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                              ASTOUNDING

                               STORIES

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VOL. IV, No. 2 CONTENTS NOVEMBER, 1930

COVER DESIGN              H. W. WESSOLOWSKI

    _Painted in Water-Colors from a Scene in "The Pirate Planet."_

THE WALL OF DEATH         VICTOR ROUSSEAU              151

    _Out of the Antarctic It Came--a Wall of Viscid, Grey, Half-Human
     Jelly, Absorbing and Destroying All Life That It Encountered._

THE PIRATE PLANET         CHARLES W. DIFFIN            168

    _A Strange Light Blinks on Venus, and Over Old Earth Hovers a
     Mysterious Visitant--Dread Harbinger of Interplanetary War._
     (Beginning a Four-Part Novel.)

THE DESTROYER             WILLIAM MERRIAM ROUSE        198

    _Slowly, Insidiously, There Stole Over Allen Parker Something
     Uncanny. He Could No Longer Control His Hands--Even His Brain!_

THE GRAY PLAGUE           L. A. ESHBACH                210

    _Maimed and Captive, in the Depths of an Interplanetary Meteor-Craft,
     Lay the Only Possible Savior of Plague-Ridden Earth._

JETTA OF THE LOWLANDS     RAY CUMMINGS                 230

    _Black-Garbed Figures Move in Ghastly Greenness As the Invisible Flyer
     Speeds on Its Business of Ransom._ (Conclusion.)

VAGABONDS OF SPACE        HARL VINCENT                 244

    _From the Depths of the Sargasso Sea of Space Came the Thought-Warning,
     "Turn Back!" But Carr and His Martian Friend Found It Was Too Late!_
     (A Complete Novelette.)

THE READERS' CORNER       ALL OF US                    271

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The Wall of Death

_By Victor Rousseau_

[Illustration: And then Kay had broken through and was hewing madly
with great sweeps of the ax.]

[Sidenote: Out of the Antarctic it came--a wall of viscid, grey,
half-human jelly, absorbing and destroying all life that it
encountered.]

"This news," said Cliff Hynes, pointing to the newspaper, "means the
end of _homo Americanus_."

The newspaper in question was the hour-sheet of the International
Broadcast Association, just delivered by pneumatic tube at the
laboratory. It was stamped 1961, Month 13, Day 7, Horometer 3, and the
headlines on the front page confirmed the news of the decisive defeat
of the American military and naval forces at the hands of the Chinese
Republic.

A gallant fight for days against hopeless odds; failure of the army
dynamos; airships cut off from ground guidance; battleships ripped to
pieces by the Chinese disintegrators; and, finally, the great wave of
black death that had wiped out two hundred thousand men.

Kay Bevan--to use the old-fashioned names which still persisted,
despite the official numerical nomenclature--glanced through the
account. He threw the sheet away. "We deserved it, Cliff," he said.

Cliff nodded. "You saw that bit about the new Chinese disintegrator?
If the Government had seriously considered our Crumbler--"

Kay glanced at the huge, humming top that filled the center of the
laboratory. It spun so fast that it appeared as nothing but a
spherical shadow, through which one could see the sparse furnishings,
the table, the apparatus ranged upon it, and the window over-looking
the upper streets of New York.

"Yes--_if!_" he answered bitterly. "And I'm willing to bet the Chinese
have an inferior machine, built upon the plans that Chinese servant
stole from us last year."

"We deserved it, Cliff," said Kay again. "For ten years we've harried
and enslaved the yellow man, and taken a hundred thousand of his men
and women to sacrifice to the Earth Giants. What would we have done,
if conditions had been reversed?"

"Self-preservation," Cliff suggested.

"Exactly. The law of the survival of the fittest. They thought that
they were fitter to survive. I tell you they had right on their side,
Cliff, and that's what's beaten us. Now--a hundred thousand of our
_own_ boys and girls must be fed into the maw of these monsters every
year. God, suppose it were Ruth!"

"Or you or I," said Cliff. "If only we could perfect the Crumbler!"

"What use would that be against the Earth Giants? There's nothing
organic about them, not even bones. Pure protoplasm!"

"We could have used it against the Chinese," said Cliff. "Now--" He
shrugged his shoulders hopelessly.

And if explorers had been content to leave the vast unknown Antarctic
Continent alone, they would never have taught the imprisoned Giants to
cross the great ice barrier. But that crossing had taken place fifteen
years ago, and already the mind of man had become accustomed to the
grim facts.

Who could have dreamed that the supposed table-land was merely a rim
of ice-mountains, surrounding a valley twice the size of Europe, so
far below sea-level that it was warmed to tropic heat by Earth's
interior fires? Or that this valley was peopled with what could best
be described as organized protoplasm?

Enormous, half-transparent, gelatinous organism, attaining a height of
about a hundred feet, and crudely organized into forms not unlike
those of men?

Half the members of the Rawlins Expedition, which had first entered
this valley, had fallen victims to the monsters. Most of the rest had
gone raving mad. And the stories of the two who returned, sane, to
Buenos Aires, were discredited and scoffed at as those of madmen.

But of a second expedition none had survived, and it was the solitary
survivor of the third who had confirmed the amazing story. The giant
monsters, actuated by some flickering human intelligence, had found
their way out of the central valley, where they had subsisted by
enfolding their vegetable and small animal prey with pseudopods, that
it to say, temporary projections of arms from the gelatinous bulk of
their substance.

They had floated across the shallow seas between the tip of the
Antarctic Continent and Cape Horn, as toy balloons float on water.
Then they had spread northward, extending in a wall that reached from
the Atlantic to the Andes. And, as they moved, they had devoured all
vegetables and animal life in their path. Behind them lay one great
bare, absolutely lifeless area.

How many of them were there? That was the hideous fact that had to be
faced. Their numbers could not be counted because, after attaining a
height of about a hundred feet, they reproduced by budding!

And within a few weeks these buds, in turn, attained their full
development.

The Argentine Government had sent a force of twenty thousand men
against them, armed with cannon, machine-guns, tanks, airplanes,
poison gas, and the new death-ray. And in the night, when it was
bivouacking, after what it had thought was glorious victory, it had
been overwhelmed _and eaten_!

Proof against the poison gas, the hideous monsters were, and
invulnerable to shot and shell. Divided and sub-divided, slashed into
ribbons, blown to fragments by bombs, each of the pieces simply became
the nucleus of a new organism, able, within a few hours, to assume the
outlines of a dwarf man, and to seize and devour its prey.

But the Argentine expedition had done worse than it at first dreamed
of. _It had given the monsters a taste for human flesh!_

After that, the wave of devastation had obliterated life in every city
clear up to the Amazonian forests. And then it had been discovered
that, by feeding these devils human flesh, they could be rendered
torpid and their advance stayed--so long as the periodical meals
continued!

At first criminals had been supplied them, then natives, then Chinese,
obtained by periodical war raids. What would you have? The savage
regions of the earth had already been depopulated, and a frenzy of
fear had taken possession of the whole world.

Now the Chinese had defeated the annual American invasion, and the
Earth Giants were budding and swarming through the heart of Brazil.

"Man," said the Theosophists, "is the fifth of the great root-races
that have inhabited this planet. The fourth were the Atlanteans. The
third were the Lemurians, half-human beings of whom the Australian
aborigines are the survivors. The second race was not fully organized
into human form. Of the first, nothing is known.

"These are the second race, surviving in the Antarctic valleys.
Half-human objects, groping toward that perfection of humanity of
which we ourselves fall very far short. As the Kabbala says, man,
before Adam, reached from heaven to earth."

Kay Bevan and Cliff Hynes had been working feverishly to perfect
their Crumbler for use in the Chinese wars. Convinced, as were all
fair-minded men, that these annual raids were unjustified, they
yielded to the logic of the facts. Should America sacrifice a hundred
thousand of her boys and girls each year, when human life was cheap in
China? _Boys and girls!_

It had been discovered that the Earth Giants required the flesh of
women as well as of men. Some subtle chemical constituent then
produced the state of torpidity during which the advance and the
budding of the monsters was stayed. During the ten past years their
northward advance had been almost inappreciable. Brazil had even sent
another army against them.

But the deadliest gases had failed to destroy the tenacious life of
these protoplasmic creatures, and the tanks, which had driven through
and through them, had become entangled and blocked in the gelatinous
exudations, and their occupants eaten.

All over the world scientists were striving to invent some way of
removing this menace to the world. Moreover, airplanes sent to the
polar continent had reported fresh masses mobilizing for the advance
northward. A second wave would probably burst through the Amazon
forest barrier and sweep over the Isthmus and overrun North America.

Five days after the news of the Chinese disaster was confirmed, Cliff
Hynes came back from the capital of the American Confederation,
Washington.

"It's no use, Kay," he said. "The Government won't even look at the
Crumbler. I told them it would disintegrate every inorganic substance
to powder, and they laughed at me. And it's true, Kay: they've given
up the attempt to enslave China. Henceforward a hundred thousand of
our own citizens are to be sacrificed each year. Eaten alive, Kay!
God, if only the Crumbler would destroy organic forms as well!"

The first year's quota of fifty thousand boys and fifty thousand
girls, thrown to the maw of the monsters to save humanity, nearly
disrupted the Confederation. Despite the utmost secrecy, despite the
penalty of death for publishing news of the sacrifice, despite the
fact that those who drew the fatal lots were snatched from their homes
at dead of night, everything became known.

On the vast pampas in the extreme north of the Argentine Republic,
where Bolivia, the Argentine, Paraguay and Brazil unite, was the place
of sacrifice. Thousands of acres, white with the bones of those whom
the monsters had engulfed. Brainless, devoid of intelligence,
sightless, because even the sense had not become differentiated in
them, yet by some infernal instinct the Earth Giants had become aware
that this was their feasting ground.

By some tacit compact, the guards who had annually brought their
victims to be devoured had been unmolested, the vast wall of
semi-human shapes withdrawing into the shelter of the surrounding
forests while the Chinese were staked out in rows. Death, which would
have been a mercy, had been denied them. It was living flesh that the
Earth Giants craved. And here, on the spot known as Golgotha, the
hideous sacrifice had been annually repeated.

That first year, when the chosen victims were transported to the fatal
spot, all America went mad. Frenzied parents attacked the offices of
the Federation in every city. The cry was raised that Spanish
Americans had been selected in preference to those of more northern
blood. Civil war loomed imminent.

And year after year these scenes must be repeated. Boys and girls,
from fifteen to twenty years of age, the flower of the Federation, a
hundred thousand of them, must die a hideous death to save humanity.
Now the choice of the second year's victims was at hand.

In their laboratory, removed to the heart of the Adirondacks
wilderness, Cliff and Kay were working frantically.

"It's the last chance, Kay," said Cliff. "If I've not solved the
secret this time, it means another year's delay. The secret of
dissolving organic forms as well as inorganic ones! What is this
mysterious power that enables organic forms to withstand the terrific
bombardment of the W-ray?"

The W-ray was the Millikan cosmic ray, imprisoned and adapted for
human use. It was a million times more powerful than the highest known
voltage of electricity. Beneath it, even the diamond, the hardest
substance known, dissolved into a puff of dust; and yet the most
fragile plant growth remained unaffected.

The laboratory in the Adirondacks was open at one end. Here, against a
background of big forest trees, a curious medley of substances had
been assembled: old chairs, a couple of broken-down airplanes, a large
disused dynamo, a heap of discarded clothing, a miscellany of kitchen
utensils on a table, a gas stove, and a heap of metal junk of all
kinds. The place looked, in fact, like a junk heap.

The great top was set in a socket in a heavy bar of craolite, the new
metal that combined the utmost tensile strength with complete
infusibility, even in the electric furnace. About six feet in height,
it looked like nothing but what it was, a gyroscope in gimbals, with a
long and extremely narrow slit extending all around the central
bulge, but closed on the operator's side by a sliding cover of the
same craolite.

Within this top, which, by its motion, generated a field of electrical
force between the arms of an interior magnet, the W-rays were
generated in accordance with a secret formula; the speed of gyration,
exceeding anything known on earth, multiplied their force a
billionfold, converting them to wave-lengths shorter than the shortest
known to physical science. Like all great inventions, the top was of
the simplest construction.

"Well," said Cliff, "you'd better bring out Susie."

Kay left the laboratory and went to the cabin beside the lake that the
two men occupied. From her box in front of the stove a lady porcupine
looked up lazily and grunted. Kay raised the porcupine; in the box, of
course. Susie was constitutionally indolent, but one does not handle
porcupines, however smooth their quills may lie.

Kay brought her to the heap of junk and placed the box on top of it.
He went inside the laboratory. "I may as well tell you, Cliff. I
wouldn't have brought Susie if I'd thought the experiment had the
least chance of success," he said.

Cliff said nothing. He was bending over the wheel, adjusting a
micrometer. "All ready, Kay?" he asked.

Kay nodded and stepped back. He swallowed hard. He hated sacrificing
Susie to the cause of science; he almost hoped the experiment would
fail.

Cliff pressed a lever, and slowly the ponderous top began to revolve
upon its axis. Faster, faster, till it was nothing but a blur. Faster
yet, until only its outlines were visible. Cliff pressed a lever on
the other side.

Nothing happened apparently, except for a cloudy appearance of the air
at the open end of the laboratory. Cliff touched a foot lever. The top
began to grow visible, its rotations could be seen; it ran slower,
began to come to a stop.

