Ray Cummings

“ Over us now a barrage came with a hiss, a circular curtain of insulation. The huge globular room faded. We were alone on the mound, Snap, Molo, myself, Anita, Venza and Meka upon the end of our bench. Behind us stood our single Wandlite guard, with a weapon in his shoulder hand.
At our feet an opening yawned into the mound-interior. It was a tiny, lighted room. In a cup-like seat a brain was perched, just below the level of our feet: the great Master Brain of Wandl. He was alone here. ”

“ Anita and I were uninjured, victorious—but what a hollow victory. On the rocks here, bound together by that strange wire, Snap and Venza lay inert. We bent over them. The wire was cold to the touch now. It resisted our efforts to untwine it. We pulled frantically as we pleaded: "Snap, speak to us! Venza, can't you speak?"
Their eyes were open. I was aware that there was no starlight above us, but instead, a lurid sky of flying clouds, shot with a greenish cast. The darkness here was green. The glow of it struck upon the wide-open staring eyes of Venza and Snap. ”

“ I must paint now upon a broader canvas to depict the utter chaos of this most memorable night in the history of the Earth, Venus and Mars.
From that point in the bowels of Greater New York, near the southern tip of Manhattan Island, the mysterious light-beam shot up. It screamed with its weird electrical voice for an hour, so penetrating a sound that it was heard with the unaided ears as far away as Philadelphia. A titan voice it was, shrill as if with triumph. There were millions of people awakened by it this night ”

“ On the distant mountain peaks looming above the nearby horizon; it seemed that the sheen of coming night was mingled with the red sunlight.
Anita and Snap laid Venza on the rocks. I suddenly remembered the two blobs in the sky behind us, which had seemed to be following. I stood gazing across the river. The red sky there seemed empty.
"Thank God, she's reviving!" Snap called at me and I joined them. Venza was stirring. Color was coming into her cheeks. Her lips were murmuring as though she were talking in her sleep.
Then she opened her eyes. Her gaze fixed on us as we bent over her. ”

“ I saw sunlight upon the mountain ahead. The darkness had been paling. Now day suddenly burst upon us. The sun, smaller than on Earth, mounted swiftly up. It was a flattened, distorted, dull-red disc, blurred by Wandl's strange atmosphere. We were in a dim red daylight.
Anita twitched at my ankles. "Look back of us!"
We were going up. Venza and Snap, behind us, were in a descending arc. Above them, far back in the direction from which they had come, two blobs were visible up against the reddish day sky. ”

“ Broken, leprous Wandl vessels whose barrage at close range had been smashed by Grantline's guns; torn and littered allied ships, struck by the huge exploding comet-projectiles and the whirling discs; airless hulks, and scattered fragments which no longer resembled a ship at all but only a hull plate or a torn segment of dome. And little drifting blobs, the survivors in pressure suits who had leaped from the wreckage; little blobs ignored, whirled away or drawn forward as by chance the sweeping gravity-beams fell upon them ”

“ Far to one side, across the bowl from us, was a single globe-dwelling with lighted windows. From its ground doorway, a narrow metal catwalk extended like a sidewalk on the ground, winding and branching among the towers and discs.
This was the exterior of the Wandl gravity station. It lay silent and dark, save for the starlight and the little lights on the towers. No sign of humans. Then we saw movement in the globe-dwelling. A man came to the doorway, gazed at the sky and went back. ”

“ And the light burst with an exploding puff. The black metal cubby walls seemed to melt like phantoms in a dream. A titan's blowtorch, the opalescent light shot upward, a circular ten-foot beam, eating its way through all the city levels as though they were paper, up through the city roof.
Molo's cubby was gone. His mechanism was eaten by the light and destroyed. There was only this motionless, upstanding beam, contacted here with the Earth, streaming like an opalescent sword into the starry sky. ”

“ Or, with some form of invisibility, might it be close to us [48] now, just as the lurking ship might be somewhere around here?
From the little circular helio cubby, perched here under the dome like an eagle's nest, I could see down all the length of the ship, and out the side ports of the dome to the blazing firmament. The Sun, Moon and Earth and all the starfield were silently turning as Drac swung us upon our new course. ”

