The Golden Age of Science Fiction Novels Vol 03

by Anthology

  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!

  CHAPTER II.

  THE UNKNOWN ENEMY.

  When, in February, 1941, Professor James Newland issued this remarkable statement, my paper sent me at once to interview him. He was at this time at the head of the Harvard observatory staff. He lived with his son and daughter in Cambridge. His wife was dead. I had been acquainted with the professor and his family for some time. I first met his son, Alan, during our university days at Harvard. We liked each other at once, and became firm friends--possibly because we were such opposite physical types, as sometimes happens.

  Alan was tall, lean and muscular--an inch or so over six feet--with the perfect build of an athlete. I am dark; Alan was blond, with short, curly hair, and blue eyes. His features were strong and regular. He was, in fact, one of the handsomest men I have ever seen. And yet he acted as though he didn't know it--or if he did, as though he considered it a handicap. I think what saved him was his ingenious, ready smile, and his retiring, unassuming--almost diffident--manner.

  At the time of the events I am describing Alan was twenty-two--about two years younger than I. It was his first year out of college. He had taken a scientific course and intended to join his father's staff.

  Beth and Alan were twins. I was tremendously interested in Beth even then. She seemed one of the most worth-while girls I had ever met. She was a little wisp of femininity, slender and delicate, hardly more than five feet one or two. She had beautiful golden hair and an animated, pretty face, with a pert little snub nose. She was a graduate of Vassar, and planned to take up chemistry as a profession, for she had the same scientific bent as her father and brother.

  I called upon Professor Newland the evening of the day his statement was published, and found all three discussing it.

  "You want me to talk for publication, don't you, Bob Trevor?" the professor asked suddenly, after we had exchanged a few pleasantries.

  He was a wiry little man, about sixty, smooth-shaven, with sparse gray hair, a rugged face of strong character, and a restless air of energy about him. He was an indefatigable worker; indeed, I am confident that, for any single continuous period of work without sleep, he could have run Alan and me into the ground and still have been comparatively fresh.

  "You want an exclusive follow-up story from me to-night, don't you?" he repeated.

  I admitted that I did.

  "What you'll get won't be just what you expect. Look at this."

  He pulled one of the evening papers toward him vigorously. "They think it is humorous. There--read that."

  The item to which he pointed was a sprightly account of the weird beings that might shortly arrive from Mercury.

  "They think it's a joke--some of them. There's another--read that."

  The attitude of the press was distinctly an inclination to treat the affair from the humorous side. I had seen indications of that during the day at the office.

  "Look here, Bob"--the professor swept all the papers aside with his hand. "You put it to them this way. Make them see this is not a prediction of the end of the world. We've had those before--nobody pays any attention to them, and rightly so. But this Mercutian Light is more than a theory--it's a fact. We fought it last November, and we'll have to fight it again next month. That's what I want to make them realize."

  "They'll think it is worth being serious about," Alan put in, "if one of those lights drop into Boston or New York--especially if it happens to play in a horizontal direction instead of vertical."

  We went into the whole subject thoroughly, and the professor gave me a second signed statement in which he called upon the nations of the world to prepare for the coming peril.

  The actual characteristics of the Mercutian Light we had discussed before several times. A good deal had been printed about it during the previous December--without, as I have said, attracting much public attention. The two meteors had been examined. They were found to be of a mineral that could have originated on Mercury. They were burned and pitted like other meteorites by their passage through the earth's atmosphere.

  Of the light itself Professor Newland had already given his opinion. It was, he said, some unknown form of etheric vibration. It radiated heat very slightly, but it had the peculiarity of generating intense heat in anything it touched directly.

  "You'd better explain that, father," said Beth, when we reached this point in our summary that evening.

  "Heat is the vibration of molecules of matter," the professor began.

  I nodded.

  "Make it clear when you write it up, Bob," Alan put in. "It's like this. All molecules are in motion--the faster the motion, the hotter the substance, and vice versa."

  "And this Mercutian Light," Beth added, "has the power of enormously increasing the molecular vibration of anything it comes in contact with--"

  "But it doesn't radiate much heat itself," Alan finished.

  Professor Newland smiled. "The old man doesn't have much of a show, does he?"

  Alan sat down somewhat abashed, but Beth remained standing beside her father, listening intently to everything he said.

  "This light I conceive to be the chief weapon of warfare of the Mercutians," the professor went on. "There has been some talk of those two meteors being signals. That's all nonsense. They were not signals--they were missiles. It was an act of aggression."