The cloud was gone. Where the airplanes and other junk had been, was
nothing but a heap of grayish dust. It was this that had made the
cloud.

Nothing remained, except that impalpable powder against the background
of the trees.

Kay caught Cliff's arm. "Look out!" he shouted, pointing to the heap.
"Something's moving in there!"

Something was. A very angry lady porcupine was scrambling out, a
_quillless_ porcupine, with a white skin, looking like nothing so much
as a large, hairless rat. Cliff turned to Kay.

"We've failed," he said briefly. "Too late for this year now."

"But--the quills?"

"Inorganic material. But even the bones remain intact because there's
circulation in the marrow, you see. And the Earth Giants haven't even
bones. They're safe--this year!"

He flung himself down under a tree, staring up at the sky in abject
despair.

"Look, Kay, I've got my number!" Ruth Meade smiled as she handed Kay
the ticket issued by the Government announcing the lottery number
provided for each citizen.

One hundred thousand young people between the ages of fifteen and
twenty would be drawn for the sacrifice, and Ruth, being nineteen, had
come within the limits, but this would be her last year. In a few
weeks the Government would announce the numbers--drawn by a second
lottery--of those who were condemned.

Then, before these had been made public, the victims would already
have been seized and hurried to the airship depots in a hundred
places, for conveyance to the hideous Golgotha of the pampas.

The chance that any individual would be among the fated ones was
reasonably small. It was the fashion to make a jest of the whole
business. Ruth smiled as she showed her ticket.

Kay stared at it. "Ruth, if--if anything happened to you I'd go
insane. I'd--"

"Why this sudden ardor, Kay?"

Kay took Ruth's small hand in his. "Ruth, you mustn't play with me any
more. You know I love you. And the sight of that thing makes me almost
insane. You do care, don't you?" And, as Ruth remained silent, "Ruth,
it isn't Cliff Hymes, is it? I know you two are old friends. I'd
rather it were Cliff than anybody else, if it had to be some one,
but--tell me, Ruth!"

"It isn't Cliff," said Ruth slowly.

"Is it--some one else?"

"It's you, dear," answered Ruth. "It's always been you. It might have
been Cliff if you hadn't come along. But he knows now it can never be
he."

"Does he know it's me?" asked Kay, greatly relieved.

Ruth inclined her head. "He took it very finely," she said. "He said
just what you've said about him. Oh, Kay, if only your experiment had
succeeded, and the world could be free of this nightmare! What
happened? Why couldn't you and Cliff make it destroy life?"

"I don't know, dear," answered Kay. "Iron and steel melt into powder
at the least impact of the rays. They are so powerful that there was
even a leakage through the rubber and anelektron container. Even the
craolite socket was partly fused, and that is supposed to be an
impossibility. And there was a hole in the ground seven feet deep
where the very mineral water in the earth had been dissolved. But
against organic substances the W-ray is powerless.

"Next year, dear--next year we'll have solved our problem, and then
we'll free the world of this menace, this nightmare. Ruth--don't let's
talk about that now. I love you!"

They kissed. The Earth Giants faded out of their consciousness even
while Ruth held that ominous ticket in her hand.

Kay said nothing to Cliff about it, but Cliff knew. Perhaps he had put
his fate to the test with Ruth and learned the truth from her. Ruth
made no reference to the matter when she saw Kay. But between the two
men, friends for years, a coolness was inexorably developing.

They had gone to work on the new machine. They were hopeful. When they
were working, they forgot their rivalry.

"You see, Kay," said Cliff, "we mustn't forget that the Millikan rays
have been bombarding Earth since Earth became a planet, out of the
depths of space. It is their very nature not to injure organic life,
otherwise all life on Earth would have been destroyed long ago. Now,
our process is only an adaptation of these cosmic rays. We haven't
changed their nature."

"No," agreed Kay. "What we want is a death-ray strong enough to
obliterate these monsters, without simply disintegrating them and
creating new fragments to bud into the complete being. Why do you
suppose they are so tenacious of life, Cliff?"

"They represent primeval man, life itself, striving to organize
itself, and nothing is more tenacious than the life principle,"
answered Cliff.

Meanwhile the fatal weeks were passing. A few days after the tickets
had been distributed, a Government notice was broadcasted and
published, ordaining that, in view of former dissensions, no
substitutes for the condemned persons would be permitted. Rich or
poor, each of the victims chosen by lot must meet his fate.

And the monsters were growing active. There had been an extension of
their activities. Tongues had been creeping up the rivers that ran
into the Amazon. Suddenly a dense mass of the devils had appeared on
the north coast, near Georgetown. They had overleaped the Amazon; they
were overrunning British Guiana, eating up everything on their way.
Georgetown was abandoned; the monsters were in complete control.

"They will be cut off from the main herd," the optimistic reports
announced. "We shall deal with the main herd first. This year the
sacrifice will have to be made, but it will be the last. Scientists
have at last hit upon an infallible toxin which will utterly destroy
this menace within a few months."

Nobody believed that story, for everything had been tried and failed.
In their laboratory Cliff and Kay were working frantically. And now
the coldness that had developed between them was affecting their
collaboration too. Cliff was keeping something back from Kay.

Kay knew it. Cliff had made some discovery that he was not sharing
with his partner. Often Kay, entering the laboratory, would find Cliff
furtively attempting to conceal some operation that he was in the
midst of. Kay said nothing, but a brooding anger began to fill his
heart. So Cliff was trying to get all the credit for the result of
their years of work together!

And always, in the back of his mind, there was a vision of the little
Government ticket in Ruth's hand, with the numbers in staring black
type. They had burned into his brain. He could never forget them.
Often at night, after a hard day's work, he would suddenly awaken out
of a hideous nightmare, in which he saw Ruth taken away by the agents
of the Government, to be thrown as a sacrifice to the monsters.

And Cliff was hiding something! That made the situation unbearable.

The coolness between the two men was rapidly changing into open
animosity. And then one day, quite by chance, in Cliff's absence, Kay
came upon evidence of Cliff's activities.

Cliff was no longer experimenting with the W-ray! He was using a new
type of ray altogether, the next series, the psenium electron
emanation discovered only a few years before, which had the peculiar
property of non-alternation, even when the psenium electron changed
its orbit around the central nucleus of the psenium atom.

Instead of discontinuity, the psenium electron had been found to emit
radiation steadily, and this had upset the classic theories of matter
for the ninth time in the past fifteen years.

And Kay's wrath broke loose in a storm of reproaches when Cliff came
into the laboratory.

"You've been deliberately keeping me in the dark!" he shouted. "You're
a nice sort of partner to have! Here's where we split up the
combination, Hynes!"

"I've been thinking that for a long time," sneered Cliff. "The fact
is, Kay, you're a little too elementary in your ideas to suit me. It's
due to you that I kept hammering away on the wrong tack for years. The
sooner we part, the better."

"No time like now," said Kay. "Keep your laboratory. You put most of
the money into it, anyway. I'll build me another--where I can work
without being hampered by a partner who's out for himself all the
time. Good luck to you in your researches, and I hope you'll get all
the credit when you find a way of annihilating the Earth Giants."

And he stormed out of the laboratory, jumped into his plane, and
winged his way southward toward his apartment in New York.

Crowds in the streets of every town on the way. In villages and
hamlets, swarming like ants, and hurrying along the highways! Kay, who
flew one of the slow, old-fashioned planes, averaging little more than
a hundred miles an hour, winged his way methodically overhead, too
much absorbed in his anger against Cliff to pay much attention to this
phenomenon at first. But gradually it was borne in upon him that
something was wrong.

He flew lower, and now he was passing over a substantial town, and he
could hear the shouts of anger that came up to him. The whole town was
in a ferment, gathered in the town square.

Suddenly the reason came home to Kay. He saw the adjoining airport,
and dropped like a plummet, hovering down until his wheels touched the
ground. Without waiting to taxi into one of the public hangars, he
leaped out and ran through the deserted grounds into the square.

Groans, yells, shrieks of derision rent the air. The whole crowd had
gone maniacal. And it was as Kay had thought. Upon a white background
high up on the town ball building, the numbers of the local boys and
girls who had been picked for sacrifices were being shown.

Eight boys and fifteen girls, already on their way into the wastes of
South America, to meet a hideous death.

"They took my Sally," screamed a wizened woman, the tears raining down
her checks. "Kidnapped her at the street corner after dark. I didn't
know why she hadn't come home last night. God, my Sally, my little
girl, gone--gone--"

"People, you must be patient," boomed the Government announcer. "The
President feels with you in your affliction. But by next year a means
will have been devised of destroying these monsters. Your children
will have their sacrifice recorded in the Hall of Fame. They are true
soldiers who--"

"To hell with the Government!" roared a man. "Stop that damn talk
machine! Break her, fellows! Then we'll hang President Bogart from the
top of the Capitol!"

Yells answered him, and the crowd surged forward toward the building.

"Stand back!" shrieked the announcer. "It's death to set foot on the
step. We are now electrified. Last warning!"

The first ranks of the mob recoiled as a charge of electricity at a
voltage just short of that required to take life coursed through their
bodies. Shrieks of agony rang out. Files of writhing forms covered the
ground.

Kay rushed to the automatic clerk at the window beside the metal
steps, taking care to avoid contact with them. Within six feet, the
temperature of his body brought the thermostatic control into action;
the window slid upward and the dummy appeared. He turned the dial to
Albany.

"I want New York Division, Sub-station F, Loyalist Registration," he
called. "Give me Z numbers of the lottery, please."

"No numbers will be given out until Horometer 13," the dummy boomed.

"But I tell you I must know immediately!" Kay pleaded frantically.

"Stand away, please!"

"I've got to know, I tell you!"

"We are now electrified. Last warning!"

"Listen to me. My name's Kay Bevan. I--"

A mighty buffet in the chest hurled Kay ten feet backward upon the
ground. He rose, came within the electric zone, felt his arms twisted
in a giant's grasp, staggered back again and sat down gasping. The
window went down noiselessly, the dummy swung back into place. Kay got
upon his feet again, choking with impotent rage.

All about him men and women were milling in a frantic mob. He broke
through them, went back to where his plane was standing. A minute
later he was driving madly toward the district airport in New York
within three blocks of Ruth's apartment.

He dropped into a vacant landing place, checked hastily, and rushed
into the elevator. Once in the upper street, he bounded to the middle
platform, and, not satisfied to let it convey him at eight miles an
hour, strode on through the indignant throng until he reached his
destination. Hurling the crowds right and left he gained the exit,
and a half-minute later was on the upper level of the apartment block.

He pushed past the janitor and raced along the corridor to Ruth's
apartment. She would be in if all was well; she worked for the
Broadcast Association, correcting the proofs that came from the
district headquarters by pneumatic tube. He stopped outside the door.
The little dial of white light showed him that the apartment was
unoccupied.

As he stood there in a daze, hoping against hope, he saw a thread
hanging from the crevice between door and frame. He pulled at it, and
drew out a tiny strip of scandium, the new compressible metal that had
become fashionable for engagement rings. Plastic, all but invisible,
it could be compressed to the thickness of a sheet of paper: it was
the token of secret lovers, and Kay had given Ruth a ring of it.

It was the signal, the dreaded signal that Ruth had been on the
lottery list--the only signal that she had been able to convey, since
stringent precautions were taken to prevent the victims becoming known
until all possibility of rescue was removed.

No chance of rescuing her! From a hundred airports the great
Government airships had long since sailed into the skies, carrying
those selected by the wheel at Washington for sacrifice to the Earth
Giants. Only one chance remained. If Cliff had discovered the secret
that had so long eluded them, surely he would reveal it to him now!

Their quarrel was forgotten. Kay only knew that the woman he loved was
even then speeding southward to be thrown to the maw of the vile
monsters that held the world in terror. Surely Cliff would bend every
effort to save her!

Only a few hours had passed since Kay had stormed out of the
laboratory in the Adirondacks in a rage when he was back on their
little private landing field. He leaped from the plane and ran up the
trail beside the lake between the trees. The cabin was dark; and, when
Kay reached the laboratory he found it dark too.

"Cliff! Cliff!" he shouted.

No answer came, and with a sinking heart he snapped the button at the
door. It failed to throw the expected flood of light through the
interior. With shaking hand Kay pulled the little electron torch from
his pocket, and its bright beam showed that the door was padlocked. He
moved round to the window. The glass was unbreakable, but the ray from
the torch showed that the interior of the laboratory had been
dismantled, and the great top was gone.

In those few hours Cliff, for reasons best known to himself, had
removed the top, Kay's one hope of saving Ruth. And he was gone.

In that moment Kay went insane. He raved and cursed, calling down
vengeance upon Cliff's head. Cliff's very motive was incredible. That
he had deliberately removed the top in order that Ruth should die was
not, of course, conceivable. But in that first outburst of fury Kay
did not consider that.

Presently Kay's madness burned itself out. There was still one thing
that he could do. His plane, slow though it was, would carry him to
the pampas. He could get fresh fuel at numerous bootleg petrol
stations, even though the regulations against intersectional flight
were rigid. With luck he could reach the pampas, perhaps before the
sluggish monsters had fallen upon their prey. It was said that the
victims sometimes waited for days!

Something was rubbing against his leg, pricking it through his
anklets. Kay looked down. A lady porcupine, with tiny new quills, was
showing recognition, even affection, if such a spiny beast could be
said to possess that quality.

