by Earl
Then, in 1991, came the alien invasion!
Disarmed, helpless, unprotected, Earth lay open to the interplanetary raiders who came without warning. Not a gun to lift against them. Not the smallest weapon with which to oppose. No armed airship to soar at the enemy’s throat. No armored battleship to defend important coastal cities. No single body of trained, armed troops to resist attack.
Cosmic irony!
All through the month of May, 1991, definite reports were received in important news centers that mysterious red ships had been sighted all over the world. It was not only a puzzle as to whose ships they were, but how they flew. Wingless and silent, their torpedo shapes strangely defied gravitation. Such ships had never before been seen on Earth.
During May they had done nothing more than hover over various cities for a few minutes, hanging motionless as no normal airship should. When air patrol police had approached, they had streaked away at an amazing velocity, generally rising to the stratosphere. The much-discussed scarlet ships were sometimes sighted by the passengers of strato-liners crossing the ocean.
Gradually a tension grew over Earth. To each city and nation it looked like nothing more than some enemy taking observations. Yet war was outlawed. Peace and peaceful relations had spread over the world like a soft blanket. What did it mean?
When a dozen of the red ships appeared over Paris in late May and without warning razed that city to the ground with a mysterious ray in a short three days, the world wept. The bubble of peace had been destroyed. There would be war again. But what cowardly, evil nation had done this atrocity?
The nation across the Rhine became the focal point. Buried hatreds flamed anew. A harsh message of inquiry went from nation to nation. Denial only increased suspicion. Germany had about been branded with the deed when——
Berlin was burned into the ground! And London, Moscow, Rome, Vienna, Stockholm, Madrid, Constantinople and Warsaw—all in a short month!
Then, obviously emboldened by Earth’s utter lack of defence, the enemy ships split into three factions which attacked Europe, Asia and America simultaneously.
Aghast at the frightful menace that had suddenly appeared from nowhere, the world lay stunned. But not for long. There were no weapons with which to fight back, but Earth would rearm. Steel mills began turning out gun barrels. Nitrate plants changed from fertilizers to explosives. The best engineers started designing weapons of every grade and size.
With a will, all the world fell to the task. Every one did his or her part in the great project. Every one, that is, except young Professor Harvey Carmichael——
SKIRTING a small town, the powerful car followed a macadam road toward the coast. Young Professor Harvey Carmichael had just escaped from Boston, where officials of the International League—Earth’s ruling body—had conscripted him for their cannon factory. A bitter smile touched his lips as he drove through the night. He was thinking of the scene some hours earlier when his fiancée, Tanya Maxwell, had branded him as an egomaniac, anarchist, and several other things, and thrown his ring across the room. He had tried to explain, but she had not given him a chance to finish. He shrugged, but the bitter smile did not leave his grim lips.
A half hour later a grove of trees loomed out of the darkness. His headlights limned a rambling old house among them, and the waters of the Atlantic just beyond. His summer retreat, presumably for vacationing, but with its basement completely outfitted as a laboratory. He had done some of his best work here, unmolested.
It was the ideal place now for his further work. The IL agents would never trace him here. Only Tanya Maxwell knew of its location. And at that thought a worried frown creased his forehead as he put the car away, and carried his two suitcases inside the house. Would Tanya, in a mistaken notion of patriotic duty, betray him? He would have to be prepared for it.
Dust lay over everything as he made his way to a bedroom and unpacked his clothing from one suitcase. He debated whether to phone the near-by village for his usual Negro houseboy, but decided against it. It would be best for him to be alone in this.
In a few more minutes he was down in the basement with the second grip. The lights revealed a large worktable in the center, shelves at the sides loaded with paraphernalia and supplies. At the back, dynamo, transformer and several large vacuum tubes designed to produce several varieties of subatomic artillery. A large, complete television outfit, with a five-foot screen, occupied the space opposite the table.
With reverent care, Carmichael unpacked the apparatus he had brought along from the city. He let out his breath in a deep sigh when he saw that nothing had been damaged. He set it on the worktable and clamped it rigidly to a stand.
To the casual eye it was a hybrid creation. But the trained scientific eye would center first on the overhanging Crooke’s tube, trace the cathode radiation to a cuplike target of platinum, note the adjacent electromagnet and below the crystal resonator. The scientist would immediately know it was meant to explore atomic phenomena. He might even suspect it was delicate enough to probe into subatomic depths. But he would never guess what it was really meant to do—wrest from the atom one of its most treasured secrets.
But Carmichael had not quite succeeded yet. He knew by theory exactly what he was looking for, and knew he was close. There was one chance in a hundred, or a thousand——
WITH THE ATTACK of America, the world saw its doom at hand, like the handwriting on the wall. Under the International League, all Earth had united in the effort to save itself. Its main hope lay with the scientists and their prodigious efforts to rearm a world that had not manufactured a gun in the past generation.
It was a bitter, ironical thought that if the enemy had attacked a half century before, when the world had been a great armed camp, the outcome would not have been so questionable. The red enemy ships over any city at that time would have touched off a furious belching of powerful guns. Guns whose trained crews could pick off invisible specks in the stratosphere. Great fleets of man-made eagles there had been which would have harassed the enemy out of the sky. Giant cannon whose bombs exploded in the air, ripping anything within a mile to shreds, developed as defence against aerial attack.
