Jim Baen's Universe

Classic

Born of the Sun

Written by Jack Williamson

Illustrated by William Johns

The deep song of a wide-open motor throbbed into the huge mahogany library—the first faint note of rising menace. Foster Ross, busy over a great table in the end of the room, glanced up abstractedly at a frost-rimed window. Gaunt trees, outside, flung bare, skeletal branches against the gray gloom of an early December dusk; the moaning wind carried a few flakes of snow.

Listening, Foster Ross wondered briefly the reason for such suicidal haste over the icy highways, before his attention went back to the experiment that had engrossed him for two hard years.

He was alone in the great, rambling stone mansion his father had left him, secluded upon a lonely, wooded Pennsylvania hilltop. No visitors were expected—the house was being closed for the winter. The few servants had departed that afternoon. Foster, himself, planned to leave at midnight for sunny Palm Beach to meet June Trevor.

A lean, muscular giant, he was whistling absently as he bent over the immense mahogany table. It was littered with electrical apparatus. In the center of it, shimmering under brilliant light, was a little aluminum sphere, trailing two fine platinum wires.

Foster tightened a last connection. He stepped back a little eagerly brushing a wisp of copper-colored hair out of his eyes.

“Now!” he whispered. “It should go up. As the first space ship will go up toward the Moon! It should be—”

Nervously watching the toylike sphere, he snapped down a key. Anxiously, he waited, as coils whined angrily, and violet discharges flickered about bright contacts.

The tiny globe did not move. A moment he stared at it, sighing wearily. Then he shrugged, grinned at himself.

“Fifty thousand, that makes,” he muttered to himself. “Fifty thousand dollars, for a pipe dream! I could have sowed a lot of wild oats for that. What a fool I am, to be fussing with this infernal thing like an old crank, when I might be lounging on the beach with June!”

But something flashed, then, in his level blue eyes; his wide shoulders squared.

“It can be done!” he insisted under his breath. “I might try a conegrid. Or alloy the cathode element with titanium. The motor-tube—”

He heard, then, the insistent doorbell and frantic knocking at the front door. Foster hurried down the gloomy hall.

Still he could hear the racing car, a deep-toned, ominous roll, that grew swiftly louder. It slackened momentarily, was renewed.

“It has turned in the drive,” he thought. “Two unexpected guests, and both in a hurry!”

He flung the door open upon wintry gloom; the bitter wind whirled snow into his face.

A cab was standing in front of the door, yellow lights stabbing feebly into the swirling snow. It glided away as he appeared. And Foster saw the man who had rung, a small figure, muffled in an enormous gray coat, crouching against the wall.

He sprang toward the opening door, gasping: “Quick! Inside! The other car—”

Powerful lights probed through the snow; the second machine came roaring up the drive, behind the departing cab. Skidding recklessly, it swerved toward the door.

Terrific reports crashed in Foster’s ears; yellow flame jetted from a black automatic in the little man’s hand. He was shooting into the skidding sedan.

A thin sword of blinding orange light stabbed back from the machine, as it thundered past. The ray seemed to touch the little man. He whirled, as his gun exploded a last time, fell inside the door.

The black car paused, plunged forward again. Its headlights rested a moment on the cab, swept past it. It vanished down the drive.

****

Bewildered, Foster slammed the door, locked it. He bent over the little man on the floor. A gasping breath greeted him, then a faint chuckle.

A low voice spoke, oddly calm: “We score one, Foster!”

“You aren’t hurt, sir? You fell, when the orange light—”

“No. I dropped in time.”

Foster was helping him to rise.

“But it’s a deadly thing. The poison flame, they call it. It’s an actinic radiation, I believe, that splits proteins. It forms poison in the blood.”

The little man bent for his automatic. Deliberately, he removed the empty cartridge clip, snapped another into place, slipped the heavy weapon back into the pocket of his gray coat.

“Won’t you come in where it’s warmer?” Foster invited. “And if you don’t mind explaining—”

“Of course, Foster.”

His strange guest followed him through the shadowy hall, into the brightly lighted library. Foster turned, when they came into the light, to survey the other.

“You seem to know my name,” he remarked. Recognition flashed then, in his level blue eyes. “Uncle Barron!” he exclaimed. “I hadn’t recognized you!” He offered his hand cordially.

Barron Kane was a small man. His chest was flat; his drooping shoulders were thin as a boy’s; his arms were lean and stringy. Yet the serene patience of the scientist lighted his weary face with a radiance of power. In his calm gray eyes was confidence, and beside it, strangely, the shadow of a devouring dread.

“You surprised me,” said Foster. “I thought, you know, that you must be—dead. It’s years since any one has heard from you. My father tried to locate you.”

