Four hours ago I had sent that flash-signal to Earth. If it were received, a patrol-ship could come to our rescue and arrive here in another eight hours--or perhaps even less.
Ah, that "if!" _If_ the signal were received! _If_ the patrol-ship were immediately available! _If_ it started at once....
Eight hours at the very least. I tried to a.s.sure myself that we could hold out that long....
The brigand ship crossed the opposite crater-rim. It dropped lower. It seemed poised over the crater-valley, almost at our own level and less than two miles from us. Its search-beam vanished. For a moment it hung, a sleek, cylindrical silver shape, gleaming in the Earthlight.
Snap looked at me and murmured, "It"s descending."
It slowly settled, cautiously picked its landing-place amid the crags and pits of the tumbled scarred valley floor. It came to rest, a vague silver menacing shape lurking in the lower shadows, close at the foot of the inner opposite crater-wall.
A few moments of tense waiting pa.s.sed. Soon tiny lights were moving down there, some out on the rocks near the ship, others up under its deck-dome.
A stab of searchlight shot across the valley, swung along our ledge and clung with its glaring ten-foot circle to the front of our main building. Then a ray flashed.
The a.s.sault had begun!
(_To be concluded_)
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The Jovian Jest
_By Lilith Lorraine_
[Ill.u.s.tration: _The object shot forth another tentacle._]
[Sidenote: There came to our pigmy planet a radiant wanderer with a message--and a jest--from the vasty universe.]
Consternation reigned in Elsnore village when the Nameless Thing was discovered in Farmer Burns" corn-patch. When the rumor began to gain credence that it was some sort of meteor from inter-stellar s.p.a.ce, reporters, scientists and college professors flocked to the scene, desirous of prying off particles for a.n.a.lysis. But they soon discovered that the Thing was no ordinary meteor, for it glowed at night with a peculiar luminescence. They also observed that it was practically weightless, since it had embedded itself in the soft sand scarcely more than a few inches.
By the time the first group of newspapermen and scientists had reached the farm, another phenomenon was plainly observable. The Thing was growing!
Farmer Burns, with an eye to profit, had already built a picket fence around his starry visitor and was charging admission. He also flatly refused to permit the chipping off of specimens or even the touching of the object. His att.i.tude was severely criticized, but he stubbornly clung to the theory that possession is nine points in law.
It was Professor Ralston of Princewell who, on the third day after the fall of the meteor, remarked upon its growth. His colleagues crowded around him as he pointed out this peculiarity, and soon they discovered another factor--pulsation!
Larger than a small balloon, and gradually, almost imperceptibly expanding, with its viscid transparency shot through with opalescent lights, the Thing lay there in the deepening twilight and palpably shivered. As darkness descended, a sort of h.e.l.lish radiance began to ooze from it. I say h.e.l.lish, because there is no other word to describe that spectral, sulphurous emanation.
As the hangers-on around the pickets shudderingly shrank away from the weird light that was streaming out to them and tinting their faces with a ghastly, greenish pallor, Farmer Burns" small boy, moved by some imp of perversity, did a characteristically childish thing. He picked up a good-sized stone and flung it straight at the nameless ma.s.s!
Instead of veering off and falling to the ground as from an impact with metal, the stone sank right through the surface of the Thing as into a pool of protoplastic slime. When it reached the central core of the object, a more abundant life suddenly leaped and pulsed from center to circ.u.mference. Visible waves of sentient color circled round the solid stone. Stabbing swords of light leaped forth from them, piercing the stone, crumbling it, absorbing it. When it was gone, only a red spot, like a bloodshot eye, throbbed eerily where it had been.
Before the now thoroughly mystified crowd had time to remark upon this inexplicable disintegration, a more horrible manifestation occurred.
The Thing, as though thoroughly awakened and vitalized by its unusual fare, was putting forth a tentacle. Right from the top of the shivering globe it pushed, sluggishly weaving and prescient of doom.
Wavering, it hung for a moment, turning, twisting, groping. Finally it shot straight outward swift as a rattler"s strike!
Before the closely packed crowd could give room for escape, it had circled the neck of the nearest bystander, Bill Jones, a cattleman, and jerked him, writhing and screaming, into the reddish core.
Stupefied with soul-chilling terror, with their ma.s.s-consciousness practically annihilated before a deed with which their minds could make no a.s.sociation, the crowd could only gasp in sobbing unison and await the outcome.
The absorption of the stone had taught them what to expect, and for a moment it seemed that their worst antic.i.p.ations were to be realised. The sluggish currents circled through the Thing, swirling the victim"s body to the center. The giant tentacle drew back into the globe and became itself a current. The concentric circles merged--tightened--became one gleaming cord that encircled the helpless prey. From the inner circ.u.mference of this cord shot forth, not the swords of light that had powdered the stone to atoms, but myriads of radiant tentacles that gripped and cupped the body in a thousand places.
Suddenly the tentacles withdrew themselves, all save the ones that grasped the head. These seemed to tighten their pressure--to swell and pulse with a grayish substance that was flowing from the cups into the cord and from the cord into the body of the ma.s.s. Yes, it was a grayish something, a smokelike Essence that was being drawn from the cranial cavity. Bill Jones was no longer screaming and gibbering, but was stiff with the rigidity of stone. Notwithstanding, there was no visible mark upon his body; his flesh seemed unharmed.