And then there had been the mysterious Vorday gun, believed to have utilized atomic power. Its inventor, Henri Vorday, perhaps the greatest genius of the age, had built only one and set it up in the heart of the city he lived in. Through twenty years of war, that city had remained untouched. For whenever enemy craft had appeared, a frightful, ravening force from the Vorday gun had disintegrated them to impalpable dust.
With a wisdom equalling his genius, Henri Vorday had not distributed the plans for his superweapon, not even to his countrymen. In the post-war rise of pacifism, he had wrecked the gun and burned all plans. He had come to an untimely death a few weeks later, with a dozen others, in a midocean fall of a strato-liner.
Particularly would the Vorday-gun have been a godsend now—fire against fire. For it was plain that the enemy had atomic energy. Their ships sent down the horrific violet beams hour after hour without letup. Only the cheap, endless energies of atomic matter itself could supply such steady power.
But Earth had nothing, whether Vorday-gun, cannon or even hand-pistol. An entire new armament had to be designed and put into action in desperate haste—untried, unproven. When the first crop of new weapons appeared in Europe, they proved almost useless. Machine guns, mounted on fast commercial aircraft, jammed hopelessly after the first burst of fire. Antiaircraft guns burst after the first few shots, maiming and killing their crews. Cannon belched out one shell—and remained silent, with split breeches.
Earth did not know how to manufacture weapons! But Earth did not give up. Each mistake was pounced upon, corrected. Engineers and technicians accumulated experience. The world’s vast industrial organization ground out, overnight, crops of weapons, each superior to the last. Men were rapidly trained in their use and rushed to strategic cities. A hopeless situation showed faint promise of bette
rment. Soon would come a decisive struggle between Earth’s new armament and the demoniac powers of the aliens from space——
In the meantime, the enemy continued its slaughter. With devilish thoroughness they carried on their apparent aim to decimate all Earth. They made no attempt to communicate with mankind. No one knew where their ships came from, or where they had a base. With daily, maddening regularity the silent, crimson ships appeared over large cities all over the world and burned them to the ground with their atomic flames. In a month the toll had reached tens of millions of lives, and an incalculable amount of property.
Many of the cities last destroyed had been partially evacuated. Most other large cities not yet attacked would be evacuated almost entirely. Crews of factory workers, turning out munitions, were ready at a moment’s notice to leave. Guns were set up, waiting for the enemy to strike.
Earth prepared for a decisive last stand——
HAGGARD from three days of unremitting toil, young Professor Harvey Carmichael cursed for the need of an assistant as he attempted to attune twin resonators while watching five meters register fleeting dissonances that he must weed out. He flung himself away nervously. He looked at his trembling hands and realized the news he had heard over the radio an hour before had unnerved him. The news that Boston had been attacked by the aliens.
Boston, the city he had always lived in and in which his parents had lived before their death. For the first time the full meaning of what a city’s destruction meant to those living in it struck him. He went out on the back steps and saw a horrible red glow on the horizon—the flames that were eating the city. It seemed a flame eating into his vitals. He cursed the aliens—cursed them——
And Tanya! Suppose she were unable to escape? Suppose the aliens destroyed her, too? She, and his work, had been the only things he loved. Would she die condemning him to the last as a renegade to his own race——?
Dully he noticed a car turning into the driveway. A white figure stepped out and ran to him.
“Tanya!” he whispered unbelievingly.
Livid terror shone in her eyes. “The burning of Boston—Harvey—it’s horrible!” Her voice shook uncontrollably as she described what she had seen, until at last she had talked the terror out of her system.
She hesitated, then went on in a small voice. “Harvey, I’ve come here to help you in your work. I see your viewpoint. It’s a strange, distorted viewpoint—science above humanity—but I think I see it. Do you want me to stay——”
She stared, breathlessly, at this man whose innermost thoughts she had never fathomed. He nodded and two souls were at peace with one another.
Inside, with his head on her lap, she laughed a little hysterically. “How strange it will be,” she said. “Out there—the whole world battling an alien menace. Here—you and I, going on with scientific work that may never——”
She caught herself. “Harvey, just what is your work? You’ve told me so little of it.”
With an effort he spoke. “There is one chance in a hundred, or a thousand——” His voice trailed away.
Tanya waited for him to go on, but when she looked down, his eyes were closed. He had not slept, or eaten, for three days.
“My theory,” explained Carmichael, the next day, “is that vibrations in the ether expand both outward and inward from the point of propagation!”
“Yes, I remember you saying that before.” Tanya looked again at the queer apparatus, without knowing in the least what it was meant to do. “And that your work for two years has been in that field. But can you explain it more fully?”
“Classical theory,” began Carmichael, “states that from the point of propagation, a uniformly growing sphere of wave-energy starts and expands into the sidereal cosmos. Traveling at the speed of light, the sphere includes the solar system in a few hours. In four years, its outer surface has included Proxima Centauri, the nearest star. An age later, the sphere is a tremendous thing that has engulfed all the Milky Way Galaxy and is bulging out toward the island universes.”