Somehow the presence of the beast restored Kay's mind to normal.

"Well, he's left us both in the lurch, Susie," he said. "Good luck to
you, beastie, and may you find a secure hiding place until your quills
have grown."

Drowning men catch at straws. Kay snatched out his watch, and the
illuminated dial showed that it was already two quintets past
horometer 13. He darted back to the cabin. The door was unfastened,
and his torch showed him that, though Cliff had evidently departed,
and taken his things, the interior was much as it had been. When Kay
picked up the telephotophone, the oblong dial flashed out. The
instrument was in working order.

He turned the crank, and swiftly a succession of scenes flashed over
the dial. On this little patch of glassite, Kay was actually making
the spatial journey to Albany, each minutest movement of the crank
representing a distance covered. The building of the New York Division
appeared, and its appearance signified that Kay was telephonically
connected. But there was no automatic voice attachment, an expense
that Kay and Cliff had decided would be unjustified. He had to rely
upon the old-fashioned telephone, such as was still widely in use in
rural districts. He took up the receiver.

"Sub-Station F, Loyalist Registration, please," he called.

"Speaking," said a girl's voice presently.

"I want the Z numbers. All from Z5 to ZA," said Kay.

And thus, in the dark hut, he listened to the doom pronounced, miles
away, by a more or less indifferent operator. When the fatal number
was read out, he thanked her and hung up. He released the crank, which
moved back to its position, putting out the light on the dial.

For a moment or two he stood there motionless, in a sort of daze,
though actually he was gathering all his reserves of resolution for
the task confronting him. Simply to find Ruth among the hundred
thousand victims, and die with her. A task stupendous in itself, and
yet Kay had no doubt that he would succeed, that he would be holding
her in his arms when the tide of hell flowed over them.

He knew the manner of that death. The irresistible onset of the giant
masses of protoplasm, the extrusion of temporary arms, or feelers,
that would grasp them, drag them into the heart of the yielding
substance, and slowly smother them to death while the life was drained
from their bodies. It had been said the death was painless, but that
was Government propaganda. But he would be holding Ruth in his arms.
He'd find her: he had no doubt of that at all.

And, strangely enough, now that Kay knew the worst, now that not the
slightest doubt remained, he was conscious of an elevation of spirits,
a sort of mad recklessness that was perfectly indefinable.

Kay turned his torch into a corner of the kitchen. Yes, there was the
thing subconsciousness had prompted him to seek. A long-shafted, heavy
woodsman's ax, a formidable weapon at close quarters. Because it is
the instinct of _homo Americanus_ to die with a weapon in his hands,
rather than let himself be butchered helplessly, Kay snatched it up.
He ran back to his plane. The gas tank was nearly empty, but there was
petrol in the ice house beside the lake.

Kay wheeled the machine up to it, and filled up with gas and oil. All
ready now! He leaped in, pressed the starter, soared vertically,
helicopter wings fluttering like a soaring hawk's. Up to the passenger
air lane at nine thousand: higher to twelve, the track of the
international and supply ships; higher still, to the fourteen thousand
ceiling of the antiquated machine. He banked, turned southward.

It was freezing cold up there, and Kay had no flying suit on him,
but, between the passenger lane and the lane of the heliospheres, at
thirty thousand, there was no air police. And he could afford to take
no chances. The Government police would be on the lookout for a score
such desperate men as he, bent on a similar mission. He drove the
plane toward the Atlantic till a red glow began to diffuse itself
beneath him, an area of conflagration covering square miles of
territory.

Swooping lower, Kay could hear the sound of detonations, the roar of
old-fashioned guns, while through the pall of lurid smoke came the
long, violet flashes of atomic guns, cleaving lanes of devastation.
New York was burning.

The frenzied populace had broken into revolt, seized the guns stored
in the arsenals, and attacked the great Bronx fortress that stood like
a mighty sentinel to protect the port.

A swarm of airships came into view, swirling in savage fight. Kay
zoomed. It was not his battle.

Now New York lay behind him, and he was winging southward over the
Atlantic. All night he flew. At dawn he came down in a coast hamlet
for bootleg petrol and oil.

"You come from New York?" asked the Georgian. "Hear there's war broke
out up there."

"My war's down in Brazil," muttered Kay.

"Say, if them Giants comes up here yuh know what us folks is going to
do? We're going to set the hounds on 'em. Yes, sirree, we've got a
pack of bloodhounds, raised for jest that purpose. I guess that's
something them wisecrackers at Washington ain't thought of. They took
two little fellers from Hopetown, but they won't take nobody from
here."

Kay fuelled up and resumed his flight southward.

After that it was a nightmare. The sun rose and set, alternating with
the staring moon and stars. Kay crossed the Caribbean, sighted the
South American coast, swept southward over the jungles of Brazil. He
drank, but no food passed his lips. He had become a mechanism, set for
on special purpose--self-immolation.

It was in a wide savannah among the jungles that he first caught sight
of the monsters. At first he thought it was the rising dawn mist; then
he began to distinguish a certain horrible resemblance to human forms,
and swooped down, banking round and round the opening in the jungle
until he could see clearly.

There were perhaps a score of them, an advance guard that had pushed
forward from one of the main divisions. Men? Anthropoids, rather, for
their sex was indistinguishable! Human forms ranging from a few feet
to a hundred, composed apparently of a grayish jelly, propelling
themselves clumsily on two feet, but floating rather than walking.
Translucent, semi-transparent. Most horrible of all, these shadowy,
spheroid creatures exhibited here and there buds of various sizes,
which were taking on the similitude of fresh forms. And among them
were the young, the buds that had fallen from the parent stems, fully
formed humans of perhaps five or six feet, bouncing with a horrible
playfulness among their sires.

As Kay soared some three hundred feet overhead, a young tapir came
leaping out of the jungle and ran, apparently unconscious of their
presence, right toward the monsters. Suddenly it stopped, and Kay saw
that it was already encircled by coils of protoplasm, resembling arms,
which had shot forth from the bodies of the devils.

Swiftly, despite its struggles and bleatings, the tapir was drawn into
the substance of the monsters, which seemed to fuse together and form
a solid wall of protoplasm in all respects like the agglutination of
bacteria under certain conditions.

Then the beast vanished in the wall, whose agitated churnings alone
gave proof of its existence.

For perhaps ten minutes longer Kay remained hovering above the
clearing. Then the bodies divided, resuming their separate shapes. And
the white bones of the tapir lay in a huddled mass in the open.

Kay went mad. Deliberately he set down his plane, and, hatchet in
hand, advanced upon the sluggish monsters. Shouting wildly, he leaped
into their midst.

The fight that followed was like a nightmare fight. He lopped off the
slow tentacles that sought to envelop him, he slashed the devils into
long ribbons of writhing jelly, slashed until the substance blunted
the ax; wiped it clean and leaped into their midst again, hewing until
he could no longer raise his arm. Then he drew back and surveyed the
scene before him.

It was dreadful enough to drive the last remnants of sanity from his
brain. For every piece that he had cut from the monsters, every
protoplasmic ribbon was reorganizing before his eyes into the
semblance of a new creature. Where there had been a score, there were
now five hundred!

Kay ran back to his plane, leaped in, and soared southward. His face
was a grotesque mask of madness, and his cries rang out through the
ether.

The victims were no longer chained to stakes. The Federation, which
always acted with complete secrecy, had gone one better. It had
engaged electrical engineers, kept them housed in secret places,
transported them to Golgotha; and there a vast electrified field had
been established, an open space whose boundaries were marked out by
pillars of electron steel.

Between these pillars ran lines of electric force. To attempt to pass
them meant--not death, for dead boys and girls were spurned by the
devils--but a violent shock that hurled one backward.

On this great plain the hundred thousand victims sat huddled in the
open. Food they had none, for no purpose was to be served by
mitigating their last agonies. No shelter either, for the sight of
buildings might delay the final phase. But high above the doomed there
floated the flag of the Federation, on a lofty pole, a touch of ironic
sentimentality that had commended itself to some mind at Washington.

Over a square mile of territory, ringed with jungle the victims lay.
The majority of them ringed this terrain; that is to say, attempting
to escape, they had been hurled back by the electrical charge, and,
having no strength or will remaining, they had dropped where they had
been hurled, and lay in apathetic resignation.

There had been screams and cries for mercy, and piteous scenes when
the Government airships had deposited them there and flown away, but
now an intense silence had descended upon the doomed. Resigned to
their fate, they sat or lay in little silent groups, all eyes turned
toward the gloomy jungle.

And everywhere within this jungle a wraith-like mist was forming at
this dawn hour. From a thousand miles around, the devils were
mustering for their prey, agglutinating, in order that the meal of one
might become the meal of all.

Wisps of protoplasmic fog were stealing out through the trees,
changing shape every instant, but always advancing: now presenting the
appearance of an aligned regiment of huge, shadowy men, now nothing
but a wall of semi-solid vapor. And still, with eyeballs straining in
their sockets, the victims watched.

Suddenly all were seized with the same spasm of mad terror. Again they
hurled themselves against the electrified lines, and again they were
hurled back, masses of boys and girls tumbling against one another,
and screaming in one wail that, could it have been heard in
Washington, would have driven all insane. Again and again, till they
fell back, panting and helpless. And solidly the wall of devils was
creeping up from every side.

Ruth Deane, one of the few who had themselves in control, lay some
distance back from the electrified field. From the moment when she was
surprised in her apartment by the Government representatives, she had
known that there was no hope of escape.

She had slipped the ring off her finger, snapped the plastic metal,
and attached it to a thread torn from her dress. She had managed to
insert it in the door, hoping that Kay would find it. It would serve
as a last message of love to him.

Every removal of a selected victim was in the nature of a kidnapping.
At dead of night her apartment had been opened. She had been ordered
to dress. Nothing could be written, no arrangements made. She was
already considered as one dead.

She had been hurried out of the upper entrance to the monorail, which
conveyed her in a special car to the landing station. A few minutes
later she had been on her way to join the camp of other victims, a
hundred miles away. Within two hours she was on her way southward.

Stunned by the tragedy, none of the victims had made much of an
outcry. They had been given water by the airship police. No food for
boys and girls already dead. Days and nights had passed, and now she
was here, faint from exhaustion, and wondering at the despair shown by
those others. What difference would it make in half an hour? Besides,
that Government pamphlet had insisted that this death was painless!

But an immense longing to see Kay once more came over her. There had
been a time when she thought she loved Cliff; then Kay had come into
her life, and she had known that other affair was folly. She had
never told Kay of the bitter scene between Cliff and herself, how he
had raved against Kay and sworn to win her in the end.

Cliff had calmed down and apologized, and Ruth had never seen him
again. She wished he had not taken it like that. But above all she
wanted to see Kay, just to say good-by.

And she tried to send out her whole heart to him in an unspoken
message of love that would surely somehow convey itself to him.

The wall of devils was creeping up on every side, slowly,
lethargically. The monsters took their time, because they knew they
were invincible. The sobs and shrieks had died away. Collected into a
mass almost as rigid as that of the Earth Giants, the victims waited,
palsied as a rabbit that awaits the approach of the serpent.

A humming overhead. An airplane shooting down from the sky. Rescue?
No. Only a solitary pilot, armed with a woodsman's ax.

Kay drifted down, touched ground, leaped to his feet. Chance had
brought him within five hundred yards of where Ruth was standing. But
Ruth had known who that lone flyer must be. She broke through the
throng; she rushed to meet him. Her arms were around him.

"Kay, darling Kay!"

"Ruth, dearest!"

"I knew you'd come."

"I've come to die beside you!"

It was perhaps odd that it did not enter the head of either as a
possibility that Kay should simply place Ruth in the plane and fly
away with here to safety. Had the thought occurred to Kay, he might
have been tempted. But such black treachery was something
inconceivable by either. So long as the Federation remained, so long
as man moved in an organized society, he was bound to his fellows, to
fight, suffer, and die with them.

"Stand by me, Ruth. We're going down fighting."

They moved back toward the throng, which, momentarily stirred to hope
by Kay's appearance, had fallen into the former apathy of despair. And
now the monsters were beginning to enter the electrified zone at one
point. As they passed the line of posts, the high tension current made
their bodies luminous, but it had no appreciable effect upon them.
They moved on, inevitably.

A score or so of semi-human forms, agglutinated into a mass, and yet
individually discernible. They bore down slowly upon the crowd of
victims, who pressed backward as they advanced. On the other sides,
though they almost encircled the field of death, the monsters were
making no maneuvers to entrap their prey. Their sluggish minds were
incapable of conceiving anything of the kind. But for the electrified
zone, the great majority of the victims could have effected their
escape. The monsters were simply pressing forward to their meal; they
did not interpret its capture in terms of strategy at all.

A new frenzy of horror seized the crowd. They fled, struggling back
until the foremost in flight reached the other side of Golgotha, to be
repulsed by the electrified zone there. They fell in tumbled heaps.
Appalling shrieks rang through the air.

Another line of the monsters was seeping forward, converging toward
the first. As the two lines met, they coalesced into a wall of
protoplasm, a thousand feet in length by a hundred high. A wall out of
which leered phantasmal faces, like those in a frieze.

Kay stood alone, his arm around Ruth. To follow the flying mob would
but prolong the agony. He raised the ax. He looked into the girl's
eyes. She understood, and nodded.