“I’ve been in Asia,” said the little sun-browned man, “at an oasis in the Gobi, that you won’t find on the maps. I was completely cut off from civilization. And there’s a power, you see, that would cut me off forever.”

He nodded in the direction the racing car had gone.

“I remember when you were fitting out your last expedition,” recalled Foster. “Twelve years ago—I was in high school. You were so mysterious about where you were headed. And I was wild to go along, for the adventure of it, trying to talk dad out of the idea that I was destined to run the steel business.

“But sit down. Do you care for a drink?”

Barron Kane shook a brown, bald head—he had arrived without a hat. “But I must talk to you, Foster.”

“I’m keen to know all about it,” Foster assured him. “All this is—well, interesting.”

“We might be interrupted,” said Barron Kane. “Do you mind fastening the doors and windows and drawing the blinds?”

“Of course not. Do you think—they will come back?”

“There is a power,” said Barron Kane, his low voice still oddly calm, “that will not rest without positive proof that I am dead.”

Foster locked the door, went to secure the windows. He came back to find his uncle curiously examining the little silver model on the table.

“I read your monograph last month in the Science Review,” he said. “About the omicron-effect and your motor-tube. That’s why I’ve come to you, Foster. You’ve hit on a tremendous thing—”

“Not yet,” denied Foster, with a weary little smile. “I’ve spent two years of time and a good deal of money on the motor-tube. And still it won’t lift its own weight.”

“But you’re still trying?” The low voice was edged with a strange anxiety.

“I was working today.” Foster touched the little aluminum globe. “This is a model of the space machine. The motor-tube is inside, connected with these platinum wires. The real ship, of course, would have all this other apparatus aboard. The living accommodations and she—”

He stopped himself, shook his head bitterly.

“But it’s just a dream!” he muttered. “A crazy dream—I’m not going to waste my life on it.” His blue eyes flashed at Barron Kane defiantly. “I’m leaving for Palm Beach, to-night, to meet June Trevor.” He explained: “We’re engaged. We’ll be married New Year’s. Barron, June’s simply—wonderful!”

“You can’t do that!” protested Barron Kane. Gripping Foster’s arm, he spoke with a puzzling urgency. “You must stick to the space machine. You must finish it, Foster, to save the human race.”

“Eh!” Grunting with astonishment, Foster stepped back from him. “What do you mean?”

“Just that,” Barron Kane told him, in the same quiet voice that was emphatic for its very lack of emphasis. “I’ve come to tell you a dreadful thing, Foster. A thing I learned in Asia. A thing that a terrible power is bent upon keeping me from telling.”

Foster stared at him, demanded: “What’s that?”

“The planet is doomed to destruction,” said Barron Kane, still grimly calm. “And the human race with it—unless you can save a handful of humanity. You are the one man who has even the ghost of a chance, Foster, with your steel mills and your invention of the motor-tube.”

****

Amazed, a little shaken, despite himself, at the chill touch of alien fear, Foster watched his uncle.

Had the man gone mad in the twelve years since he vanished? He always had been famous for an eccentricity of character no less than his ability as geologist and astrophysicist. No, Foster decided, his manner was sane enough. And the car from which the orange ray had flamed had been no mad delusion. It had been very real.

Foster took Barron Kane by the shoulder, marched him to a great leather chair and seated him in it. Standing over him, he demanded:

“Now tell me exactly what this is all about?”

Grave humor momentarily banished the haunting shadow of dread from those calm gray eyes.

“No, Foster,” the quiet voice said; “I’m afraid that I’m perfectly sane.”

Barron Kane laced his thin brown fingers together, stared at them meditatively.

“You cannot have heard of the Cult of the Great Egg,” he began. “You can’t, because even the name of it is almost completely unknown outside. But it is a fanatical religious sect, whose temple is hidden in an unknown oasis in the Gobi.

“Nearly ten years ago, Foster, I became a member of that sect. It was not easily done. And afterward I had to endure ordeals that were—well, trying. After seven years I was fully initiated. From the lips of the head of the order—a human demon named L’ao Ku—I heard the dreadful secret that I had gone to Asia to learn.

“That was three years ago. L’ao Ku must have suspected me. I was very closely watched. Two years I had to wait, even for the chance to escape. Since, I’ve been hunted across the world by the agents of L’ao Ku. It’s almost another year.

“I thought I’d given them the slip in Panama. I saw your article about the motor-tube and came to you, Foster. You, as I say, are the only man— But they’ve somehow picked up the trail again. I’m afraid I’ve sentenced you to death.”

“Sentenced me?” asked Foster. “How?”

“L’ao Ku wants his secret kept. Three men have died very soon after talking with me, mysteriously.”

Foster was still planted in front of Barron Kane, wonder and incredulity struggling in his mind. His chin tightened with determination to find some rational order in these bewildering incidents.

“This secret?” he demanded. “What is it? What’s this about the end of the world?”