“ Horror checked me at the thought of Venza and Snap, lying there on the rocks. We saw the body of Wyk, like a great dried insect, lifted by the wind, whirled like a brown leaf over and over, and carried away.
A little pebble came hurtling and struck me. Then a rain of pebbles, like hailstones was pelting at us.
The storm was probably caused by the axial rotation of Wandl. The light-beam upon Earth had been attacked by the Wandl control station without axial rotation. But to attack the beam from Mars, a manipulation of Wandl was necessary. The planet's rotation was started; and suddenly checked. ”

“ My heart was pounding, but I flung them a curious, impersonal stare.
"You are here," said Molo. "Good. We go now." He bent over Snap and me. "I advise you make no effort to leap away, though it may look easy."
"Not me," said Snap. "Where would I go alone in this damned world? I can't very well leap back to Earth, can I?"
"True enough," said Molo. "You have sense, little fellow. But I just warn you: the guard who will watch you always is very sharp of eye. And the weapons here bring very swift death."
I could feel Anita's gaze upon me, but I did not dare look her way. ”

“ For a moment there was a chaos of strangeness, the wrench to my sense of the transition. I had been the inhabitant of a little world, the Cometara, with a gravity beneath my feet. Now, in a breath, I had no world to inhabit. I was alone in space. No gravity; nothing solid to touch; emptiness.
I was in a world to myself, and the abnormality of it brought a mental shock. But in a moment the adjustment came. I passed the transition, the sense of falling.
The firmament steadied and my senses cleared. My dive from the Cometara carried me in a slow arc some three hundred feet away. ”

“ Snap and I were frantically searching. Somewhere here was an entrance to Molo's lair. It seemed in the silence that Anita's scream was still ringing in my ears. Had it been entirely from the instrument, or were we so close that we had heard its distant echoes?
"Gregg, help me." Snap was tugging at a horizontal door-slide, like a trap in the tunnel floor, partly under the vacuum tube. "Stuck!" he gasped.
It yielded with our efforts. It slid aside. Steps led downward into blackness. We plunged in, caution gone from us. The steps went down some twenty feet; we were in another smaller corridor. ”

“ Snap shoved me. "Don't stay there, you fool!"
We lunged up the passage. Figures barred it but they scattered; a bolt hissed at us, but missed. At the kiosk a group of workers and several peering little brains leaped away in terror to let us pass.
We gained the open air. With the small gravity rays darting down with repulsion upon the rocks we mounted like rockets out of the cauldron. The upper plateau lay silent in the starlight, but the cauldron behind us was ringing with alarm, and again the danger siren was blaring. ”

“ His answering voice was grim. "We can tow them from the wreck. Six or seven of us altogether have power. Do you suppose we can get away, Gregg? Get loose from the ship before she falls?"
Only trying it could tell us that. The Cometara, and all of us with her, were plunging for the Moon. We would seek out the men who were alive and tow them in a string. If we could break the gravity pull of the ship, and then struggle upward from the Moon, we could maintain ourselves here in space until some rescue ship from Earth, Venus or Mars would come and pick us up. ”

“ I learned further how Molo and Meka became identified with the Wandlites; it was as we had suspected.
"You will rule Mars?" Venza was saying. "When this is over, you mean you will really be given Mars to rule?"
"I would rather live on the Earth," said Anita. "There was a young man there."
"He will not be there much longer." Molo laughed. "You are very lucky that I fancy you!"
"Lucky indeed," Venza echoed. "No death for me. I'm too young."
"But all those millions dead. It seems so terrible."
"It is, for them!" Molo was in high good humor, pleased with himself and with these girls. ”

“ The Star-Streak responded smoothly; with acceleration such as only Molo's famous terror of the starways could attain, we dove for the Moon.
Breathless minutes! Those Wandl ships up in the firmament behind our stern would probably do nothing; they would not understand this sudden move of their friendly ship. The brain masters, the insect-like Wandlites down on the Moon rocks operating the mechanism of the gravity-ray, would not suspect until too late what the Star-Streak was doing. ”

