by Don Wilcox
Abruptly he awoke. Allison was standing above him, smiling.
“Come out of it, Kirk. We need your muscles. I’ll help you down to Headquarters. You’ll meet the gang, and as soon as you’ve taken on a little nourishment I want you to lend a hand on the black metal lathe.”
“O.K., if my legs will help me up.” Kirk climbed to his feet weakly and ambled along, bearing on Allison’s arm. “I have just dreamed up some big ideas. You know those flying starfish—I’ve got a notion they did it.”
“Did what?”
“Built the shell. Don’t ask me how, but we’ve got it figured out that they must have come from some other planet, and the way I’ve got it doped out, why, if there was a thousand of them workin’ together—”
Allison gave a low laugh.
“How many million square miles of surface do you think there are in that shell? If that substance had been convoyed to the earth by flying starfish, the telescopes would have seen them—hundreds of millions of them blacking out the Sun.”
“But you did see some great black object coming through space, you said.”
“You’re right, that has got me going. I can still see it in my mind, and Smitt and the rest of the gang have had me describe it over and over to them. But whether it and the flying starfish with the big brains and the shell that has formed around the earth have any connection is more than I can say.”
Kirk could hear the hum of generators and the clanking of derrick chains from the windows of the stone walled shop. A moment later he was being introduced to the engineers who made this world of magic go—Smitt, Laughlin, Bob Wakefield, and their crews of mechanics. These were all Americans who, with their families, were living here, keeping the wheels of the Kilhide Mills turning.
Salutations were brief, for, as Allison explained, “We have got a big job on, cooking.” Then, as Kirk was led into the noisy shop, he saw what was happening. The Battering Ram stood outside with its nose pointed through the huge aperture in the side of a building. The point was being removed by three workmen.
“We are going to transmit power to the Ram’s nose,” said Allison, “and there’s the mechanism we will add.”
He pointed to a blueprint. Kirk’s eyes took in the plans: a Battering Ram with an augur in the front.
“If this metal is as tough as I think it is, we will go back to that shell and bore through it,” said Allison.
CHAPTER XIII
Rude Awakening
At last they were off again, with high hopes that their scheme would come to some good.
Kirk watched through the windows for a long time, after he had been dismissed from the duties of piloting. To gaze out at that velvety blackness and know that these were the spaceways of which Lester Allison had become the master was an ever-increasing thrill for Kirk. The deepest blue of midnight on the Earth was never so black as this never-ending ether.
But Kirk realized more than ever that he was a novice in comparison with Allison. The veteran flyer had an instinct for direction and distance, and he knew the Battering Ram well enough to guess the approximate speed without glancing at the dials. It must have taken hundreds of thousands of miles of lonely travel to develop this sense.
“You’d better get some sleep, Kirk,” said Allison. “I have the controls set so that we will zoom straight for the Earth at a high speed, and I’m setting the alarm to wake me up twenty-five thousand miles from the Earth’s core. That will give us ample time for retarding before we approach the shell.”
“You remember that the shell was expanding,” said Kirk.
“I think it has ceased to expand.” Allison reassured. “I have studied it through the telescope for the past half hour. Take a look if you want to.”
“Thanks. Believe I will. Oh, Les—”
“Then get yourself some sleep,” Allison repeated.
“Are you sure, Les, that you will hear that alarm?”
Allison smiled. “Don’t worry, Kirk. I never sleep overtime. I’ll be up ahead of it.”
Allison trailed off to his bunk.
Kirk took another look at the controls, set for steady cruising. Then he turned to the forward telescopes and spent several minutes gazing at the distant Earth.
What a strange sensation—to be seeing your own home planet from thousands of miles away. That was the Earth all right.
Through the crystal shell the very continents could be seen, with their shadowy mountain ridges. Allison was right about the shell, too. It was still a concentric circle around the Earth, and Kirk guessed it to be about three thousand miles out from the surface.
What was going on back there now, he wondered. What had happened with Professor Haycox and his excitement over new specimens? Had the scientists determined upon some planet as the home of the gigantic flying starfish? What had they learned of the mysteries of that creature’s brain? And what speculations must be going on in the Rocky Mountain Observatory?
And what were the boys at the New York space-port thinking? Did they realize that all space business was about to crash head-on into an immovable object? Perhaps there had been accidents already. At any rate, all the sirens and loud-speakers would be screaming warnings for the benefit of every amateur navigator who hoped to take off for another planet.
And what of Brooklyn? Ten to one, the girl friend was crying her eyes out because she had not had so much as a telephone call from Kirk for several days.
Just how many days it had been Kirk wasn’t sure. As he went to his bunk and piled down for the “night,” he kept puzzling over this matter of time. Without the benefit of dark nights and bright days, he had lost track of how many times the hour hand of his watch had gone round. And that wouldn’t have told him anything accurate. The light gravity of Mercury had speeded up the time-piece.
But as Kirk dreamed off he kept seeing the busy scenes in the Kilhide shops, hearing the hum of machines, watching the sweating workmen with their electric torches and giant lathes. The sparks were still flying in his mind, and he closed his eyes tighter to put that vivid nightmare aside.