One last embrace, one kiss, and Kay placed her behind him. He sprang
forward, shouting, and plunged into the very heart of the wall.

And Ruth, watching with eyes dilated with horror, saw it yield with a
sucking sound, and saw Kay disappear within it.

She saw the hideous mass fold itself upon him, and a hundred extruded
tentacles wave in the air as they blindly grappled for him. And then
Kay had broken through, and was hewing madly with great sweeps of the
ax that slashed great streamers of the amorphous tissue from the wall
of protoplasm.

It recoiled and then folded once more, and Kay's mighty sweeps were
slashing phantom limbs from phantom bodies; and lopping off tentacles
that curled and coiled, and put forth caricatures of hands and
fingers, and then, uniting with other slashed off tentacles, began to
mould themselves into the likeness of dwarf monsters. Kay's struggle
was like that of a man fighting a fog, for again and again he broke
through the wall, and always it reunited.

And behind it another wall of protoplasm was pressing forward, and on
another side a wall was drifting up. As Kay stopped, panting, and
momentarily free, Ruth saw that they were almost encircled.

She saw the nature of that fight. Inevitably that wall would close
about them; and, though the bones of last year's victims had been
gathered up and carried away by the Federation, she guessed what would
occur.

She ran to Kay and dragged him back through the closing gap. It met
behind them, and again they stood face to face with the devils. Only
this time, instead of a wall of protoplasm, it was a veritable
mountain that confronted them, and there could be no more breaking
through.

Kay thought afterward that the one touch of absolute horror was that
the reforming monsters, the young ones growing visibly before his
eyes, had the gamboling instinct of young lambs or other creatures.
They were much more lively than the parent creatures.

By this time perhaps a third of the space within the electrified lines
had been occupied by the devils. The wall was slowly and sluggishly
advancing, and a fresh infiltration was drifting in on another side.
As the victims were pressed closer and closer together in their
flight, half of them seemed to go insane. They raced to and fro,
laughing and screaming, flinging their arms aloft in extravagant
gestures. One young fellow, rushing across the ground, hurled himself
like a bolt from a catapult into the heart of the grisly mass, which
opened and received him.

There was a struggle, a convulsion; then the mass moved on.

Kay wiped his ax. He stood beside Ruth, gathering strength and breath
to fight again. What else was there to do?

Suddenly a humming sound came to his ears. Still some little distance
from the monsters, he glanced back. The victims were shouting, staring
upward. Over the tops of the jungle trees Kay saw a second airplane
flying toward them, a larger one than the plane which he had flown.

It opened its helicopter wings and drifted downward. Kay saw a single
pilot, and, in the baggage compartment something that at first he did
not recognize. Then he recognized both this object and the aviator.

"It's Cliff," he whispered hoarsely. "He's brought the top!"

The crowd was milling about Cliff as he stepped out of the plane. Kay
broke through their midst, shouting to them to clear a space, that it
was their chance, their only chance. They heard him and obeyed. And
Cliff and Kay clasped hands, and there was Ruth beside them.

The two men carried the top out of the baggage compartment and set it
up.

"Thank God I came in time," Cliff hissed. "How long have we got, Kay?"

"Five minutes, I think," Kay answered, glancing at the oncoming wall.
"They're slow. Will it work, Cliff? God, when I found you'd gone last
night--"

Cliff did not answer. Ignoring Kay's offer of assistance, he fitted
the top tightly into its socket of craolite, much heavier than the
former one. Beneath this, three heavy craolite legs formed a sort of
tripod.

"I looked forward to this possibility, Kay," said Cliff, as he
adjusted the top and turned the clamps that held it in position.
"Sorry I had to deceive you, but you we're so set on the cosmic rays,
and I knew the psenium emanations wouldn't appeal to you. You wouldn't
have believed. I had a hunch Ruth would draw one of those numbers....
_How long?_"

The swaying masses of gray jelly were very near them. Cliff worked
feverishly at the top.

"Let me help. Cliff!"

"No! I'm through! Stand back!" shouted Cliff.

Even then--he regretted it afterward, and knew that he would regret it
to his dying day--even then the thought flashed through Kay's mind
that Cliff wanted all the glory. Behind him the milling, screaming
crowd was huddling, as if for protection. Slowly a wisp-like tentacle
protruded from the advancing wall. Kay swung his ax and lopped it from
the phantom body. But the wall was almost upon them, and from the
other side it was advancing rapidly.

"I'm ready! Stand back!" Cliff turned upon Kay, his face white, his
voice hoarse. "I've one request to make, Kay. Keep everybody back,
including you and Ruth. Nobody is to come within twenty-five yards of
this machine!"

"That shall be done," said Kay, a little bitterness in his tone.

"Ruth, I think I'm going to save you all." Cliff looked into the
girl's face for a moment. "Please stand back twenty-five yards," he
repeated.

Kay took Ruth by the arm and drew her back. The crowd moved back,
their pressure moving back the vast multitudes behind them. The vast
mob was almost packed into the quarter of the Golgotha; there was
scarcely room to move.

Kay saw Cliff press the lever.

Slowly the giant top began to whirl. Faster ... faster.... Now it was
revolving so fast that it had become totally invisible. But Cliff was
almost surrounded by the wall of jelly. Only his back could be seen,
and then space was narrowing fast.

Kay gripped Ruth's arm tightly. He held his breath. The crowd, of whom
only a small part knew what was taking place, was screaming with
terror as the mass of jelly on the other side pressed them inexorably
backward. And Cliff had almost vanished. Would the machine work? Was
it possible that the psenium emanations would succeed where the
Millikan rays, the W-ray had failed?

Then of a sudden the air grew dark as night. Kay began to sneeze. He
gasped for air. He was choking. He could see nothing, and he strained
Ruth to him convulsively, while the terrified multitudes behind him
set up a last wail of despair.

He could see nothing, and he stood with the ax ready for the onset of
the monsters, more terrible now, in their invisibility, than before.
Then of a sudden there sounded subterranean rumblings. The ground
seemed to open almost under Kay's feet.

He leaped back, dragging Ruth with him. Slowly the dust was settling,
the darkness lessening. A faint, luminous glow overhead revealed the
sun. Kay was aware that Cliff had swung the top, so that the psenium
rays were being brought to bear upon the second mass of the monsters
on the other side.

The sun vanished in appalling blackness. Again the dust-choked air was
almost unbreathable. The shrieks of the crowd died away in wheezing
gasps; and then a wilder clamor began.

"The earthquake! The earthquake!" a girl was shrilling. "God help us
all!"

Kay stood still, clutching Ruth tightly in his arms. He dared not
stir, for all the world seemed to be dissolving into chaos.

Slowly the dust began to settle again. Perhaps five minutes passed
before the sunbeams began to struggle through. A cloud of grey dust
still obscured everything. But the wall of protoplasm was gone!

Cliff's voice came moaning out of the murk, calling Kay's name.

Kay moved forward cautiously, still holding Ruth. He seemed to be
skirting the edge of a vast crater. At the edge of it he found the
top, revolving slowly. And Cliff's voice came from beside the top.

"Kay, we've won. Don't look at me. Don't let Ruth see me! Look down!"

Kay looked down into the bottomless pit, extending clear across the
plain to the distant jungle. An enormous canyon cloven in the earth,
filled with the slowly settling cloud of dust.

"They're there, Kay. Don't look this way!"

But Kay looked--and could see nothing except a pile of debris, from
the bottom of which Cliff's voice issued.

"Cliff, you're not hurt?"

"A--a little. You must listen while I tell you how to clean up the
monsters. It's the psenium emanation. It has the same effect when our
method is applied to it. It disintegrates everything inorganic--not
organic.

"I thought, if I couldn't get them, I'd crumble the earth away--bury
them. They're underneath the debris, Kay, a mile deep, buried, beneath
the impalpable powder that represented the inorganic salts and
minerals of the earth. They'll never get out of that. Protoplasm needs
oxygen. They'll trouble us no more.

"You must take the top, Kay. Use our old method. You'll find its
application to the psenium emanation written in a book fastened
beneath the hood. Wipe out the rest of them. If any more come, you'll
know how to deal with them."

"Cliff, you're not badly hurt?" Kay asked again.

"Don't look, I tell you! Keep Ruth away!"

But the dust was settling fast, and suddenly Ruth uttered a scream of
fear.

And a strangled cry broke from Kay's throat as he looked down at what
had been Cliff Hynes.

The man seemed to have become resolved into the same sort of
protoplasm as the Earth Giants. He lay, a little heap, incredibly
small, incredibly distorted. Flesh without bones, shapeless lumps of
flesh where arms and legs and body frame should have been.

Cliff's voice came faintly. "You remember the leakage through the
rubber and analektron container, Kay. The W-rays even fused the
craolite socket. The psenium rays are stronger. They destroy even
bone. They're fatal to the man who operates the machine, unless he
follows the directions. I've written them out for you, but I had--no
time--to apply them."

His voice broke off. Then, "Good luck to you and--Ruth, Kay," he
whispered, absent inaudibly. "Don't let--her--look at me."

Kay led Ruth gently away. "Did you hear that?" she whispered, sobbing.
"He died to save us Kay."

It was like a return from the grave for the amazed boys and girls
who--since the onset of the monsters had destroyed the electric
lines--poured out of the plain of Golgotha to life and freedom.

Many of them had gone mad, a few had died of fright, but the rest
would come back to normal, and the world was saved.

Hunger was their greatest problem, for, despite Kay's hurried flight
to the nearest occupied post, it was difficult to convince the
Federation officials that the devils were really gone, buried beneath
a mile of crumbled earth. And Kay had to be back to mop up other,
smaller bands that had spread through the forests.

It was six months before the last of the monsters had been
obliterated, and then Kay, now one of the highest officials in the
Federation's service, was granted a lunarian's leave of absence
pending his taking command of an Antarctic expedition for the purpose
of destroying the remaining monsters in their lair.

He took this opportunity to be married to Ruth, in the church in his
native town, which was _en fête_ for the occasion.

"Thinking of Cliff?" Kay asked his bride, as she settled in his plane
preparatory to their starting for the honeymoon in the Adirondacks. "I
think he would be happy if he knew. He saved the world, dear; he gave
his best. And that was all he wanted."

[Advertisement: ]

The Pirate Planet

BEGINNING A FOUR-PART NOVEL

_By Charles W. Diffin_

[Illustration: Like rats in a cage, the planes of the 91st Squadron
were darting and whirling.]

[Sidenote: A strange light blinks on Venus, and over old Earth hovers
a mysterious visitant--dread harbinger of interplanetary war.]

CHAPTER I

Lieutenant McGuire threw open his coat with its winged insignia of the
air force and leaned back in his chair to read more comfortably the
newspaper article.

He glanced at Captain Blake across the table. The captain was deep in
a game of solitaire, but he looked up at McGuire's audible chuckle.

"Gay old girl!" said Lieutenant McGuire and smoothed the paper across
his knees. "She's getting flirtatious."

The captain swore softly as he gathered up his cards. "Not
interested," he announced; "too hot to-night. Keep her away."

"Oh, she's far enough away," McGuire responded; "about seventy million
miles. Don't get excited."

"What are you talking about?" The captain shuffled his cards
irritably.

"Venus. She's winking at us, the old reprobate. One of these
star-gazers up on Mount Lawson saw the flashes a week or so ago. If
you'll cut out your solitaire and listen, I'll read you something to
improve your mind." He ignored the other's disrespectful remark and
held the paper closer to see the paragraphs.

"Is Venus Signalling?" inquired the caption which Lieutenant McGuire
read. "Professor Sykes of Mt. Lawson Observatory Reports Flashes.

"The planet Venus, now a brilliant spectacle in the evening sky, is
behaving strangely according to a report from the local observatory on
Mount Lawson. This sister star, most like Earth of all the planets, is
now at its eastern elongation, showing like a half-moon in the big
telescopes on Mt. Lawson. Shrouded in impenetrable clouds, its surface
has never been seen, but something is happening there. Professor Sykes
reports seeing a distinct flash of light upon the terminator, or
margin of light. It lasted for several seconds and was not repeated.

"No explanation of the phenomenon is offered by scientists, as
conditions on the planet's surface are unknown. Is there life there?
Are the people of Venus trying to communicate? One guess is as good as
another. But it is interesting to recall that our scientists recently
proposed to send a similar signal from Earth to Mars by firing a
tremendous flare of magnesium.

"Venus is now approaching the earth; she comes the nearest of all
planets. Have the Venusians penetrated their cloak of cloud masses
with a visible light? The planet will be watched with increased
interest as it swings toward us in space, in hope of there being a
repetition of the unexplained flash."

"There," said Lieutenant McGuire,"--doesn't that elevate your mind?
Take it off this infernally hot night? Carry you out through the cool
reaches of interplanetary space? If there is anything else you want to
know, just ask me."

"Yes," Captain Blake agree, "there is. I want to know how the game
came out back in New York--and you don't know that. Let's go over and
ask the radio man. He probably has the dope."

"Good idea," said McGuire; "maybe he has picked up a message from
Venus; we'll make a date." He looked vainly for the brilliant star as
they walked out into the night. There were clouds of fog from the
nearby Pacific drifting high overhead. Here and there stars showed
momentarily, then were blotted from sight.

The operator in the radio room handed the captain a paper with the
day's scores from the eastern games. But Lieutenant McGuire, despite
his ready amusement at the idea, found his thoughts clinging to the
words he had read. "Was the planet communicating?" he pictured the
great globe--another Earth--slipping silently through space, coming
nearer and nearer.

