THE EARLY WILLIAMSON INCLUDES
The Metal Man — and his hideous secret...
A deadly legacy from a lost planet...
The grim gateway of the Purple Cloud ...
The power that spanned space to destroy a
world ...
IT'S A SCIENCE FICTION FEAST!

Also by Jack Williamson in Sphere Books:
The classic Legion of Space trilogy:
the legion of space
the cometeers
one against the legion
the legion of time
darker than you think
the humanoids
the power of blackness

The Early Williamson
JACK WILLIAMSON
sphere books limited
30/32 Gray's Inn Road, London WC1X 8JL

First published in Great Britain
by Sphere Books Ltd 1978
Copyright© Jack Williamson 1975
To Isaac Asimov
ii
This book is sold subject to the condition that
it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent,
re-sold, hired out or otherwise circulated without
the publisher's prior consent in any form of
binding or cover other than that in which it is
published and without a similar condition
including this condition being imposed on the
subsequent purchaser.
All of the characters in this book are fictitious, and any
resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely
coincidental.
Filmset in Photon Times
Printed in Great Britain by
C. Nicholls & Company Ltd
The Philips Park Press, Manchester

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
'Scientifiction, Searchlight of Science,' from Amazing
Stories Quarterly, Fall 1928. Copyright 1928 by
Experimenter Publications, Inc.
'The Metal Man,' from Amazing Stories, December
1928. Copyright 1928 by Experimenter Publications,
Inc.
'The Girl from Mars,' Science Fiction Series No. 1.
Copyright 1929 by Gernsback Publications, Inc.
'The Cosmic Express,' from Amazing Stories, November
1930.		Copyright 1931 by Experimenter Publications,
Inc.
'The Meteor Girl,' from Astounding Stories, March 1931.
Copyright 1931 by Readers Guild, Inc.
'Through the Purple Cloud,' from Wonder Stories, May
1931.		Copyright 1931 by Gernsback Publications,
Inc.
'The Doom from Planet Four,' from Astounding Stories,
July 1931. Copyright 1931 by Clayton Magazines,
Inc.
'Twelve Hours to Live!' from Wonder Stories, August
1931. Copyright 1931 by Gernsback Publications,
Inc.
'The Plutonian Terror,' from Weird Tales, October
1933. Copyright 1933 by Popular Fiction Publishing
Co.
'Salvage in Space,' from Astounding Stories, March
1933. Copyright 1933 by Clayton Magazines, Inc.
'We Ain't Beggars,' from New Mexico Quarterly, August
1933. Copyright 1933 by New Mexico Quarterly.
'Dead Star Station,' from Astounding Stories, November
1933. Copyright 1933 by Street and Smith
Publications, Inc.

CONTENTS
Introduction 		9
The Metal Man ... 			23
The Girl from Mars 		39
The Cosmic Express 		63
The Meteor Girl 		79
Through the Purple Cloud 		106
The Doom from Planet 4	 . ...	131
Twelve Hours to Live! 		157
The Plutonian Terror 		172
Salvage in Space 	201
'We Ain't Beggars' 	230
Dead Star Station		242

INTRODUCTION
My thanks for this book go to the Good Doctor, Isaac
Asimov, who published his own first stories as The Early
Asimov and then generously persuaded the people at
Doubleday that there ought to be an Early Williamson.
Flattered and delighted as I am, the actual early
Williamson is hard for me to recall. Nearly fifty years
have passed since I first tried to write science fiction.
Looking for the truth about that almost-forgotten indi-
vidual, and wondering too about what makes a science
fiction writer, I've been comparing what I can recall of
him with what I know about Isaac. I'm finding odd
similarities and wide contrasts — which probably mean
nothing at all.
I have known and admired Isaac since about the time
he started selling science fiction; luckily for me, I was
already a veteran by then, a dozen years ahead of him. In
some ways our careers have really been similar. Not that I
can match his impressive number of books in print or his
well-earned status as the authority on nearly everything.
We both grew up in families where the fight for
economic survival was real, though I think his family was
a bit more secure than mine. We were both the first of
several children, both young introverts. We both had early
love affairs with science fiction that changed our lives.
Isaac was born in Russia in 1920. His family had
suffered hardships under the Czars. In 1923, a famine
year, they came to America and soon bought a candy
shop in Brooklyn. Though I was born in Arizona, in 1908,
most of my first three years was spent in another country
— Mexico. Isaac almost died of double pneumonia in his
second year. In my own third I came so near death from
something then called cholera infantum that I had to learn
9

to walk all over again. Isaac began tending the shop at
about the same age that I began doing farm chores. I've
found other parallels.
But, before I discover how to make a science fiction
writer, the contrasts begin to strike me. My own parents
were Texans. My father's forebears had been migrating
west, generation by generation, since before the Revolution,
from New Jersey to Ohio, on to Indiana, by oxcart to
Minnesota. His father, for some reason, soon after the Civil
War, turned south to Texas. My father was born on a small
farm there. A seventh child, he was dedicated to the Lord at
birth and schooled for the ministry. Education changed his
faith, however; he left the church to become a rancher and
farmer, though he remained a somewhat puritanic moralist.
Most of all, I think, he was an American pioneer searching
in vain for the vanished frontier.
My mother's people had been somewhat Faulkneresque
southern aristocrats, refugees to Texas from the war that
had ruined them and still too much inclined to live in the
world they had lost. She was poorly prepared for the hard
life she lived. I remember the bits and pieces of her own
past she treasured in an old trunk. She was often ill —
illness, I suspect, had become her best way to cope with
poverty and disaster.
A city boy, Isaac has always lived among people and
machines. In my own childhood, I was pretty much alone.
El Rancho la Loba - the Bitch-Wolf Ranch - where I
spent my first years, was high in the Sierra Madre of
Sonora, a long day's ride, as my mother used to say, from
any road for wheels. Life there was still nearly at a Stone
Age level.
My father had been ranching in partnership with my
mother's brothers. When revolution came, in 1910, we
moved from Mexico to an irrigated farm near Pecos,
Texas, and went broke there. The year I was seven, we
moved again by covered wagon to the arid sandhill
homestead in eastern New Mexico where I grew up.
10

I don't know much about the problems of survival in a
Brooklyn candy shop, but on our claim they were severe.
We were late settlers, and the better land had already been
taken. Ours had no water under it; we hauled water
through the sandhills in a wagon tank. We soon found that
it wasn't fit for farming - when plowed, it blew away. We
picked up cowchips and grubbed mesquite roots for fuel.
We milked a few cows and sold cream; we grew share-
crops for neighbors on better land; my father went to
Arizona one hard winter to work in the copper mines.
Later, he and my brother Jim and I spent a winter in the
Pecos valley, picking cotton.
Even in New Mexico, we were several miles from the
nearest neighbor and I was pretty well isolated from all the
marvels of technology — perhaps that's why they're still so
exciting to me. Looking back at the impact of the machine
age on my life, I remember being sick from the motion of
the stagecoach when we came out of Mexico. I vividly
recall the first automobile I examined, a Ford touring car
just bought by a farm neighbor at Pecos, who cranked it
up and turned on the headlamps to astonish me. There
were electric lights in the camphouse at the wagon yard
where we stayed on the rare occasions when I got to make
the three-day trip from the homestead to Portales with my
father, and I recall screwing out a bulb to test the
electricity with my thumb. I did that several times, feeling
nothing worse than wonder. I recall my awe at the first
airplane I saw, and the thrill I always felt at seeing and
hearing and smelling the steam power of a railroad
locomotive.
Three years older than the next child, my sister Jo, I
often played alone. From the age of eight or nine I often
worked through long days alone, riding a horse behind
cows or some farm implement behind a team of mules. In
the dry year of 1918, I remember driving the wagon
behind our little herd of starving cattle on a long ex-
pedition into Texas to search for grass. These duties didn't
11

damage me, any more than tending the shop hurt Isaac. I
think in fact that it's good for a child to know that he's a
useful part of a family. But the isolation and monotony of
those tasks did help shape the early Williamson.
Both my parents had been teachers, with the same
respect for books that Isaac's family had, and most of my
own early schooling was at home. My first year of real
school was rather painful. To weather another dry year,
my father had taken a job as principal of a two-room
school. My sister Jo and I rode there behind him on an old
roan mare. 1 was admitted to the fourth grade, except in
arithmetic. My home training in that had been weak; I
remember trying to cheat, in a desperate effort to hold my
own even in the third-grade class. I had never learned how
to get on with other children, and, as the teacher's son, I
was hazed pretty savagely. No good at games, I spent the
recess periods reading books from the library shelf I found
in a dusty closet. With the release and adventure I found
in them, I got through the term. After two more years at
home, I went back to school in the seventh grade and, at
the end of the term, managed to pass the state eighth-
grade examinations. Even in arithmetic!
That's the picture I see, when I look back for the early
Jack Williamson. A poor country kid, poorly educated, ill
at ease with people and absent-minded at his work, secure
enough in his place in the family but unhappy with his
whole environment, longing for something else.
There had always been one way out — imagination. As
early as I can remember, I was escaping from hardship and
boredom into endless cycles of adventure where I was the
hero — and where too often I forgot some farm duty.
Sometimes in the field with my younger brother and sisters,
I entertained them with endless oral sagas. Later we
invented our own game world, complete with government,
armed forces, and money — with peach seed for coinage.
My exposure to imaginative literature was pretty
spotty. We wore out a copy of The Red Fairy Book. My
12

father subscribed to the Saturday Evening Post and other
magazines, and my mother used to read the fiction aloud.
My grandmother used to give me subscriptions to Youth's
Companion and The American Boy. With excited delight,
I discovered Edgar Allan Poe. I remember spending a
whole day, alone on the farm, reading Longfellow's
Hiawatha aloud. On that library shelf at school, I found
Bulwer-Lytton's The Last Days of Pompeii and The
Coming Race. A kind teacher lent me Mark Twain's
Connecticut Yankee. Once at a newsstand I remember
looking at a copy of Weird Tales long enough to sense its
exciting strangeness, though I had no money to buy it.
I spent four years in a rural high school at Richland — a
place that has since vanished from the map. Out of school,
I felt trapped by circumstance. Farm and ranch life
promised nothing I wanted. Our crops had been too often
destroyed before harvest, by bugs or wind or hail or
• drouth,' Even when there was something to harvest, it
was' too often worthless on the market. Raising cattle in
reality lacked the glamor of western fiction. Once I had
owned six or seven head, all descendants of a spotted
heifer named Easter. Except for one yearling steer, they all
died one dry spring from eating a poison scrub oak. The
yearling, standing by a barbed-wire fence, was killed by
lightning. I longed to escape from all that.
Vaguely, I wanted to be some kind of scientist. I had
begun to learn my first smatterings of science from the
out-dated physics texts in a trunkful of mouse-eaten books
that my parents and an uncle had used and from a slightly
more recent two-volume encyclopedia that generous
teacher had given me. But there were no funds in sight for
a scientific education.
In that nearly desperate situation, I discovered science
fiction. Amazing Stories had been launched by Hugo
Gernsback in the spring of 1926, the year after I finished
high school. A friend of mine, a radio ham, showed me the
November issue. A little later I answered an ad in a little
13

farm paper, the Pathfinder, to ask for a free sample copy
of my own.
I still recall my excitement over the issue I received. It
was dated March 1927. The bright-hued cover, by Frank
R. Paul, showed the alien space rocket taking off for the
planet Jupiter in T. S. Stribling's 'The Green Splotches.'
Inside, there was also H. G. Wells's stunning vision of the
cosmos in 'Under the Knife,' and worlds of strange
adventure in the second installment of Edgar Rice
Burroughs' The Land that Time Forgot, and the haunting
spell of A. Merritt's 'The People of the Pit.'
Completely enchanted, I persuaded my sister to help me
pay for a subscription. Soon I was lost in the wonders of
Merritt's Moon Pool. The browned and crumbling copies
of those old magazines give me odd sensations when I
look at them today. The covers have become lurid and
crude, and A. Merritt's style is now too rich for my taste.
But they were windows to new worlds then.
I decided to write for Amazing.
Looked at in any objective way, the odds were against
me. My formal schooling totaled six years. I knew more
than I wanted to about raising cattle and dry-land farm-
ing, but very little about people or literature. My mother
had hopes for me, perhaps because she had wanted to
write. With well-grounded skepticism, my father was
trying to get me a job as a carpenter's helper or the
courthouse janitor.
By way of training, I had read a set of how-to-write
booklets my mother had bought by mail. Actually, they
were useful lessons — I can still recite the quotation from
Poe about the short story. My uncle loaned me an old
basket-model Remington typewriter with a dim purple
ribbon. Still doing farm work, I began spending my spare
time writing stories and mailing them to Hugo Gernsback.
Three or four came back with rejection slips. The only
one I remember clearly was called 'Via the Vacium
Tubeway' - with 'vacuum' misspelled in the title. For its
14

time, the idea wasn't bad. I was trying to update Verne's
Around the World in Eighty Days. My hero won an
eighty-minute race around the world, traveling on a future
railway inside an evacuated tunnel. The story was meant
to be humorous, but I guess the editors weren't amused.
Another story, 'The Metal Man,' had Merritt's 'The
People of the Pit' for a model. The encounter with strange
beings in a volcanic crater made a somewhat similar plot,
and the style was laced with Merritt's purple adjectives. I
revised it with care and sent it off hopefully. The weeks of
waiting grew into months, but I heard nothing from it.
That summer my father sold the oil royalty on our
homestead for four dollars an acre and used part of the
money to send me and Jo to school at Canyon, Texas.
Economizing, we rented a little house and got our own
meals. A freshman there at West Texas State that fall, I
was shopping for groceries when I happened to pass a
drugstore window and saw the December issue of
Amazing displayed on the rack, with a bright Paul cover
picturing what looked like my own metal man.
I looked into the magazine. The story was really mine.
Unbelievably, the editor compared it to Merritt's Moon
Pool and hoped that 'Mr. Williamson can be induced to
write a number of stories in a similar vein.' There was
nothing I felt more eager to do. In my dazed elation, I
bought all three copies off the rack and left my sack of
groceries.
The first delight was only a little tempered by the fact
that the story had not been paid for. I knew nothing at all
about the business of writing. A week or two earlier, the
fall issue of Gernsback's Amazing Stories Quarterly had
come out with an editorial I had submitted in a contest
offering a $50 prize. The editorial was five hundred words,
the story five thousand. I remember a too-hopeful cal-
culation that the story might be worth $500.
In January, after I had written two or three plaintive
letters, Gernsback sent me $75, $50 for the editorial and
15

$25 for the story. The small size of the check was a sharp
disappointment, yet I wasn't really discouraged. Amazing
wanted more stories. I was a writer!
That editorial was titled 'Scientifiction, Searchlight of
Science.' The term 'science fiction' had not yet been
invented; Gernsback coined it the next year when he had
lost control of Amazing and put out Science Wonder
Stories in its place. I'm reprinting the editorial here for the
way it shows what science fiction meant to the youth who
wrote it in the summer of 1928.
AMAZING STORIES QUARTERLY
Vol. 1, No. 4 FALL 1928
$50.00
WILL BE PAID
FOR
EVERY EDITORIAL
PRINTED HERE
Scientifiction, Searchlight of Science
by jack williamson
Science ever widens our conception of the material
universe. We drift farther from the old idea of man as the
chief end of creation. To the savage, the universe is his
valley, with the heavens arching low overhead, and him-
self, supreme. Science has found a million new worlds, and
lost itself in them. Earth has become a cosmic mote; man,
utterly ephemeral and insignificant. Science and Intelli-
gence alone remain considerable quantities. Then, if the
16

life of the earth is the briefest instant in Time, a question
rises: Must man pass with the earth, or will Human
Intelligence rule on, a new factor in the universe? The idea
is stupendous. Science is the doorway to the future;
scientifiction, the golden key.
The chief function of scientifiction is the creation of real
pictures of new things, new ideas, and new machines.
Scientifiction is the product of the human imagination,
guided by the suggestion of science. It takes the basis of
science, considers all the clues that science has to offer,
and then adds a thing that is alien to science — imagina-
tion. It goes ahead and lights the way. And when science
sees the things made real in the author's mind, it makes
them real indeed. It deals only with that which it can see,
or weigh, or measure; only with logical hypothesis, experi-
ment and influence and calculation. Scientifiction begins
with the ending of science.
The realization of scientifiction is proverbial. Science
has made hardly a single step that scientifiction has not
foretold. And science, in return, has disclosed a million
new and startling facts, to serve as wings for the scienti-
fiction author's brain.
Scientifiction takes a thousand accumulated facts and
builds them into a real, impressive picture of ages past,
whereby the future of the race may be foretold. It mounts
a Time Machine and ventures through futurity, revealing
the results of known conditions and tendencies.
Science knows that life on other worlds is possible, but
it remains for scientifiction to make the vision real, and to
suggest the space flier to verify it. Then science may build
the flier, and see for itself. The boundless emergy of the
atom, the Fourth Dimension, the sub-universe below and
the super-universe above, are scientific absurdities all,
until scientifiction gives them reality.
And science goes on, with scientifiction as the search-
light. Here is the picture, if we can but see it. A universe
ruled by the human mind. A new Golden Age of fair cities,
17

of new laws and new machines, of human capabilities
undreamed of, of a civilization that has conquered matter
and Nature, distance and time, disease and death. A
glorious picture of an empire that lies away past a million
flaming suns until it reaches the black infinity of unknown
space, and extends beyond. The picture is incredible to us
now. Even in the light of scientifiction it is distorted and
vague. The idea of the final product of evolution is beyond
us. But a sublime picture is that scientifiction may build
through the ages, and that science may realize for the
ultimate advancement of man.
Jack Williamson,
Elida, New Mex., East Star R.
*
Aside from the odd delusion that imagination is alien to
science, the most striking thing about the editorial is the
naive faith in scientific progress. In his editorial
announcement of 'A New Sort of Magazine,' in the first
issue of Amazing, Gernsback had displayed the same
unlimited optimism. Stressing the scientific content and
the prophetic nature of scientifiction, he promised that
posterity will point to Amazing 'as having blazed a new
trail, not only in literature and fiction, but in progress as
well.'
Even then, of course, the actual contents of the maga-
zine didn't always fit that pious declaration. Every issue
for the first few years carried one of the great early stories
of H. G. Wells, which are consistently critical of the idea
of progress, as I have tried to show in my doctoral
dissertation and the book made from it.
But science fiction was certainly more optimistic in
1928 than it is today. Its most signal change since I began
writing is the loss of the Utopian vision I tried to express in
that editorial. The reasons are various and vague. More
and more writers and readers must have seen the human
18

limits and the cosmic limits on man's future that Wells
had discovered so long before. Such horrifying inventions
as nuclear bombs and the rockets to deliver them have
cast darker and darker shadows of doubt across the
ultimate promise of science. The heirs of Wells —
Zamyatin and Huxley and Orwell and Vonnegut and a
hundred others — have pictured futures more and more
hopeless, until we have almost lost our old faith in our
science and ourselves.
I think our pessimism has swung too far. Though the
human situation does look alarming enough, I believe
there is a purely accidental bias in favor of pessimistic
fiction. In need of dramatic conflict to keep up story
interest, the writer is tempted to amplify the sources of evil
and danger. Catastrophe is excitingly dynamic; the perfect
society is static and almost by definition dull.
My own optimism, though sometimes bettered, is still
alive. I'm still reasonably hopeful that mankind and
science and civilization will survive these alarming times.
Yet, as I put this book together, I was surprised at the
overtones of pessimism in a few of my very early stories;
and my own most successful later book has been The
Humanoids, in which all human freedom is lost to the very
machines designed to defend it.
Besides this loss of confidence in technology and pro-
gress, science fiction has changed of course in other ways.
Its wonders are all familiar now to anybody old enough to
watch the TV kiddie cartoons on Saturday morning. In
1928 it was still excitingly new, at least as a separate sort
of writing with a name of its own.
Without a name, it had been appearing now and then
for a hundred years. Brian Aldiss begins its history with
Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, published in 1818. Poe
wrote science fiction, if he didn't in fact invent it. Jules
Verne, its first great master, published From the Earth to
the Moon in 1865. H. G. Wells was, I think, the first
systematic futurologist and the man with the best claim to
19

the title 'father of modern science fiction.' His Time
Machine appeared in 1895. In America, Edgar Rice
Burroughs had made a fortune from his novels of Tarzan
in the jungle and John Carter on Mars. Weird Tales was
running 'weird-scientific' tales before Amazing appeared.
The old all-fiction Argosy was printing Merritt's great
romances as 'different' stories.
The early issues of Amazing were filled with such
classics — the first story in the first issue was an install-
ment of Verne's novel, Off on a Comet. The new thing was
the name — 'scientifiction' or 'science fiction' — and the
fact that Amazing was a 'pulp.' Maybe I should explain
that label. In the twenties, before radio and TV, before the
vogue of book clubs and paperbacks, the newsstands were
stacked with fiction magazines in two categories. The
'slicks' used expensive coated paper, and they paid more
for stories, as much as a dollar a word.
The pulps were fiction for the common man, printed on
cheap gray wood-pulp paper. Gernsback ordered a special
sort of it. Amazing Stories Bulky Weave, intended to offer
the reader a fat package for his quarter. The best of the
pulps paid only a few cents a word, and Gernsback gave
me as little as a quarter of a cent.
The pulp label thrust science fiction into a ghetto from
which it is only now escaping. For many years — until the
late forties, in fact — there was no book market for it, no
space for it in the more respected magazines. Even in the
pulps, it was outclassed by the better-selling publications
devoted to Westerns or to mysteries, to war stories or love
stories.
To make a living writing science fiction alone was
nearly impossible. Ed Hamilton and I were among the first
to try it. At least for me, it was never easy. My yearly
income, up until the time I became an Army Air Forces
weatherman in 1942, was never as much as $2,000.
The dollar of course was worth more then. I was used
to economy and still unmarried. Sometimes I was able to
20

live for a while in New York or Hollywood, in Santa Fe or
Key West. When times were hard, I could always retreat
to the little cabin I built on the family ranch. I existed —
and enjoyed the priceless freedom to write.
Though the pulps were looked down upon, their
influence on science fiction was not entirely bad. The pulp
editors demanded strong plots and clear writing; they
required distinctive characters and consistently motivated
action and positive themes. Every writer, I think, needs to
know most of what they taught, and it's a misfortune for
the young person learning to write today that they are
gone.
There were great pulp writers. Max Brand was the one 1
most hoped to emulate. Using a score of pen names, he
wrote four thousand words of action fiction every day,
never revising. Under his actual name, Frederick Faust, he
was also a poet. Later, when I came to study the classic
epics, it struck me that Brand had a good deal in common
with Homer — his rhythmic style and his figures of speech
and his monumental characters in heroic action belonged
to an oral tradition, to a sort of literature not originally
written but sung or chanted to responsive listeners.
In my first professional years, I was trying not to create
literature but to write pulp fiction. In evaluating these
early stories, that difference is significant. My awareness
of good literature was still pretty sketchy, and at the time
I had no hope of being printed in anything except the
cheap pulps that were quickly read and thrown away.
Later, of course, with my horizons widening, I began
daring to hope for more.
Anyhow, here's my very first published story. I have
manfully resisted every temptation to update the science
or slick up the style or even to delete excess commas.
Except for the correction of a few typographical errors, all
these stories are reprinted exactly as they originally
appeared.
21

THE METAL MAN
The Metal Man stands in a dark, dusty corner of the Tyburn
College Museum. Just who is responsible for the figure being
moved there, or why it was done, I do not know. To the casual
eye it looks to be merely an ordinary life-size statue. The
visitor who gives it a closer view marvels at the minute
perfection of the detail of hair and skin; at the silent tragedy
in the set, determined expression and poise; and at the
remarkable greenish cast of the metal of which it is com-
posed, but, most of all, at the peculiar mark upon the chest. It
is a six-sided blot, of a deep crimson hue, with the surface
oddly granular and strange wavering lines radiating from it-
lines of a lighter shade of red.
Of course it is generally known that the Metal Man was
once Professor Thomas Kelvin of the Geology Depart-
ment. There are current many garbled and inaccurate
accounts of the weird disaster that befell him. I believe I
am the only one to whom he entrusted his story. It is to
put these fantastic tales at rest that I have decided to
publish the narrative that Kelvin sent me.
For some years he had been spending his summer
vacations along the Pacific coast of Mexico, prospecting
for radium. It was three months since he had returned
from his last expedition. Evidently he had been successful
beyond his wildest dreams. He did not come to Tyeburn,
but we heard stories of his selling millions of dollars worth
of salts of radium, and giving as much more to institutions
employing radium treatment. And it was said that he was
sick of a strange disorder that defied the world's best
specialists, and that he was pouring out his millions in the
establishment of scholarships and endowments as if he
expected to die soon.
One cold, stormy day, when the sea was running high
23

on the unprotected coast which the cottage overlooks, I
saw a sail out to the north. It rapidly drew nearer until I
could tell that it was a small sailing schooner with
auxiliary power. She was running with the wind, but a half
mile offshore she came up into it and the sails were
lowered. Soon a boat had put off in the direction of the
shore. The sea was not so rough as to make the landing
hazardous, but the proceeding was rather unusual, and, as
I had nothing better to do, I went out in the yard before
my modest house, which stands perhaps two hundred
yards above the beach, in order to have a better view.
When the boat touched, four men sprang out and
rushed it up higher on the sand. As a fifth tall man arose in
the stern, the four picked up a great chest and started up in
my direction. The fifth person followed leisurely. Silently,
and without invitation, the men brought the chest up the
beach, and into my yard, and set it down in front of the
door.
The fifth man, whom I now knew to be a hard-faced
Yankee skipper, walked up to me and said gruffly,
'I am Captain McAndrews.'
'I'm glad to meet you, Captain,' I said, wondering.
'There must be some mistake. I was not expecting —'
'Not at all,' he said abruptly. 'The man in that chest was
transferred to my ship from the liner Plutonia three days
ago. He had paid me for my services, and I believe his
instructions have been carried out. Good day, sir.'
He turned on his heel and started away.
'A man in the chest!' I exclaimed.
He walked on unheeding, and the seamen followed. I
stood and watched them as they walked down to the boat,
and rowed back to the schooner. I gazed at its sails until
they were lost against the dull blue of the clouds. Frankly,
I feared to open the chest.
At last I nerved myself to do it. It was unlocked. I threw
back the lid. With a shock of uncontrollable horror that
left me half sick for hours, I saw in it, stark naked, with
24

the strange crimson mark standing lividly out from the
pale green of the breast, the Metal Man, just as you may
see him in the Museum.
Of course, I knew at once that it was Kelvin. For a long
time I bent, trembling and staring at him. Then I saw an
old canteen, purple-stained, lying by the head of the figure,
and under it, a sheaf of manuscript. I got the latter out,
walked with shaken steps to the easy chair in the house,
and read the story that follows:
'Dear Russell,
'You are my best — my only — intimate friend. I have
arranged to have my body and this story brought to you. I
just drank the last of the wonderful purple liquid that has
kept me alive since I came back, and I have scant time to
finish this necessarily brief account of my adventure. But
my affairs are in order and I die in peace. I had myself
transferred to the schooner to-day, in order to reach you
as soon as could be and to avoid possible complications. I
trust Captain McAndrews. When I left France, I hoped to
see you before the end. But Fate ruled otherwise.
'You know that the goal of my expedition was the
headwaters of El Rio de la Sangre, "The River of Blood."
It is a small stream whose strangely red waters flow into
the Pacific. On my trip last year I had discovered that its
waters were powerfully radioactive. Water has the power
of absorbing radium emanations and emitting them in
turn, and I hoped to find radium-bearing minerals in the
bed of the upper river. Twenty-five miles above the mouth
the river emerges from the Cordilleras. There are a few
miles of rapids and back of them the river plunges down a
magnificent waterfall. No exploring party had ever been
back of the falls. I had hired an Indian guide and made a
muleback journey to their foot. At once I saw the futility
of attempting to climb the precipitous escarpment. But the
water there was even more powerfully radioactive than at
the mouth. There was nothing to do but return.
25

'This summer I bought a small monoplane. Though it
was comparatively slow in speed and able to spend only
six hours aloft, its light weight and the small area needed
for landing, made it the only machine suitable for use in so
rough a country. The steamer left me again on the dock at
the little town of Vaca Morena, with my stack of crates
and gasoline tins. After a visit to the Alcalde I secured the
use of an abandoned shed for a hangar. I set about
asembling the plane and in a fortnight I had completed the
task. It was a beautiful little machine, with a wing spread
of only twenty-five feet.		
'Then, one morning, I started the engine and made a
trial flight. It flew smoothly and in the afternoon I refilled
the tanks and set off for the Rio de la Sangre. The stream
looked like a red snake crawling out to the sea - there was
something serpentine in its aspect. Flying high, I followed
it, above the falls and into a region of towering mountain
peaks. The river disappeared beneath a mountain. For a
moment I thought of landing, and then it occurred to me
that it flowed subterraneously for only a few miles, and
would reappear farther inland.
'I soared over the cliffs and came over the crater.
'A great pool of green fire it was, fully ten miles across
to the black ramparts at the farther side. The surface of
the green was so smooth that at first I thought it was a
lake, and then I knew that it must be a pool of heavy gas.
In the glory of the evening sun the snow-capped summits
about were brilliant argent crowns, dyed with crimson,
tinged with purple and gold, tinted with strange and
incredibly beautiful hues. Amid this wild scenery, nature
had placed her greatest treasure. I knew that in the crater I
would find the radium I sought.
'I circled about the place, rapt in wonder. As the sun
sank lower, a light silver mist gathered on the peaks, half
veiling their wonders, and flowed toward the crater. It
seemed drawn with a strange attraction. And then the
26

center of the green lake rose up in a shining peak. It flowed
up into a great hill of emerald fire. Something was rising in
the green — carrying it up! Then the vapor flowed back,
revealing a strange object, still veiled faintly by the green
and silver clouds. It was a gigantic sphere of deep red,
marked with four huge oval spots of dull black. Its surface
was smooth, metallic, and thickly studded with great
spikes that seemed of yellow fire. It was a machine,
inconceivably great in size. It spun slowly as it rose, on a
vertical axis, moving with a deliberate, purposeful motion.
'It came to my own level, paused and seemed to spin
faster. And the silver mist was drawn to the yellow points,
condensing, curdling, until the whole globe was a ball of
lambent argent. For a moment it hung, unbelievably
glorious in the light of the setting sun, and then it sank —
ever faster — until it dropped like a plummet into the sea of
green.
'And with its fall a sinister darkness descended upon
the desolate wilderness of the peaks, and I was seized by a
fear that had been deadened by amazement, and realized
that I had scant time to reach Vaca Morena before
complete darkness fell. Immediately I put the plane about
in the direction of the town. According to my recollec-
tions, I had, at the time, no very definite idea of what it
was I had seen, or whether the weird exhibition had been
caused by human or natural agencies. I remember think-
ing that in such enormous quantities as undoubtedly the
crater contained it, radium might possess qualities un-
noticed in small amounts, or, again, that there might be
present radioactive minerals at present unknown. It
occurred to me also that perhaps some other scientists had
already discovered the deposits and that what I had
witnessed had been the trial of an airship in which radium
was utilized as a propellent. I was considerably shaken,
but not much alarmed. What happened later would have
seemed incredible to me then.
'And then I noticed that a pale bluish luminosity was
27

gathering about the cowl of the cockpit, and in a moment I
saw that the whole machine, and even my own person,
was covered with it. It was somewhat like St. Elmo's Fire,
except that it covered all surfaces indiscriminately, instead
of being restricted to sharp points. All at once I connected
the phenomenon with the thing I had seen. I felt no
physical discomfort, and the motor continued to run, but
as the blue radiance continued to increase, I observed that
my body felt heavier, and that the machine was being
drawn downward! My mind was flooded with wonder and
terror. I fought to retain sufficient self-possession to fly the
ship. My arms were soon so heavy that I could hold them
upon the controls only with difficulty, and I felt a slight
dizziness, due, no doubt, to the blood's being drawn from
my head. When I recovered, I was already almost upon
the green. Somehow, my gravitation had been increased
and I was being drawn into the pit! It was possible to keep
the plane under control only by diving and keeping at a
high speed.
'I plunged into the green pool. The gas was not
suffocating, as I had anticipated. In fact, I noticed no
change in the atmosphere, save that my vision was limited
to a few yards around. The wings of the plane were still
distinctly discernible. Suddenly a smooth, sandy plain was
murkily revealed below, and I was able to level the ship off
enough for a safe landing. As I came to a stop I saw that
the sand was slightly luminous, as the green mist seemed
to be, and red. For a time I was confined to the ship by my
own weight, but I noticed that the blue was slowly
dissipating, and with it, its effect.
'As soon as I was able, I clambered over the side of the
cockpit, carrying my canteen and automatic, which were
themselves immensely heavy. I was unable to stand erect,
but I crawled off over the coarse, shining, red sand,
stopping at frequent intervals to lie flat and rest. I was in
deathly fear of the force that had brought me down. I was
sure it had been directed by intelligence. The floor was so
28

smooth and level that I supposed it to be the bottom of an
ancient lake.
'Sometimes I looked fearfully back, and when I was a
hundred yards away I saw a score of lights floating
through the green toward the airplane. In the luminous
murk each bright point was surrounded by a disc of paler
blue. I made no movement, but lay and watched them.
They floated to the plane and wheeled about it with a slow,
heavy motion. Closer and lower they came until they
reached the ground about it. The mist was so thick as to
obscure the details of the scene.
'When I went to resume my flight, I found my excess of
gravity almost entirely gone, though I went on hands and
knees for another hundred yards to escape possible
observation. When I got to my feet, the plane was lost to
view. I walked on for perhaps a quarter of a mile and
suddenly realized that my sense of direction was
altogether gone. I was completely lost in a strange world,
inhabited by beings whose nature and disposition I could
not even guess! And then I realized that it was a height of
folly to walk about when any step might precipitate me
into a danger of which I could know nothing. I had a
peculiarly unpleasant feeling of helpless fear.
'The luminous red sand and the shining green of the air
lay about in ail directions, unbroken by a single solid
object. There was no life, no sound, no motion. The air
hung heavy and stagnant. The flat sand was like the
surface of a dead and desolate sea. The mist seemed to
come closer; the strange evil in it seemed to grow more
alert.
'Suddenly a darting light passed meteor-like through the
green above and in my alarm I ran a few blundering steps.
My foot struck a light object that rang like metal. The
sharpness of the concussion filled me with fear, but in an
instant the light was gone. I bent down to see what I had
kicked.
29

'It was a metal bird - an eagle formed of metal -
with the wings outspread, the talons gripping, the fierce
beak set open. The color was white, tinged with green.
It weighed no more than the living bird. At first I
thought it was a cast model, and then I saw that each
feather was complete and flexible. Somehow, a real
eagle had been turned to metal! It seemed incredible,
yet here was the concrete proof. I wondered if the
radium deposits, which I had already used to explain so
much, might account for this too. I knew that science
held transmutation of elements to be possible — had
even accomplished it in a limited way, and that radium
itself was the product of the disintegration of ionium;
and ionium that of uranium.
'I was struck with fright for my own safety. Might I be
changed to metal? I looked to see if there were other metal
things about. And I found them in abundance. Half-buried
in the glowing sands were metal birds of every kind -
birds that had flown over the surrounding cliffs. And, at
the climax of my search, I found a pterosaur — a flying
reptile that had invaded the pit in ages past - changed to
ageless metal. Its wingspread was fully fifteen feet — it
would be a treasure in any museum.
'I made a fearful examination of myself, and to my
unutterable horror, I perceived that the tips of my finger
nails, and the fine hairs upon my hands, were already
changed to light green metal! The shock unnerved me
completely. You cannot conceive my horror. I screamed
aloud in agony of soul, careless of the terrible foes that the
sound might attract. I ran off wildly. I was blind, un-
reasoning. I felt no fatigue as I ran, only stark terror.
'Bright, swift-moving lights passed above in the green,
but I heeded them not. Suddenly I came upon the great
sphere that 1 had seen above. It rested motionless in a
cradle of black metal. The yellow fire was gone from the
spikes, but the red surface shone with a metallic luster.
Lights floated about it. They made little bright spots in the
30

green, like lanterns swinging in a fog. I turned and ran
again, desperately. I took no note of direction, nor of the
passage of time.
'Then I came upon a bank of violet vegetation. Waist-
deep it was, grass-like, with thick narrow leaves, dotted
with clusters of small pink blooms, and little purple
berries. And a score of yards beyond I saw a sluggish red
stream — El Rio de la Sangre. Here was cover at last. I
threw myself down in the violet growth and lay sobbing
with fatigue and terror. For a long time I was unable to
stir or think. When I looked again at my finger nails, the
tips of metal had doubled in width.
'I tried to control my agitation, and to think. Possibly
the lights, whatever they were, would sleep by day. If I
could find the plane, or scale the walls, I might escape the
fearful action of the radioactive minerals before it was too
late. I realized that I was hungry. I plucked off a few of the
purple berries and tasted them. They had a salty, metallic
taste, and I thought they would be valueless for food. But
in pulling them I had inadvertently squeezed the juice
from one upon my fingers, and when I wiped it off I saw,
to my amazement and my inexpressible joy, that the rim
of metal was gone from the finger nails it had touched. I
had discovered a means of safety! I suppose that the
plants were able to exist there only because they had been
so developed that they produced compounds counter-
acting the metal-forming emanations. Probably their
evolution began when the action was far weaker than now,
and only those able to withstand the more intense
radiations had survived. I lost no time in eating a cluster
of the berries, and then I poured the water from my
canteen and filled it with their juice. I have analyzed the
fluid and it corresponds in some ways with the standard
formulas for the neutralization of radium burns and
doubtless it saved me from the terrible burns caused by the
action of ordinary radium.
31

'I lay there until dawn, dozing a little at times, only to
start into wakefulness without cause. It seemed that some
daylight filtered through the green, for at dawn it grew
paler, and even the red sand appeared less luminous. After
eating a few more of the berries, I ascertained the
direction in which the stagnant red water was moving, and
set off down-stream, toward the west. In order to get an
idea of where I was going, I counted my paces. I had
walked about two and a half miles, along by the violet
plants, when I came to an abrupt cliff. It towered up until
it was lost in the green gloom. It seemed to be mostly of
black pitchblende. The barrier seemed absolutely un-
scalable. The red river plunged out of sight by the cliff in a
racing whirlpool.
'I walked off north around the rim. I had no very
definite plan, except to try to find a way out over the cliffs.
If I failed in that, it would be time to hunt the plane. I had
a mortal fear of going near it, or of encountering the
strange lights I had seen floating about it. As I went I saw
none of them. I suppose they slept when it was day.
'I went on until it must have been noon, though my
watch had stopped. Occasionally I passed metal trees that
had fallen from above, and once, the metallic body of a
bear that had slipped off a path above, some time in past
ages. And there were metal birds without number. They
must have been accumulating through geological ages. All
along up to this, the cliff had risen perpendicularly to the
limit of my vision, but now I saw a wide ledge, with a
sloping wall beyond it, dimly visible above. But the sheer
wall rose a full hundred feet to the shelf, and I cursed at
my inability to surmount it. For a time I stood there,
devising impractical means for climbing it, driven almost
to tears by my impotence. I was ravenously hungry, and
thirsty as well.
'At last I went on.
'In an hour I came upon it. A slender cylinder of black
metal, that towered a hundred feet into the greenish mist,
32

and carried at the top, a great mushroom-shaped orange
flame. It was a strange thing. The fire was as big as a
balloon, bright and steady. It looked much like a great jet
of combustible gas, burning as it streamed from the
cylinder. I stood petrified in amazement, wondering
vaguely at the what and why of the thing.
'And then I saw more of them back of it, dimly — scores
of them — a whole forest of flames.
'I crouched back against the cliff, while I considered.
Here I supposed, was the city of the lights. They were
sleeping now, but still I had not the courage to enter.
According to my calculations I had gone about fifteen
miles. Then I must be, I thought, almost diametrically
opposite the place where the crimson river flowed under
the wall, with half of the rim unexplored. If I wished to
continue my journey, I must go around the city, if I may
call it that.
'So I left the wall. Soon it was lost to view. I tried to
keep in view of the orange flames, but abruptly they were
gone in the mist. I walked more to the left, but I came
upon nothing but the wastes of red sand, with the green
murk above. On and on I wandered. Then the sand and
the air grew slowly brighter and I knew that night had
fallen. The lights were soon passing to and fro. I had seen
lights the night before, but they traveled high and fast.
These, on the other hand, sailed low, and I felt that they
were searching.
'I knew that they were hunting for me. I lay down in a
little hollow in the sand. Vague, mist-veiled points of light
came near and passed. And then one stopped directly
overhead. It descended and the circle of radiance grew
about it. I knew that it was useless to run, and I could not
have done so, for my terror. Down and down it came.
'And then I saw its form. The thing was of a glittering,
blazing crystal. A great-six-sided, upright prism of red, a
dozen feet in length, it was, with a six-pointed structure
33

like a snowflake about the center, deep blue, with pointed
blue flanges running from the points of the star to angles
of the prism! Soft scarlet fire flowed from the points. And
on each face of the prism, above and below the star, was a
purple cone that must have been an eye. Strange pulsating
lights flickered in the crystal. It was alive with light.
'It fell straight toward me!
'It was a terribly, utterly alien form of life. It was not
human, not animal — not even life as we know it at all.
And yet it had intelligence. But it was strange and foreign
and devoid of feeling. It is curious to say that even then, as
I lay beneath it, the thought came to me, that the thing and
its fellows must have crystallized when the waters of the
ancient sea dried out of the crater. Crystallizing salts take
intricate forms.
'I drew my automatic and fired three times, but the
bullets ricocheted harmlessly off the polished facets.
'It dropped until the gleaming lower point of the prism
was not a yard above me. Then the scarlet fire reached out
caressingly — flowed over my body. My weight grew less. I
was lifted, held against the point. You may see its mark
upon my chest. The thing floated into the air, carrying me.
Soon others were drifting about. I was overcome with
nausea. The scene grew black and I knew no more.
'I awoke floating free in a brilliant orange light. I
touched no solid object. I writhed, kicked about — at
nothingness. I could not move or turn over, because I
could get a hold on nothing. My memory of the last two
days seemed a nightmare. My clothing was still upon me.
My canteen still hung, or rather floated, by my shoulder.
And my automatic was in my pocket. I had the sensation
that a great space of time had passed. There was a curious
stiffness in my side. I examined it and found a red scar. I
believe those crystal things had cut into me. And I found,
with a horror you cannot understand, the mark upon my
chest. Presently it dawned upon me that I was floating,
devoid of gravity and free as an object in space, in the
34

orange flame at the top of one of the black cylinders. The
crystals knew the secret of gravity. It was vital to them.
And peering about, I discerned, with infinite repulsion, a
great flashing body, a few yards away. But its inner lights
were dead, so I knew that it was day, and that the strange
beings were sleeping.
'If I was ever to escape, this was the opportunity. I
kicked, clawed desperately at the air, all in vain. I did not
move an inch. If they had chained me, I could not have
been more secure. I drew my automatic, resolved on a
desperate measure. They would not find me again, alive.
And as I had it in my hand, an idea came into my mind. I
pointed the gun to the side, and fired six rapid shots. And
the recoil of each explosion sent me drifting faster, rocket-
wise, toward the edge.
'I shot out into the green. Had my gravity been
suddenly restored, I might have been killed by the fall, but
I descended slowly, and felt a curious lightness for several
minutes. And to my surprise, when I struck the ground,
the airplane was right before me! They had drawn it up by
the base of the tower. It seemed to be intact. I started the
engine with nervous haste, and sprang into the cockpit. As
I started, another black tower loomed up abruptly before
me, but I veered around it, and took off in safety.
'In a few moments I was above the green. I half
expected the gravitational wave to be turned on me again,
but higher and higher I rose unhindered until the accursed
black walls were about me no longer. The sun blazed high
in the heavens. Soon I had landed again at Vaca Morena.
'I had had enough of radium hunting. On the beach,
where I landed, I sold the plane to a rancher at his own
price, and told him to reserve a place for me on the next
steamer, which was due in three days. Then I went to the
town's single inn, ate, and went to bed. At noon the next
day, when I got up, I found that my shoes and the pockets of
my clothes contained a good bit of the red sand from the
35

crater that had been collected as I crawled about in flight
from the crystal lights. I saved some of it for curiosity alone,
but when I analyzed it I found it a radium compound so rich
that the little handful was worth millions of dollars.
'But the fortune was of little value, for, despite frequent
doses of the fluid from my canteen, and the best medical
aid, I have suffered continually, and now that my canteen
is empty, I am doomed.
Your friend, Thomas Kelvin'
Thus the manuscript ends. If the reader doubts the truth
of the letter, he may see the Metal Man in the Tyburn
Museum.
*
By the time 'The Metal Man' appeared I was beginning
to make friends, mostly by mail, in the new world of
science fiction. The magazines carried long columns of
letters in microscopic type - one of my own had been
printed in Amazing, begging for illustration in color. I
joined one of the first fan organizations, the International
Science Correspondence Club. A little later, I belonged to
the American Interplanetary Society, then a group of two
or three dozen young people devoted to the impossible
dream of using rockets to break into space.
Among the first of these friends was Dr. Miles J.
Breuer, a physician who practiced in Lincoln, Nebraska.
Science fiction was his very serious hobby. I admired the
competent workmanship of his published fiction and got
him to take me on as a sort of literary apprentice.
We did a short story together, then a novel. After we
had discussed ideas in an exchange of letters, I did the
writing. He revised and criticized. This work with him, I
think, was a good antidote to the overblown romanticism
of Merritt. He insisted on a clear sense of reality and
strong thematic values, and he taught me to curb my
tendencies toward wild melodrama and purple adjectives.
36

The short story was originally called 'The Egg from the
Lost Planet.' We finished it in October, 1928, and mailed
it to Amazing. Gernsback took the manuscript with him
when he lost control of Experimenter Publishing
Company and its string of magazines. His new complex of
publishing firms issued the story in a twenty-four-page
booklet the next summer as the first volume of a series,
with the title changed to 'The Girl from Mars.' He paid us
a cent a word for it, $30 each.
I believe the idea came from Breuer, suggested by
Wells's The War of the Worlds. He must have been
responsible for most of the biological science. Reading the
story again after many years, I see opportunities we failed
to realize. The style is self-consciously Victorian, and the
character conflicts aren't fully developed. If they had been,
there's plot enough for a novel.
The novel we did write was The Birth of a New
Republic. It was turned out the next winter, while I was a
sophomore at Canyon. Again the idea was Breuer's. The
human colonists on the moon fight for independence, in a
situation that parallels the American Revolution. Several
later writers have done the same thing better, notably Bob
Heinlein in The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress.
It was a mistake, as I tried to argue at the time, to make
the repetition of history quite so literal as we did. The
parallels are too numerous and too obvious. But I did
enjoy elaborating the fresh details of life and war on the
moon. I recall doing bits of the novel for the writing
courses I was taking, and I had particular fun with the
elephant-sized, silicon-eating Selenites that were the
analogues of the American Indians.
The novel was sold to Amazing through Breuer's agent,
who managed to get a record rate of three-quarters of a
cent a word but then kept for himself a not-very-ethical 25
per cent commission. My share of the check was $168.75.
The story was published in the winter issue of Amazing
Stories Quarterly (January, 1931).
37

Breuer's own stories were popular then, though seldom
reprinted now. His most serious effort was a Utopian
novel, Paradise and Iron, which also ran in Amazing
Stories Quarterly. Later, when I stopped in Lincoln on my
first trip east, he entertained me in his home and showed
me his office. I must have been a trying guest, socially
graceless and uncomfortable with people. But I was
enormously eager to learn all about everything, and I'm
grateful for the aid he gave me.
38

