Part 17 (1/2)
”Your purpose discovered?” asked Anita. ”What does that mean? Won't you tell us now? Twin queens for your future Mars, and you treat us like children!”
”That light-beam he so cleverly planted in Greater New York,” Venza hinted.
”Yes, I will tell you. Without me in New York and my men who went with these Wandlites to Ferrok-Shahn and Grebhar, the vital gravity beams could never successfully have been planted. The apparatus was complicated; you saw it. You saw the labor I had making the contact?”
”But what are the light-beams for?”
I listened, breathless, as he told them. The electronic beams could not be destroyed; a disintegration of the rock atoms had been set up.
With each rotation of the Earth it was sweeping the sky. From a great control station, Wandl was flinging attraction gravity upon that beam, using it as a monstrous lever upon the rotation of Earth. With every daily pa.s.sage now the force was being exerted. The rotation was slowing. In a few days it would stop, with the end of the beam drawn to Wandl and held there.
And the beams from Grebhar and Ferrok-Shahn were the same. Three giant chains! Then Wandl, traveling of its own gravitational volition, would withdraw from our solar system. The gravitational chains would pull the Earth, Venus and Mars after it!
t.i.tanic tow-ropes! The destruction, not of our worlds, but of all life upon them, for the cold of interstellar s.p.a.ce would leave no living organism. Three dead worlds; Wandl would draw them to her own Sun and then free them, send them, with new orbits, around the distant blazing star. Three new worlds brought home triumphantly by Wandl to join the little family of inhabited planets revolving around this other Sun.
Three fair and lovely worlds, warmed back by the other sunlight to be green mansions untenanted, ready to receive the new beings who would come and possess them.
9
”You, Snap!”
”Gregg! But how...?”
”Hus.h.!.+ They might hear us.”
”They can do more than that. They can almost hear you think.”
”Anita and Venza are here.”
”I know it. I was with them for a time. This accursed gravity! I can't walk.”
”Careful,” I whispered. ”You can crack your head on something with the least false step. Are they taking us ash.o.r.e?”
”I guess so. How did you happen...?”
”Tell you later.”
They had come for me in that dark pressure-port, taken me along a dim corridor of the s.h.i.+p, which evidently had landed a few moments before.
Then Snap, with strange figures around him, had been flung at me.
These weird beings! The brains were here, but not many; I saw half a dozen on the s.h.i.+p. They could move easily now. They bounced upon their small arms and legs, hitching with little leaps of a few feet. Close at hand they were gruesome; from a distance they had the aspect of thirty-inch ovoids, bouncing of their own volition. And I saw too that underneath, toward the back, was a shriveled body.
The other figures were wholly different; they seemed at first to be ten-foot, upright insects. The two legs were like stilts, the body narrow but with bulging chest. The neck was thin, holding the small round head, about the size of my own.
Words seem futile to picture this thing which was a man of Wandl.
There was no skin, but instead what seemed to be a glossy, hard brown sh.e.l.l. It was laid in scales; and upon the legs was a brown fuzz of stiff hair. There were many joints, both of the legs and the torso.
Clothing was worn; a single garment, hanging from a wide belt halfway down the legs seemed incongruous, fantastically aping humanity.
This was the worker, equipped by nature for mechanical tasks. There were not two arms, but at least ten. From what could have been called the shoulders, they were tentacles, half the length of an elephant's trunk, with many-fingered hands at the ends. From the waist depended huge lobster-like pincers; and from the chest and back the arms were smaller, each with a different type finger-claw.