Death ray

“ First he had made the fatal error of saying he had never been in the Incinerator before, when he knew damned well that all children were brought here on tours, every year, from the time they were four, to instill the idea of the clean fire death and the Incinerator in their minds. Death was a bright fire, death was warmth and the sun. ”

“ But death and hell, the grave, and destruction have their bounds. We may entertain ourselves with the consideration of the face of the Deluge, and of the broken and drowned earth, in this scheme, with the floating Ark, and the guardian angels.’
The most eminent natural theologian of the time after Ray, and one who would have surpassed Ray in importance if his labours in this department had been more than a brief episode in a busy career, was Richard Bentley, whose power of destructive criticism in other fields proved how formidable a champion he could be on the negative side of any question. ”

“ what shriek of death comes in the gale,
And in the distant ray what glimmering sail
Bends to the storm?—Now sinks the note of fear!
Ah! wretched mariners!—no more shall day
Unclose his cheering eye to light ye on your way! ”

“ All shooting stars, according to the Indian belief, are flying stones; hence the custom of placing a stone in the stomach of the dead. It is supposed to be able to mount heavenward, and, assuming its true character, become the avenging adversary, and destroy the one who caused the death—always a bad witch doctor. The bird's claw scratches out the enemy's heart, and the ashes annihilate the spirit. One of the missionaries in the Lengua tribe stated that he assisted at the burial of a woman where the corpse fell head foremost into the grave, the feet remaining up. ”

“ Aircraft, such as could so hastily be mustered, swept overhead. A glare of lights everywhere. The shrill voice of the siren stilled, to make audible the broadcast warnings—stentorian tones screaming: "The Black Cloud of Death! Escape from the city! Escape to Industriana!"
Warning, advice, command! But over it all, the breath of the black cloud now lay heavy. The lights were dimmed by it. Everywhere—to every deepest recess of the city—to every inner room where to escape it many had fled—its deadly choking breath was penetrating. ”

“ Looking upward, Elza caught a gleam of green eyes overhead. A triangle of three baleful spots of phosphorescent green. Her murmur of fright caused Tarrano to glance upward. His lavender, beam, grown suddenly larger, swung there with a hiss. Falling from above came a pink body. A bloated body, square, with squat, twisted legs; a thing larger than a man. A grotesque naked monstrosity almost in human form. A travesty—gruesome mockery of mankind. A face, three-eyed...
The thing lay writhing in the underbrush, mouthing, mumbling and then screaming—the shrill scream of death agony. ”

“ With this reinforcement we became stronger over here, and the red chaos surged inward. I saw it flow almost to engulf the crouching Brutar fighters who were here opposing it. Saw a few of them fall—ghostly shells lying inert—and above them a something luminous, the Ego-mind deranged, unhinged, hovering, then winging away into death....
A shape hurriedly approached us; a man with harried, anxious face. "Thone! We are too weak now upon the other side. The Red Death is almost upon us there! They want the thinkers back." ”

“ To hold on true to his purpose in the face of such soul-harrowing indifference is the crowning act of heroism upon the part of our missionaries. No one of them has ever drawn back and given up his work for fear of death at the hands of his persecutors, but it must be said for the sake of the truth that some have succumbed before the rigors of blasting indifference. The saints at home ought to support valiantly with their prayers our missionaries who at the front are engaged in a battle even unto death with indifferent souls unwilling to accept their message. ”

“ Thought leaves the ancient
Earth behind to mold.
And when the galaxies have
heeded DEATH,
And welcomed lastly SPACE'S
poisoned breath,
Still shall thought travel
as an arrow flown.
SPACE--thy boundaries are
TIME---AND TIME ALONE!
This work is in the public domain in the United States because it was legally published within the United States (or the United Nations Headquarters in New York subject to Section 7 of the United States Headquarters Agreement) between 1928 and 1977 (inclusive) without a copyright notice. ”

“ He had slain the world's greatest scientists!
He recalled the moment of shocked horror that followed. Something radically wrong had happened to the machine. He, Layeville, the inventor of the machine, had staggered backward, his clothes flaming and eating up about him. No time for explanations. Then he had collapsed in the blackness of pain and numbing defeat.
Swept to a hasty trial, Layeville faced jeering throngs calling out for his death. "Destroy the Time Machine!" they cried. "And destroy this MURDERER with it!"
Murderer! And he had tried to help humanity. ”

“ The little procession stopped in a patch of starlight by the port. They rested the body on a bank of chairs. The black-robed chaplain, roused from his bed and still trembling from excitement of this sudden, inexplicable death on board, said a brief, solemn little prayer. An appeal: That the Almighty Ruler of all these blazing worlds might guard the soul of this gentle girl whose mortal remains were now to be returned to Him. ”

“ The walls of this iglo apparently remained as they had been first built, but the gruesome paraphernalia was missing, the crossbar and line being probably buried with the defunct Eskimos, and the block of snow from whence they had launched themselves into eternity thrown aside and drifted over. Deep imprints on the snow walls told that death had come only to the suicides after desperate struggles, and two distinct mounds of snow a little to one side and close together clearly marked the suicides’ graves. ”

“ Nothing was visible except under the flashes of lightning, too often blinding; only there was occasionally the spectral white outline of a foam-crested wave that washed up out of the darkness. Wind, water and thunder filled the air; I doubted not that they filled the universe with stormy orchestration.
I tried to tell myself that death under the volleying thunders of Heaven's cannon, with the sea piling mountains of water for the grave-mound, with the epitaph scrawled in slithering foam, was death and nothing more or less than if one died abed. ”