Did they have radio? he wondered. Would they send recognizable
signals--words--or some mathematical sequence to prove their reality?
He turned to the radio operator on duty.

"Have you picked up anything peculiar," he asked, and laughed inwardly
at himself for the asking. "Any new dots and dashes? The scientists
say that Venus is calling. You'll have to be learning a new code."

The man glanced at him strangely and looked quickly away.

"No, sir," he said. And added after a pause: "No new dots and dashes."

"Don't take that stuff too seriously, Mac," the captain remonstrated.
"The day of miracles is past; we don't want to commit you to the
psychopathic ward. Now here is something real: the Giants won, and I
had ten dollars on them. How shall we celebrate?"

The radio man was listening intently as they started to leave. His
voice was hesitating as he stopped them; he seemed reluctant to put
his thoughts into words.

"Just a minute, sir," he said to Captain Blake.

"Well?" the captain asked. And again the man waited before he replied.
Then--

"Lieutenant McGuire asked me," he began, "if I had heard any strange
dots and dashes. I have not; but ... well, the fact is, sir, that I
have been getting some mighty queer sounds for the past few nights.
They've got me guessing.

"If you wouldn't mind waiting. Captain; they're about due now--" He
listened again to some signal inaudible to the others, then hooked up
two extra head-sets for the officers.

"It's on now," he said. "If you don't mind--"

McGuire grinned at the captain as they took up the ear-phones. "Power
of suggestion," he whispered, but the smile was erased from his lips
as he listened. For in his ear was sounding a weird and wailing note.

No dots or dashes, as the operator had said, but the signal was
strong. It rose and fell and wavered into shrill tremolos, a ghostly,
unearthly sound, and it kept on and on in a shrill despairing wail.
Abruptly it stopped.

The captain would have removed the receiver from his ear, but the
operator stopped him. "Listen," he said, "to the answer."

There was silence, broken only by an occasional hiss and crackle of
some far distant mountain storm. Then, faint as a whisper, came an
answering, whistling breath.

It, too, trembled and quavered. It went up--up--to the limit of
hearing; then slid down the scale to catch and tremble and again
ascend in endless unvarying ups and downs of sound. It was another
unbroken, unceasing, but always changing vibration.

"What in thunder is that?" Captain Blake demanded.

"Communication of some sort, I should say," McGuire said slowly, and
he caught the operator's eyes upon him in silent agreement.

"No letters," Blake objected; "no breaks; just that screech." He
listened again. "Darned if it doesn't almost seem to say something,"
he admitted.

"When did you first hear this?" he demanded of the radio man.

"Night before last, sir. I did not report it. It seemed too--too--"

"Quite so," said Captain Blake in understanding, "but it is some form
of broadcasting on a variable wave; though how a thing like that can
make sense--"

"They talk back and forth," said the operator; "all night, most.
Notice the loud one and the faint one; two stations sending and
answering."

Captain Blake waved him to silence. "Wait--wait!" he ordered. "It's
growing louder!"

In the ears of the listening men the noise dropped to a loud grumble; rose
to a piercing shriek; wavered and leaped rapidly from note to note. It was
increasing; rushing upon them with unbearable sound. The sense of something
approaching, driving toward them swiftly, was strong upon Lieutenant
McGuire. He tore the head-phones from his ears and rushed to the door. The
captain was beside him. Whoever--whatever--was sending that mysterious
signal was coming near--but was that nearness a matter of miles or of
thousands of miles?

They stared at the stormy night sky above. A moon was glowing faintly
behind scudding clouds, and the gray-black of flying shadows formed an
opening as they watched, a wind-blown opening like a doorway to the
infinity beyond, where, blocking out the stars, was a something that
brought a breath-catching shout from the watching men.

Some five thousand feet up in the night was a gleaming ship. There
were rows of portholes that shone twinkling against the black
sky--portholes in multiple rows on the side. The craft was
inconceivably huge. Formless and dim of outline in the darkness, its
vast bulk was unmistakable.

And as they watched with staring, incredulous eyes, it seemed to take
alarm as if it sensed the parting of its concealing cloud blanket. It
shot with dizzy speed and the roar of a mighty meteor straight up into
the night. The gleam of its twinkling lights merged to a distant star
that dwindled, shrank and vanished in the heights.

The men were wordless and open-mouthed. They stared at each other in
disbelief of what their eyes had registered.

"A liner!" gasped Captain Blake. "A--a--liner! Mac, there is no such
thing."

McGuire pointed where the real cause of their visitor's departure
appeared. A plane with engine wide open came tearing down through the
clouds. It swung in a great spiral down over the field and dropped a
white flare as it straightened away; then returned for the landing. It
taxied at reckless speed toward the hangars and stopped a short
distance from the men. The pilot threw himself out of the cockpit and
raced drunkenly toward them.

"Did you see it?" he shouted, his voice a cracked scream. "Did you see
it?"

"We saw it," said Captain Blake; "yes, we saw it. Big as--" He sought
vainly for a proper comparison, then repeated his former words: "Big
as an ocean liner!"

The pilot nodded; he was breathing heavily.

"Any markings?" asked his superior. "Anything to identify it?"

"Yes, there were markings, but I don't know what they mean. There was
a circle painted on her bow and marks like clouds around it, but I
didn't have time to see much. I came out of a cloud, and there the
thing was. I was flying at five thousand, and they hung there dead
ahead. I couldn't believe it; it was monstrous; tremendous. Then they
sighted me, I guess, and they up-ended that ship in mid-air and shot
straight up till they were out of sight."

It was the captain's turn to nod mutely.

"There's your miracle," said Lieutenant McGuire softly.

"Miracle is right," agreed Captain Blake; "nothing less! But it is no
miracle of ours, and I am betting it doesn't mean any good to us. Some
other country has got the jump on us."

To the pilot he ordered: "Say nothing of this--not a word--get that?
Let me have a written report: full details, but concise as possible."

He went back to the radio room, and the operator there received the
same instructions.

"What are you going to do?" the lieutenant questioned.

Captain Blake was reaching for a head-set. "Listen in," he said
briefly; "try to link up that impossible ship with those messages,
then report at once to the colonel and whoever he calls in. I'll want
you along, Mac, to swear I am sober."

He had a head-set adjusted, and McGuire took up the other. Again the
room was still, and again from the far reaches of space the dark night
sent to them its quavering call.

The weird shrillness cried less loudly now, and the men listened in
strained silence to the go and come of that variable shriek. Musical
at times as it leaped from one clear note to another, again it would
merge into discordant blendings of half-tones that sent shivers of
nervous reaction up the listeners' spines.

"Listen," said McGuire abruptly. "Check me on this. There are two of
them, one loud and one faint--right?"

"Right," said Captain Blake.

"Now notice the time intervals--there! The faint one stops, and the
big boy cuts in immediately. No waiting; he answers quickly. He does
it every time."

"Well?" the captain asked.

"Listen when he stops and see how long before the faint one answers.
Call the loud one the ship and the faint one the station.... There!
The ship is through!"

There was pause; some seconds elapsed before the answer that whispered
so faintly in their ears came out of the night.

"You are right, sir," the operator said in corroboration of McGuire's
remark. "There is that wait every time."

"The ship answers at once," said McGuire; "the station only after a
wait."

"Meaning--?" inquired the captain.

"Meaning, as I take it, that there is time required for the message to
go from the ship to the station and for them to reply."

"An appreciable time like that," Captain Blake exclaimed, "--with
radio! Why, a few seconds, even, would carry it around the world a
score of times!"

Lieutenant McGuire hesitated a moment. "It happens every time," he
reminded the captain: "it is no coincidence. And if that other station
is out in space--another ship perhaps, relaying the messages to yet
others between here and--Venus, let us say...."

He left the thought unfinished. Captain Blake was staring at him as
one who beholds a fellow-man suddenly insane. But the look in his eyes
changed slowly, and his lips that had been opened in remonstrance came
gradually in a firm, straight line.

"Crazy!" he said, but it was apparent that he was speaking as much to
himself as to McGuire. "Plumb, raving crazy!... Yet that ship _did_ go
straight up out of sight--an acceleration in the upper air beyond
anything we know. It might be--" And he, too, stopped at the actual
voicing of the wild surmise. He shook his head sharply as if to rid it
of intruding, unwelcome thoughts.

"Forget that!" he told McGuire, and repeated it in a less commanding
tone. "Forget it, Mac: we've got to render a report to sane men, you
and I. What we know will be hard enough for them to believe without
any wild guesses.

"That new craft is real. It has got it all over us for size and speed
and potential offensive action. Who made it? Who mans it? Red Russia?
Japan? That's what the brass hats will be wondering; that's what they
will want to find out.

"Not a word!" he repeated to the radio man. "You will keep mum on
this."

He took McGuire with him as he left to seek out his colonel. But it
was a disturbed and shaken man, instead of the cool, methodical
Captain Blake of ordinary days, who went in search of his commanding
officer. And he clung to McGuire for corroboration of his impossible
story.

There was a group of officers to whom Blake made his full report.
Colonel Boynton had heard but little when he halted his subordinate
curtly and reached for a phone. And his words over that instrument
brought a quick conference of officers and a quiet man whom McGuire
did not recognize. The "brass hats," as Blake had foreseen, were avid
for details.

The pilot of the incoming plane was there, too, and the radio man.
Their stories were told in a disconcerting silence, broken only by
some officer's abrupt and skeptical question on one point and another.

"Now, for heaven's sake, shut up about Venus," McGuire had been told.
But he did not need Captain Blake's warning to hold himself strictly
to what he had seen and let the others draw their own conclusions.

Lieutenant McGuire was the last one to speak. There was silence in the
office of Colonel Boynton as he finished, a silence that almost echoed
from the grim walls. And the faces of the men who gathered there were
carefully masked from any expression that might betray their thoughts.

It was the quiet man in civilian attire who spoke first. He sat beside
another whose insignia proclaimed him of general's rank, but he
addressed himself to Colonel Boynton.

"I am very glad," he said quietly, "very glad. Colonel, that my
unofficial visit came at just this time. I should like to ask some few
questions."

Colonel Boynton shifted the responsibility with a gesture almost of
relief. "It is in your hands. Mr. Secretary," he said. "You and
General Clinton have dropped in opportunely. There is something here
that will tax all our minds."

The man in civilian clothes nodded assent. He turned to Captain Blake.

"Captain," he said, "you saw this at first hand. You have told us what
you saw. I should like greatly to know what you think. Will you give
us your opinion, your impressions?"

The captain arose smartly, but his words came with less ease.

"My opinion," he stated, "will be of little value, but it is based
upon these facts. I have seen to-night, sir, a new type of aircraft,
with speed, climb and ceiling beyond anything we are capable of. I
can only regard it as a menace. It may or may not have been armed, but
it had the size to permit the armament of a cruiser; it had power to
carry that weight. It hung stationary in the air, so it is independent
of wing-lift, yet it turned and shot upward like a feather in a gale.
That spells maneuverability.

"That combination, sir, can mean only that we are out-flown,
out-maneuvered and out-fought in the air. It means that the planes in
our hangars are obsolete, our armament so much old iron.

"The menace is potential at present. Whether it is an actual threat or
not is another matter. Who mans that ship--what country's insignia she
carries--is something on which I can have no opinion. The power is
there: who wields it I wish we knew."

The questioner nodded at the conclusion of Blake's words, and he
exchanged quiet, grave glances with the general beside him. Then--

"I think we all would wish to know that, Captain Blake," he observed.
And to the colonel: "You may be able to answer that soon. It would be
my idea that this craft should be--ah--drawn out, if we can do it. We
would not attack it, of course, until its mission is proved definitely
unfriendly, but you will resist any offensive from them.

"And now," he added, "let us thank these officers for their able
reports and excuse them. We have much to discuss...."

Captain Blake took McGuire's arm as they went out into the night. And
he drew him away where they walked for silent minutes by themselves.
The eyes of Lieutenant McGuire roamed upward to the scudding clouds
and the glimpse of far, lonely stars; he stumbled occasionally as he
walked. But for Captain Blake there was thought only of matters
nearby.

"The old fox!" he exclaimed. "Didn't he 'sic us on' neatly? If we mix
it with that stranger there will be no censure from the Secretary of
War."

"I assumed that was who it was," said McGuire. "Well, they have
something to think about, that bunch; something to study over....
Perhaps more than they know.

"And that's their job," he concluded after a silence. "I'm going to
bed; but I would like a leave of absence to-morrow if that's O. K."

"Sure," said Captain Blake, "though I should think you would like to
stick around. Perhaps we will see something. What's on your mind,
Mac?"

"A little drive to the top of Mount Lawson," said Lieutenant McGuire.
"I want to talk to a bird named Sykes."

CHAPTER II

Lieutenant McGuire, U. S. A., was not given as a usual thing to vain
conjectures, nor did his imagination carry him beyond the practical
boundaries of accepted facts. Yet his mind, as he drove for hours
through the orange-scented hills of California, reverted time and
again to one persistent thought. And it was with him still, even when
he was consciously concentrating on the hairpin turns of Mount
Lawson's narrow road.

