David Henry Keller

“ She did not know that I could pass through the door and find out what was on the other side. She did not know that I had a key.
The next day I pleaded indisposition and spent most of the hours idling and drowsing in my chamber. Not till nearly midnight did I venture down. The servants were certainly asleep that time. A dose of chloral in their wine had attended to the certainty of their slumbers. Fully dressed, with an automatic in my pocket, I reached the cellar and opened the door. It swung noiselessly on its well-greased hinges. The darkness on the other side was the blackness of hell. ”

“ A number of the most fearful men made a dash for the elevator. They were driven back by a torrent of rats climbing up the elevator shaft. Then fear came—and panic. With gun and heel, and broken chairs for clubs, they started in to kill rats, and for every one they killed, a hundred fastened to them with chisel teeth. To make it worse, the lights went out, and they were there in the dark, with mutilation as a beginning and death as an ending, and still the rats poured into the room, up the elevator shaft and out of the hole in the wall. ”

“ James Tarvish, old, shrewd, wealthy, realized before most of the world’s rich men what might happen on the earth. Having neither wife nor child, he had made money his God, and machinery his hobby. It was his cash which made the dream of interplanetary travel become a living reality. Though not an inventor himself, he was able to tell the men under his rule what to invent. Silently, vigorously, relentlessly he fought the battle against the automatons, but finally realized the fact that it might easily become a hopeless fight. ”

“ Only those near the door had their human flies in the trap. In the opposite direction the rows of pillars stretched into a far oblivion. I thought that at the end there was the black mouth of a tunnel, but I could not be sure and dared not go that far to explore the truth. Then, out of that tunnel, I heard a voice come, a singing voice. Slipping my shoes off, I ran back near the door and hid as best I could in a dark recess, back of a far piece of stone. I stood there in the darkness, my torch out, the handle of the revolver in my hand. ”

“ A worm like a night crawler, only much larger, in fact, very much larger. That made him laugh — to think how much larger this worm was than the ones he had used for fishing. All through the night he walked the floor and burned the lamp and said, "This is my home. No worm can make me leave it!" Several times he went down the steps, just a few of them, and shouted the message into the pit as though he wanted the Worm to hear and understand, "This is my home! NO WORM CAN MAKE ME LEAVE IT!!" ”

“ Could twenty men surfer more than one man? And then a thought came to me, a terrible, impossible thought, so horrible that I doubted my logic. But now two and two were beginning to make four. Could those men be the masters? They came and bought and left—to go to the cellar and stay there!
"Oh! Donna Marchesi!" I whispered. "How about those cat-eyes? If you had a hand in this, you are not a woman. You are a tiger."
I thought that I understood part of it. The latest master came to her for the key to the cellar, and then, when he once passed through the door he never left. ”

“ Make it powerful, swift, the finest ship ever made. In the one ship I want a giant refrigerator built. In fact, I want the entire half to be a refrigerator. Think of the greatest heat possible, the most terrible heat known to our intelligence and then plan a refrigerating plant that will enable a human being to live inside no matter what the heat is outside, and keep on living there, year after year. You have broken up the atom to obtain energy. Learn how to use that energy to produce cold. Stock both ends of the ship with everything necessary to keep several people alive for many years ”

“ He assured the dog that if business ever did come to the mill, he would be ready for it.
It was on Christmas Day of that winter that he first heard the noise. Going down to the basement to see that nothing had been injured by the bitter freeze of the night before, his attention was attracted, even while descending the stone steps, by a peculiar grinding noise, that seemed to come from out of the ground. His ancestors, building for permanency, had not only put in solid foundations, but had paved the entire basement with slate flagstones three feet wide and as many inches thick. ”

“ More than one business tried to resist and more than one business awoke to find that it owned nothing but ruins. Rat protection was worthless when the enemy came by the hundred thousand and even million. The only worth-while defense against the multitudinous enemy was the payment of the weekly tribute, small enough each week, but in the course of the year taking the profits from most of the firms compelled to pay. Within a year the average business in the city was working for the gangsters and content to, at least, be permitted to stay in business. ”

“ And that told me a good many things, as it was the hand that had rested against the upper hinge of the door. I washed the hand, changed my clothes and drove my car to Sorona.
Fortunately, the Donna Marchesi was at home. I might have met her before, but I now saw her ethereal beauty for the first time. A least, it seemed ethereal at the first moment. In some ways she was the most beautiful woman that I had ever seen: skin white as milk, hair a tawny red, piled in great masses on her head, and eyes of a peculiar green, with pupils that "were slots instead of circles. ”

“ He said goodbye to the men who had tutored him and, as the bulldog barked, he shut and fastened the door, and pushed the various buttons that started the giant ship on its journey to one of the infernos of the universe.
Mercury! The planet nearest the sun. The planet of mystery, of terrible heat, the place human life is supposed to be impossible. The place even a determined young lady could not follow a man she coveted. ”

