserve strength had nearly been sapped now by

the insidious rays of that malevolent green moon. Even as he started

toward the projectile, he staggered and fell. Unable to drag himself

to his feet again, he began grimly crawling with arms and legs as

stiff and dead as that much stone.

Only ten more yards to go now. And now only five. Grimly, doggedly,

with senses reeling and muscles nearly dead, the last survivor of a

dying planet fought desperately on under the malignant rays of the

vivid green moon!

One last sprawling convulsive effort--and Dixon had the projectile in

his hands. His stiff fingers fumbled agonizingly with the activating

stud. Then abruptly the stud snapped home. With a crescendo whistle of

sundered air the projectile flashed upward into the western sky.

Dixon collapsed upon his back, his dimming eyes fixed upon the grim

green moon. Minutes that seemed eternities dragged slowly by. Then his

heart leaped in sudden hope. Had there really glowed a small blue

spark up there beside the green moon--a spark marking the mighty

explosion of the radium bomb against the Centaurians' space ship?

A fraction of a second later, and doubt became glorious certainty. The

vivid green of the moonlight vanished. The silvery white sheen of a

normal moon again shone serenely up there in the western sky!

With the extinguishing of the dread green rays, new strength surged

swiftly through Dixon's tired body. He arose and hurried over to where

Ruth lay limp and still near the wreckage of the great globe. He

worked over her for many anxious minutes before the normal flush of

health returned to her white cheeks and her eyes slowly opened.

Then he took Ruth into his arms and for a long minute the two silently

drank in the beauty of that radiant silver moon above them, while

their hearts thrilled with a realization of the glorious miracle of

awakening life that they knew must already be beginning to rejuvenate

a stricken world.

The Death-Cloud

_By Nat Schachner and Arthur L. Zagat_

[Illustration: _Someone at a huge switchboard turned toward me. I

pressed the trigger._]

[Sidenote: The epic exploit of one who worked in the dark and alone,

behind the enemy lines, in the great Last War.]

We sat, Eric Bolton and I, at a parapet table atop the 200-story

General Aviation Building. The efficient robot waiter of the Sky Club

had cleared away the remnants of an epicurean meal. Only a bowl of

golden fruit remained--globes of nectar picked in the citrus groves of

California that morning.

My eye wandered over the scene spread before us, the vast piling of

masonry that is New York. The dying beams of the setting sun glinted

golden from the roofs of the pleasure palaces topping the soaring

structures. Lower, amid interlacing archings of the mid-air

thoroughfares, darkness had already piled its blackness. Two thousand

feet below, in the region of perpetual night, the green-blue factory

lights flared.

On three sides, the unbroken serration of the Empire City's beehives

stretched in a semicircle of twenty miles radius. Long since, the

rivers that had made old Manhattan an island had been roofed over.

But, to the east, the heaving sea still stretched its green expanse.

On the horizon a vast cloud mountain billowed upward from the watery

surface, white, and pink and many shades of violet.

"That's just the way it looked," Bolton muttered, as he drew my

attention to the cloud mass. "See that air-liner just diving into it?

Just so I saw the _New York_--five thousand men--pride of the Air

Service--dive into that mountain of smoke. And she never came out!

Gone--like that!" And he snapped his fingers.

He fell silent again, gazing dreamily at the drifting rings of pipe

smoke. He smiled, the twisted smile which was the sole indication that

one side of his face was the master work of a great surgeon-sculptor.

A marvelous piece of work, that, but no less marvelous than the

protean changes that Bolton himself could make in his appearance. It

was this genius at impersonation that had won Bolton his commission in

the Intelligence Service, when, in 1992, the world burst into flame.

"Would you like to hear about it?" The obtuseness of the man!

"If you'd care to tell me." I spoke off-handedly. This was like

hunting birds on the wing: too abrupt a movement of the glider, and

the game was lost.

This is the story he told me, in the low, modulated voice of the

trained actor. He told it simply, with no dramatic tricks, no

stressing, no climatic crescendos. But I saw the scenes he described,

dodged with him through black caverns of dread, felt an icy hand

clutch my heart as the Ferret stared at me with his baleful glance;

was deafened, and stunned, and crushed by that final tremendous down

pouring of the waters.

* * * * *

I was standing--he began--on one of our rafts, watching the

installation of a new ray machine. A storm was raging, but the great

raft, a thousand feet long, and five hundred wide, was as steady as a

rock. We were 700 miles out; the great push of '92, that drove us back

to within 150 miles of our coast and almost ended the war, was still

eleven weeks off.