THE GIRL FROM MARS
Twenty-five years have passed since the falling of the egg
from the Lost Planet, and five more since the explosion of
Mars. It was during my latter college days that that
catastrophe occurred. The French savant, Vanne, had just
published his treatise relative to the existence of life on
Mars. His daring proposals had raised a storm in the
scientific world and energetic measures were being taken
to establish interplanetary communication, when the red
planet was destroyed.
The destruction, according to the subsequently
advanced theories of M. Vanne, was due to atomic
disintegration, which later shattered the planet. For there
is little doubt that the Lost Planet was destroyed by
intra-atomic energy. The previous manifestations of
intelligence, as Vanne observed them, are unmistakable.
The conclusion is inevitable. Mars was destroyed by
atomic energy released by intelligent entities.
For the month before the explosion came there had
been observed a luminous hollow with a diameter of a
thousand miles and a violet sea hundreds of miles acros^.
The end came without warning. There was a vivid flare of
green light that suddenly appeared and faded slowly
through a period of many hours. And when it was gone
the fragments of the Lost Planet were started on the orbits
they occupy today.
It was five years later that the meteors fell. My wife had
been dead for many months. On that August evening,
after dark, I was standing with little Fred, my two year old
son, by the west windows of the pleasant rambling
mansion I inherited from my father. Beyond the wide,
tree-dotted lawn a thunderstorm was rising in the night, its
dense masses of black vapor continually riven by blinding
39

flashes of lightning. Brief glimpses were given of the dark
sheets of falling rain below the cloud, and of the sleeping
campus of Idlewood College, in which I became head of
the department of biology. In those minutes the world was
dominated by the sublime, majestic power of the storm.
Suddenly a dazzlingly brilliant point of green light
appeared above the cloud and swept across the heavens to
the north. I had half turned to follow its course when
another sprang into being and raced low over the horizon,
vanishing in the direction of Camden. Wondering if we
were to have a storm of falling stars, I looked anxiously
out toward the south.
Abruptly an intense beam of green light poured in
through the windows, casting on the opposite wall a sharp
image of the panes, and of the branches of the elm outside.
I looked out again to see a painfully bright point of green
that had broken through the black curtains of the storm. It
was motionless before the cloud, which hung in oddly
lighted green streamers around it. Rapidly its brilliance
increased until it was blinding. Suddenly I realized that it
was a third meteor, and that it was plunging, with
inconceivable rapidity, directly toward us.
I turned in horror and took Fred in my arms. I
staggered blindly toward the center of the room. The light
grew so bright I had to put a hand to my eyes. Then,
simultaneously, it went out and we were plunged into utter
blackness; I heard a terrific detonation; the earth shook
and trembled; and there was a bellowing shriek of parted
air. The windows burst in, and an oven-hot tempest roared
through the room. I was knocked down by the blast and
the child began to cry, but neither of us was injured.
I groped my way to the door and went out, still
carrying Fred in my arms. The falling star had struck in
the yard. There, where a flowerbed had been, was a great
funnel-shaped crater. All the trees and shrubs about had
been knocked down by the air-blast and one was burning,
40

lighting the ruinous scene with its flickering glare. From
the pit I heard the irregular hiss and sputter of steam, and
a thin cloud of condensing vapor rose above it. I went over
and looked into the hole. I saw the smooth side of a
four-foot globe, covered with a grayish vitrified crust, and
glowing dully red. But the red was fading quickly, as the
heat was absorbed by the interior of the body, which still
had the intense cold of space.
When I went back to the pit on the morning after, I
found the meteorite in the pool of rainwater at the bottom,
shattered like hot glass by the water. I picked up a
fragment, and like glass, it was transparent and sharp-
edged. When I had it analyzed it proved to be composed
principally of silicon; and an almost perfect insulator of
heat.
I moved a larger piece and my eye caught the gleam of
bright metal. Quickly I stooped and scraped about until I
had uncovered the end of a polished green metal cylinder.
My mind reeled under a flood of ideas. Was this the
handiwork of intelligent beings? Was some other planet
trying to communicate with earth? The idea seemed
fantastic. Yet, was it impossible?
For a few moments I stood there dazed, trying vaguely
to imagine what might be in the cylinder. At last I bent,
knocked the shattered, glassy stuff off the thing, and
picked it up. It was a heavy smooth tube of green metal,
some fifteen inches in diameter and thirty long. I turned it
wonderingly in my hands, resting it on the edge of the pit.
I saw, on the upper end, a flat disc rather like the dial on a
safe, with a single deep groove running across it. Looking
more closely at the top of the cylinder, I saw on it two
little metal points so placed that the ends of the groove
could be brought opposite them by the rotation of the dial
through about sixty degrees. I twisted at the dial and it
turned quite easily. When the groove reached the points a
sharp metallic click and then a high pitched hum came
from the cylinder. Then the whole head sprang up
41

abruptly, as though thrown by a spring, and fell with a
startling clatter on the rocks.
I noticed with surprise that my hands were trembling
from excitement. Carefully I steadied the tube and looked
in the top. The walls were thin and lined with two inches
of a soft substance resembling sponge rubber. Just below
the slots in which the lock had engaged was a smooth little
disc of black metal. I was picking it up when my eye was
caught by a flash of color upon it. Before my astonished
vision there materialized a picture of the solar system in
miniature, with the sun and planets much enlarged. The
colors were exact and the picture was curiously bright and
clear.
And Mars, that weird red world as it had been before
the explosion, swam toward the center of the vision,
growing untii I could see the vast scorched deserts, the
narrow fertile regions, and the vast strange crater with the
steaming violet sea as it had been near the end. Even as I
was thinking of Vanne's theories, I was given a brief
glimpse of an intricate machine, with terrified human
workmen running from it, growing incandescent and
melting into a violet fluid. And then a diagram was shown
that, even with my slight knowledge of physics, I recog-
nized as representing the breaking up of an atomic
structure according to the Bohr theory.
Then the little picture showed how the world of Mars
was overwhelmed by the vapor that rose from the violet
stuff and flowed in acrid, poisonous seas, sweeping over
the Martian cities one by one, with a terrible corrosive
action on flesh and all organic matter. At last only a few
survivors were left, on one of the low mountains of Mars,
protected by a hastily constructed metallic dome.
In that dome, surgeons were shown, working skillfully
over still forms, with marvelous apparatus. Presently I saw
that the patients were females; that the operators were
engaged in removing the mature egg from the female
42

ovary, and sealing it in a cylinder of fluid, with tubes,
pumps, filters, and oxygen containers attached. Other
Martians put those cylinders, together with radium
heaters, tubes of fluid, and other apparatus, in green metal
shells, locked them, and cast them in the glass-like globes.
At last, through huge guns, they were shot out into space.
The Martians it seems, were doomed but they hoped to
perpetuate their race on another world.
The plaque went on to show how to fertilize the egg,
and to add the numbered bottles of chemicals to maintain
the growth of the ovum. Everything was shown in detail. It
was all simple and easy. Finally it showed how to remove
the fully developed infant from the fluid and start its
breathing.
I put the cover back and carried the cylinder into the
house. Emptying it, I found everything just as it had been
shown on the plaque. There was even a nursing bottle and
packages of prepared food. I broke the seal on the
incubator cylinder, added the little capsule containing the
sperm to fertilize the egg, and the first can of fluid; I
fastened on the oxygen cylinders and the filters; set the
little clock into motion; and replaced the whole in the
insulated cylinder above the radium heater.
For seven and a half long months, I divided my care
between my little son and that incubator. With infinite
pains I watched the little being in the tube develop into a
human babe. At last I lifted the little girl tenderly out, and
bathed her quickly in the contents of the last can. She
breathed! She cried, and clenched a tiny hand....
I named her Pandorina. She became a rare elflike
beauty; her skin very white; her hair a soft, red bronze.
She came to have a quiet gentle grace of movement.
Her strange beauty increased as she grew older. The
bronze hair darkened and the eyes were clear and
beautiful. She was very human, and very dear to me. I did
not dare to tell her that she was the daughter of another
world, for fear she would feel estranged from me. But I did
43

tell her that she was an orphan. She and Fred grew up
together like sister and brother. But as they approached
maturity I began to see that they were falling in love.
Pandorina's intelligence was remarkable. She and Fred
always studied together, and, although my son was no
mean scholar, she was always considerably in the lead.
She studied music too, displaying an astonishing aptitude
that must have been her inheritance from a higher civiliza-
tion.
Scientists have sometimes claimed to have photographs
and descriptions of a subtle luminous emanation of the
human body, known as the human aura. I suspected that
Pandorina had an aura, though I could never be sure. But,
at night or in a dark room, when she was excited, I fancied
that a faint luminosity flickered about her. And her senses
appeared sometimes so remarkably keen that I thought the
aura might be a sixth sense not developed in terrestrial
man, perhaps a sensitivity to ethereal waves too high or
too low in pitch to be perceived by our senses. I have
always considered such things as foolish when I read them
in the writings of others; over and over again I told myself
it was nonsense; yet the thing kept forcing itself on my
attention.
Fred and Pandorina were classmates in school and
college. They seemed very happy together and their mutual
attachment grew always stronger. Neither of them had
many intimate friends. Fred was tall and slender, blond, and
cleanly made. There was modest, honest manhood in his
keen, blue eyes. I knew that he loved Pandorina with all his
being and that his love was well requited. The marriage had
been arranged. It was to be two months after the girl's
twentieth birthday, on a day in June.
One morning, just a week before the date set for the
wedding, Pandorina and Fred were playing tennis on the
lawn behind the house. I delighted in their joy. The sea
breeze was just springing up from the Atlantic, ten miles
44

away. The summer day was clear, save for the cloud of
smoke that ever hangs above the great steel mills in that
part of New Jersey just west of Idlewood. The air was still,
though sometimes we heard the distant detonation of a
heavy gun, or the scream and explosion of a shell, from
the proving ground not far from the college. For there are
tried out the huge guns that are forged for our navy in
Millville.
I had forgotten myself in the contemplation of the
players, and their happy laughter, when one of the new
mail planes roared low overhead. Fred and the girl
stopped to watch it, and the pilot, curiously, leaned out
and waved to them. In a few moments the plane dropped
out of sight in the landing field beyond the town.
Pandorina's white skin was a little flushed, and she seemed
excited. She turned to me and said impulsively,
'What a queer man — made me feel strange —' and
abruptly she hesitated and then went back to the game. It
was all a little strange and I noticed that she looked off
two or three times, in the direction of the landing field, as
though the incident had left a strong impression.
And oddly enough, in half an hour, a man in aviator's
togs and helmet came walking up from that direction. He
came straight across the vacant lot next to us, seeming to
be hunting for some small object on the ground. He came
right on over my lawn, without looking up, and I went
over to him. He was well over six feet tall, erect, and very
strongly built. His skin seemed almost unnaturally white. I
stopped before him and he raised his eyes. They were
greenish black, and I had a feeling that they would be
luminous in the dark, though of course I thought it fancy
at the time. The fellow had about himself a vague and
indefinite air of supernormal power and shadowy
malignance. Really there was nothing definite, but at first
sight I mistrusted him.
He smiled, with a flashing display of white teeth, and
said,
45

'I beg your pardon. I lost a watch as I went over awhile
ago. A wrist watch. I was looking at it and the strap must
have come unfastened. The windstream whipped it away.
Maybe not much chance to find it, but it was right
valuable.'
I thought the fellow was lying and I was about to tell him
that he might go around my possessions, when Pandorina
and Fred came up. She smiled and offered to help him look
in the shrubbery and flower beds beyond the house if he
thought it had fallen there. So we walked around the house
and made a pretense of search. I thought that Pandorina
and the stranger looked at each other more than necessary,
but they said nothing save for a few comments on the
weather, and in a few minutes he went on.
I hoped I had seen the last of the man, but the next day
I learned that a Mr. Harvey Mason, who was a pilot for
the Atlantic Aero Express Company, and had his base in
Philadelphia, was renting the King place, almost next door
to us, and that he was moving in at once, planning to
spend his off hours in Idlewood. I could only guess that it
was the same man and that Pandorina had something to
do with his action. I was not much surprised when the
stranger came to call a day or so later, with one of my
neighbors.
The company sat down and talked a while. Once I saw
Mason and Pandorina staring at one another, quite lost to
their surroundings. He became self-conscious and looked
away, with a laugh, and Pandorina dropped her eyes.
During the rest of the evening I was disturbed by the
thought that she was developing an infatuation for the
fellow, and Fred must have noticed it too, though he gave
no sign. Presently the three of them went to the piano and
Pandorina played. They all seemed very gay, but I knew
that Fred was worried, though he said nothing about it
after the visitors had gone.
Fred had studied law. The next day he was down at his
46

office, and I came home early and alone. I was a little
surprised to find that Pandorina was not in the house. In
half an hour, however, an automobile stopped at the front
and she and Mason came up the walk. The man held her
arm with a possessive air. I went to the door and opened
it. Mason spoke to me, with something haughty and
aggressive in his manner.
'I should like to speak to you alone for a moment, if you
please, sir,' he said stiffly.
I led him into my study, shut the door, and sat down by
my desk. He remained standing, a striking and powerful
figure with his mighty, muscular limbs, his strong and
prominent features, and his eyes of penetrating brilliance.
Then there was the difference I have mentioned, the air of
alien power and the strange, malign spirit that lurked in
the green-black eyes, setting him apart from ordinary men.
'Is Pandorina the child of earthly parents?' he asked
harshly, his sharp eyes boring into mine.
'Why, what makes you ask that?' I countered, caught
unexpectedly, but unwilling to admit anything.
'You have told her that she is not your child. In pallor
of skin, color of hair, and luster of eye, she resembles me.
But I am not a terrestrial man. I came to earth in a meteor.
I am the son of the science of another world, and I know
that two other similar meteors fell on the same evening. I
was brought up by a farmer named Mason. He lived in the
village of Folsom, over toward Camden. He did not, as
you have done, lie to his foster-child about his origin.
These are the reasons for my question; these, and the fact
that Pandorina and I feel an irresistible attraction.'
For a moment he paused, with those dark eyes still
intent upon me, and then he cried,
'Ha, I am right! I read it in your face!'
I was beaten. 'Go away!' I told him. 'Get out of my
house! Let me be the one to tell her. Please.'
So, grinning unpleasantly, he went out and left me, but
it was a long time before I had the heart to do anything
47

but sit there and stare at the wall. At last I roused myself
and went to look for Pandorina. I found her standing by
the windows of her room, gazing pensively out at the hills
in the north, empurpled by the setting sun. She started at
the sound of my voice, and smiled to see me. I had her to
come with me into the little laboratory where I had taken
the green metal cylinder. The door had been locked for
almost twenty years. There, on the dusty tables, was the
cylinder. I showed it to her, and then told her about the
night when it had fallen, and how I had found it. Then I
opened it and let her see the contents. As the last bars of
sunshine through the cobweb covered windows fell upon
the little plaque the movies appeared again, and when the
last scene was black, and the sun had fallen behind the
hills, I said,
'Pandorina, you came to earth in ihat tube. And there
were three of the meteors. There are other Martians on
earth! Mason is one of them!'
She was confused by the abruptness of the disclosures.
For a moment she was silent, passing a hand over her
white forehead.
'Now I know why I feel for him as I do. I think — I love
him — more than I ever did Fred. But still, don't think -
oh, what shall I do?'
Abruptly tears started into her eyes and she clutched
my shoulder and hung against me, her slight body racked
by sobs. I tried to comfort her and presently she grew
calmer and went out. I stood there in the room, looking
idly at the cylinder and thinking of the part it had played
in my life, until I was deep in the mazes of memory and
dusk had fallen.
At last Fred came into the room. Somehow he seemed
almost old. Blank despair was in his clear blue eyes. His
face was white and drawn and his slender figure was
painfully erect. Pandorina had met him as he came home.
What she told him I do not know. I put out my hand and
he gripped it hard.
48

'Pandorina has told me,' he said unevenly. 'She loves
him. I'm going away. I don't know what to do.' He paused
uncertainly, and looked away. 'But I can't stay here. I'll go
away. Perhaps — I'll forget. Good-by, father.'
He choked, and a lump had risen in my throat so that I
could not speak. I went with him out to the garage. He got
out his car and as he drove away I stood and watched the
light flashing on houses and trees, and the dwindling point
of red, until it all was lost in the night. Two weeks later I
had a half-incoherent note that told of his driving aim-
lessly down to Atlantic City, and then of his going to New
York. There, it seems, he fell in with an old school friend
who was living at New Brunswick, and went home with
him.
Pandorina was hurt by Fred's going. To me she was
more than usually demonstrative. But she spent much time
with Mason. I think he took her up several times in his
plane, and out over Delaware Bay.
One day when the two had gone out together for a
picnic, I heard familiar footsteps on the verandah and
Fred walked into my study. He was thinner than when he
had gone, and looked tired and worn, but in his deep blue
eyes I read hope and determination. I sprang to my feet to
greet him. Smiling a little, he said, as he grasped my hand,
'My arrival is a little sudden. And I brought a visitor. I
wrote that I had gone with John to New Brunswick.
Yesterday he and I started to the theatre to attend the
matinee. On the street we met a man whom I took at first
to be our friend Mason, although he seemed not quite so
tall, and much better dressed. But John hailed him and it
soon developed that the stranger was an old acquaintance
of his, Irving Worrell by name. It seems that he is quite
wealthy and is considered a brilliant young scientist, with
many wonderful discoveries to his credit.
'As we were talking I was struck more and more at his
resemblance to Mason and presently I remembered your
49

telling me that the first meteor fell in the direction of New
Brunswick. I spoke to him about it and he told me that the
cylinder had been found by a banker named Worrell, on
his country place. This man had hatched and raised the
Martian.
'Worrell was intensely interested to learn of the two
others of his race. He brought me over today in a
remarkable conveyance of his own, a sort of rocket sailer.
We covered the hundred miles in half an hour.'
We went out, and Fred introduced me to the stranger.
He was, like Mason, a strange figure, with dead-white
skin, brilliant green-black eyes, and an intangible aura of
mysterious power. While he was not quite so powerfully
built as the other man, he seemed to have an even more
forceful character, emphasized by the penetrating bright-
ness of his eyes, and the remarkable strength of his
features.
He brought home to me more vividly than Mason had
done, that the civilization of Mars must have been far
above our own, with its people maturing much more
quickly. The superiority of the planetary people speak
highly for the advancement of the Lost Planet. Imagine a
civilized baby brought up by primitive savages — it would
have all the potential abilities to read and do algebra and
play the piano, but, never having had a chance, it would
not have learned to do these things. Although it could, due
to a higher intelligence, outstrip the savages in their own
accomplishments, its ability would be crude compared to
real civilized accomplishments, because of its lack of
civilized education. That is the impression those two men
made upon my mind.
Presently Mason and Pandorina came in. They were
very much surprised to meet the newcomers and I thought
the girl was glad to see Fred. At any rate, while the others
were talking, Fred and Pandorina sat down together, but
the men were soon beside them. With his brilliant,
cultured mind, Worrell easily dominated the conversation.
50

He told us something of his life and his scientific work.
Beginning with a study of the cylinder in which he had
fallen, with its chemicals and apparatus, the radium heater
and the motion-picture plaque, he had done amazing
things. Many of his discoveries had been given to the
world. But as he was talking he took from his pocket a
little handful of gleaming objects of metal and crystal.
There were a half dozen of the little machines, very tiny
and wonderfully finished.
'I have devoted some attention to the science of
warfare,' he said, tossing the little objects lightly upon his
palm. 'Here are a few of my inventions that were too
dangerous to publish. Perhaps they look insignificant
enough, but with them I could defeat and destroy a
battleship. They utilize the powers of radium and the
disrupted atom.
'Let us look at this one, for example.'
He held up a little double disc, about the size of a
dollar. One face looked like platinum, the other gleamed
with an unfamiliar red. He took it in his fingers and slowly
turned each face upon the other, as he stepped toward the
center of the room.
'It creates a protonic wall that absorbs etheric vibration
and stops the passage of ions,' he said. 'By a variation of
adjustment, any desired wave length can be stopped or
admitted. This one may have a clear field of vision, and, at
the same time, be protected against heat or ultraviolet or
cathode ray weapons, some of which I have developed to a
high degree of efficiency.'
Suddenly my vision of Worrell dimmed. He seemed to
be standing in a transparent red bubble ten feet in
diameter, with its center at the thing in his hand. He
manipulated the tiny instrument and the bubble grew
darker until he looked a ghastly bloody red. And then, as
we began to cower back in terrified amazement, the red
thing floated up until it had melted far into the ceiling and
51

Worrell's head almost touched it. As the thing floated
down again, the red darkened until the thing seemed a
solid sphere, densely, inconceivably, black. It was un-
canny to hear the Martian's guttural laugh coming from it.
Abruptly it vanished, and he came toward us, grinning.
I was speechless, but Mason stammered:
'Why — how did you — what made it go up?'
Worrell answered easily, 'The shell may intercept any
wave length. Gravitation is cut off as readily as any other.'
He took a tiny metal statuette off the piano and set it on
the corner of the table. As we watched with some
apprehension, he took from his collection a piece of green
crystal in the shape of a horseshoe, with a tiny silver
needle mounted between the ends. As he held it so that the
needle pointed at the little figure, a blinding tongue of fire
stabbed out and the metal burst into vivid incandescence,
with a dull report, and was gone.
'Cathode rays,' Worrell said.
He took up his weapons and returned them to his
pocket, and he and Mason went home to Mason's house
across the street. They came back next morning and the
three Martians went for an automobile ride. Fred went
along. It was when they came back in the afternoon that I
first noticed that the two men were growing jealous of one
another, and that they looked with black disfavor on
Fred's attentions to Pandorina.
Next morning they did not come in. After dinner
Pandorina was playing the piano, with Fred sitting by her.
I could tell her mood by her music and I knew she was
very happy. Suddenly the door of the room was flung open
and Mason strode in. At the sight of Fred with the girl he
stopped short, an expression of terrible anger contorting
his features. His body was disfigured by fiendish, inhuman
rage. And I imagined, in the semi-gloom of the room, that
a vague green aura was flickering about his body.
'Man, didn't I warn you? Didn't I tell you to go?' the
heavy voice boomed out. I was sickened by the ruthless-
52

ness and malignance in the tone. Fred sprang to his feet,
clasping Pandorina's hand. He released it and stepped
quickly toward Mason, clenching his fist.
The ultramundane man thrust a hand into his pocket
and pulled out one of Worrell's little instruments. I did not
see the shape of the thing, but as he clasped it in his hand,
a vague green fire flowed out of it and flashed across to
Fred. What that force was, I do not know - some form of
electric energy, or of ions, perhaps. The green radiance
condensed about my son. His brave advance was abruptly
checked. An expression of agony came over his face. He
tottered and began a scream that ended in a rattling sob.
For a moment his body was outlined sharply in the
curdling green incandescence. Mason relaxed his grip of
the tiny device and calmly returned it to his pocket as my
son, burned and distorted, fell heavily to the floor.
Then I think I must have fainted from grief and horror.
The next I knew I was lying on the sofa. Pandorina was
standing by me, with her cool white hand on my brow. I
sat up dazedly. I did not begin to remember what hap-
pened until I saw Fred, still lying where he had fallen. And
then I saw Mason and Worrell. They were standing face to
face in the middle of the room. Again I fancied the flicker
of green light about them. They were talking heatedly, but
in low tones, and I was so mentally befogged that I did not
at first catch the drift of what they were saying. But
presently I got an idea of the jealousy they felt, and of the
fact that they were in a fair way to get into a fight.
Suddenly the aviator stepped back, with a sharp word
that fell upon my dazed brain like a curse, and then
swung forward at the other with a heavy blow. Worrell's
hand made a fleeting motion, and I caught in it the glitter
of one of his tiny weapons. And, strangely, though he
made no attempt to dodge, the aviator's blow did not fall
home. Out of Worrell's hand flashed a beam of green fire.
With a cry of pain, Mason staggered back as though he
had received a heavy but invisible blow. Following his
53

evident advantage, the scientist snatched from his coat
pocket a little metal tube about the size of a fountain
pen. As he pointed it at the aviator there was a sharp
click and a little capsule flew out, seeming to ignite as it
struck the air, for it burst into a ball of brilliant blue
light, somewhat like a ball of lightning, that shot toward
Mason's head. By the exertion of his powerful muscles to
the utmost, the man was able to hurl himself out of the
path of the strange missile. By a fortunate chance it
struck an open window, flew out, and struck the old elm
outside, reducing it to a blazing stump.
All with a single swift motion, Mason sprang aside,
picked up a chair, and hurled it at the scientist with such
terrific force, that I expected to see him brained on the
spot. But Worrell was ready with his little ray-machine. A
green light fell upon the chair and it swerved from its path,
and went crashing into the glass front of a book case by
the wall.
By that time I was sufficiently recovered to understand
the danger I was in from the combat. I stepped toward the
middle of the room, with my hand upraised. 'Gentlemen,
just a minute —' I began. They turned fiercely toward me.
Mason lifted in his hand the deadly little weapon he had
used on Fred. Doubtless he had forgotten it during the
fight, but now he raised it deliberately. A pale light flashed
out of it, and I felt an icy chill, a strange numbing pain,
run over my arm and shoulder. But, crying out, with
compassionate horror and pity on her tear-stained face,
Pandorina sprang to my side and grasped my hand. And,
although Mason was still muttering menacingly, the
numbness left my arm. However, it was raw and painful
for several days.
'Gentlemen,' I went on, 'I see your problem. Grant me
respect for my dead son and I'll help you work out your
question' - for a plan had sprung into my mind. Force
was useless against them, but cunning might prevail.
The aviator snorted at the idea of my assisting them
54

but, possibly for that reason, Worrell agreed to the plan I
explained. Assuming blindness, while I suppressed a fear
that they would read my thoughts and find my secret, I led
the way out to my car. Pandorina rode with me and the
muttering planetary men climbed into the rear. In half an
hour we drove up before a locked gate, with an open space
beyond. Stopping the car back from the gate and well to
one side, I explained:
'This is government property. The public is not per-
mitted inside the fence, but I have secured the use of it for
my botanical researches. Here you may be assured of
plenty of room for your duel, and freedom from inter-
ruptions.'
'Very well,' said Worrell, 'let us waste no time.'
Noticing that my watch said 10:30, I got out, unlocked
the heavy gate and swung it quickly around before they
could read the sign upon it, and then drove in toward the
center.
'Now suppose you separate a little way, and I will
sound the horn as a signal to begin,' I suggested.
Mason agreed with a savage monosyllable. Smiling,
and haughtily polite, Worrell took from his pocket a few
of his amazing weapons, also a little leather case, in which
were more of them. Quickly he divided them into equal
shares, handing Mason's to him with brief words of
instruction for their use. Mason was grim and belligerent
but Worrell smiled superciliously. They went to their
places and I gave the signal to begin. Then I drove
frantically away to a distance of a half mile.
When I looked back they were already struggling. A
great red transparent globe marked the place of each
combatant. Slender, blinding bright tongues of white flame
(electric arcs, perhaps) played back and forth between
them, and the little globes of blue fire flew to and fro,
exploding with terrific violence upon striking. Faint green
lights flickered about them. Now and then the protonic
armor of one or the other was darkened to afford greater
55

protection, or momentarily dispensed with altogether to
give greater freedom of attack.
And at one side was a slender, white-clad figure. It was
Pandorina. In the heat of my grief and my plan for
revenge, I had quite forgotten her. God knows that I
meant her no harm! But then it was too late.
I could see few of the details of the contest until I
remembered the binoculars under the car seat. I got them
out and focused them on the scene of action. Indeed, that
conflict of the Martians was a strange one. It was, to me,
incomprehensible. They employed destructive agencies
discovered ages ago, perhaps, on Mars, but inconceivable
to man — powerful developments of radioactive energy,
disintegrated atoms, electric arcs, cathode rays and
streams of ions. And their means of defense and counter
attack were as far advanced — protonic armor and screens
of repulsion.
The Martians were perhaps a hundred feet apart.
Mason was advancing steadily, while Worrell calmly held
his ground. At times the red armor was so dim that I could
see the men quite plainly. It was a strange scene, bright
with the vivid flashes of the ray weapons and the globes of
flame, with the impalpable green luminosity, which may
have been an incidental by-product of atomic disintegra-
tion, hanging over all. The earth was scorched and
smoking from the effect of the intense white rays, and the
air was full of rocks and dust from the continual ex-
plosions.
Suddenly Worrell stood still, and the red armor
vanished from about him. A constant stream of the blue
globules poured from his weapon. The balloon-like object
that sheltered the aviator bounded from side to side as the
occupant made wild efforts to escape the spheres, then
vanished itself as Mason determined to let down his
defenses in an effort to get in a vital blow. A great blaze of
incandescence left his hand and poured over Worrell. It
56

seemed to explode with withering flames and a roar that
shook the earth. And, for the moment, the scientist
disappeared.
At the same instant, as Mason stood with the blue
globes exploding all about him, a faint mist of green flame
was thrown over him — a flame like that with which Fred
had been murdered. He grew rigid, with limbs stiffly
outstretched, and slowly fell. But before he struck the
earth the shielding sphere sprang strong and black about
him.
All the while Pandorina stood close by. I could see the
expressions of pity and fear and horror that moved across
her face. Still I loved her and wished I had thought to save
her.
Then Worrell, with the faint red shell about him, sprang
out of the hollow into which he had been thrown. And
strangely, he did not curve back to earth, but floated on
and on, up over the motionless shell of the aviator,
flashing his deadly rays and explosive blue globes down
upon him. Abruptly a blinding light beamed out of the
aviator's armor and struck full upon the one overhead.
The red shell was lifted and driven back by the impact of
the ray. And it changed color. Splotches of changing
orange and yellow came upon it. Mason was doing
something to neutralize its effect. But Worrell replied with
a frantic use of his weapons; successive puffs of greenish
vapor impinged upon Mason's globe until it was almost
hidden from sight.
All the time I had been keeping an eye out in the
direction of Millville, twenty miles west, to the left of the
fighters and the pitiful girl who watched them.
Now I heard the familiar but undescribable scream of
the projectile from a great 16-inch naval gun, and I saw it
as a dark speck, describing its trajectory. I saw the smoke
in the distance and heard the detonation of the gun that
had fired it. The shell struck and exploded with a force
that shook the earth, throwing up a great fountain of dirt,
57

rocks and fragments, that presently showered down into
the great cloud of smoke that now hid the scene of the
duel.
I waited patiently for the smoke to clear. It was half an
hour before I could get close enough to see without getting
choked by the acrid fumes. I found a vast crater, big
enough to hold a house, with raw, torn earth about, and
stifling odors still floating up. But no sign did I see of the
Martians. There was nothing anywhere to show that they
had ever existed.
When I went out I locked the gate, displaying again the
sign that I had hidden by swinging it around against the
fence.
danger
Targets for Naval Guns
Heavy Artillery from 11 to 12 a.m.
keep out
*
The next story, all my own, was a novelette which I called
'The Silver Sea.' At a date when the blank spots on the
map were already pretty small for that sort of thing, I let
my explorers discover a land of weird powers and strange
beings in the western desert of Australia.
I finished it during the Christmas break of my first
college year and mailed it to Amazing Stories. Eventually
I got a letter from Hugo Gernsback, who had taken my
manuscript along when he left to set up his new publishing
enterprises. He offered me 'space rates' for it. Hungry for
publication, I agreed without asking what 'space rates'
would come to. He renamed the story 'The Alien Intelli-
gence' and ran it in the second and third issues of the new
Science Wonder Stories. His check, when it came, was
only $75. I had expected half a cent a word, which would
have been nearly twice that.
(You may feel that I'm dwelling too much on low word
58

rates and the uncertainties of pay, but every dollar mat-
tered then. Becoming a writer was a desperate goal. To
reach it, I somehow had to survive.)
There were compensations, however, for the small
check. The editor's blurb began, 'Not since the famous
Moon Pool by A. Merritt have we read such a remarkable
story as the present one, by the well-known author.' Not
only was I suddenly this 'well-known author,' but I soon
received a sort of fan letter from the great Merritt himself,
asking for my carbon copy of the second installment.
After such attention, money didn't matter so much.
For the sake of completeness, I'd like to reprint the
story here, but it's too long. In selecting stories for this
book, I face uncomfortable dilemmas. I have always put
most of my writing effort into novelettes and novels, and
they have earned more praise than my short stories. I
agree with Jim Gunn that the natural length for science
fiction is the novelette, because it offers space enough to
fill out backgrounds and explore new ideas.
To my regret, this book has to be limited to shorts.
Two or three novelettes couldn't carry the story I want to
tell of what it was like to be a beginning writer for the
early science fiction magazines. But Isaac Asimov has
reprinted two of my early novelettes, 'The Moon Era'
and 'Born of the Sun,' in his recent collection, Before the
Golden Age.
Though the years have blurred my recollections, my file
cards on finished stories show that 1929 was a busy year.
Still in college in Canyon, I kept writing in a furious haste
for more success. The cards show two short stories
produced in January, but I remember neither. 'The
Flaming Fear' was rejected by Weird Tales. 'The Planet's
Hint,' another collaboration with Breuer, was relinquished
to him after two or three editors had turned it down. He
revised and published it as 'The Perfect Planet.' In
February I wrote an essay on chemistry that failed to win
a prize; in March another story that Weird Tales didn't
59

take. Later in the year, two other shorts and a novelette
also failed to sell.
But the mail brought good news, too. Somehow, I
persuaded A. Merritt to let me collaborate with him on a
serial for Argosy, which was then one of the top adventure
pulps, paying five or six cents a word. Merritt was still my
idol, and I vividly recall my elation over his letters of
advice and comment. The plot for our planned novel was
my own and perhaps a bit wild. Our explorers, somewhere
in the deserts of Asia, were to discover an enormous
crystal mass that had developed a mind and will of its
own. At school that fall, I spent the four-day Thanksgiving
recess writing 20,000 words of the story, The Purple
Mountain.
Merritt never returned the manuscript, and I suppose it
no longer exists. His comment was short and not very
committal. Then the associate editor of the American
Weekly, the Sunday supplement for the Hearst newspaper
chain, he explained that he had little time for fiction. That
outcome isn't very surprising, when I look back at it now.
I had neither seen our Asian setting nor even read much
about it. The human characters were so vague I can't
recall them. The writing must have showed my driving
urgency. Clearly I had been trying too hard to lean on
Merritt.
To balance such failures, however, I did sell stories that
year. After another novelette, 'Red Wings,' was rejected
by Argosy, I revised it and sold it to Gernsback's new Air
Wonder Stories for half a cent a word, earning $50.
Published as 'The Second Shell,' it's about a not-
very-probable layer of invisible electronic life above our
atmosphere.
During the spring, I wrote a short novel, The Green
Girl, with an equally unlikely setting - an enormous air
bubble under the Pacific. Such improbabilities were
seasoned with science from my chemistry course, and the
action was fast. Amazing Stories bought it for $200 and
60

published it in two parts, with a cover illustration and my
name in big letters.
For a vacation that summer I spent a month on my
uncle's huge ranch in Chihuahua, riding every day. The
uncle, Stewart Hunt, was a colorful cowman who had
lived most of his life in northern Mexico, making and
losing cattle fortunes. I had always loved and admired
him, and Mexico has always been a place of exotic
romance in my imagination. Ranching on his scale was
exciting, and that trip was a pleasant adventure.
On the way, I spent a week exploring El Paso and
Juarez. When I found the flying field, the airplanes
fascinated me. I hung around to talk to the pilots, learned
to start a motor by pulling the prop through, and took my
first plane ride.
Back at Canyon that winter, I was working with Breuer
on our novel about the moon republic, but in December I
also finished two shorts of my own that sold to Amazing,
'In the Scarlet Star' was intended to begin a series of
time-travel stories to dramatize the birth and growth of
human civilization, beginning with the discovery of fire.
The editorial response was so discouraging, however, that
I gave up the plan. Amazing didn't inform me until the
following August that the story had been 'marked
accepted,' and it was not published or paid for until March
of 1933.
Isaac Asimov was more fortunate than I, in having
John Campbell for an editor when he was breaking in.
With the inspiring guidance that Campbell offered, I
might have become a better writer with less lost motion.
No such creative help came from Gernsback, or from T.
O'Connor Sloane, Ph.D., the aged scientist who followed
him as editor of Amazing. Reports were often deadly slow,
and useful comments rare.
The other story I wrote that December was 'The
Cosmic Express.' Rejected by Argosy, it was accepted by
Amazing in July, with the comment that it was almost too
61

bizarre but 'saved by being well written.' It was published
in the November issue. In a letter printed two months
later, Dr. Breuer approved the story, pleasing me
immensely.
Generally I've been very cautious about attempting
humor, because my first efforts weren't very successful
and maybe because I was pretty serious about science
fiction. Here, however, I was trying for a lighter touch, as
well as for the interest of character and theme that Breuer
desired.
The detailed science in the story is the sort of stuff
wanted by Gernsback and T. O'Connor Sloane. It read
better then than now. The notion of a tropical Venus was
still respectable in 1929, and with television still more
dream than fact, the idea of transmitting a live human
being wasn't too much wilder than the idea of transmitting
a living picture.
62

THE COSMIC EXPRESS
Mr. Eric Stokes-Harding tumbled out of the rumpled
bed-clothing, a striking slender figure in purple-striped
pajamas. He smiled fondly across to the other of the twin
beds, where Nada, his pretty bride, lay quiet beneath
light silk covers. With a groan, he stood up and began a
series of fantastic bending exercises. But after a few
half-hearted movements, he gave it up, and walked
through an open door into a small bright room, its walls
covered with book-cases and also with scientific
appliances that would have been strange to the man of
four or five centuries before, when the Age of Aviation
was but beginning.
Yawning, Mr. Eric Stokes-Harding stood before the
great open window, staring out. Below him was a wide,
park-like space, green with emerald lawns, and bright with
flowering plants. Two hundred yards across it rose an
immense pyramidal building - an artistic structure, gleam-
ing with white marble and bright metal, striped with the
verdure of terraced roof-gardens, its slender peak rising to
help support the gray, steel-ribbed glass roof above.
Beyond, the park stretched away in illimitable vistas,
broken with the graceful columned buildings that held up
the great glass roof.
Above the glass, over this New York of 2432 a.d., a
freezing blizzard was sweeping. But small concern was
that to the lightly clad man at the window, who was
inhaling deeply the fragrant air from the plants below — air
kept, winter and summer, exactly at 20° C.
With another yawn, Mr. Eric Stokes-Harding turned
back to the room, which was bright with the rich golden
light that poured in from the suspended globes of the cold
ato-light that illuminated the snow-covered city. With a
63

distasteful grimace, he seated himself before a broad,
paper-littered desk, sat a few minutes leaning back, with
his hands clasped behind his head. At last he straightened
reluctantly, slid a small typewriter out of its drawer, and
began pecking at it impatiently.
For Mr. Eric Stokes-Harding was an author. There was
a whole shelf of his books on the wall, in bright jackets,
red and blue and green, that brought a thrill of pleasure to
the young novelist's heart when he looked up from his
clattering machine.
He wrote 'thrilling action romances,' as his enthusiastic
publishers and television directors said, 'of ages past,
when men were men. Red-blooded heroes responding
vigorously to the stirring passions of primordial life!'
He was impartial as to the source of his thrills —
provided they were distant enough from modern civiliza-
tion. His hero was likely to be an ape-man roaring through
the jungle, with a bloody rock in one hand and a beautiful
girl in the other. Or a cowboy, 'hard-riding, hard-
shooting,' the vanishing hero of the ancient ranches. Or a
man marooned with a lovely woman on a deserted South
Sea island. His heroes were invariably strong, fearless,
resourceful fellows, who could handle a club on equal
terms with a cave-man, or call science to aid them in
defending a beautiful mate from the terrors of a desolate
wilderness.
And a hundred million read Eric's novels, and watched
the dramatization of them on the television screens. They
thrilled at the simple, romantic lives his heroes led, paid
him handsome royalties, and subconsciously shared his
opinion that civilization had taken all the best from the life
of man.
Eric had settled down to the artistic satisfaction of
describing the sensuous delight of his hero in the roasted
marrow-bones of a dead mammoth, when the pretty
woman in the other room stirred, and presently came
tripping into the study, gay and vivacious, and - as her
64

husband of a few months most justly thought — altogether
beautiful in a bright silk dressing gown.
Recklessly, he slammed the machine back into its place,
and resolved to forget that his next 'red-blooded action
thriller' was due in the publisher's office at the end of the
month. He sprang up to kiss his wife, held her embraced
for a iong' happy moment. And then they went hand in
hand, to the side of the room and punched a series of
buttons' on a panel — a simple way of ordering breakfast
sent up the automatic shaft from the kitchens below.
Nada Stokes-Harding was also an author. She wrote
poems — 'back to nature stuff — simple lyrics of the sea, of
sunsets, of bird songs, of bright flowers and warm winds,
of thrilling communion with Nature, and growing things.
Men read her poems and called her a genius. Even though
the whole world had grown up into a city, the birds were
extinct, there were no wild flowers, and no one had time to
bother about sunsets.
'Eric, darling,' she said, 'isn't it terrible to be cooped up
here in this little flat, away from the things we both love?'
'Yes, dear. Civilization has ruined the world. If we
could only have lived a thousand years ago, when life was
simple and natural, when men hunted and killed their
meat, instead of drinking synthetic stuff, when men still
had the joys of conflict, instead of living under glass, like
hot-house flowers.'
'If we could only go somewhere -'
'There isn't anywhere to go. I write about the West,
Africa, South Sea islands. But they were all filled up two
hundred years ago. Pleasure resorts, sanatoriums, cities,
factories.'
'If only we lived on Venus! I was listening to a lecture
on the television, last night. The speaker said that the
Planet Venus is younger than the Earth, that it has not
cooled so much. It has a thick, cloudy atmosphere, and
low, rainy forests. There's simple, elemental life there —
like Earth had before civilization ruined it'
65

'Yes, Kingsley, with his new infra-red ray telescope,
that penetrates the cloud layers of the planet, proved that
Venus rotates in about the same period as Earth; and it
must be much like Earth was a million years ago.'
'Eric, I wonder if we could go there! It would be so
thrilling to begin life like the characters in your stories, to
get away from this hateful civilization, and live natural
lives. Maybe a rocket-'
The young author's eyes were glowing. He skipped
across the floor, seized Nada, kissed her ecstatically.
'Splendid! Think of hunting in the virgin forest, and
bringing the game home to you! But I'm afraid there is no
way. — Wait! The Cosmic Express!'
'The Cosmic Express?'
'A new invention. Just perfected a few weeks ago, I
understand. By Ludwig Von der Vails, the German
physicist.'
'I've quit bothering about science. It has ruined nature,
filled the world with silly, artificial people, doing silly,
artificial things.'
'But this is quite remarkable, dear. A new way to travel
— by ether!'
'By ether!'
'Yes. You know of course that energy and matter are
interchangeable terms; both are simply etheric vibration,
of different sorts.'
'Of course. That's elementary.' She smiled proudly. 'I
can give you examples, even of the change. The disintegra-
tion of the radium atom, making helium and lead and
energy. And Millikan's old proof that his Cosmic Ray is
generated when particles of electricity are united to form
an atom.'
'Fine! I thought you said you weren't a scientist.' He
glowed with pride. 'But the method, in the new Cosmic
Express, is simply to convert the matter to be carried into
power, send it out as a radiant beam and focus the beam
to convert it back into atoms at the destination.'
66

'But the amount of energy must be terrific —'
'It is. You know short waves carry more energy than
long ones. The Express Ray is an electromagnetic
vibration of frequency far higher than that of even the
Cosmic ray, and correspondingly more powerful and
more penetrating.'
The girl frowned, running slim fingers through golden-
brown hair. 'But I don't see how they get any recognizable
object, not even how they get the radiation turned back
into matter.'
'The beam is focused, just "like the light that passes
through a camera lens. The photographic lens, using light
rays, picks up a picture and reproduces it again on the
plate — just the same as the Express Ray picks up an
object and sets it down on the other side of the world.
'An analogy from television might help. You know that
by means of the scanning disc, the picture is transformed
into mere rapid fluctuations in the brightness of a beam of
light. In a parallel manner, the focal plane of the Express
Ray moves slowly through the object, progressively, dis-
solving layers of the thickness of a single atom, which are
accurately reproduced at the other focus of the instrument
— which might be in Venus!
'But the analogy of the lens is the better of the two. For
no receiving instrument is required, as in television. The
object is built up of an infinite series of plane layers, at the
focus of the ray, no matter where that may be. Such a
thing would be impossible with radio apparatus, because
even with the best beam transmission, all but a tiny
fraction of the power is lost, and power is required to
rebuild the atoms. Do you understand, dear?'
'Not altogether. But I should worry! Here comes break-
fast. Let me butter your toast.'
A bell had rung at the shaft. She ran to it, and returned
with a great silver tray, laden with dainty dishes, which
she set on a little side table. They sat down opposite each
other, and ate, getting as much satisfaction from con-
67

templation of each other's faces as from the excellent food.
When they had finished, she carried the tray to the shaft,
slid it in a slot, and touched a button - thus disposing of
the culinary cares of the morning.
She ran back to Eric, who was once more staring
distastefully at his typewriter.
'Oh, darling! I 'm thrilled to death about the Cosmic
Express! If we could go to Venus, to a new life on a new
world, and get away from all this hateful conventional
society -'
'We can go to their office — it's only five minutes. The
chap that operates the machine for the company is a pal of
mine. He's not supposed to take passengers except
between the offices they have scattered about the world.
But I know his weak point —'
Eric laughed, fumbled with a hidden spring under his
desk. A small polished object, gleaming silvery, slid down
into his hand.
'Old friendship, plus this, would make him — like
spinach.'
Five minutes later Mr. Stokes-Harding and his pretty
wife were in street clothes, light silk tunics of loose, flowing
lines — little clothing being required in the artificially
warmed city. They entered an elevator and dropped thirty
stories to the ground floor of the great building.
There they entered a cylindrical car, with rows of seats
down the sides. Not greatly different from an ancient
subway car, except that it was air-tight, and was hurled by
magnetic attraction and repulsion through a tube ex-
hausted of air, at a speed that would have made an old
subway rider gasp with amazement.
In five more minutes their car had whipped up to the
base of another building, in the business section, where
there was no room for parks between the mighty struc-
tures that held the unbroken glass roofs two hundred
stories above the concrete pavement.
68

An elevator brought them up a hundred and fifty
stories. Eric led Nada down a long, carpeted corridor to a
wide glass door, which bore the words:
cosmic express
stenciled in gold capitals across it.
As they approached, a lean man, carrying a black bag,
darted out of an elevator shaft opposite the door, ran
across the corridor, and entered. They pushed in after
him.
They were in a little room, cut in two by a high brass
grill. In front of it was a long bench against the wall, that
reminded one of the waiting room in an old railroad depot.
In the grill was a little window, with a lazy, brown-eyed
youth leaning on the shelf behind it. Beyond him was a
great, glittering piece of mechanism, half hidden by the
brass. A little door gave access to the machine from the
space before the grill.
The thin man in black, whom Eric now recognized as a
prominent French heart-specialist, was dancing before the
window, waving his bag frantically, raving at the sleepy
boy.
'Queek! I have tell you zee truth! I have zee most urgent
necessity to go queekly. A patient I have in Paree, zat ees
in zee most creetical condition!'
'Hold your horses just a minute, Mister. We got a client
in the machine now. Russian diplomat from Moscow to
Rio de Janeiro.... Two hundred seventy dollars and
eighty cents, please.... Your turn next. Keep cool, you'll
be there before you know it. Remember this is just an
experimental service. Regular installations all over the
world in a year.... Ready now. Come on in.'
The youth took the money, pressed a button. The door
sprang open in the grill, and the frantic physician leaped
through it.
'Lie down on the crystal, face up,' the young man
ordered. 'Hands at your sides, don't breathe. Ready!'
69

He manipulated his dials and switches, and pressed
another button.
'Why, hello, Eric, old man!' he cried. 'That's the lady
you were telling me about? Congratulations!' A bell
jangled before him on the panel. 'Just a minute. I've got a
call.'
He punched the board again. Little bulbs lit and glowed
for a second. The youth turned toward the half-hidden
machine, spoke courteously.
'All right, madam. Walk out. Hope you found the
transit pleasant.'
'But my Violet! My precious Violet!' a shrill female
voice came from the machine. 'Sir, what have you done
with my darling Violet?'
'I'm sure I don't know, madam. You lost it off your
hat?'
'None of your impertinence, sir! I want my dog.'
'Ah, a dog. Must have jumped off the crystal. You can
have him sent on for three hundred and —'
'Young man, if any harm comes to my Violet - I'll — I'll
- I'll appeal to the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to
Animals!'
'Very good, madam. We appreciate your patronage.'
The door flew open again. A very fat woman, puffing
angrily, face highly colored, clothing shimmering with
artificial gems, waddled pompously out of the door
through which the frantic French doctor had so recently
vanished. She rolled heavily across the room, and out into
the corridor. Shrill words floated back:
'I'm going to see my lawyer! My precious Violet -'
The sallow youth winked. 'And now what can I do for
you, Eric?'
'We want to go to Venus, if that ray of yours can put us
there.'
'To Venus? Impossible. My orders are to use the
Express merely between the sixteen designated stations, at
New York, San Francisco, Tokio, Lon—'
70

'See here, Charley,' with a cautious glance toward the
door, Eric held up the silver flask. 'For old time's sake,
and for this -'
The boy seemed dazed at sight of the bright flask. Then,
with a single swift motion, he snatched it out of Eric's
hand, and bent to conceal it below his instrument panel.
'Sure, old boy. I'd send you to heaven for that, if you'd
give me the micrometer readings to set the ray with. But I
tell you, this is dangerous. I've got a sort of television
attachment, for focusing the ray. I can turn that on Venus
- I've been amusing myself, watching the life there,
already. Terrible place. Savage. I can pick a place on high
land to set you down. But I can't be responsible for what
happens afterward.'
'Simple, primitive life is what we're looking for. And
now what do I owe you -'
'Oh, that's all right. Between friends. Provided that
stuffs genuine! Walk in and lie down on the crystal block.
Hands at your sides. Don't move.'
The little door had swung open again, and Eric led
Nada through. They stepped into a little cell, completely
surrounded with mirrors and vast prisms and lenses and
electron tubes. In the center was a slab of transparent
crystal, eight feet square and two inches thick, with an
intricate mass of machinery below it.
Eric helped Nada to a place on the crystal, lay down at
her side.
'I think the Express Ray is focused just at the surface of
the crystal, from below,' he said. 'It dissolves our sub-
stance, to be transmitted by the beam. It would look as if
we were melting into the crystal.'
'Ready,' called the youth. 'Think I've got it for you.
Sort of a high island in the jungle. Nothing bad in sight
now. But, I say — how're you coming back? I haven't got
time to watch you.'
'Go ahead. We aren't coming back.'
'Gee! What is it? Elopement? I thought you were
71

married already. Or is it business difficulties? The Bears
did make an awful raid last night. But you better let me set
you down in Hong Kong.'
A bell jangled. 'So long,' the youth called.
Nada and Eric felt themselves enveloped in fire. Sheets
of white flame seemed to lap up about them from the
crystal block. Suddenly there was a sharp tingling
sensation where they touched the polished surface. Then
blackness, blankness.
The next thing they knew, the fires were gone from
about them. They were lying in something extremely soft
and fluid; and warm rain was beating in their faces. Eric
sat up, found himself in a mud-puddle. Beside him was
Nada, opening her eyes and struggling up, her bright
garments stained with black mud.
All about rose a thick jungle, dark and gloomy — and
very wet. Palm-like, the gigantic trees were, or fern-like,
flinging clouds of feathery green foliage high against a
somber sky of unbroken gloom.
They stood up, triumphant.
'At last!' Nada cried. 'We're free! Free of that hateful
old civilization! We're back to Nature!'
'Yes, we're on our feet now, not parasites on the
machines.'
'It's wonderful to have a fine, strong man like you to
trust in, Eric. You're just like one of the heroes in your
books!'
'You're the perfect companion, Nada.... But now we
must be practical. We must build a fire, find weapons, set
up a shelter of some kind. I guess it will be night, pretty
soon. And Charley said something about savage animals
he had seen in the television.'
'We'll find a nice dry cave, and have fire in front of the
door. And skins of animals to sleep on. And pottery
vessels to cook in. And you will find seeds and grown
grain.'
72

'But first we must find a flint-bed. We need flint for
tools, and to strike sparks to make a fire with. We will
probably come across a chunk of virgin copper, too - it's
found native.'
Presently they set off through the jungle. The mud
seemed to be very abundant, and of a most stocky
consistence. They sank into it ankle deep at every step,
and vast masses of it clung to their feet. A mile they
struggled on, without finding where a provident nature had
left them even a single fragment of quartz, to say nothing
of a mass of pure copper.
'A darned shame,' Eric grumbled, 'to come forty
million miles, and meet such a reception as this!'
Nada stopped. 'Eric,' she said, 'I'm tired. And I don't
believe there's any rock here, anyway. You'll have to use
wooden tools sharpened in the fire.'
'Probably you're right. This soil seemed to be of alluvial
origin. Shouldn't be surprised if the native rock is some
hundreds of feet underground. Your idea is better.'
'You can make a fire by rubbing sticks together, can't
you?'
'It can be done — easily enough, I'm sure. I've never
tried it, myself. We need some dry sticks, first.'
They resumed the weary march, with a good fraction of
the new planet adhering to their feet. Rain was still falling
from the dark heavens in a steady, warm downpour. Dry
wood seemed scarce as the proverbial hen's teeth.
'You didn't bring any matches, dear?'
'Matches! Of course not! We're going back to Nature.'
'I hope we get a fire pretty soon.'
'If dry wood were gold dust, we couldn't buy a hot dog.'
'Eric, that reminds me that I'm hungry.'
He confessed to a few pangs of his own. They turned
their attention to looking for banana trees, and coconut
palms, but they did not seem to abound in the Venerian
jungle. Even small animals that might have been slain with
a broken branch had contrary ideas about the matter.
73