There was a picture there, printed indelibly in his mind--a picture of
a monstrous craft, a liner of the air, that swung its glowing lights
in a swift arc and, like a projectile from some huge gun, shot up and
up and still up until it vanished in a jet-black sky. Its altitude
when it passed from sight he could not even guess, but the sense of
ever-increasing speed, of power that mocked at gravitation's puny
force, had struck deep into his mind. And McGuire saw plainly this
mystery ship going on and on far into the empty night where man had
never been.

No lagging in that swift flight that he had seen; an acceleration that
threw the ship faster and yet faster, regardless of the thin air and
the lessened buoyancy in an ocean of atmosphere that held man-made
machines so close to Earth. That constant acceleration, hour after
hour, day after day--the speed would be almost unlimited;
inconceivable!

He stopped his car where the mountain road held straight for a hundred
feet, and he looked out over the coastal plain spread like a toy world
far below.

"Now, how about it?" he asked himself. "Blake thinks I am making a
fool of myself. Perhaps I am. I wonder. It's a long time since I fell
for any fairy stories. But this thing has got me. A sort of hunch, I
guess."

The sun was shining now from a vault of clear blue. It was lighting a
world of reality, of houses where people lived their commonplace
lives, tiny houses squared off in blocks a mile below. There was smoke
here and there from factories; it spread in a haze, and it meant
boilers and engines and sound practical machinery of a practical world
to the watching man.

What had all this to do with Venus? he asked himself. This was the
world he knew. It was real; space was impenetrable; there were no men
or beings of any sort that could travel through space. Blake was
right: he was on a fool's errand. They couldn't tell him anything up
here at the observatory; they would laugh at him as he deserved....

Wondering vaguely if there was a place to turn around, he looked ahead
and then up; his eyes passed from the gash of roadway on the
mountainside to the deep blue beyond. And within the man some driving,
insistent, mental force etched strongly before his eyes that picture
and its problem unanswered. There was the ship--he saw it in
memory--and it went up and still up; and he knew as surely as if he
had guided the craft that the meteor-like flight could be endless.

Lieutenant McGuire could not reason it out--such power was beyond his
imagining--but suddenly he dared to believe, and he knew it was true.

"Earthbound!" he said in contempt of his own human kind, and he looked
again at the map spread below. "Ants! Mites! That's what we
are--swarming across the surface of the globe. And we think we're so
damn clever if we lift ourselves up a few miles from the surface!

"Guess I'll see Sykes," he muttered aloud. "He and his kind at least
dare to look out into space; take their eyes off the world; be
impractical!"

He swung the car slowly around the curve ahead, eased noiselessly into
second gear and went on with the climb.

There were domed observatories where he stopped: rounded structures
that gleamed silvery in the air; and offices, laboratories: it was a
place of busy men. And Professor Sykes, he found, was busy. But he
spared a few minutes to answer courteously the questions of this slim
young fellow in the khaki uniform of the air service.

"What can I do for you?" asked Professor Sykes.

"No dreamer, this man," thought McGuire as he looked at the short,
stocky figure of the scientist. Clear eyes glanced sharply from under
shaggy brows; there were papers in his hand scrawled over with strange
mathematical symbols.

"You can answer some fool questions," said Lieutenant McGuire
abruptly, "if you don't mind."

The scientist smiled broadly. "We're used to that," he told the young
officer; "you can't think of any worse ones than those we have heard.
Have a chair."

McGuire drew a clipping from his pocket--it was the newspaper account
he had read--and he handed it to Professor Sykes.

"I came to see you about this," he began.

The lips of Professor Sykes lost their genial curve; they straightened
to a hard line. "Nothing for publication," he said curtly. "As usual
they enlarged upon the report and made assumptions and inferences not
warranted by facts."

"But you did see that flash?"

"By visual observation I saw a bright area formed on the
terminator--yes! We have no photographic corroboration."

"I am wondering what it meant."

"That is your privilege--and mine," said the scientist coldly.

"But it said there," McGuire persisted, "that it might have been a
signal of some sort."

"_I_ did not say so: that is an inference only. I have told you,
Lieutenant"--he glanced at the card in his hand--"--Lieutenant
McGuire--all that I know. We deal in facts up here, and we leave the
brilliant theorizing to the journalists."

The young officer felt distinctly disconcerted. He did not know
exactly what he had expected from this man--what corroboration of his
wild surmises--but he was getting nowhere, he admitted. And he
resented the cold aloofness of the scientist before him.

"I am not trying to pin you down on anything," he said, and his tone
carried a hint of the nervous strain that had been his. "I am trying
to learn something."

"Just what?" the other inquired.

"Could that flash have been a signal?"

"You may think so if you wish: I have told you all that I know. And
now," he added, and rose from his chair, "I must ask to be excused; I
have work to do."

McGuire came slowly to his feet. He had learned nothing; perhaps there
was nothing to be learned. A fool's errand! Blake was right. But the
inner urge for some definite knowledge drove him on. His eyes were
serious and his face drawn to a scowl of earnestness as he turned once
more to the waiting man.

"Professor Sykes," he demanded, "just one more question. Could that
have been the flash of a--a rocket? Like the proposed experiments in
Germany. Could it have meant in any way the launching of a
projectile--a ship--to travel Earthward through space?"

Professor Sykes knew what it was to be harassed by the curious mob, to
avoid traps set by ingenious reporters, but he knew, too, when he was
meeting with honest bewilderment and a longing for knowledge. His
fists were placed firmly on the hips of his stocky figure as he stood
looking at the persistent questioner, and his eyes passed from the
intent face to the snug khaki coat and the spread wings that
proclaimed the wearer's work. A ship out of space--a projectile--this
young man had said.

"Lieutenant," he suggested quietly--and again the smile had returned
to his lips as he spoke--"sit down. I'm not as busy as I pretend to
be. Now tell me: what in the devil have you got in your mind?"

And McGuire told him. "Like some of your dope," he said, "this is not
for publication. But I have not been instructed to hush it up, and I
know you will keep it to yourself."

He told the clear-eyed, listening man of the previous night's events.
Of the radio's weird call and the mystery ship.

"Hallucination," suggested the scientist. "You saw the stars very
clearly, and they suggested a ship."

"Tell that to Jim Burgess," said McGuire: "he was the pilot of that
plane." And the scientist nodded as if the answer were what he
expected.

He asked again about the ship's flight. And he, too, bore down heavily
upon the matter of acceleration in the thin upper air. He rose to lay
a friendly hand on McGuire's shoulder.

"We can't know what it means," he said, "but we can form our own
theories, you and I--and anything is possible.

"It is getting late," he added, "and you have had a long drive. Come
over and eat; spend the night here. Perhaps you would like to have a
look at our equipment--see Venus for yourself. I will be observing her
through the sixty-inch refractor to-night. Would you care to?"

"Would I?" McGuire demanded with enthusiasm. "Say, that will be
great!"

The sun was dropping toward the horizon when the two men again came
out into the cool mountain air.

"Just time for a quick look around," suggested Professor Sykes, "if
you are interested."

He took the lieutenant first to an enormous dome that bulged high
above the ground, and admitted him to the dark interior. They climbed
a stairway and came out into a room that held a skeleton frame of
steel. "This is the big boy," said Professor Sykes, "the one
hundred-inch reflector."

There were other workers there, one a man standing upon a raised
platform beside the steel frame, who arranged big holders for
photographic plates. The slotted ceiling opened as McGuire watched,
and the whole structure swung slowly around. It was still, and the
towering steel frame began to swing noiselessly when a man at a desk
touched various controls. McGuire looked about him in bewilderment.

"Quite a shop," he admitted; "but where is the telescope?"

Professor Sykes pointed to the towering latticework of steel. "Right
there," he said. "Like everyone else, you were expecting to see a big
tube."

He explained in simple words the operation of the great instrument
that brought in light rays from sources millions of light years away.
He pointed out where the big mirror was placed--the one hundred-inch
reflector--and he traced for the wondering man the pathway of light
that finally converged upon a sensitized plate to catch and record
what no eye had ever seen.

He checked the younger man's flow of questions and turned him back
toward the stairs. "We will leave them to their work," he said; "they
will be gathering light that has been traveling millions of years on
its ways. But you and I have something a great deal nearer to study."

Another building held the big refractor, and it was a matter of only a
few seconds and some cryptic instructions from Sykes until the
eye-piece showed the image of the brilliant planet.

"The moon!" McGuire exclaimed in disappointed tones when the professor
motioned him to see for himself. His eyes saw a familiar half-circle
of light.

"Venus," the professor informed him. "It has phases like the moon. The
planet is approaching; the sun's light strikes it from the side." But
McGuire hardly heard. He was gazing with all his faculties centered
upon that distant world, so near to him now.

"Venus," he whispered half aloud. Then to the professor: "It's all
hazy. There are no markings--"

"Clouds," said the other. "The goddess is veiled; Venus is blanketed
in clouds. What lies underneath we may never know, but we do know that
of all the planets this is most like the earth; most probably is an
inhabited world. Its size, its density, your weight if you were
there--and the temperature under the sun's rays about double that of
ours. Still, the cloud envelope would shield it."

McGuire was fascinated, and his thoughts raced wildly in speculation
of what might be transpiring before his eyes. People, living in that
tropical world; living and going through their daily routine under
that cloud-filled sky where the sun was never seen. The margin of
light that made the clear shape of a half-moon marked their daylight
and dark; there was one small dot of light forming just beyond that
margin. It penetrated the dark side. And it grew, as he watched, to a
bright patch.

"What is that?" he inquired abstractedly--his thoughts were still
filled with those beings of his imagination. "There is a light that
extends into the dark part. It is spreading--"

He found himself thrust roughly aside as Professor Sykes applied a
more understanding eye to the instrument.

The professor whirled abruptly to his assistant. "Phone Professor
Giles," he said sharply; "he is working on the reflector. Tell him to
get a photograph of Venus at once; the cloud envelope is broken." He
returned hurriedly to his observations. One hand sketched on a waiting
pad.

"Markings!" he said exultantly. "If it would only hold!... There, it
is closing ... gone...."

His hand was quiet now upon the paper, but where he had marked was a
crude sketch of what might have been an island. It was "L" shaped;
sharply bent.

"Whew!" breathed Professor Sykes and looked up for a moment. "Now that
was interesting."

"You saw through?" asked McGuire eagerly. "Glimpsed the surface?--an
island?"

The scientist's face relaxed. "Don't jump to conclusions," he told the
aviator: "we are not ready to make a geography of Venus quite yet. But
we shall know that mark if we ever see it again. I hardly think they
had time to get a picture.

"And now there is only a matter of three hours for observation: I must
watch every minute. Stay here if you wish. But," he added, "don't let
your imagination run wild. Some eruption, perhaps, this we have
seen--an ignition of gasses in the upper air--who knows? But don't
connect this with your mysterious ship. If the ship is a menace, if it
means war, that is your field of action, not mine. And you will be
fighting with someone on Earth. It must be that some country has
gained a big lead in aeronautics. Now I must get to work."

"I'll not wait," said McGuire. "I will start for the field; get there
by daylight, if I can find my way down that road in the dark."

"Thanks a lot." He paused a moment before concluding slowly: "And in
spite of what you say, Professor, I believe that we will have
something to get together on again in this matter."

The scientist, he saw, had turned again to his instrument. McGuire
picked his way carefully along the narrow path that led where he had
parked his car. "Good scout, this Sykes!" he was thinking, and he
stopped to look overhead in the quick-gathering dark at that
laboratory of the heavens, where Sykes and his kind delved and probed,
measured and weighed, and gathered painstakingly the messages from
suns beyond counting, from universe out there in space that added
their bit of enlightenment to the great story of the mystery of
creation.

He was humbly aware of his own deep ignorance as he backed his car,
slipped it into second, and began the long drive down the tortuous
grade. He would have liked to talk more with Sykes. But he had no
thought as he wound round the curves how soon that wish was to be
gratified.

Part way down the mountainside he again checked his car where he had
stopped on the upward climb and reasoned with himself about his
errand. Once more he looked out over the level ground below, a vast
glowing expanse of electric lights now, that stretched to the ocean
beyond. He was suddenly unthrilled by this man-made illumination, and
he got out of his car to stare again at the blackness above and its
myriad of stars that gathered and multiplied as he watched.

One brighter than the rest winked suddenly out. There was a
constellation of twinkling lights that clustered nearby, and they too
vanished. The eyes of the watcher strained themselves to see more
clearly a dim-lit outline. There were no lights: it was a black
shape, lost in the blackness of the mountain sky, that was blocking
out the stars. But it was a shape, and from near the horizon the pale
gleams of the rising moon picked it out in softest of outline; a vague
ghost of a curve that reflected a silvery contour to the watching eyes
below.

There had been a wider space in the road that McGuire had passed; he
backed carefully till he could swing his car and turn it to head once
more at desperate speed toward the mountain top. And it was less than
an hour since he had left when he was racing back along the narrow
footpath to slam open the door where Professor Sykes looked up in
amazement at his abrupt return.

The aviator's voice was hoarse with excitement as he shouted: "It's
here--the ship! It's here! Where's your phone?--I must call the field!
It's right overhead--descending slowly--no lights, but I saw it--I saw
it!"

He was working with trembling fingers at the phone where Sykes had
pointed. "Long distance!" he shouted. He gave a number to the
operator. "Make it quick," he implored. "Quick!"

Back at Maricopa Flying Field the daily routine had been disturbed.
There were conferences of officers, instructions from Colonel Boynton,
and a curiosity-provoking lack of explanations. Only with Captain
Blake did the colonel indulge in any discussion.

