The Fire People

by Ray Cummings

  THE FIRE PEOPLE

  by

  RAY CUMMINGS

  Author of "The Golden Atom," etc.

  CONTENTS

  CHAPTER I. THE COMING OF THE LIGHT. CHAPTER II. THE UNKNOWN ENEMY. CHAPTER III. THE LANDING OF THE INVADERS. CHAPTER IV. THE MEETING. CHAPTER V. CAPTURED! CHAPTER VI. MIELA. CHAPTER VII. THE MERCUTIAN CAMP. CHAPTER VIII. THE ESCAPE. CHAPTER IX. FUTILE ATTACKS. CHAPTER X. MIELA'S STORY. CHAPTER XI. TO SAVE THE WORLD. CHAPTER XII. THE LANDING ON MERCURY. CHAPTER XIII. THE CAPTIVE EARTH-MAN. CHAPTER XIV. THE RULER OF THE LIGHT COUNTRY. CHAPTER XV. THE MOUNTAIN CONCLAVE. CHAPTER XVI. THE FIRE PLANET. CHAPTER XVII. THE FIGHT AT THE BAYOU. CHAPTER XVIII. REVOLUTION. CHAPTER XIX. THE NEW RULER. CHAPTER XX. IN THE TWILIGHT COUNTRY. CHAPTER XXI. ANOTHER LIGHT-RAY! CHAPTER XXII. THE THEFT OF THE LIGHT-RAY. CHAPTER XXIII. THE STROM. CHAPTER XXIV. THE WATER CITY. CHAPTER XXV. PREPARATIONS FOR WAR. CHAPTER XXVI. THE BATTLE. CHAPTER XXVII. THE SIEGE OF THE LONE CITY. CHAPTER XXVIII. THE END OF TAO. CHAPTER XXIX. THE RETURN.

  CHAPTER I.

  THE COMING OF THE LIGHT.

  The first of the new meteors landed on the earth in November, 1940. It wasdiscovered by a farmer in his field near Brookline, Massachusetts, shortlyafter daybreak on the morning of the 11th. Astronomically, the event wasrecorded by the observatory at Harvard as the sudden appearance of whatapparently was a new star, increasing in the short space of a few hoursfrom invisibility to a power beyond that of the first magnitude, and thenas rapidly fading again to invisibility. This star was recorded by two ofthe other great North American observatories, and by one in the ArgentineRepublic. That it was comparatively small in mass and exceedingly close tothe earth, even when first discovered, was obvious. All observers agreedthat it was a heavenly body of an entirely new order.

  The observatory at Harvard supplemented its account by recording thefalling, just before dawn of the 11th, of an extraordinarily brilliantmeteor that flamed with a curious red and green light as it entered theearth's atmosphere. This meteor did not burn itself out, but fell, stillretaining its luminosity, from a point near the zenith, to the horizon.

  What the farmer saw was a huge fire burning near the center of his field.It was circular in form and about thirty feet in diameter. He wasastonished to see it there, but what surprised him more was its peculiaraspect.

  It was still the twilight of dawn when he reached the field. He beheld thefire first from a point several hundred yards away. As he explained it,the light--for it was more aptly described as a light than afire--extended in parallel rays from the ground directly upward into thesky. He could see no line of demarkation where it ended at the top. Itseemed to extend into the sky an infinite distance. It was, in fact, asthough an enormous searchlight were buried in his field, casting its beamof light directly upward.

  But more than all this, the farmer was struck by the extraordinary colorof the light. At the base it was a deep, solid green. This green colorextended upward for perhaps fifty feet, then it shaded into red. Thefarmer noticed, too, that the fire did not leap and dance with flames, butseemed rather to glow--a steady light like the burning of colored powder.In the morning half-light it threw a weird, unearthly reddish-green glowover the field.

  The farmer approached to within twenty feet of the light. He looked to seewhat was burning, but could not determine, for the greenish base extendeddirectly down into the ground. He noticed also that it gave outextraordinarily little heat. The morning was not exceptionally cold, yethe stood within twenty feet of the fire without discomfort.