At last, from sheer weariness, they stopped and
gathered branches to make a sloping shelter by a vast
fallen tree-trunk.
'This will keep out the rain' — maybe —' Eric said
hopefully. 'And tomorrow, when it has quit raining - I'm
sure we'll do better.'
They crept in, as gloomy night fell without. They lay in
each other's arms, the body warmth oddly comforting.
Nada cried a little.
'Buck up,' Eric advised her. 'We're back to nature -
where we've always wanted to be.'
With the darkness, the temperature fell somewhat, and
a high wind rose, whipping cold rain into the little shelter,
and threatening to demolish it. Swarms of mosquito-like
insects, seemingly not inconvenienced in the least by the
inclement elements, swarmed about them in clouds.
Then came a sound from the dismal stormy night, a
hoarse, bellowing roar, raucous, terrifying.
Nada clung against Eric. 'What is it, dear?' she chat-
tered.
'Must be a reptile. Dinosaur, or something of the sort.
This world seems to be in about the same state as the earth
when they flourished there.... But maybe it won't find us.'
The roar was repeated, nearer. The earth trembled
beneath a mighty tread.
'Eric,' a thin voice trembled. 'Don't you think - it might
have been better — You know the old life was not so bad,
after all.'
'I was just thinking of our rooms, nice and warm and
bright, with hot foods coming up the shaft whenever we
pushed the button, and the gay crowds in the park, and
my old typewriter.'
'Eric?'
'Yes, dear.'
'Don't you wish - we had known better?'
'I do.' If he winced at the 'we' the girl did not notice.
The roaring outside was closer. And suddenly it was
74

answered by another raucous bellow, at considerable dis-
tance, that echoed strangely through the forest. The fearful
sounds were repeated, alternately. And always the more
distant seemed nearer, until the two sounds were together.
And then an infernal din broke out in the darkness.
Bellows. Screams. Deafening shrieks. Mighty splashes, as
if struggling Titans had upset oceans. Thunderous crashes,
as if they were demolishing forests.
Eric and Nada clung to each other, in doubt whether to
stay or to fly through the storm. Gradually the sound of
the conflict came nearer, until the earth shook beneath
them, and they were afraid to move.
Suddenly the great fallen tree against which they had
erected the flimsy shelter was rolled back, evidently by a
chance blow from the invisible monsters. The pitiful roof
collapsed on the bedraggled humans. Nada burst into
tears.
'Oh, if only — if only —'
Suddenly flame lapped up about them, the same white
fire they had seen as they lay on the crystal block.
Dizziness, insensibility overcame them. A few moments
later, they were lying on the transparent table in the
Cosmic Express office, with all those great mirrors and
prisms and lenses about them.
A bustling, red-faced official appeared through the door
in the grill, fairly bubbling apologies.
'So sorry — an accident — inconceivable. I can't see how
he got it! We got you back as soon as we could find a
focus. I sincerely hope you haven't been injured.'
'Why - what - what -'
'Why I happened in, found our operator drunk. I've no
idea where he got the stuff. He muttered something about
Venus. I consulted the auto-register, and found two more
passengers registered here than had been recorded at our
other stations. I looked up the duplicate beam coordinates,
and found that it had been set on Venus. I got men on the
television at once, and we happened to find you.
75

'I can't imagine how it happened. I've had the fellow
locked up, and the "dry-laws" are on the job. I hope you
won't hold us for excessive damages.'
'No, I ask nothing except that you don't press charges
against the boy. I don't want him to suffer for it in any
way. My wife and I will be perfectly satisfied to get back
to our apartment.'
'I don't wonder. You look like you've been through — I
don't know what. But I'll have you there in five minutes.
My private car —'
Mr. Eric Stokes-Harding noted author of primitive life
and love, ate a hearty meal with his pretty spouse, after
they had washed off the grime of another planet. He spent
the next twelve hours in bed.
At the end of the month he delivered his promised story
to his publishers, a thrilling tale of a man marooned on
Venus, with a beautiful girl. The hero made stone tools,
erected a dwelling for himself and his mate, hunted food
for her, defended her from the mammoth saurian monsters
of the Venerian jungles.
The book was a huge success.
*
My total writing income in 1929 was $235. In 1930, as I
began getting money for stories done the year before, it
was $878. Small sums in today's dollars. But large
enough, in those hard times, to let me keep on writing.
Eagerly, I did.
A big event, at the end of 1929, was the arrival of a new
magazine, edited by Harry Bates and first called Astound-
ing Stories of Super-Science. A member of the Clayton
chain of pulps, it paid a fabulous two cents a word. Still
alive today, as Analog, it has been the greatest science
fiction magazine.
For mixed good and bad, Astounding brought the pulp
tradition into science fiction. Luckily, perhaps, for such
76

beginners as myself, the earlier magazines had paid too
little to interest professional writers. Faced with stronger
competition, I might have failed. Most of the new fiction
Gernsback bought was probably worth no more than he
paid. Bates was professional. Demanding better crafts-
manship, as well as more action, he eliminated the long,
dry passages of science for its own sake.
Not that he wanted literature, or even great science
fiction. The fabled golden age of Astounding had to wait
for the editorship of John Campbell, with his fine story
sense and knowledge of science and his passionate interest
in possible shapes of the future. Bates wanted well-
constructed action stories about strong, successful heroes.
The 'super-science' had to be exciting and more or less
plausible, but it couldn't take much space.
In June, back from college, I wrote three short stories
slanted for Astounding. 'The Meteor Girl,' 'The Lake of
Light,' and 'The Crystal Castle.' On June 20, I mailed all
three to Harry Bates in one package. By July 10, I had
Clayton's check for $360 for 'The Meteor Girl' and 'The
Lake of Light' at two cents a word, along with a note from
Bates asking me to slow up until he had time to use the
stories. He returned 'The Crystal Castle' - a Merrittesque
tale which I had considered the best of the three. Though I
revised it twice and tried it on several other markets, it
never sold. Which goes to show ...
'The Meteor Girl' is a story about relativity. At Canyon
I had taken two years of courses in chemistry and physics.
Though I enjoyed them and made fairly easy As, I was
always disappointed because we never went far enough. In
physics, we studied Matter and Motion and Sound, Heat
and Light and Electricity, but we never came to what I
really wanted to know. (The physics instructor was a lean,
tall man with a precise high voice, who must have learned
his own science before relativity and atomic theory began
to matter.)
One day in the library I looked up 'Relativity' in the
77

new edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica. The in-
formation there was far more exciting than Mr. Carter's
lectures. I made notes. 'The Meteor Girl' is a translation of
what I had learned, into the pulp conventions of the early
Astounding. I used $125 of that check to buy my own
Britannica. Though in the long run it was an excellent
investment, there were few articles that I was able to
rewrite so profitably.
There were girls in these early stories, but they were
drawn chiefly from literature and imagination. I had
known too few real girls. Though some of these were
vastly fascinating, 1 had always kept a cautious distance.
Since I'm trying to be candid here, I suppose I should
confess that I was still a virgin when I started reading
Freud and went to the Menninger Clinic in Topeka for
psychoanalysis in 1936. I was there for a year and later
spent another year with my analyst, Dr. Charles W. Tidd,
who had moved to Beverly Hills by then. Though I once
drew a somewhat satiric picture of Tidd in a novel called
Darker Than You Think, I think the analysis was a
beneficial experience. It helped me solve some personal
problems. Perhaps it produced no dramatic changes, but
at least it helped me to accept and understand myself. As
for the girls, they became a little less hazardous. In 1947 I
married Blanche, whom I had known and admired in
grade school. But that's jumping a long way ahead of'The
Meteor Girl.'
78

THE METEOR GIRL
'What's the good in Einstein, anyhow?'
I shot the question at lean young Charlie King. In a
moment he looked up at me; I thought there was pain in
the back of his clear brown eyes. Lips closed in a thin
white line across his wind-tanned face; nervously he
tapped his pipe on the metal cowling of the Golden GulFs
cockpit.
'I know that space is curved, that there is really no
space or time, but only space-time, that electricity and
gravitation and magnetism are all the same. But how is
that going to pay my grocery bill — or yours?'
'That's what Virginia wants to know.'
'Virginia Randall!' I was astonished. 'Why, I thought -'
'I know. We've been engaged a year. But she's called it
off.'
Charlie looked into my eyes for a long minute, his lips
still compressed. We were leaning on the freshly painted,
streamline fuselage of the Golden Gull, as neat a little
amphibian monoplane as ever made three hundred miles
an hour. She stood on the glistening white sand of our
private landing field on the eastern Florida coast. Below
us the green Atlantic was running in white foam on the
rocks.
In the year that Charlie King and I had been out of the
Institute of Technology, we had built the nucleus of a
commercial airplane business. We had designed and built
here in our own shops several very successful seaplanes
and amphibians. Charlie's brilliant mathematical mind
was of the greatest aid, except when he was too far lost in
his abstruse speculations to descend to things commercial.
Mathematics is painful enough to me when it is used in
calculating the camber of an airplane wing. And pure
79

mathematics, such as the theories of relativity and equiva-
lence, I simply abhor.
I was amazed. Virginia Randall was a girl trim and
beautiful as our shining Golden Gull. I had thought thern
devotedly in love, and had been looking forward to the
wedding.
'But it isn't two weeks since Virginia was out here! You
took her up in our Western Gull IVV
Nervously Charlie lit his pipe, drew quickly on it. His
face, lean and drawn beneath the flying goggles pushed up
on his forehead, sought mine anxiously.
'I know. I drove her back to the station. That was when
- when we quarreled.'
'But why? About Einstein? That's silly.'
'She wanted me to give it up here, and go in with her
father in his Wall Street brokerage business. The old
gent is willing to take me, and make a business man of
me.'
'Why, I couldn't run the business without you, Charlie!'
'We talked about that, Hammond. I don't really do
much of the work. JuSt play around with the mathematics,
and leave the models and blueprints to you.'
'Oh, Charlie, that's not quite -'
'It's the truth, right enough,' he said, bitterly. 'You
design aircraft, and I play with Einstein. And as you say,
a fellow can't eat equations.'
'I'd hate to see you go.'
'And I'd hate to give up you, and our business, and the
math. Really no need of it. My tastes are simple enough.
And old "Iron-clad" Randall has made all one family
needs. Virginia's not exactly a pauper, herself. Two or
three millions, I think.'
'And where did Virginia go?'
'She took the Valhalla yesterday at San Francisco.
Going to join her father at Panama. He cruises about the
world in his steam yacht, you know, and runs Wall Street
80

by radio. I was to telegraph her if I'd changed my mind. I
decided to stick to you, Hammond. I telegraphed a
corsage of orchids, and sent her the message, "Einstein
forever!"'	„
'If I know Virginia, those were not very polite words.'
'Well, a man -'
His words were cut short by a very unusual incident.
A thin, high scream came suddenly from above our
neat stuccoed hangars at the edge of the white field. I
looked up quickly, to catch a glimpse of a bright object
hurtling through the air above our heads. The bellowing
scream ended abruptly in a thunderous crash. I felt a
tremor of the ground underfoot.
'What —' I ejaculated.
'Look!' cried Charlie.
He pointed. I looked over the gleaming metal wing of
the Golden Gull, to see a huge cloud of white sand rising
like a fountain at the farther side of the level field.
Deliberately the column of debris rose, spread, rained
down, leaving a gaping crater in the earth.
'Something fell?'
'It sounded like a shell from a big gun, except that it
didn't explode. Let's get over and see!'
We ran to where the thing had struck, three hundred
yards across the field. We found a great funnel-shaped pit
torn in the naked earth. It was a dozen yards across,
fifteen feet deep, and surrounded with a powdery ring of
white sand and pulverized rock.
'Something like a shell-hole,' I observed.
'I've got it!' Charlie cried. 'It was a meteor!'
'A meteor? So big?'
'Yes. Lucky for us it was no bigger. If it had been like
the one that fell in Siberia a few years ago, or the one that
made the Winslow crater in Arizona — we wouldn't have
been talking about it. Probably we have a chunk of
nickel-iron alloy here.'
81

'I'll get some of the men out here with digging tools, and
we'll see what we can find.'
Our mechanics were already hurrying across the field. I
shouted at them to bring picks and shovels. In a few
minutes five of us were at work throwing sand and
shattered rock out of the pit.
Suddenly I noticed a curious thing. A pale bluish mist
hung in the bottom of the pit. It was easily transparent, no
denser than tobacco smoke. Passing my spade through it
did not seem to disturb it in the least.
I rubbed my eyes doubtfully, said to Charlie, 'Do you
see a sort of blue haze in the pit?'
He peered. 'No. No. ... Yes. Yes, I do! Funny thing.
Kind of a blue fog. And the tools cut right through it
without moving it! Queer! Must have something to do
with the meteor!' He was very excited.
We dug more eagerly. An hour later we had opened the
hole to a depth of twenty feet. Our shovels were clanging
on the gray iron of the rock from space. The mist had
grown thicker as the excavation deepened; we looked at
the stone through a screen of motionless blue fog.
We had found the meteor. There were several queer
things about it. The first man who touched it - a big
Swede mechanic named Olson — was knocked cold as if
by a nasty jolt of electricity. It took half an hour to bring
him to consciousness.
As fast as the rugged iron side of the meteorite was
uncovered, a white crust of frost formed over it.
'It was as cold as outer space, nearly at the absolute
zero,' Charlie explained. 'And it was heated only super-
ficially during its quick passage through the air. But how
it comes to be charged with electricity — I can't say.'
He hurried up to his laboratory behind the hangars,
where he had equipment ranging from an astronomical
telescope to a delicate seismograph. He brought back as
much electrical equipment as he could carry. He had me
82

touch an insulated wire to the frost-covered stone from
space, while he put the other end to one post of a
galvanometer.
I think he got a current that wrecked the instrument. At
any rate, he grew very much excited.
'Something queer about that stone!' he cried. 'This is
the chance of a lifetime! I don't know that a meteor has
ever been scientifically examined so soon after falling.'
He hurried us all across to the laboratory. We came
back with a truck load of coils and tubes and batteries and
potentiometers and other assorted equipment. He had men
with heavy rubber gloves lift the frost-covered stone to a
packing box on a bench. The thing was irregular in shape,
about a foot long; it must have weighed two hundred
pounds. He sent a man racing on a motorcycle to the
drug store to get dry ice (solidified carbon dioxide) to keep
the iron stone at its low temperature.
In a few hours he had a complete laboratory set up
around the meteorite. He worked feverishly in the hot
sunshine, reading the various instruments he had set up.
and arranging more. He contrived to keep the stone cold
by packing it in a box of dry ice.
The mechanics stopped for dinner, and I tried to get
him to take time to eat.
'No, Hammond,' he said. 'This is something big! We
were talking about Einstein. This rock seems energized
with a new kind of force: all meteors are probably the
same way, when they first plunge out of space. I think this
will be to relativity what the falling apple is to gravity.
This is a big thing.'
He looked up at me, brown eyes flashing.
'This is my chance to make a name, Hammond. If I do
something big enough - Virginia might reconsider her
opinion.'
Charlie worked steadily through the long hot afternoon.
I spent most of the time helping him, or gazing in
83

fascination at the curious haze of luminous blue mist that
clung like a sphere of azure fog about the meteoric stone. I
did not completely understand what he did; the reader
who wants the details may consult the monograph he is
preparing for the scientific press.
He had the men string up a line from our direct current
generator in the shops, to supply power for his electrical
instruments. He mounted a powerful electromagnet just
below the meteorite, and set up an X-ray tube to bombard
it with rays.
Night came, and the fire of the white sun faded from the
sky. In the darkness, the curious haze about the stone
became luminescent, distinct, a dim, motionless sphere of
blue light. I fancied that I saw grotesque shapes flashing
through it. A ball of blue fire, shimmering and ghost-like,
shrouded the instruments.
Charlie's induction coil buzzed wickedly, with purple
fire playing about the terminals. The X-ray tube flickered
with a greenish glow. He manipulated the rheostat that
controlled the current through the electromagnet, and
continued to read his instruments.
'Look at that!' he cried.
The bluish haze about the stone grew brighter; it
became a ball of sapphire flame, five feet thick, bright and
motionless. A great sphere of shimmering azure fire!
Wisps of pale, sparkling bluish mist ringed it. The stone in
its box, the X-ray bulb and other apparatus were hidden.
The end of the table stuck oddly from the ball of light.
I heard Charlie move a switch. The hum of the coils
changed a note.
The ball of blue fire vanished abruptly. It became a
hole, a window in space!
Through it, we saw another world!
The darkness of the night hung about us. Where the ball
had been was a circle of misty blue flame, five feet across.
Through that circle I could see a vast expanse of blue
84

ocean, running in high, white-capped rollers, beneath a
sky overcast with low gray clouds.
It was no flat picture like a movie screen. The scene had
vast depth; I knew that we were really looking over an
infinite expanse of stormy ocean. It was all perfectly clear,
distinct, real!
Astounded, I turned to find Charlie standing back and
looking into the ring of blue fire, with a curious mixture of
surprise and delighted satisfaction.
'What — what —' I gasped.
'It's amazing! Wonderful! More than I had dared hope
for! The complete vindication of my theory! If Virginia
cares for scientific reputation -'
'But what is it?'
'It's hard to explain without mathematical language.
You might say that we are looking through a hole in
space. The new force in the meteorite, amplified by the
X-rays and the magnetic field, is causing a distortion of
space-time coordinates. You know that a gravitational
field bends light; the light of a star is deflected in passing
the sun. The field of this meteorite bends light through
space-time, through the four-dimensional continuum. That
scrap of ocean we can see may be on the other side of the
earth.'
I walked around the circle of luminous smoke with the
marvelous picture in the center. It seemed that the window
swung with me. I surveyed the whole angry surface of that
slate-gray, storm-beaten sea, to the misty horizon. No-
where was it broken by land or ship.
Charlie fell to adjusting his rheostat and switches.
It seemed that the gray ocean moved swiftly beyond the
window. Vast stretches of it raced below our eyes. Faint
black stains of steamer smoke appeared against the blue-
gray horizon and swept past. Then land appeared — a long,
green-gray line. We had a flash of a long coast that
unreeled in endless panorama before us. It was such a
85

view as one might get from a swift airplane — a plane
flying thousands of miles per hour.
The Golden Gate flashed before us, with the familiar
skyline of San Francisco rising on the hills behind it.
'San Francisco!' Charlie cried. 'This is the Pacific we've
been seeing. Let's find the Valhalla. We might be able to
see Virginia!'
The coast-line vanished as he manipulated his in-
struments. Staring into the circle of shining blue mist, I
saw the endless ocean racing below us again. We picked
up a pleasure yacht, running under bare poles.
'I didn't know there was such a storm on,' Charlie
murmured.
Other vessels swam past below us, laboring against
heavy seas.
Then we looked upon an ocean whipped into mighty
white-crowned waves. Rain beat down in sheets from low
dense clouds; vivid violet lightnings flashed before us. It
seemed very strange to see such lightning and hear not the
faintest whisper of thunder — but no sound came from
anything we saw through the blue-rimmed window in
space.
'I hope the Valhalla isn't in weather like this!' cried
Charlie.
In a few minutes a dark form loomed through the
wind-riven mist. Swiftly it swam nearer; became a black
ship.
'Only a tramp,' Charlie said, breathing a sigh of relief.
It was a dingy tramp steamer, her superstructure
wrecked. Her fires seemed dead. She lay across the wind,
rolling sluggishly, threatening to sink with every
monstrous wave. We saw no living person aboard her; she
seemed a sinking derelict. We made out the name Roma
on her side.
Charlie moved his dials again.
In a few minutes the slender prow of another great
86

steamer came through the sheets of rain. It was evidently a
passenger vessel. She seemed limping along, half wrecked,
with mighty waves breaking over her rail.
Charlie grew white with alarm. 'The Valhalla!' he
gasped. 'And she's headed straight for that wreck!'
In a moment, as he brought the liner closer below our
blue-rimmed window, I, too, made out the name. The wet,
glistening decks were almost deserted. Here and there a
man struggled futilely against the force of the storm.
In a few minutes the drifting wreck of the Roma came
into cur view, dead ahead of the limping liner. Through
the mist and falling rain, the derelict could not have been
in sight of the lookout of the passenger vessel until she was
almost upon it.
We saw the white burst of steam as the siren was
blown. We watched the desperate effort of the liner to
check her way, to come about. But it was too much for the
already crippled ship. Charlie cried out as a mighty wave
drove the Valhalla down upon the sluggishly drifting
wreck.
All the mad scene that ensued was strangely silent. We
heard no crash when the collision occurred; heard no
screams or shouts while the mob of desperate, white-faced
passengers were fighting their way to the deck. The vain
struggle to launch the boats was like a silent movie.
One boat was splintered while being lowered. Another,
already filled with passengers, was lifted by a great wave
and crushed against the side of the ship. Only shivered
wood and red foam were left. The ship listed so rapidly
that the boats on the lee side were useless. It was
impossible to launch the others in that terrible, lashing
sea.
'Virginia can swim,' Charlie said hopefully. 'You know
she tried the Channel last year, and nearly made it, too.'
He stopped to watch that terrible scene in white-faced,
anxious silence.
87

The tramp went down before the steamer, drawing
fragments of wrecked boats after it. The liner was
evidently sinking rapidly. We saw dozens of hopeless,
panic-stricken passengers diving off the lee side, trying to
swim off far enough to avoid the tremendous suction.
Then, with a curious deliberation, the bow of the
Valhalla dipped under green water; her stern rose in the
air until the ship stood almost perpendicular. She slipped
quickly down, out of sight.
Only a few swimming humans, and the wrecks of a few
boats, were left on the rough gray sea. Charlie fumbled
nervously with his dials, trying to get the scene near
enough so that we could see the identity of the struggling
swimmers.
A long boat, which must have been swept below by the
suction of the ship, came plunging above the surface,
upside down. It drifted swiftly among the swimmers, who
struggled to reach it. I saw one person, evidently a girl,
grasp it and drag herself upon it. It swept on past the
others still struggling.
The wrecked boat with the girl upon it seemed coming
swiftly toward our blue-rimmed window. In a few minutes
I saw something familiar about her.
'It's Virginia!' Charlie cried. 'God! We've got to save
her, somehow!'
The long rollers drove the overturned boat swiftly
along. Virginia Randall clung desperately to it, deluged in
foam, whipped with flying spray, the wild wind tearing at
her.
About us, the clear still night was deepening. The air
was warm and still; the hot stars shone steadily. Quiet
lighted houses were in sight above the beach. It was very
strange to look through the fire-rimmed circle, to see a girl
struggling for life, clinging to a wrecked boat in a stormy
sea.
Charlie watched in an apathy of grief and horror,
88

trembling and speechless, doing nothing except move the
controls to keep the floating girl in our sight.
Hours went by as we watched. Then Charlie cried out
in sudden hope. 'There's a chance! I might do it! I might
be able to save her!'
'Might do what?'
'We are able to see what we do because the field of the
meteor bends light through the four-dimensional con-
tinuum. The world line of a ray of light is a geodesic in the
continuum. The field I have built distorts the continuum,
so we see rays that originated at a distant point. Is that
clear?'
'Clear as mud!'
'Well, anyhow, if the field were strong enough, we could
bring physical objects through space-time, instead of mere
visual images. We could pick Virginia up and bring her
right here to the crater! I'm sure of it!'
'You mean you could move a girl through some four or
five thousand miles of space!'
'You don't understand. She wouldn't come through
space at all, but through space-time, through the con-
tinuum, which is a very different thing. She is four
thousand miles away in our three-dimensional space, but
in space-time, as you see, she is only a few yards away.
She is only a few ydrds from us in the fourth dimension. If
I can increase the field a little, she will be drawn right
through!'
'You're a wizard if you can do it!'
'I've got to do it! She's a fine swimmer - that's the only
reason she's still alive — but she'll never live to reach the
shore. Not in a sea like that!'
Charlie fell to work at once, mounting another electro-
magnet beside the one he had set up, and rigging up two
more X-ray bulbs beside the packing box which held the
meteor. The motion of the boat in the fire-rimmed window
kept drawing it swiftly away from us, and Charlie showed
89

me how to move the dial of his rheostat to keep the girl in
view.
Before he had completed his arrangements, a patch of
white foam came into view just ahead of the drifting boat.
In a moment I made out a cruel black rock, with the angry
sea breaking into fleecy spray upon 4t. The boat was
almost upon it, driving straight for it. Charlie saw it, and
cried out in horror.
The long black hull of the splintered boat, floating keel
upward, was only a few yards away. A great white-capped
breaker lifted it and hurled it forward, with the girl
clinging to it. She drew herself up and stared in terror at
the black rock, while another long surging roller picked up
the boat and swept it forward again.
I stood, paralyzed in horror, while the shattered boat
was driven full upon the great rock. I could imagine the
crash of it, but it was all as still as a silent picture. The
boat, riding high on a crest of white foam, smashed
against the rock and was shivered to splinters. Virginia
was hurled forward against the slick wet stone. Desper-
ately she scrambled to reach the top of the boulder. Her
hands slipped on the polished rock; the wild sea dragged
at her. At last she got out of reach of the angry gray water,
though spume still deluged her.
I breathed a sigh of relief, though her position was still
far from enviable.
'Virginia! Virginia! Why did I let you go?' Charlie
cried.
Desperately he fell to work again, mounting the magnet
and tubes. Another hour went by, while I watched the
shivering girl on the rock. Bobbed hair, wet and glistening,
was plastered close against her head, and her clothing was
torn half off. She looked utterly exhausted; it seemed to
take all her ebbing energy to cling to the rock against the
force of the wind and the waves that dashed against her.
She looked cold, blue and trembling.
90

The water stood higher.
'The tide is rising!' Charlie exclaimed. 'It will cover the
rock pretty soon. If I don't get her off in time — she's lost!'
He finished twisting his wires together.
'I've got it all ready,' he said. 'Now I've got to find out
exactly where she is, to know how to set it. Even then it's
fearfully uncertain. I hate to try it, but it's the only
chance.'
'You can find out?'
'Yes. From the spectral shift and other factors. I'll have
to get some other apparatus.' He ran up to the laboratory,
across the level field that lay black beneath the stars. He
came back, panting, with spectrometer, terrestrial globe,
and other articles.
'The tide is higher!' he cried as he looked through the
blue-rimmed circle at the girl on the rock. 'She'll be swept
off before long!'
He mounted the spectrometer and fell to work with a
will, taking observations through the telescope, adjusting
prisms and diffraction gratings, reading electrometers and
other apparatus, and stopping to make intricate calcula-
tions.
I helped him when I could, or stared through the ring of
shining blue mist, where I could see the waves breaking
higher about the exhausted girl who clung to the rock.
Clouds of wind-whipped spray often hid her from sight. I
knew that she would not have the strength to hold on
much longer against the force of the rising sea.
Although driven almost to distraction by the horror of
her predicament, he worked with a cool, swift efficiency.
Only the pale, anxiety-drawn expression on his face
showed how great was the strain. He finished the last
spectrometer observation, snatched out a pad and fell to
figuring furiously.
'Something queer here,' he said presently, frowning. 'A
shift of the spectrum that I can't explain by distortion
91

through three-dimensional space alone. I don't understand
it.'
We stared at the chilled and trembling girl on the rock.
'I'm almost afraid to try it. What if something went
wrong?'
He turned to the terrestrial globe he had brought down
and traced a line over it. He made a quick calculation on
his pad, then made a fine dot on the globe with the pencil
point.
'Here she is. On a rock some miles off Point Eugenia,
on the coast of the Mexican State of Lower California.
Most lonely spot in the world. No chance for a rescue. We
must —
'My god!' he screamed in sudden horror. 'Look!'
I looked through the blue-ringed window and saw the
girl. Green water was surging about her waist. It seemed
that each wave almost tore her off. Then I saw that she was
struggling with something. A great coiling tentacle, black
and leathery and glistening, was thrust up out of the green
water. It wavered deliberately through the air and grasped
at the girl. She seemed to scream, though we could hear
nothing. She beat at the monster, weakly, vainly.
'She's gone!' cried Charlie.
'An octopus!' I said. 'A giant cutdefish!'
Virginia made a sudden fierce effort. With a strength
that I had not thought her chilled limbs possessed, she tore
away from the dreaful creature and clambered higher on
the rock. But still a hideous black tentacle clung about her
ankle, tugging at her, drawing her back despite her
desperate struggle to break free.
'I've got to try it!' Charlie said, determination flashing
in his eyes. 'It's a chance!'	\
He closed a switch. His new coils sung out above the
old one. X-ray tubes flickered beside the blue fire that
ringed the window. He adjusted his rheostats and closed
the circuit through the new magnet.
92

A curtain of blue flame was drawn quickly between us
and the round, fire-rimmed window. A huge ball of blue
fire hung about the meteorite and the instruments. For
minutes it hung there, while Charlie, perspiring, worked
desperately with the apparatus. Then it expanded; became
huge. It exploded noiselessly, in a great flash of sapphire
flame, then vanished completely.
Meteor, bench, and apparatus were gone!
In the light of the stars we could make out the huge
crater the meteorite had torn, with a few odds and ends of
equipment scattered about it. But all the apparatus Charlie
had set up, connected with the meteoric stone, had
disappeared.
He was dumbfounded, staggered with disappointment.
'Virginia! Virginia!' he called out, in a hopeless tone.
'No, she isn't here. It didn't draw her through. I've failed.
And we can't even see her any more!'
Desperately I searched for consolation for him.
'Maybe the octopus won't hurt her,' I offered. 'They say
that most of the stories of their ferocity are somewhat
exaggerated.'
'If the monster doesn't get her, the tide will!' he said
bitterly. 'I made a miserable failure of it! And I don't
know why! I can't understand it!'
Apathetically, he picked up his pad and held it in the
light of his electric lantern.
'Something funny about this equation. The shift of the
spectrum lines can't be accounted for by distortion
through space alone.'
With wrinkled brow, he stared for many minutes at the
bit of paper he held in the white circle of light. Suddenly he
seized a pencil and figured rapidly.
'I have it! The light was bent through time! I should
have recognized these space-time coordinates.'
He calculated again.
'Yes. The scene we saw in that circle of light was
93

distant from us not only in space but in time. The Valhalla
probably hasn't sunk yet at all. We were looking into the
future!'
'But how can that be? Seeing things before they
happen!'
I have the profoundest respect for Charlie King's
mathematical genius. But when he said that I was frankly
incredulous.
'Space and time are only relative terms. Our material
universe is merely the intersection of tangled world lines of
geodesies in a four-dimensional continuum. Space and
time have no meaning independently of each other. Jeans
says, "A terrestrial astronomer may reckon that the
outburst on Nova Persei occurred a century before the
great fire of London, but an astronomer on the Nova may
reckon with equal accuracy that the great fire occurred a
century before the outburst on the Nova." The field of this
meteorite deflected light waves so that we saw them
several hours earlier, according to our conventional ideas
of time, than they originated. We saw several hours into
the future.
'And the amplified field of the magnet, though strong
enough to move Virginia through space, was not suf-
ficiently powerful to draw her back to us across time. Yet
she must have felt the pull. Some dreadful thing may have
happened. The problem is rather complicated.'
He lifted his pencil again. In the glow of the little
electric lantern I saw his lean young face tense with the
fierce effort of his thought. His pencil raced across the
little pad, setting down symbols that I could make nothing
of.
My own thoughts were racing. Seeing into the future
was a rather revolutionary idea to me. My mind is
conservative; I have always been skeptical of the more
fantastic ideas suggested by science. But Charlie seemed
to know what he was talking about. In view of the
94

marvelous things he had done that night, it seemed hardly
fair to doubt him now. I decided to accept his astounding
statement at face value and to follow the adventure
through.
He lifted his pencil and consulted the luminous dial of
his wrist watch.
'We saw that last scene some twelve hours and forty
minutes before it happened — to put it in conventional
language. The distortion of the time coordinates amounted
to that.'
In the light of dawn — for we had been all night at the
meteor pit, and silver was coming in the east — he looked
at me with fierce resolve in his eyes.
'Hammond, that gives us over twelve hours to get to
Virginia!'
'You mean to go? But just twelve hours! That's better
than the transcontinental record — to say nothing of the
time it would take to find a little rock in the Pacific!'
'We have the Golden Gulll She's as fast as any ship
we've ever flown.'
'But we can't take the Gull\ Those alterations haven't
been made. And that new engine! A bear-cat for power,
but it may go dead any second. The Gull can fly, but she
isn't safe!'
'Safety be damned! I've got to get to Virginia, and get
there in the next twelve hours!'
'The Gull will fly, but -'
'All right. Please help me get off!'
'Help you off? It's a fool thing to do! But if you go, 1
do!'
'Thanks, Hammond. Awfully!' He gripped my hand.
'We've got to make it!'
With a last glance into the gaping pit from which we
had dug the marvelous stone, we turned and ran across to
the hangars. As we ran the sun came above the sea in the
east; its first rays struck us like a fiery lance. The
95

mechanics had not yet appeared. Charlie pushed the doors
back, and we ran out the trim little Golden Gull, beautiful
with her slender wing and her graceful, tapering lines.
I seized the starting crank and Charlie sprang into the
cockpit. I cranked until the mechanism was droning
dismally, and pulled the lever that engaged it with the
engine. I had been in too much haste to get up the proper
speed, and the powerful new engine failed to fire. Charlie
almost cried with vexation while I was cranking again.
This time the motor coughed and fell into a steady,
vibrant roar. With the wind from the propeller screaming
about me, I disengaged the crank and stood waiting while
the motor warmed. Charlie gave it scant time to do so
before he motioned me to kick out the blocks. I tumbled
into the enclosed cockpit beside him, he gave the ship the
gun, and we roared across the field.
In five minutes we were flying west, at a speed just
under three hundred miles per hour. Charlie was crouched
over the stick, scanning the instrument board, and flying
the Gull almost at her top speed. Again and again his eyes
went to the little clock on the panel.
'Twelve hours and forty minutes,' he said. 'And an hour
gone already! We've got to be there by five minutes after
six.'
We were flying over Louisiana when the oil line
clogged. The engine heated dangerously. Reluctantly,
Charlie cut off the ignition, and fell in a swift spiral to an
open field.
'We've got to fix it!' he said. 'Another hour gone! And
we needed every minute!'
'This new engine! It's powerful enough, but we should
have had time to overhaul it, and make those changes.'
Charlie landed with his usual skill, and we fell to work
in desperate haste. A grizzled farmer, a wad of tobacco in
his cheek and three ragged urchins at his heels, stopped to
watch us. He had just been to his mailbox, and had a
96

morning paper in his hand. Charlie questioned him about
the storm.
'Storm-center nears the American coast,' he read in a
nasal drawl. 'Greatest storm of year drives shipping upon
west coast. Six vessels reported lost. S. S. Valhalla,
disabled, sends S. O. S.
'A thousand lives are the estimated toll to-night of the
most terrific storm of the year, which is sweeping toward
the Pacific coast, driving all shipping before it. Radio-
grams from the Valhalla at 5 p.m. report that she is
disabled and in danger. It is doubtful that rescue vessels
can reach her through the storm.'
We got the engine repaired, took off again. Charlie
looked at the little clock.
'Five minutes to ten. Eight hours and ten minutes left,
and we've got a darn long ways to go.'
We had to stop at San Antonio, Texas, to replenish
gasoline and oil.
'Ten minutes lost!' Charlie complained as we took off.
'And that monster — waiting in the future to drag Virginia
to a hideous death!'
Two hours later the plane developed trouble in the
ignition system. The motor was new, with several radical
changes that we had introduced to increase power and
lessen weight. As I had objected to Charlie, we had not
done enough experimental work on it to perfect it.
We limped into the field at El Paso and spent another
priceless half-hour at work. I got some sandwiches at a
luncheon counter beside the field, and listened a moment
to a radio loudspeaker there.
'Many thousands are dead,' came the crisp, metallic
voice of the announcer, 'as a result of the storm now
raging on the Pacific coast, the worst in several years. The
storm-center is spending its force on the coastal regions
to-day. Millions of dollars in damage are reported in cities
from San Francisco to Manzanillo, Mexico.
97

'The greatest disaster of the storm is the loss of the
passenger liner Valhalla, of the Red Star Line. It is
believed to have collided with the abandoned hulk of an
Italian-owned tramp freighter, the Roma, which was left
by its crew yesterday in a sinking condition. Radiograms
from the liner ceased three hours ago, when she was said
to be sinking. The officers doubted that her boats could be
launched in such a sea —'
I waited to hear no more. Charlie checked our route
while we were stopped. And we took off; we crossed the
Rio Grande and flew across the rocky, brush-scattered
hills of Mexico, in a direct line for the rock in the sea.
'If anything happens so we have to land again - well,
it's just too bad,' Charlie said grimly. 'But we've got to go
this way. It's something over six hundred miles in a
straight line. Fifteen minutes to four, now. We have to
average nearly three hundred miles an hour to get there.'
He was silent and intent over his maps and instruments
as we flew on over the lofty Sierra Madre Range, and over
a long slope down to the Gulf of California. Head-winds
beset us as we were over the stretch of blue water, and we
flew on into a storm.
'We had hardly time to make it, without the wind
against us,' Charlie said. 'If it holds us back many miles —
well, it just mustn't!'
Purple lightning flickered ominously in the mass of
blue storm-clouds that hung above the mountainous
peninsula of Lower California. I had a qualm about
flying into it in our untested machine. But Charlie leaned
tensely forward and sent the Golden Gull on at the limit
of her speed. Gray vapor swirled about us, rent with livid
streaks of lightning. Thunder crashed and rumbled above
the roar of our racing engine. Wild winds screeched in
the struts; rain and hail beat against us. The plane rose
and fell; she was swirled about like a falling leaf. The
stick struggled in Charlie's hands like a living thing.
98

With lips tightened to a thin line, he fought silently,
fiercely, desperately.
Suddenly we were sucked down until I had an uneasy
feeling at the pit of my stomach. I saw the grim outline of
a bare mountain peak, dangerously close below us,
shrouded in wind-whipped mist.
In sudden alarm I shouted, 'We'd better get out of this,
Charlie! We can't live in it long!'
In the roar of the storm he did not hear me, and I
shouted again.
He turned to face me, after a glance at the clock. 'We've
less than an hour, Hammond. We've got to go on!'
I sank back in my seat. The plane rolled and tossed until I
thanked my lucky stars for the safety strap. In nervous
anxiety I watched Charlie bring the ship up again, and fight
his way on through the storm. For an eternity, it seemed, we
battled through a chaos of wind-driven mist, bright with
purple lightning and shaken with crashing thunder.
Charlie struggled with the controls until he was drip-
ping with perspiration. He must have been utterly worn
out, after thirty-six hours of exhausting effort. A dozen
times I despaired of life. The compass had gone to
spinning crazily; we dived through the rain until we could
pick up landmarks below. Three times a great bare peak
loomed suddenly up ahead of us, and Charlie averted
collision only by zooming suddenly upward.
Then slate-gray water was beneath us, running in
white-crested mountains. I knew that we were at last out
over the Pacific.
'We've passed Point Eugenia,' Charlie said. 'It can't be
far, now. But we have only fifteen minutes left. Fifteen
minutes to get to her - before th" attraction of the meteor
jerks her away, perhaps to a horrible fate.'
We flew low and fast over the racing waves. Charlie
looked over his charts and made a swift calculation. He
changed our course a bit and we flew on at top speed. We
99

scanned the vast, mad expanse of sea below the blue-gray
clouds. Here and there were lines of white breakers, but
nowhere did we see a rock with a girl upon it. Presently
the green outline of an island appeared out of the wild
water on our right.
'That's Del Tiburon,' Charlie said. 'We missed the
rock.'
He swung the plane about and we flew south over the
hastening waves. I looked at the little clock. It showed two
minutes to six. I turned to Charlie.
'Seven minutes!' he whispered grimly.
On and on we flew, in a wide circle. The motor roared
loud. An endless expanse of racing waves unreeled below
us. The little hand crawled around the dial. One minute
past six. Only four minutes to go.
We saw a speck of white foam on the mad gray water.
It was miles away, almost on the horizon. We plunged
toward it, motor bellowing loud. Five miles a minute we
flew. The white fleck became a black rock smothered in
snowy foam. On we swept, and over the rock, with
bullet-like speed.
As we plunged by I saw Virginia's slender form,
tattered, brinesoaked, struggling in the hideous tentacles
of the monster octopus. It was the same terrible scene that
we had viewed, through the amazing phenomenon of
distortion of light through space-time, four thousand miles
away and twelve hours before.
In a few minutes the time would come when Charlie
had ended our view of the scene by his attempt to draw the
girl through the fourth dimension to our apparatus in
Florida. What terrible thing might happen then?
Charlie brought the ship about so quickly that we were
flung against the sides. Down we came toward the mad
waves in a swift glide. In sudden apprehension, I dropped
my hand on his shoulder.
'Man, you can't land in a sea like that! It's suicide!'
Without a word, he shook off my hand and continued
100

our steep glide toward the rock. I drew my breath in
apprehension of a crash.
I do not blame Charlie for what happened. He is as
skillful a pilot as I know. It was a mad freak of the sea that
did the thing.
The gray waste of mountainous, white-crested waves
rose swiftly up to meet us, with the rock with the girl
clinging to it just to our right. The Golden Gull struck the
crest of a wave, buried herself in the foam, and plunged
down the long slope to the trough. We rose safely to the
crest of the oncoming roller, and I saw the black outline of
the rock not a dozen yards away.
Charlie had landed with all his skill. It was not his fault
that the blustering wind caught the ship as she reached the
crest of the wave and flung her sidewise toward the rock.
It is no fault of his that the white-capped mountain of
racing green water completed what the wind had begun
and hurled the frail plane crashing on the rock.
I have a confused memory of the wild plunge at the
mercy of the wave, of my despair as I realized that we
were being wrecked. I must have been knocked uncon-
scious when we struck. The next I remember I was
opening my eyes to find myself on the rock, Charlie's
strong arm on my shoulder. I was soaked with icy brine,
and my head was aching from a heavy blow.
Virginia, shivering and blue, was perched beside us. I
could see no sign of the plane: the mighty sea had swept
away what was left of it. Clinging to the lee side of the
rock I saw the black tentacles of the giant octopus -
waiting for a wave to dash us to its mercy.
'All right, Hammond?' Charlie inquired anxiously. 'I'm
afraid you got a pretty nasty bump on the head. About all
I could do to fish you out before the Gull was swept away.'
He helped me to a better position to withstand the force
of the great roller that came plunging down upon us like a
101

moving mountain. Virginia was in his arms, too exhausted
to more than cling to him.
'What can we do?' I sputtered, shaking water from my
head.
'Not a thing! We're in a pretty bad fix, I imagine. In a
few seconds we will feel the attraction of the meteor's field
— the force with which I tried to draw Virginia to the
crater through the fourth dimension. I don't know what
will happen; we may be jerked out of space altogether.
And if that doesn't get us, the tide and the octopus will!'
His voice was drowned in the roar of the coming wave.
A mountain of water deluged us. Half drowned, I clung to
the rock against the mad water.
Then blinding blue light flashed about me. A sharp
crash rang in my ears, like splintering glass. I reeled, and
felt myself falling headlong.
I brought up on soft sand.
I sat up, dumbfounded, and opened my eyes. I was
sitting on the steep sandy side of a conical pit. Charlie and
Virginia were sprawled beside me, looking as astonished
as I felt. Charlie got to his knees and lifted the limp form
of the girl in his arms.
Something snapped in my brain. The sand-walled pit
was suddenly familiar. I got to my feet and clambered out
of it. I saw that we were on our own landing field.
Astonishing, we were back in the meteor crater.
Charlie's vanished apparatus was scattered about us. I
saw the gray site of the wrought iron meteorite itself,
half-buried in the sand at the bottom of the pit.
'What - what happened?' I demanded of Charlie.
'Don't you see? Simple enough. I should have thought
of it before. The field of the meteorite brought Virginia -
and us — through to this point in space. But it could not
bring us back through time; instead, the apparatus itself
was jerked forward through time. That is why it vanished.
We got here just twelve hours and forty minutes after I
102

closed the switch, since we had been looking that far into
the future. The mathematical explanation -'
'That's enough for me!' I said hastily. 'We better see
about a warm, dry bed for Virginia, and some hot soup or
something.'
Now the rough gray meteorite, in a neat glass case,
rests above the mantel in the library of a beautiful home
where I am a frequent guest. I was there one evening, a
few days ago, when Charlie King fell silent in one of his
fits of mathematical speculation.
'Einstein again?' I chaffingly inquired.
He raised his brown eyes and looked at me.
'Hammond, since relativity enabled us to find the Meteor
Girl, you ought to be convinced!'
Virginia — whom her husband calls the Meteor Girl —
came laughingly to the rescue.
'Yes, Mr. Hammond, what do you think of Einstein
now?'
*
Astounding was using novelettes as well as shorts, paying
$500 for 25,000 words. That was a fabulous sum to me in
those depression years - I had done hard farm work for a
dollar a day. While Harry Bates considered my three short
stories, I was at work on a novelette, 'The Prince of
Space.'
Set in the future year 2131, it's the saga of a heroic
space pirate who becomes the champion of humanity in a
war with Mars. There's perhaps too much superscience
and melodramatic action, leading up to the invention of an
ultimate weapon with which the prince dissolves the
hostile Martians and their whole planet into cosmic
nothingness.
This absolute weapon was tossed almost casually into
the action, among such other future wonders as Trainor's
Tower and the City of Space. I had forgotten it until I
103

reread the story, but I recall now that I made much better
use of such a weapon a few years later. Renamed AKKA,
and treated with a fitting awe, it became the central
premise of my series of novels about the Legion of Space.
Elated with the check from Harry Bates, I mailed the
novelette to him at the end of July. He was 'well stocked
with longs' and it 'did not make the grade.' Humbled again,
I sent the manuscript to Amazing. It was bought for $125
and featured on the cover of the issue of January 1931.
Argosy was then running one-page sketches of its
authors, and I had been reading these hungrily, looking for
the secret of literary success. That wasn't easy.tc find.
Pulp writers had come from every possible background,
had followed almost every possible vocation. But at last I
saw one thing they had in common. Their writing skills
had not been learned in college.
Accordingly, I didn't return to Canyon for my junior
year. Though I had been offered a student assistantship in
chemistry, I was now resolved to be a writer, not a
chemist. My father thought this a reckless decision. I
suppose he was right. As a livelihood, writing science
fiction has been even more precarious than dry-land
farming. It's perhaps also true that a better scientific
education would have made me a better writer. Really,
though, I've no regrets.
Not entirely through with college, I went to California
that fall to study astronomy as background for space
fiction. I rode a bus to Los Angeles. After a visit to the
Mount Wilson observatory and a side trip to Catalina, I
squandered twenty-four dollars to take a plane to San
Francisco.
Commercial flight was still new enough in 1930 to be
high adventure, at least to me. I was eagerly alert to every
sensation, and most of my impressions went into the story
'Through the Purple Cloud.' It was written in January,
after I was back in New Mexico, and offered first to
Astounding, where it 'failed to make the grade.'
104

Wonder Stories published it in May 1931, with my
name and the title on a striking cover picture of the
doomed airliner toppling through the purple disk out of
the blue California sky into the red-lit parallel world.
Gernsback eventually paid me $40 for it, which left me a
profit of $16.
Even then, I must admit, the notion of a parallel
universe wasn't new. Wells had brought this fallen angel
from a parallel universe in The Wonderful Visit, as early
as 1895. But at least, when I wrote the story, the dimen-
sional doorway was still a novel hazard to commercial
aviation.
105

THROUGH THE PURPLE CLOUD
A rather pretty girl was seated across from George
Cleland, on the other side of the aisle. They were in the
rear compartment of the gigantic, four-motored Fokker
passenger plane, just taking off from the Alhambra field at
Los Angeles, for the three-hour flight to San Francisco -
or rather, to meet as weird and astounding an adventure
as ever befell human beings. George was returning to his
office in San Francisco, and to his engineering work after
a summer's vacation.
He watched the girl with interest as the steward handed
her the little package of absorbent cotton with which to
stop her ears against the oppressive roar of the motors.
Clearly it was her first long flight. Her smooth cheeks were
flushed with excitement; her shining gray eyes looked up
quickly to see what the other passengers were doing with
the cotton.
Her eyes met George's. She smiled at him as a com-
panion in the adventure of the flight. He grinned, instruct-
ing her to twist the soft cotton into cylinders, and fit them
into her ears. She smiled her thanks.
Already the great plane had rolled across the field with
ever-increasing speed, powerful motors thundering, had
left the ground to rise easily through the low, gray fog,
into the brilliant sunlight of the August morning.
George liked the girl. She was pretty. Soft brown hair,
glistening with ruddy lights, tastefully arranged. Bright
face flushed with excitement. Gray eyes shining. She wore
a dark green traveling suit, neat and trim. The body
beneath it seemed to be neat and trim, too; athletic and
well-developed. She looked like a co-ed. He remembered
that the University at Berkeley would open in a few days,
and supposed that she was flying up to attend it.
106

