The Collected Stories

by Earl

  Ten minutes later, dressed in the slightly-too-large spacesuit, Tommy lugged the can of fuel to a deep niche in the Magnetoid. He set a fuse and then dashed back to the ship. The airlock door cycled, and he was inside next to Jon Jarl.

  “Better brace yourself, kid!” Jon said.

  He grabbed a safety bar, and Tommy did the same. They didn’t have long to wait. The explosion lit up the viewport like high noon in Arizona, and the little rocketship lurched and bucked.

  When the glow died down and he could see clearly again, not only had the blast split the Magnetoid into bits, Jon realized, but it had flung the ship free and clear.

  As he fired the rockets and once more resumed course toward Earth, Jon spoke slowly.

  “You know, Tommy, if I had been alone in the ship, I would have been doomed. I couldn’t move an inch with my broken leg, let alone set that charge. So thank the stars you did stow away on my ship. You saved my life!”

  “Gee, I’m glad!” said Tommy. He took the ticket from his pocket. “This ticket, Lieutenant—can I tear it up now?”

  Jon’s face went stern. “No, kid! You still have to report to court on Earth and pay your hundred-dollar fine! Sorry!”

  Jon waited a few moments, watching the stricken look on the lad’s face, and then broke into a grin. “But by the way, Tommy, there’s another little law which states that anyone who saves the life a Space Policeman gets a reward of one thousand dollars! So you’ll have 900 dollars profit . . . enough, I think, to get you into the Space Patrol Training School.”

  The hitchhiker of space smiled.

  MIND OVER MATTER

  Titania, one of Uranus’ four moons, was 1,000 miles in diameter, and served as a mining outpost for Earth. As Lieutenant Jon Jarl of the Space Patrol slanted down in his rocketship, he wondered what was wrong. He had picked up an SOS from the miners, hours before, that they were in trouble.

  In a valley, he saw the huge open pit from which they dug valuable ores. Nearby was the village. But there was no mining going on. The machines lay idle. And not a soul could be seen in the village.

  Puzzled, and deciding to use caution, Jon landed his ship outside the village, screened by trees, and stepped out. The gravity was light, and the air thin and cold, but Jon was used to such extra-terrestrial conditions.

  He strode through the trees toward the village, but whirled, pulling his ray gun, at the sudden sound of a footstep behind him. Then Jon relaxed, smiling. A man was approaching him. One of the miners, no doubt, since he wore rough clothes and had a small pickaxe in his belt.

  “Hello,” said Jon. “What are you doing out in the woods? Why are you away from the village?”

  As the miner approached, John noticed a strange, cold light in his eyes. “You are of the Space Patrol?” the miner asked in a stiff voice. “You have come to help the village people?”

  “Why, yes,” nodded Jon, puzzled at the way he put it.

  “Then we will seize you!” barked the man suddenly. Several more miners now slipped from behind trees and converged on Jon. They all had a strange hostile look in their eyes.

  “Hey, what is this?” demanded Jon. “I’m here to help you. I’m a fellow Earthman, a human being.”

  “Our enemy!” hissed the leader, and they all jumped for Jon—only Jon wasn’t there. He had leaped back twenty feet, in the light gravity. One man moved to hurl his pickaxe at Jon, but Jon shot it out of his hand.

  “You men are acting mighty strange,” Jon snapped, holding them off. “I’m going to the village and find out the answer to all this.” He turned and made a dash for the village. The miners let him go, making no effort to pursue him.

  Another surprise lay in store for Jon in the village. As he passed the first aluminum hut, a ray spanged out, nearly clipping him. Men jumping him in the woods, and now men shooting at him in the village! What was going on here?

  But then the door of the hut opened, and a miner rushed out, with a glad cry. “A space policeman! We mistook you for one of the Mindies! Come in, come in! We sure are glad to see you!”

  Well, that was better! Jon went in. The door was carefully locked behind him. In the hut were ten miners, all haggard, worn, and unshaven, as though they had been on guard for days. The leader introduced himself as Dan Gallard.

  “Those men in the woods,” asked Jon, “why did they attack me? Why would they attack a fellow Earthman?”