Again Barron Kane thoughtfully studied the tips of his laced fingers. “I’ll begin, I think,” he said, “by asking you a question—by asking you, Foster, the greatest riddle in the world. What is the Earth?”

Startled, Foster searched the weary, patient face. He studied the gray eyes, calm, yet shadowed with brooding horror. He shook his head. Barron Kane was an enigma.

“All right, what is the Earth?”

“I’ve a very astounding thing to tell you,” went on Barron Kane, “a very terrible thing. It will be hard for you to accept, for it is contrary to a lot of our unthinking dogma that is older than science.

“The idea is so strange, so terrible, Foster, that no western mind could have conceived it. We owe a debt, after all, to the Cult of the Great Egg. The oriental mentality, working with the secret science of the order, saw a thing that we should never have been able to see, in spite of all the evidence in front of our eyes.

“But I can make it easier for you to accept the thing, Foster, by recalling a few notorious gaps in scientific knowledge. And you must accept it, Foster. The very life of humanity depends upon you.”

Foster dropped into a chair directly before Barron Kane. Sitting bolt upright, he waited silently.

“We live in appalling ignorance of the planet beneath us,” the same calm voice spoke on, edged still with a terrible intensity. “Out of four thousand miles to the center of the Earth, how far have we penetrated? Not four miles!

“What lies beyond? What, really, is the thing whose tremors we call earthquakes? What lies beneath the thin shell of solid rock we live upon? What is it whose heat causes our volcanoes? I could cite you a thousand vague, conflicting theories, guesses, about the nature of the Earth’s interior—but hardly one proved fact. We know actually as little of the Earth, Foster, as a fly, crawling on an egg, knows of the mystery of embryonic life within.

“And how much less we know of the other planets! What scientist can tell you even how they came to be? Oh, there’ve been fine theories enough, since Laplace. We have the planetesimal hypothesis, the nebular hypothesis, the gaseous hypothesis, the meteoritic hypothesis—this hypothesis and that. The most remarkable thing about each one is that it successfully contradicts all the others.

“Think of the puzzle of the lost planet! According to Bode’s Law, you know, there should be another planet in the gap between Mars and Jupiter, where the asteroids are. The asteroids and the comets and the meteor swarms apparently are fragments of it—but, altogether, they account for no more than a tenth of the bulk it should have had. What unthinkable cataclysm shattered the lost planet, Foster? And, tell me, what became of the nine-tenths of it that is gone?

“Take another cosmic enigma! What is the Sun itself, upon which our very lives depend? What is the life story of a sun, any sun? How does it acquire its matter and its motion and its heat? What is the purpose in existence of a sun? What you look at the stars on a winter night, Foster, can you conceive them without any end in being?

“Consider the riddle of entropy! There is a force of death that pervades the universe. Stars grow cold and die; star dust is scattered; radiation is diffused and lost. Our cosmogonists say the universe is running down. But must there not also be a force of life, of growth, of creation?

“How can death be, Foster, without life before it?

“Did you never wonder, Foster, why the Sun, like other variable stars, expands and contracts in the rhythm of the sun-spot cycle, with a beat like the pulse of a living thing?”

Barron Kane leaned forward. His gray eyes—the shadow of haunting horror was deeper in them, now—fixed upon Foster’s face with a desperate, appealing earnestness.

“Foster,” he went on, “I know what the Earth is!

“Years ago, struggling with the failures and the contradictions of our western science, I vaguely guessed the thing. Twelve years ago, from a chance faint rumor, I inferred that oriental insight had seen the truth hidden from our dogmatic western minds.

“I went, as I say, into the Gobi. I found the secret sect. After seven years of effort and endurance, I reached the inner mystery. L’ao Ku confirmed my terrible inference.

“I learned from him things I had not dared even to guess. I learned that the Earth—the entire solar system—is destined to break up within a very short time. We shall see the end, Foster—unless the secret agents of L’ao Ku make away with us first.

“We must not forget him, Foster, in the greater danger. The man is inhuman, fanatic, diabolical; but he is a genius. And all his power, all the secret science that produced the poison ray, is bent upon our destruction.”

The calm voice paused. Quiet hung in the wide library, strained, electric. And Foster whispered, incredulous:

“The end of the world!”

“The end,” repeated Barron Kane, with the same compelling calm. “I had hoped we might have—years. But I know to-night, from an item in the evening paper, that the change has already begun.”

Foster Ross surged back to his feet, towered over the little brown man. “Tell me,” he implored, “just what are you getting at?”

Barron Kane told him, leaning forward, his low voice sunk almost to a whisper. Foster listened silently, still standing. Unbelieving wonder was first in his blue eyes. It gave way slowly to the dawn of a terrible fear.

II.