Two other men were sitting in that rear compartment
with them — the great plane did not have a full load and
four of the seats were empty. Facing George was a
slender, meager, little man, whose black suit was polished
with wear. He wore enormously thick-lensed glasses, and
his face was narrow, pinched, bird-like, so that he gave
George's imaginative mind the suggestion of a grotesque,
goggle-eyed monster.
Presently he leaned forward, however, with the map of
the route that the steward had handed him, introduced
himself as Howard Cann, said that he owned a dry goods
store in Oakland, and asked George to help him locate the
observatory which, according to the map, should be in
sight on Mt. Wilson. His voice sounded thin and bird-like,
above the unceasing roar of the motors.
George pointed out the silver domes and towers
shimmering on the crest of the mountain, in the bright
August sunlight. Cann nodded his thanks, and bent over
the map again.
The other man was sunk sullenly into a seat facing the
girl. George did not like him. His clothes fitted his bull-like
form loosely, grotesquely. His heavy-jowled face was
black with a short stubble of beard. From beneath a
disreputable cap, pulled low over his forehead, he was
staring at the girl, rather to her discomfort.
His ferret eyes were black, shifty. George noticed that
he swept the compartment watchfully with them, at
intervals, always resuming his annoying gaze at the girl. I
wouldn't like to meet him on a dark night, thought
George.
They had been up a little less than an hour when the
astounding catastrophe took place.
The little, spectacled man who said his name was Cann
had persisted in his high-voiced questions. George had
pointed out to him the San Fernando and Santa Clara
valleys, and Tejon Pass, and Lebec. They were just
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coming across the last gray mountain range, over the
southern tip of the great San Joaquin Valley.
The air had been smooth, though the ship seemed to
rise and fall with a slow, almost regular motion. The girl
had seemed to be enjoying her flight immensely, peering
out of the windows with a lively interest. Once or twice, to
George's pleasure, she had leaned over to watch when he
was pointing out something of interest on Cann's map.
Once she had asked some little question. Her voice,
above the mighty, overwhelming roar of the four great
motors, had seemed clear and pleasant. George began to
regret that the flight and their companionship must end in
a few short hours when the great plane glided down to the
Alameda airport, across the bay from San Francisco.
But the plane, and most of her passengers, never
reached Alameda.
George happened to be peering out when it occurred,
trying to locate for Cann the town of Maricopa, which lay
a little to the left, and ahead of the plane.
The air before the ship was suddenly filled with a
blinding purple light, as though a great shell had burst,
releasing a vast volume of incandescent violet vapor. A
moment before, the sky had been clear. The purple cloud
appeared suddenly, as if from thin air.
Its diameter must have been many miles extending from
the ground into the cloudless sky above them. The great
plane was plunging almost at the center of it, and far too
close for the pilot to turn aside.
George thinks, however, that the ship was suddenly
tilted up, at the last instant, as if the pilot had attempted to
zoom above the purple cloud. But it was only a moment
after the cloud appeared that they struck it; the tragedy
was occasioned by chance, not by any want of skill — and
no display of skill could have averted it.
But as they pierced through it, George saw the purple
cloud contract swiftly. It became a great, smooth-surfaced
sphere of violet-red radiance. Then, somehow, it seemed to
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flatten, become thin, until it was only a disk of red-blue
light.
It became a circle of purple flame, a hundred yards and
more in diameter — we can judge its size only from George
Cleland's guess based on that quick glimpse of the
amazing thing. A disk of amethystine fire, hanging in the
air, with the great plane plunging away from its center.
A long, dreadful instant went by, after George knew
that they had crashed through it. He had time to wonder
what it was, to wonder if it could be only some trouble
with his eyes, then he realized that others could see it for
Cann shrank back from the window and clutched at his
arm.
Without a sound or a vibration, they had passed
through the purple disk, into a flood of crimson light!
George was dazed.
One instant, the blue sky was above and the green-blue
fields beneath. The next, they were flying at some crazy
angle beneath a sky that was red, plunging toward the foot
of a precipitous cliff of jet-black rock.
The cloud of purple had been like a gate to another
world. They had flashed through it, into another plane of
existence that seemed to lie co-existent with ours, yet more
distant than the Andromeda nebula. To the science of a
few decades ago, such a thing would have been incredible.
But Einstein's relativity, with its four-dimensional con-
tinuum, with its destruction of the old conception of space
as an absolute dimension brings it much nearer to under-
standable phenomena. And it is confidently trusted that
the implications of the incident narrated here will result in
a farther modification of the changing theories of rela-
tivity.
The plane was hurtling toward the base of a rugged,
towering wall of grim black rock, which had suddenly
appeared beyond the purple disk. A crash was inevitable.
The pilot had time only to bank the ship, causing it to
strike the ebon cliff obliquely instead of head on.
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George was stunned by the crash.
His last recollection was of their plunging flight toward
the sheer, soaring wall of black rock, of the attempting
turn that had failed to save them, of the splintering crashes
and the merciless bruising shock of the collision with the
mountain.
Memory did not return at once, as he recovered. He
found himself lying in the bottom of a dark, cramped
place, with a soft human body beside him. A hoarse voice,
evidently that of the bearded man, was muttering curses,
while heavy feet, apparently belonging to the same indi-
vidual, were carelessly trampling George's legs.
Then George caught the acrid odors of burning paint
and gasoline.
His memory returned. He knew that the plane had
crashed into the black mountain wall, that it was wrecked
and in flames. The soft body against his was that of the
girl. And it was the big man who was trampling on the
others.
George tried to struggle up, pressing a hand to his head
to try to stop the dizzy pain, to clear the faintness from his
vision and the ringing noises from his ears, to sweep the
misty clouds of pain from his mind.
A suffocating breath of flame came from the forward
part of the ship, where the blaze had evidently started.
The fuselage was on its side, George saw. The door was
above them. And the big, bull-like man, walking upon
their bodies as carelessly as if they were sacks of grain,
was struggling to open the door.
Suddenly there was a sharp snap, as if he had broken a
lock with the strength of his great, heavy hands. A
moment later the door was thrown back, revealing the sky
above, crimson, dark and sullen, red as if deluged in blood.
For a moment the strange scarlet sky was in view. Then
thick masses of black smoke, touched with flickering, lurid
yellow flames, floated across it. George heard the
increasing roar of the conflagration.
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He tried to struggle to his feet, still rubbing his throb-
bing head.
'Thanks, Mister,' came the hoarse voice of the giant,
mockingly.
The huge man placed one heavy foot on George's
shoulder, while he was still on his knees, sprang forward.
He clambered through the door in the uppermost side of
the side.
George was sent crashing to the bottom of the com-
partment again, under the force of the ruthless kick.
Choking black smoke, so hot that it seared his lungs,
was filling the little space when it struggled up again. The
roar and crackle of the flames was growing swiftly louder.
A black and yellow canopy of smoke and flame was
rolling above the door.
Still his head throbbed with dull pain; his thoughts were
slow, confused; he reeled; his knees buckled uncertainly.
'Not much time, now,' he muttered. 'Guess they are all
gone, in the front part of the ship.'
He bent beside the girl, lifted her with an effort, fighting
to control his shaking knees. She was conscious.
'What's — matter?' she whispered in a slow, uncertain
voice.
'Plane smashed,' he said. 'Burning. We must get out!
Able to help? Do your best, but we have time.'
'I'll try,' she murmured through white, compressed lips.
He lifted her in his arms. She grasped the side of the
door, he pushed her up. She scrambled through it. For a
moment she darkened the opening. Then she was gone
from sight. Smoke and fire were still rolling over the
opening.
The forward part of the plane was already an inferno.
White heat drove down the aisle. Blinding, blistering
smoke swirled into the compartment. Gasping for breath,
tears streaming from his eyes, perspiration running from
his skin under the scorching heat, the engineer stood still a
111

moment, to recover from the exhausting effort that had
been required to lift the girl through the door.
A choking groan came from beside his feet.
He bent, wiping the tears from his smoke-blinded eyes,
distinguished the limp little body of Cann, lying in a little
heap in a corner of the compartment, sprawled over the
back of a seat.
'Poor Cann can't,' he muttered in grim horror, as he
began the very serious task of lifting the inert body
through the door above him.
In ever denser volumes, the smoke was pouring into the
compartment, blinding, suffocating. Tears were streaming
from George's eyes, so that he could hardly see the bright
square of the door above. The hot smoke seemed to dry
and scorch his throat and lungs. He coughed, strangled.
Sweat was pouring from his body; the heat was almost
intolerable.
And he was still dazed and groggy from the blow that
had stunned him when the great plane crashed. His head
throbbed with leaden pains; his ears rang queerly; his
thoughts were slow, confused. But he did not hesitate in
beginning the grim task of saving the little man who had
questioned him so persistently in his thin, bird-like tones.
Fighting the heavy inertia that tugged at him, George
lifted the limp body and thrust it up toward the door. It
was a terrific task. Some malignant demon seemed to be
pressing back against him. His aching muscles relaxed,
despite the fiercest effort of his will, the unconscious man
fell back into his arms.
George bent, sucked in a deep breath of the cooler air
that hung in the bottom of the compartment, and raised
himself, thrusting the body of the little man up again. At
last his arms straightened; the still body was outside, lying
beside the door, atop the fuselage.
A blistering tongue of lurid yellow flame licked through
the compartment, up through the open door. George
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gasped and strangled from the hot breath of it. He felt hair
burned from his head, felt the bare skin of his face and
hands scorched.
Reeling from exhaustion and the lingering effects of the
blow he had received when they fell, he bent for another
gasping inhalation of the still breathable air in the bottom of
the compartment. Then he stood up, grasped the sides of the
door, leaped, and struggled to draw himself through it.
Burning smoke swirled up about him. He strangled,
tried to hold his breath. His muscles cracked. The effort
seemed almost beyond him, in his weakened condition.
And an infernal river of smoke and flame seemed pouring
across above the door. He shrank back from it.
Then he saw Cann's inert hand, still hanging in the door
— glimpsed it through streaming, smarting eyes. He had to
get out, to save the little man.
With a fast fierce effort, he swung himself up, got his
feet upon the edges of the door, straightened up in a blast
of smoke and flame. In a moment he had snatched up
Cann again, and leaped, blindly, desperately, into space.
He came down on bare, hard rock. The smoke was still
blinding, he could feel the beating radiation of heat from
the inferno which he had just escaped, but he was out of
its intolerable area.
Gasping in great breaths of the cooler air, he dragged
Cann over the rock, to where the heat was bearable. He
dropped his limp burden, still drawing fresh air into his
tortured lungs, and wiped his smarting eyes.
An amazing world he saw, when he was able to open
his painful eyes. Half of it was hidden by the dense clouds
of smoke and the lurid curtains of yellow flame that leaped
from the blazing wreck of the plane; but in the half that he
saw was matter enough for wonder and amazement.
The sky was red, intensely crimson, dark and oppres-
sive. Like a dome cut from a monster ruby, and lit with a
dull, sinister light from beyond. It was unbroken by cloud
or sun or star. A pall of scarlet gloom, sullen and terrible.
113

Beneath the lowering, crimson sky was a barren waste
of black rock. It resembled obsidian, without the glassy
luster of the volcanic glass. It was a dead, dull black,
somber and unrelieved by any gleam. It did not even
reflect the angry fire of the scarlet sky.
It seemed that they were at the bottom of a rast pit or
abyss, for sheer black precipices, like that against the foot
of which the plane had crashed, rose about them in a
rugged wall, leaping up to inconceivable heights.
George estimates that the diameter of this crater or pit
must have been ten or a dozen miles, and he thinks the
cliffs that ringed it must have been fully five miles high.
No elevations of this abruptness are found on the earth,
though several are to be observed upon the moon. The
walls of several lunar ring-craters rise vertically for several
miles. This abyss appeared to be of similar formation.
The floor of the pit was a rugged, tortured wilderness of
black rock, cracked and scarred, pitted with innumerable
chasms, thrown up in miniature peaks, twisted into
grotesque fantasies of lifeless black stone.
George saw no tree, no bird or insect — no living thing
at all.
He had no time to wonder at it, then. He merely swept
the weird horizon of scarlet sky and stupendous dull black
cliff with a single glance, and turned back to the burning
plane.
Where was the girl? She had been conscious when he
helped her through the door. Had she been able to reach a
safe distance from the flaming ship?
He heard a faint cry, and found her lying on the
ground, several yards from the burning ship. She had been
able to slip from the upper side of the fuselage to the
ground, to stagger away a few steps before she collapsed.
George carried her out of the smoke, and placed her
beside the still inert body of Cann.
She was still conscious, but weak and dizzy, suffering
from concussion.
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'Where are we?' she whispered. 'The sky looks red. And
these black mountains — they are so high!'
'I don't know,' George said. 'We'll think of that after a
while. I was almost wondering if I wasn't seeing things.
But we have a patient here to look after.'
He bent over Cann's limp body.
'Oh!' the girl cried suddenly, with pain in her voice.
'You are all burnt! Your face, and your hands! You stayed
to carry us out!'
'What else could I do?' George asked.
'There was another man that didn't stay,' the girl said.
'He trampled all over us, and then climbed out and left us
to burn.'
'Wonder where the kindly fellow is?' George said. He
looked about them, over the rugged, desolate wilderness of
twisted black stone.
But George paused to wonder again at the eldrich
landscape spread out before him. The barren, lifeless
waste of burned and tortured black rock. The mighty cliffs
that plunged up beyond it - higher than any earthly
mountains, so high they seemed unreal. They were night-
mare mountains; cruel, looming crags from some drugged
dream. Their rugged faces swept up far toward the zenith
surrounding the horizon. George had an unpleasant sense
of oppression, as if those lofty, ebon walls were crowding
them, smothering them.
And above the black peaks the sky was crimson, red as
clouds of blood-mist, red as a dome of ruby lit with dull,
sinister lights. It was lowering, gloomy, oppressive as the
bald, looming walls — it shone with a dark and sullen glare.
The red of blood. The red of horror. The red of death.
George Cleland was frightened by it — though he took
care not to show the girl his fears. He dropped his gaze
from the fearful wonder of the new world, and resumed his
slow examination of Cann's body.
The littie man was still unconscious. His clothing had
been scorched and torn. His thick glasses were lost, and he
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looked oddly different without them - small and weak, like
a child, or perhaps a crippled bird. His right upper arm
had been broken. George pushed up the sleeve to examine
it. On the skin was the blue print of a man's heel; the
bull-like man who sat opposite the girl had stepped on it,
breaking the bone.
George straightened the limb, and tried to set it. But he
could find nothing satisfactory to use for splints. There
seemed to be no tree or bush - or any living thing at all -
in the wilderness of black rock, from which he could get a
splint. But during his search he made a curious discovery.
The barren waste of dead black stone was scattered
with huge green crystals. Clear and transparent, as if cut
from monster emeralds.
In shape, they resembled snow-crystals, as seen through
the microscope. Six-pointed stars, with a delicate,
symmetrical fretwork, never the same in two crystals,
between the points. But they were far huger than snow-
crystals. Three feet from point to point. They were usually
three or four inches thick. The first one that George
discovered, lying in a deep crack in the black rock, not far
from where the plane had crashed, weighed about twenty
pounds. He is unable to make any suggestion as to the
material of which it was composed, though it seems that it
must have crystallized in the air, and fallen as a snowflake
falls in our world.
While George was working over Cann, the girl told him
something of herself.
'My name is Juanita Harvel,' she said. 'Dad has a fruit
ranch near Los Angeles. I was going up to Berkeley, to the
University. I was to graduate this year - but my pros-
pects, right now, aren't very good.' She smiled a little.
Then soberly, 'Where can we be?'
'Your guess is as good as anybody's,' George told her.
'Do you think -' she asked, and paused oddly, 'do you
think that - we could be - dead? The plane smashed. It
may have killed us all.'
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'Not a bit,' George cried. 'For myself, I feel very much
alive and real — especially where the skin was cooked so
it's coming off!' He grinned painfully.
'Oh, I'm so sorry for you!' Juanita cried.
'That's all right,' George assured her. 'It won't make
much difference, if I'm dead. And if I'm alive, I'll get well.
We can cook up some sort of theory to account for it all. I
suppose you've heard about the so-called Fourth Dimen-
sion?'
'Yes, I've heard about it,' she admitted. 'But as for
understanding it —'
'There's been a lot of bunk written on the subject, but
nobody seems to know much about it. Einstein's theory of
relativity, however, introduces a fourth dimension, which
is not different in any way from the three other dimensions
we know. He says that to an observer on a different
planet, the fourth dimension, or part of it, might appear as
a spatial dimension; and one of the dimensions that
appears spatial to us, would be, for him, partly or wholly
the fourth dimension.
'Of course, I may be putting an interpretation on his
work that he would not approve. He devised the
hypothesis of the four-dimensional continuum, or "space-
time" as it is more generally called, to account for known
facts. He was not interested in other worlds that might lie
beside our own, billions of light years distant — in our
space, but touching the earth in the fourth dimension.
'The plane, you know, flew into a circle of purple light
that appeared suddenly ahead of us. It may have been a
sort of a gate to this other world, through the fourth
dimension. This planet may be so far distant in space from
our own world that it is in another universe, yet touching
it in the fourth dimension.'
'How could that be?' Juanita asked in a puzzled tone.
'I don't know whether I can explain it very clearly. But
a favorite method in such discussions is to form an
analogy in dimensions of a lower order. Suppose we were
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two-dimensional beings, with length and width, but no
thickness. Suppose our world were on the surface of a
sheet of paper. And suppose this planet were on the other
side of the sheet, just opposite.
'Being two-dimensional beings, we could not conceive
of the third dimension, which is the thickness of the paper.
We could not know of the other world so near, nor could
we reach it except by going around the edge of the sheet.
'But suppose somebody stuck a pin hole in the paper,
through the two worlds on opposite sides. Then we might
blunder through, into a new world outside of our know-
ledge, just as the plane flew through that purple cloud into
this strange place. So we must have fallen through a hole
in the fourth dimension!'
'And what can we do about it?' Juanita asked.
'I don't know. My theory may be the bunk, anyhow.
But there was evidently some phenomenon, either of
natural or artificial cause, which swept the plane through
the "continuum" from our world, to this. It may happen
again. We must watch. If we see it happen, we may be able
to find the cause, and manipulate it to act in reverse to
take us home. A slim chance, but our best bet!'
It was not very long before the flames of the wrecked
plane died away. Only a mass of bare, blackened metal
was left, scattered with charred bones. When the wreckage
was cool enough, George found some traps of metal in it
which he used as splints on Cann's broken arm.
The little man remained unconscious.
For a very long time they stayed there, near the wreck —
they did not know how long. George had lost his watch,
and Juanita's had been broken. There were no days in this
weird world, no sun. The somber, angry crimson of the
sky did not change, no luminous object appeared within it.
They grew thirsty, for there was no water to be had.
They felt the pains of hunger. They reeled with weariness,
and dared not sleep. But the physical hardships, at first,
were more endurable than the mental torture.,
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They were in a strange world, absolutely foreign. It
seemed that chemical and physical processes here did not
always follow the same course as on their own earth.
There was no sun — only the sullen gloom of the crimson
sky. No living things except themselves to break the
terrible monotony.
Their minds struggled for an explanation of it all. How
had they come here? Was there any chance for escape?
What was the meaning of the red sky? Of the huge green
crystals that scattered the stony wilderness? Of the
inconceivably colossal black mountains?
The air was neither cold nor hot, its temperature
remained constant. Faint radiation of heat, as well as
light, seemed to fall from the somber scarlet sky. George
suggested that the higher atmosphere was filled with some
radioactive gas.
Cann never recovered consciousness. Nor did he die of
his hurts. He was murdered. It came about in this way.
They must have been in the fantastic world of the
adventure for many hours, for both George and Juanita
were suffering keenly from hunger and thirst. They were
still watching beside Cann. During those long, lonely hours,
they had talked a great deal. They felt drawn together by a
powerful sympathy, as if they had long been friends.
Both of them were startled immeasurably by the bullet.
They had been waiting there a very long time, anxious,
alert, waiting. They had been fearful of unknown dangers,
fearful of the weird life that this world might possess,
fearful even of the dead, endless silence.
The bullet came whining angrily past them. It struck the
sheer face of the black cliff behind them with an explosive
plop, and showered them with fine fragments of broken
rock.
George started uncontrollably, Juanita half screamed,
clapped a hand to her lips, and apprehensively grasped the
engineer's arm.
'What is it?' she gasped.
119

'Sounded like a bullet,' he said, uneasily. 'Suppose the
inhabitants of this world have firearms?'
'Look!' she whispered suddenly, in a strained voice.
'Something moving!'
She pointed out across the cragged wilderness of dull
black rock. Following her slender arm, George glimpsed a
dark object slowly rising into view behind a twisted black
boulder.
A little wisp of bluish smoke floated up beside it. They
heard a crashing report, as another bullet sang past them
and thudded against the precipice behind them, scattering
bits of shattered rock.
'A man!' Juanita cried.
George saw that it was. A human head, covered with
unkept black hair and a thick stubble of black beard. A
human body rising behind it, grimy, clothed in tattered
garments. It was the huge, sullen individual companion of
their voyage.
'Why, it's an old friend!' George whispered. 'The man
who admired you so much in the plane!' He grinned grimly.
'What does he mean, shooting at us?' Juanita cried.
'Guess it won't hurt to ask him,' George said. He raised
his voice, and shouted at the man. His tones came oddly
shrill and strange from his dry throat.
'What do you want?' he called.
The man did not reply. But he left the shelter of the
black boulder and stalked cautiously toward them, a huge,
terrible figure, a pistol ready in his hand - a heavy
automatic.
'What's the idea, shooting at us?' George shouted
again, in a shrill, thirst-cracked voice.
'I'm dyin' for a drink,' the huge man growled back. 'No
water in this damn place! I'm thirsty as hell! I've got to
drink! Blood!' Again and again, as he ran toward them, he
repeated the word in a voice that had become almost a
scream. 'Blood! Blood! Blood!'
'He's crazy!' George muttered.
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Cann still lay unconscious on the bare black rock.
When the huge man, charging down upon them, was thirty
yards away, he shot again — into the body of the un-
conscious man. George saw the body jerk with the bullet's
impact.
'Oh!' the girl cried out in horror. Then whispered, 'Let's
run! We can't do anything!'
George took her hand; they ran off along the foot of the
Cyclopean wall of dull black stone. They were weak from
thirst and hunger and weariness; their bodies seemed very
heavy. And the black rock over which they fled was so
cracked and twisted, pitted with yawning chasms and
broken with peaks and boulders and hummocks, that real
running was impossible. Many times they stumbled. They
leaped, and crawled, and climbed — jumped bottomless
cracks, crept across narrow ledges, clambered up cliffs
and boulders.
The huge maniac shouted at them to stop, but they paid
no heed. He fired at them twice. The bullets screamed past,
and ricocheted among the black summits before them.
'Down!' George cried.
He leaped into a deep traverse crack in the black rock,
between two massive, twisted summits, helped Juanita
down beside him. They were out of the big man's sight.
Swiftly, they stumbled on, down the narrow ravine.
Half an hour later, when they had covered perhaps five
hundred yards, they came up to where they could see the
lunatic again. The huge fellow was bent over what was left
of inoffensive little Cann, tearing at his body like a hungry
wolf.
Horrified, they stumbled on again.
Long hours — tortured ages — crept by. On and on they
drove themselves. A man and a woman lost in an alien
world. Sick with fear. Tortured with thirst. Weak from
hunger. Reeling from fatigue. Driven on by the horror of
what they had seen — one human being rending another
like a ravening beast.
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They did not travel many miles. For they were weak.
And the wilderness of black rock was incredibly rugged,
twisted into fantastic, sharp-edged masses, carved with
wild, volcanic energies.
The Cyclopean cliffs still hemmed them in, an
impassable barrier, inconceivably lofty. Grim precipices
leaped sheer half way to the zenith, all about them. Those
mighty black cliffs were terrible, oppressive, like the stone
walls of some ancient prison.
The scarlet sky still gleamed above the jagged summits
of the ebon cliffs, with a dark and sullen glare, changeless,
monotonous. There was neither day nor night; no sun nor
moon nor stars ever broke the monotony of grim, for-
bidding crimson twilight.
It was a long time after they had left the sight of the wreck,
when the red rain fell. Memory of the hideous orgy of the
maniac already seemed faint to George; it had become
unreal, a fantastic horror so far past that it did not matter.
Huge red drops began abruptly to fall from the crimson
sky.
But they were not water that could be drunk - the laws
of nature, or at least the chemical composition of the
atmosphere, seemed to have been different on that weird
world.
The great drops, red as blood, were at least a foot in
diameter. They came thudding down with terrific force,
scattering the waste of black rock. They did not spatter.
They remained lying about, in spheroids shaped like drops
of mercury - but larger than footballs!
George and Juanita sought shelter in a cave, beneath a
sloping ledge of dull black rock, while the weird rain was
falling.
The ground was by no means covered with red
globules. George estimates that no more than two or three
fell on every hundred square yards.
'Must be some new chemical, with an enormously
strong surface film,' George speculated. 'Mercury forms
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round drops like that, or water dropped in fine dust. But
these drops are huge, compared to those. Atmospheric
conditions here must be quite different to what they are on
earth. You remember those big green crystals we've been
finding. There must be a sort of snow, that falls here. Some
chemical crystallizing in the air, and falling as snow falls
on earth —'
'There's one!' Juanita cried.
She pointed from under the sheltering ledge of dull
black rock. A broad, rugged ravine lay before them, a
deep, cruel scar that bore witness to the cataclysmic birth
of this alien world. On its farther slope, fifty yards away,
was a glitter of green, standing out against the dead black
of the rock. A huge, six-sided emerald crystal, sparkling
and brilliant, like a snow crystal tinted green and
enormously magnified.
Another of the riddles of this strange world.
Hours went by. The enormous red drops widely scat-
tered still thudded down from the sky. The wanderers
could see several of the puzzling scarlet spheroids.
Suddenly George noticed that those they watched were
dwindling in size.
'Look!' he cried. 'They're going away. Evaporating, I
suppose. Must be some red gas in the sky, which
condenses and falls, as rain does on earth. And they
evaporate, to form clouds again.'
It was not long after that an amazing phenomenon took
place. A falling red drop happened to strike the green
crystal that Juanita had pointed out. George chanced to be
watching the green formation speculatively when it
occurred. He heard the crashing explosion, saw a vast
cloud of luminous purple vapor rise, as if some violent
chemical reaction had taken place between the scarlet
spheroid and the emerald crystal.
The great burst of shining red-violet vapor rushed up as
suddenly as the white smoke of a bursting shell. It formed
an enormous cloud. The cloud of purple contracted
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swiftly. But then it seemed to form an immense disk,
which they viewed obliquely.
A few seconds went by, as they watched in astounded
wonder.
Then the purple disk contracted swiftly and vanished.
George broke their silence with an excited cry, which
came queerly through his dry throat.
'The purple circle that came in front of the plane looked
just like that!' he cried. 'We have seen the gate to our
world opened again — I am sure of it —'
'There's a bird!' Juanita broke in. 'See!'
She pointed to a little gray sparrow flitting uncertainly
from where the purple disk had vanished. It circled
aimlessly, rose in a wild, bewildered flight, became a little
brown speck against the sullen crimson sky and
vanished	
'Yes,' George said slowly. 'The bird came through it. A
sparrow from our own world! It blundered through just as
the plane did. I wonder -' He fell into silent speculation.
'You wonder what, George?' Juanita asked.
'I must think, dear!'
He patted her hand. A little hand, thin from starvation,
red with cuts and scratches gained in their long struggle
through the desert of wild black rocks.
Feeling a faint thrill of pleasure at the 'dear,' she fell
silent, and sat watching him with cool gray eyes
brightened with a faint light of hope. A long time went by,
while the engineer remained silent, immersed in thought.
The red rain stopped.
'We might try it!' he said suddenly. 'There's no way of
telling whether it will work the other way. We are pretty
likely to kill ourselves in the experiment. But it's better to
take a pretty big risk than end our days here, eh?'
'You mean —' Juanita cried tremulously. 'You mean —
there's a chance to get back home?'
Her gray eyes were wide with excitement and sudden
hope.
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'A chance,' George said. 'A bare chance. But better
than staying here until we die for want of food and water.'
'What is it?' she cried.
'We can find one of the green crystals, of course, and
dump it on one of the red drops. There ought to be another
explosion — and another opening of the gate to our world.
I don't understand the formation of the purple disk, of
course. But something that results from the explosive
union of the red drop and the green crystal seems to
break down the barrier between the two worlds - some
form of radiation, perhaps.
'Are you willing to try it?'
He looked into her cool gray eyes.
'Of course, George!' She smiled at him. A little smile,
wan and strained. It had meant an effort against the
weakness of hunger and the torture of thirst. 'I'll do
anything you want to try. But we must hurry. The red
drops, you know, are going away!'
'That's right!' George replied in the hoarse whisper that
his voice had become. 'I'd forgotten. We must try it right
away. It must be a rare coincidence for the green crystals
and the red drops to be on the ground at the same time.'
Weak and reeling, they rose, and tottered out from
beneath the sheltering black ledge. Searching down the
long ravine, they came upon a few of the scarlet spheroids.
Already they were shrunken to the size of a man's fist.
They were evaporating swiftly; little streamers of pinkish
vapor were rising up from them. One of them dwindled
and vanished, even as they were watching it.
For half an hour, they could not find one of the green
crystals.
Then Juanita's keen eyes discovered one, standing on
edge in a narrow crack in the dull black rock. George bent
beside the crack, lifted it out. A great, six-pointed star of
glistening green, brilliant and transparent, the feathery
structure between the points delicate and perfectly
symmetrical.
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It weighed no more than thirty pounds, but the
engineer, weakened by long hardship, reeled beneath the
burden of it.
'Now to find one of the red drops,' he muttered.
They struggled on down the ravine, George staggering
beneath the weight of a blazing thing that might have been
cut from a monster emerald by some gargantuan jeweler,
Juanita dragging herself along by his side.
Once they came upon one of the scarlet spheroids. But
it was no larger than a baseball, when they first saw it. As
they staggered up to it, it dwindled swiftly, seeming to hiss
like a drop of water on a hot stove. It was gone.
A sound came suddenly from behind them. A hoarse
shout, insane, incoherent.
George turned in alarm. He saw a man running after
them, a huge man with a black, bearded face — and red
blood on his hands. The man who had reached this alien
world in the plane with them. The man who had fallen like
a wolf on the body of little insignificant Cann.
An automatic pistol was in his blood-stained hand.
'Guess he's finished Cann,' George whispered. 'Looking
for fresh blood.'
'Oh, it will be dreadful if he catches us,' Juanita
whispered. 'Let's run!'
'I don't feel exactly fit for a Marathon!' George
muttered.
But they broke into a stumbling run.
The wild, blood-stained figure behind them shouted,
gesticulated. Then they heard shots. Bullets whined and
screamed about them, crashing on the dull black walls of
the canyon.
They ran on - or tried to run. It was a pitiful, staggering
pace; they were almost too weak to move. George, reeling
under the burden of the green crystal, was gasping for
breath. His tongue, swollen and leathery, seemed to fill his
mouth, choking him. Juanita dragged her feeble, abused
body along, keeping back any word of complaint.
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The man running behind them was far stronger; he had
had food recently. Swiftly he gained upon them, pausing
to fire wildly after them with the pistol whenever a straight
section of the ravine put them in his sight for a few
minutes.
Then they came to the end of the canyon.
Rugged walls of dead black rock rose before them,
sheer, impossible to climb. They stopped, looked at it.
George dropped the green crystal. He looked at Juanita.
'Well, I guess this means good-by,' he managed to
articulate, in a hoarse, grating whisper. 'Hope he makes it
merciful. Anyhow, being with you has made it a lot more
pleasant.'
He took Juanita's hand, looked into her cool gray eyes,
and tried to grin.
For the first time in their terrible adventure, Juanita
burst into tears. She fell weakly into the engineer's arms,
sobbing uncontrollably, clinging to him with her thin,
bruised arms.
The huge, blood-stained man came into view again, a
hundred yards away. He stopped, threw up his automatic,
and began to shoot. Bullets rang against the cliff behind
them, sent splinters of black rock flying.
Then George, holding Juanita's sob-shaken body in his
arms, looked over her shoulder and saw the thing lying in
a little crevice in the ebon rock, almost at their feet. A red
spheroid, nearly a foot in diameter, with pale pink vapors
hissing up from about it.
Several of the huge, strange crimson drops must have
run together in the crevice, forming a single larger drop
which did not evaporate so rapidly.
'Buck up!' the engineer cried, pushing the girl to her
feet. 'We'll try it yet. We'll beat our friend out of his
dinner!'
He picked up the huge, glistening green crystal that he
had dropped, tossed it into the crevice, upon the spheroid
of scarlet-red liquid.
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An explosive out-rush of purple vapor hurled them
bodily backward, against the canyon wall. They crouched
there a few seconds, waiting. George had an arm around
Juanita's waist, half-supporting her.
Abruptly the red-violet vapor receded from about them.
It became a straight wall of purple light, the surface of a
great disk.
'Now!' George whispered.
Half carrying Juanita's slight body, he ran forward,
leaped into that wall of red-blue light.
The next thing the engineer knew, they were lying
sprawled in soft green grass. Juanita had fallen across his
body, he sat up with her in his arms. He gazed at the world
about him, and shed tears of relief and joy. The sky was no
longer a sullen, angry red - it was soft and warmly blue.
Cyclopean, nightmare mountains of dull black stone no
longer hemmed them in - they were surrounded by the
green fields of the San Joaquin Valley. On one side of
them a herd of Jersey cows was grazing. Beyond them
stood a pleasant-looking farmhouse. On the other side was
a fence, and beyond the fence, an unpaved country road.
The sound of an automobile engine reached George's
ears — sounding strange after his ages of silent imprison-
ment in that other world.
A farm truck, loaded with cans of milk, was coming
down the road.
'A milk wagon!' he whispered to Juanita. 'Let's stop it!'
She responded feebly and they struggled over to the
fence.
The farmer stopped to investigate these poor, tattered,
bruised humans, who clung weakly to the fence, crying for
joy. A few minutes later he had given each a few sips of
milk from one of the cans, and was taking them to the
pleasant farmhouse on the hill, where they would find
many things that, in their terrible stay in the other world,
they had known only in delirious dreams.
128

'Where on earth have you been?' asked the country
doctor, who had been called in, and who assured them
they would soon be completely recovered.
'You'd never believe it!' was George's answer.
Though I had gone to Berkeley to study astronomy, I
didn't enroll. The tuition might have strained my uncertain
writing income, but what I recall is an argument with a
faculty adviser who wanted me to take a course in
Shakespeare. I refused.
My attitude seems nearly incredible now. One of my
most successful fiction characters, Giles Habibula in the
novels about the Legion of Space, was later borrowed
from Shakespeare, and after I went back to college in the
1950s I took Shakespeare courses enough to become
something of a bardolator. But then, I refused to see that
Shakespeare was relevant to writing science fiction.
I did stay through the fall, however, auditing an
astronomy course and exploring the Bay area. I rode the
San Francisco cable cars and attended an opera — with no
more appreciation than I had for Shakespeare. I remember
haunting Chinatown and the harbor. My clearest recollec-
tion is taking the old Oakland auto ferry at sunset to
watch the fog rolling in through the Golden Gate.
When I left in November I took a passenger ship back
to Los Angeles, paying six dollars for a second-class
fare!' The ocean is a long way from New Mexico. It
fascinated me long before I saw it, as it still does. I look
back fondly even at the hours I stood leaning over the
rail of the Army transport that brought me back from
Manila in 1945.
The first story I wrote when I got back to New Mexico
was one I called 'The Island of Mars.' The file card shows
that it was written on November 22 and 23 and mailed to
Astounding on November 24. By January 22 I had
Clayton's check for $160 for 8,000 words, along with
129

another request from Harry Bates to 'lay off me until I've
a chance to use what I have.'
He renamed the story 'The Doom from Planet 4.'
Though I like my own title better, I didn't complain. It was
featured in Astounding for July 1931, with a lovely
watercolor cover by Wesso overprinted with my name and
the new title in bright red.
The opening of the story reflects my old enchantment
with the sea. Rereading it today, I'm impressed that it's
very early Williamson. I couldn't write it now. Certainly
not in two days. The plot owes something to Ed Hamilton,
but it's still good. I recognized it, a little more elaborated,
in a best-selling science fiction novel just a few years ago.
The proposed method of interplanetary communication
still seems pretty sound. Essentially, it is the same system
that has lately been worked out in more detail by such
space experts as Frank Drake and Carl Sagan.
130

THE DOOM FROM PLANET 4
'SOS. SOS. SOS.' Three short, three long, three short, the
flashes winked from the dark headland. Dan MeNally,
master and owner of the small and ancient trading
schooner, Virginia, caught the feeble flickering light from
the island as he strode across the foredeck. He stopped,
stared at the looming black line of land beneath the
tropical stars. Again light flashed from a point of rock far
above the dim white line of phosphorescent surf, spelling
out the signal of distress.
'Somebody bane callin' with a flashlight, I t'ank,' the
big Swede, Larsen, rumbled from the wheel.
Dan thought suddenly of reply. He rushed into the
charthouse, to return in a moment with a lighted lantern
and a copy of the Nautical Almanac which would serve to
hide the flame between flashes. He flashed an answer.
Again the pale light flickered from the dark mass of
land, spelling words out rather slowly, as if the sender
were uncertain in his knowledge of Morse. Surprised as
Dan had been by the signal from an island marked on the
charts as uninhabited, he was astonished at the message
that now came to him.
'You are in terrible danger,' he read in the flashes.
'Dreadful thing here. Hurry away. Radio for warships. I
am —'
The winking light suddenly went out. Dan strained his
eyes to watch the point where it had been, and a few
seconds later he saw a curious thing. A darting, stabbing
lance of green fire flashed out across the barren, rock>
cliff, lighting it fleetingly with pale green radiance. It leapt
out and was gone in an instant, leaving the shoulder of the
island dark as before.
Dan watched for long minutes, but he saw nothing
131

more brilliant than the pale gleam of phosphorescence
where the waves dashed against the sheer granite wall of
the island.
'What you t'ank?' Larsen broke in upon him.
Dan started, then answered slowly. 'I don't know. First
I thought there must be a lunatic at large. But that green
light! I didn't like it.'
He stared again at the looming mass of the island.
Davis Island is one of the innumerable tiny islets that dot
the South Pacific; merely the summit of a dead volcano,
projecting above the sea. Nominally claimed by Great
Britain, it is marked on the charts as uninhabited.
'Radio for warships, eh?' he muttered. A wireless
transmitter was one of many modern innovations that the
Virginia did not boast. She had been gathering copra and
shell among the islands long before such things came into
common use, though Dan had invested his modest savings
in her only a year before.
'What would anyone want with warships on Davis
Island?' The name roused a vague memory. 'Davis
Island?' he repeated, staring in concentration at the black
sea. 'Of course!' It came to him suddenly. A newspaper
article that he had read five years before, at about the time
he had abandoned college in the middle of his junior year,
to follow the call of adventure.
The account had dealt with an eclipse of the sun, visible
only from certain points on the Pacific. One Dr. Hunter,
under the auspices of a Western university, had sailed with
his instruments and assistants to Davis Island, to study the
solar corona during the few precious moments when the
shadow covered the sun, and to observe the displacement of
certain stars as a test of Einstein's theory of relativity.
The reporter had interviewed the party at San
Francisco, on the eve of sailing. There had been photo-
graphs of the chartered vessel, of Dr. Hunter and his
instruments, and of his daughter, Helen, who acted as his
secretary. She looked not at all like a scientist, Dan
132

recalled. In fact, her face had seemed rather pretty, even in
the blurred newspaper half-tone.
But the memory cast no light upon the present puzzle.
In the rambling years that had led him to this spot upon
the old Virginia, he had lost touch with the science that
had interested him during his college days. He had heard
nothing of the results of the Hunter expedition. But this
island had been its destination.
He turned decisively to the man at the wheel. 'Larsen,
we'll stand well offshore till daylight,' he said. 'Then,
unless we see something unusual, we can sail in and land a
boat to -'
The sentence was never finished. Through the corner of
his eye, Dan saw a ray of green light darting toward them
from the island. A line of green fire seemed to reach out
and strike him a physical blow. Green flame flared around
him, and somehow he was hurled from the bridge, clear of
the rail and into the sea.
His impression of the incident was very confused. He
seemed to have struck the water with such force that his
breath was knocked out. He struggled back to the surface,
strangling, and coughing the bitter brine from his lungs. It
was several minutes before he was comfortably treading
water, and able to see what had happened.
The old schooner was then a hundred yards away,
careening crazily, and drifting aimlessly before the light
breeze. The strange green fire had vanished. Parts of the
ship apparently had been carried away or disintegrated by
the ray or the force of which it was a visible effect, wthe
mainmast was down, and was hanging over the side in a
tangle of rigging.
Bright yellow flames were dancing at a dozen points
about the wreckage on the listing deck. A grotesque
broken thing, queerly illuminated by the growing fires, was
hanging over the wheel — the body of Larsen. No living
thing was visible; and Dan, after a second look at the
133

wreck of the bow, kney that he must be the sole survivor
of the catastrophe.
'Too bad about the boys,' he muttered through teeth
that chattered, for the cold water had already chilled him.
'And poor old Larsen.'
He thought again of the warning flashed from the shore.
'Guess there must be something hellish afoot after all,' he
muttered again. 'The flicker of green that stopped the
signals, and the green fire that got us — what can they
mean?' He looked toward the looming black shadow of
the island, and began divesting himself of his clinging,
sodden garments. 'I don't wonder somebody wanted
battleships. But even a battleship, if that green ray hit it -'
He drew a deep breath and ducked his head while he
unlaced his shoes and kicked out of them. Then, with a
final look at the burning wreck of the Virginia, he tore off
the last bit of his underclothing and swam for the shore in
an easy crawl.
The rocky ramparts of Davis Island were three or four
miles away. But there was no wind; the black sea was
calm save for a long, hardly perceptible swell. A strong
swimmer and in superb condition, Dan felt no anxiety
about being able to make the distance. There was danger,
however, that a shark would run across him, or that he
could not find a landing place upon the rocky shore.
Four bells had rung when he had seen the first flash; it
had been just ten o'clock. And it was some four hours
later that Dan touched bottom and waded wearily up a bit
of smooth hard beach, through palely glittering phos-
phorescent foam.
He rubbed the brine from his tired limbs, and sat down
for a time, in a spot where a fallen boulder sheltered his
naked body from the cool morning wind. In. a few
moments he rose, flexed his muscles and peered through
the starlit darkness for a way up the cliff behind the beach.
He found it impossible to distinguish anything.
'Got to keep moving, or find some clothes,' he muttered.
134

'And I may stumble onto what made the green light. Darn
lucky I've been so far, anyhow. Larsen and the others -
but I shan't think of them. Wonder who was flashing the
signals from the island. And did the green fire get him?'
He turned to look out over the black plain of the sea.
Far out, the Virginia lay low in the water, a pillar of
yellow flame rising from her hull. As he watched, the flame
flickered and vanished: the old schooner, he supposed, had
sunk. Then he noticed a pale glow come into being among
the stars on the eastern horizon.
'Hello,' he muttered again. 'So we're going to have a
moon? In the last quarter, but still it ought to light me up
from this beach.'
A moment later the horns of the crescent had come
above the black rim of the sea. Dan waited, swinging his
arms and tramping up and down on the sand, until the
silvery moon had cleared the horizon and illuminated the
rugged face of the cliff with pale white radiance.
He chose a path to the top of the cliff and clambered
up, emerging in a jungle-like thicket of brush. Picking his
way with the greatest caution, yet scratching his naked
skin most painfully, he made his way for a few yards
through the brush to a point of vantage from which he
could look about.
He was, he perceived, in a narrow valley or ravine, with
rugged black walls rising sheer on either side. The silvery
light of the crescent moon fell upon the rank jungle that
covered the narrow floor of the canyon, which rose and
dwindled as it penetrated inland.
Gazing up the canyon, Dan gasped in amazement at
what he saw.
Mars, the red planet, hung bright and motionless, low in
the western sky, gleaming with deep bloody radiance.
Directly beneath it, bathed in the white light of the moon,
was a bare, rocky peak that seemed the highest point of
the island. And upon that highest pinnacle, that chanced
135

to be just below the ruddy star, was an astounding
machine.
Three slender towers, of a white metal that gleamed in
the moonlight with the silvery luster of aluminum, rose
from the rocky peak. They supported, in a horizontal
position, an enormous metal ring. It must be, Dan
reckoned swiftly, at least a hundred feet in diameter, and
held a hundred feet above the summit of the mountain.
The huge ring gleamed with a strange purple radiance.
A shimmering mist of red-violet light surrounded it. An
unknown force seemed to throb within the mighty ring,
drawing the mantle of purple haze about it.
And suspended inside the ring and below it was a long,
slender needle of dazzling white light. To Dan, from where
he stood in the canyon, it seemed a fine, sharp line, though
he knew it must be some kind of pointer, luminous with
the strange force pulsing through it.
The strange needle wavered a little, with quick,
uncertain motions. The brilliance of its light varied oddly;
it seemed to throb with a queer, irregular rhythm.
And the gleaming needle pointed straight at the planet
Mars!
Dan stood a long time, watching the purple ring upon
the silver towers, with the shining white needle hanging
below it. He stared at Mars, glowing like a red and sinister
eye above the incredible mechanism.
His mind was in a wild storm of wonder shot with fear.
What was the meaning of the gleaming ring and needle?
What connection did this great device have with the signal
of distress from the cliff, and the green fire that had
destroyed the Virginia? And why did the glowing needle
point at Mars?
He did not know when he first began to hear the sound.
For a time it was merely part of the strange mystery of the
island, only another element in the atmosphere of fear and
wonder that surrounded him. Then it rose a little, and he
became suddenly sharply conscious of it as an additional
136

menace. The sound was not loud, but deep and vibrant.
A whir or hum, like that of a powerful, muffled motor, but
deeper than the sound of any motor man has ever made. It
came down the gorge, from the direction of the machine
on the mountain.
That deep, throbbing noise frightened Dan as none of
his previous experiences had done. Shivering from fear as
much as from cold, he crouched down beside a huge
boulder in the edge of the tangle of brush that covered the
bottom of the ravine. His heart pounded wildly. He was in
the clutches of an unreasoning fear that some terrible
Thing had seen him, and was about to seek him out. For a
moment he had to use all his will to keep himself from
panic flight through the brush. The unknown is always
terrible, and he had invaded the domain of a force he
could not understand.
In a moment, however, he recovered himself. He would
be as safe there in the jungle, he thought, as anywhere on
the island. He thought of starting a fire, then realized that
he had no matches, and that he would not dare to make
light if he were able. He pulled a few handfuls of dry grass
to make a sort of bed, upon which he huddled up,
thanking his lucky stars that the island was in semi-
tropical latitudes.
His mind returned again to the riddles that confronted
him: the green flash and the strange mechanism on the
peak. He recalled fantastic stories he had read, of hermit
scientists conducting amazing experiments in isolated
parts of the world. Presently he decided that something of
the kind must be on foot here.
'The green flash is a sort of a death ray,' he summed up,
aloud. 'And they shoot it from that bright needle. No
wonder they don't want to be bothered! Somebody may be
fixing to upset civilization!
'But it's queer that the needle points at Mars....'
Of this last fact, which might have been a clue to the
most reasonable solution of the mystery, if a rather
137

astounding one, he was able to make nothing. In fact,
huddled up on his pile of grass in some degree of comfort,
he presently went to sleep, still pondering in vain upon this
last clue.
He was awakened by a soft, insistent purring sound,
rather like that of a small electric motor run without load
at very high speed. Recollection of the night's events came
abruptly to him, and he sprang to his feet in alarm, finding
his muscles sore and stiff from his cramped position.
From one side Dan heard the rumble of thunder, and.
glancing up, saw that the sky above the sea was overcast
with a rolling mass of dark, menacing clouds. There was a
strange portentous blackness about these storm clouds
that filled him with a nameless fear.
Suddenly he was struck with the thought that it was not
thunder that had wakened him. The noise he had heard
had not the rumbling or booming quality of thunder. As
he stood there he again became conscious of the low,
whirring sound, behind him. He whirled around to face it.
The shock of what he saw left him momentarily dizzy and
trembling - though undoubtedly his surroundings had
much to do with its effect upon him.
The sound came from a glistening metal machine which
stood half-hidden in the brush a dozen yards away looking
at him\
The thing was made of a lustrous, silvery metal, which
Dan afterwards supposed to be aluminum, or some alloy of
that metal. Its gleaming case was shaped more like a coffin,
or an Egyptian mummy-case, than any other object with
which he was familiar, though rather larger than either.
That is, it was an oblong metal box, tapering toward the
ends, with the greatest width forward of the middle. Twin
tubes projected from the end of it, lenses in them glistening
like eyes. Just below them sprang out steely, glistening
tentacles several feet long, writhing and twitching as if
they were alive. The tangle of green brush hid the thing's
legs, so that Dan could not see them.
138

Suddenly it sprang toward him, rising ten feet high and
covering half the distance between them. It alighted easily
upon the two long, jointed metal limbs upon which it had
leapt, and continued to keep the lens-tubes turned toward
Dan, so he knew that the grotesque metal thing was
watching him.
The limbs, he observed, were similar to the hind legs of
a grasshopper, both in shape and position. And evidently
the thing leapt upon them in about the same way. Then he
noticed another curious thing about it.
Three little bars of metal projected above the thickest
part of its case, on the upper side. Their ends were joined
by a little ring, three inches across. The tiny metal ring
glowed with purple luminosity. A purple haze seemed to
cling about it, as to the huge ring Dan had seen on the
towers above the peak. And suspended inside this ring was
a tiny metal needle, shimmering with pulsating white fire.
On the back of this metal monster was a miniature
replica of the strange mechanism upon the pinnacle. The
little needle pointed up the canyon. A glance that way
showed Dan that it pointed at the great device upon the
mountain, which looked even more brilliant on this
gloomy morning than in the uncertain radiance of the
moon. The colossal ring was shrouded in a splendid
mantle of purple flame; and the long, slender needle, which
seemed to have swung on down to follow Mars below the
horizon, still throbbed with scintillating white fire.
For several minutes the two stood there, studying each
other. A naked man, tense and bewildered in the presence
of mysterious forces — and a grotesque machine, cased in
gleaming white metal, whose parts seemed to duplicate
most of the functions of a living creature.
Then one of the writhing tentacles that shot from the
'head' of the machine reached back under the metal case,
and reappeared grasping what appeared to be a fiat disk of
emerald, two inches across and half an inch thick.
This green disk it held up, with a flat side toward Dan.
139

