The John Russell Fearn Science Fiction Megapack

by John Russell Fearn

  True, he had done no harm as yet, picking his way with mammoth feet through the fleeing people. Where he had gone, what his object was, nobody seemed to know—except a grey-haired man and woman and their daughter, and an old professor, in the comfortable residence on London’s outskirts.

  Adison Boyd, incredibly aged with the passing years, was talking with his daughter, now nineteen years of age. She was slim, intelligent, and possessed a great love of science and ability to utilize its limitless powers.

  “Father, Edward and Grace Morgan begin their campaign for world-sub­jection tomorrow—you know that,” she said steadily. “Edward will be twenty-one tomorrow, and, we hope, at the end of his wild growth. Grace, of course, is fifteen, but possessing all the characteristics of a woman of twenty-five.

  “Do not forget their intelligence. Be­tween them they can crush the world! Do not forget their uncanny knowledge of dimensions, atomic structures, light­waves, sound-vibrations and a thousand other astounding things. Nobody in this world will be able to stand against them!”

  Her father shrugged. “Mary, you used to have some sort of influ­ence over Edward, but since he went his own way four years ago that influ­ence has been broken. What do you propose doing?”

  Mary seated herself composedly and took hold of her father’s hand.

  “I’ve thought of a way, father, but I must work fast and have your aid to do it. It will mean the death of Edward, but it has to be done if the world is to be saved. That woman Grace Morgan will also be extinguished…

  “When I was a young girl I used to talk to Edward a lot, and during those talks I learned all about the formula that caused the trouble. He told me calcium was the basis. Is that right?”

  Adison Boyd nodded dully. “Quite right, Mary—but what of it?”

  “It will save the world from Edward and Grace,” Mary replied calmly. “That may sound wild, but it’s true—and ultimately you’ll see why. For the time being, we don’t need to keep on their track. I know where they are hiding because I’ve made it my business to find out. Then we’ve got to get through those steel coverings of theirs, and you can leave the rest to me.

  “Before we start off to find them I have some calcium experiments, to complete, experiments which will speed up the known efficiency of cal­cium by something like one hundred times.”

  “And what good is that?” Boyd de­manded helplessly, “You talk in riddles, Mary. Which reminds me! Why do Edward and Grace wear those cov­erings, anyhow?”

  “Because they are so stupendously tall. If they didn’t they would fall to pieces by their own weight. That’s why they have to have rigid, immovable support. Those suits, I presume, are hinged at the necessary joints, other­wise quite inflexible. I imagine that the only time Edward and Grace take them off is when they are resting. Ly­ing down they would be all right…

  “Now, Father, don’t worry me while I finish off my calcium experiment. Calcium it must be; I’d thought of poison, but it would have no lasting effect. And tonight well get busy… You know, Father, you ought to have checked this in its incipiency!”

  “I know,” Boyd agreed in a low voice, “It was only for your Mother’s sake that I refrained…”

  CHAPTER IV

  The Battle With The Giants

  In the depths of a wood, twenty-five miles south of London, a titanic figure laid himself flat on the warm, leafy ground, crushing down saplings and small trees beneath his stupendous weight. A moment or two elapsed, then another figure, less tall but still gigantic, came into view and lay down beside him.

  Strange clicking noises sounded and the steel coverings fell apart along un­expected seams and dropped noisily to one side. The now white-garbed figures turned and looked at each other from their supine positions.

  “Grace, we begin tomorrow,” rum­bled Edward’s deep bass voice. “I have it all planned. We will begin with London itself and force the inhabitants to do our bidding. The mere sight of us will cow them into obedience. If they refuse, we’ll start a reign of ter­ror that will force them to be our slaves. We have one weapon that should sway them without any trouble—re­member? The one I made in my father’s lab. It is so powerful that it splits the atomic structure of light-mass by the use of force and causes instant disintegration of any object over any predetermined distance. I do not expect any resistance. We’ve eas­ily managed to evade police so far.”

  “And then what?” asked Grace, pass­ing her mammoth hand through her jungle of golden hair, “Conquest of the Earth?”