He had learned things out of that work siege. He had seen the admiration of every member of that little colony for the leadership of Lester Allison. He had seen the finest example of co-operation under pressure. No bickerings, no disputes, no alibis for mistakes. Trial and error had been taken in their stride. And above all, there had been a strong faith evident throughout every hour of the work.
Kirk wished that his cronies back in the New York space-port could have seen those engineers at work. They were a picked bunch. They were pioneers in this new age of interplanetary travel. And every grease monkey from Nome to Rio would have got a new perspective to have looked in on such a show.
Kirk slept like a log.
Blang! . . . Blang! . . . Blang! . . . Blang!!!
Kirk groaned and roused up. “Alarm clocks! Alarm clocks! Even out in space they won’t let you rest. Twenty-five thousand miles from Earth, and the darned alarm clock still hounds you. Where can a man go to get a bit of rest?”
Kirk kept on mumbling as he got into his clothes. He heard no response from Allison and decided that the latter was still sleeping.
“It’s a good thing I came along, Les. I bet you’d have slept on until you crashed that shell. Hey, Les, wake up! Don’t you know it’s time?”
Then Kirk discovered that Allison’s bunk was empty. So the seasoned space man had awakened for his appointment, after all.
Kirk rubbed his eyes and marched down the aisle to the control room to make sure. Yes, there was Allison busying himself at the telescope.
“Morning!” said Kirk. “If it is morning.”
Allison was evidently too busy to answer. Kirk gazed dreamily through the windows. The sky was still full of blackness. A tinge of thin amber sunlight glinted off the Battering Ram’s nose. That Sun was millions of miles to their rear, and the other suns—the stars—were hundreds of millions of miles distant—tiny pin-points of white light in the opaque velvet.
Vaguely Kirk realized that something was strange in this scene. He had expected to see the Earth spreading into a wide white disc right over the Battering Ram’s nose. At twenty-five thousand miles it should fill a considerable share of the sky.
But it was not there, and Kirk wondered if for some reason Allison had changed the course.
Kirk studied the instruments, and the more he studied the more deeply he frowned.
“Look here, Les, what’s happened to the Earth? Somehow I can’t seem to get my bearings.”
“The Earth,” said Lester Allison, “is gone!”
CHAPTER XIV
Through Eyes Too Large to See
In the land of great creatures, the teacher went over certain fundamentals with his class.
Some of the pupils drubbed their seven-fingered hands listlessly, for they knew the story by heart. Others were catching it for the first time.
The teacher turned a piece of pink substance in his seven-fingered hands as he talked.
“We should stand in awe of the wonders which make up our world. This bit of fuel feels solid to our touch. I press it and it does not give. If I hammer it, it breaks, but we call it hard. If I scrape it with a knife, it crumbles into dust, but it has offered strong resistance that only a sharp blade can successfully overcome.
“But if we analyze this substance, or any substance, whether it be stone or wood, or the blood from your veins or the air that you breathe we find it to be largely space. But within the space there are tiny particles of energy—particles which we may call electrons. And the rapid-fire whirling of these electrons in their courses gives the atom which they comprise a semblance of substance.
“There are veritable universes of these tiny bodies of energy making up the dust from this bit of fuel.”
Then the teacher added that thought which always fired the imagination of every student.
“At last we know that certain electrons within this invisible system do sustain life.
“We shall never see this life. We shall never have any feeling to give it, no hatreds, no loves or sympathies. Our understanding is too shallow for that. But I say to you that if we could somehow bring to light the ebb and flow of life that is hidden here, we would spend the rest of our days marveling.
“Our invisible servants, the graduate microbes are too large to see into the space which pervades these miniature universes. But there are other creatures, only one ten-thousandth as large as these microbes, much, much too small for us to see. Those creatures were once parasites which lived upon these microbes almost unnoticed. The microbes inform us that these unbelievably tiny creatures are green and that they have a body, a head, two arms and two legs. But to our great eyes they can never have color or form. Our instruments cannot even detect the faint energy waves which constitute light to them.
“But the miracle is this—that these little green parasites are nearly as large as some of the electrons that we are investigating. They can see these electrons. They are sure that some are inhabited. And now it is their plan to accommodate their masters and us by endeavoring to capture one of these electrons, to isolate it for observation.
“How will they do this? Obviously by methods we cannot hope to observe or understand. But we do know this. They will take great risk of life and limb in meddling with any of the established motions of these swiftly flying particles.”
CHAPTER XV
Electron on a Straw
In the colony of civilized fleas there was a great pandemonium.
Lyon, who had grown more bombastic from the hour that the telescope had been dedicated, was bouncing around the thoroughfares, clamoring to his fellow citizens:
“This is a fine state of affairs. Why don’t we do something? Get together, my fellow fleas, and demand that your leaders give you action. There’s that fine expensive telescope sitting idle out on the Green Plains.”
Some of the fellow fleas shrugged apathetically. They could not be bothered by matters outside their customary routine. Others were stirred, but they had no ideas about what should be done.