“ The girl nestled closer without reply.
"And if something should happen to one of us, the other would wait—because love like ours will never know death—it must go on—for eternity," he continued. "I know that I'll love you even when I'm dead, and if there are such things as spirits, I'll come back to you—somehow. Or would it frighten you?"
Ellen pouted: "Don't be so funereal! It makes me feel strangely inside. Of course nothing can separate us. It's a beautiful nite and we're wasting it on—oh, dear!" Her eyes had glanced at the small clock on the paneling. "It's late, Robert. ”

“ Another form of this superstitious fancy is the corpse-candle, or ‘tomb-fire,’ which is invariably a death-warning. It sometimes appears ‘as a stately flambeau, stalking along unsupported, burning with a ghastly blue flame. Sometimes it is a plain tallow “dip” in the hand of a ghost; and when the ghost is seen distinctly, it is recognised as that of some person still living, who will now soon die [140] —in fact, a wraith.’ Occasionally the light issues from the person’s mouth, or nostrils. ”

“ Racing forward as they were, the serpent-creatures rushing upon us could only loose their death-beams at chance upon us, and it was that alone that saved us, the deadly rays going wide except for one that struck and annihilated two of our party in its wild whirling. ”

“ This mortal air is one wide pestilence, that kills us all at last. Whom the Death-cloud spares, sleeping, dies in silent watches of the night. He whom the spears of many battles could not slay, dies of a grape-stone, beneath the vine-clad bower he built, to shade declining years. We die, because we live. ”

“ For the serpent-creatures behind us were within yards of us now, hissing cries of triumph rising from them as they writhed toward us. Then, in the next moment, from the great, looming bulk of our ship ahead there stabbed down and over us a shaft of blinding crimson light, a narrow, deadly ray that struck the writhing masses of our pursuers and swept through them in a great, slicing curve, sending them into annihilation in dazzling bursts of light as it touched them. ”

“ Among the papers of a man he helped to bury, Joel Rae found a journal that the dead man had kept until within a few days of his death. By the light of his last candle he read it until late into the night.
“The weather grew colder each day; and many got their feet so badly frozen that they could not walk and had to be lifted from place to place. Some got their fingers frozen; others their ears; and one woman lost her sight by the frost. These severities of the weather also increased our number of deaths, so that we buried several each day. ”

“ These phantasms appear, either in dreams or in broad daylight, to the friends of dying persons. They may announce in words, "I am dying," or "I am dead." They may merely appear with signs upon their faces of alarm or of impending dissolution. They may appear as bodies lying dead upon a couch or in a coffin. They may predict the hour of their death, but more usually their appearance coincides with the exact moment at which their physical bodies ceased to exist. ”

“ THE ORIGIN OF DEATH.
(The original, in the Hottentot language, is in Sir G. Grey’s Library, G. Krönlein’s Manuscript, pp. 33, 34.)
The Moon, it is said, sent once an Insect to Men, saying, “Go thou to Men, and tell them, ‘As I die, and dying live, so ye shall also die, and dying live.’ ” The Insect started with the message, but whilst on his way was overtaken by the Hare, who asked: “On what errand art thou bound?” The Insect answered: “I am sent by the Moon to Men, to tell them that as she dies, and dying lives, they also shall die, and dying live.” ”

“ Mr Davis in a work by T. Charley entitled The Invisible World, corpse-candles are so called because their light resembles a material candle-light, and might be mistaken for the same, saving that when anyone approaches them they vanish, and presently reappear. If the corpse-candle be small, pale, or bluish, it denotes the death of an infant; if it be big, the death of an adult is foretold; and if there are two, three, or more candle-lights, varying in size, then the deaths are predicted of a corresponding number of infants and adults. ”

“ But with all this reputed rapidity of the earth in ‘loosing’ the dead bodies committed to her care, the action of fire is incontrovertibly more rapid. In hours, not in days, may be counted the period of disintegration on the pyre. And as it is quicker, so also is it far surer. No body that has been burned can wander as a revenant over the earth, while for the buried there is no perfect assurance of dissolution. Some curse, some crime, the violence of their death, or the deficiency of their funeral rites, each and all of these may keep their bodies ‘bound’ and indissoluble. ”

“ If rain does not fall, so that the freshly [pg 279] planted root crops wither; or if sickness is rife, the people recognise in the calamity the wrath of the ghost, who can only be appeased by the slaughter of the wicked magician or of somebody else. Hence the avengers of blood often do not set out until a fresh death, an outbreak of sickness, failure in the chase, or some other misfortune reminds the living of the duty they owe to the dead. ”

“ Report of the Fourth Meeting of the Australasian Association for the Advancement of Science, held at Hobart, Tasmania, in January 1892, pp. 641 sq.; J. B. Stair, Old Samoa, p. 184. According to Brown and Stair the ceremony described in the text was observed when a man had died a violent death, even when the relatives were in possession of the body, and in that case the insect, or whatever it might be, was buried with the corpse. I have followed Turner and Ella in supposing that the ceremony was only observed when the corpse could not be found. ”

“ The entrance on earth of that unknown and terrible power which has since been called death is solemn and tragical. The body is lying there motionless and cold amid its brethren, who are amazed at the sleep which they cannot break, at the livid pallor and the stiffness of the limbs. Horror succeeds surprise when the signs of decomposition become visible. The body is concealed under leaves, under stones heaped up within [343] caverns, and each one wonders with terror whether that death is an exceptional case, or whether the same fate awaits every one in a more or less distant future. ”

“ The bodies of persons killed on the field of battle, and of those who have been drowned, sometimes seem to be overtaken by the rigor mortis at the very instant of death; the bodies retain the same position, and the face the same expression, which they had in the last moments of life. The rigor mortis may continue for from one to ten days, generally, but not always; death from narcotic poisons is followed by a short and feeble rigidity. While death by lightning is followed by rapid and intense rigidity, in young children, it is feeble and of short duration. ”