“ Could he destroy a Thing that was able to bore a thirty foot hole through solid rock, swallow a river and digest grinding stones like so many pills? One thing he was sure of — he could accomplish nothing without knowing more about it. To know more, he had to watch. He determined to cut a hole through the floor. ”

“ The complaint of Moyer & Perkins was only one of a dozen similar ones which reached the Chamber of Commerce that day. In a secluded room of the Manufacturers' Club a dozen wealthy men met day after day, hearing and weighing evidence against a hundred forms of racketeering which was rapidly becoming a terrible and powerful enemy to the varied industries of the Metropolis. Practically every business had been threatened and more than one captain of industry blustered openly, but paid his weekly tribute silently in order to protect his business, family, and home. ”

“ Tarvish had used the very mechanical perfection that he was afraid of to devise a space home that was in everyway foolproof. Anyone knowing enough to read and press buttons could guide the machine through the void of time and space and live in it for the full span of individual existence. ”

“ By the way, may I change my mind and ask for the key to the door in the cellar?"
"Do you want it, really want it, my friend?"
"I am sure I do. I may never use it, but it will please me to have it. Little things in life make me happy, and this key is a little thing."
"Then you shall have it. Will you do me a favor? Wait till Sunday to use it. Today is Friday, and you will not have to wait many hours."
"It will be a pleasure to do as you desire," I replied, kissing her hand. "And shall I hear you sing again? May I come often to hear you sing?" ”

“ Of course, everybody knew something about rats—that they were supposed to be numerous around the river fronts and warehouses—but on the other hand, rats were seldom seen in daylight, and there were many New Yorkers who never saw one.
Not one of the dozen men had been raised on a farm and none had served in the trenches during the World War. They did not understand rats, so, they hesitated, and finally simply advised the merchants who had received the rat letters to use their own judgement. ”

“ There was no difficulty in believing that the earth under the mill was also solid rock. There was no reason for thinking otherwise. Evidently some of these strata of stone had become loose and were slipping and twisting under the mill. The simplest explanation was the most reasonable: it was simply a geological phenomenon. The behavior of the dog, however, was not so easily explained. He had refused to go with his master into the cellar, and now, instead of sleeping in comfort before the fire, he was in an attitude of strained expectancy. ”

“ At last they reached Mercury and landed on its superheated surface. In every way the refrigerating mechanicism worked as it was supposed to work. Life in the space ship was pleasant, placid and peaceful. The bullpups were growing up. Ruth and Cecil were growing up. The old man laughed more and more to himself.
Over the space radio they received news from the earth. It was not at all pleasant and confirmed Travish’s worst anticipations. The automatons were winning the struggle for supremacy. Unless something happened the human race would be enslaved and then destroyed. ”

“ I feel that in some way our fates approach the same star."
I looked into her eyes, her yellow cat-eyes, and I was sure that she spoke the truth. Destiny had certainly brought me to find her in Sorona.
I bought two dozen rat-tailed files, and dashed across the mountains to Milan. There I was closeted with the consuls of three nations: England, France and my own. They did not want to believe my story. I gave them names, and they had to admit that there had been inquiries, but they felt that the main details were nightmares, resulting from an over-use of Italian wines. ”

“ For two hundred years it had slowly worked its way through the primitive rack. Why should it worry over a mill and the things within it? Staples saw then that the mill had been but a slight incident in its life. It was probable that it had not even known it was there — the water, the gristmillstones, the red hot stove, had meant nothing — they had been taken as a part of the day's work. There was only one thing that the Worm was really interested in, but one idea that had reached its consciousness and remained there through two centuries, and that was to find its mate. ”

“ But if I am, I will, naturally, try to destroy you. We might end up like the Kilkenny cats. But if we are allies, I have eight years of power and you have eight years of liberty in which to plunder the richest nation in the world. ”

“ When I came on the ship my dog followed me. As fine an English bull as you ever saw, and a bitch.”
“What?”
“Sure! Dogs die. They wither and grow old and die. We will live on and what would life be without a dog? Why, man, the human race has always had dogs; so , when you told me what kind of a dog you were going to take, I went and got a mate for him.”
“And you intended to make the trip with me all the time?” ”

“ Of course, that is for the coroner to say."
"Do you know who these men were?"
"I suppose they were business associates of Consuelo. At least, that is what he told me."
"They were the hundred biggest gangsters in America. They were the brains of everything vicious in American society. There is not a man there whom we have not been after for years, but we just couldn't pin anything on them. Their death in one night gives the decent people in our country a new lease on life. We can go ahead now and get the little fellows. But, tell me, Mr. Willowby, how did it happen?" ”