The girl nodded. “So far it’s clear.”
“But that is only half the picture,” pursued the young scientist, the words tumbling out eagerly. “Classical science fails to take account of the inward propagation of electromagnetic waves—into the microcosmos! Within the atom are to be found the identical sets of vibrations that fill the outer universe. Here a curious thing results. Relativity indicates that the time system of the microcosmos is as different from ours as its dimensions. The contracting sphere takes as long to reach the absolute zero of dimension, as the expanding sphere in the macrocosmos takes to plumb infinity.”
“I think I follow you,” said Tanya hesitantly. “Except—what’s to be done with it.”
“Plenty,” assured Carmichael. “Visionaries have often pictured rocketing out into space at greater than the speed of light—if such a thing were possible—and catching up with light rays that left Earth centuries, or ages ago. They would observe the visual record of Earth’s history at first hand. But we cannot go faster than light. Yet what about the same etheric records that exist within the atom? They are available!”
The young scientist’s voice became a sharp hiss. “Within the atoms of all the matter around us lie the records of the past, in the form of ether vibrations.
An instrument that can reach down within the atom and translate those vibrations into visible light waves would make the past an open book. In plain words—television of the past!”
TANYA, womanlike, tried to hide the deep admiration in her eyes as she looked at the man she loved. She made her voice casual. “And you have done that, Harvey? Delved into the past?”
“In a measure, yes,” he replied, waving a hand toward the hybrid apparatus on the worktable. “There’s the microoscillator—I call it my subatomic eye—connected with a television circuit. Resonance is the key to it, as it is to all television mechanism. This apparatus is made to explore deep within the atom. Its resonator can attune itself to the miniature spheres of radiation that started at the atom’s surface years—even ages—ago, and are still plumbing the infinite smallness.”
“But the atoms dance!” exclaimed Tanya suddenly. “How can you tune to anything inside a dancing, whirling atom?”
Carmichael smiled a bit patronizingly. “I don’t just probe within a single atom, but into millions. By the law of averages alone, in the hordes of countless atoms, millions are alike. Look, here is a glass of sea-water, right from the Atlantic. In it are so many atoms that the number is meaningless. If this glassful were poured back into the ocean, in a few years every glassful of water in the world would contain millions of these particular atoms!”
He poured some of the water from the glass into the target cup of platinum.
“When I focus my tuned-radiation into the target cup to any certain layer of atoms, at least one atom of the same category is there all the time. That is the principle of statistics, the same system of mass action by which insurance companies assure themselves of an equilibrium among great numbers.”
He frowned then. “Still, it isn’t as easy as all that. I need greater selectivity. Each time I move my tuned beam slightly, I intersect hundreds of atomic orbits. So far, on the screen, I’ve only been able to get superimposed pictures of the past—look, I’ll show you.”
He fingered the various controls of his subatomic eye. After a moment he turned off the room’s lights, and the television screen at the side suddenly came to life. Its surface sheen reflected prismatic patterns that changed with the swiftness of a whirling kaleidoscope. The interplay of light and shadow solidified to form and substance.
Carmichael shifted a vernier and the pictures clarified, but dissolved rapidly into one another. Drab coasts, fleecy clouds, strange underwater fish, towering jungles, enigmatic hairy figures and man-made structures flitted evanescently across the screen, all in an insane jumble.
The lights came on again to reveal annoyed impatience on the young scientist’
s face. He ran fingers through his hair. “To have gone this far and be balked——”
Tanya stood up, went to him comfortingly. “You’ll overcome it, Harvey. And I’ll help as much as I can if you——”
“I can use help,” he said gratefully. “Come on, let’s get busy. First——”
“First,” interjected Tanya, “will you do me a great favor, dear? It would mean so much to me if you gave me your ring back. I was a fool for the way I acted that night.”
He stared at her blankly for a moment, then fumbled in his vest pocket. Pulling out the ring, he extended it toward her. Just as she was about to take it, he drew it back suddenly. He turned it over several times, staring.
“That’s it!” he exclaimed finally. “Why didn’t I think of it before? Diamond separates different wave lengths of light. It can do the same for my tuned radiation—sharpen its focus!”
He turned to her. “Do you mind?” he asked perfunctorily. In another moment he had plucked the diamond from its setting with pliers, and began making a cradle for it with fine quartz threads.
THAT DAY, in Europe, the first alien ship was shot down by the new Earth armament. It was an occasion for wild rejoicing all over the world. At last it had been proven that the enemy was not invulnerable. If one ship could be shot down, so could the others, till not one was left of the hated outlanders. That was the word of hope that reverberated over the besieged planet.
The next day two more scarlet craft fell prey, one in Asia and one in America. The big guns from Chicago’s foundries, in the latter case, had not poured out a ransom in shells for nothing. The crippled ship over that city had fluttered downward like a wounded bird. Eager eyes watched it approach. Eager fingers clenched and unclenched. When the ship landed, virtual madmen would batter in the walls and drag out the aliens, tear them to shreds. Perhaps torture them. Ragged, grim smiles appeared on faces that had not smiled for weeks.