"We'll keep this under our hats," he said, "and out of the newspapers
as long as we can. You can imagine what the yellow journals would do
with a scarehead like that. Why, they would have us all wiped off the
map and the country devastated by imaginary fleets in the first three
paragraphs."

Blake regarded his superior gravely. "I feel somewhat the same way,
myself. Colonel," he admitted. "When I think what this can mean--some
other country so far ahead of us in air force that we are back in the
dark ages--well, it doesn't look any too good to me if they mean
trouble."

"We will meet it when it comes," said Colonel Boynton. "But, between
ourselves, I am in the same state of mind.

"The whole occurrence is so damn mysterious. Washington hasn't a
whisper of information of any such construction; the Secretary
admitted that last night. It's a surprise, a complete surprise, to
everyone.

"But, Blake, you get that new ship ready as quickly as you can.
Prepare for an altitude test the same as we planned, but get into the
air the first minute possible. She ought to show a better ceiling than
anything we have here, and you may have to fly high to say 'Good
morning' to that liner you saw. Put all the mechanics on it that can
work to advantage. I think they have it pretty well along now."

"Engine's tested and installed, sir," was Blake's instant report. "I
think I can take it up this afternoon."

He left immediately to hurry to the hangar where a new plane stood
glistening in pristine freshness, and where hurrying mechanics
grumbled under their breaths at the sudden rush for a ship that was
expected to take the air a week later.

An altitude test under full load! Well, what of it? they demanded one
of another; wouldn't another day do as well as this one? And they
worked as they growled, worked with swift sureness and skill, and the
final instruments took their place in the ship that she might roll
from the hangar complete under that day's sun.

Her supercharger was tested--the adjunct to a powerful engine that
would feed the hungry cylinders with heavy air up in the heights where
the air is thin; there were oxygen flasks to keep life in the pilot in
the same thin air. And the hot southern sun made ludicrous that
afternoon the bulky, heavily-wrapped figure of Captain Blake as he
sat at the controls and listened approvingly to the roaring engine.

He waved good-by and smiled understandingly as he met the eyes of
Colonel Boynton; then pulled on his helmet, settled himself in his
seat and took off in a thunderous blast of sound to begin his long
ascent.

He had long since cracked open the valve of his oxygen flask when the
climb was ended, and his goggles were frosted in the arctic cold so
that it was only with difficulty he could read his instrument board.

"That's the top," he thought in that mind so light and so curiously
not his own. He throttled the engine and went into a long spiral that
was to end within a rod of where he had started on the brown sun-baked
field. The last rays of the sun were slanting over distant mountains
as he climbed stiffly from the machine.

"Better than fifty thousand," exulted Colonel Boynton. "Of course your
barograph will have to be calibrated and verified, but it looks like a
record, Blake--and you had a full load.

"Ready to go up and give merry hell to that other ship if she shows
up?" he asked. But Captain Blake shook a dubious head.

"Fifty thousand is just a start for that bird," he said. "You didn't
see them shoot out of sight, Colonel. Lord knows when they quit
_their_ climb--or where."

"Well, we'll just have a squadron ready in any event," the colonel
assured him. "We will make him show his stuff or take a beating--if
that is what he wants."

They were in the colonel's office. "You had better go and get warmed
up," he told the flyer: "then come back here for instructions." But
Blake was more anxious for information than for other comforts.

"I'm all right," he said: "just tired a bit. Let me stretch out here,
Colonel, and give me the dope on what you expect of our visitor and
what we will do."

He settled back comfortably in a big chair. The office was warm, and
Blake knew now he had been doing a day's work.

"We will just take it as it comes," Colonel Boynton explained. "I
can't for the life of me figure why the craft was spying around here.
What are they looking for? We haven't any big secrets the whole world
doesn't know.

"Of course he may not return. But if he does I want you to go up and
give him the once over. I can trust you to note every significant
detail.

"You saw no wings. If it is a dirigible, let's know something of their
power and how they can throw themselves up into the air the way you
described. Watch for anything that may serve to identify it and its
probable place of manufacture--any peculiarity of marking or design or
construction that may give us a lead. Then return and report."

Blake nodded his understanding of what was wanted, but his mind was on
further contingencies: he wanted definite instructions.

"And," he asked; "if they attack--what then? Is their fire to be
returned?"

"If they make one single false move," said Colonel Boynton savagely,
"give them everything you've got. And the 91st Squadron will be off
the ground to support you at the first sign of trouble. We don't want
to start anything, nor appear to do so. But, by the gods, Blake, this
fellow means trouble eventually as sure as you're a flyer, and we
won't wait for him to ask for it twice."

They sat in silence, while the field outside became shrouded in night.
And they speculated, as best they could from the few facts they had,
as to what this might mean to the world, to their country, to
themselves. It was an hour before Blake was aware of the fact that he
was hungry.

He rose to leave, but paused while Colonel Boynton answered the phone.
The first startled exclamation held him rigid while he tried to piece
together the officer's curt responses and guess at what was being
told.

"Colonel Boynton speaking.... McGuire?... Yes, Lieutenant.... Over
Mount Lawson?... Yes--yes, the same ship, I've no doubt."

His voice was even and cool in contrast to the excited tones that
carried faintly to Blake standing by.

"Quite right!" he said shortly. "You will remain where you are: act as
observer: hold this line open and keep me informed. Captain Blake will
leave immediately for observation. A squadron will follow. Let me know
promptly what you see."

He turned abruptly to the waiting man.

"It is back!" he said. "We're in luck! Over the observatories at Mount
Lawson; descending, so Lieutenant McGuire says. Take the same ship you
had up to-day. Look them over--get up close--good luck!" He turned
again to the phone.

There were planes rolling from their hangars before Blake could reach
his own ship. Their engines were thundering: men were rushing across
the field, pulling on leather helmets and coats as they ran--all this
while he warmed up his engine.

A mechanic thrust in a package of sandwiches and a thermos of coffee
while he waited. And Captain Blake grinned cheerfully and gulped the
last of his food as he waved to the mechanics to pull out the wheel
blocks. He opened the throttle and shot out into the dark.

He climbed and circled the field, saw the waving motion of lights in
red and green that marked the take-off of the planes of the 91st, and
he straightened out on a course that in less than two hours would
bring him over the heights of Mount Lawson and the mystery that
awaited him there. And he fingered the trigger grip that was part of
the stick and nodded within his dark cockpit at the rattle of a
machine gun that merged its staccato notes with the engine's roar.

But he felt, as he thought of that monster shape, as some primordial
man might have felt, setting forth with a stone in his hand to wage
war on a saurian beast.

CHAPTER IV

If Colonel Boynton could have stood with one of his lieutenants and
Professor Sykes on a mountain top, he would have found, perhaps, the
answer to his question. He had wondered in a puzzled fashion why the
great ship had shown its mysterious presence over the flying field. He
had questioned whether it was indeed the field that had been the
object of their attention or whether in the cloudy murk they had
merely wandered past. Could he have seen with the eyes of Lieutenant
McGuire the descent of the great shape over Mount Lawson, he would
have known beyond doubt that here was the magnet that drew the eyes of
whatever crew was manning the big craft.

It was dark where the two men stood. Others had come running at their
call, but their forms, too, were lost in the shadows of the towering
pines. The light from an open door struck across an open space beyond
which McGuire and Professor Sykes stood alone, stood silent and
spellbound, their heads craned back at a neck-wrenching angle. They
were oblivious to all discomforts; their eyes and their whole minds
were on the unbelievable thing in the sky.

Beyond the fact that no lights were showing along the hull, there was
no effort at concealment. The moon was up now to illumine the scene,
and it showed plainly the gleaming cylinder with its long body and
blunt, shining ends, dropping, slowly, inexorably down.

"Like a dirigible," said McGuire huskily. "But the size, man--the
size! And its shape is not right; it isn't streamlined correctly; the
air--" He stopped his half-unconscious analysis abruptly. "The air!"
What had this craft to do with the air? A thin layer of gas that hung
close to the earth--the skin on an apple! And beyond--space! There was
the ethereal ocean in which this great shape swam!

The reality of the big ship, the very substance of it, made the space
ship idea the harder to grasp. Lieutenant McGuire found that it was
easier to see an imaginary craft taking off into space than to
conceive of this monstrous shape, many hundreds of tons in weight,
being thrown through vast emptiness. Yet he knew; he knew!

And his mind was a chaos of grim threats and forebodings as he looked
at the unbelievable reality and tried to picture what manner of men
were watching, peering, from those rows of ports.

At last it was motionless. It hung soundless and silent except for a
soft roar, a scant thousand feet in the air. And its huge bulk was
dwarfing the giant pines, the rounded buildings; it threw the men's
familiar surroundings into a new and smaller scale.

He had many times flown over these mountains, and Lieutenant McGuire
had seen the silvery domes of the observatories shining among the
trees. Like fortresses for aerial defense, he had thought, and the
memory returned to him now. What did these new-comers think of them?
Had they, too, found them suggestive of forts on the frontier of a
world, defenses against invasion from out there? Or did they know them
for what they were? Did they wish only to learn the extent of our
knowledge, our culture? Were they friendly, perhaps?--half-timid and
fearful of what they might find?

A star moved in the sky, a pin-point of light that was plain in its
message to the aviator. It was Blake, flying high, volplaning to make
contact and learn from the air what this stranger might mean. The
light of his plane slanted down in an easy descent; the flyer was
gliding in on a long aerial toboggan slide. His motor was throttled;
there was only the whistle of torn air on the monoplane's wings.
McGuire was with the captain in his mind, and like him he was waiting
for whatever the stranger might do.

Other lights were clustered where the one plane had been. The men of
the 91st had their orders, and the fingers of the watching, silent man
gripped an imaginary stick while he wished with his whole heart that
he was up in the air. To be with Blake or the others! His thoughts
whipped back to the mysterious stranger: the great shape was in
motion: it rose sharply a thousand feet in the air.

The approaching plane showed clear in the moon's light. It swung and
banked, and the vibrant song of its engine came down to the men as
Blake swept in a great circle about the big ship. He was looking it
over, but he began his inspection at a distance, and the orbit of his
plane made a tightening spiral as he edged for a closer look. He was
still swinging in the monotonous round when the ship made its first
forward move.

It leaped in the air: it swept faster and faster. And it was moving
with terrific speed as it crashed silently through the path of the
tiny plane. And Blake, as he leaned forward on the stick to throw his
plane downward in a power dive, could have had a vision, not of a ship
of the air, but only of a shining projectile as the great monster
shrieked overhead.

McGuire trembled for the safety of those wings as he saw Blake pull
his little ship out of the dive and shoot upward to a straight climb.

But--"That's dodging them!" he exulted: "that's flying! I wonder, did
they mean to wipe him out or were they only scared off?"

His question was answered as, out of the night, a whistling shriek
proclaimed the passage of the meteor ship that drove unmistakably at
the lone plane. And again the pilot with superb skill waited until the
last moment and threw himself out of the path of the oncoming mass,
though his own plane was tossed and whirled like an autumn leaf in the
vortex that the enemy created. Not a second was lost as Blake opened
his throttle and forced his plane into a steep climb.

"Atta-boy!" said McGuire, as if words could span across to the man in
the plane. "Altitude, Blake--get altitude!"

The meteor had turned in a tremendous circle; so swift its motion that
it made an actual line of light as the moon marked its course. And the
curved line straightened abruptly to a flashing mark that shot
straight toward the struggling plane.

This time another sound came down to the listening ears of the two
men. The plane tore head on to meet the onslaught, to swing at the
last instant in a frantic leap that ended as before in the maelstrom
of air back of the ship. But the muffled roar was changed, punctured
with a machine-gun's familiar rattle, and the stabbing flashes from
Blake's ship before he threw it out of the other's path were a song of
joy to the tense nerves of the men down below.

This deadly rush could only be construed as an attack, and Blake was
fighting back. The very speed of the great projectile must hold it to
its course; the faster it went the more difficult to swerve it from a
line. This and much more was flashing sharply in McGuire's mind.
But--Blake!--alone against this huge antagonist!... It was coming
back. Another rush like a star through space....

And McGuire shouted aloud in a frenzy of emotion as a cluster of
lights came falling from on high. No lone machine gun now that tore
the air with this clattering bedlam of shots: the planes of the 91st
Squadron were diving from the heights. They came on a steep slant
that seemed marking them for crashing death against the huge cylinder
flashing past. And their stabbing needles of machine-gun fire made a
drumming tattoo, till the planes, with the swiftness of hawks, swept
aside, formed to groups, tore on down toward the ground and then
curved in great circles of speed to climb back to the theater of
action.

Lieutenant McGuire was rigid and quivering. He should go to the phone
and report to the colonel, but the thought left him as quickly as it
came. He was frozen in place, and his mind could hold only the scene
that was being pictured before him.

The enemy ship had described its swift curve, and the planes of the
defenders were climbing desperately for advantage. So slowly they
moved as compared with the swiftness of the other!

But the great ship was slowing; it came on, but its wild speed was
checked. The light of the full moon showed plainly now what McGuire
had seen but dimly before--a great metal beak on the ship, pointed and
shining, a ram whose touch must bring annihilation to anything it
struck.

The squadron of planes made a group in the sky, and Blake's monoplane,
too, was with them. The huge enemy was approaching slowly: was it
damaged? McGuire hardly dared hope ... yet that raking fire might well
have been deadly: it might be that some bullets had torn and
penetrated to the vitals of this ship's machinery and damaged some
part.