An hour later, it was, when the grave little scientist finished and leaned back in the huge leather chair lacing his thin brown fingers together again.

Without speaking, Foster strode to a tall window. He put up the blind and stared out into the early-winter night. The bare trees were a ghostly rank of skeletons on fields of snow that shimmered faintly under the dark sky. Flakes of snow gleamed white in the flood of light from the window. The bitter wind moaned bleakly against the ancient stone walls.

“Please draw the blind,” requested Barron Kane, with that same calm that nothing disturbed. “The agents of L’ao Ku might be watching. The poison ray—”

Foster snatched down the blind. He strode back to his uncle, tense, trembling a little. “Sorry!” he muttered. “I forgot.”

“The idea is a peculiarly difficult one for the western mind to receive,” said Barron Kane sympathetically. “It would drive most westerners mad, I suspect, to be forced to believe it. But, if you will try to grasp it with something of the oriental fatalism—”

Foster seemed unconscious of him. He strode up and down the vast, dark-paneled room. He paused, once, to touch the little aluminum model of the space ship on the table. He took a photograph of dark-eyed June Trevor from the mantel, and studied her demure, classic loveliness for a moment and replaced it very carefully. He strode back to his uncle.

“The Earth—that!” he rasped. “I can’t believe it! It’s too-monstrous!”

Barron Kane rose and came to him eagerly. “You must believe me, Foster,” his low voice pleaded. “Because only you have the means to save the seed of humanity. And you must begin the work at once—to-night!”

“To-night?” echoed Foster, in dull surprise.

“You must realize, Foster, that we’ve only months. Half a year, at most. And the undertaking is—terrific. We must set up a laboratory to rush the development of your motor-tube. Your steel mills must begin fabricating parts for the—the ark of space.

“We’ve a thousand problems to solve in every branch of engineering. And the thing must be finished in less time than was ever taken for a similar construction. Much less time!”

“There has been no similar construction,” Foster said. “Even a battle ship is a simple toy compared to the space machine. It would take a lifetime to launch the thing.

“Besides,” he protested vaguely, still lost in wonderment, “I’m going to Palm Beach. I promised June that I—”

“Then you must break your promise,” cut in Barron Kane imperatively. “Both of us must give every second to the job. Even then, the time is fearfully short. And we must look out for L’ao Ku with his poison ray.”

“Really, you see, I can’t—can’t quite believe.” Foster’s blue eyes looked soberly at Barron Kane. “The thing’s too damnably fantastic!”

“You must try to grasp it with the oriental viewpoint,” urged his uncle. “The eastern fatalism—”

“I’m no Chinaman,” said Foster. “But I do love June Trevor—more than anything. Even if you’re right—if the next six months will be the last—I’d rather spend them with her.”

“Don’t you see?” whispered Barron Kane. He gripped Foster’s arm with thin fingers. “If you love June Trevor, you must build the space machine to save her. Would you want to see her die, Foster, with the rest of the human race, like—like vermin in a burning house? Wiped out—annihilated?”

“No!” exclaimed Foster. “No! But I can’t believe—”

“You must!” insisted Barron Kane. “There’s proof, I tell you. To-night, in the evening paper, is an item that heralds the disruption of the solar system.”

“Proof?” cried Foster incredulously. “Proof of—that?”

“Have you an evening paper?”

“It’s here somewhere. I had no time to look at it. The experiment, you know.”

He found the paper, unfolded it curiously. His eye sought the chief headline, saw that it concerned merely a new disclosure of political corruption.

Barron Kane’s thin, eager hands took the paper from him, pointed out an obscurely headed item at the bottom of the page.

SAVANTS PUZZLED

Doctor Lynn Poynter, of the Mount Wilson Observatory, reported this morning that the planet Pluto has left its orbit and is wandering away from the Sun on an erratic and inexplicable path. The planet’s color, Doctor Poynter also stated, has changed from yellowish to vivid green.

He is unable, Doctor Poynter says, to give any explanation of the phenomenon. He refuses to make any further comments upon it, except to say that other astronomers, in all parts of the world, are being requested to check his observations.

Foster’s face set grimly as he read the brief paragraphs. His fingers, trembling, closed unconsciously upon the newspaper, tore it slowly in two. Into his blue eyes, when he looked back at Barron Kane, had come a new, consuming horror. Huskily, he spoke:

“So Pluto is already—gone? Already, the solar system is breaking up!”

He gazed down at the torn paper in his hands.

“We’ll go down to the mill in the morning, Barron,” he said, “to begin.”

Silently, the little brown man gripped his hand, mutely thankful.

“Now,” said Foster, “I must telephone June.”