There was no sound, but a flash of green light came from
it, cutting a wide swath into the jungle, and littering its
path with smoking and flaming debris.
But Dan, expecting something of the kind, had flung
himself sidewise into the shelter of the boulder beside
which he had slept. Behind it, he gathered his feet under
him, picked up a rock of convenient size for throwing, and
waited, ready and alert.
He heard the soft humming sound on the other side of
the boulder. A glittering object flashed above him.
Crashing through the brush the metal monster came to
earth on the same side of the boulder with him.
But the metal thing had not turned in its flight:
consequently its rear end was toward Dan. As it began
cumberously to turn about, he hurled his rock with an
accuracy that came of a boyhood on the farm. Instinct
had made him try for the little ring and needle on the back
of the monster, apparently its most vulnerable part.
Whether by luck or skill, the rock struck the gleaming
ring, crushing it against the needle — and instant paralysis
overtook the metal thing. Its tentacles and limbs became
fixed and rigid, and it toppled over in the brush.
Dan walked over to it, and examined it briefly. The
green disk had fallen on the ground, and he picked it up. It
was made of emerald crystal, it had a little knob of
glistening metal set in one side. Rather afraid of it, Dan
forebore to twist the knob. But he still clutched it in his
hand a few moments later, when, partly for fear that
others of its kind would come to succor the fallen monster,
and partly to secure shelter from the threatening rain, he
retired into the shadows of the tangled jungle.
He spent perhaps half an hour in creeping back to what
he supposed a place of comparative safety. For some time
he lay there in the cool gloom, brushing occasional insects
off his bare skin, wishing by turns that he had a cup of
coffee and a good beefsteak, and that he could puzzle out
a logical solution of all the astounding things he had met
140

in the island. After the encounter with the metal monster,
he felt his theory of the hermit scientists a bit inadequate.
Presently his attention was attracted by the un-
mistakable mew of a kitten. Then he heard the padding
sound of cautious human footsteps, and a clear feminine
voice calling 'Kitty, kitty,' in low tones. The steps and the
voice seemed coming toward him; since there was no
sound of crackling brush, he supposed there was a trail
which he had not found.
'Hello,' he ventured, when the voice seemed only a few
yards away through the green tangle.
At the same instant a gray kitten appeared out of the
underbrush, and frisked trustfully across to him. He put
out a hand, caressed it, picked it up. In a moment the
feminine voice replied, 'Hello yourself. Who are you?'
A crackling sound came from the brush, as if the
speaker were starting toward him. Dan, abruptly
conscious of his lack of attire, said quickly, 'Wait a
minute! I haven't anything on, you see. I'm Dan McNally.
I owned the schooner that something happened to off the
island last night.'
A delicious, trilling laugh greeted the panic of his first
words. Then the clear, sweet voice, serious again, replied,
'So you swam ashore from the boat I signaled?'
'Yes.'
'Gee, but I'm glad to find you! And you say you haven't
any clothes? I wonder what....' The voice paused re-
flectively, then resumed, 'Here's a sheet that I got to signal
with in the daytime, if I had a chance. You might wrap it
around you until we find something better.'
The low, liquid laugh rang out again; again there was a
rustling in the brush, and presently an arm appeared,
holding a rolled-up sheet.
'All right,' he called. 'Throw it this way.'
In a moment, with the sheet draped around him like a
Roman toga, and the kitten on his arm, he advanced to
meet the owner of the beautiful voice.
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At the trail he met a trim, active-looking young woman,
clad in out-of-door attire and with a canvas knapsack on
her back. Bareheaded, she wore her brown hair closely
shingled. Her face, Dan recognized from the photograph
he had seen five years before, though it was more lovely
than the splotched newspaper picture had hinted. Her
brown eyes were filled with laughter at his predicament
and his present unusual garb.
He bowed with mock gravity and said, 'How do you
do, Miss Helen Hunter?'
Brown eyes widened in surprise. 'You know me?' she
asked.
'Not half so well as I hope to,' he grinned.
Then, handing her the kitten, he spoke seriously. 'What
about this island? The green flashes? The big machine on the
mountain? The metal thing that jumps about like a grass-
hopper? What's it all about? You know anything about it?'
'Yes, I know a good deal about it,' she told him soberly.
'It's rather a terrible story. And one you may not believe -
no, you've seen them! But the kitten is hungry, and you
must be, too, if you swam ashore.'
'Well, yes, I am,' Dan admitted.
The storm clouds were drifting out to sea; the sun was
beginning to assert itself, and it now lighted up the scene
with a cheerful brightness. She slung off her pack and sat
down cross-legged at the side of the trail. Dan sat down
opposite her as she opened the knapsack and produced a
can of condensed milk, one of sardines, a can-opener, and
half a loaf of bread.
'I had to select my supplies rather at random,' she said,
'and you'll have to make the best of them.'
She started to open the sardines. 'You'd better give it to
me,' Dan advised. 'You might cut your hand.'
'You think so?' she asked, deftly lifting the lid, fishing
out a fish for the kitten, and presenting the can to Dan.
Then with capable hands she broke off a large chunk of
bread, which she handed him.
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'Go ahead and finish this up,? she said. 'I've already had
breakfast.' She punched two holes in the end of the milk
can, and poured some of the thick yellow fluid into the
palm of her left hand, from which she let the kitten lap it.
'And now for the mystery of the island,' Dan
demanded, forgetting bread and sardines in his eagerness.
The girl turned her face to him. 'I'm Helen Hunter, as
you seem to know,' she began. 'I came here with my father
five years ago to observe an eclipse of the sun. When it
was all over, and the ship called to take us off, he decided
to send the results of our observations by one of the other
men. He wanted to stay here to carry on another experi-
ment — the one that led to that machine on the hill. Part of
the other men were willing to stay. The yacht left us here,
and has been back from San Francisco every six months
since, with mail and supplies.'
'And what was the experiment?' Dan demanded
eagerly.
'Have you ever looked at Mars through a good tele-
scope?' she countered. 'Then you must have seen the
canals — straight dark lines running from the white polar
caps to the equatorial zone. All scientists did not agree as
to what they were, but nobody could suggest a natural
origin for them.
'My father was one of those who thought that the canals
were fertile, cultivated strips, irrigated with water brought
down from the melting ice-caps. Irrigation systems meant
intelligent life upon the planet, and his experiment was an
attempt to communicate with that intelligence.'
'And he succeeded?' Dan was astounded.
'Yes. The means was simple enough: other men had
suggested it years before, in fact. Any fairly bright light on
Mars — such as the beam of a searchlight directed toward
earth — would be visible in a good telescope, when the
planet is favorably situated; it follows that such a light on
earth should be visible to an observer with a similar
instrument on Mars.
143

'It was possible, of course, but unlikely, that Mars
would have intelligent inhabitants still ignorant of the
telescope. It was also possible that their senses would be
different from ours — that, if they saw at all, it would be
with a different part of the spectrum. Father took the
chance. And he succeeded.
'The call was simple: merely three flashes of light,
repeated again and again. We used a portable searchlight,
mounted on a motor-truck, such as is used in the army.
The three flashes meant that we were on the third planet of
the solar system. The answering call, from the fourth
planet, should be four flashes, of course.
'For three nights we kept signaling. One of the men
watched the motor-generator, and I operated the search-
light, swinging it on Mars and off again, to make the flashes.
Dad kept his eye screwed to the telescope. Nothing hap-
pened and he got discouraged. I persuaded him to keep on
for another night, in case they hadn't seen us at fir^t; or
needed more time to get their searchlight ready.
'And on the fourth night poor Dad came out of the
observatory, shouting that he had seen four flashes.'
Dan gasped, speechless with astonishment. 'Then that
machine, with the needle pointing at Mars, and the green
flashes, and the thing that jumped at me -'
Helen waved a white hand for silence. 'Just keep cool a
minute! I'm coming to them.
'The four flashes just began it. In a few days Dad and
the Martians were communicating by a sort of television
process. He would mark off a sheet of paper into squares,
blacken some of the squares to make a picture or design,
then have me send a flash for each black square, and miss
an interval for each white one, taking them in regular
order. The Martians seemed to catch on pretty soon; in a
few days Dad was receiving pictures of the same sort.
'Rather a slow way of communication, perhaps. But it
worked better than one might think at first. In a month
144

Dad had received instructions for building a small
machine like that big one on the hill. It is something like
radio — at least it operates with vibrations in the ether -
but it's as much ahead of our radio as an airplane is in
advance of a fire-balloon. I understand a good bit about it,
but I won't try to explain it now.
'And in the next three years Dad learned no end of
things from the people on Mars. One queer thing about it
was, that they never let us see them on the television
apparatus, no matter how many of their scientific secrets
they gave us. Dad and I exhibited ourselves, but I don't
know yet what the Martians look like — though I have
made a guess.
'By the end of the third year they had showed Dad how
to make one of those metal things -'
'Like that one that jumped at me?' Dan broke in with a
shudder.
'Yes. They seem almost alive; but they are machines,
like our robots, and controlled by the radio apparatus. The
eyes use photo-electric cells, and relay what is before them
to the Master Intelligence.' The girl spoke these last words
in a low tone, shrinking involuntarily. She paused a
moment, then shrugged and continued.
'The first machine did not obey my father. It was
controlled by signals that came from Mars, over the big
station on the hill. And it went to work, making more
apparatus, building more machines, enlarging the re-
ceiving station. It worked in obedience to the Master
Intelligence on Mars!
'That was a year ago. The last time the yacht called, my
father and the other men still hoped to control the
machines. They let her go back without us. The machines
tolerated us a while; paid no attention to us; they were
busy working mines and building huge, strange things that
must be flying machines; the plateau on the other side of
the peak is crowded with them.
145

'For the machines are preparing to leave the island!
They are going to conquer the world for the Master
Intelligence on Mars!
'Months ago my father discovered this, and realized
that he had loosed doom upon the earth. He and the three
other men planned to destroy that big station on the peak.
All the signals to the machines are relayed through that,
from Mars. The machines seemed to pay no heed as they
made their preparations.
'Then one night, about three weeks ago, they tried to
dynamite the station.' The girl's shoulder trembled; she
paused to brush a tear from her eye, then went on hastily,
in a voice grown husky with emotion. Dan felt an odd
desire to take her slight form in his arms and comfort her
in her grief.
'The machines had seemed heedless, but they were
ready. They had those disks that throw the green fire: we
had not seen them before. And — well, all four of them
were killed.'
Dan handed her the disk of green crystal he had taken
from the thing that had attacked him. She examined it
silendy, then went on.
'Dad had left me in bed, but I heard an explosion. I
think the bombs went off when the green fire struck them.
I knew what had happened, and got out of the house just
before the machines arrived. They wrecked the place with
their green flashes.
'And for the last three weeks I've been hiding in the
jungle, or watching for ships. Three times I've raided the
ruins of the house for something to eat: fortunately it
didn't burn, like your ship. And that's all, I suppose —
except I'm awfully glad that you got ashore.'
'Thanks,' Dan said, earnestly. 'And what are we going
to do now?'
'I don't know,' Helen answered in a troubled tone. 'I'm
afraid. Afraid for all humanity. On the television, I've seen
146

enough of Mars to be sure that it is a world of machines,
controlled by one Master Intelligence. And even that may be
a machine. We make machines that compute the tides and
carry out other computations that are almost beyond the
power of the human mind: why couldn't a machine think ?
'The Master Intelligence of Mars plans to add the Earth
to his domain. Unless we can do something to stop it, in a
few years the world will be overrun with gigantic robot-
machines, controlled by force from across the gulf of
space. Humanity cannot resist them. Imagine a battleship
pitted against that green annihilating ray, and all the other
science of an elder planet!
'Life is to be blotted out! The Master Intelligence of
Mars will rule two worlds of mechanical monsters!'
Dan sat in a dazed vision of horror to come, until Helen
straightened up as if shaking off a mantle of fear, and
smiled heroically, if a bit wanly.
'Now you must eat your bread and sardines, to give you
strength to fight for humanity!' she cried, with a laugh that
she strived, not too successfully, to make cheerful and gay.
Obediently, he began to eat, finding an excellent
appetite....
It was several minutes later that he fancied he heard a
whirring and crackling in the brush behind them. He
sprang to his feet in alarm.
'It can't be far back to where I left the machine,' he
cried. 'Do you suppose there's danger that -'
The mechanical ears of the metal things may have
picked up the sound of his voice: but in any event, green
flame flashed about them on the instant. Feeling a sudden
protective impulse, Dan started toward Helen. That was
his last recollection, before what seemed a terrific con-
cussion swept him into the abyss of unconsciousness....
His first thought, when he awakened, was of the girl.
But he was alone in the silence of the canyon. He sat up,
realizing that many hours had passed, for the air .was
growing cool again, and the sun was low behind the peak
147

at the head of the ravine. The huge, mysterious machine of
the purple ring and the vibrating white needle were blazing
splendidly.
He took more detailed stock of his immediate surroun-
dings. The tangle of brush that had sheltered them had
been cut away by the green annihilating ray. Charred
stumps remained to show where it had fired bushes
beyond the trail. His own shoulder was blistered, a hole
was burned in the sheet wound about him, and the hair
was singed from the back of his head.
Suddenly trembling with horror, he looked about for
anything to show that Helen had perished by the ray.
Discovering nothing, he breathed a sigh of relief.
'She must be still alive, anyhow,' he muttered. 'And I've
had another lucky break! The ray was too high to get me.
They must have left me for dead.'
Presently he became conscious of torturing thirst. He
retired through the brush, along the rocky wall of the
canyon. By sunset he came upon a little natural basin in a
rock, half full of rain water. It was none too clean, but he
drank his fill of it, and felt relief.
Looking up the canyon, he could see the great
mechanism on the peak, gleaming in the dusk. Intensely-
glowing purple mist clung about the great metal ring, and
the slender, delicate needle swung below it, still vibrating,
still throbbing with brilliant, white radiance. It pointed at
the red eye of Mars, which had just winked into view.
Dan stared at it a long time.
'It all sounds crazy,' he muttered, 'but it isn't! The
Master Intelligence of Mars, she said, is controlling the
mechanical things through that! The doom of the Earth is
coming through that white needle! If only I could smash it,
somehow!'
He looked down at the white folds of the sheet that
draped him, and clenched his hands impotently. 'No gun!
Not even a pocket-knife. Nothing but my bare hands!' He
bit his lip.
148

Still he stared challengingly at the gleaming mechanism
on the peak. An idea slowly took form in his mind; an
exclamation abruptly escaped him. Narrowly he eyed the
trussed girders of the silver towers which supported the
great ring, muttering to himself.
'Yes, I can do it! If I don't get caught! I can climb it,
well enough. The needle looks a bit frail. I should be able
to smash it! I'd like to see Helen again, though.'
He gathered the sheet around him, and began picking a
cautious way up the canyon, staying always in the cover
of boulders or brush. A few times he disturbed a rock, or
snapped a twig beneath his foot. Then he waited out of
sight for long minutes, though he had no reason to believe
that the metal monsters were on the alert for him.
'I've got to do it! The world depends on it!' he kept
saying again and again in his mind.
The quick darkness of the tropics had fallen almost
before he started. But he welcomed the night, for, if it
made his own silent progress more difficult, it reduced the
hazard that he would be discovered.
Gauging the time by the slow wheeling of the diamond-
like stars across the velvet sky, he thought that two hours
had passed when he reached the head of the canyon. He
stood up cautiously to survey the little plateau at the
summit of the hill.
It was several acres in extent, quite level, and almost
clear of vegetation. At the farther side was a pile of
wreckage, which, he supposed, had been the quarters of
Dr. Hunter's party, before they had been destroyed.
Many huge machines stood about the plateau, vast,
dark masses looming in the starlight. Mostly they were
either not running or very silent in operation; but a very
deep, vibrant humming sound came from one near him.
Smaller shapes were moving about them, with long easy
leaps. These, he knew, were the mechanical monsters,
though it was too dark to distinguish them.
But by far the most prominent object upon the plateau
149

was the enormous, gleaming thing that Helen had said was
the station over which came the signals from the Master
Intelligence on Mars. One of its three towers sprang up
not far from where he stood. The huge, refulgent ring,
swathed in its mist of purple fire, was a full hundred feet
above him; and the slender needle, pulsing with white
flame, swinging within and below the colossal ring, was
itself a hundred feet in length.
The white needle, for all its length, seemed hardly
thicker than a man's finger. It was mounted at the top of a
curiously complex and delicate-looking device that spread
broadly out between the three towers, below the center of
the huge purple ring.
Dan looked at it and decided that his plan had at least a
chance of success — though he had no hope that it would
not be fatal to him.
Quickly and silently he ran to the base of the mighty
silver towers nearest him and began to climb the side
toward the ravine, where the maze of girders would hide
him, at least partially, from any watchers back on the
plateau. The starlight and the faint weird radiance of the
purple ring above sufficed to guide him.
The cross-braces on the girder he had chosen were
spaced closely enough to serve as the rungs of a ladder.
Dan climbed easily, pausing twice for breath, and to look
down at the dark plateau. The vast, humming machines
loomed up strangely in the pale purple light that fell from
the gleaming ring.
Once he looked across toward the other side of the
island. The surface there was more level. He glimpsed tiny
moving lights, and huge stationary masses, apparently as
large as ocean liners. He had an impression of a vast
amount of mechanical activity, proceeding in the darkness
very rapidly, and in a silent and orderly fashion.
'The expeditionary force of the Master Intelligence of
Mars,' he thought, 'preparing to set out against humanity!
And what I can do is the only chance to stop it!'
150

He climbed again with renewed energy. A few yards
more brought him to the colossal metal ring. Resting upon
the three towers, it was a circular band of shining metal a
fott thick and as wide as a road. The intense purple glow
extended several feet from its surface.
Dan touched it tentatively. He felt a tingling electric
shock. And he thought he could feel a radiation coming
from it, giving him a curious sensation of cold. As he
reached his hands up and grasped the upper edge of the
great ring, he felt what seemed a physical current of cold.
Controlling his tendency to shiver, he climbed upon the
last brace, and, lifting his weight with his hands, threw
himself face down upon the flat upper surface of the vast
ring. He lay bathed in cold purple fire. He tingled with the
chill of it. A frozen current seemed to penetrate his body.
Involuntarily he trembled, lost his grip and dangled pre-
cariously from the rim.
Only a frantic scrambling restored his hold. Then, fighting
the sensation of freezing cold that came from the mist of
purple flame, he drew himself forward and got to his feet upon
the broad surface of the metal ring. On both sides it curved
away like a circular track. Red-violet fire shimmered about
it, bathing him to the waist in a chilling torrent.
Through coruscating frozen flame he waded to the
inner rim of the colossal ring. Below him hung the needle,
a mere straight line of white fire, a hundred feet in length.
Eye-dazzling radiance scintillated along it, waxing and
waning with a curious throbbing rhythm. The needle
vibrated a little, but it pointed directly at the red point of
Mars, now almost directly overhead.
Repressing a shudder, Dan looked down at the complex
and delicate apparatus upon which the slender needle was
mounted. It was a light frame of white metal bars, with
spidery coils and huge glowing tubes and flimsy spinning
disks mounted in it. The gleaming needle was mounted
much like a telescope at the top of the device, fully fiftv
feet below him.
151

'Looks flimsy enough,' Dan muttered. 'I'll go through it
like a sixteen-inch shell! Who would have thought I'd end
this way!'
He stepped back for a moment, and stood on the
polished metal, hidden to the waist in cold purple flame.
Lest it impede his movements, he tore the sheet from him
and threw it aside. He let his eyes sweep for a last time
over the familiar constellations blazing so splendidly in the
black sky above. He had a pang of heartache, as if the
stars were old friends. His glance roved fondly over the
dark, indistinct masses of the island, and across the black
plain of the sea.
'Well, no good in waiting,' he muttered again. 'Sorry I
can't see Helen. Hope she gets off all right.'
He backed to the outer rim and drew a deep breath, like
one about to dive. Then, with set face, he sprinted
forward. As he did so a blinding flash of green light
flickered up before him. He ducked his head and leapt
from the inner edge of the vast glowing ring.
For long seconds, it seemed, he was plunging down
through space, feet first. Air rushed screaming about his
ears. But his mind was quite calm, and registered an
astonishingly large series of impressions.
He saw the delicate, gleaming machine rushing up to
meet him, the shimmering white needle swung on its top.
He took in the silent, dark plateau, with the masses of
the great machines rising like ominous shadows here and
there, and the mechanical monsters leaping busily about
it, almost invisible in the dim, ghostly radiance that fell
from the purple ring.
He saw a vivid flame of green reach up past him from
somewhere below. He knew, without emotion or alarm,
that he had been discovered, and that it was too late for
his discoverers to stop him.
He found time, even, for a fleeting thought of death. His
mind framed the question, 'What will I be in a moment
from now?'
152

Then he had struck the great white needle, and was
crashing into the delicate apparatus below it. Waves of
pain beat upon his mind like flashes of blinding light. But
his last mental image, as he passed into oblivion, was a
picture of Helen's face. Oddly, it was not her face as he
had seen it, but a reproduction of the old newspaper
half-tone, curiously retouched with life and color.
There is little more to tell. It was some weeks later
when Dan came back out of a world of delirium and
dreams, to find himself lying on his back in a tent, very
much bandaged. He was alone at the moment, and at
first could not recall that tremendous last day of his
conscious life.
Then he heard a thrillingly familiar feminine voice
calling 'Kitty, kitty, kitty.' He tried to move, a dull pain
throbbed in his breast, and a groan escaped him. In a
moment Helen appeared; a gray kitten was forgotten. She
looked very anxious and solicitous - and also, Dan
thought, very beautiful.
'No, no!' she cried. 'You are going to be all right! Dad
made me learn a little elementary medicine before we
came here, and I know. But you mustn't speak! Not for
days yet! I'll have to guess what you want. And you can
wink when I guess the right thing.
'Gee, but I'm glad you've come to! You'll be as well as
ever, pretty soon. The kitten was lots of comfort. Still —'
Dan attempted to move. She leaned over him, shifted
his weight and smoothed the sheet with strong, capable
hands. 'You want to know about what happened to the
machine monsters?'
He winked.
'Well, you remember when they found us, and shot the
green ray at us. They left you there - I thought you were
dead — and carried me up here on the hill. Perhaps they
wanted me for a laboratory subject to test the green ray
on, or something of the kind. Anyhow, they carried me
into a big shed filled with strange machines.
153

'They kept me there until that night. Then, all of a
sudden, they all — stopped! They froze! They were dead!
'The tentacles of the one that was holding me were set
about me. But I worked free, and got out of the shed. It
took all night. And when I came out, just at sunrise, I saw
that the purple fire was gone from the great ring. The
needle was knocked down, and the apparatus smashed.
'I found you there in the wreckage. You made a human
bullet of yourself to smash it! The greatest thing a man
ever did!'
Though normally rather modest, Dan felt a glow of
pride at the honest admiration ringing in her clear voice,
and shining from her warm brown eyes.
'So I gathered up what was left of you,' she went on,
'and tried to put you back together again. A good many
bones were broken, and you had more cuts and bruises
than I could mention; but the apparatus had broken the
force of the fall, and you were still alive. You are
remarkably well put together, I should say; and unusually
lucky, as well!
'And, well, the machines and apparatus are scattered
about all over the island. Every one of them stopped the
instant you smashed the connection with the directing
intelligence on Mars. There'll be quite a stir in the
scientific world, I imagine, in about three weeks, when the
yacht comes and carries us back with a lot of plans and
specimens. We must send about a thousand engineers
back here to study what we leave behind us.
'And do you want anything else?' She bent over and
watched his bandaged face. Looking up into her bright
eyes, thrilling to the cool, comforting pressure of her hand
on his forehead, Dan reflected. Then he winked.
'Something you want me to do?'
He winked.
'When? Right now?'
No response.
'After the yacht comes?'
154

He winked.
'What is it?' She looked him in the eye, blushed a little,
and laughed. 'You mean —'
Dan winked.
*
I'm struck now with the contrast in theme between 'The
Cosmic Express' and 'The Doom from Planet 4.' Though
they were written only a year apart, their attitudes toward
technology are sharply opposite. The first story accepts
progress as a good thing and pokes fun at the primitivistic
longing to escape from a mechanized world.
'The Doom from Planet 4' reverses everything.
Machines are the enemy, threatening to mechanize the
Earth for the Master Intelligence of Mars. The human
hero, empty-handed and nearly empty-minded, making a
living bullet of his own body, becomes a symbol of pure
primitivism.
When I wrote the stories, of course, I was simply trying
to write good pulp fiction, with no thought of symbolism.
As a professor of English now, I'm more alert to themes.
Especially, I'm concerned with the increasing pessimism
I've seen in science fiction since 1926, and I'm a little
surprised to find technology-as-demon emphasized so
clearly in such an early story of my own.
My next project was a little more ambitious. In
emulation of Doc Smith's 'Skylark of Space,' I had
decided to try a space epic of my own. My hero was
named Dick Smith, after Doc's Richard Seaton and Doc
himself. The story was The btone from the Green Star,
my first full-length novel. The file card shows that it was
written in the month from November 25 to December 24,
1930. Argosy rejected it with a comment, 'plot not strong
enough,' and I mailed it to Amazing on January 30.
The wheels there moved as deliberately as usual.
Miriam Boune wrote me in May that it stood a good
chance, but did not accept it until August. It was paid for
155

in September - $350 for 60,000 words - and published in
the issues for October and November, with beautiful
covers to feature both installments.
Trying valiantly to follow the pattern of such pulp
giants as Max Brand and Edgar Rice Burroughs, I was
still submitting first drafts, except that I usually turned
back from the end to sharpen a few pages of the opening.
At the time, this effort seemed successful. The Stone from
the Green Star had a good reception — it seems to be
remembered fondly even now by such then-youthful
readers as Fred Pohl.
But I presently discovered that I was no Max Brand.
Though I could write four thousand words a day while a
story was in production, I needed time for emotional
recharge before I could do the next one. Hard as I tried, I
could turn out only one novel a year. As my aims changed
and my own standards rose, I found myself doing more
and more revision - so much sometimes that I'm afraid
the original vigor was spoiled by my tinkering.
'Twelve Hours to Live!, however, was another first-
draft story, written on March 10, 1931, as a technical
experiment. Studying great short stories and books on
how to write them, I had come upon Frank R. Stockton's
'The Lady or the Tiger?' What I tried to do was to
translate this classic into science fiction.
Mailed on March 15, the story was accepted on March
23 for Wonder Stories. For Gernsback, that was a
remarkably quick response. It was published in the
August issue, with the title featured on the cover. The
editors solved the problem of the Stockton ending by
running a prize contest for the best conclusion to be
suggested by a reader.
156

TWELVE HOURS TO LIVE!
Wearily, Captain David Grant paced the bridge, pausing
at intervals to peer out with heavy-lidded eyes at the
star-studded blackness of interplanetary space, beyond the
small round observation ports.
For three days the Queen of Night, Grant's rocket liner,
had been pursued by the implacable vandal of the inter-
stellar void, the Black Hawk.
For three days Captain Grant had kept his great
space-liner, with her rich cargo of uranium salts from the
mines on the outer satellite of Neptune and her hundreds
of passengers, ahead of the questing disintegrator rays of
the Black Hawk only by burning his full battery of
reaction-motors at their maximum power.
And the fuel was almost gone — word had just come
from the rocket rooms that the last chest of the radioactive
protonite had been opened. In a few minutes the great liner
would be at the questionable mercy of the Black Hawk.
Slowly the vibrant humming of the motors, which had
filled the great ship with a vital under-current of sound,
died away.
The black pointer which indicated reaction-pressure
crept back across its dial toward zero.
The Queen of Night was no longer accelerating her
speed.
Watching keenly with tired eyes, Grant saw a vague
pink glow come into being in the jet, star-sprinkled sky
behind. 'Done for!' he groaned.
The glow, he knew, was a fluorescent, electronic dis-
charge in the radioactive gases jetting from the rockets of
a racing ship. The Black Hawk was swiftly overtaking
them!
'Man the rays!'
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The Captain spoke the order into the black mouthpiece
below the television screen. He tried in vain to keep
hopelessness from his voice. For what chance had the two
feeble ray tubes of the Queen of Night, against the
powerful armament of the Black Hawkl
His mate's square face appeared on the screen.
'Man the rays it is, sir,' came his voice.
Captain Grant turned quickly away, for he heard a
light footstep and a snatch of gay song from beyond the
bridge-room's entrance.
The oval metal door swung open suddenly, and a gay,
laughing sprite danced through.
'Nell! Nell! Darling -' the captain cried and his voice
suddenly choked.
The radiant being ran across to him; in a moment his face
was buried in a fragrant mass of gleaming red-gold hair.
It was Captain Grant's lovely bride, whom he had
married just before the beginning of the voyage. He had
not told her of the vandal pursuing them — it had seemed
to him a crime to blast her joyous happiness with helpless
anxiety.
'What's the matter, Dave dear?' came her voice, half
smothered in his embrace. 'You seem worried lately — and
you've been busy in here for three days and nights. You
must sleep!'
'Look!' the Captain said, and pointed out through a
port.
A thin sword of green stabbed across the blackness of
the sky, darting like a wicked blade toward the liner.
'Oh, it's lovely!' she cried. 'What is it, a comet?'
His face grew white, his jaws set, lambent flame glowed
in his blue eyes. His arms tightened fiercely about her.
'Nell, darling!' he cried.
He looked away, swallowed. In a moment he went on.
'I haven't told you, but the Black Hawk is after us. For
three days we have been running for our lives. And it
begins to look as if we have lost the race. You know what
158

it means - the Black Hawk! I didn't tell you; I didn't want
you to worry.'
Brown eyes looked up at him, wide with alarm.
'The Black Hawk! The pirate?' she cried. 'But don't
worry, Dave -1 know you can fight him off!'
Captain Grant's eyes suddenly glistened, and he had to
swallow again. He drew her close, kissed her shining mass
of hair, her sweet face.
'Yes, we'll fight,' he said fiercely. 'We'll fight. And now
you must go back below, dear. The bridge is too exposed,
too dangerous.'
'No, no!' she cried. 'I'd rather stay with you.'
Gently, he pushed her through the door.
Brushing the moisture from his eyes, he sprang back to
the television screen, and began to give orders for the
coming combat.
The humming song of the motors ceased. The indicator
needle swung back to zero. The fuel was exhausted. The
liner, drifting helpless, was completely at the mercy of the
pursuing pirate.
And the pinkish glow in the sky behind grew more
distinct, with the black outline of the pirate vessel in its
center.
Again and again, searching fingers of green flame
reached out of that black ship. Green lances searching for
the liner, to disintegrate the atoms of her armor into
brown atomic dust, to cut away her walls so that the vital
air would rush out, leaving passengers and crew
asphyxiated in a frozen vacuum.
'Hold our fire,' Grant ordered. 'That's the only chance -
wait until they are in easy range.'
Minutes throbbed by.
The Black Hawk hurtled on toward the liner, until the
sinister curves of its ebon hull were plainly visible.
Three times the green tongues of the pirate's dis-
integrating rays swept across the helpless ship. But the
159

hull was not broken; the pirate sought to plunder rather
than to destroy.
Captain Grant nervously paced the bridge. Each time
the blasting green fire of the enemy rays had fallen upon
them, he had turned uncertainly toward the television
screen, with the order to fire trembling on his lips.
And each time he had checked himself.
'Wait, wait!' he had muttered again and again. 'Not
yet!'
At last the trim ebon length of the pirate vessel was
close beside the liner, airfoils folded to her smooth hull,
little jets of rosy flame hissing occasionally from her
rockets to hold her in position.
'Do you surrender?' the query flicked from the helio-
graph of the enemy - a swinging mirror reflecting the light
of the distant sun.
'Fire!' Captain Grant shouted toward his television
screen, by way of answer.
The lone bow turret of the Queen of Night swung
suddenly about. Twin narrow tongues of bright fire flashed
from it like lances of emerald. The black hull of the pirate
shone green where they struck.
A dreadful reply came from the Black Hawk.
Myriad arrowed rays leapt from her black length,
sparkling jets of green radiance. They converged upon the
silver-armored turret from which stabbed the two
defensive beams.
Brown powder swirled away from the turret — neutronic
dust, matter annihilated as such, when its electrons had
been hurled into their central protons by the ray.
The turret glowed green, crumpled, vanished.
A swirl of brown dust clouded the blackness of space.
Captain Grant groaned, and clutched the edge of an
instrument panel until his knuckles shone white.
'Do you surrender?' the heliograph flashed again.
The captain made no move to reply. But he was without
resource. He could neither fight nor run. He could merely
160

pace up and down the bridge like a caged animal, as he
watched the tiny auxiliary rockets putting off from the
pirate, and darting across toward the liner, under cover of
the threatening rays.
He was helpless as they fastened themselves upon the
liner with magnetic clamps, and began cutting openings
through her hull. He could only have the ship's meager
supply of hand arms served out, and the crew stationed to
repel the invaders.
The fighting was bloody but hopeless. Half an hour
later the Queen of Night was in the hands of the individual
who gave the same grim name, the Black Hawk, to
himself and his ship alike.
Nell had come back to the bridge. She and the captain
had barred the door. They were in each other's arms when
it was broken down.
To Captain Grant's surprise, he and his bride were
treated with elaborate, though mocking, courtesy. They
were conducted to one of the auxiliary rockets attached
to the doomed liner, and transported across to the black
ship.
When the little vessel had slipped through the airlocks
of the larger one, and they stepped from it, and the Black
Hawk himself greeted them.
A tall man, suavely polite, immaculately attired. His
hair was long, lustrous, silken, brilliantly black.
Even his eyes, cold and mocking, were black as jet.
He bowed deliberately to Nell, and seized Captain
Grant's hand with effusive mocking cordiality.
'Congratulations, Captain,' he cried in a voice that was
low, cold, and toneless. 'Your defense was excellent,
considering the disadvantages under which you struggled.
Your flight, with the clever twists to evade me! Your
cleverness in withholding your fire to the last moment!
You have given me the most diverting hours I have had in
months. I am deeply in your debt.'
'Thank you,' the Captain said, ironically.
161

'I assure you that I really owe you much,' the Black
Hawk insisted. 'I see that you doubt my sincerity. To
prove it, shall I grant some request for you?'
The lean, dark face of the pirate twisted into a cold,
mocking smile that was almost a leer.
'Honestly, do you mean it?' the captain demanded, with
eagerness and doubt mingled in his tone.
'Certainly. But name your wish.'
'Will you spare my wife — take her back to some
civilized planet?'
For long seconds, the dark visaged man stared at the
captain and his lovely bride. Suddenly he appeared to
think of something that pleased him hugely, for his white
teeth gleamed in a sinister smile, and his black eyes
Oashed diabolically.
'With all my heart!' his cold voice cried. 'And since I
fear the lady would find little joy in a life without you, I
shall also set you at liberty!'
With tears of joy in his eyes, the captain grasped the
Black Hawk's cold hand.
'Come,' the pirate said. 'Forget the favor, if such it is.
You have earned it. Your wife will be shown to her rooms,
and we shall watch the fate of those prisoners who were
not so fortunate as yourself.'
The Black Hawk led Captain Grant away through the
rocket's maze of passages, and a servant guided Nell to a
luxurious stateroom.
The Captain will never forget the horror of what
followed.
The mocking saturnine pirate conducted him into a
domed room, whose curved walls and roof glistened with
silvery brilliance.
The floor of that room was transparent crystal. Beneath
was a large circular compartment, without visible open-
ings. Its floor was covered with a curious red substance, in
oddly shaped masses. Grant shuddered as he saw those
162

crumbling red forms. They looked weirdly like decayed
statues — they were horrible travesties of human shapes.
'The space below us,' the Black Hawk explained, in his
chill, mocking voice, 'contains a certain variety of crimson
fungus. The original spores came from the jungles of the
third satellite of Neptune.
'The fungi, you know, are a group of thallophytic
plants, of which molds and mushrooms are members.
They are devoid of the chlorophyll to which green plants
owe their color. Reproduction is largely by means of
asexual spores. A characteristic is the great speed with
which some varieties grow.
'This particular type has a peculiar avidity for human
flesh, and grows with unprecedented speed. It amuses me
to watch its development upon the bodies of my less
fortunate captives. But watch the results for yourself!'
A panel had suddenly slid open into the space below the
crystal floor. A man, stripped to the waist, whom the
captain recognized as a luckless engineer from his crew,
was thrown into the strange room. The panel instantly
closed.
The naked man fell on his face in a cloud of red dust. In
a moment he stumbled to his feet, coughing, gasping,
strangling, beating wildly at his face.
The Black Hawk touched a lever that seemed to close
the circuit of a microphone. Instantly the captain heard a
scream of insupportable agony from below.
The man below the crystal floor darted madly through
the red dust, hammered wildly on the walls with bare fists,
shrieking, moaning, pleading for aid, praying.
Suddenly his tortured body stiffened, grew rigid.
Curious masses of scarlet filaments or hypha, resembling
tufts of red hair, sprang from nostrils, eyes, and ears.
Crimson growth spread swiftly, until the body seemed
covered with red fur.
And in a few moments it fell over, crumbling, with a
crimson cloud of spores swirling about it.
163

'What do you think of my hobby?' The Black Hawk
inquired with a taunting smile.
Captain Grant was sick with horror.
'You — you demon!' he choked.
Blind rage suddenly overcame his shuddering horror.
Clenching a fist, he swung abruptly upon the Satanic
pirate.
The Black Hawk's hand came up swiftly, holding a tiny
but deadly ray tube.
'You forget yourself, Captain,' he said. 'Remember that
I promised to spare you and your wife from undergoing
the little ceremony we just witnessed. Do not make me
recall that promise.'
The captain fell back before the menace of the weapon,
suddenly weak and trembling.
'Let me out of this infernal place,' he muttered.
The Black Hawk called a steward to show him to his
room.
For a week Captain Grant and his wife were enforced
guests of the pirate, treated with deliberate, if taunting,
courtesy.
The black rocket, laden with plunder, continued her
restless cruise of the void.
Then, after a night of troubled sleep, the captain awoke
to find Nell gone from the luxurious stateroom which they
occupied.
At once, he sought the Black Hawk, who greeted him
with his usual half-sneering politeness.
'Your wife is slightly unwell,' his cold tone informed
Captain Grant. 'She has the attention of my specialists.
You need fear nothing on her account.
'And you will be interested,' he added, 'to know that we
are soon to part. In a few hours we enter the atmosphere
of the planet Venus. You and your wife will be landed
there today. I regret that I must lose your companionship.'
'Whatever happens to me, please don't harm Nell,' the
captain pleaded.
164

'My word is still good,' the Black Hawk said coldly.
Several hours later, somewhat to the surprise of
Captain Grant, the rocket landed on firm ground. He was
assisted from the port, and looked about anxiously.
The slender black hull of the rocket lay on a bare sandy
beach. Above it rose a barren gray rock. A vast waste of
green-grey ocean stretched away in all directions. Dense
gray clouds filled the sky.
The tall form of the Black Hawk stepped out beside
him. 'An island on the planet Venus,' he said. 'It's less
than a thousand miles to the city of Thalong, from which
aid can reach you.'
'But my wife —' the captain cried.
'Here she is.'
The Black Hawk pointed to two large chests, of a white,
silvery metal, which the crew were busy lowering through the
port. In a moment they lay side by side on the sandy beach.
'Your wife is in one of them,' the pirate said, with a
demoniac smile. 'She is under a mild anaesthetic which
will keep her sleeping quietly for twelve hours. The chest
contains sufficient air to last her that long, and no longer.
It contains also a supply of food and water, and a portable
radio transmitter, with which you may summon aid. The
chest is not locked — you have merely to lift the lid.'
'And the other chest?' The captain's voice was anxious.
'Ah! the other chest!' The Black Hawk smiled. 'The
other chest! It is filled with spores of crimson fungus. If
you, by any unfortunate mistake, open it, a cloud of the
spores will instantly fly out and settle on your skin. You
will meet the fate of the man we watched through the
crystal floor.'
'Which chest -' Captain Grant cried, his voice
trembling.
'Ah yes, which chest!' The Black Hawk's suave tone
replied. 'That is for you to decide. Remember your wife
will live only twelve hours, if the chest is not opened. And
good-by, my friend.'
165

Leaving Captain Grant shaken and speechless, the
pirate of space sprang back through the port. Roseate
flame hissed from the exhaust nozzles of the long black
ship. It leapt up to vanish in the gray clouds.
The captain was left alone with the chests.
They seemed identical in every respect. The ornate
pattern engraved in the silvery metal was the same on each
chest. They were roughly three feet square by six in length.
The captain fell furiously to examining them. He could
detect no faintest difference. He held his ear against each,
in hope that some faint sound of breathing might reach
him, to reveal which held his precious Nell. But he heard
nothing.
He left the chests and walked anxiously up and down
the beach, gazing wildly over the vast desert of water,
staring into the gray gloom of the sky. Many times his
heart leapt, as he thought he glimpsed a distant rocket
plane. And always it fell again, when he found his
eagerness had deceived him.
He turned again to the bright chests, lying side by side
on the white sand. He ran from the one to the other
listening, feeling them, even tugging a little at the lids.
His brain was a wild chaos of wonder. Suppose the
Black Hawk had tricked him? Suppose the chests were
empty? Suppose both contained the fatal spores? Suppose
his lovely Nell were in one and the food and radio set in
the other?
Again he walked up and down beside them, thinking
madly. Hours went by, and he must soon release his wife
or she would be suffocated.
Impulsively, he bent to raise the lid of the nearest.
His eyes caught fine letters engraved on the edge of the
silvery lid.
'the other one.'
The Black Hawk had cut it there. A warning. Captain
Grant ran to the other chest. But with his hand on the lid,
166

he paused, trembling, his body clammy with a cold sweat.
Might the warning be false? Had the letters been cut
there to cause him to open the deadly chest? Or did the
pirate intend the words to save his life?
He ran back toward the first chest, he stopped, and
collapsed in a trembling heap. Cold sweat chilled him; a
strange dizziness came over him, his throat was dry; he
trembled.
But the time was up — he must delay no longer. He
tottered to his feet, ran back to the chest without the
warning, tugged at the lid. Dizzy weakness overcame him.
'A trick,' he muttered.
He turned and staggered to the other, and grasped the
lid. The inscribed words, 'the other one' caught his eye
again. He recoiled as from a deadly snake.
He ran away from the chests, stumbling across the
sand, eyes wild with fear. He imagined the swift red mold
growing over him, choking him, converting him into a
rotting, crumbling mass.
He would not open the chest! There was a fair chance
that he would be discovered by some passing air-liner
before he starved to death.
Then the hideous vision of the death of the scarlet
fungus was dispelled by a picture of Nell as she had been
on the recent wedding day. Happy, singing, gloriously
lovely, devoted to him. She was in one of the chests,
suffocating. He could not let her die!
He rushed back to the chest with the warning on it. As
his fingers sought the lid, he imagined the sudden swirl of
red spores, the agonizing pain he would suffer as the quick
growth entered his lungs, covered his body, choking him,
piercing him with swift-growing rootlets.
Trembling weakness overcame him. He staggered back,
wiping cold perspiration from his brow with the back of
his hand.
For a moment he paused, irresolute. Then he pictured
Nell, awaking in the coffin-like prison, beating weakly
167

against its walls, gasping for breath, dying. He staggered
toward the other chest, hesitated, ran back to the one with
the warning words.
With a sudden convulsive effort, he tugged at the heavy
lid....
*
My translation of Stockton's classic story is not complete,
as I see now. The Black Hawk should have had a
seductive, headstrong daughter. She should have been
struck with a wild passion for Captain Grant and a
jealous hatred for his bride. She should have been
tormented by the hard choice between surrendering him to
her rival or condemning him to death. The tantalizing
warning scratched on the chest should have reflected her
unguessable decision. No such objections came, however,
from the editors of Wonder Stories in 1931.
Though the great depression had gripped the country
by then, my writing income rose that year to $1,267.
Harry Bates bought two more shorts. In 'The Pygmy
Planet' the hero makes a flight down through size to visit a
tiny artificial world created in a laboratory. It was
featured in Astounding for February 1932, with another
lovely Wesso cover. 'Salvage in Space' will be reprinted
below.
My largest check that year came from another Clayton
pulp, Strange Tales, for 'Wolves of Darkness.' Another
first-draft story, one that almost wrote itself, it was a
twenty-five-thousand-word shocker about creatures of
darkness that break through from another space to seize the
bodies of animals and people. Harry Bates sent me $500 for
it and a three-word note, 'God is love.' It was featured in the
issue for January 1932, with a terrifying Wesso cover that
showed the half-nude heroine kneeling on the moonlit snow,
embracing two snarling, green-eyed wolves.
I wrote that in April. In the first two weeks of May I
completed another novelette, 'The Lady of Light,' which
168

was rejected by Argosy and Astounding, but finally pub-
lished in Amazing for September 1932, earning $125.
Suddenly rich, I joined Ed Hamilton that summer for a
boat trip down the Mississippi. A couple of years older
than I, Hamilton had been I think the most prolific and
popular Weird Tales writer since about 1926. We had got
in touch through a fan named Jerome Siegel, later dis-
tinguished as a cocreator of Superman, but we met face to
face for the first time in a Minneapolis hotel.
He had been dreaming of a houseboat trip. When that
seemed impractical, we started down the river in a
fourteen-foot boat with an outboard motor. Neither of us
had ever been in such a craft. We almost ran it under a
barge and almost capsized it when we steered too close to
the first steamboat we met. At Vicksburg, with the motor
worn out, we sold the boat and went on to New Orleans
aboard the old Tennessee Belle, a craft straight from Mark
Twain.
After all the mishaps, we were still good friends. I later
made several long visits to his home in western Pennsyl-
ania; he came to New Mexico, and we spent the winter of
1932/33 on the beach of Key West, living there near
Ernest Hemingway's place in a house with its own cistern
and its own tropical orchard that we rented in those
depression days for eight dollars a month. (Hemingway
was hunting lions in Africa.)
Back in New Mexico, I wrote several novelettes and
spent most of the winter on another novel. 'The Moon
Era,' featured on the cover of Wonder Stories for
February 1932, was one of the last and no doubt the best
of my first-draft stories. It has already been reprinted in
two Doubleday books, Sam Moskowitz's Three Stories
(1967) and Asimov's Before the Golden Age (1974). Its
chief innovation is the character of the Mother, I think one
of the first sympathetic space aliens in science fiction.
Another novelette was 'The Wand of Doom,' a horror
story with local color I had picked up along the
169

Mississippi. Revised after rejection by Strange Tales, it
became my first sale to Weird Tales, published in the
October issue, 1932.
1 recall Farnsworth Wright, its long-time editor, with a
special fondness. Though the contents ranged from mag-
nificent to awful, Weird Tales had a spell of fantastic
strangeness that justified its claim to be 'the unique
magazine.' I think it was never very profitable, but Wright
paid an honest cent a word on publication.
As unique as the magazine, Wright was being slowly
disabled by Parkinson's disease. The solemn look of his
stiffened features concealed a ribald humor and a
generous interest in his writers. Something of a scholar, he
wanted to edit Shakespeare. I still prize my copy of A
Midsummer Night's Dream, which he published as the
first volume of Wright's Shakespeare Library in pulp
magazine format. Fortunately, he also liked my work. He
told me 'The Wand of Doom' was the most popular story
he had run in two years, and I recall good visits to his
office and his home.
'Red Slag of Mars' was a third novelette, written in
January of 1932 for Wonder Stories Quarterly and
printed in the spring issue for that year. Remotely based
on a plot submitted in a contest, it develops the notion that
the quarreling peoples of Earth might unite themselves to
face an invented external menace. A notion still alive, I
see, in current science fiction.
But my chief project, that winter, was the novel Golden
Blood. That was before I built my own small cabin on the
ranch, and I remember working till dawn, night after
night, by a kerosene lamp in the family living room, after
everyone else was in bed.
The setting was the Arabian desert, which I had never
seen. My interest in the oriental had been excited by the
Weird Tales writers, especially by E. Hoffman Price. I
culled details from travel books and sprinkled the narra-
tive a bit too freely with phrases of third-hand Arabic.
170

In a serious effort to break into Argosy, I constructed
the story as a six-part serial, with a dramatic break at the
end of each 10,000-word installment. After a good deal of
cutting and revising, I re-typed the whole manuscript. This
was the first time I had ever spent so much time on a
story, and I mailed it out with high hopes.
As usual, however, Argosy returned it, even though the
editors liked 'the nice color.' I sent it to Wright. He
accepted it promptly and ran it in Weird Tales for the
months of April through September 1933. The first two
parts had stunning covers by J. Allen St. John, the great
Burroughs illustrator, and the readers applauded it.
'The Plutonian Terror' is included here as the first of the
'weird-scientific' short stories I did for Weird Tales.
Though I can find no file card, it must have been written in
1932. It was printed in the issue for October 1933,
following the last part of Golden Blood. At 9,000 words, it
brought $90.
171

THE PLUTONIAN TERROR
The strange, dead silence of the ether was the first grim
hint of unconceived catastrophe.
Back to Earth the first explorers of space were slanting,
returning from a perilous year on the barren moon, eager
to feel again the poignant joys of human intercourse.
Through the transparent ports of the Cosmobile's steel-
domed bridge, the two first adventurers of the void
scanned with proud joy their native planet. They were
nearing home!
Earth swam before them, a swelling green-blue sphere,
swathed indistinctly in the misty radiance of its atmos-
phere. Soft and warm and bright it shone, against the
startiing, frozen, eternal blackness of the star-set universal
void. The foreboding sense of ruthlessly alien cosmic
immensities was strong in them; and they yearned for the
welcoming arms of Earth, with keenest nostalgia for the
world that held all they owned and had known and loved.
'Oh, Ellis,' little Keening whispered through the white
bandages that masked his face, 'aren't we in radio range?'
'Why, that's right, we are!' cried the tall young
engineer. 'Try it. We had fair reception this far, on the
outward trip.'
So the smaller man withdrew his eyes from the supernal
panorama of cosmic space, and donned the head-phones
of the compact little set built in the top of the chart-table.
Impatiently he manipulated the dials, and at last cast aside
the headset in exasperation.
'Not a thing,' he whispered. 'Quiet as the grave.'
'Queer,' Ellis muttered. 'There should be something
This far out we got a dozen stations —'
Keening's dry, muffled whisper cut him short.
'That! What is it?
172

The little man pointed out into the void, and Ellis saw
the cube. A silvery cube, bright, sharp-edged, hung in the
ebon depth of space. It looked small, and far off, so that it
was not prominent among the still stars. Yet its sunward
faces shimmered, and it crept across the firmament.
Unmistakably cuboid it was, and relatively near.
Ellis hastened to consult his star-charts, and Keening
went to the little telescope. A little time they were busy, the
technician whispering his readings through the bandages
over his face, Ellis plotting the position and orbit of the
strange body upon his charts.
'Is there — dangerV Keening whispered, at last.
'It's a hundred miles away, and crossing in front of us.
It will be no nearer. But what is the thing?'
'It looks like a perfect cube, made of silvery metal.
Could it be a ship, you suppose? Like our CosmobileV
'I don't think so. Couldn't be. Why, at a hundred miles'
distance, it must be nearly a mile on a side! I suppose it's
an asteroid.'
'But a cube?' protested Keening. 'An artificial shape.'
'An asteroid that size would be as likely to be a cube as
any other shape - the gravitation of such small bodies
isn't sufficient to make them spherical. As for the color —
it must be white rock.'
'Could we get nearer,' whispered Keening, 'see?'
'No. It's moving too fast. We couldn't overtake it.'
And the cube crept across the ebon sky, and dwindled
to a silvery fleck among the white pin-points that were
stars, and so was lost at last in the trackless and utter
obscurity of the gulf.
Mutely wondering, troubled perhaps with some faint
icy premonition of the unnamed horror that had ridden
into their lives upon the cube, the two of them stood in the
control room, beneath the curve of the Cosmobile's steel
hull, gazing after the mysterious object through the small,
steel-shuttered ports of laminated glass
173