  I was on the staff of the Boston _Observer_ at this time. I reachedBrookline about noon of the 11th of November, and went directly to thefield where the fire was burning. Nearly a thousand people were there,watching.

  By daylight the fire still held its green and red color, although itslight was much less intense. It held its characteristic shape. Thoughclearly definable, under the rays of the sun it became quite transparent.Looking through it, I could see plainly the crowd of people on the fartherside of the field. The effect was similar to looking through a faintlytinted glass, except that now I noticed that the light had a sort ofcrawling motion, like the particles of a heavy fog. The fire came from ahole in the ground; by daylight now the hole could be seen plainly.

  For some moments I stood silent, awestruck by this extraordinaryspectacle. Then a man standing beside me remarked that there was no smoke.I had not thought of that before, but it was true--indeed, the fireappeared phosphorescent.

  "Let's get up closer," said the man beside me.

  Together we walked to within ten feet of the outer edge of the fire. Wecould feel its heat now, although it was not uncomfortable except when itbeat directly on our faces. Standing so close, we could see down into thehole from which the light emanated.

  Lying at the bottom of the hole, perhaps ten feet below the surface, I sawthe jagged top of an enormous gray sphere, burned and pitted. This was themeteor--nearly thirty feet in diameter--that in its fall had buried itselfdeep in the loam of the field.

  As we stood there looking down into the hole some one across from ustossed in a ball of paper. It seemed to hang poised a moment, then itshriveled up, turned black, and floated slowly down until it rested on topof the sphere.

  Some one else threw a block of wood about a foot long into the hole. Icould see it as it struck the top of the sphere. It lay there an instant;then it, too, turned black and charred, but it did not burst into flame.

  The man beside me plucked at my sleeve. "Why don't it burn?" he asked.

  I shook myself loose.

  "How should I know?" I answered impatiently.

  I found myself trembling all over with an unreasoning fear, for there wassomething uncanny about the whole affair. I went back to Brookline soonafter that to send in the story and do some telephoning. When I got backto the field I saw a man in front of me carrying a pail of water. I fellinto step beside him.

  "What do you suppose it'll do?" he asked as we walked along.

  "God knows," I answered. "Try it."

  But when we got down into the field we found the police authorities incharge. The crowd was held back now in a circle, a hundred yards away fromthe light. After some argument we got past the officials, and, followed bytwo camera men and a motion-picture man who bobbed up from nowhere, walkedout across the cleared space toward the light. We stopped about six oreight feet from the edge of the hole; the heat was uncomfortably intense.

  "I'll make a dash for it," said the man with the pail.

  He ran forward a few steps, splashed the water into the light, and hastilyretreated. As the water struck the edge of the light there came a roarlike steam escaping under tremendous pressure; a great cloud of vaporrolled back over us and dissolved. When the air cleared I saw that thelight, or the fire of this mysterious agency, was unchanged. The waterdashed against it had had absolutely no effect.

  It was just after this incident that the first real tragedy happened. Oneof the many quadruplanes that had been circling over the field during theafternoon passed directly over the light at an altitude of perhaps threethousand feet. We saw it sail away erratically, as though its pilot nolonger had it under control. Then it suddenly burst into flame and camequivering down in a long, lengthening spiral of smoke.

  That night the second of the meteors landed on the earth. It fell nearJuneau, Alaska, and was accompanied by the same phenomena as the one wewere watching. The reports showed it to be slightly smaller in size thanthe Brookline meteor. It burned brightly during the day of November 12.On the morning of the 13th wireless reports from Alaska stated that it hadburned out during the previous night
.

  Meanwhile the light at Brookline was under constant surveillance. Itremained unchanged in all respects.

  The next night it rained--a heavy, pelting downpour. For a mile or morearound the field the hissing of steam could be heard as the rain struckthe light. The next morning was clear, and still we saw no change in thelight.

  Then, a week later, came the cold spell of 1940. Surpassing in severitythe winters of 1888 and 1918, it broke all existing records of the WeatherBureau. The temperature during the night of November 20, at Brookline,fell to thirty degrees below zero. During this night the fire was seen todwindle gradually in size, and by morning it was entirely extinguished.