  “Why not? Who’s to stop us? Our knowledge, our size, everything is in our favor. The strongest shell made would bounce off our steel coatings like rocks hurled at a fast-moving ex­press train. We’re normal human be­ings in a toy world, Grace. There’s nothing we can’t do! To reach coun­tries across the sea, we will tie ocean-liners together and use them as a raft.”

  Grace looked determined, “What about all those strange-looking weapons that we’ve built to destroy man? Are we going to use them?” Grace asked, her massive lips curling back in a hideous smile from eight-inch teeth.

  Edward nodded. “Exactly. We be­gin tomorrow. Now we need sleep…”

  So the two giant figures dragged themselves along the ground, by sheer muscular effort, to a clearing which they had chosen as their rendezvous many months before. There, impervious to cold or heat, they sank down on the grass at full length, to presently fall into deep slumber; chests rising and falling like small hills against the green sward.

  While the Monsters Slept

  The sun had been set half an hour when they went to sleep; and it was the closest approach to the darkness of a summer night when four tiny figures crept up with infinite caution through the trees, paused at the sight of the sleeping titans, and engaged in whis­pered conversation.

  Dr. Boyd, Mary, Mrs. Boyd, and, as ever, Professor Kemphill, comprised the quartet.

  “You knew their hide-out all right, Mary,” Adison Boyd murmured. “They’ve got those steel coverings off, too. That’s luck!

  “No—judgment,” Mary answered calmly, “I assumed that they would discard them when lying down. Now is our chance!”

  From under her coat she brought out an object resembling a garden-syringe and looked pensively at the needle-like point with the open-nozzle.

  “Excessively energized calcium con­tained in liquid,” she said, in response to the questioning looks directed at her in the starlight. “Unless my scien­tific training is all wrong, this will bring about the end of these two, I don’t regard Ted as my brother any longer, but as a dangerous monstrosity. You see, bullets or cannons or poisons can never hurt them. Nothing normal can destroy them. It has got to be something abnormal—inside them. Now comes the difficult part of the job, Come with me.”

  Silently, though still mystified as to the girl’s real intentions, her father, mother and the professor crept silently after her through the shadows, until they came within three feet of those stupendous masses of sleeping flesh. Edward’s right arm, a corded mass of iron muscle, lay stretched in the grass like the trunk of some pink-colored tree.

  For a moment his sister stood look­ing at him, Then, steeling herself, she pushed the syringe instrument forward, pulling the long pressure-handle out to its fullest extent, Mary hesitated for an instant, then she sank the needle-pointed tip into a vein of his arm, dis­tinguishable like knotted cable.

  The giant moved slightly, but did not waken. His deep breathing drowned the sighing of the night breeze through the foliage of the trees.

  By the united efforts of the four tiny figures, the pressure-handle was pushed down half-way, until a bulge appeared under the skin of Edward’s arms, to gradually disappear as the liquid as­similated itself into the bloodstream. At this point Mary desisted, withdrew the huge hypodermic syringe, and walked over to where Grace lay.

  With infinite care, the same treat­ment was meted out to the girl Colos­sus. Perhaps because she was more sensitive than Edward, she felt the sudde
n sting of the needle, and a hand, as large as a full-grown man, came round and lazily investigated the spot. Then it relaxed as its owner continued to sleep.

  “Our work is finished,” Mary breathed tensely. “We can only await results. Come, before we are discov­ered.”

  Without a second’s hesitation the four conspirators made their way back through the trees until they reached the fast car in which they had come, parked by the side of the main high­way…

  Edward’s Ultimatum

  The following morning London awoke to a reign of terror. At eight o’clock, when sleepy-eyed people were congregated on station platforms waiting for their trains to take them to work, Edward and Grace stalked into the city. Wading through the traffic about Trafalgar Square, the two mon­sters could be seen, their steel cover­ings glittering in the sun. Each car­ried a strange-looking weapon.