****

“It’s you, Foster!” came the girl’s clear voice over the wire, eager with anticipation. “You’re coming down to-morrow? I’ll drive to meet you—”

Foster was picturing her staid, brown-eyed charm; he saw her as she would sit at the wheel, tall, slender: a gay, childish eagerness beneath her sedate reserve. And he was faint, suddenly, with a sick regret that he could not go to her.

“No,” he was saying, trying to keep the pain from his voice; “I’m afraid I can’t come down.”

He sensed the quick anxiety in her reply:

“Is something—wrong?”

“A thing has come up,” he stumbled, searching for words not too alarming. “A job that I must do. It’s tremendously important. I must stay—”

“Oh!” In her voice was a little catch of agony. “Will it keep you—past the New Year?”

“Yes,” he said. “We’ll have to name a new wedding day.”

“Oh!” It was a gasp of pain: Foster was sick with pity for her. “Can’t you tell me what it is?”

“No; not over the phone. But I want you to come to me, June, as soon as you can. I’ll explain.”

“I’ve a lot of engagements,” she protested. “And you seem so—strange!”

“It’s really important,” he urged. “Please come! I need you, really. Oh, June—please—”

A moment of silence; then she spoke decisively:

“All right, Foster, I’ll be there—let’s see—Monday.”

“Thanks, dear!” he said gratefully. “When you understand—”

“Atta boy!” she cried, almost gaily. “Get some sunshine in your voice! You were talking as if the world were going to end! I’ll be there Monday.”

Dear June, the same good sport, he was thinking, as she hung up. Gay and unselfish as ever. She always understood. And he would, he must, finish the space machine in time to carry her away from this unbelievable terror that Barron Kane promised.

****

That night Barron Kane and Foster Ross did not go to bed. They stayed in the long library, beside the little aluminum model of the space machine, planning how to transform the dream of it into reality. Foster ventured to the kitchen at midnight and brought bread and cold ham and a bottle of milk and set them beside the toy ship.

At dawn he began packing into a brief case the model and the sheets they had covered with plans, to carry down to the mill.

“There’s a danger, remember,” warned Barron Kane. “The men who followed me won’t be far away. They won’t go back without proof that I am dead.”

“I’ll call the mill,” said Foster, “have a few men sent out.”

But the line, he discovered, was dead.

“The wires are down,” he said. “The storm—”

“L’ao Ku’s men have cut them,” whispered Barron Kane. “They are waiting for us.”

“We’d better make a dash for it, then,” Foster suggested, “while we can.”

Barron Kane nodded. “We’ll have to fence ourselves in if we do get to the mill,” he said. “For we’ll be fighting L’ao Ku, to the end, as well as fighting against time. It is the basis of the secret sect that all life must perish when the Earth breaks up. Any attempt to save even a single human life breaks the first tenet of their fantastic dogma.”

Leaving the lights burning in the library, the two slipped out through the rear of the old mansion. The grounds were ghostly white with snow. Dense clouds hid the sky, ice-gray with the first glow of dawn. Mysterious shadows were clotted against trees and buildings.

Foster carried his priceless model. Barron Kane had drawn his heavy automatic, snapped off the safety. At a half run, they crunched through thick snow to the garage. Foster unlocked the doors, flung them back.

A thin orange ray, bright as a blade of incandescent metal, flamed silently out of the gloomy doorway. It struck Barron Kane’s arm. His automatic spoke once in reply. Then, gasping with agony, he crumpled down on the snow.

Foster caught his breath. His lean body catapulted instantly into the black corner from which the silent ray had come.

His groping hand closed over a talonlike hand that held a light metal tube. His shoulder struck a lithe, powerful body, flung it heavily against the wall. Another lean hand closed on his throat. He caught a sinewy wrist, forced it back.

The two recoiled from the wall, thudded on the concrete floor. Foster had heard a guttural grunt of surprise. That was the only sound from his unseen opponent. The battle was finished in silence and darkness.

A doubled knee drove into Foster’s groin. As he writhed in agony, hard fingers twitched under his. A blinding finger of yellow light stabbed from the little tube. It wavered across the wall of the garage. Slowly it came down.

The poison ray! If it touched him, to make a deadly venom of his own blood—

Intolerable agony burst suddenly from the tortured wrist of his resisting arm. He trembled with the pain of effort. Hot sweat burst out on his face.

The orange ray touched the floor, trembled toward his shoulder. The talons that moved it were hard as steel.

Foster was giddy with the unbearable pain from his twisted arm. The world spun; a wave of blackness rose. Then, in the moment of defeat, a queer something happened to him, a blinding revelation. In a moment of crystal vision, he saw himself not as one man fighting for his own life, but the champion of humanity, battling for ultimate survival.

****

A new strength came oddly with the vision; deathless purpose flowed into him like a strange tide.

He straightened his tortured arm. Red agony flamed in it. But the orange needle flickered away. The hard body against him knotted with exertion; the ray flashed back. Faint and dizzy, Foster drew on his new strength to the utmost.