  “Fellow Earthman, nothing!” retorted Gallard. “They aren’t fellow Earthmen at all.”

  “What?” Jon said. “But they are men—human beings! I saw them with my own eyes.”

  “Yes, human in form. But mentally, they are alien beings!”

  “You mean their minds are not human?”

  Gallard nodded. “Let me explain. The native beings of Titania are pure minds. They have no physical bodies. We call them Mindies. They are just minds, floating freely. They have the power to go into a human brain and take it over! We didn’t suspect this ourselves, till a week ago. Before that, a man now and then would seem to go crazy, run amok and dash off into the woods. We thought he just went bats. But what really happened was that a Mindie had crept into his brain and taken him over.”

  Jon was amazed, but then he nodded. There were many weird beings among the various worlds. “How many of your men have been taken over by the Mindies?”

  “Too many,” Gallard muttered. “A week ago, the Mindies came in a huge swarm and took over as many as they could. They got fifty men! That leaves only us ten in the village—LOOK OUT!”

  The last was a warning screech from Gallard. Suddenly he began wildly beating his arms about his head as if fighting an invisible nightmare. “A Mindie!” he yelled. “In this room! It must have slipped in when we let the Space Policeman in.”

  “But I don’t see anything—” began Jon. He stopped, for dimly now, he could see the vague misty ball that hung in the room. The misty ball of pure mind darted at Jon and wrapped itself around his head.

  Suddenly, a strong telepathic voice rang through his head. “Get out!” the voice said. “Get out, you Earthly mind! I am going to take your place and rule this Earthman’s body! Get out—get out!”

  Jon felt his mind slipping. No, not slipping—it felt as if his mind were being shoved out of his brain! Once that happened, he knew he would no longer be Lieutenant Jon Jarl, but a Mindie, an enemy of Earthmen!

  Some instinct told Jon there was only one way to fight the Mindie. He couldn’t hit it, or shoot it. He could only fight it with menial force!

  “No!” Jon yelled. “You can’t get in! You can’t get in! You can’t—!”

  Suddenly he was free. The Mindie, defeated, let out a sort of mental curse, and Jon could see its cloudy, round shape dart for the door. Gallard opened it, and the Mindie flew out.

  “Only too glad to get rid of it,” Gallard grunted. He turned to Jon.

  “Good thing you have a strong mind. Those with weak minds give in to the Mindies and get taken over.”

  Jon wiped the sweat off his brow and then said thoughtfully, “Those Mindies can’t be pure mental force. They must have some material form. They can only get in—and out—through open doors . . . Hmm.”

  Gallard peered out of the window. “They’ll probably attack soon. I mean the Mindies in Earthman bodies. They outnumber us now. One good attack and they could kill us off and take over the village for themselves. We’ve been expecting it for a long time. That’s why we sent out that SOS. Can you think of any way to save us?”

  Jon thought silently for a time. Then his expression brightened. “Do you have any batteries?” he asked.

  “Why yes,” Gallard said, looking puzzled. “We have batteries in every hut. We use them for heating purposes—electrical heat.” He pointed to a bank of large batteries at the back.

  Without explanation, Jon began hooking and unhooking wires.

  Not long after, the attack came. A wildly yelling horde of men streamed from the forest, swinging pickaxes, and tried to batter down
the door to get at the barricaded miners. Humans fighting humans! But half of them were not human. They were the alien Mindies.

  As the door broke open and the enemy charged in, Jon was ready. “Stand back!” he yelled to his still-human companions. Then he extended a bare wire and pulled a switch. A long streak of electrical energy sprang forth and hit one of the attackers. A surprised look came over the face, replacing the alien look, and then the body fell to the floor.

  Jon shot his electrical spark into the other Mindies, and down they all went. The attackers outside could not see what was happening, and they swarmed in over their falled comrades, but Jon’s spark got them all.

  “You licked them!” Gallard said, awed. “How did you do it?”

  “Simple enough,” Jon explained. “I figured the Mindies must be a ball of something—maybe just loose atoms or electrons. And an electrical charge can disperse loose atoms. In short, I electrocuted the Mindies!”