  The hurrying panic-stricken crowds emerged from buses and trains and fled in mortal terror. But they were brought to a sudden, abrupt halt by a tremendous wave of mental force. The mighty brains of Edward and Grace, working in unison and possessed of five hundred times more power than the average person, produced a terrific effect. Everybody within radius was held spellbound, gazing up at the fan­tastic creatures subjecting them to their will.

  “This is the era of the giants!” thundered Edward’s voice at length. “The time has come for the little peo­ple who dwell in the dark and small places of the Earth to be destroyed! The entire Earth is destined to become a habitation fit for monsters such as my companion and me. The day of the Little is over; it is now the day of the Big!

  “You are little—unintelligent—incapable! We can, and will, transform the world. And unless we are volun­tarily permitted to do this we will do it by force, which will mean war of a type you have never yet encountered. You will be crushed and obliterated into extinction, your homes and build­ings torn down. Your friends and children ripped to shreds, until you learn! Learn that we are the masters!

  “Because of the fact that our brain­powers, tremendous though they are, do not permit us to rule the entire world by mental force alone, we shall match the physical with the mental and thereby produce an invincible strength. Our first command is the relinquishment of London to us, and we shall determine what is to be done and choose suitable people to carry out our plans. The second command is the voluntary surrender of all babies, male and female, under one year old, to the care of laboratory technicians whom we shall appoint, and whom we shall instruct in the uses and effects of giantism and excessive hypertrophy.

  “These two commands must be obeyed, and from your acquiescence there will grow up through the years a new era—the day of the Big, a world of strength, power and invincible formidability!”

  As his words died away, Edward relaxed his mental forces that he might hear the people answer, and their voices floated up to him and Grace in a babel of unintelligible sound. Then came the answer—very effectively. Missiles of all descrip­tions began to hurtle through the air, glancing off the steel coverings, and at best hitting no higher than the knees.

  “They refuse!” Edward snapped curtly. “Use force!”

  Saying that, he strode forward, Grace by his side, and between them they crushed people by the dozen beneath their titanic, steel-shod feet. Pausing a moment, they switched on the instru­ments they carried. Immediately, stabbing blasts of force split the air—the instant disintegration of light-mass. In a vicious circle of destruction the invisible power beams swept round, razing tall buildings to the ground in clouds of dust and spreading immeasur­able havoc over a wide area.

  Swelling uproar rose to the giants as they went grimly on, striding over the smaller buildings, smashing some of them down like cardboard boxes. Be­cause of their size, the movements of the colossal pair were slow and ponder­ous. Only their steel supports kept them upright at all, and even that was with great difficulty.

  The orgy of destruction and massa­cre was halted for a time by the arrival of a brave army of police, who fired bombs at the monsters. But they ex­ploded harmlessly, with no more ef­fect than cheap fire crackers about the waists of the impregnable invaders. Later, as the uncanny battle raged, anti-aircraft guns came into play, and for a while shells whis­tled dangerously near the heads of the two giants. Until, with one huge hand, Edward bent down and snuffed the ag­gressors into extinction, as a normal man would a garden worm.

  The End of the Giants

  By noon London became a city of panic and destruction. The giants, only beaten in height by the tallest build­ings, were wreaking incalculable dam­age on all sides. The whole western section of the metropolis was smash­ing visibly under the onslaught of light-mass destroyers and steel-clad, pile-driving fists. Even the airplanes that flew to the attack were reduced to wreckage, Edward and Grace dealing with them with their force rays as though the powerful machines were nothing more than slow-moving house flies…

  Mary Boyd, her father, mother, and the professor, could distinctly see the huge figures against the skyline from their home, and watched with growing anxiety as they beheld building after building hurtle down to destruction. Through the entire day they watched, scarcely moving, binoculars glued to their eyes.

  Then, towards sunset, when the red glare was flooding across from the bat­tered silhouettes of the city, the two gigantic figures were seen to suddenly become curiously rigid. Both of them stood quite still with arms upraised in mid-air preparatory to destroying a building!

  “I—I believe it’s worked!” Mary gasped hoarsely. “Come on. Get in the car and well go and see.”