Ellis Drew. Robust, red-headed giant, with the big
hands and the heavy jaw of a fighting-man. The dynamic,
irresistible energy of his large-boned, steel-sinewed body
was reflected in his piercingly blue, wide-set eyes. A man
made for conquest, for defiance of the impossible. No
other sort could have accomplished what he had done.
In six years out of engineering school, his only resource
at the beginning an idea, Ellis Drew had challenged
accepted science, convinced skeptical financiers, met and
conquered a hundred technological impossibilities. He had
created the Cosmobile, and in it, with one companion, he
had dared — victoriously — the uncharted perils of inter-
planetary space.
Keening was the one companion. A martyr to science,
offering, on this mad voyage, his life to the same jealous
mistress who had already robbed him of face and voice. A
slight, frail-looking figure, face always bandaged to
conceal the horror that X-rays had written there.
Toward western America the Cosmobile was dropping.
'Where shall we land?' Keening whispered - the same
incautious experiments, Ellis understood, had cost him his
face and his vocal organs; he never spoke above that dry
and muffled whisper. 'Back in the Mare Island yard, I
suppose, where we started?'
'No, Keening,' Ellis said, slowly. 'No, I want to land at
a house in the foothills east of San Jose.'
The white-bandaged face looked at him curiously.
Ellis was a little while reflectively silent, then he said:
'You see, Keening, a friend of mine lives there. The first
scientific man to recognize that my ether-screw was more
than a dream. Doctor Fredric Durand.'
Keening whispered, 'I see.'
But Ellis was not thinking of Doctor Durand. His
thoughts were all of a girl, the daughter of his friend.
Something of a scientist herself, thanks to her father's
training, she had been actually the first critic Ellis had
convinced; and she had convinced her father.
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More, she had decided to go with Ellis to the moon.
A picture of her came back to him, as she had looked
when she asked to go. Slim and cleanly made, with the
lithe elasticity of the disciplined athlete. Oval face flushed
and eager, gray eyes burning.
'Sorry,' Ellis had told her, disturbed and embarrassed. 'I
can't consider it. Why, you don't understand what you're
proposing. The two of us together alone, for a year!'
'I think I could stand you, Ellis,' said Tempest Durand.
'It isn't that!' he floundered desperately. 'You must
understand, Tempest, I have no animus against you.
Instead, I am deeply grateful, both to you and your father,
for what you have done. In fact,' he stammered, 'I like
you.'
'Then,' Tempest mocked him, 'if it's the conventions
that worry you, why not marry me?'
Going red, Ellis restrained himself from ignominious
flight.
'You must understand, Tempest,' he blundered on,
'There's no place in my life for women. And even if — if I -
I loved you, do you think I'd be willing to take you out to
the moon? To be smashed with a meteor, or asphyxiated,
or frozen to death!'
'You'll find me stowed away on your old CosmobileV
she had challenged him.
And then she began stormily to cry. With a disquieting
feeling that she was weeping just to see the effect upon
him, Ellis had risen and snatched his hat and fled.
It had not been easy to find a companion for the trip.
Cranks in abundance had offered themselves, but none
possessing the scientific training he required. He had come
almost to regret his refusal of the girl's companionship.
Had she spoken of the matter again, he might have thrust
his scruples aside. But she avoided him.
Fortunately, just on the eve of the Cosmobile's
scheduled departure, Keening had come to offer himself.
A trained technician, he possessed the skill that Ellis
175

required. He was willing, he said, to take any risk in the
service of science. Incurable burns, resulting from in-
judicious experimenting with 'hard' or high-frequency
X-rays, had eaten his face away, destroyed his voice. Life
meant nothing to him.
The Cosmobile settled softly into the tangled shrubbery
of die wide, Spanish-style patio of Doctor Fredric
Durand's stuccoed dwelling, secluded in the foothills of
the lovely Santa Clara valley. Ellis's heart was leaping.
Many times, in the long year of exploration upon the
lifeless moon, he had lived over this moment when he
should see Tempest again. For in the loneliness of space
he had seen life more clearly; he realized that women - or
one woman — had gained a place in his being that could
not be denied her.
The Cosmobile was a hollow ball of three-inch steel,
twenty-four feet in diameter, divided horizontally by two
floors or decks. Beneath the lower deck were the banks of
storage batteries, the cylinders of liquid oxygen to keep
the air breathable, and the compact apparatus of the
ether-screw, or, as Ellis termed it in his technical mono-
graph, the 'electro-dynamic geodesic compensator.' Above
the upper floor was the crowded control room. The space
between decks was divided into sleeping-compartments,
storerooms, and galley.
Keening was still working impatiently with the radio.
'Can't get a thing,' he whispered, 'or find anything
wrong with the set. Static as usual. But not a human
voice.'
They descended from the bridge, and opened the
circular valve in the side of the sphere. It was eight feet to
the ground. Ellis dropped the folding metal ladder, and
they climbed down into the patio.
'Hamilton Penn has apparently taken a holiday,' Ellis
observed when they stood beneath the bulging steel hull of
the ether-car. He pointed at the dahlia-beds, neglected,
176

weed-grown, wilted. 'Penn,' he explained, 'was my friend's
negro gardener.'
He remembered Tempest Durand, as he had seen her
standing among the fresh blooms, and looked hopefully
toward the door. But she did not appear. Nor did anyone
else. The house was deserted, burdened with a heavy and
ominous silence.
Wondering, both chilled with fatal apprehension,
thinking of all that can happen in a year, Ellis and
Keening entered the house.
The doors were open. Dust of months had settled upon
the floors. The clock had stopped. In the dining-room a
meal was on the table - but the food, half eaten, was dry,
covered with white dust. The house had not been lived in
for many days.
Keening went to the radio set in the living-room, tried
to tune it. Crackle and sputter of static came from the
speaker, but never a note of music nor a vyhisper of human
speech.
Ominously, the ether was dead.
Then Ellis thought of the telephone and hastened to call
Central. Though he tried for minutes, there was no
response. The wires were also dead!
Together they ran out through the front door, and down
the drive to the road. The valley below was empty of
movement. Wind-smoothed, the road-dust revealed no
mark of wheel. No traffic, obviously, had it known for
many weeks.
'Something,' Ellis muttered, 'is wrong.'
And Keening's whisper echoed,'Dreadfully wrong.'
Back in the steel ball of the Cosmobile, they floated
slowly above the farms and orchards of the lovely Santa
Clara valley. Fruit was unpicked, crops untended.
Strangely lonely was the countryside, and they saw no
human being.
In minutes they were above the roofs of San Jose.
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Below, the streets were empty. The sphere settled into a
deserted thoroughfare. Once more they lowered the metal
ladder, and descended.
The midday sun beat down upon dusty asphalt. As far
as they could see, in either direction, pavement and
sidewalks were bare. Neither vehicle nor pedestrian moved
upon them.
They walked together across the street, to a dry goods
store. The door was open, and a table of dusty garments
stood in front of it, with a fading sign that announced the
fact of a cut-price sale. Ellis shouted hopefully back into
the room - and dead echoes mocked him.
Next door was a grocery and meat market. Impulsively,
Ellis pushed open the unlocked door, thrust his head
within. Stench of putrefying food greeted his nostrils.
Keening led the way ahead to a news stand at the
corner. Its wares, exposed to wind and weather, were
yellow, faded, tattered. He found a legible newspaper, read
aloud the date: 'May 19.'
'May?' echoed Ellis. 'Why, that's six months ago.'
Anxiously they scanned the sheet in search of any item
that might cast light upon this baffling, terrifying mystery
of the city's desertion. But the dingy columns contained
nothing extraordinary; the front page was largely devoted
to the brutal details of a club murder.
'We have learned two things,' Ellis said at last. 'We
know that it happened on May 19. And we know there
was no warning — none, at least, that attracted newspaper
attention.'
'Do you suppose,' Keening whispered — 'do you
suppose that something has happened to all humanity?'
'Of course not,' Ellis said. 'Just something frightened
the people away from here. Earthquake? Epidemic? What
could -'
He remembered the silent ether, and stopped.
Strange it was to feel that they might be alone -
inexplicably alone - upon the Earth.
178

Two alone ...
None to aid them or to criticize. None to applaud or
jeer. None to welcome their return, or to listen to their
story of adventure on the moon. None henceforward with
whom to hold converse. It was terror and desolation.
Flying again, northward, they came over San Francisco
Bay. It was gray with rafts of crowded shipping. The fleets
of all the world were gathered there. Long gray dread-
naughts, low slim destroyers, furtive submarines. Proudly
splendid liners and red-rusted, salt-caked ocean tramps.
Trim, white-sailed yachts, and ancient wind-jammers with
yellow, rotting canvas. Rafts and rowboats, canoes and
catamarans, junks and proas.
From them flew tattered flags of every nation. The stars
and stripes, the Union Jack, the tricolor of France. The
red ball and the many-rayed sunburst of Japan. The
German flag, with its swastika. Red, white and green of
Italy. The dragon of new China, and the crosses of
Scandinavia. The red flag of Russia, with its golden sickle,
hammer and star. And many more.
Fleets of death. No deck showed movement. No funnel
belched smoke. No canvas was set nor signal hoisted.
How came the ships of all the world in San Francisco
Bay, Ellis and Keening demanded of each other,
abandoned, derelict? Why the ships here, when the men
were gone?
Into Market Street the Cosmobile dropped. It was as
San Jose had been. Eerily empty. Now it was late after-
noon, the sun declining toward the sea beyond the lovely
green Presidio and the Golden Gate. The hour when
thousands were wont to throng the lower street, on their
way to the Ferry Building and their homes across the bay.
But Market Street was deathly still. No man was in
view, nor any vehicle save an abandoned push-cart, yet
laden with fruit long decayed.
In the windows of a jeweler priceless gems blazed in
vain allure. No purchaser to try their glow against satiny
179

skin, nor salesman to offer them. No officer to guard them
nor thief to snatch them.
Dust lay on the pavement, and the trolley tracks were
rusty.
Ellis and Keening went back aboard the iron globe, and
drifted above the dead fleet upon the bay. Derelicts of
many nations. Ferries of Charon abandoned on the Styx.
Over Alameda they flew - and it was mortally quiet as
San Jose and San Francisco had been.
And then over Oakland. The streets of half that little
city were black with motionless, crowded cars. Its railway
tracks were lined unendingly with rolling stock. Its flying-
field was thick with planes.
The other half of Oakland was gone. Between Broad-
way and the bay, the city had been razed, leveled,
annihilated. Where buildings once had stood was now an
open plain, scattered with structures and machines of
silver-white metal.
The Cosmobile sank to earth once more, and the two
men descended the ladder to bare and hard-packed soil.
Before them lay\the new-cleared field, stretching from
Broadway to the bay, clustered with cumbrous mechan-
isms of unfamiliar aspect, all of some white metal, and all
abandoned.
In the center of the field was a flat forest of massive
white girders, interminable ranks of braced uprights,
which carried to Ellis a curious suggestion of incomplete-
ness, as if they had been merely a foundation for some-
thing not erected, deserted unfinished.
Walking close together and a little fearfully, Ellis Drew
and little Keening left the foot of the ladder, and
approached the nearest enigmatic mechanism. Its silver-
blue metal, Ellis recognized, was aluminum. At one side of
it, beneath two enormous claws of white metal, was a heap
of red clay. Beyond its cumbrous, intricate bulk were
stacks of aluminum ingots, new and bright.
The machine was motionless, silent, abandoned.
180

'A machine,' Ellis murmured in awed tones, 'for
refining aluminum from common clay. And, Keening,
human beings did not design it. In a thousand ways it
shows the stamp of something alien. No bolts, you see, or
screws or rivets. It is fastened together with slotted plates.'
They went on toward the maze of girders. A forest of
aluminum uprights braced and trussed, all rising to a
uniform height of perhaps fifty feet. A framework of
mighty metal beams, covering a square nearly a mile on a
side.
'Notice how thick those I beams are?' muttered Ellis,
wonderingly. 'The thing must have been designed to
support a prodigious weight. But why — a foundation like
that? A mile square! And you can see it's no human
engineering. No rivets. The whole thing, except for the
welding, is put together with U-staples and slotted disks.'
'But human beings must have made it, Drew!' came the
dry whisper of the man Keening, muffled in the bandages
on his face. 'People came here! The ships in the bay. The
abandoned automobiles, the aircraft, the deserted trains.
Couldn't a series of great inventions account for it? And
then a disaster of some sort —'
'I tell you, Keening, those things weren't designed by
men — at least, not by men of our civilization. The slotted
disks are no better than bolts and rivets — merely different.
No, Keening, those things were built by an alien science.
But why? Why? What was the reason for building a
foundation like that, strong enough to hold up all the cities
of the Earth, if they were piled on it? And then abandon-
ing the thing, unused? As you say, men must have come
here. But where have they gone? What has become of
humanity?'
'I think I know, Drew,' the little man whispered softly
through his bandages. 7 think the foundation was used.'
Ellis faced him blankly. 'What do you mean? What
could —'
'Drew,' Keening whispered, 'you remember the cube?'
181

'Cube? Oh, that cube?'
'Yes, the cube we saw in space. It was nearly a mile on
a side. About the right size to have rested on that
trusswork. It was white - the color of aluminum. And we
met it; it must have been Jiving away from the EarthV
'That's it,' muttered Ellis. In a dazed voice he repeated,
'That's it!'
And he swung upon the little man with incredulous awe
in his eyes.
'Yes, Keening, you've hit it. The human race
congregated here while we were gone. Every man of it,
perhaps; these ships and planes came from all over the
Earth. They built that cube, and flew away into space.'
'But whyV whispered Keening. lWhy? Were they
afraid? Some catastrophe foreseen? Was the cube a
second ark?'
'No, Keening. We know that couldn't have been. There
was no warning; you remember the papers we found. And
no delay; they took no time to gather up their valuables, or
to lock their houses, or even to finish their meals. No,
Keening. They didn't go willingly. They were carried
away by something — nameless, alien. Remember the
slotted disks. They didn't design the cube. It was some-
thing else. Something, Keening, that called the human race
away from the Earth as the Pied Piper called the rats from
Hamelin town!'
'And we are left alone!' whispered the little man.
'Saved, because we were on the moon. Alive, because we
had dared the most dangerous thing ...'
'Just think of it, Keening. All our friends, on that cube. All
the people weever knew. All weever saw. Carried off...'
The little man had turned; he was staring silently into
the strange vistas of white metal pillars.
'We've got to follow, Keening!' cried Ellis. 'We have the
Cosmobile. We must find what happened. And we might
be able to save a few. Enough ... so that men could have
another chance . . .'
182

The bandaged face turned slowly back. "Must we go,
Drew? It seems so - so terrible. Any power that could
carry off all humanity! ... What chance would we have,
against it? ... And here we have all the world.'
Ellis's blue eyes blazed on him suddenly.
'You want to stay? What would life mean to us, here?
Growing old on a dead planet! Ghosts of the lost race all
about us! Ghosts and dreams and memories! Surely,
Keening, you aren't going to be a -' He checked the harsh
word, and said in its place'- to be afraid?'
The slight form stiffened, and the bandaged face looked
at him quickly.
'Very well, Drew. We follow.'
Ellis was instantly regretful. 'Sorry, Keening, I didn't
mean what I said. Guess all this is getting on my nerves.'
He nodded at the grotesque, white machines. 'Lord, to
criticize your courage, after all we've been through to-
gether! Don't mind it, Keening.'
'That's all right,' whispered the other. 'I thought of
staying. But I see now that we have to go.'
By dusk they were back in the steel hull of the
Cosmobile. Ellis went to the bridge and consulted upon the
charts the notations he had made of the white cube's
positions and velocity. At last he came down to the galley,
where Keening was preparing a meal.
'You found out—' whispered the little man.
'Yes, Keening. We had enough of the elements to plot
its course.'
The technician stopped, with a platter of smoking ham
in his hands, stared expectantly.
'Hard to believe it, Keening. But the cube is evidently
bound for the ninth planet. For Pluto!'
'Pluto? ... We must follow, thereV
'As soon as we can find supplies.'
The steel ball rose in the dawn, and crossed the bay
again, to empty Market Street. For a week they were busy
183

there. Canned food they discovered in abundance. In a
machine shop, Ellis found cylinders of compressed
oxygen. Keening visited a hardware store, and brought
back sporting-rifles, revolvers, and ammunition.
But they did not often separate. They were held to-
gether by instinctive dread of the lonely, lifeless Earth.
Ellis had intended to find some small dynamo-
generator, which he could run to re-charge the batteries of
the ether-ship. But none came to his attention, and
presently, with a better idea, he moved the Cosmobile to
an electrical supply house, and there replaced the old cells
with new ones.
The cylinders of oxygen and the heavy batteries had not
been easy to handle, and both were exhausted at the
beginning of the long flight to Pluto — the outermost
planet. Standing watch and watch beneath the steel dome
of the hull, staring out endlessly into the black vacancies
of the star-powdered void, they had ample time to rest.
Four hours long were the watches - by the chron-
ometer. They seemed four minutes, sometimes, or four
thousand years. No sun rose and set; time hung motion-
less. Silently the chronometer ticked. Their hearts beat.
They watched and sometimes ate and slept, and spoke
only in infrequent monosyllables.
And the ether-car drove out into dark infinity. Into void
inconceivable. Earth and moon were two bright points,
small and white, larger and green. Against endless night
they dwindled, crept into one.
The sun shrank. Argent Venus and Jupiter, red Mars
and yellow Saturn drew toward it, and waned. The sun
became dimensionless. A bright star, lost and futile in the
void of universal night.
Still they flew outward. To Pluto. The black planet. The
border-world. The last outpost against night of void
cosmos.
Pluto, the ultimate planet — and the eldest. It must have
cooled enough for life when Jupiter was still a second sun,
184

when Earth was not yet flung molten from the central star.
Evolution — planetary and organic - must there have run
its course.
Pluto, whose book of life should have been written to
the end, sealed, forgotten. Star of darkness and death, was
it yet undead? A vampire world, reaching from death
across the void, to pluck from Earth the warm fresh fruit
of the sun?
The voyage was done.
A black landscape, beneath the Cosmobile, expanded
into frozen, starlit desolation. Perilously, the iron ball
settled upon a ragged ebon crag. All about, in pallid
star-shine, tumbled bleak and elemental wilderness of
barren stone.
Dark planet. Livid, jagged mountains leaping with
savage teeth at cruel, star-jeweled sky. Titanic peaks,
gigantic buttresses of dark rock, cleft with colossal
canyons that were wells of ominous obscurity. Jet,
cyclopean ranges, plunging into gigantic gorges.
Air there was none. The cold was unutterable; the sun
merely a yellow star. Nothing lived or moved upon all this
tangled, alpine desolation of darkness and doom.
Yet to this world humanity had come — in a cube of
aluminum. Why? To what evil end?
The steel sphere rose from the peak, and circled above
grim, cataclysm-born ranges — above titanic mountains
reared in the last fierce convulsions of a dying planet.
Above sheer and incredible twisted crags and black,
fathomless abysms. A weary time slipped by, measured
only by the restless, silent ticking of the chronometer. And
then they looked into an illuminated pit.
A volcanic shaft, rimmed with black and monstrous
peaks. Miles it was across, and scores — or hundreds — of
miles in depth, piercing to the very heart of the black
planet. Blue the rocks glowed in its depths, with eldritch
fire of radio-activity.
185

In that ghostly phosphorescence, so dim that it looked a
specter thing, they saw the cube. Tens on tens of miles
below, upon the rugged, pallidly glowing floor of the azure
abyss. Like a child's building-block painted silver and
carelessly dropped among jagged boulders.
Did that cube, after all, contain the race of man?
Ellis wondered. And he wondered if one girl was in it,
Tempest Durand. Once she might have been his, with her
lithe, athletic beauty, her wit, her gay vivacity. And he had
left her, because his work was too important, because he
had no thought to spend upon a woman, because she
disturbed his delicate mental processes. Had he then lost
her? For ever?
The Cosmobile hung a long time over the rim of the pit.
'Must we go down?' whispered little Keening, watching
Ellis Drew from his bandaged face. 'Down into that blue
flame? What can we do? What — against a power that
could reach across to Earth?'
His whisper was frightened and pleading.
After all, Ellis asked himself, what could they do?
What, when they did not even know the nature of the
power they must fight? But he remembered Tempest
Durand.
'Yes,' he told Keening. 'We're going down.'
The Cosmobile fell into the well. Past smooth, fire-
glazed walls of volcanic obsidian. Past jagged ledges like
threatening teeth. Past mysterious cavern-mouths.
The feeble gleam of starlight vanished from the rocks.
And then the walls of the shaft were blue, glowing
increasingly bright. Beneath was a field of boulders,
cyclopean stones that had fallen from the sides of the
chasm, a tumbled confusion of rugged masses, shimmer-
ing pallidly phosphorescent.
The opening above, a patch of cold stars, narrowed
disquietingly. The black walls closed above the ether-car
like a swallowing throat. And the blue bottom of the pit
seemed to expand as it dropped.
186

At last the steel sphere was brought to rest upon the
boulder-fields between two colossal masses of blue-
glowing stone that offered it some concealment. Three
miles away, perhaps, across ragged, luminescent rocks,
rose the pale argent sides of the cube, smooth and
unbroken. Beyond the cube, and in every direction, leapt
up walls of shimmering rock, growing darker and narrow-
ing at the top of this cyclopean well, about a tiny,
star-flecked disk.
'We are here,' whispered Keening.
'Here,' repeated Ellis. 'To do what we can. To find what
has happened. And rescue a few — if we can. I had a
friend ...
'There is air here,' he announced, consulting his
instruments. 'Breathable air, though thin and dry and cold.
We won't need the atmospheric armor.'
They descended from the bridge, hurriedly donned
heavy clothing, and each selected from their racks a heavy
rifle and a revolver. And at last Ellis opened the valve and
unrolled his metal ladder, and they climbed down upon
rocks that shone dimly, with chill blue radiance.
The air was scanty and bitterly cold. Both of them were
panting a little, even from the exertion of climbing down
the ladder. There was no wind; but the gelid chill of this
dead and frozen world drove through their garments.
Furtively, they slipped away from the steel sphere,
along the floor of the rugged ravine in which it was
hidden, following in the direction of the gigantic
aluminum cube.
They had gone perhaps a hundred yards, when Keening
voiced through his bandages a muted, whispering scream.
With an icy, shaking hand, he grasped Ellis Drew's arm,
and pointed. Then both men dropped to their knees, and
began to fire.
It is significant of their instinctive horror of the
approaching things that they shot at once, without
question or hesitation.
187

The little group of beings that came running toward
them along the bottom of the ravine, between frowning
walls of blue-shining stone, wore the shape of men. Men
they were in form, but less than human and more than
human. Weird metamorphosis had overtaken them since
they had been snatched from the Earth.
Specters of elemental horror. Most of them were nude;
a few wore foul and tattered scraps of garments. Like the
rocks, their livid flesh glowed with pallid, bluish light. And
it was translucent, so that their bones were visible.
Skeletons animated, clad in lucent flesh of ghostly blue.
They moved, though rapidly, with a curious stiffness,
like inert and nerveless marionettes. Their faces were
fixed, lifeless — dead, transparent masks in front of
grinning skulls.
They made no sound; they did not speak. Each seemed
unconscious of his companions. Those who fell beneath
the rifle bullets neither screamed nor groaned. They spun
about and went down silently - and the others trampled
inexorably over them.
The things revealed no fear. Unarmed, they came on in
the face or barking rifles, moving with stark and uncanny
automatism. They were machines, bent ruthlessly upon
one single end. Death alone stayed their stalking advance.
The rifles were empty, and half a score of the things
strode grimly on. Fumbling for cartridges, Ellis cried to
Keening:
'Back to the ship! I'll stand them off!'
Loading his own rifles, the little man laughed through
his bandages with a curious dry sound, and moved closer
to Ellis.
The guns were empty again when the remnant of the
band reached them - now reduced to four monstrous
things, grappling at them with long-nailed, skeletal talons,
clothed in blue light. Ellis had no time to load again, or
even to find the revolver in his pocket.
One went down beneath his clubbed rifle; the stock of
188

the weapon splintered upon its ghastly skull. Then hands
srasped him from behind. Icy hands, fiendishly strong,
colder than living flesh could be, freezing with the eldrich
chill of this black world of death.
Ellis struggled savagely, vainly, in strange arms whose
bones were visible through ghostly-blue flesh. Then
Keening's revolver cracked; the arms relaxed and slipped
from him.
The two then stood back to back. Again the rifle-barrel
rose and fell in Ellis's hands, and Keening's revolver
barked.
The battle abruptly was done, and they stood over
sprawling skeletons that were clothed in translucent,
shimmering flesh. No blood seemed to flow from the
things. Dead, they were no more silent than they had been,
living. Tense, waiting quiet reigned.
Ellis shuddered. 'Sorry, Keening,' he muttered. 'I got
you into this.'
He heard the little man's whispered protest, 'But we had
to come, Drew. I understand that. Though I was
afraid.... But why are these men like that?'
'I don't know, Keening.' He looked down at ghastly,
shimmering faces. 'They weren't even alive. The one that
touched me was cold.'
'Let's get back into the ship,' whispered Keening.
Ellis retreated with him. 'The luminescence of these
rocks,' he muttered, 'must be caused by radio-activity.
And that is what makes them — transparent. A penetrating
radiation.'
'Must be,' assented Keening. 'They do look as if they were
under the X-ray. Bones surrounded with shadows of flesh.'
'But that doesn't explain what brought them here. Do
you suppose —' and mute horror struggled in his voice,
'Do you suppose all humanity is - like theseV
Keening never replied, for then the music smote them.
Music of madness!
It beat upon their brains. High, swift, pizzicati notes,
189

strumming upon taut nerves like a crystal hail of sound.
Tinkling, exciting, calling. A challenge and a lure.
Liquid, soothing rhythms, mellow sussurations, lulling,
slumbrous.
Deep and throbbing infra-bass, booming, commanding,
dominating.
Ellis realized from the first that he did not hear that
music with his ears. It was not sound, but penetrating,
all-pervading radiation. It pulsed through all his brain.
Music of madness. It swept fiim, conquered him, thrust
aside his mind. He was pushed aside. His body was
surrendered to the music, moving freely to its wild rhythm.
Keening was beside him. They had dropped the rifles;
they were running. Running after the mystic music, the
thought beat through his mind, as the rats and the children
of Hamelin ran after the Piper - and in the contrast of the
familiar legend with their own desperate plight, he found a
peculiar horror.
The physiological effect of the music is undeniable.
And this was more than music. It was not sound, but a
vibration that thrummed through all their bodies,
impinging upon every fiber of their nervous systems. It
was hypnotic.
Was it thus the human race had been drawn across the
void? By mad music that had mastered their bodies, made
them slaves of vibration?
Along the ravine they ran, their minds sitting helplessly
apart in bodies ruled by that weird and soundless music.
Past the looming, titanic mass of the silver-walled cube.
And on, across what must once have been a city.
A level space, nearly circular, a mile wide. Surrounded
with a curving ridge, it was scattered with heaps of
crumbled stone. The piles, Ellis thought, were too regular to
be anything save remains of buildings, but buildings that
had been ruins five hundred thousand years, or a million.
Where had the survivors gone — if there had been survivors?
The question was answered without words.
190

The silent music swept them on beyond the cube, and
across the dead mounds, toward the cyanic-shining,
vertical wall of the pit. It carried them out of the ruins,
upon a worn and ancient road. And the road sloped
downward, curved into a vast crevice whose jagged walls
glowed with light of sapphires.
From the crevice they passed into lofty and intermin-
able vaulted caverns, whose smoothed walls yet bore the
mark of tools. Dust of eons lay thick upon the floor,
swirled up chokingly about them.
The compelling, noiseless chords led them downward
once more, and into a lower system of artificial caverns.
Here the rock was brighter still, glowing with radiance
softly electric-blue, shadowless and unearthly. The air was
heavier here, and warmer, and the floor was clear of dust.
They were drawn into a colossal space, blue-walled,
domed and circular, and far out across its floor. The mad
music abruptly ceased its throbbing in their brains. The
journey was ended.
Free of the dread, hypnotic music, Ellis was yet
strangely paralyzed. His body stood erect, stiff and oddly
tingling. It took all the power of his will to turn his head,
to survey this weird space into which the vibration had
swept them.
The place was titanic. Not less than two thousand feet
across could the circular floor have been; the dome was
fully half that high.
Resting in the middle of the floor, and surrounded by
colossal mechanisms, was a red, pulsating mountain. A
monstrous, quivering mass, scarlet, cleft, convoluted,
wrinkled, folded. A heap of red, palpitating flesh, a full
hundred feet high, supported by frames and plates of metal.
From the strange and intricate apparatus that sur-
rounded it rose two tall, cylindrical tanks, of glass or other
transparent substance, filled with luminously violet liquid.
At the base of each cylinder was a throbbing pump, and a
thick tube connected it with the mountain of flesh.
191

Soft, crimson mass, surrounded by weird and complex
mechanisms. About it stood scores of men — or of things
such as Ellis and Keening had fought. Monsters, with
shining flesh translucent and grim skeletons visible.
Ellis, fighting that lingering paralysis, stared at the red
mountain, and wondered. Then he saw the face of it, and
understood.
The face was grotesquely and incredibly tiny, situated
just above the blue floor, with quivering, wrinkled red folds
bulging out above it. A thin, sharp, chinless beak, and two
hideously malevolent, amazingly ancient eyes.
The eyes riveted his gaze. Two of them, protruding
above the beak, at the corners of the tiny, triangular
face. They were green. And compound, like the eyes of
insects. Each had seven orbs. Age-old wisdom was writ
cold in each septuple eye, and malign power, ruthlessly
evil.
The scarlet mountain was a brain. A living brain,
hypertrophied to the ultimate degree. It answered Ellis
Drew's old question; it was the hideous consummation of
organic evolution upon the oldest planet.
Body it had none. Metal plates and girders formed its
supporting pan. Its face was fantastically tiny, pressed
down against the floor.
Then he saw its arms.
The virescent, septuple eyes rested with cold and un-
utterable malignancy upon Ellis, and then moved to
Keening. And the little man ran stiffly forward from
beside Ellis, like one in a dream, toward the dwarfed and
hideous face beneath the crimson, palpitating mountain.
Thin and eager tentacles reached out to meet him, from
beneath the brain. The hands of the monster. They were
four, white and whip-like and many yards long, writhing
and twitching avidly.
They grasped little Keening, twisted snake-like about
his limbs, drew him toward the face. Abruptly he was
struggling with fierce, futile energy. And Ellis heard him
192

scream - a gasping and inchoate sound bursting through
the bandages on his face, thick and clotted with horror.
Just once he screamed. The twining white tentacles
brought him up to the tiny face. And the thin black beak
found his throat.
Ellis tried to move.
Tingling paralysis still held him. He surged forward
vainly against it, in a terrible attempt to follow Keening.
Lifeless muscles failed him, and he almost fell.
Through cold, stark lips he gasped out futile curses. He
felt as if the black and hideous beak of the brain were
sinking into his own throat. He and Keening had been
long together. The little man had proved a true comrade,
staunch and daring.
Must he stand and see his body drained by this red
vampire-brain?
Ellis forced himself forward once more, in a vain battle
against the rigor of his strange paralysis. Then, belatedly,
he remembered the heavy.revolver in his pocket.
His hands were numb and stiff and dead, tingling
painfully. But at last they had grasped and lifted the
weapon. Holding it clumsily in both hands, he shot into
the mass of the red brain.
The scarlet mountain heaved and trembled. The white
tentacles released Keening, dropped him inertly supine
before the tiny face. The septuple green orbs stared at Ellis
with maleficent evil, with a fear that was terrible and a
hate that was consuming.
Fighting the tingling numbness of his stark body, Ellis
stumbled forward, firing at the virescent eyes. One of them
became a pendulous smear of green jelly, and then
another.
Then the revolver was empty. And the things that had
been men were rushing at him. Skeletons swathed in
ghostly blue, running with dumb and implacable
automatism.
Ellis realized that he had not time to load again. The
193

things, in seconds, would be upon him. And bullets, after
all, might do little great or immediate hurt to the
mountainous brain. What could he do? His thoughts
raced wildly, and one idea leapt into his mind.
The body of the giant brain was the mechanism that
surrounded it. The thick tubes were obviously its veins,
the throbbing pumps its heart, the violet liquid in the tanks
its blood. If the mechanism had some vulnerable part...
If he could break the glass tanks ...
His body was still stiff with the icy, numbing deadness
in which the soundless music had left him. And the
stalking, mechanical, half-transparent men were near. He
staggered toward the nearer tank, grasping the heavy
revolver by the barrel.
He stumbled against the side of the tank, hammered
desperately upon it with the gun. Apparently it was glass,
but very thick and tough. White cracks radiated from the
points of impact, but it did not shatter.
Then the monsters were clawing at him with gleaming,
skeletal talons — shocking him with the contact of their
death-cold bodies. They dragged him back.
He saw little Keening, lying limp and helpless on the
blue floor before that malign, black-beaked face, the white,
ophidian tentacles writhing over his body.
Ellis twisted in the cold, glowing hands that held him.
Savagely he struck with the gun at grinning, blue-clad
skulls. And once more, for a little time, he was free.
The glass was unbreakable. He flung himself at the
mechanism of the throbbing pump — the heart of the red
brain. It looked delicate enough. A few blows upon the
gears and gliding plungers...
But he did not reach the pump.
The music of madness once more struck him, beat
through all his body with its soundless and hypnotic
melody. A helpless tool of weird vibration, he dropped the
revolver. And he was swept toward the tiny, malevolent
face of the red brain.
194

White, slender tentacles reached out, whipped around
his body. With irresistible strength they tightened, con-
tracted. Toward the shrunken, hideous face he was drawn.
Toward the narrow black beak and the evilly green,
seven-orbed eyes.
He saw Keening struggling to his feet, gasped at him:
'Run, Keening! I'll make a fuss! You might —'
A hard white coil wrapped around his neck, cut off his
voice. He saw the little man running toward him, heard
him cry out:
'Oh! Ellis! My-'
It was the first time Ellis had heard the whispering man
speak aloud, or address him by his Christian name.
Another white tentacle darted out, coiled about the
technician's body. The two were drawn ^elpless toward
the black-beaked face.
Then the brain rotted.
It had none of the immunity to terrestrial bacteria that
has been developed by the higher life of Earth. Its soft
tissues must have formed an ideal culture for the micro-
organisms of decay introduced into them by Ellis Drew's
pistol bullets.
It collapsed. It sloughed into a heap of writhing ruin. It
flowed in rivers of red corruption.
The tentacles softened and broke. Ellis and Keening
flung them off and staggered away.
The translucent, glowing men died with the brain - if
they had not been already dead, and merely animated by
the supernal will of that colossal intelligence.
Ellis and Keening ran out of the great room, pursued by
the reeking stench of rapid dissolution.
Once again, and slowly, they crossed the circular plain
that must have been the site of the planet's last city. Ellis
whispered as they walked across it:
'That brain must have been alive when this city was
inhabited. It was that old. It clung to an unnatural
195

existence after its world and its kind were dead, gathering
evil power of science, until it was able to reach across
space with that music. It must have been something like
radio. Vibration in the ether. Hypnotic suggestion borne
on a carrying wave. It mastered the human race. Made
them build the cube, and brought them here. For slaves?
For food?'
'Now, Ellis, we can go back,' Keening whispered
through his bandages.
'I'm going,' said Ellis, 'to look into that cube. I had a
friend; I told you when we were coming back from the
moon -'
'Durand?'
'Yes, Durand.'
They approached the mile-high cube. Midway of its
silvery wall they found a broad stage leading up to a small,
square door. Side by side they walked up, and entered the
cube.
The interior was lit with cold, pallid, sourceless blue
radiance. In it they saw infinite corridors of metal shelves,
stretching to far distances, rising tier upon tier. The whole
cube was filled with shelves.
And upon the aluminum shelves, side by side, lay
human beings, the uncounted millions who had been
carried from the Earth. They were motionless, deathly
quiet. They lay in heavy, utter silence. Their flesh shone
translucent and blue, and skeletal frames were visible
beneath it.
Ellis stared at them, and touched the arm of one.
'Dead,' he whispered. 'All dead.'
'Better that,' breathed Keening, 'than to live as those
others did.'
The Cosmobile lifted above the ghostly blue radiance of
the pit, and came once more into the clean light of the
stars. A bright yellow point, the sun shone across the void,
warm and welcoming. Ellis and Keening remained
196

together upon the bridge until the course was set, until the
grim and cragged desolation of the black planet had
dropped for ever behind.
'We are left alone, of all humanity,' Keening whispered
solemnly. 'Think of it.'
'There's really no use in going back,' Ellis said. 'We can
only grow old and die, the last men on a dead planet.
'I haven't ever told you, Keening. But there was a girl
who wanted to go with me to the moon. It was she I
wanted to see, when we came back. If I had taken her -'
'You mean Tempest Durand?'
'Yes. But how did you know her name? I didn't tell
you!'
Keening seemed to smile behind his bandages.
'I know,' he whispered. 'But do you mean you were
looking for Tempest Durand — all the time?'
'Yes, Keening. No good to say so now, but I'd give my
life for one moment with her. I was a fool. I left her for
fear she would take my attention from my cursed work.'
'Then you would really like to see her?'
'Yes, Keening!' Ellis spoke almost angrily. 'But there's
no use thinking what might have been.... Yet, that's all
there is left for us to do.'
'I'll go find her, then,' whispered Keening. And he
slipped away from the bridge, leaving Ellis puzzled at his
words.
Ellis was staring through the ports at the pale, tiny
point of the sun, when a clear, melodious and well-
remembered voice rang out behind him.
'Ellis, won't you even look at me?'
He spun around, mouth sagging open in incredulous
amazement.
Tempest Durand was standing behind him, slim and
beautiful as she had ever been. Her oval face was pale, but
it bore a roguish smile.
'Tempest!' he gasped.'TempestT
He choked, and a strangling tension came into his
197

throat. Two strides across the floor, and he seized her
slight shoulders, stared into her mocking eyes.
'Tempest, I'm not dreaming?' he cried, in poignant,
dawning joy. 'Speak to me, Tempest?'
For a time she gazed silently at him. And then tears
broke into her quizzical eyes. She slipped forward into his
arms, laughing almost hysterically.
'Oh, Ellis, I'm so gladV
'Tell me,' he demanded, holding her quivering body.
'How did you get here? I don't understand. Did Keening
have you hidden?'
'Lord, no!' she laughed, tearfully. 'Don't you see? There
is Keening!'
She held up the familiar mask of bandages.
'But you didn't!' She laughed, reminiscently. 'When you
wouldn't let me go with you, I meant first to hide on
board. Then I thought of the disguise. I had often played
masculine parts in dramatics at college. The bandages hid
my face, and the same story of the X-ray burns was the
excuse for a different voice. Even then I gave myself away
a hundred times, but you were so wrapped up in your
science you hardly noticed poor Keening.'
'But, Tempest, why didn't you tell me, when we got
back to the Earth?'
'I'd no way to know your — your attitude had changed.
Anyhow, I was about to. And you called me a coward.
Don't you remember? I wanted to show you. Anyhow, we
had to come.'
And thus the Cosmobile drove back to Earth, carrying
an Adam and Eve, an Epimetheus and a Pandora, to lift
the curtain on another act of the infinite and varied drama
of Man.
*
The not-very-believable twist at the end of the story seems
to suggest that I wasn't yet fully aware of women, but at
least I had learned to dance. With my brother and sisters I
198

was attending Saturday-night country dances, and I had
bought a spring-powered phonograph. There was one fast
breakdown - I can't recall the name of the tune — that I
played again and again to get the feel of 'the music of
madness' for the story.
The plot idea comes from M. P. Shield. I don't think I
had yet read The Purple Cloud, but Ed Hamilton had told
it to me when we were camped one night on a Mississippi
sandbar, and my imagination has always been haunted by
his terrifying vision of one man left all alone in a dead
world.
The Plutonian terror is actually terror of progress —
that's what strikes me now when I reread the story.
Perhaps I had caught that dread from Wells, whose early
fiction I was studying with a vast admiration. Certainly
the story owes much to him. The giant brain, 'the hideous
consummation of organic evolution,' is clearly borrowed
from his First Men in the Moon, and its quick decay is a
device from The War of the Worlds.
I am hesitant to claim any connection between that
pessimistic theme and my real-life affairs, yet I can't help
reflecting that the economic depression had begun to get
to me. The pulp magazines had been weathering the hard
times without much trouble, I suppose because jobless
workers still bought them for cheap entertainment, but
disaster now overtook the Clayton chain. I never learned
all the details, but Astounding went bimonthly and quit
buying stories in 1932. It ceased publication in early
•933. Clayton was bankrupt.
This was a heavy blow to my hopes of survival as a
writer, because Clayton had been my only good market.
To add to my difficulties, Gernsback stopped paying for
the stories he was using, even at half a cent a word. After a
S50 partial payment for 'The Moon Era,' I received
nothing from him until 1934, when I got a lawyer to
collect S3 34 due me by then.
'Salvage in Space,' written late in 1932, was the last
199

story I sold Bates — the last one I sold anybody for many
years for as much as two cents a word. It was featured in
the last Clayton issue, with a Wesso cover actually
painted for Doc Smith's novel, Triplanetary, which was to
have run as a serial if the magazine had lived.
Reading the story today, I rather like it. Some of the
events may be cliches, but I think they are neatly put
together. The scientific extrapolations aren't bad, I think,
for 1932. I'm especially happy about the pulsed uranium
fission rocket my meteor miner uses, because it is such a
clear anticipation of Project Orion.
Orion came twenty-five years later, in the late 1950s.
The idea was to propel a spaceship by exploding small
atom bombs behind a flat steel pusher plate, one every
second. It's actually a more workable idea than you might
first think. Shock absorbers and the mass of the plate itself
would protect the payload from impact and radiation
damage. A manned version was designed to reach Mars
with sixty men and 1,000 tons of supplies after a flight of
only three weeks.
I didn't know about it in 1960, but to the people
involved the conquest of space was at hand. The engineer-
ing problems had largely been solved. Orion was funded
by NASA, the Defense Department, and private industry.
Actual hardware was built and tested. But then, in 1961,
the whole project had to be scrubbed because the Test-Ban
Treaty outlawed atomic bombs in space.
200

SALVAGE IN SPACE
His 'plant' was the smallest in the solar system, and the
loneliest, Thad Allen was thinking, as he straightened
wearily in the huge, bulging, inflated fabric of his Osprey
space armor. Walking awkwardly in the magnetic boots
that held him to the black mass of meteoric iron, he
mounted a projection and stood motionless, staring
moodily away through the vision panels of his bulky
helmet into the dark mystery of the void.
His welding arc dangled at his belt, the electrode still
glowing red. He had just finished securing to this slowly-
accumulated mass of iron his most recent find, a meteorite
the size of his head.
Five perilous weeks he had labored, to collect this
rugged lump of metal — a jagged mass, some ten feet in
diameter, composed of hundreds of fragments, that he had
captured and welded together. His luck had not been
good. His findings had been heart-breakingly small; the
spectro-fiash analysis had revealed that the content of the
precious metals was disappointingly minute.*
On the other side of this tiny sphere of hard-won
treasure, his Millen atomic rocket was sputtering, spurts
of hot blue flame jetting from its exhaust. A simple
mechanism, bolted to the first sizable fragment he had
captured, it drove the iron ball through space like a ship.
Through the magnetic soles of his insulated boots, Thad
could feel the vibration of the iron mass, beneath the
rocket's regular thrust. The magazine of uranite fuel
*The meteor or asteroid belt, between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter, is
'mined1 by such adventurers as Thad Allen for the platinum, iridium and
osmium that all meteoric irons contain in small quantities. The meteor swarms
are supposed by some astronomers to be fragments of a disrupted planet, which,
according to Bode's Law. should occupy this space.
201

capsules was nearly empty, now, he reflected. He would
soon have to turn back toward Mars.
Turn back. But how could he, with so slender a reward
for his efforts? Meteor mining is expensive. There was his
bill at Millen and Helion, Mars, for uranite and supplies.
And the unpaid last installment on his Osprey suit. How
could he outfit himself again, if he returned with no more
metal than this? There were men who averaged a thousand
tons of iron a month. Why couldn't fortune smile on him?
He knew men who had made fabulous strikes, who had
captured whole planetoids of rich metal, and he knew
weary, white-haired men who had braved the perils of
vacuum and absolute cold and bullet-swift meteors for
hard years, who still hoped.
But sometime fortune had to smile, and then....
The picture came to him. A tower of white metal,
among the low red hills near Helion. A slim, graceful
tower of argent, rising in a fragrant garden of flowering
Martian shrubs, purple and saffron. And a girl waiting, at
the silver door — a trim, slender girl in white, with blue
eyes and hair richly brown.
Thad had seen the white tower many times, on his
holiday tramps through the hills about Helion. He had
even dared to ask if it could be bought, to find that its
price was an amount that he might not amass in many
years at his perilous profession. But the girl in white was
yet only a glorious dream....
The strangeness of interplanetary space, and the
somber mystery of it, pressed upon him like an illimitable
and deserted ocean. The sun was a tiny white disk on his
right, hanging between rosy coronal wings; his native
Earth, a bright greenish point suspended in the dark gulf
below it; Mars, nearer, smaller, a little ocher speck above
the shrunken sun. Above him, below him, in all directions
was vastness, blackness, emptiness. Ebon infinity,
sprinkled with far, cold stars.
202

Thad was alone. Utterly alone. No man was visible, in
all the supernal vastness of space. And no work of man -
save the few tools of his daring trade, and the glittering
little rocket bolted to the black iron behind him. It was
terrible to think that the nearest human being must be tens
of millions of miles away.
On his first trips, the loneliness had been terrible,
unendurable. Now he was becoming accustomed to it. At
least, he no longer feared that he was going mad. But
sometimes....
Thad shook himself and spoke aloud, his voice ringing
hollow in his huge metal helmet:
'Brace up, old top. In good company, when you're by
yourself, as Dad used to say. Be back in Helion in a week or
so, anyhow. Look up Dan and "Chuck" and the rest of the
crowd again, at Comet's place. What price a friendly boxing
match with Mason, or an evening at the teleview theater?
'Fresh air instead of this stale synthetic stuff! Real
food, in place of these tasteless concentrates! A hot bath,
instead of greasing yourself!
'Too dull out here. Life—' He broke off, set his jaw.
No use thinking about such things. Only made it worse.
Besides, how did he know that a whizzing meteor wasn't
going to flash him out before he got back?
He drew his right arm out of the bulging sleeve of the
suit, into its ample interior, found a cigarette in an inside
pocket, and lighted it. The smoke swirled about in the
helmet, drawn swiftly into the air filters.
'Darn clever, these suits,' he murmured. 'Food, smokes,
water generator, all where you can reach them. And
darned expensive, too. I'd better be looking for pay metal!'
He clambered to a better position; stood peering out
into space, searching for the tiny gleam of sunlight on a
meteoric fragment that might be worth capturing for its
content of precious metals. For an hour he scanned the
black, star-strewn gulf, as the sputtering rocket continued
to drive him forward.
203

'There she glows!' he eried suddenly, and grinned.
Before him was a tiny, glowing fleck, that moved
among the unchanging stars. He stared at it intensely,
breathing faster in the helmet.
Always he thrilled to see such a moving gleam. What
treasure it promised! At first sight, it was impossible to
determine size or distance or rate of motion. It might be
ten thousand tons of rich metal. A fortune! It would more
probably prove to be a tiny, stony mass, not worth
capturing. It might even be large and valuable, but moving
so rapidly that he could not overtake it with the power of
the diminutive Millen rocket.
He studied the tiny speck intently, with practiced eye, as
the minutes passed — an untrained eye would never have
seen it at all, among the flaming hosts of stars. Skilfully he
judged, from its apparent rate of motion and its slow
increase in brilliance, its size and distance from him.
'Must be — must be fair size,' he spoke aloud, at length.
'A hundred tons, I'll bet my helmet! But scooting along
pretty fast. Stretch the little old rocket to run it down.'
He clambered back to the rocket, changed the angle of
the flaming exhaust, to drive him directly across the path
of the object ahead, filled the magazine again with the little
pellets of uranite, which were fed automatically into the
combustion chamber, and increased the firing rate.
The trailing blue flame reached farther backward from
the incandescent orifice of the exhaust. The vibration of
the metal sphere increased. Thad left the sputtering rocket
and went back where he could see the object before him.
It was nearer now, rushing obliquely across his path.
Would he be in time to capture it as it passed, or would it
hurtle by ahead of him, and vanish in the limitless
darkness of space before his feeble rocket could check the
momentum of his ball of metal?
He peered at it, as it drew closer.
Its surface seemed oddly bright, silvery. Not the dull
black of meteoric iron. And it was larger, more distant,
204

than he had thought at first. In form, too, it seemed
curiously regular, ellipsoid. It was no jagged mass of
metal.
His hopes sank, rose again immediately. Even if it were
not the mass of rich metal for which he had prayed, it
might be something as valuable — and more interesting.
He returned to the rocket, adjusted the angle of the
nozzle again, and advanced the firing time slightly, even at
the risk of a ruinous explosion.
When he returned to where he could see the hurtling
object before him, he saw that it was a ship. A tapering
silver-green rocket-flier.
Once more his dreams were dashed. The officers of
interplanetary liners lose no love upon the meteor miners,
claiming that their collected masses of metal, almost
helpless, always underpowered, are menaces to navi-
gation. That could expect nothing from the ship save a
heliographed warning to keep clear.
But how came a rocket-flier here, in the perilous
swarms of the meteor belt? Many a vessel had been
destroyed by collision with an asteroid, in the days before
charted lanes were cleared of drifting metal.
The lanes more frequently used, between Earth, Mars,
Venus and Mercury, were of course far inside the orbits of
the asteroids. And the few ships running to Jupiter's
moons avoided them by crossing millions of miles above
their plane.
Could it be that legendary green ship, said once to have
mysteriously appeared, sliced up and drawn within her
hull several of the primitive ships of that day, and then
disappeared forever after in the remote wastes of space?
Absurd, of course: he dismissed the idle fancy and
examined the ship still more closely.
Then he saw that it was turning, end over end, very
slowly. That meant that its gyros were stopped; that it was
helpless, drifting, disabled, powerless to avoid hurtling
meteoric stones. Had it blundered unawares into the belt
205

of swarms — been struck before the danger was realized?
Was it a derelict, with all dead upon it?
Either the ship's machinery was completely wrecked,
Thad knew, or there was no one on watch. For the
controls of a modern rocket-flier are so simple and so
nearly automatic that a single man at the bridge can keep
a vessel upon her course.
It might be, he thought, that a meteorite had ripped
open the hull, allowing the air to escape so quickly that the
entire crew had been asphyxiated before any repairs could
be made. But that seemed unlikely, since the ship must
have been divided into several compartments by air-tight
bulkheads.
Could the vessel have been deserted for some reason?
The crew might have mutinied, and left her in the life-
tubes. She might have been robbed by pirates, and set
adrift. But with the space lanes policed as they were,
piracy and successful mutiny were rare.
Thad saw that the flier's navigation lights were out.
He found the heliograph signal mirror at his side,
sighted it upon the ship, and worked the mirror rapidly.
He waited, repeated the call. There was no response.
The vessel was plainly a derelict. Could he board her,
and take her to Mars? By law, it was his duty to attempt
to aid any helpless ship, or at least to try to save any
endangered lives upon her. And the salvage award, if the
ship should be deserted and he could bring her safe to
port, would be half her value.
No mean prize, that. Half the value of ship and cargo!
More than he was apt to earn in years of mining the
meteor belt.
With new anxiety, he measured the relative motion of
the gleaming ship. It was going to pass ahead of him. And
very soon. No more time for speculation. It was still
uncertain whether it would come near enough so that he
could get a line to it.
206