It came back slowly, ominously, toward the circling planes. Then,
throwing itself through the air, it leaped not directly toward them
but off to one side.

Like a stone on the end of a cord it swung with inconceivable speed in
a circle that enclosed the group of planes. Again and again it
whipped around them, while the planes, by comparison, were motionless.
Its orbit was flat with the ground: then tilting, more yet, it made a
last circle that stood like a hoop in the air. And behind it as it
circled it left a faint trace of vapor. Nebulous!--milky in the
moonlight!--but the ship had built a sphere, a great globe of the gas,
and within it, like rats in a cage, the planes of the 91st Squadron
were darting and whirling.

"Gas!" groaned the watching man: "gas! What is it? Why don't they
break through?"

The thin clouds of vapor were mingling now and expanding: they
blossomed and mushroomed, and the light of the moon came in pale
iridescence from their billowing folds.

"Break through!" McGuire had prayed--and he stood in voiceless horror
as he saw the attempt.

The mist was touching here and there a plane: they were engulfed, yet
he could see them plainly. And he saw with staring, fear-filled eyes
the clumsy tumbling and fluttering of unguided wings as the great
eagles of the 91st fell roaring to earth with no conscious minds
guiding their flight.

The valleys were deep about the mountain, and their shadowed blackness
opened to receive the maimed, stricken things that came fluttering or
swooping wildly to that last embrace, where, in the concealing
shadows, the deeper shadows of death awaited....

There was a room where a telephone waited: McGuire sensed this but
dumbly, and the way to that room was long to his stumbling feet. He
was blinded: his mind would not function: he saw only those fluttering
things, and the moonlight on their wings, and the shadows that took
them so softly at the last.

One plane whistled close overhead. McGuire stopped where he stood to
follow it with unbelieving eyes. That one man had lived, escaped the
net--it was inconceivable! The plane returned: it was flying low, and
it swerved erratically as it flew. It was a monoplane: a new ship.

Its motor was silenced: it stalled as he watched, to pancake and crash
where the towering pines made a cradle of great branches to cushion
its fall.

No thought now of the colonel waiting impatiently for a report; even
the enemy, there in the sky was forgotten. It was Blake in that ship,
and he was alive--or had been--for he had cut his motor. McGuire
screamed out for Professor Sykes, and there were others, too, who came
running at his call. He tore recklessly through the scrub and
undergrowth and gained at last the place where wreckage hung dangling
from the trees. The fuselage of a plane, scarred and broken, was still
held in the strong limbs.

Captain Blake was in the cockpit, half hanging from the side. He was
motionless, quiet, and his face shone white and ghastly as they
released him and drew him out. But one hand still clung with a grip
like death itself to a hose that led from an oxygen tank. McGuire
stared in wonder and slowly gathering comprehension.

"He was fixed for an altitude test," he said dazedly; "this ship was
to be used, and he was to find her ceiling. He saw what the others
were getting, and he flew himself through on a jet of pure oxygen--"
He stopped in utter admiration of the quickness of thought that could
outwit death in an instant like that.

They carried the limp body to the light. "No bones broken so far as I
can see," said the voice of Professor Sykes. "Leave him here in the
air. He must have got a whiff of their devilish mist in spite of his
oxygen; he was flying mighty awkwardly when he came in here."

But he was alive!--and Lieutenant McGuire hastened with all speed now
to the room where a telephone was ringing wildly and a colonel of the
air force must be told of the annihilation of a crack squadron and of
a threat that menaced all the world.

In that far room there were others waiting where Colonel Boynton sat
with receiver to his ear. A general's uniform was gleaming in the
light to make more sober by contrast the civilian clothing of that
quiet, clear-eyed man who held the portfolio of the Secretary of War.

They stared silently at Colonel Boynton, and they saw the blood recede
from his face, while his cool voice went on unmoved with its replies.

"... I understand," he said; "a washout, complete except for Captain
Blake; his oxygen saved him.... It attacked with gas, you say?... And
why did not our own planes escape?... Its speed!--yes, we'll have to
imagine it, but it is unbelievable. One moment--" He turned to those
who waited for his report.

"The squadron," he said with forced quiet, though his lips twitched in
a bloodless line, "--the 91st--is destroyed. The enemy put them down
with one blow; enveloped them with gas." He recounted the essence of
McGuire's report, then turned once more to the phone.

"Hello, Lieutenant--the enemy ship--where is it now?"

He listened--listened--to a silent receiver: silent save for the sound
of a shot--a crashing fall--a loud, panting breath. He heard the
breathing close to the distant instrument; it ended in a choking gasp;
the instrument was silent in his ear....

He signalled violently for the operator: ordered the ringing of any
and all phones about the observatory, and listened in vain for a sound
or syllable in reply.

"A plane," he told an orderly, "at once! Phone the commercial flying
field near the base of Mount Lawson. Have them hold a car ready for
me: I shall land there!"

CHAPTER V

To Captain Blake alone, of all those persons on the summit of Mount
Lawson, it was given to see and to know and be able to relate what
transpired there and in the air above. For Blake, although he appeared
like one dead, was never unconscious throughout his experience.

Driving head on toward the ship, he had emptied his drum of cartridges
before he threw his plane over and down in a dive that escaped the
onrush of the great craft by a scant margin, and that carried him down
in company with the men and machines of the squadron that dived from
above.

He turned as they turned and climbed as they climbed for the advantage
that altitude might give. And he climbed faster: his ship outdistanced
them in that tearing, scrambling rush for the heights. The squadron
was spiraling upward in close formation with his plane above them when
the enemy struck.

He saw that great shape swing around them, terrible in its silent
swiftness, and, like the others, he failed to realize at first the net
she was weaving. So thin was the gas and so rapid the circling of the
enemy craft, they were captured and cut off inside of the gaseous
sphere before the purpose of the maneuver was seen or understood.

He saw the first faint vapor form above him; swung over for a steep
bank that carried him around the inside of the great cage of gas and
that showed him the spiraling planes as the first wisps of vapor swept
past them.

He held that bank with his swift machine, while below him a squadron
of close-formed fighting craft dissolved before his eyes into unguided
units. The formations melted: wings touched and locked; the planes
fell dizzily or shot off in wild, ungoverned, swerving flight. The air
was misty about him; it was fragrant in his nostrils; the world was
swimming....

It was gas, he knew, and with the light-headedness that was upon him,
so curiously like that of excessive altitudes, he reached
unconsciously for the oxygen supply. The blast of pure gas in his face
revived him for an instant, and in that instant of clear thinking his
plan was formed. He threw his weight on stick and rudder, corrected
the skid his ship was taking, and, with one hand holding the tube of
life-giving oxygen before his face, he drove straight down in a dive
toward the earth.

There were great weights fastened to his arm, it seemed, when he tried
to bring the ship from her fearful dive. He moved only with greatest
effort, and it was force of will alone that compelled his hands to do
their work. His brain, as he saw the gleaming roundness of observatory
buildings beneath him, was as clear as ever in his life, but his
muscles, his arms and legs, refused to work: even his head; he was
slowly sinking beneath a load of utter fatigue.

The observatories were behind him; he must swing back; he could not
last long, he knew; each slightest movement was intolerable effort.

Was this death? he wondered; but his mind was so clear! There were the
buildings, the trees! How thickly they were massed beyond--

He brought every ounce of will power to bear ... the throttle!--and a
slow glide in ... he was losing speed ... the stick--must--come--back!
The crashing branches whipped about him, bending, crackling--and the
world went dark....

There were stars above him when he awoke, and his back was wrenched
and aching. He tried to move, to call, but found that the paralysing
effect of the gas still held him fast. He was lying on the ground, he
knew: a door was open in a building beyond, and the light in the room
showed him men, a small group of them, standing silent while
someone--yes, it was McGuire--shouted into a phone.

"... The squadron," he was saying. "... Lost! Every plane down and
destroyed.... Blake is living but injured...." And then Blake
remembered. And the tumbling, helpless planes came again before his
eyes while he cursed silently at this freezing grip that would not let
him cover his face with his hands to shut out the sight.

The figure of a man hurried past him, nor saw the body lying helpless
in the cool dark. McGuire was still at the phone. And the enemy
ship--?

His mind, filled with a welter of words as he tried to find phrases to
compass his hate for that ship. And then, as if conjured out of
nothing by his thoughts, the great craft itself came in view overhead
in all its mighty bulk.

It settled down swiftly: it was riding on an even keel. And in silence
and darkness it came from above. Blake tried to call out, but no sound
could be formed by his paralyzed throat. Doors opened in silence,
swinging down from the belly of the thing to show in the darkness
square openings through which shot beams of brilliant yellow light.

There were cages that lowered--great platforms in slings--and the
platforms came softly to rest on the ground. They were moving with
life; living beings clustered upon them thick in the dark. Oh God! for
an instant's release from the numbness that held his lips and throat
to cry out one word!... The shapes were passing now in the shelter of
darkness, going toward the room.... He could see McGuire's back turned
toward the door.

Man-shapes, tall and thin, distorted humans, each swathed in bulging
garments; horrible staring eyes of glass in the masks about their
heads, and each hand ready with a shining weapon as they stood waiting
for the men within to move.

McGuire must have seen them first, though his figure was half
concealed from Blake where he was lying. But he saw the head turn;
knew by the quick twist of the shoulders the man was reaching for a
gun. One shot echoed in Blake's ears; one bulging figure spun and fell
awkwardly to the ground; then the weapons in those clumsy hands hissed
savagely while jets of vapor, half liquid and half gas, shot
blindingly into the room. The faces dropped from his sight....

There had been the clamor of surprised and shouting men: there was
silence now. And the awkward figures in the bloated casings that
protected their bodies from the gas passed in safety to the room.
Blake, bound in the invisible chains of enemy gas, struggled silently,
futilely, to pit his will against this grip that held him. To lie
there helpless, to see these men slaughtered! He saw one of the
creatures push the body of his fallen comrade out of the way: it was
cast aside with an indifferent foot.

They were coming back: Blake saw the form of McGuire in unmistakable
khaki. He and another man were carried high on the shoulders of some
of the invaders. They were going toward the platforms, the slings
beneath the ship.... They passed close to Blake, and again he was
unnoticed in the dark.

A clamor came from distant buildings, a babel of howls and shrieks,
inhuman, unearthly. There were no phrases or syllables, but to Blake
it was familiar ... somewhere he had heard it ... and then he
remembered the radio and the weird wailing note that told of
communication. These things were talking in the same discordant din.

They were gathering now on the platforms slung under the ship. A
whistling note from somewhere within the great structure and the
platforms went high in the air. They were loaded, he saw, with papers
and books and instruments plundered from the observatories. Some made
a second trip to take up the loot they had gathered. Then the black
doorways closed; the huge bulk of the ship floated high above the
trees; it took form, dwindled smaller and smaller, then vanished from
sight in the star-studded sky.

Blake thought of their unconscious passenger--the slim figure of
Lieutenant McGuire. Mac had been a close friend and a good one; his
ready smile; his steady eyes that could tear a problem to pieces with
their analytic scrutiny or gaze far into space to see those visions of
a dreamer!

"Far into space." Blake repeated the words in his mind. And: "Good-by
Mac," he said softly; "you've shipped for a long cruise, I'm
thinking." He hardly realized he had spoken the words aloud.

Lying there in the cold night he felt his strength returning slowly.
The pines sang their soothing, whispered message, and the faint night
noises served but to intensify the silence of the mountain. It was
some time before the grind of straining gears came faintly in the air
to announce the coming of a car up the long grade. And still later he
heard it come to a stop some distance beyond. There were footsteps,
and voices calling: he heard the voice of Colonel Boynton. And he was
able to call out in reply, even to move his head and turn it to see
the approaching figures in the night.

Colonel Boynton knelt beside him. "Did they get you, old man?" he
asked.

"Almost," Blake told him. "My oxygen--I was lucky. But the others--".
He did not need to complete the sentence. The silent canyons among
those wooded hills told plainly the story of the lost men.

"We will fight them with gas masks," said the colonel; "your
experience has taught us the way."

"Gas-tight uniforms and our own supplies of oxygen," Blake
supplemented. He told Boynton of the man-things he had seen come from
the ship, of their baggy suits, their helmets.... And he had seen a
small generator on the back of each helmet. He told him of the small,
shining weapons and their powerful jets of gas. Deadly and unescapable
at short range, he well knew.

"They got McGuire," Blake concluded; "carried him off a prisoner. Took
another man, too."

For a moment Colonel Boynton's quiet tones lost their even steadiness.
"We'll get them," he said savagely, and it was plain that it was the
invaders that filled his mind; "we'll go after them, and we'll get
them in spite of their damn gas, and we'll rip their big ship into
ribbons--"

Captain Blake was able to raise a dissenting hand. "We will have to go
where they are, Colonel, to do that."

Colonel Boynton stared at him. "Well?" he demanded. "Why not?"

"We can't go where _they_ went," said Blake simply. "I laughed at
McGuire; told him not to be a fool. But I was the fool--the blind one;
we all were, Colonel. That thing came here out of space. It has gone
back; it is far beyond our air. I saw it go up out of sight, and I
know. Those creatures were men, if you like, but no men that we
know--not those shrieking, wailing devils! And we're going to hear