  At top speed they headed for the city, where they left the car and joined the milling multitudes of people who were gazing in awe at two rigid, immovable figures, each with one foot planted in one street and the other in a neighbour­ing one, mighty arms raised to the darkening skies.

  “What’s happened to them?” Adison Boyd breathed at last, “Mary! What did you do?”

  A light of infinite relief was in his daughter’s eyes as she turned to him.

  “The calcium I used and energized to become one hundred times more effective than normal, entered the blood­streams of Edward and Grace and fol­lowing chemical law, turned their flesh and blood into the basis of lime. That went on until—well, surely you can see for yourself?”

  “By Jove, yes!” Kemphill exclaimed, “I understand, Mary. Either these two will stand there forever, or they’ll have to be removed and destroyed. It de­pends how the people feel about it.”

  “But I still don’t understand!” Boyd protested.

  “They have been turned to stone!” Mary replied quietly. “It is a chemical fact that flesh and blood containing an abnormal amount of calcium will cause the limbs and organs to actually turn to stone with the passage of time. I could quote many instances. Death follows, of course, when a vital organ is affected.

  “In this case I used calcium speeded up exactly one hundred times, by lab­oratory processes, and injected it into the arms of both of them. Until the stuff was equally distributed over their bodies they felt nothing. Then sud­denly it took devastating effect, halting them in mid-action, turning them to figures of stone!”

  Adlison Boyd gazed up once more at the rigid, glittering figures.

  “Then they are dead?”

  “Utterly,” the girl answered in a somber voice.

  * * * *

  The figures of stone, by popular as­sent, remained where they were, and London grew up again around them. Twenty years later they were still standing in the same position, mighty monuments to a strange and weird in­vasion—a stupendous man and woman whose heads seemed wreathed in clouds; carved, granite faces staring into the sky.

  The world went on its way, the affair of the giants forgotten. Dr. Adison Boyd, the instigator of it all, his wife, Professor Kemphill and Mary, all grew old and died, Mary leaving a son who alone knew the rudiments of the story of the monstrous invasion.

  But the figures still stood on, the steel in
teguments rusted with the elements; behemoth arms upraised as though poised ready for destruction, above the teeming, midget world below.

  SEEDS FROM SPACE

  A titanic weed whose seed came from Mars enveloped Earth in its grip… But the creeping menace saved mankind from a far greater disaster!

  CHAPTER I

  The Spore Doom

  For several minutes Price Driscoll had been silent, eyes fixed on the summer dust at his feet. It seemed that he had forgotten the park in which he was seated, the warm sunshine, and the girl by his side.

  A cough from the girl aroused him. He looked up with a guilty start to find her blue eyes upon him.

  “Well, it’s not before it’s time!” she commented frankly.

  “I’m sorry, Lucy.” He smiled apolo­getically. “I’m worried. There’s some­thing coming to this old world of ours that never came before.”

  “I know—but it has been before,” the girl answered promptly. “You mean war?”

  “Good heavens, no—something in­finitely more terrible than war! A menace that will make war seem like a child’s pastime by comparison. You see, it’s my job to know all about it. And because I dared to tell what I know to be the truth I have been asked to resign my position. A fine thing to befall a young astronomer full of ideals, isn’t it?”

  The girl’s eyes went wide. “You mean you’ve—you’ve lost your post? Oh, Price, I’m so—”

  “I know; you’re sorry. That’s all any­body can say. If only they would listen to me instead! Me, the only man in the world who knows what is coming, and I’m not heeded.

  “The entire Earth is doomed to des­truction! And, so far as I know, there’s no remedy. One can take precautions, of course; but since I’m discredited, what’s the use?”

  Lucy Harridge compressed her lips. “Price, what is the matter?” she de­manded. “Tell me!”

  “Well, until I was dismissed, I was, as you know, a responsible young astronomer at the observatory. One night recently, I made a remarkable discovery in connection with the planet Mars, a discovery which would have been impossible without the aid of our giant telescopic-reflector… Briefly, I saw a colossal cloud of seed-spores literally spewed into space from the planet.”