“ He was too proud and too stubborn to do anything else.
The mill was his home, even as it had served all of his family for a home during the last two hundred years. The first Staples had built it to stay, and it was still as strong as on the day it was finished. There was a basement for the machinery of the mill, the first floor was the place of grinding and storage and the upper two floors served as the Staples' homestead. The building was warm in winter and cool in summer. Times past it had sheltered a dozen Staples at a time; now it provided a home for John Staples and his dog. ”

“ At first only the visionaries thought of the possibility of a time’s arriving when the automatons would function without the aid of a guiding human intelligence. But that time came. Almost before the human race were aware of their danger they were placed in a position of it’s being hard to tell whether the intelligence of man was directing the activities of the machine or the intelligence of the machine was gradually enslaving the remnant of the human species. ”

“ Staples started to walk around on the slate flagstones when he observed something that made him decide to stay on the steps. The floor was beginning to sink in the middle; not much, but enough to cause some of the shafts to separate from the ceiling. The ceiling seemed to sag. He saw that light objects like the empty barrel were congregating at the middle of the cellar. There was not much light but he was easily able to see that the floor was no longer level; that it was becoming saucer-shaped. The grinding noise grew louder. ”

“ The person at the other end wanted to protect my hotel from rats for the small compensation of twenty-five thousand dollars a week. He referred casually to the three warehouses and one laundry that had been wrecked last week. Right at the present time I have, on an average, twelve hundred guests a night. They are here to be entertained, not to be frightened by rats. But here is the point. If I yield, every other hotel in the city will be placed in a similar position. Three hundred thousand strangers are in the city every day. ”

“ But they come and go. I am old and forget."
"And all these masters, none of them ever wrote on the walls?"
"Of a certainty. All wrote with pencil what they desired to write. Who should say they should not? For did not the villa belong to them while they were here? But always we prepared for the new master, and made the walls clean and beautiful again."
"You were always sure that there would be a new master?"
"Certainly. Someone must pay us our wages."
I gravely placed a gold piece in his itching palm, asking, "What did they write on the walls?" ”

“ So, we are all going to the moon, and after that we are going back to New York and do some shopping, and I wish you would find out which button to press to turn on the heat, because now that we are away from Mercury we have nothing to neutralize the cold of the refrigerating system; and if you men feel the way I do, you are not at all comfortable. I covered the babies up before I left them, but I suppose they are uncovered by this time; so, I am going back to look after them and leave you men with the machinery. ”

“ Crawford," explained Willowby. "There is something peculiar happening in New York at the present time, and it has to do with rats and their actions. In some way rats of New York seem to be under the control of a set of racketeers who are able to force them to enter any building they select. The rats come and go suddenly. It is all over in a little while, but when they are in the building, they do a lot of damage." ”

“ Staples saw, even with the first glance, that it would not be long before this cement "cork" would be destroyed. What was there to do next? All that day when hunting, his mind had been dimly working on that problem. Now he had the answer. He could not cork the hole, so he would fill it with water. The walls of the mill were solid, but he could blast a hole through them and turn the mill race into the cellar. The race, fed by the river, took only a part of what it could take, if its level were rapidly lowered. Whatever it was that was breaking down the floor of the mill could be drowned. ”

“ They may be sending the same message to every planet, and the message we received is the same the people received on earth. It may be a grand hoax and then again it may be something very vital, something so great in its scope that even a limited comprehension of it is impossible. But I have made up my mind as to what to do. I am going to separate the two parts of our ship, leave you and Ruth and the babies here with some of the dogs and I am going to take the other half of the ship and go to the Moon and find out what it all means. ”

“ I saw a lemming migration in Norway, but that was different," explained Rastell. "It seems to me that if we actually saw one of these nocturnal attacks, we might learn why they wanted to do it."
"He is deadly right," agreed Professor Wilson. "A few actual facts are worth a hundred theories."
"That is why I have asked you to help me," explained the richest man in New York. "I have prepared some experimental stations for your use. I can put you in a grocery warehouse and guarantee that inside of a week you will see more rats than you ever dreamed of. I have a laundry and a small hotel. ”

“ She feeds us and sings to us and we applaud. When one of us dies, she unchains the body, and throws it down a hole somewhere. She talks to us about that hole sometimes and brags that she is going to fill it up before she stops. ”

“ Machinery could now be so delicately attuned to the nervous system of mankind that all that was necessary was to develop the power of physic control, buy a few machines and let them work for their master. Naturally, the man who could buy the most machines and learn how to govern them was able to subdue the poor man who could only boast of a few imperfect automatons of early vintage. ”

“ If we fight, we will simply kill each other, but if we become allies who can stop us? But I must be sure of you, and the only way I can be sure is to have you talk to your men, and then let me talk to them. ”