Suddenly the buzzer of my radio-receiver whirred against my chest.

"2--6--4"--my personal call. "2--2"--"Go to nearest communications

booth." "A--4"--"Use Intelligence Service intermitter 4." The secret

of that was known only to a half-dozen men in the field. Headquarters

wanted to talk to me on a supremely important matter.

There was a booth only a short distance away. I stepped to it and

identified myself to the guard. In a moment I was within and had swung

shut and sealed the sound-proof door. I set the intermitter switches

to the A--4 combination. Not even our own control officers could

eavesdrop now. Then I switched off the light, and waited.

A green glow grew out of the darkness. I was being inspected.

Headquarters was taking no chances. Out of the green haze before me

the general himself materialized. I could count every hair in his

grizzled beard. The little scar at the corner of his left eye

fascinated me with its distinctness.

I saluted. "Captain Bolton reporting, sir."

"At ease!" General Sommers' voice snapped with military precision. The

general was standing in his private office in Washington. I could see

his desk in the corner, and the great operations map on the wall.

There were new lines of worry in the general's grim face.

* * * * *

He went straight to the point. "Captain Bolton, we are confronted with

a problem that must be solved at once. While our information is

meagre, the Staff is convinced that a great danger menaces us. Of its

precise nature, or how it is to be combatted, we are unaware. I am

assigning you to secure the answer to these two questions.

"A week ago there appeared, ten miles east of the enemies' first line,

and directly opposite our raft 1264, what seemed at first to be merely

a peculiar cloud formation. It rose directly from the surface of the

water, and was shaped roughly like half an egg. The greatest

dimension, lying along the water, parallel to the battle line, was

about 5 miles; the height approximately a mile.

"When two or three days had passed, and no change in the shape or

dimensions of the strange mass had taken place, although wind and

weather conditions had been varied, we determined to investigate. This

was undoubtedly an artificial, not a natural, phenomenon. It was then

that we discovered that there was a concentration of defenses along

this portion of the front. Our scouts were unable to find any of the

usual gaps in either the ray network in the upper air, or the

gyro-knife barrier beneath the surface. At the same time, from

scouting parties and deserters at other points we learned that rumors

are rife throughout the enemy forces of some scheme now on foot that

will overwhelm us within a very short time. No details have been

given, but so widespread is the gossip, and so consistent, that we

have been forced to the conclusion that it cannot be reasonably

dismissed as mere morale-supporting propaganda.

"We have secretly developed a method of so equipping aircraft as to

render them immune to the enemy death ray. The device is complicated

and requires time to manufacture and install. After careful

consideration, we decided that the situation was sufficiently grave to

warrant revealing to the enemy our possession of this new device.

"The battle-airship _New York_ has been equipped with the new

protective equipment. To-morrow at sunrise she will make an attack in

force on whatever lies behind that screen.

"Your orders are these. You will proceed at once to raft 1264. You

will observe the attack made by the _New York_. If she fails, you will

then find some way to enter that area, discover what is going on

behind the screen, hamper or destroy the enemy plans if possible and

report back to me personally."

* * * * *

The general's face suddenly softened. His tones lost their military

precision. "I am afraid, Captain, that I am sending you to your death.

But--we must know what is going on. If the _New York_ fails, the task

will appear impossible, but you have already done the impossible."

The grim mask dropped again over the chief's features; again he became

the perfect military machine. "You will call on any officer of our

forces for whatever you may need. Here is your authority." He stepped

aside, and I heard the low burr of the tel-autograph at the side of

the screen before me. A moment, and the general was again visible.

"That will be all." Once more the momentary softening. "Good luck, my

boy." A final exchange of salutes, and the screen went blank.

I switched on the light. There in the little machine was a slip of

paper. I extracted it. The lines of type, the scrawled signature,

burned into my brain like letters of fire.

"To: All Officers of the Military Forces of the Americas.

Subject: Military Assistance. Eric Bolton, Captain M.I.S.,

M.F.A. is authorized to call upon you for any assistance.

You will comply with his requests.

Alton Sommers, Lieut. General Commanding M.I.S., M.F.A.

By authority of the Commander in Chief."

In the corner appeared my thumb-print.

I stood there for a long time, mulling the thing over. The Staff was

laying tremendous stress on the enemy's strange cloud formation, even

to the extent of disclosing the secret of the new defensive device.

The Easterners, too, had something novel, something that would cut off

absolutely the transmission of ether waves. Nothing either side had

yet produced would do that. What was happening behind that screen?

Would they break through our defenses at last?