  Gallard waved sadly at the bodies. “Too bad they had to die.”

  But at that moment one of the men sat up, bewildered. “Uh . . . hello,” he said. “What happened? Last I remember, I was at the mine working, and then all went blank!”

  “They’re alive!” cried Gallard. “And their minds are back!”

  “Their minds never really left,” Jon corrected. “The Mindies only gained control of the human brain, submerging the human mind. Then, when the Mindie got electrocuted, the miner’s human mind was free again. The electrical shock was strong enough to kill the Mindies, but not powerful enough to harm the rugged human bodies they were in.”

  “Then all the men will recover and be normal human beings again,” Gallard said thankfully. “And now we know how to fight off the Mindies—with electricity! Lt. Jarl, all I can say is—”

  “Skip it,” Jon said with a grin. “I’m hungry. How about some chow?”

  THE WORLD STEALERS

  Lieutenant Jon Jarl of the Space Patrol was cruising between Mars and Earth when the radio message came from Headquarters.

  “You deserve a well-earned rest, Lieutenant Jarl. You are granted two weeks’ leave. You are off duty as of this moment. Enjoy yourself!”

  “Yippee!” said Jon exuberantly, grabbing the controls and setting his course for Earth. “Me for a nice two weeks at Miami Beach. And the most I’m going to do is shoo the flies away.”

  It was some hours later that Jon peered through the front viewport at Earth, thinking of his coming vacation—but Earth wasn’t there! Had he for once set his controls wrong? Such a dumb error. But he was puzzled as he checked the instruments. According to them, Earth should have been directly in front of him.

  Either the instruments were wrong—or Earth had moved out of its orbit.

  “Of course, Earth didn’t move out of its orbit.” Jon grinned at the ridiculous thought. But then his face went slack. “Or did it?”

  With shaking fingers, he used the space octant, triangulating with the Sun and Mars, and finally located Earth. The octant dropped from his fingers. “Great Jupiter!” Jon gasped, completely stunned. “The Earth actually is out of its orbit!”

  It was crazy! Insane! Impossible! How could a great big world like Earth, obeying the age-old laws of gravity, be slipping out of its orbit? Then another stunning thought hit Jon.

  “It can’t happen by itself! Therefore—someone is causing it! Someone is moving a world!”

  But how? Who would do such a thing? And why? Nobody could move a world out of its orbit unless he was a greater scientist and mastermind than Earth had ever known. It would take billions upon billions of horsepower. Who or what had a machine like that?

  Scanning the region nearest Earth with his small space telescope, Jon suddenly spotted a tiny black object to one side. It was small in proportion to huge Earth, but it was actually a gigantic object, as Jon soon saw when he rocketed close.

  It was a spaceship, over a mile long! And from its stern came out a long beam of some amazing radiation that seemed to be towing Earth along, like a barge behind a tug.

  Jon radioed Headquarters. “Attention! Huge space tug pulling Earth out of its orbit.”

  The answer came back in a bellow. “Don’t you think we know it? Good lord, the whole universe is changing around us as we leave Earth’s orbit around the Sun. Stop that ship, Lieutenant! We can’t get a cruiser there for hours. Stop that ship!”

  “And this,” groaned Jon, “is my vacation!”

  But the next instant, he shot his tiny rocketship close to the huge monster. He tried to signal it by radio, but no response came. Grimly, Jon opened fire with his ray-cannon. He gave it full power, enough to blast a mountain to atoms.

  But the giant alien craft showed not a dent or mark and kept right on towing Earth away!

  Jon shot forward and landed on top the giant ship, like a flea on an elephant. He had to get inside and find out who—or what—was doing this, and why . . .

  As Jon stepped out of his ship’s airlock in a spacesuit, the surface of the huge spacecraft dropped out from under his feet. A portion of the hull had opened, like a trap door, and the artificial gravity was pulling him in. Jon alighted in a huge room and found himself face to face with the ship’s operators.

  Jon blinked. He had seen many unusual-looking creatures on other planets, but these aliens were the strangest of all—for they were exactly like Earthmen! And yet Jon could see they weren’t Earthmen at all, by their odd clothing of spun metals. And their eyes—they were cold, ruthless, and infinitely intelligent.