He heard the dull snap of a breaking bone. The steel talons in his grasp turned to limp flesh. The orange blade described a sudden arc, that touched the head of the other man. Then the little tube crashed against the wall, the ray went out.

The other was already dead from his own weapon when Foster staggered to his feet.

Barron Kane lay still on the snow outside, a small gray huddle in the pale dawn light. Foster ran to him, heard his faint whisper:

“The poison ray—my wrist—a tourniquet at the elbow—bleed it.”

Foster pushed up the sleeve on the thin brown arm. He whipped his handkerchief around the right elbow, twisted it tight with a spanner he snatched from the wall. On the lean, stringy wrist he saw a swelling, lividly purple, swiftly increasing in size. He dug a keen penknife out of his vest pocket, slashed deep into it, put his own lips to the wound to draw out the poison.

“That will do,” whispered Barron Kane at last, his voice a little stronger. “Guess I’m done for, anyhow. Just hope I live to see you win, Foster. No matter. I’ve done my part. It’s up to you, now, to save the seed of mankind.”

“I—I’ll do my best,” Foster promised him, choking. He was still strong with the strange self-forgetful resolution that had come to him in the fight.

“Drive on,” whispered Barron Kane, “to the mill!”

Foster lifted him into the roadster. When he switched on the lights he paused a moment to look down at the dead man on the floor. His face was yellow, Mongoloid, with a hawklike thinness. It was set, now, in the fearful, derisive grin of death.

“Open his clothing, Foster,” commanded Barron Kane. “Look on his body, under the left arm.”

Foster obeyed. Under the man’s arm, on the yellow skin stretched like parchment over the ribs, was a scarlet mark, like a large O.

“He’s branded!” he cried. “With a red circle!”

“That is the emblem of the secret cult,” whispered Barron Kane. “He came from L’ao Ku.”

Foster leaped in beside Barron Kane. The stiff motor came to bellowing life. The roadster lunged forward, swerved past the dead man, skidded out upon the icy drive.

The leaden, frigid day had come when they drove into the grimy mill town. Gaunt, ugly, the little buildings of the workers huddled over hillsides gray with snow and soot. The mill stood in the level valley; gigantic blast furnaces marched, like a grim army of black steel monsters, against the gloomy clouds.

Foster drove straight through the gates to the emergency hospital. He carried Barron Kane to a cot inside.

“The doctors will soon be here,” he promised.

“Don’t worry about me,” the little man whispered. “You have work to do. I’m going to try to live to see you finish it.”

III.

Three months later, a new fence surrounded the steel mill. It was twenty feet high, and the first ten were bullet-proof concrete and steel. The top of it was wired to powerful generators. At hundred-foot intervals it was studded with rotating turrets of steel and bullet-proof glass, in which sentries watched always, behind frowning machine guns.

Inside the fence, on a huge pier of reënforced concrete, the space machine was building.

Its hull was already completed—a feat unprecedented in engineering. A colossal sphere, nearly five hundred feet in diameter, it dwarfed to insignificance the flanking armies of blast furnaces. The top of its gray bulk was visible for many miles across the low Pennsylvania hills, that now, in March, were green with the last spring of Earth.

Much, however, remained to be done in perfecting the interior arrangements, by which human life was to be sustained indefinitely in the sunless void. Greatest lack of all, the motor-tube, which was to utilize Foster Ross’ omicron-effect to propel the machine, was still unperfected.

“The rest will be finished in a month,” Foster promised Barron Kane, one windy spring day. “But a lot of good that will be if the motor-tube won’t work. A million tons of steel and glass! We have no way to move it an inch, unless—”

They were in a room in the emergency hospital, from the windows of which the sick man could watch the tremendous gray-painted sphere of steel, looming against pale-green hills and wind-torn sky.

Barron Kane was still on his back. The venom formed by the orange ray had affected spinal nerve centers; he was unable to walk, even his hands were partially paralyzed. But his brain remained keen as ever; despite his helplessness and pain, he had helped the solution of many a problem in the building of the space machine.

“Unless?” he whispered. “You’re trying something else?”

“We began this morning to work out a new design. We started from a new beginning, suggested by the equations of the omicron-effect. We don’t know that it will be any better. Even if it works, the installation will take six weeks.”

“Six weeks?” breathed Barron Kane in weary alarm. “We may not have that long before Earth breaks up!”

His gray eyes stared at Foster from the pillow, calm, yet dark with dread.

“The moon of Neptune, you know,” he whispered, “left its orbit last week. It turned greenish and followed Pluto off into space. And there’s another thing—”

His shrunken, half-useless hands fumbled for the newspaper on the blanket beside him.

“What is it?” asked Foster.