Rapidly he unslung from his belt the apparatus he used
to capture meteors. A powerful electromagnet, with a thin,
strong wire fastened to it, to be hurled from a helix-gun.
He set the drum on which the wire was wound upon the
metal at his feet, fastened it with its magnetic anchor,
wondering if it would stand the terrific strain when the
wire tightened.
Raising the helix to his shoulder, he trained it upon a
point well ahead of the rushing flier, and stood waiting for
the exact moment to press the lever. The slender spindle of
the ship was only a mile away now, bright in the sunlight.
He could see no break in her polished hull, save for the
dark rows of circular ports. She was not, by any means,
completely wrecked.
He read the black letters of her name.
Red Dragon.
The name of her home port, below, was in smaller
letters. But in a moment he made them out. San Francisco.
The ship then came from the Earth! From the very city
where Thad was born!
The gleaming hull was near now. Only a few hundred
yards away. Passing. Aiming well ahead of her, to allow
for her motion, Thad pressed the key that hurled the
magnet from the helix. It flung away from him, the wire
screaming from the reel behind it.
Thad's mass of metal swung on past the ship, as he
returned to the rocket and stopped its clattering explosions.
He watched the tiny black speck of the magnet. It vanished
from sight in the darkness of space, appeared against
against the white, burnished hull of the rocket ship.
For a painful instant he thought he had missed. Then he
saw that the magnet was fast to the side of the flier, near
the stern. The line tightened. Soon the strain would come
upon it, as it checked the momentum of the mass of iron.
He set the friction brake.
Thad flung himself flat, grasped the wire above the reel.
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Even if the mass of iron tore itself free, he could hold to
the wire, and himself reach the ship.
He flung past the deserted vessel, behind it, his lump of
iron swung like a pebble in a sling. A cloud of smoke burst
from the burned lining of the friction brake, in the reel.
Then the wire was all out; there was a sudden jerk.
And the hard-gathered sphere of metal was gone -
snapped off into space. Thad clung desperately to the wire,:
muscles cracking, tortured arms almost drawn from their
sockets. Fear flashed over his mind; what if the wire
broke, and left him floating helpless in space?
It held, though, to his relief.
He was trailing behind the ship. Eagerly he seized the
handle of the reel; began to wind up the mile of thin wire.
Half an hour later, Thad's suited figure bumped gently
against the shining hull of the rocket. He got to his feet,
and gazed backward into the starry gulf, where his sphere
of iron had long since vanished.
'Somebody is going to find himself a nice chunk of
metal, all welded together and equipped for rocket navi-
gation,' he murmured. 'As for me - well, I've simply got to
run this tub to Mars!'
He walked over the smooth, refulgent hull, held to it by
magnetic soles. Nowhere was it broken, though he found
scars where small meteoric particles had scratched the
brilliant polish. So no meteor had wrecked the ship. What,
then, was the matter? Soon he would know.
The Red Dragon was not large. A hundred and thirty feet
long, Thad estimated, with a beam Of twenty-five feet. But her
trim lines bespoke design recent and good; the double ring of
black projecting rockets at the stern told of unusual speed.
A pretty piece of salvage, he reflected, if he could land
her on Mars. Half the value of such a ship, unharmed and
safe in port, would be a larger sum than he dared put in
figures. And he must take her in, now that he had lost his
own rocket!
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He found the life-tubes, six of them, slender, silvery
cylinders, lying secure in their niches, three along each
side of the flier. None was missing. So the crew had not
willingly deserted the ship.
He approached the main air-lock, at the center of the
hull, behind the projecting dome of the bridge. It was
closed. A glance at the dials told him there was full air
pressure within it. It had, then, last been used to enter the
rocket, not to leave it.
Thad opened the exhaust valve, let the air hiss from the
chamber of the lock. The huge door swung open in
response to his hand upon the wheel, and he entered the
cylindrical chamber. In a moment the door was closed
behind him, air was hissing into the lock again.
He started to open the face-plate of his helmet, longing
for a breath of air that did not smell of sweat and stale
tobacco smoke, as that in his suit always did, despite the
best chemical purifiers. Then he hesitated. Perhaps some
deadly gas, from the combustion chambers....
Thad opened the inner valve, and came upon the upper
deck of the vessel. A floor ran the full length of the ship,
broken with hatches and companionways that gave to the
rocket rooms, cargo holds, and quarters for crew and
passengers below. There was an enclosed ladder that led to
bridge and navigating room in the dome above.. The hull
formed an arched roof over it.
The deck was deserted, lit only by three dim blue
globes, hanging from the curved roof. All seemed in order
— the fire-fighting equipment hanging on the walls, and the
huge metal patches and welding equipment for repairing
breaks in the hull. Everything was clean, bright with polish
or new paint.
And all was very still. The silence held a vague,
brooding threat that frightened Thad, made him wish for a
moment that he was back upon his rugged ball of metal.
But he banished his fear, and strode down the deck.
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Midway of it he found a dark stain upon the clean
metal. The black of long-dried blood. A few tattered
scraps of cloth beside it. No more than bloody rags. And a
heavy meat cleaver, half hidden beneath a bit of darkened
fabric.
Mute record of tragedy! Thad strove to read it. Had a
man fought here and been killed? It must have been a
struggle of peculiar violence, to judge by the dark
spattered stains, and the indescribable condition of the
remnants of clothing. But what had he fought? Another
man, or some thing? And what had become of victor and
vanquished?
He walked on down the deck.
The torturing silence was broken by the abrupt patter of
quick little footsteps behind him. He turned quickly,
nervously, with a hand going instinctively to his welding
arc, which, he knew, would make a fairly effective weapon.
It was merely a dog. A little dog, yellow, nondescript,
pathetically delighted. With a sharp, eager bark, it leaped
up at Thad, pawing at his armor and licking it, standing on
its hind legs and reaching toward the visor of his helmet.
It was very thin, as if from long starvation. Both ears
were ragged and bloody, and there was a long, unhealed
scratch across the shoulder, somewhat inflamed, but not a
serious wound.
The bright, eager eyes were alight with joy. But Thad
thought he saw fear in them. And even through the stiff
fabric of the Osprey suit, he felt that the dog was
trembling.
Suddenly, with a low whine, it shrank close to his side.
And another sound reached Thad's ears.
A cry, weird and harrowing beyond telling. A scream
so thin and so high that it roughened his skin, so keenly
shrill that it tortured his nerves; a sound of that peculiar
frequency that is more agonizing than any bodily pain.
When silence came again, Thad was standing with his
210

back against the wall, the welding arc in his hand. His face
was cold with sweat, and a queer chill prickled up and
down his spine. The yellow dog crouched whimpering
against his legs.
Ominous, threatening stillness filled the ship again,
disturbed only by the whimpers and frightened growls of
the dog. Trying to calm his overwrought nerves, Thad
listened - strained his ears. He could hear nothing. And he
had no idea from which direction the terrifying sound had
come.
A strange cry. Thad knew it had been born in no
human throat. Nor in the thoat of any animal he knew. It
had carried an alien note that overcame him with instinc-
tive fear and horror. What had voiced it? Was the ship
haunted by some dread entity?
For many minutes Thad stood upon the deck, waiting,
tensely grasping the welding tool. But the nerve-shattering
scream did not come again. Nor any other sound. The
yellow dog seemed half to forget its fear. It leaped up at
his face again, with another short little bark.
The air must be good, he thought, if the dog could live
in it.
He unscrewed the face-plate of his helmet, and lifted it.
The air that struck his face was cool and clean. He
breathed deeply, gratefully. And at first he did not notice
the strange odor upon it: a curious, unpleasant scent,
earthly, almost fetid, unfamiliar.
The dog kept leaping up, whining.
'Hungry, boy?' Thad whispered.
He fumbled in the bulky inside pockets of his suit,
found a slab of concentrated food, and tossed it out
through the opened panel. The dog sprang upon it, wolfed
it eagerly, and came back to his side.
Thad set at once about exploring the ship.
First he ascended the ladder to the bridge. A metal
dome covered it, studded with transparent ports. Charts
211

and instruments were in order. And the room was vacant,
heavy with the fatal silence of the ship.
Thad had no expert's knowledge of the flier's mechan-
ism. But he had studied interplanetary navigation, to
qualify for his license to carry masses of metal under
rocket power through the space lanes and into planetary
atmospheres. He was sure he could manage the ship if its
mechanism were in good order, though he Was uncertain
of his ability to make any considerable repairs.
To his relief, a scrutiny of the dials revealed nothing
wrong.
He started the gyro motors, got the great wheels to
spinning, and thus stopped the slow, end-over-end turning
of the flier. Then he went to the rocket controls, warmed
three of the tubes, and set them to firing. The vessel
answered readily to her helm. In a few minutes he had the
red fleck of Mars over the bow.
'Yes, I can run her, all right,' he announced to the dog,
which had followed him up the steps, keeping close to his
feet. 'Don't worry, old boy. We'll be eating a juicy
beefsteak together, in a week. At Comet's place in Helion,
down by the canal. Not much style — but the eats!
'And now we're going to do a little detective work, and
find out what made that disagreeable noise. And what
happened to all your fellow-astronauts. Better find out,
before it happens to us!'
He shut off the rockets, and climbed down from the
bridge again.
When Thad started down the companionway to the
officers' quarters, in the central one of the five main
compartments of the ship, the dog kept close to his legs,
growling, trembling, hackles lifted. Sensing the animal's
terror, pitying it for the naked fear in its eyes, Thad
wondered what dramas of horror it might have seen.
The cabins of the navigator, calculator, chief tech-
nician, and first officer were empty, and forbidding with
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the ominous silence of the ship. They were neatly in order,
and the berths had been made since they were used. But
there was a large bloodstain, black and circular, on the
floor of the calculator's room.
The captain's cabin held evidence of a violent struggle.
The door had been broken in. Its fragments, with pieces of
broken furniture, books, covers from the berth, and three
service pistols, were scattered about in indescribable con-
fusion, all stained with blood. Among the frightful debris,
Thad found several scraps of clothing, of dissimilar
fabrics. The guns were empty.
Attempting to reconstruct the action of the tragedy
from those grim clues, he imagined that the five officers,
aware of some peril, had gathered here, fought, and died.
The dog refused to enter the room. It stood at the door,
looking anxiously after him, trembling and whimpering
pitifully. Several times it sniffed the air and drew back,
snarling. Thad thought that the unpleasant earthy odor he
had noticed upon opening the face-plate of his helmet was
stronger here.
After a few minutes of searching through the wildly
disordered room, he found the ship's log — or its remains.
Many pages had been torn from the book, and the
remainder, soaked with blood, formed a stiff black mass.
Only one legible entry did he find, that on a page torn
from the book, which somehow had escaped destruction.
Dated five months before, it gave the position of the vessel
and her bearings — she was then just outside Jupiter's
orbit, Earthward bound - and concluded with a remark of
sinister implications:
Another man gone this morning. Simms, assistant
technician. A fine workman. O'Deen swears he heard
something moving on the deck. Cook thinks some of
the doctor's stuffed monstrosities have come to life.
Ridiculous, of course. But what is one to think?
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Pondering the significance of those few lines, Thad
climbed back to the deck. Was the ship haunted by some
weird death, that had seized the crew man by man,
mysteriously? That was the obvious implication. And if
the flier had been still outside Jupiter's orbit when those
words were written, it must have been weeks before the
end. A lurking, invisible death! The scream he had
heard....
He descended into the forecastle, and came upon
another such silent record of frightful carnage as he had
found in the captain's cabin. Dried blood, scraps of cloth,
knives and other weapons. A fearful question was
beginning to obsess him. What had become of the bodies
of those who must have died in these conflicts? He dared
not think the answer.
Gripping the welding arc, Thad approached the after
hatch, giving to the cargo hold. Trepidation almost over-
powered him, but he was determined to find the sinister
menace of the ship, before it found him. The dog
whimpered, hung back, and finally deserted him, con-
tributing nothing to his peace of mind.
The hold proved to be dark. An indefinite black space,
oppressive with the terrible silence of the flier. The air
within it bore still more strongly the unpleasant fetor.
Thad hesitated on the steps. The hold was not inviting.
But at the thought that he must sleep, unguarded, while
taking the flier to Mars, his resolution returned. The
uncertainty, the constant fear, would be unendurable.
He climbed on down, feeling for the light button. He
found it, as his feet touched the floor. Blue light flooded
the hold.
It was filled with monstrous things, colossal creatures,
such as nothing that ever lived upon Earth; like nothing
known in the jungles of Venus or the deserts of Mars, or
anything that has been found upon Jupiter's moons.
They were monsters remotely resembling insects or
214

crustaceans, but as large as horses or elephants; creatures
upreared upon strange limbs, armed with hideously fanged
jaws, cruel talons, frightful, saw-toothed snouts, and
glittering scales, red and yellow and green. They leered at
him with phosphorescent eyes, yellow and purple.
They cast grotesquely gigantic shadows in the blue
light....
A cold shock of horror started along Thad's spine, at
sight of those incredible nightmare things. Automatically
he flung up the welding tool, flicking over the lever with
his thumb, so that violet electric flame played about the
electrode.
Then he saw that the crowding, hideous things were
motionless, that they stood upon wooden pedestals, that
many of them were supported upon metal bars. They were
dead. Mounted. Collected specimens of some alien life.
Grinning wanly, and conscious of a weakness in the
knees, he muttered: 'They sure will fill the museum, if
everybody gets the kick out of 'em that I did. A little too
realistic, I'd say. Guess these are the "stuffed monstrosi-
ties" mentioned in the page out of the log. No wonder the
cook was afraid of them. Some of them do look hellishly
alive!'
He started across the hold, shrinking involuntarily from
the armored enormities that seemed crouched to spring at
him, motionless eyes staring.
So, at the end of the long space, he found the treasure.
Glittering in the blue light, it looked unreal. Incredible.
A dazzling dream. He stopped among the fearful, silent
things that seemed gathered as if to guard it, and stared
with wide eyes through the open face-plate of his helmet.
He saw neat stacks of gold ingots, new, freshly smelted;
bars of silver-white iridium, of argent platinum, of blue-
white osmium. Many of them. Thousands of pounds,
Thad knew. He trembled at thought of their value. Almost
beyond calculation.
215

Then he saw the coffer, lying beyond the piled,
gleaming ingots — a huge box, eight feet long, made of
some crystal that glittered with snowy whiteness, filled
with sparkling, iridescent gleams, and inlaid with strange
designs, apparently in vermilion enamel.
With a little cry, he ran toward the chest, moving
awkwardly in the loose, deflated fabric of the Osprey suit.
Beside the coffer, on the floor of the hold, was literally a
mountain of flame — blazing gems, heaped as if they had
been carelessly dumped from it; cut diamonds, incredibly
gigantic; monster emeralds, sapphires, rubies; and strange
stones, that Thad did not recognize.
And Thad gasped with horror, when he looked at the
designs of the vermilion inlay, in the white, gleaming
crystal. Weird forms. Shapes of creatures somewhat like
gigantic spiders, and more unlike them. Demoniac things,
wickedly fanged, jaws slavering. Executed with masterly
skill, that made them seem living, menacing, secretly
gloating!
Thad stared at them for long minutes, fascinated almost
hypnotically. Three times he approached the chest, to lift
the lid and find what it held. And three times the un-
utterable horror of those crimson images thrust him back,
shuddering.
'Nothing but pictures,' he muttered hoarsely.
A fourth time he advanced, trembling, and seized the lid
of the coffer. Heavy, massive, it was fashioned also of
glistening white crystal, and inlaid in crimson with weirdly
hideous figures. Great hinges of white platinum held it on
the farther side; it was fastened with a simple, heavy hasp
of the precious metal.
Hands quivering, Thad snapped back the hasp, lifted
the lid.
New treasure in the chest would not have surprised
him. He was prepared to meet dazzling wonders of gems
or priceless metal. Nor would he have been astonished at
216

some weird creature such as one of those whose likenesses
were inlaid in the crystal.
But what he saw made him drop the massive lid.
A woman lay in the chest — motionless, in white.
In a moment he raised the lid again; examined the still
form more closely. The woman had been young. The
features were regular, good to look upon. The eyes were
closed; the white face appeared very peaceful.
Save for the extreme, cadaverous pallor, there was no
mark of death. With a fancy that the body might be
miraculously living, sleeping, Thad thrust an arm out
through the opened panel of his suit, and touched a
slender, bare white arm. It was stiff, very cold.
The still, pallid face was framed in fine brown hair. The
fair, small hands were crossed upon the breast, over the
simple white garment.
A queer ache came into his heart. Something made him
think of a white tower in the red hills near Helion, and a
girl waiting in its fragrant garden of saffron and purple — a
girl like this.
The body lay upon a bed of blazing jewels.
It appeared, Thad thought, as if the pile of gems upon
the floor had been hastily scraped from the coffer, to make
room for the quiet form. He wondered how long it had lain
there. It looked as if it might have been living but minutes
before. Some preservative....
His thought was broken by a sound that rang from the
open hatch-way on the deck above - the furious barking
and yelping of the dog. Abruptly that was silent, and in its
place came the uncanny and terrifying scream that Thad
had heard once before, on this flier of mystery. A shriek so
keen and shrill that it seemed to tear out his nerves by
their roots. The voice of the haunter of the ship.
When Thad came back upon the deck, the dog was still
barking nervously. He saw the animal forward, almost at
217

the bow. Hackles raised, tail between its legs, it was
slinking backward, barking sharply as if to call for aid.
Apparently it was retreating from something between
Thad and itself. But Thad, searching the dimly-lit deck,
could see no source of alarm. Nor could the structures
upon it have shut any large object from his view.
'It's all right!' Thad called, intending to reassure the
frightened animal, but finding his voice queerly dry.
'Coming on the double, old man. Don't worry.'
The dog had reached the end of the deck. It stopped
yelping, but snarled and whined as if in terror. It began
darting back and forth, moving exactly as if something
were slowly closing in upon it, trapping it in the corner.
But Thad could see nothing.
Then it made a wild dash back toward Thad, darting
along by the wall, as if trying to run past an unseen
enemy.
Thad thought he heard quick, rasping footsteps, then,
that were not those of the dog. And something seemed to
catch the dog in mid-air, as it leaped. It was hurled
howling to the deck. For a moment it struggled furiously,
as if an invisible claw had pinned it down. Then it
escaped, and fled whimpering to Thad's side.
He saw a new wound across its hips. Three long,
parallel scratches, from which fresh red blood was trick-
ling.
Regular scraping sounds came from the end of the
deck, where no moving thing was to be seen - sounds such
as might be made by the walking of feet with unsheathed
claws. Something was coming back toward Thad. Some-
thing that was invisible!
Terror seized him, with the knowledge. He had nerved
himself to face desperate men, or a savage animal. But an
invisible being, diat could creep upon him and strike
unseen! It was incredible ... yet he had seen the dog
knocked down, and the bleeding wound it had received.
218

His heart paused, then beat very quickly. For the
moment he thought only blindly, of escape. He knew only
an overpowering desire to hide, to conceal himself from
the invisible thing. Had it been possible, he might have
tried to leave the flier.
Beside him was one of the companionways amidships,
giving access to a compartment of the vessel that he had
not explored. He turned, leaped down the steps, with the
terrified dog at his heels.
Below, he found himself in a short hall, dimly lighted.
Several metal doors opened from it. He tried one at
random. It gave. He sprang through, let the dog follow,
closed and locked it.
Trying to listen, he leaned weakly against the door. The
rushing of his breath, swift and regular. The loud hammer
of his thudding heart. The dog's low whines. Then -
unmistakable scraping sounds, outside.
The scratching of claws, Thad knew. Invisible claws!
He stood there, bracing the door with the weight of his
body, holding the welding arc ready in his hand. Several
times the hinges creaked, and he felt a heavy pressure
against the panels. But at last the scratching sounds
ceased. He relaxed. The monster had withdrawn, at least
for a time.
When he had time to think, the invisibility of the thing
was not so incredible. The mounted creatures he had seen
in the hold were evidence that the flier had visited some
unknown planet, where weird life reigned. It was not
beyond reason that such a planet should be inhabited by
beings invisible to human sight.
Human vision, as he knew, utilizes only a tiny fraction
of the spectrum. The creature must be largely transparent
to visible light, as human flesh is radiolucent to hard
X-rays. Quite possibly it could be seen by infra-red or
ultra-violet light - evidently it was visible enough to the
dog's eyes, with their different range of sensitivity.
219

Pushing the subject from his mind, he turned to survey
the room into which he had burst. It had apparently been
occupied by a woman. A frail blue silk dress and more
intimate items of feminine wearing apparel were hanging
above the berth. Two pairs of delicate black slippers stood
neatly below it.
Across from him was a dressing table, with a large
mirror above it. Combs, pins, jars of cosmetic cluttered it.
And Thad saw upon it a little leather-bound book, locked,
stamped on the back 'Diary.'
He crossed the room and picked up the little book,
which smelled faintly of jasmine. Momentary shame
overcame him at thus stealing the secrets of an unknown
girl. Necessity, however, left him no choice but to seize
any chance of learning more of this ship of mystery and
her invisible haunter. He broke the flimsy fastening.
Linda Cross was the name written on the fly-leaf, in a
firm, clear feminine hand. On the next page was the
photograph, in color, of a girl, the brown-haired girl whose
body Thad had discovered in the crystal coffer in the hold.
Her eyes, he saw, had been blue. He thought she looked
very lovely — like the waiting girl in his old dream of the
silver tower in the red hills by Helion.
The diary, it appeared, had not been kept very
devotedly. Most of the pages were blank.
One of the first entries, dated a year and a half before,
told of a party that Linda had attended in San Francisco,
and of her refusal to dance with a certain man, referred to
as 'Benny,' because he had been unpleasantly insistent
about wanting to marry her. It ended:
Dad said to-night that we're going off in the
Dragon again. All the way to Uranus, if the new fuel
works as he expects. What a lark, to explore a few
new worlds of our own! Dad says one of Uranus'
moons is as large as Mercury. And Benny won't be
proposing again soon!
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Turning on, Thad found other scattered entries, some of
them dealing with the preparation for the voyage, the start
from San Francisco - and a huge bunch of flowers from
'Benny,' the long months of the trip through space, out
past the orbit of Mars, above the meteor belt, across
Jupiter's orbit, beyond the track of Saturn, which was the
farthest point that rocket explorers had previously
reached, and on to Uranus, where they could not land
because of the unstable surface.
The remainder of the entries Thad found less frequent,
shorter, bearing the mark of excitement: landing upon
Titania, the third and largest satellite of Uranus; unearthly
forests, sheltering strange and monstrous life; the hunting
of weird creatures, and mounting them for museum
specimens.
Then the discovery of a ruined city, whose remains
indicated that it had been built by a lost race of intelligent,
spiderlike things; the finding of a temple whose walls were
of precious metals, containing a crystal chest filled with
wondrous gems; the smelting of the metal into convenient
ingots, and the transfer of the treasure to the hold.
The first sinister note there entered the diary:
Some of the men say we shouldn't have disturbed the
temple. Think it will bring us bad luck. Rubbish, of
course. But one man did vanish while they were
smelting the gold. Poor Mr. Tom James. I suppose he
ventured away from the rest, and something caught
him.
The few entries that followed were shorter, and showed
increasing nervous tension. They recorded the departure
from Titania, made almost as soon as the treasure was
loaded. The last was made several weeks later. A dozen
men had vanished from the crew, leaving only gouts of
blood to hint the manner of their going. The last entry ran:
221

Dad says I'm to stay in here to-day. Old dear, he's
afraid the thing will get me — whatever it is. It's really
serious. Two men taken from their berths last night.
And not a trace. Some of them think it's a curse on the
treasure. One of them swears he saw Dad's stuffed
specimens moving about in the hold.
Some terrible thing must have slipped aboard the
flier, out of the jungle. That's what Dad and the captain
think. Queer they can't find it. They've searched all
over. Well....
Musing and regretful, Thad turned back for another
look at the smiling girl in the photograph.
What a tragedy her death had been! Reading the diary
had made him like her. Her balance and humor. Her quiet
affection for 'Dad.' The calm courage with which she
seemed to have faced the creeping, lurking death that
darkened the ship with its unescapable shadow.
How had her body come to be • in the coffer, he
wondered, when all the others were — gone? It had shown
no marks of violence. She must have died of fear. No, her
face had seemed too calm and peaceful for that. Had she
chosen easy death by some poison, rather than that other
dreadful fate? Had her body been put in the chest to
protect it, and the poison arrested decomposition?
Thad was still studying the picture, thoughtfully and
sadly, when the dog, which had been silent, suddenly
growled again, and retreated from the door, toward the
corner of the room.
The invisible monster had returned. Thad heard its
claws scratching across the door again. And he heard
another dreadful sound — not the long, shrill scream that
had so grated on his nerves before, but a short, sharp
coughing or barking, a series of shrill, indescribable notes
that could have been made by no beast he knew.
The decision to open the door cost a huge effort of
Thad's will.
222

For hours he had waited, thinking desperately. And the
thing outside the door had waited as patiently, scratching
upon it from time to time, uttering those dreadful, shrill
coughing cries.
Sooner or later, he would have to face the monster.
Even if he could escape from the room and avoid it for a
time, he would have to meet it in the end. And it might
creep upon him while he slept.
To be sure, the issue of the combat was extremely
doubtful. The monster, apparently, had succeeded in
killing every man upon the flier, even though some of them
had been armed. It must be large and very ferocious.
But Thad was not without hope. He still wore his
Osprey-suit. The heavy fabric, made of metal wires
impregnated with a tough, elastic composition, should
afford considerable protection against the thing.
The welding arc, intended to fuse refractive meteoric
iron, would be no mean weapon, at close quarters. And
the quarters would be close.
If only he could find some way to make the thing
visible!
Paint, or something of the kind, would stick to its
skin.... His eyes, searching the room, caught the jar of
face powder on the dressing table. Dash that over it! It
ought to stick enough to make the outline visible.
So, at last, holding the powder ready in one hand, he
waited until a time when the pressure upon the door had
just relaxed, and he knew the monster was waiting outside.
Swiftly, he opened the door....
Thad had partially overcome the instinctive horror that
the unseen being had first aroused in him. But it returned
in a sickening wave when he heard the short, shrill,
coughing cries, hideously eager, that greeted the opening
of the door. And the quick rasping of naked claws upon
the floor. Sounds from nothingness!
He flung the powder at the sound.
223

A form of weird horror materialized before him, still
half invisible, half outlined with the white film of adhering
powder: gigantic and hideous claws, that seemed to reach
out of empty air, the side of a huge, scaly body, a
yawning, dripping jaw. For a moment Thad could see
great, hooked fangs in that jaw. Then they vanished, as if
an unseen tongue had licked the powder from them,
dissolving it in fluids which made it invisible.
That unearthly, half-seen shape leaped at him.
He was carried backward into the room, hurled to the
floor. Claws were rasping upon the tough fabric of his suit.
His arm was seized crushing in half-visible jaws.
Desperately he clung to the welding tool. The heated
electrode was driven toward his body. He fought to keep it
away; he knew that it would burn through even the
insulated fabric of his suit.
A claw ripped savagely at his side. He heard the sharp,
rending sound, as the tough fabric of his suit was torn, and
felt a thin pencil of pain drawn along his body, where a
claw cut his skin.
Suddenly the suit was full of the earthy fetor of the
monster's body, nauseatingly intense. Thad gasped, tried
to hold his breath, and thrust upward hard with the
incandescent electrode. He felt warm blood trickling from
the wound.
A numbing blow struck his arm. The welding tool was
carried from his hand. Flung to the side of the room, it
clattered to the floor; and then a heavy weight came upon
his chest, forcing the breath from his lungs. The monster
stood upon his body and clawed at him.
Thad squirmed furiously. He kicked out with his feet,
encountering a great, hard body. Futilely he beat and
thrust with his arms against the pillarlike limb.
His body was being mauled, bruised beneath the thick
fabric. He heard it tear again, along his right thigh. But he
felt no pain, and thought the claws had not reached the skin.
224

It was the yellow dog that gave him the chance to
recover the weapon. The animal had been running back
and forth in the opposite end of the room, fairly howling in
excitement and terror. Now, with the mad courage of
desperation, it leaped recklessly at the monster.
A mighty, dimly seen claw caught it, hurled it back
across the room. It lay still, broken, whimpering.
For a moment the thing had lifted its weight from
Thad's body. And Thad slipped quickly from beneath it,
flung himself across the room, snatched up the welding
tool.
In an instant the creature was upon him again. But he
met it with the incandescent electrode. He was crouched in
a corner, now, where it could come at him from only one
direction. Its claws still slashed at him ferociously. But he
was able to cling to the weapon, and meet each onslaught
with hot metal.
Gradually its mad attacks weakened. Then one of his
blind, thrusting blows seemed to burn into a vital organ. A
terrible choking, strangling sound came from the air. And
he heard the thrashing struggles of wild convulsions. At
last all was quiet. He prodded the thing again and again
with the hot electrode, and it did not move. It was dead.
The creature's body was so heavy that Thad had to
return to the bridge, and shut off the current in the gravity
plates along the keel, before he could move it. He dragged
it to the lock through which he had entered the flier, and
consigned it to space....
Five days later Thad brought the Red Dragon into the
atmosphere of Mars. A puzzled pilot came aboard, in
response to his signals, and docked the flier safely at
Helion. Thad went down into the hold again, with the
astonished port authorities who had come aboard o
inspect the vessel.
Again he passed among the grotesque and outrageous
monsters in the hold, leading the gasping officers. While
225

they marveled at the treasure, he lifted the weirdly embel-
lished lid of the coffer of white crystal, and looked once
more upon the still form of the girl within it.
Pity stirred him. An ache came in his throat.
Linda Cross, so quiet and cold and white, and yet so
lovely. How terrible her last days of life must have been,
with doom shadowing the vessel, and the men vanishing
mysteriously, one by one! Terrible — until she had sought
the security of death.
Strangely, Thad felt no great elation at the thought that
half the incalculable treasure about him was now safely
his own, as the award of salvage. If only the girl were still
living.... He felt a poignantly keen desire to hear her
voice.
Thad found the note when they started to lift her from
the chest. A hasty scrawl, it lay beneath her head, among
glittering gems.
This woman is not dead. Please have her given
skilled medical attention as soon as possible. She lies in
a state of suspended animation, induced by the injec-
tion of fifty minims of zeronel.
She is my daughter, Linda Cross, and my sole heir.
I entreat the finders of this to have care given her,
and to keep in trust for her such part of the treasure on
this ship as may remain after the payment of salvage or
other claims.
Sometime she will wake. Perhaps in a year, perhaps
in a hundred. The purity of my drugs is uncertain, and
the injection was made hastily, so I do not know the
exact time that must elapse.
If this is found, it will be because the lurking thing
upon the ship has destroyed me and all my men.
Please do not fail me.
Levington Cross.
Thad bought the white tower of his dreams, slim and
graceful in its Martian garden of Saffron and purple,
226

among the low ocher hills beside Helion. He carried the
sleeping girl through the silver door where the girl of his
dreams had waited, and set the coffer in a great, vaulted
chamber. Many times each day he came into the room
where she lay, to look into her pallid face, and feel her cold
wrist. He kept a nurse in attendance, and had a physician
call daily.
A long Martian year went by.
Looking in his mirror one day, Thad saw little wrinkles
about his eyes. He realized that the nervous strain and
anxiety of waiting was aging him. And it might be a
hundred years, he remembered, before Linda Cross came
from beneath the drugs' influence.
He wondered if he should grow old and infirm, while
Linda lay still young and beautiful and unchanged in her
sleep; if she might awake, after long years, and see in him
only a feeble old man. And he knew that he would not be
sorry he had waited, even if he should die before she
revived.
On the next day, the nurse called him into the room
where Linda lay. He was bending over her when she
opened her eyes. They were blue, glorious.
A long time she looked up at him, first in fearful
wonder, then with confidence, and dawning understand-
ing. And at last she smiled.
People used to ask why I didn't write something besides
science fiction, usually with some implication that they
considered it hardly worth writing. The best answer is that
I love and respect science fiction, that it's a big element in
my whole mental world, and that it has always given me a
flexible and sufficient vehicle for what I wanted to say.
Now and then, however, I have tried something else.
'We Ain't Beggars' was an attempt at what used to be
called quality fiction. At first I was doubtful about its
227

place in this book, but it does illustrate another chapter in
the writing life of the early Williamson - and anyhow it's
only three thousand words.
In the depression year of 1932, with Clayton in trouble
and Gernsback not paying, my writing income fell to
$465. I retreated to the family ranch, where I could help a
bit with the work and live for almost nothing. When I
wanted a vacation from the typewriter that summer, I
bought a backpack and set out on foot, with about $40 for
expenses.
I tried hitchhiking, but got no rides. After I learned to
catch the freight trains, I had better luck. I rode them a
thousand miles, across New Mexico, into Colorado as far
as Denver, back home through Amarillo in the Texas
Panhandle.
I stopped a few days at a fifty-cent hotel in each of the
interesting cities to explore the sights and look for science
fiction in the public library - never finding much of that. I
toured the steel mil! at Pueblo, hiked up Pikes Peak,
discovered burlesque in Denver, panned for gold on
Cherry Creek, visited hobo jungles, talked to a lot of
people.
Though the freights were uncomfortable, the whole trip
was a good adventure. Now and then I encumbered a
professional hobo, with his alarming tales about such
malevolent railroad bulls as Denver Bob, but most of the
men I met were as young and naive as I was, victims of
the broken-down economic system, riding the rails in
search of some way to survive.
'We Ain't Beggars' came from that trip. Though it is
fiction, most of the details I had observed or heard about.
Writing it, I was trying hard to put experience into literary
form. My success, clearly, was not complete. When I
mailed the story to such literary magazines as Atlantic
Monthly and Harper's, it came back without comment.
A little richer that fall, with checks from Weird Tales
and Amazing, I returned to college for my junior year,
228

though not to West Texas. I rode the Santa Fe freights
back to Albuquerque and enrolled there in the University
of New Mexico as a psychology major. Understandably
discouraged with the fiction business, I had written Dr.
Breuer to ask how to become a psychiatrist. His reply
convinced me that this was financially impossible, but at
least I hoped the psychologists could teach me a little
more about people and about myself.
That college year was rewarding. I had a glimpse of the
Pueblo Indian cultures and came to know some of the
anthropologists who were studying them. I had good
fortune in my roommate, Langdon Backus, a civilized and
idealistic Easterner who is still a friend. A great teacher,
Dr. George St. Claire, gave me a deeper respect for classic
literature. I studied biology and helped edit the literary
year-book and even learned a little psychology.
'We Ain't Beggars' was published there the following
fall, in the New Mexico Quarterly, for no pay at all. The
editor had reservations, natural at the time, about soiling
his academic pages with such a rude phrase as 'son of a
bitch,' but finally decided to let it stand. The story says
something about American life in those depression years,
I think, and maybe something about me.
229

'WE AIN'T BEGGARS'
He took the crushed stale bun out of his overalls pocket. It
was the last of the four he had bought in Ft. Worth for six
pennies. He had meant to save it for tomorrow....
The dog lying against him whined and licked at his
hand.
In the cold faint moonlight that fell through the half-
open door of the box car he broke the dry bun carefully in
half.
'Here, Tige, ol' man. It ain't much. But we'll git to
Uncle Jethro's tomorrow, shore.'
The bony dog gnawed and gulpeJ the piece of bread.
Slowly, with lingering joy, the boy ate his own share,
chewing each frugal bite until it became a sweetish liquid
in his mouth.
The car lurched and jolted. The boy's body was sore at
hips and shoulders from lying on the bare splintery floor.
Through the door rang the incessant rumble of the wheels,
and a white arm of moonlight moved back and forth to
rest on one or another of the untidy men sleeping with
their heads on paper bundles. In worn overalls and thin
blue shirt the boy's slight body was cold; he was glad for
Tige's warm body against him.
A man groaned and rose. A match lit a weary, un-
shaven face, cast uncertain shadows over motionless
bodies. Reek of cheap tobacco filled the car. The man
shook out a dusty vest that had been rolled up under his
head; he put it on, and walked across the sleepers to close
the door.
The roar of the wheels was a little diminished; but yet it
filled the car, mighty and unending.
In the new inky darkness the boy felt slightly warmer.
He turned over, and drew Tige's rough body closer to him.
230

He tried to go to sleep, and wished that he had another
bun. He licked fragments of the last from the corners of
his mouth and chewed at them and swallowed.
The hammering of the wheels grew slower and ceased.
The train had stopped. In the new silence the boy could
hear the snores of sleeping men. The car started again,
with a jerk that slid his sore body over the rough planks,
stopped as abruptly.
The door had been flung open; the man in the vest
peered out furtively.
'Wake up, you guys,' he called. 'The dirty hogheads
have set us out, to hell and gone from no place!'
Men stirred and yawned and groaned. They struck
matches that lit the car fugitively, rolled cigarettes, moved
toward the door with their bundles.
The boy slipped out of the door, and took Tige in his arms
to set him down. Cold dry air struck through his thin cotton
garments. In the dead light of the narrow waning moon he
saw that the car stood on a siding, in a string of empties.
'She's coupling up over yonder,' said the man in the
vest.
He walked away, wearily cursing. The boy followed
him through the line of cars, calling to Tige.
He saw the train on another track, the engine headlight
blazing on telegraph poles and a section shack. A man
with a flashlight was coming back along the cars.
'A damn shack,' muttered the man in the vest. 'Get out
of sight.'
He and the boy stepped back between two cars.
'He'll play hell keeping me off. I'm riding this damn
rattler to the end of the division. And then I'm going to
eat. Ain't had a sit down since I left K. C.'
There was a pause, while they shivered in the cold
moonlight that struck through between the cars. The man
looked cautiously out. Then the boy asked:
'You got folks waitin' for you?'
'Hell, no. I stem what I get.'
231

Curiously, the man looked at the thin, proud childish
face, pallid and grimy in the moonlight.
'Don't you bum, kid?'
The boy shook his head.
'Hell, it's easy. Just stick with me and we'll stem hell out
of the next dump.'
'I ain't no beggar.'
The dog put his velvety head up against the boy's hand,
and whined. The boy looked down at him quickly, and
patted the soft fur.
'Tige and me are hungry,' he said. 'But v/e ain't goin' to
beg. We got folks.'
His slight shoulders stiffened as he looked at the man.
'Don't be a fool, kid. We can mooch enough in an hour
to last two days. Hell, it's easy. No sense starving. You'll
get weak, and fall under the wheels.'
'We ain't beggars. I'm goin' to my Uncle Jethro.'
The man started to laugh. Then the whistle sounded two
blasts and the train began to move.
'Them sons of bitches set out all the empties,' he
grumbled. 'We gotta ride on top.'
He swung on the end of a car as it passed.
The next was a tank car. The boy lifted Tige in his arms
and set him on the running board. The dog seemed very
heavy; he staggered a little beneath the weight.
'Easy, ol' man. I'm a-comin'.'
He climbed on the steps at the end of the car and
walked back along the narrow plank to Tige. By the ladder
at the middle of the car he sat down, swinging off his feet.
He grasped a rung of the ladder with one hand, and curved
an arm around Tige's body.
The boy felt a little queer and dizzy, but he set his jaw
and held up his chin.
'We ain't beggars, are we, ol' man?' he whispered at last
to the dog. 'I reckon he was right about me gittin' weak.
An' I'm shore sorry about you havin' to go without. But I
can't beg. An' we got Uncle Jethro.'
232

The train gathered speed. The wind grew stronger.
Most of the buttons were gone off the shirt, and the wind
whipped it away from the boy's body. He was colder than
he had been in the box car.
The car swayed and lurched. The sound of the wheels
was the clangor of sledges on a thousand anvils. Ceaseless,
powerful, terrible. A demoniac yell that never ended.
The black edge of the grade raced endlessly back at his
feet, and interminable rows of weeds. Sometimes cinders
rained on him. When one got in his eye, he forgot the cold
until tears had washed it out. The arm with which he grasped
the ladder was stiff and numb, but he dared not move to
exercise the cold and the cramp from his body while the train
plunged rocking through the night. He or Tige might fall, and
the screaming, inexorable wheels were very near...
Dull eternities dragged away, and he clung shivering to
the cold iron.
Lee Haskell came of a proud breed. His mother he
knew only as a tight-mouthed face on a fading photo-
graph. He and his father had always lived in lonely
independence in the pine shack at the edge of the stony
forty acres. Lee did not remember when he had been
too small to go with his father to the cotton patch.
A proud and lonely breed. They asked no favors, and
fate had given them none. All the year before Lee's father
had been too infirm to help in the field. Lee did his
stubborn best. But cotton was five cents, and the boll
weevil got into the crop. His father sold the best half the
forty, and could not pay the taxes on the rest. He would
not ask for a loan.
That spring he was feebler still. Lee put in the crop
alone. When the cultivation was but well begun, Toby, the
old mule, foundered himself when he broke into Jim Cole's
green corn, and died. Jim Cole, owner of a rich bottom
farm, came next day, driving a team of grays to a riding
cultivator. He found Lee's father sitting on a rickety chair
in the shade of the lone peach tree by the shack.
233

'I'm right sorry about your mule foundering,' he said.
'Colonel,' - the stiff pride of the old man's bearing must
have won him the title, for he had seen no military service-
'Colonel, I'm loaning Lee my outfit to plow out his cotton.'
The old man stiffened in his chair.
'Thankee, sir,' he said. 'But I reckon we can make out.'
'Why, I won't be needing them for a week, Colonel. We
just got through this morning.'
'We ain't askin' nothin', sir, from nobody.'
Jim Cole laughed. 'I know you didn't ask, Colonel. But
I'd be glad to loan you the team.'
'Thankee, sir. But we don't want it.'
When Cole had abandoned his efforts to lend the team
and driven away, the old man called Lee out of the shack
where he had been preparing their meal.
'Did you go beggin' Jim Cole for help, boy?' his shrill
voice cracked accusingly. 'Ain't you got no pride?
Beggin'! An' off a damn Yankee!'
'I didn't ask him, Pa. I ain't spoke a word to him since
Toby died.'
'I'm glad to hear it, Lee my son. We ain't no poor white
trash. And I reckon we can get along without askin' help
from nobody. You jest finish choppin' out the cotton, Lee.
An' then get what weeds you can with the hoe. An' don't
be thinkin' of beggin'!'
During the summer, as Lee toiled in the shrunken,
weed-grown field, the old man took by degrees to his bed.
One flaming noon, when the boy trudged in from the field,
sweat-streaked and dusty, worn hoe on his shoulder, he
found Mrs. Cole standing in the door of the shack. A
large, energetic, jovial woman; Lee had always liked her.
In a basket on her arm were a pail of milk and loaves of
white bread and a pat of new butter.
'You're a sick man, Colonel Haskell,' she was saying. 'I
tell you corn pone and salt meat ain't best for you. Your
stomach ain't as strong as it used to be. It calls for lighter
victuals.'
234

Lee's father was sitting up on the rusty iron bed.
'Thankee, ma'am,' he said. 'But I reckon Lee and I can
take care of ourselves. We ain't beggars.'
Three weeks later he was dead.
Lee remembered the gossiping company that sat up all
night with the corpse, while hammers tapped away in the
shed behind, fashioning the pine coffin. And then the man
who came with the sheriff, to claim the rest of the farm for
taxes.
Mrs. Cole came again, and wanted Lee to go home with
her.
'I know you're a good boy, Lee,' she said. 'Jim and me
want you to come and live with us. We'll be good to you.
You won't have to work so hard; you'll have time to go to
school, and everything. Jim and me always wanted a boy
of our own.'
Lee stood with tears in his eyes, and she came to him
and pressed his trembling body against her soft bosom.
Fiercely he broke away from her arms, chin up, fists
clenched.
'I can look after myself,' he choked. 'Tige and me, we
ain't beggars.'
'But honey, Jim and me want you. And you ain't got a
soul in the world to go to.'
'Yes, I got folks,' stammered Lee. 'I got my Uncle
Jethro.'
'Your uncle? Where does he live, child?'
'Pa always said he was in Denver. He went there the
year I was born. He's a paper hanger.'
'But hon, does he know you're coming?'
'No, mam, we never heard from him after he started
out. Pa was always lookin' for a letter. But he tol' me he
knowed Uncle Jethro was goin' to Denver.'
Her strong soft arms went around his body. He knew
that she was crying, too, and felt a strange comfort.
'You must come stay with Jim and me, child, till we find
him.'
235

Lee had heard tramp cotton pickers talk about riding
the freights. That night he started.
Dawn came. A white gleam that slowly drowned the
thin moon and the hard clear stars. The train hammered
on and the gray light brought no warmth.
Lee was sleepy.
He could not relax. He dared not loosen his grasp upon
the ladder or withdraw the guarding arm that held Tige
against him ... The pounding, ringing wheels were very
near ... He tried not to close his eyes, but the lids slipped
down. Again and again he yawned.
Little gaps came in his consciousness, when he had
been on the edge of sleep. They made it seem that he had
been forever on the car, that the crashing ring of steel on
steel would never end.
White sun struck him, feebly warm. The chill receded
gradually from his limbs. But still they were cramped and
stiff.
Yet he fought the desire to sleep, jerking himself back
again and again from just beyond the brink, but alarmed
into wakefulness only for moments by the threat of
screaming steel.
The train lurched on.
The sun was high and Lee at last warm again when it
slowed. He saw they were entering a hollow among bare
hills. Desire to sleep had almost left; he was hungrier. He
looked eagerly toward the town ahead.
Men were climbing from the train. He waited until it
was rolling slowly, then threw himself off. He had meant
to land on his feet, but he stumbled and fell in the weeds. It
was strange how weak and tired he felt, when he was not
so hungry as he had been yesterday. Giddy, and feeling
almost that he was swimming instead of walking.
Tige yelped and leapt off the plank and came running back
to him. He yawned and whined and licked the boy's hand.
'Wisht I had somethin' for you, ol' — ol' man,' Lee
choked. 'But 1 can't beg. I jes' can't!'
236

On a weed-grown open space near the track he
approached three shabby men about a fire. One was cutting
up cabbage and potatoes in a grimy tin bucket; and the
scent of steaming coffee made the boy's head swim.
'Please, sir,' Lee addressed the one who looked up at
him. 'Is this Denver? I'm lookin' for my Uncle Jethro.'
And he added hastily, 'His name is Jethro Wade.'
The unshaven man scanned him, and grinned.
'Hell no, kid. This burg's Trinidad. You can make
Denver by night, though. Just hop the Rio Grande around
the other end of the yards. She pulls out in about an hour.'
He jerked his thumb.
Lee swayed, and bit his lip.
'You — you ain't jokin', Mister. I rode on the side of an
oil car, so long! You don't really mean this ain't Denver?'
The man started to grin, and then looked quickly away.
'Honest, kid. But you can make it today, easy. Better sit
down and have a fill of slum with us.'
'Much oblige, sir,' Lee said wearily. 'We'll be gittin' on.'
He turned stiffly away. Tige went whining up to the
man by the fire.
'Hungry, pup?'
'Here, Tige! Come here!' the boy called sternly. 'We
ain't -'
His voice broke; he walked away hastily, the dog
reluctantly at heel.
'How you making it, kid?' came a hail.
It was the man of the vest - the garment by day was a
dingy green.
'I'm lookin' for the place to git on the cars again.'
'Had anything to eat?'
'No. I'm goin' to Denver, to my Uncle Jethro.'
The man came toward Lee.
'Hell, kid, you look all washed up. Come on with me.
Let's mooch something, and eat.'
'I ain't goin' to beg,' said Lee. 'Not when I got folks to
go to.'
237

'Listen, kid, you're starving. You gotta eat.'
The boy looked stubbornly away.
'Well, anyhow, let's move on. The train leaves out up
this way.'
They passed in front of a cafe. Lee saw men sitting at a
counter inside, heard the rattle of thick dishes. He turned
his face away, and hurried on. The man in the green vest
lingered. Crisp fragrance of new bread smote Lee with
intolerable yearning; he stopped and looked back.
A bakery truck had stopped in front of the cafe; the
driver was getting out. The lingering man spoke to him.
'Sure, buddy,' said the driver. 'I've got plenty of stale
bread. Rolls too.'
He reached into the truck, produced a loaf of bread and
a package of brown cinnamon rolls. The unshaven man
stood eyeing his prizes with visible satisfaction.
'Hit him when he comes out, kid,' he advised. 'He's got
plenty more. Hell, kid, you're starving. You'll never get to
Denver unless you eat. You'll fall off the train.'
The delicious odor of fresh bread floated around the
boy. He swallowed, and took an unsteady step toward the
door of the cafe. Then he clenched his thin black hands,
and thrust them hard into the pockets of his overalls.
'I ain't a beggar,' he muttered. 'Not so long as I got
folks.'
He went back to the tracks and stumbled along them
until he came to the caboose of the motionless train.
Walking along beside it, toward the engine blowing off
steam far away at the head, he looked for an empty car in
which he could lie down. He didn't feel like holding on to
the outside again. But all the cars were sealed.
A rough man strode down upon him.
'Get the hell out of the yards, you! You damn sure ain't
going to ride the train out!'
Lee hurried on, the bull followed him. They came to
more men waiting; the bull herded them all down the
track, left them at last to sit down wearily.
238