  No other meteors fell that winter; and, as their significance remainedunexplained, public interest in them soon died out. The observatories atHarvard, Flagstaff, Cordoba, and the newer one on Table Mountain, nearCape Town, all reported the appearance of several new stars, flaring intoprominence for a few hours and visible just after sunset and before dawn,on several nights during November. But these published statements werecasually received and aroused only slight general comment.

  Then, in February, 1941, came the publication of Professor Newland'sfamous theory of the Mercutian Light--as the fire was afterward known.Professor Newland was at this time the foremost astronomer in America, andhis extraordinary theory and the predictions he made, coming from soauthoritative a source, amazed and startled the world.

  His paper, couched in the language of science, was rewritten to the publicunderstanding and published in the newspapers of nearly every country. Itwas an exhaustive scientific deduction, explaining in theory the origin ofthe two meteors that had fallen to earth two months before.

  In effect Professor Newland declared that the curious astronomicalphenomena of the previous November--the new "stars" observed, the twometeors that had fallen with their red and green light-fire--were allevidence of the existence of intelligent life on the planet Mercury.

  I give you here only the more important parts of the paper as it wasrewritten for the public prints:

  ... I am therefore strongly inclined to accept the theory advanced by Schiaparelli in 1882, in which he concluded that Mercury rotates on its axis once in eighty-eight days. Now, since the sidereal revolution of Mercury, _i.e._, its complete revolution around the sun, occupies only slightly under eighty-eight days, the planet always presents the same face to the sun. On that side reigns perpetual day; on the other--the side presented to the earth as Mercury passes us--perpetual night.

  The existence of an atmospheric envelope on Mercury, to temper the extremes of heat and cold that would otherwise exist on its light and dark hemispheres, seems fairly certain. If there were no atmosphere on the planet, temperatures on that face toward the sun would be extraordinarily high--many hundred degrees hotter than the boiling point of water.

  Quite the other extreme would be the conditions on the dark side, for without the sheltering blanket of an atmosphere, this surface must be exposed to the intense cold of interplanetary space.

  I have reason to believe, however, particularly from my deductions made in connection with the photographs taken during the transit of Mercury over the face of the sun on November 11 last, that there does exist an atmosphere on this planet--an atmosphere that appears to be denser and more cloudy than our own. I am led to this conclusion by other evidence that has long been fairly generally accepted as fact. The terminating edge of the phases of Mercury is not sharp, but diffuse and shaded--there is here an atmospheric penumbra. The spectroscope also shows lines of absorption, which proves that Mercury has a gaseous envelope thicker than ours.

  This atmosphere, whatever may be its nature I do not assume, tempers the heat and cold on Mercury to a degree comparable to the earth. But I do believe that it makes the planet--on its dark face particularly--capable of supporting intelligent life of some form.

  Mercury was in transit over the face of the sun on November 11, of last year, within a few hours of the time the first meteor fell to earth. The planet was therefore at one of her closest points to the earth, and--this is significant--was presenting her _dark face_ toward us.

  At this time several new "stars" were reported, flashing into brilliancy and then fading again into obscurity. All were observed in the vicinity of Mercury; none appeared elsewhere. I believe these so-called "stars" to be some form of interplanetary vehicle--probably navigated in space by beings from Mercury. And from them were launched the two meteors that struck our planet. How many others were dispatched that may have missed their mark we have no means of determining.

  The days around November 11 last, owing to the proximity of Mercury to the earth, were most favorable for such a bombardment. A similar time is now once more almost upon us!

  Because of the difference in the velocities of Mercury and the earth in their revolutions around the sun, one synodic revolution of Mercury, _i.e._, from one inferior conjunction to the next, requires nearly one hundred and sixteen days. In eighty-eight days Mercury has completed her sidereal revolution, but during that time the earth has moved ahead a distance requiring twenty-eight days more before she can be overtaken.

  After the first week in March of this year therefore Mercury will again be approaching inferior conjunction, and again will pass at her closest point to the earth.

  We may expect at this time another bombardment of a severity that may cause tremendous destruction, or destroy entirely life on this planet!