“In the morning paper. Still no one sees what’s coming. They have the story hidden on an inside page—nobody saw what it meant. But it’s about the most important thing they ever printed. Here it is!”

Foster read the item:

QUAKES SHOW RHYTHM

A new series of tremors is shaking the earth, announced Doctor Madison Kline, noted English seismologist, speaking to-day before an international convention of geologists.

These recently observed earth tremors occur at regular intervals of about thirty-one minutes, said Doctor Kline. He believes they reflect some rhythmic disturbance deep within the planet.

Doctor Kline and his associates, he stated, have had the phenomenon under observation for several weeks, during which time it has steadily and markedly increased.

No conclusively definite explanation can yet be offered, Doctor Kline said, though he believes that the period of the vibration corresponds to the natural fundamental frequency of the planet.

Foster’s hands closed until the knuckles went white. “That means,” he muttered huskily, “that we’re near—the finish.”

“You see,” whispered Barron Kane, “you must rush the installation of the new motor-tube.”

“We will!” Foster promised. “Though the thing may not work, when it’s done. We’re trying, you see, to compress a generation of scientific progress into four months.”

“There are other things,” Barron Kane reminded him. “We must be ready to cut all connection with civilization.”

“Our supplies are mostly on board, already,” Foster informed him. “And our people are moving into the machine as fast as the quarters are ready. Six hundred picked men, representing every race and every craft and every creed, with their wives and children. Two thousand, all told—and the very cream of humanity.”

“The laboratories?” queried Barron Kane.

“Oh, they’ll be finished in time,” Foster assured him. “In a month, Barron, we’ll have our own artificial air and our own synthetic food, made on board from the refined elements of the waste.

“Once out in space,” he went on, a ring of enthusiasm in his voice, “we’ll be independent. Our generators will tap the limitless energy of the cosmic ray. They will supply warmth and light and power, the means for the manufacture of oxygen and food, and current for the motor-tube.

“The machine can sail on forever, Barron. It’s a little world, itself, independent of the Sun—”

Foster stopped himself, bit his lips. “Here I am,” he muttered sheepishly, “ranting about the thing! When I couldn’t move it an inch, to save my soul! So long, Barron. I must get back to the shops.”

“Wait!” whispered the sick man. “There’s another thing. Where is your fiancée?”

“Why,” Foster told him, “June has gone back to Florida for a short visit with some friends. I want her to forget, as much as she can, what’s coming. It’s so terrible, for a girl like her—”

“Have her come back,” advised Barron Kane. “Have her move on board with us.”

“There’s danger?” demanded Foster. “Already?”

“The first quiver of the Earth’s crust will be enough to shatter the thing we call civilization,” whispered the little man. “She must be here before that happens. And there’s another danger.”

“What’s that?”

“L’ao Ku hasn’t shown his power, Foster. But don’t forget that he has a power. He’s just waiting, getting ready. Don’t be deceived; don’t let down your guard.”

“Oh!” breathed Foster, relieved. “I thought you meant some danger to June.”

“I do,” whispered Barron Kane.

Foster leaned over him, tense with alarm.

“In that temple in the Gobi is an altar erected to the Great Egg. Above it is an image, cut from black stone. The image is a globe, with the outlines of the continents engraved on it, so you can see that it represents the Earth. It is split, and a thing is emerging. A thing obscenely monstrous!

“Regular ceremonies are held in the temple, Foster. On that altar, under the image of that unthinkable obscenity breaking from the earth, L’ao Ku offers sacrifices. The victims are always women. When possible, they are heretics or members of their families.

“It is possible, Foster, that June Trevor might—suffer, just because you plan to save her.”

Foster’s face was gray, drawn. Hoarsely, he rasped: “I’ll send for her to come on board. Right away!”

****

The scientific world was stunned from the first. The aberration of Pluto shattered the whole painfully built structure of western science. The pulselike tremors of the earth, which soon became violent enough to be felt as one walked in the street, received no adequate explanation.

Scientists, for a time, took refuge in pitiful charges of inaccurate observation. But they could not long deny that the solar system was breaking up. The planet Neptune shifted unaccountably from its calculated position. One by one, the greater moons of Saturn and Uranus assumed a greenish color and departed from their orbits. The change, spreading inward through the solar system, overtook the four large moons of Jupiter.

The very universe of science collapsed.

The common man, however, at first was only slightly concerned. Business went on as usual; the public attention centered in turn upon unemployment, the stabilized dollar, the sensational murder of a Hollywood actress. There was no real panic, even when the “Earth-beat,” as the newspapers termed the oddly rhythmic tremors of the planet, became a chief topic of conversation.

Real panic began only with loss of life. Late in March a series of terrific earthquakes and accompanying tidal waves overwhelmed, one by one, Tokyo, Bombay, Rio de Janeiro, and Los Angeles. The cataclysms were progressively more violent. Hardly a paper, so long as papers were printed, lacked its story of a new holocaust.