“ Grantline whispered, "That's the War Secretary from Greater London."
I recognized him: Brayley, Commander in Chief of the land, air, water and space armies of the United States of the World. He was gigantic in stature, with a great shock of gray-white hair. A commanding figure, if there ever was one.
Beside him, Nippor, the Japanese representative in Greater New York, seemed a pigmy. The acoustics of the silent hall carried his soft voice up to us. "I would be afraid of drugs. Will we use force? It is vital." ”

“ You know her, the Cometara."
"I know her," I said.
"Quite so. She is taking off as soon as we can ready her. She will carry about fifty men. Grantline is in charge of the armament and men. You, Dean, we want to handle her radio-helio."
"Right," said Snap.
"And you, Haljan, we can think of no one better to navigate her."
He waved away my appreciation. "Within a brief time we shall have thirty such ships in space. Mars and Venus also are mobilizing."
He stood up. "We feel, Haljan, that if anyone can handle the Cometara with skill enough to combat this lurking enemy, it will be you." ”

“ He added to Snap and me: "I plan to take prisoners. My Supreme Rulers, rulers of a neighboring more powerful planet, which sent Wandl upon her mission of conquest, ordered it. When your worlds are vacant of life, those who command me will want some of you left alive to be studied. Your thoughts are very black, Earthman. I think when they are carefully read you will prove no great advantage to us."
There was irony in the voice, and upon the monstrous bulging face came the horrible travesty of a grin.
The grin on the brain's face faded. His interest went again to Molo. "That is your sister." ”

“ Lord, Gregg, I don't blame you for staring like that. You don't know what's been going on for the past two days on Earth, and Venus and Mars. It's all been suppressed. Neither did I, until I heard it here tonight. The U.S.W., the Martian Union, the Venus Free State, are all preparing for war. Every government spaceship on Earth is being commissioned. We're not going to sit around and wait for invaders to land; the war won't be fought on Earth if we can help it. ”

“ We thrust our hands and forearms into their loops. The shields extended from a few inches beyond our fingers to the elbow.
Snap had slid the window blind. I bent over the prone form of Meka. "Don't try to move. Molo will release you when he comes back."
We gathered on the starlit balcony. The city stretched around us. There was as yet no alarm. No swimming figures near here; but a distance away we saw the towering conclave globe, with its audience just beginning to emerge, like bees coming from a hive.
"Let me go first." I held Anita and Venza at the rail. "It's like swimming. ”

“ I heard the sound of someone joining them, and then the hollow voice again: "Molo! Bad tidings come from Mars. One of the Masters was captured there in Ferrok-Shahn. They tortured him as they did the one on Earth. But he did not die unyielding. He spoke and told our plans!"
"Hah! Did I not advise you to keep those helpless things on Wandl?"
"But it is done now. The worlds know our purpose. They are preparing spaceships. Already some are rising from Ferrok-Shahn, from Grebhar and from Greater New York." ”

“ The danger of a collision, which both ships would do anything to avert, was negligible; in the immensity of space two objects so small could not strike each other, even with intention, once in a million times.
We could not calculate the passing so closely, but suddenly it seemed that perhaps the enemy could. The bow-beacon radiance, so obviously a miniature of the weird light-beams streaming from Earth, Mars and Venus, now swung away from us and was extinguished. Whatever alteration of our course [53] the enemy had made, they seemed to be satisfied. The passing would be to their liking. ”

“ It was long sleek, the size of an Earth leopard. A muscled body, with ponderable weight, it was moving toward us, padding on the rocks.
I recovered my wits and shoved Anita behind me. I crouched on one knee. There was no escape, nowhere to run. This tunnel was blocked by a fallen rock mass behind us, with the wild storm raging outside. The thing was some twenty feet away, where the tunnel broadened into a black cave of unknown size. Beside me Snap and Venza lay inert, the still-unconscious Molo with them. ”

“ Three fair and lovely worlds, warmed back by the other sunlight to be green mansions untenanted, ready to receive the new beings who would come and possess them. [72]
9
"You, Snap!"
"Gregg! But how...?"
"Hush! They might hear us."
"They can do more than that. They can almost hear you think."
"Anita and Venza are here."
"I know it. I was with them for a time. This accursed gravity! I can't walk."
"Careful," I whispered. "You can crack your head on something with the least false step. Are they taking us ashore?" ”