But the leaders of the colony were far from complacent. The pressure was upon them. Censure, too, for they had not come through with their promises.
“I knew they would not be able to do it,” said Zeerat, the cynic. “Those flying balls are too big to be pulled out of their paths.”
“Bah! Such talk!” Lyon was indignant. “You are always knocking, Zeerat. What a gloomy civilization we would have if everyone were like you! Give the boys a boost. Tell them you know it can be done, even if you have to roll up your sleeves and do it yourself.”
“They’d tell me to do it,” Zeerat growled.
“And why shouldn’t you? Pitch in, my friend. Maybe you’re just the man to put this deal over.”
“Why don’t you do something?” Zeerat cracked. ,
Lyon gave him a disdainful look. “Me? I am the spirit of this great movement. I supply the pep and ambition. I point the way. When the job’s done—”
“I know,” said Zeerat, “you will take the credit.”
“Exactly,” said Lyon, and he puffed up his chest and marched on to continue his ballyhoo.
The thoroughfares were soon lined with anxious fleas who demanded to know what had happened to Prince Zaywoodie’s promises. They turned themselves into organized demonstrators. They shouted, chanted, chased around in circles and indulged in all sorts of high-jumping antics.
At length, this clamor brought forth Prince Zaywoodie and his entourage of dignitaries. Prince Zaywoodie motioned the crowd to join him at the platform on the parade grounds. When they were assembled, he silenced them and made his report.
“Fellow fleas, the news which I bring you carries a promise of ultimate success. Our early experiments have been costly, but we are learning the way. You must bear in mind that the wheels of progress do not spin as swiftly as those balls of energy which we hope to capture.
“What have we done? I will report to you.
“Our invisible servants—the one-cells—are co-operating in a most satisfactory manner. Even now our microbes are trained upon a cluster of key one-cells, whose six arms are waving to us in symbols of our established code. And what do they tell us?
“They tell us that they have singled out a ball which is rich in inhabitants. It is this electron that I told you about before, inhabited by creatures patterned after ourselves—creatures with heads and bodies, two arms, two legs. These creatures can be seen through the eyes of our one-cells. They live in great swarms. They protect themselves with sturdy roofs and walls. They depend upon an abundance of tiny plant life for their food. They have at their command a wealth of mechanical contrivances—machines which our one-cells could see from the air—machines which would build for them, dig for them, transfer them through space or over the surface of their ball.”
The great assemblage of fleas was no longer a clamoring mob. Every listener, including the blustering Lyon and cynical Zeerat, was lost in amazement.
“I am sad to report,” Prince Zaywoodie continued, “that some of our one-cells did not return. Now they are imprisoned somewhere within the chosen ball. For we have succeeded at last in our first step, to draw it out of its universe of motion. Our chemists have cleverly encased it within a shell. The gases which they spread over its surface have crystallized. This shell will enable us to remove the ball from its position without injuring the life contained thereon.”
The Prince explained in careful detail that the chosen electron was surrounded by gases of its own, which would serve as a cushion within the newly formed shell. Thus it was hoped that the ball might be drawn out of its orbit without being bumped against the sides of the shell which encased it.
“As you know, my fellow fleas, it is a perilous undertaking for us to insert the long straw which our master provided us to make contact with this electron. The first two starts with which we experimented were disastrous. The accidents occurred when we allowed the straws to pass too clos
e to the nucleus of an atom. But with the utmost care we at last succeeded in reaching far into the universe to make contact at last with an electron of one of the interior atoms.
“With this success we were able to send forth our one-cells to explore.
“Later we inserted the straw again. Some of the one-cells climbed aboard and returned. Others remained.
“Now at last we have got the chosen electron on the end of the straw and with utmost caution we are drawing it little by little out of its universe.”
This announcement brought forth a prolonged cheer. For the first time in history, an electron was about to be captured.
“And so, in conclusion,” said Prince Zaywoodie, “I ask you to be patient. It will be a slow process, dragging this captured ball out of its universe. We find we are dealing with magnetic attractions of surprising strength. The atom which was deprived of this electron was forced to revise its system of motion, and every atom that this captive electron passes exerts a pull upon it. We will be fortunate indeed if our prize is not disintegrated by a blast of energy from some other atom’s nucleus.”
CHAPTER XVI
A Girl Out of a Storm
In the annals of the solar system nothing like this had ever happened before. Planets had their orbits. They followed regularly through their years and days. The most that astronomers could detect in the way of change was a gradual slowing down of the system of motion.
Years ago, too many million of them to count, a fiery mass had whirled off the burning surfaces of the Sun, it was assumed, and had found its gravitational balance at least 93,000,000 miles away. This was the Earth. Its history had been similar to that of the other planets. They were the children of the Sun, and each had found its place in relation to the other.
The astronomers of the Earth had often speculated upon what might happen if one member of the solar family were to be removed. Such a conjecture was fanciful, they thought, but useful in illustrating the happy balance of forces which had developed around the Sun.