Even then, the old order did not immediately fall. “Business as usual” was a catchword, though prices rocketed, governments and corporations crashed, and crime ran wild.

New leaders, radical movements, fantastic fads, won tremendous support. New religions, in particular, were widely and feverishly embraced. Ten thousand new prophets rose and were acclaimed; but the greatest following was won by the disciples of that strange oriental sect, the Cult of the Great Egg.

They, alone, professed to understand the change. They, alone, could offer bewildered humanity a rational, if fantastic, key to the astounding riddle of the crumbling solar system. Even though he promised only grim death—death as a sacred duty—L’ao Ku became the master of fanatic millions.

The mad tide of his increasing power, Barron Kane and Foster Ross recognized from the beginning, was sure to be turned against them. They had made a fortress of the steel mill. They hastened the construction of the space machine to the utmost. They could do no more.

IV.

The crisis came on the night of April 23^rd. The Moon was full. The skies, often of late strangely clouded, were clear over most of North America. Horror-stricken millions, that night, watched the change overtake the Moon. Few, having seen it, were ever completely sane again.

It was the madness born of that incredible vision of mind-breaking horror, guided by the fanatic genius of L’ao Ku, that led to the mass attacks on the space machine.

The Planet—so June Trevor had named the space machine, since it was to be the sole future home of humanity—lay still upon the concrete pier, inside the fence. And still it could not be moved; the motor-tube was yet incomplete.

Atop the gray, colossal sphere of steel was a little domed space roofed with crystal panels. It was reached by a short stair from a door below. Gleaming mechanisms crowded it, the intricate instruments designed for the control and navigation of the space machine.

On that fatal night, Foster Ross and June Trevor came into the little control room, Foster carrying Barron Kane in his arms. They made the wrecked body of the little scientist as comfortable as possible in an invalid chair amid the shining instruments.

“Last night,” Foster said, “observers saw cracks spreading across the Moon. Its crust is splitting. Beneath is something— It is greenish, incandescent. To-night, we shall see the end of the Moon!

“Watching the Moon, we can see the thing that, in a day or so, is going to happen to the Earth!”

June Trevor moved, quickly, anxiously, to his side. June was a tall girl, dark-eyed, with a grave, classic beauty. She smiled at Foster—it was a wan, anxious little smile. Apprehensive, she slipped her hand into his.

“Foster,” she whispered, “will it be very—terrible?”

“The terror of it,” he told her, “will not be in what we see. It will be in what it means. In the fate of the Moon, we see the fate of the Earth, of human civilization. But try, dear, not to be afraid.”

“I’m not—not exactly afraid,” she whispered, shivering a little. “But it’s dreadful to think of so many—perishing—”

Foster’s hand tightened on her own. “June,” he said huskily, “you must try not to think of that. We’ve each other, remember. Without you, I—I’d go mad!”

“And there’s a bigger thing,” she breathed. “We’ve a duty. To save the race!”

Foster turned out the lights, then, in the tiny room. They looked upward through the panels of heavy fused quartz. Flooded with moonlight, the sky was silver-gray; in the south were white, luminous feathers of cloud. The Moon was high in the east, a supernal disk of mottled gold.

They stared at it. June Trevor quivered; she pressed close against Foster’s lean body.

“There are cracks!” she murmured, breathless. “I see them! Like a net of wire.”

“They’re spreading,” muttered Foster. “And—I see a green something, breaking through.”

From his pillow came the queer, voiceless whisper of the paralyzed scientist: “The being is emerging.”

Breathless, speechless with fearful awe, the three watched the Moon—as maddened millions were watching it over all the continent.

They saw the familiar seas and ring craters of the lunar topography dissolve in a network of cracks, black and shining green. They saw the face of the Moon, for the first time in human memory, misty with clouds of its own.

They saw a thing come out of the riven planet—an unthinkable head appeared—

It broke through, in the region of the great crater Tycho. It was monstrously weird. Colossal, triangular, a beak came first, green and shining. Behind it were two ovoid, enormous patches, like eyes, glowing with lambent purple. Between and above them was an enigmatic organ, arched, crested; it was an unearthly spray of crimson flame.

Incredible wings—reaching out—stretching—

They pushed through the shattered, crumbling shell, which already had lost all likeness to the Moon of old. Wings, alone, could human beings term them. Yet, Foster thought, they were more than anything else like the eldritch, gorgeous streamers of the Sun’s corona, which is seen only at the moment of total eclipse, spreading from the black disk like two wings of supernal light. They were sheets of green flame. They shimmered with slow waves of light, that faded indistinctly at the edges, like the uncanny fans of the aurora. They were finely veined with bright silver.

A