  One alien had been aiming a small gadget at Jon’s head. Now he put it down and said, “I used the mind probe and learned your language from your thoughts. Now I can speak to you. We saw you approach and try to attack us with your pitiful little gun. It made us laugh.”

  Jon boiled at the arrogance of the alien. “Who are you?” he demanded. “Where did you come from? And why are you moving Earth from its orbit? Don’t you realize our world is filled with our people?”

  “Is it?” retorted the alien. “Too bad. You see, we want your world. I’m afraid your people will just have to die, that’s all. As we pull Earth away from the Sun, they’ll all freeze to death.”

  Jon groaned, wishing this were a nightmare, but he knew it wasn’t.

  The alien went on. “We’re from Alpha Centauri, the star nearest to your solar system. We have only three planets around our Sun. We need more space to live in. You have nine worlds. Surely, you can spare us one of them?”

  “Stealing a world!” gasped Jon. “So that’s what you’re doing! But, good heavens, why did you pick Earth? That’s our best world . . .

  “Naturally,” nodded the alien. “That’s why we want it. But enough of this. You piddling fools can’t stop us, you know. Our tractor-beam, fed by protonic power, will tow Earth all the way to Alpha Centauri. Then we’ll put Earth into an orbit around our Sun, and colonize it.” He jerked his thumb, giving directions to the other aliens. “Now toss this Earthling out. Don’t bother killing him. He can’t harm us.”

  Jon was hustled away and thrust out through the trap door near his rocketship. Slowly, draggingly, he climbed in, turned on his rockets and took off. Like the crack of doom, a voice rang through his head—“Earth is being stolen! We can’t stop these mighty scientists! The human race is doomed!”

  Even if a space-cruiser came, it could do nothing. Not even all the fleets of battle-wagons that kept peace in the space lanes could do anything. The Alpha Centaurians had protonic power, which Jon vaguely knew to be immeasurably greater than atomic power!

  Jon was close to madness in that moment. All he could do was stare helplessly and watch Earth being dragged away. Before long, Earth would be out in the chilly wastes of space, away from the Sun, and all life on the green planet would be snuffed out.

  Yes, Jon nearly went mad! Or did he really go mad? For all of a sudden he was yelling and screeching at the top of his voice: “I’ll stop you! I’m only one man with one little ship, but I’ll stop you, watch
and see!”

  And like a madman, he shot his tiny ship to a position between the alien ship and Earth. Below him he could see the strange pulsating “tractor-beam” which was towing Earth away. He opened his bomb-bay and dropped down a small black object, straight into the beam.

  It was an atomic bomb, such as the Space Police carried for extreme emergency. But how could it work? How could it do anything to an intangible beam? It was sheer madness, of course . . .

  But something did happen. The atomic bomb hit the beam and exploded. And suddenly, the beam turned a fiery, ghastly green. At the Earth end, it let go and curled! It curled and shot back to the alien ship. Like a giant whip wielded by some world-sized monster, it hit the alien ship and sheared it in half. The ship’s crew spilled into open space and died. Then the two broken halves of the alien ship drifted off into space, lifeless.

  The menace was over! Earth was no longer being dragged away. But what would happen now? Jon turned to watch the globe of Earth. And then, relieved, he saw it slowly go back—back to its old orbit. Vaguely, Jon knew the reason for that. The alien ship had been fighting the Sun’s gravity, dragging Earth away from it. Now, as the Sun’s gravity reasserted itself, Earth went back to its age-old orbit. It was something like a rubber band being stretched, and then snapping back. In a few hours, Earth would be back where it belonged, and all would be normal.

  The madness had gone out of Jon’s eyes.

  Quietly, he spoke into his radio, reporting to Headquarters. “Aliens from Alpha Centauri were using protonic power to tow Earth. But protonic power is derived from protons. And an atomic bomb utilizes atoms. When the protons and atoms met, it was like two bulls crashing head-on. That finished the aliens. That is all.”

  But before he snapped the set off, he added—“P.S. I’m going to Earth on my vacation, as before. But I’m taking five extra hours to make up for the delay caused by the aliens.”