The engine whistled two blasts, began laborious puffing.
The man in the green vest was suddenly beside Lee,
holding out a tempting, fragrant cinnamon roll.
'Here, kid. Take this. Hell, you ain't able to hop it,
without something in your gut.'
His hand moved toward it involuntarily; he felt the
quick saliva flowing in his mouth.
Then he changed the movement to a weak slap, and
buried his face between his knees.
'I won't —' he sobbed. 'I won't be a beggar!'
The haggard, untidy men got to their feet, slung their
packs and bundles to their bodies, dully cursing the bull.
The train came roaring down. They trooped forward,
running one by one with the cars, swinging upon the
ladders.
Lee felt dizzy when he first stood up; he waited until his
head had cleared a little. The others were all gone when he
lifted Tige in his arms and staggered toward the rushing cars.
A tank car came rumbling by, and he set the dog on the
running board. The end of the car jerked past. He tried to
run with it, seized the ladder. It was moving too fast. They
had told him not to catch the rear end of a moving car, but
he didn't want to leave Tige.
The world went abruptly gray, and spun; and a
strangely delightful lassitude descended upon him. He was
unconscious that his foot had missed the step; he hardly
felt the iron rung jerk itself savagely from his hands. For
an instant, very near, he saw cruel bright steel, and the
great wheels thundering ...
Tige leapt yelping off the car. He fell rolling in the
weeds and ran back, to stand whining by the track until
the roaring train had gone.
*
Times were still hard when I got home from the university
in the summer of 1933. Weird Tales had begun printing
serial installments of Golden Blood, but the depression
239

had closed their Indianapolis bank and my checks were
delayed. I still owed the school $40 for board and room.
My assets were about six dollars in cash and the idea for a
new novel.
In his Great Books class, Dr. St. Claire had told us how
the Polish novelist, Sienkiewicz, borrowed the characters
of Dumas' musketeers and Shakespeare's Sir John Falstaff
for a series of historical novels. I thought the same trick
should work in science fiction.
The Three Musketeers had captivated me, but I was still
apprehensive about Shakespeare. What I did was to leaf
cautiously through the Henry IV plays, reading FalstafPs
speeches and skipping the rest. As scholarship, that was
reprehensible, but I did discover a spark of life for the fat
old veteran of the Legion of Space I named Giles Habibula.
Still trying for an Argosy sale, I cast the story into six
parts. They went fast. Through the long summer days, I
wrote one chapter each morning and another in the
afternoon. The first draft took three weeks, and I lavished
three more on revision before I mailed it to Argosy.
By that time another check had come, and I set out
with my younger brother, Jim, on another economy
vacation. He stripped down an old Model-T Ford and
built a box behind the seat for our gear. Camping on the
desert and sleeping under a tarp — which is the best way to
see the stars — we saw rancher friends and relatives across
New Mexico and Arizona, and visited our uncle Stewart's
new mountain ranch south of the border. We hiked down
Bright Angel Trail to the bottom of the Grand Canyon
one day, down into Meteor Crater the next.
By the time we got home, Argosy had returned The
Legion of Space, though the editors wrote they had almost
decided for it. It may have collided with a policy I learned
about later, that stories had to be mutually consistent. My
legionnaires had destroyed the moon with their absolute
weapon, and I suppose the editors wanted to save it for
other authors.
240

Since I've mentioned so many Argosy rejections, I must
say here that at last I did sell the magazine several
novelettes, though by that time the noble old all-fiction
pulp had fallen into distress and the rate of pay was only a
cent and a quarter a word.
Though the failure of my Legion novel was another
painful blow, the news that summer was not all bad. A
handwritten letter from Desmond Hall requested new
stories for Astounding, which had been taken over by
Street and Smith, an older and stronger pulp publisher
than Clayton, if not quite so generous.
The new editor of Astounding was F. Orlin Tremaine,
an able and enterprising man, though he lacked the
science background and the creative verve that John
Campbell brought to the magazine a few years later. In the
beginning he wanted short stories only, but when he
decided to run a serial, I had The Legion of Space on
hand. He bought it that winter for $600, a penny a word,
and published it in 1934. The readers seemed to like it. A
fan poll, a few years later, showed Giles Habibula to be
the most popular character that had appeared in the
magazine.
'Dead Star Station,' which comes next, was the first of
many stories I sold Street and Smith. The price was $80 -
only half what Clayton would have paid, but still good
money in that hard year. It ran in the second issue of the
revived Astounding, November 1933.
This is another story in which the science still looks
reasonably good, even after forty years. The notion of
gravity waves is somewhat more respectable now, 1 think,
than it was in 1932, and the Dead Star itself is a vague
anticipation of the neutron stars of today's astronomy —
the orbital fall around it foreshadows the plot of my own
neutron-star story, 'Operation Gravity,' published in 1953
in Gernsback's Science Fiction Plus, his last venture into
the field.
241

DEAD STAR STATION
The difference between a fool and a genius can be stated in
one word — success. And success had not found Gideon
Clew. We all tolerated the old man; most of us pitied him;
some of us genuinely liked him. A neat, trim old fellow,
white-haired, marvelously erect for his age, with cheeks
like wrinkled red apples, and bright, sober blue eyes.
The lisp in his speech made him unintentionally droll.
That must have been the chief reason why he had been so
long scorned and obscure. For the lisp increased with his
earnestness; he could never put his great idea into words
without inadvertently rousing a desire to laugh.
Fourteen of us were waiting on Dead Star Station, in
the wild, lonely Orion Passage, for the coming of the space
liner Bellatrix. Thirteen men and a girl. Twelve of us made
up the crew of the station. And the thirteenth man was
Gideon Clew.
The old man, of course, had no official right to be upon
the station. But mild old Captain Manners was soft-
hearted, and the rest of us sympathetic. Gideon Clew had
been aboard since before most of us were born — fifty
years, he said. Fifty years is a long time for a man to be
shut up in a little metal world, away from life. He had lost
his place outside; he had no one to go to. It would have
been cruelty to send him away.
He had been a generator-man until, ten years before, the
service had automatically retired him, sent out another man
to take his place. We let him stay aboard, wrapped up in the
Great Idea that — had success chosen to crown it — would
have made him famous. We even dug into our own pockets
to make up his quarterly pay check, to provide funds to
carry on the experiment that was the old man's life.
And the girl was Tonia Andros.
242

Eight years old, she was, a slim little wisp of elfin
gravity. She was not actually a beautiful child; her mouth
was too wide and her nose turned up impudently. But her
dark eyes were wistfully grave, and all of us loved her.
After all, men so far from home, from family, from all that
is life, could not be critical of her.
The story of Tonia Andros must have been another of
those adventures of space that are the stuff of romance.
We knew but a chance fragment of it. Months before, we
had found the wrecked freighter drifting. A meteor stream
from the nebula had struck it; the rusty hull was riddled,
and all on board - save Tonia - were frozen and dead.
She had been sealed between the valves of the main air
lock, where some one must have placed her after the
catastrophe. The tube of oxygen in the little cavity with
her was exhausted; she was unconscious from asphyxia-
tion and cold. But we reached her in time.
But not in time to save the ship. The wreck was already
fast in the relentless gravitation-field of the Dead Star. It
went plunging down to incandescent ruin upon that black
and dying sun, carrying with it the history of Tonia
Andros, and whatever patrimony may have been hers.
The experience must have been painful; her tortured
mind may have sought relief by blotting that time out of
memory. Whether she remembered more we never knew,
but she would tell us only her name.
Tonia was a friend to each of us. But she and old
Gideon Clew felt a particular affinity. The little girl
haunted his cabin, and he seemed not to fear her hands
upon the precious apparatus he had gathered there.
The child must have brought something of the warm
glow of life back into a nature that had been shut off from
life too long. Gideon turned aside from his invention to
make toys for her, with his skilled old hands. Yet he
worked ever harder, and he told us that he was going to
adopt her, give her home and education, when his dis-
covery was perfected.
243

'When his discovery was perfected' — that phrase had
been in his talk for forty years and more.
Still the thing was not done, and all of us save Gideon
Clew knew that it was chimera. Now we were waiting for
the Bellatrix to come down the passage. Captain Manners
was retiring; our new officer was to come upon the liner.
Manners was to take Tonia with him — though the child
was not eager to leave Gideon Clew — to try to find a
home for her.
The old man himself was torn between impatience and
relief as we waited for the liner. It was almost breaking his
heart to part with the child, who must have been his only
really intimate companion in those five decades. But he
was madly anxious for the vessel to come with a shipment
of parts for his invention, that he had ordered a year
before.
Time can pass slowly on Dead Star Station. A small
world, completely isolated. The station is really an
obsolete war-rocket, too antiquated to fly with the
system's fleets. A corroded metal hull, some two hundred
feet long. Space aboard is limited, quarters cramped,
means of diversion lacking.
But beyond the station's vitrolar ports is space in
abundance. The view must be the most weirdly colossal,
the most awesome, in all the galaxy. The Great Nebula
spans the sky like an octopus of living flame. A vast,
angry sea of swirling white fire, eerily tinged with the
green of nebulium, its twisting streamers reaching out like
incandescent tentacles.
Unthinkably vast, those tentacles seem to grasp the
Dead Star. That cyclopean cold sun is a little black disk
limned against livid flame. Its dark face is patched with
marks of sullen crimson — inimitable seas of yet molten
lava, for the Dead Star is not utterly dead.
The hurtling meteor-streams and the seas of incan-
descent gas that make up the Great Nebula of Orion form
the most stupendous barrier to trans-stellar navigation in
244

the entire galaxy. Light itself, at one hundred and eighty-
six thousand miles per second, takes three years and more
to cross it.
But there is a way through. The Orion Passage. A lane
kept cleared of darting meteors and burning gas by the
colossal gravitation of the Dead Star, a titanic dark sun
that lurks like a black spider in the bright web of the
nebula, reaching out with resistless, invisible force for
what it may draw to destruction.
No ship has ever visited the Dead Star. No rocket could
pull away from its inconceivable surface gravity. It is
estimated that a human body would weigh well over a
hundred tons upon its surface — enough so that the bones
would break and the flesh run away from them like water.
The idea is unpleasant.
The station, equipped with powerful electron-blast
motors to keep her clear of the giant sun's inexorable pull,
was established as an aid to navigation in the passage, her
duties being to chart the continually shifting meteor-
streams, inform passing shipping by photophone of the
safer courses, and to go to the aid of any endangered
vessels.
Time passed slowly upon the tiny metal world of the
station, that was but a mote hung between titan black sun
and the changeless fiery glory of the nebula. But at last the
Bellatrix came. And from dull weeks of waiting, we were
plunged incontinently into mad confusion.
The Bellatrix was a new vessel, of three times the
station's tonnage, regularly plying the passage. Those of
us who could went aboard the liner during the little time
the valves were coupled, to enjoy briefly the spaciousness
of the vessel, her cosmopolitan atmosphere, the gossip of
her curious passengers.
Vance, our photophone operator, returned with one
interesting bit. He talked to one of her passengers, a man in
an invalid chair, with a bandaged head. This man told him
that the Bellatrix carried an immensely valuable cargo of
245

uranium ingots, and that her officers had been warned to
beware of Skal Doon, the inter-stellar buccaneer.
Even so, there was no great novelty in a warning
against Skal Doon. He was one of the last freebooters of
space, the most notorious and daring. For three decades
he had been a terror of the void, escaping capture partly
by a flair for originality, party by ruthless cruelty in the
elimination of opponents, and largely by an intimate
knowledge of the mazes and fiery ways of the Great
Nebula, which he knew as no other man. It is curious
that men spoke of him with a certain admiration and
respect, which he deserved as little as a human being
could.
Gideon Clew and Tonia Andros parted at the valves.
The child's wistful eyes were frankly tearful as Captain
Manners led her away, and old Gideon's lisping voice
choked oddly. And then the old man went to claim the
long, carefully wrapped package that had come for him —
the anxiously awaited parts for his invention.
Presently the new captain came aboard the station.
Clive Kempton was his name. A tall young man, in severe
white uniform, with the eagle insignia of the service on his
cap. His face was lean and stern. We saw at once that he
was the sort that takes responsibility very seriously, that
considers regulations much more holy than they are —
perhaps because of a subconscious fear of criticism.
A little time of bustling, mad confusion. Stores coming
aboard, cylinders of oxygen, drums of fuel for our
generators. Then the last shout of farewell. The valves
were sealed again, uncoupled. And the Bellatrix went on.
We upon the station were left — or so we supposed - to
wait through other weary weeks, until another vessel
picked its way between the flaming walls of the passage.
None of us had premonition we were to see the liner again,
so soon and under such distressing circumstances.
246

Hume, the station's mate, was in the bridge room with
the new captain, when Gideon Clew limped hesitantly in,
with a hopeful smile upon his red, wrinkled face.
'Captain, thir?' he lisped, a little timidly.
'What is it?' Kempton asked brusquely. 'What's your
name?'
He did not intend to be unkind. He was taking his new
command much too seriously. The vague, blind hostility
and the supernal power of the Great Nebula and the titanic
Dead Star had already set their print of terror in his soul.
'Gideon Clew, thir. You thee, thir, I have invented a
gravity-screen. I've just installed the last parts, that came
on the Bellatrix. Pleathe, thir, may I use power from the
ship's generators to test it?'
'What's this? A shield, you mean, against the force of
gravitation?'
'Yeth, thir. I've been working on it many yearth, thir.'
Perhaps, if it had not been for Gideon's lisp, Kempton
would have listened. But the lisp made the bright-eyed,
apple-cheeked little man unconsciously and pathetically
funny; and the more serious he became, the worse his lisp.
And Kempton was young; he had not yet learned that
regulations are made to be broken.
'How much power do you need?' he asked.
'Two hundred thousand kilowatts, thir.'
Kempton, astonished, looked inquiringly around at
Hume.
'Why, that's the full capacity of our generators?'
'I know, thir. But just a few minuteth —'
'Just who are you, anyhow?' the captain demanded.
Gideon's wide blue eyes stared at him in bewilderment,
and Hume spoke to explain the old fellow's status upon
the station.
'You know, it's against regulations for you to be here at
all,' Kempton said. 'You must prepare to leave, Clew,
when the Bellatrix returns. I don't understand how it
happened.'
247

'But, thir, the power —'
'I must refuse your extraordinary request. Of coursel I
want you to realize this is not a playhouse. And not an old
man's home. I don't understand it!'
The serious, bright eyes about the man's little red
cheeks were fixed intently upon Kempton's face for a long
time. Then they began to blink, and Hume saw huge, slow
tears gathering in them.
'Yeth, thir,' Gideon whispered. And he stood there.
Kempton and Hume were busy with the astrographic
charts, checking their maps of the nebula's flaming
streamers, which flooded the bridge with greenish, ghostly
radiance. Kempton seemed to forget Clew, and the little
man stood there blinking. It must have been ten minutes
later that he spoke again.
'Captain Kempton, thir?'
'Eh? Oh, you're still here? What is it?'
The bright eyes winked bravely.
'Captain, you don't understand, thir. I've been working
on my gravity-screen nearly fifty yearth. Ever since I first
came here, thir. It was the Dead Thtar, tho near. I got
books on electronics. I studied hard, thir.
'Other men have come and gone, thir. Even the
mechanics stay only thix yearth, you know. Because it is
tho lonely. Now, thir, it is done. An electronic field, a
screen of ions, that flows over the surface of any
conductor, and reflects, dissipates, the radiations of
gravity.'
Kempton laughed. He did not intend to be malicious;
there was something irresistibly funny about Gideon
Clew, lisping so seriously.
'Why, gravitation isn't even a radiation, man! It's a
strain in the ether, a curvature —'
'I know, thir, that is one theory. But I have proved it is
a radiation, on the order of the subelectronic particles —'
Kempton was suddenly brusque. Angry with himself
because he had laughed.
248

'Anyhow, you'll have to give it up. We've no fuel to
waste on fool experiments.'
He bent over the charts again. Gideon Clew turned
dazedly toward the door, moisture glittering unheeded on
his bright, wrinkled cheeks. It is not easy for a man to give
up what he has worked for all his life — not when he has
labored and planned and dreamed as had Gideon Clew.
He turned and lisped again: 'Captain, thir?'
'What is it nowT Kempton showed his annoyance at
the interruption.
'Captain, there's Tonia Andros. A little girl, that we
took off a wreck. When my invention is successful, thir, I
am going to adopt her —'
'Sorry, Clew, I'm busy.' Kempton nodded at the door.
'Yeth, thir.'
Gideon Clew blinked and turned slowly again. He
fumbled for the door knob with twisted old fingers, and
could not see it. 'Wait!' came Kempton's brisk voice, and
he turned, sober blue eyes shining with incredulous hope.
'Thir?'
'I suppose you've a clutter of apparatus in your cabin.
See that it's cleared out. Have it all in order when you
leave.'
'But captain, thir, I can't dismantle my apparatus. I'm
an old man. I'll never have money, or a chance to try it
again. Oh, don't you theeV
There was something in the appealing blue eyes that
Kempton could not resist.
'All right,' he said suddenly. 'I'll have Mr. Colin supply
you the power-output, for exactly five minutes. I shouldn't
do it; it's against regulations.'	x
Gideon's face was wrinkled into a grin of radiant joy;
his round blue eyes shone mistily.
'Go on, now, and try it,' Kempton said. 'And afterward
clear the rubbish out of your cabin.'
Gideon vanished, and the station's lights were dim for
five minutes, and the electron-blast motors dead for that
249

long, allowing us to drift to the unopposed drag of the
Dead Star's relentless gravity.
During those minutes, Gideon Clew was furiously busy
in his cabin, among complex apparatus that filled it so
completely that there was scant room for his body.
Transformers hummed, and the tall vacuum tube that the
Bellatrix had brought filled with pallid, virescent fire. He
closed a switch that grounded one of its electrodes to the
station's hull. A feeble green glow shimmered along the
wire.
Gideon Clew felt the ship pause beneath him as that
slow drift toward the Dead Star was arrested! Crying out
from sheer pain of joy at success after fifty years of toil, he
watched in proud wonder.
Plop!
He heard the hollow, muffled sound. Heart sinking, he
spun around. Green radiance was gone from tube and
wire. The new tube had burned out!
'Captain, thir,' Gideon lisped with earnest eagerness,
back on the bridge, 'didn't you feel our drift-acceleration
stop, when my electronic screen cut off the attraction of
the Dead Thtar?'
'No, I'm afraid not. And remember our bargain, now.
You've had the power. Now you must dismantle your
machine, and get it ready to take on board the Bellatrix.''
'But captain, I know —'
Clive Kempton turned, reached for an ellipsograph. He
was a young man, full of his new responsibility. And he
did not realize how much Gideon's experiment had meant
to the old fellow.
The bright, sober eyes were blinking very fast.
Trembling hands fumbled blindly at the door. Gideon
Clew let himself out, and stood a lon<3 time leaning against
the wall. An old man, sick with failure. He was glad that
none came near him.
The Bellatrix, flashing onward along the flaming
corridor of the passage, was still in photophone com-
250

munication with us. A private call came for Gideon Clew,
and Vance, our operator, sent the steward to find the old
man.
'A call for me, thir?' he lisped in excited astonishment
as he shuffled into the photophone room. It must have
been the first in fifty years.
Vance made him sit down in front of the projection
screen, and tuned his set and synchronized the scanning
tube. The bright-hued geometric figures of the registration
pattern vanished suddenly, and on the screen was Tonia
Andros.
lOh, Granddad/' she cried, in a voice atremble with
eager joy and relief. And she ran forward until she went
out of focus, and blurred.
Smiling reassuringly, Gideon lisped: 'What ith it,
Tonia?'
Vance and the other operator were inevitable eaves-
droppers, for without' their continual adjustments, the
narrow etheric nerve between the ships would have
snapped in half a minute. The two seemed to forget them.
The little girl's image sharpened again, and she stood
there, bewildered, dark eyes round and huge and solemn.
'Oh, Granddad!' she pleaded — she always called him
that. 'I'm so lonesome! I made them let me talk to you. I
want you to come and stay with me. Please, won't you?
You said you would come when your invention is done.
Please hurry!'
Gideon clenched his gnarled old hands, and his blue
eyes glistened.
'No, Tonia,' he whispered. 'No, I'm afraid -' He choked
and stopped. Tears rolled out on his cheeks and he did not
heed them. 'No, Tonia,' he cried again. 'My invention - will
never be —finished. And, Tonia, I —have to go away —'
'But, Granddad!' Her grave voice was distressed. 'You
promised me! You mustV
'Tonia!' he cried convulsively. 'Tonia, I will! In spite of
everything! I'll come after you!'
251

She laughed happily. Then the other operator must
have spoken to her, for she looked away from the screen,
and back again.
'Good-by, Granddad!' she called. 'I'll wait!'
'Good-by, Tonia,' whispered Gideon Clew. But the
connection had already been cut, and he spoke to a blank
and empty screen.
Not an hour later, Vance's call-bell rang again,
urgently.
When the set was tuned, he saw the Bellatrix's operator
on the screen. And swift realization of tragedy overcame
him. The man's cap was gone, his face haggard, his eyes
wild with desperation. His white uniform, Vance saw, was
torn at the shoulder, one sleeve crimson with blood that
dripped and spattered on the floor.
The man's lips were working nervously; he was
gasping. Apparently he was too frightened to speak.
'Cool off!' Vance shot at him. 'What is it?'
'Come -' he cried incoherently. 'For life's sake! They
murdered the captain! Come!'
Vance heard blows upon the Bellatrix's door, and
shouts beyond it. The wounded operator turned and stared
mutely, as three men burst it open and came in, all of them
carrying glowing ionic needles. The operator stood facing
them, trembling, helpless, blood dripping from his sleeve.
Vance knew the leader of the three at once by one
feature of his face, described in many warnings and offers
of reward. He had no nose. Only a blue ray-scar where it
should have been, with two black slits for nostrils.
Skal Doon! The space pirate! The 'terror of the nebula'!
'Calling the eagles, eh?' he demanded of the operator.
His voice was thin and shrill. Vance had a vague feeling
that he had heard it before, though he knew he had never
seen Skal Doon. 'Setting the service on Skal Doon, eh?'
His hand tightened on the ionic needle, and it spat blue
sparks. The operator threw up his arms and spun around,
252

screaming. The ray had burned away his face, but
sickening minutes passed before he collapsed and was
dead.
Skal Doon watched him until he was a shuddering heap
on the floor. Then he looked into the screen, at Vance.
And Vance never forgot his amazing eyes. Large, they
were, limpidly brown, soft and gentle as a woman's.
'So our friend did call you, eh?' his thin voice shrilled.
And he kicked the trembling thing at his feet. 'And maybe
you have seen enough so you can guess what happens to
eagles that swoop at Skal Doon!'
Vance's sickness at the horror he had seen must have
been evident enough. The mild brown eyes smiled at him;
the high voice made a ribald jest at his condition. Then the
ionic needle came up again, spitting blue fire, and the
screen went blank.
Only then did Vance recognize that shrill voice. It was
the voice of the man with the bandaged head and the
invalid's chair, with whom he had talked on the Bellatrix.
Of the man who had talked, ironically, of Skal Doon.
The Bellatrix, of course, was not a fighting ship. Her
only weapon was a long rocket-torpedo tube that had been
mounted, ironically enough, for protection against the
very buccaneer who had seized the vessel.
Though the station's fighting equipment was obsolete,
consisting only of four rocket-torpedo tubes and the
Sealby Arc — which hurled a blasting shaft of electricity
from the generators — we might easily enough have
destroyed the liner. But destruction was not our aim; we
had to consider the hundreds of passengers aboard.
'We'll have to run them down, capture the ship,'
Kempton told Hume, on the bridge. 'And that torpedo-
tube will make them hard to take.'
'Doon knows how to play his cards,' Hume agreed.
Even with the station's powerful electron-blast motors,
installed for her ceaseless battle with the gravitation of the
Dead Star, we did not come up quickly with the fleeing
253

liner. It was ten hours before the battle began. After the
long tension of suspense, it was a swift and confusing
thing.
Gideon Clew came running up hopefully to Kempton,
soon after the Bellatrix was sighted - a silvery speck,
fleeing between the white curtains of the Great Nebula, the
violet, fluorescent trail of her electronic motors streaming
out behind her.
'Captain, thir! In the battle — what do you want me to
do?'
His round blue eyes were bright with eager deter-
mination. But Kempton turned on him impatiently.
'Just keep to your cabin, Clew. The crew is complete
without you.'
'But, thir,' he lisped protestingly. 'Tonia! I must help
save her! She —'
'Go below, Clew.'
Red, wrinkled face suddenly downcast, sober eyes
glittering, the old man stumbled out of the room.
As the station came up with him, Doon began to fire.
The first rocket we were able to avoid, by an abrupt
change of course. The second and the third were detonated
at a distance by the searing flame of the Sealby Arc.
But the fourth slipped past the searching finger of the
arc, a hurtling mote, a miniature ship, death-laden. It
struck amidships. The station lurched sickeningly to its
explosion. Fragments of the beryllo-steel hull were driven
inward with terrific force. And an instant later our
precious air was creaming out through the sudden, ragged
opening, chilled by expansion until snow glittered in it.
Colin, the chief engineer, was killed outright by a
splinter of the hull. Hale, the second, darted at once with
his two helpers to repair the hole, snatching down the
metal patches and the thermite welding units that always
hung ready on the wall.
The task was not easy. One of the helpers was carried
bodily through the opening by the outrushing air to
254

hideous death. Then patches were flung over the ragged
orifice, and the major leak soon stopped. But the shock
had strained all the seams of the old hull. Though Hale
and the remaining assistant found and mended many
breaks, the vital air continued to hiss out alarmingly.
Thus, for a time, the generators were deserted by their
regular crew, and just at the moment when power was
most necessary. The station was swiftly overhauling the
Bellatrix. On the bridge, Kempton was screaming a fervid
appeal into the speaking tube.
'For life's sake, Colin, give me power! For the Sealby
Arc! Before they can reload that tube!'
But the engineer was dead, and the surviving members
of his staff were completely engaged in a desperate battle
to preserve the station's essential atmosphere.
Yet the generators came again to sudden animation,
and the blue arm of the electric arc reached out once more.
It touched the rocket-torpedo tube in its armored housing
above the hull of the Bellatrix. And the tube became fused
and crumpled metal.
Skal Doon, though thus robbed of his only offensive
weapon, was still not defeated. He displayed again that
resource which so often had saved him, an original daring
worthy of a greater man. The liner deliberately changed
her course, swung about in a long curve, and plunged
downward toward the Dead Star.
'Diving for the star!' cried Hume in dismay. 'Going to
smash, rather than surrender!'
With silent attention, Kempton was studying the
motion of the argent ellipsoid through his instruments. He
laid them aside at last, and turned suddenly to the mate.
'No. Skal is cleverer than that. He is planning to fall
around the Dead Star, and back away from it.'
'Around it? How -'
'The Bellatrix is on a parabolic orbit, like a comet's. It
will flash down to the star, curve close around it, and fly
off again. Or would — if we weren't here to stop it.'
255

'You're going to follow?'
'Of course. We'll run them down, fasten the station
alongside with the magnetic anchors. The Bellatrix has no
weapon. If Skal won't surrender, we'll storm a valve, or
cut through the hull.'
He looked at the barometers, and his face fell with
alarm—
'That last shot finished us, anyhow. We're gone unless
we can get aboard the Bellatrix. The pressure is down two
pounds already. Our air won't last three hours, at this
rate.'
The silvery hull of the liner was plunging toward the
Dead Star with motors full on. Kempton shouted again
and again into the speaking tube for more power. No
voice answered, but the generators always responded.
The Bellatrix was now but a few miles ahead. Abruptly
she began a confusing series of maneuvers to evade the
station, twisting, swerving. But, lighter and more powerful,
the station kept close behind her.
The liner turned back at last, plunging directly at the
other ship with manifest intent to ram it, to the destruction
of both vessels. Kempton shouted a wild command, the
generators replied instantly, and the station slipped out of
the way.
Another order, and a heavy magnet anchor leaped from
its catapult toward the passing ship, dragging its cable. It
struck the liner's hull, clung fast.
Like a silver fish, the Bellatrix plunged and darted for a
time upon the line. But the smaller station held her
adroitly, giving her opportunity neither to ram nor to
break the cable. And steadily the ships were drawn
together as the cable was wound upon its drum!
The purple, fluorescent blast from the liner's motors
was at last shut off. The two ships drifted side by side, at
the cable's ends - hurtling down toward the black, red-
flecked disk of the Dead Star.
The station's air, leaking steadily through opened
256

seams, was swiftly growing unbreathable. Men panted at
ordinary tasks; a deadly chill stole through the ship.
Kempton called us all to the upper deck, ordered us to
don space suits. He served out ionic needles and other
weapons, ordered torches got ready for cutting through
the liner's hull, if that proved necessary.
'Colin,' he called into the speaking tube, 'bring your
men on deck. We're going to abandon ship.'
'This ith not Colin,' lisped a voice from the tube.
'Who? Clew? What the—'
'Colin ith dead, thir. I have been running the generators.
I was a generator-man forty yearth, you know.''
Kempton's voice was queer. 'All right, Clew. Good
work. Come on and get into your space suit.'
Five minutes later, the eleven of us were dragging
ourselves across between the ships in clumsy, inflated
suits, laden with weapons. As weird a journey as can be
imagined, it was. Eleven swollen giants, climbing by their
hands along a cable between two vessels in the void. For
background, the flaming streamers of the Great Nebula,
and the malign black disk of the Dead Star.
Then happened an unexpected thing — a dreadful thing.
The main valve of the Bellatrix flung suddenly wide,
and a score of human figures spewed out. We thought at
first that the pirates were foolishly leaving the ship to beat
off our attack. But these men had no space suits.
In the blast of air they were thrown clear of the ship, to
become, in the vacuum of space, queer, swollen monsters.
But, horribly, they did not immediately die. Sprawling in
the airless void, they tore at their throats, faces contorted
with agony unutterable.
An atrocious murder of helpless passengers, most of us
thought. We dragged ourselves hastily on, hot with resent-
ment, to seize the valve before it could be closed, to fight
our way from it into the ship and avenge this thing.
Strangely — ominously — our entrance was not opposed.
When we opened the inner seal, Skal Doon, alone and
257

apparently unarmed, met us on the deck inside. A curious
grim smile was upon his face, and his mild, limpidly
brown eyes were mocking.
'Skal Doon,' Kempton barked at him, 'you'll answer for
the ruthless murder of those innocent passengers!'
'But, my dear sir,' the buccaneer protested, in his
queerly thin voice, 'those were my own men! Surely you
cannot object!'
'Eh? The passengers -'
'— have not been injured, I assure you. They are safely
confined to their quarters. I put my men through the valve
as an act of mercy.'
'You might explain.' Kempton menaced him with an
ionic needle.
Doon smiled again, twistedly, and shrilled:
'You seem to have understood my plan, captain, to fall
in a parabola about the Dead Star.'
'Yes. A simple trick.'
'When I saw you follow, captain, 1 realized that you
understood. And with the ship on your cable, I realized
that I had lost the game. I was forced to select another
means of escape. Accordingly, some distance back, I
changed the course of the Bellatrix.'
'What?' Kempton demanded. 'What did you do?'
'You'll find out, I fancy. And to prevent your undoing
my work, I have also wrecked the motors, and short-
circuited the generators in such a manner as to burn them
out.'
'But — but your escape —'
'You have already witnessed the escape of my men. I
am now following them. But my deeds, you will find, are
to live after me.'
Doon's jaws contracted suddenly, and something
crushed between his teeth. Still smiling, he spat blood and
fragments of glass.
'Farewell, captain. And a safe voyage — to the Dead
Star!'
258

He saluted ironically, and fell heavily upon his face.
In a few mad minutes we verified all he had told us.
The passengers were safely locked below. The machinery
was wrecked beyond the possibility of repair. Hume and
Kempton went to the liner's bridge.
The Bellatrix, they found, was plunging toward the
Dead Star, upon a path that would end in flaming
catastrophe. Doon, realizing his defeat, had turned the
liner from the parabolic orbit toward that titanic black
sun. Truly, his deeds lived after him.
One glance at the graviscope, or gravitational field
detector, told Hume that doom was inevitable. Already the
needle was pulled to the end of its scale. Even with the full
power of her now useless motors, the ship could not have
fought free of that relentless drag.
Tonia Andros, unharmed, came running across the
deck when the imprisoned passengers were released. She
found Gideon Clew and threw her arms around him. The
old man bent and caressed her hair and looked into her
dark, wistfully happy eyes.
Then Hume came back from the bridge, with the dread
news that we were falling toward the Dead Star, helpless,
doomed.
Gideon lifted the little girl in his arms and held her tight
for a little time, and then set her down.
'Good-by, Tonia,' he whispered. 'There is something I
forgot. I must go back on the station a little while. Captain
Manners will take care of you. Run to him, now.'
He pushed the grave-eyed, bewildered child away, and
hurried toward the valve. Hume followed him, asked:
'You aren't going back on board, Clew? It's death. No
air!'
The old man paused, and his sober blue eyes looked
back at the puzzled, solemn child.
'Yeth,' he lisped. 'I must go. For herV
He got back into his space suit, and Hume let him out.
259

The station's atmosphere was very thin when Gideon
Clew returned - and cold. It glittered in the pale yellow
tube-light with a frigid, frosty glint. He could hear the
sibilant whisper of it as it hissed out into the frozen void.
He left his space suit in the air lock. Its tube of
compressed air would have lasted perhaps an hour longer,
but his hands, in its clumsy gloves, could not do the
delicate work he had set for them.
Less than an hour, without it, was left him. Already he
was breathing hard, as he made his way into the fore-
castle, gasping painfully from the slight exertion of
walking. And there was much to be done — fifty years'
labor to be brought to completion.
Synthetic air was still hissing noisily from the cylinders,
perhaps as fast as it was leaking from the hull. But the
cylinders, in a few more minutes, would be empty. And
the cold due to swift expansion of escaping air filled all the
ship; the chill of it seared Gideon's gasping lungs.
For a little time he stood, panting, shivering, among the
complex apparatus in his own, tiny cabin, his laboring
heart thumping against his throat. He felt tears come into
his eyes at sight of these familiar instruments. Offspring of
laborious years, they seemed living, intimate. He did not
matter. But the Dead Star should not have his invention.
Nor Tonia!
With trembling hands, he began the task. He first
removed the tall vacuum tube from its mountings, and
broke its air seal. When the room's frigid air had hissed
thinly into it, he unscrewed the base, to examine the
damage done when the tube had burned out.
The fine wires of the secondary electrode were fused in
silvery beads against the cathode grid. He turned the
delicate parts in his quivering, gnarled old hands, and
studied them, trying to puzzle out the original defect that
had caused the disaster. He searched patiently.
Even as he stood still, he had to gasp for breath. His
head throbbed. The utter, unthinkable cold of space crept
260

inexorably into the room; frost danced in the air. Gideon
Clew shivered and absently drew his thin jacket closer
about his erect old shoulders. One old man, he was pitted
against the searching cold and the vacuum of elemental
space — against the relentless gravitation of the Dead Star.
But he took no time for despair.
At length he saw the defect. The filament should have
been longer, the grid set back a little, and turned so. A
simple change.
He found a coil of tiny wire and delicate tools, and
began to make the repair. That was not difficult. The hard
part would be to evacuate the tube again. It was useless
with air inside, and he had no pump, or time to use it.
The new parts fitted, he screwed the base back into the
tube and then attacked the problem of exhausting it. He
knew a way, difficult, perilous — but quick.
As rapidly as he could, with numb, aching hands, he
sealed a piece of metal tubing into the tube. Then he found
his rotary drill, fitted it with his longest point, and
attacked the cabin's outside wall.
That wall was the beryllo-steel hull of the station.
Beyond its four obdurate inches was the vacuum he
needed. Trembling, he leaned on the handle of the tool.
Cool was piercing into him. His head ached; his ears
drummed. Blood began to drip from his nose, drop by
crimson drop, to freeze on the floor.
He reeled dizzily, but clung to his task. The drill
whirred in his hands, quivered, bit slowly into tough
metal. Its motor made a little heat, grateful to his stiffened
fingers; he tried to hold them closer against it.
At last the point slipped through. He drew it back, and
the air whistled shrilly through the hole, out into the void of
space. Just as he had planned. He fitted the end of the metal
tubing into it, crudely cemented it. Now the vacuum of
space would draw the air from the repaired electron tube.
He closed the switches, and started to the generator
room.
261

The hissing in the corridors had ceased. The air-
cylinders were empty. Again the pressure in the ship was
dropping, and swiftly.
Gideon's old heart labored so that he held a numb
hand against it. He was suffocating; the thin, cold air
seemed to be sucked out of his pumping lungs. His head
roared and throbbed; his pulse drummed in his ears.
Blood was still oozing from his nostrils, cold and sticky
on his face.
And his body was wooden. Every movement was a
battle against leaden inertia. Every effort burned vital
oxygen, increased the strain on heart and lungs. But he
must go on — start the generators.
Now on hands and knees, he crawled along the
corridor. His hands were stiff, lifeless things. No sensation
came from them as they fell upon the metal floor.
No longer could he see. Blackness crowded upon him,
lit with strange, lurid flashes of crimson. His head whirled;
he felt that the ship was swinging, spinning, under him. A
blind automaton, he crawled on. And the face of Tonia
Andros danced before him, smooth and childish, dark
eyes wistfully solemn.
Every tissue of his leaden, tortured body screamed at
him: 'Stop! Stop! Rest! Forget/'
So he came at last into the generator room. With
infinite effort he pulled himself up against the instrument
board. There he leaned, gasping, trembling, blood trickling
frtm his nose — straining every atom of his will to see!
The darkness at last cleared for a moment, and the
roaring quieted in his head. He read the dials, and with
stiff hands moved the switches. All the processes were
familiar, automatic. If only he could hold himself up to
carry them out!
He grasped the final lever with dead, insensate paws,
and drew it down as he fell.
The old man lay gasping upon the floor, blood gushing
frtm his nostrils in a scarlet, frothy flood — but he heard
262

the soft whir of the generators, the shrill, rising whine of
transformers.
All of us were silent for a time, upon the Bellatrix, when
Hume told us that Gideon Clew had gone back. We were
all thinking of his cheery old face, with its red cheeks and
its round, sober blue eyes. Of his faith, his optimism. And
all of us were sorry we would never hear his lisping voice
again.
But our minds were soon feverishly back upon more
immediate things.
'After all, it's rather a splendid way to die,' Vance told
Hume. But his voice was unsteady.
They had gone back together to the bridge, and from its
vitrolar panels stood watching the incandescent wonder of
the nebula, the Dead Star grasped in its fiery tentacles, a
growing black disk, splotched with red.
The battered, oxide-reddened hull of the station was
drifting alongside at the end of her cable, her dark
ellipsoid outlined against the green-tinged, flaming
vortexes of the nebula. Hume looked at it.
'Perhaps,' he said, with slow deliberation. 'But old Clew
— Going back to work with his machine, till the end —'
Vance did not reply, and they gazed out upon the
supernal majesty that infolded them. The Great Nebula:
angry, swirling masses of virescent fire, white curtains and
streamers and sheets, greenish, dazzling, clotted conden-
sations. Cosmic clouds of flame, shrouding a grim, lifeless
sun. The Dead Star: ominous black disk against lucent
glory. Its lurid crimson spots — seas of molten lava, wide
enough to swallow planets — started back like red, evil eyes.
Vance laughed hollowly, nervously. He whispered:
'When?'
Hume turned, found an astro-sextant on the chart table.
He put it to his eye and read the apparent diameter of the
Dead Star, and busied himself with his pocket calculator.
'Five hours -
263

Vance said nothing, and they watched the menacing,
red-spotted blackness of the Dead Star's face. It was
minutes later that he licked his lips and added:
'The acceleration increases, of course, as we fall nearer.
Just above the surface, the force upon us will be upward of
a ton for every pound of our bodies. We will have no
sensation of it, though, because we are falling with it, free.
And we aren't heading directly for the center of the disk.
Momentum will carry us part-way around. We'll strike on
the other side -'
A long silence, and Vance spoke again.
'Old Clew's gravity-screen! No wonder he went daft on
it, looking down in the Dead Star for fifty years. And no
doubt dreaming of something like this.'
He laughed, loudly, mirthlessly.
Kempton gathered the nervous, bewildered passengers
into the main saloon, and spoke to them.
'We are falling into the Dead Star,' he said. 'Nothing in
the universe can save us. Nothing short of a breach of the
law of gravitation. But the end will not be painful. We will
flash instantaneously into incandescent gas. I advise you
to get the most you can out of the few hours left to us. The
whole ship is at your disposal. I will welcome any plans
for diversion.
'But if any ,of you should feel that you cannot endure
the strain of waiting, you will find the ship's surgeon ready
in the sick bay with painless anaesthetics.'
He stopped; with a gesture to indicate that he was done.
The passengers milled about, white-faced, and stared
unknowingly at each other, as if they had all been
strangers.
Tonia Andros was going about the decks, asking in a
bewildered and fearful voice where Gideon was, and why
he didn't come back. Kempton found her and brought her
with him to the bridge. Through the transparent panels she
saw the Dead Star, a black, red-pocked disk, ever in-
creasing, hung against curtains of supernal light.
264

She shuddered, drew back.
'It's like a face!' she cried. 'With red eyes, gloating —'
And with anxious solemnity she demanded of Hume:
'Where is my Granddad?'
The mate pointed to the station - a battered, twisted
mass against the flaming arms of the nebula.
'Let's go across!' she cried, with big-eyed, wistful
earnestness. 'I want to find my Granddad!'
Hume shook his head. 'It's no use, Tonia. The air was
leaking out. He won't come back. He's — gone, now.'
The mate averted his eyes, and the little girl still stared
bewilderedly into the vitrolar panels.
'Look!' she cried out. 'The green light! What is it? Do
you see it? There! There!'
Then Hume saw a pale, virescent glow spreading
swiftly over the battered red hull, like a film of oil upon
water. Green luminescence streamed down the cable to the
Bellatrix; in an instant it was shining upon the metal
frames of the vision panels.
Then a bell clanged from the graviscope, and he ran
back to it. He saw that the needle, that a moment before
had been drawn to the end of its scale by the terrific pull of
the Dead Star, had returned to zero. In unbelieving
wonder, he stared at the instrument. Then he spun upon
Kempton, eagerly.
'The old man was trying to generate an ionic screen
that would reflect the radiation of gravity. That green glow
is his screen - I know it is! And the graviscope shows that
we have been cut out of all gravitational fields!'
'And I,' Kempton muttered, 'I thought-just an old fool -'
'Don't you see what it means?' Hume cried in sudden,
feverish eagerness. 'We aren't going directly toward the
Dead Star, and now it can't curve our path any more!
We'll fly on past! We'll have time to make repairs, or
photophone for aid!'
Tonia Andros was staring at him with round, wide
eyes.
265

'Then Granddad is still all right?' she cried. 'Let's go
across and find him!'
She snatched Kempton's hand, tugged toward the door.
'Yes, he's all right,' he whispered. 'And, yes — we'll go —'
*
'Dead Star Station' is a fitting story I think for the end
of this book, because it returns to the cosmic optimism
that was dominant in the early science fiction magazines.
Ma.n here is still heroic. With all the odds against him,
Gideon Clew uses science and reason to defeat human evil
and to triumph over a hostile universe.
Science fiction has always had a heroic central myth of
the conquest of space. A thousand writers have picked it
up and enlarged it. Ed Hamilton with his tales of the
Interstellar Patrol. Olaf Stapledon with his visions of a
splendid human future. Doc Smith arid Isaac Asimov.
Lately, at a loftier literary level, Ursula Le-Guin.
It's that optimistic myth, I think, that gave life to our
space program and put men on the moon. Ziolkovsky, the
Russian pioneer, wrote science fiction to promote space
travel. The German Rocket Society gained attention
through a Fritz Lang science fiction film, Frau im Mond.
The American Rocket Society grew from a handful of
science fiction fans. Willy Ley, the most influential publicist
for space flight in Germany and here, found his first wide
audience in the science fiction magazines. The ideas were
ready when Congress decided to pay for the hardware.
I think we still need the myth, with all its awed
excitement about man's splendid future. Today's science
fiction is often more sophisticated arid better written than
most science fiction was when I began, but as Sam
Moskowitz keeps saying, too much of it has lost that old
sense of wonder. I hope we can somehow revive it and get
back something of our lost faith in the human race.
The effect of fiction on science is easily exaggerated, of
course. No doubt I made too much of it in that old
266

editorial, 'Scientifiction, Searchlight of Science.' But
scientists do read and write science fiction. Not long ago
on a lecture platform I met a physicist who had been at
Los Alamos in the 1940s, designing atomic bombs. I felt a
little dazed when he told me that back in the 1930s he had
been reading my stories about the Legion of Space and
that earlier ultimate weapon, AKKA.
That's an ambiguous example, but I'm convinced that
science fiction does have a real input into the whole
temper of our times. As an alarmed optimist, I think our
crisis of faith in ourselves and our future has gone much
too far. I can't help suspecting that the desperate pessi-
mism of the 'new wave' generation of science fiction
writers should bear some of the blame. I even wonder
about the final effect of all those low-budget science-horror
films that end with a pious proclamation about 'things
man was not meant to know.' If dystopian fiction and
double-feature films are at all responsible for our loss of
nerve, we owe the future a more thoughtful second look.
In spite of pollution, in spite of the baby boom, in spite
of the spreading nuclear arsenals, I still believe our
civilization has at least a fair chance to survive. If we
attack our problems with reason and with hope, instead of
surrendering to panic or despair, it ought to be an even
better chance. I think the world still needs the faith in man
and his reason expressed in 'Dead Star Station.'
The story belongs to that optimistic myth of man's
coming greatness in space. Not that I was thinking of
myth or symbol when I wrote it. But that old dream of
man's vast cosmic future had captured my imagination. I
was trying to humanize it, to clothe the dazzling idea in
dramatic fiction about sympathetic people. Science fiction
nearly always begins with abstractions, but every sort of
fiction must work through the concrete, through percep-
tion and emotion. Gideon Clew may somehow stand for
all technology, but I loved and pitied and admired him as
a human being.
267

The old Victorian novel used to end with an epilogue, to"
tell what became of the characters after the story was
over. Having dwelt so long on my own early struggle, I
want to add at least a paragraph of epilogue here. I did
survive until World War II as one of a very few full-time,
self-supporting science fiction writers. But I started back
to college twenty years ago, while I was writing a comic
strip for the New York Sunday News. Like Isaac Asimov
again, though it took me almost a generation longer, I've
earned the Ph.D. Most of the year, I'm now a professor in
the department of English at Eastern New Mexico
University. I enjoy my students there and I feel fortunate
to be paid to talk about literature. I'm even allowed to
teach science fiction. I reserve the summers for travel and
writing. In 1974, Blanche and I got as far as Afghanistan
and India and Sri Lanka. After almost half a century and
twenty-five published books, I'm still writing science
fiction. On my own and with Fred Pohl. The Farthest Star
is the latest book with Fred. My own works in progres's
include The Power of Blackness and Brother to Demons,
Brother to Gods.
Putting this book together has been a pleasant assign-
ment. I think I have as much egotism as Isaac does,
though I've never learned to display it with his disarming
charm. Frankly, I've found it fun to write about myself.
The early Williamson is still a pretty strange fellow to me,
not altogether understandable or even entirely credible,
but I have enjoyed trying to recall him.
268

Jack Williamson's classic Legion of Space
series—available in Sphere Science Fiction
THE LEGSON OF SPACE
SPACE LEGIONNAIRES
They were the greatest trio of swashbuckling
adventurers ever to ship out to the stars! There
was giant Hal Samdu, rocklike Jay Kalam and the
incomparably shrewd and knavish Giles Habibula.
Here is their first thrilling adventure—the
peril-packed attempt to rescue the most important
person in the galaxy, keeper of the vital secret
essential to humanity's Survival in the deadly
struggle against the incredibly evil Medusae. . .
The Legion of Space is the first
self-contained novel in Jack Williamson's epic
Legion of Space series, an all-time classic of
adventurous science fiction to rank with 'Doc'
Smith's Lensman saga and Isaac Asimov's
Foundation trilogy.
0 7221 9171 5 SCIENCE FICTION 65p

Jack Williamson's classic Legion of Space
series—available in Sphere Science Fiction
THE COMETEERS
THE SOLAR SYSTEM
FACED INVASION!
In this, the second in Jack Williamson's classic
Legion of Space series, the reader will encounter
such marvels as a spaceship twelve million miles
long . . . the secret weapon that controls the
Universe ... a superhuman traitor to all mankind
. . . and, of course, the greatest trio of
swashbuckling adventurers in all of science fiction,
the Legionnaires of Space themselves. Thrill to
their breathtaking adventures as they defy mortal
peril and fantastic danger in the fight against the
dread powers of the invincible Cometeers and a
monstrous threat to the security of the
Solar System . . .
The Cometeers is the second self-contained novel
in Jack Williamson's epic Legion of Space series,
an all-time classic of adventurous science fiction to
rank with 'Doc' Smith's Lensman saga and Isaac
Asimov's Foundation trilogy.
0 7221 9173 1 SCIENCE FICTION
65p

Jack Williamson's classic Legion of Space
series—available in Sphere Science Fiction
ONE AGAINST THE LEGION
SPACE VENGEANCE!
"I am omnipotent and omniscient. I want every
man on every planet to shudder and grow pale
when he thinks of Me. For I have suffered gross
injuries that must be avenged . . ."
This sinister message—and a loathsome
serpent-like trademark—were the only clues the
Legion of Space had to the identity of Mankind's
most evasive and horrible enemy. But meanwhile.
He—or It—had meticulously begun to
destroy the world . . .
The Legiop of Space was well accustomed to facing
mortal peril in the black depths of outer space in
order to defend humanity against its unearthly
foes. But even they were to find their courage and
ingenuity tested to the utmost limits in their fight
against the vile phantom that called itself God and
shrouded the Universe in an incredible web
of terror . . .
One Against the Legion is the third
self-contained novel in Jack Williamson's epic
Legion of Space series, an all-time classic of
adventurous science fiction to rank with 'Doc'
Smith's Lensman saga and Isaac Asimov's
Foundation trilogy.
0 7221 9172 3 SCIENCE FICTION 65p

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