Swiftly came the awful climax. The waving tentacles withdrew themselves, the body of Bill Jones lost its rigidity, a heaving motion from the center of the Thing propelled its cargo to the surface--and Bill Jones stepped out!
Yes, he stepped out and stood for a moment staring straight ahead, staring at nothing, gla.s.sily. Every person in the shivering, paralysed group knew instinctively that something unthinkable had happened to him. Something had transpired, something hitherto possible only in the abysmal s.p.a.ces of the Other Side of Things. Finally he turned and faced the nameless object, raising his arm stiffly, automatically, as in a military salute. Then he turned and walked jerkily, mindlessly, round and round the globe like a wooden soldier marching. Meanwhile the Thing lay quiescent--gorged!
Professor Ralston was the first to find his voice. In fact, Professor Ralston was always finding his voice in the most unexpected places.
But this time it had caught a chill. It was trembling.
"Gentlemen," he began, looking down academically upon the motley crowd as though doubting the apt.i.tude of his salutation. "Fellow-citizens,"
he corrected, "the phenomenon we have just witnessed is, to the lay mind, inexplicable. To me--and to my honorable colleagues (added as an afterthought) it is quite clear. Quite clear, indeed. We have before us a specimen, a perfect specimen, I might say, of a--of a--"
He stammered in the presence of the unnamable. His hesitancy caused the rapt attention of the throng that was waiting breathlessly for an explanation, to flicker back to the inexplicable. In the fraction of a second that their gaze had been diverted from the Thing to the professor, the object had shot forth another tentacle, gripping him round the neck and choking off his sentence with a horrid rasp that sounded like a death rattle.
Needless to say, the revolting process that had turned Bill Jones from a human being into a mindless automaton was repeated with Professor Ralston. It happened as before, too rapidly for intervention, too suddenly for the minds of the onlookers to shake off the paralysis of an unprecedented nightmare. But when the victim was thrown to the surface, when he stepped out, drained of the grayish smokelike essence, a tentacle still gripped his neck and another rested directly on top of his head. This latter tentacle, instead of absorbing _from_ him, visibly poured into him what resembled a threadlike stream of violet light.
Facing the cowering audience with eyes staring gla.s.sily, still in the grip of the unknowable, Professor Ralston did an unbelievable thing.
He resumed his lecture at the exact point of interruption! But he spoke with the tonelessness of a machine, a machine that pulsed to the will of a dictator, inhuman and inexorable!
"What you see before you," the Voice continued--the Voice that no longer echoed the thoughts of the professor--"is what you would call an amoeba, a giant amoeba. It is I--this amoeba, who am addressing you--children of an alien universe. It is I, who through this captured instrument of expression, whose queer language you can understand, am explaining my presence on your planet. I pour my thoughts into this specialised brain-box which I have previously drained of its meager thought-content." (Here the "honorable colleagues" nudged each other gleefully.) "I have so drained it for the purpose of a.n.a.lysis and that the flow of my own ideas may pa.s.s from my mind to yours unimpeded by any distortion that might otherwise be caused by their conflict with the thoughts of this individual.
"First I absorbed the brain-content of this being whom you call Bill Jones, but I found his mental instrument unavailable. It was technically untrained in the use of your words that would best convey my meaning. He possesses more of what you would call "innate intelligence," but he has not perfected the mechanical brain through whose operation this innate intelligence can be transmitted to others and, applied for practical advantage.
"Now this creature that I am using is, as you might say, full of sound without meaning. His brain is a lumber-room in which he has h.o.a.rded a conglomeration of clever and appropriate word-forms with which to disguise the paucity of his ideas, with which to express nothing! Yet the very abundance of the material in his storeroom furnishes a discriminating mind with excellent tools for the transportation of its ideas into other minds.
"Know, then, that I am not here by accident. I am a s.p.a.ce Wanderer, an explorer from a super-universe whose evolution has proceeded without variation along the line of your amoeba. Your evolution, as I perceive from an a.n.a.lysis of the brain-content of your professor, _began_ its unfoldment in somewhat the same manner as our own. But in your smaller system, less perfectly adjusted than our own to the cosmic mechanism, a series of cataclysms occurred. In fact, your planetary system was itself the result of a catastrophe, or of what might have been a catastrophe, had the two great suns collided whose near approach caused the wrenching off of your planets. From this colossal accident, rare, indeed, in the annals of the stars, an endless chain of accidents was born, a chain of which this specimen, this professor, and the species that he represents, is one of the weakest links.
"Your infinite variety of species is directly due to the variety of adaptations necessitated by this train of accidents. In the super-universe from which I come, such derangements of the celestial machinery simply do not happen. For this reason, our evolution has unfolded harmoniously along one line of development, whereas yours has branched out into diversified and grotesque expressions of the Life-Principle. Your so-called highest manifestation of this principle, namely, your own species, is characterized by a great number of specialized organs. Through this very specialization of functions, however, you have forfeited your individual immortality, and it has come about that only your life-stream is immortal. The primal cell is inherently immortal, but death follows in the wake of specialization.