  I tried to get him to give some idea of what the inhabitants of Mercury might be like, for that was what my editor chiefly desired.

  At first he would say nothing along those lines.

  "That is pure speculation," he explained. "And very easy speculation, too. Any one can allow his imagination to run wild and picture strange beings of another world. I don't predict they will actually land on the earth--and I have no idea what they will look like if they do land. As a matter of fact, they will probably look very much like ourselves. I see no reason to doubt it."

  "Like us?" I ejaculated.

  "Why not?" said Alan. "Conditions on Mercury are not fundamentally different from here. We don't have to conceive any very extraordinary sort of being to fill them."

  "Here's what you can tell your paper," said the professor abruptly. "Take it down."

  I to
ok out my notebook, and he dictated briskly.

  "Regarding the possible characteristics of inhabitants of Mercury, it is my conception that intelligent life--let us say, human life--wherever it exists in our universe does not greatly differ in character from that of our own planet. Mars, Venus, Mercury, even Neptune, are relatively close. I believe the Creator has constructed all human life on the same general plan.

  "I believe that, being neighbors--if I may be permitted the expression--it is intended that intercourse between the planets should take place. That we have been isolated up to the present time is only because of our ignorance--our inability to bridge the gap. I believe that migration, friendship, commerce, even war, between the inhabitants of different planets of our solar system was intended by Almighty God--and, in good time, will come to pass.

  "This is not science; and yet science does not contradict it, in my opinion. Human life on Mercury, Venus or Mars may need bodies taller, shorter, heavier, lighter, more fragile or more solid than ours. The organs will differ from ours, perhaps, but not materially so. The senses will be the same.

  "In a word, I believe that nearly all the range of diversity of human life existing on any of the planets exists now on this earth, or has existed in the past, or will exist in the future through our own development, or at most the differences would not be greater than a descent into our animal kingdom would give us.

  "Mercutians may have the sense of smell developed to the point of a dog; the instinct of direction of the homing pigeon; the eyes of a cat in the dark, or an owl in the light; but I cannot conceive of them being so different that similar illustrations would not apply.

  "I believe the Creator intends intercourse of some kind, friendly or unfriendly, to take place between the worlds. As China was for centuries, so for eons we of this earth have been isolated. That time is past. The first act was one of aggression. Let us wait for the next calmly but soberly, with full realization of the danger. For we may be--indeed, I think we are--approaching the time of greatest peril that human life on this earth has ever had to face!"

  CHAPTER III.

  THE LANDING OF THE INVADERS.

  March 8, 1941, was the date at which Mercury was again to be in inferior conjunction--at her closest point to the earth since her transit over the face of the sun on November 11 of the previous year. During February--after Professor Newland's statements--the subject received a tremendous amount of publicity. Some scientific men rallied to Professor Newland's support; others scouted the idea as absurd.

  Officially, the governments of the world ignored the matter entirely. In general, the press, editorially, wrote in a humorous vein, conjuring up many ridiculous possibilities of what was about to happen. The public followed this lead. It was amused, interested to a degree; but, as a mass, neither apprehensive nor serious--only curious.

  In some parts of the earth--among the smaller Latin nations particularly--some apprehension was felt. But even so, no one knew what to do about it--where to go to avoid the danger--for the attack, if it came at all, was as likely to strike one country as another.

  The first week in March arrived with public interest steadily increasing. Mercury, always difficult of observation, presented no spectacle for the public gaze and imagination to feed upon. But, all over the world, there were probably more eyes turned toward the setting and rising sun during that week than ever had been turned there before.

  Professor Newland issued no more statements after that evening I have described. He was taken with a severe cold in the latter part of February, and as Beth was in delicate health and did not stand the Northern winters well, the whole family left for a few months' stay at their bungalow home in Florida. They were quite close to the little village of Bay Head, on the Gulf coast. I kept in communication with them there.

  The 8th of March came and passed without a report from any part of the earth of the falling of the Mercutian meteors. Satirical comment in the press doubled. There was, indeed, no scientific report of any unusual astronomical phenomena, except from the Harvard observatory the following morning. There Professor Newland's assistant, Professor Brighton, stated he had again observed a new "star"--an interplanetary vehicle, as Professor Newland described it. Only a single one had been observed this time. It was seen just before dawn of the 9th.

  Then, about 4 P.M., Atlantic time, on the afternoon of the 9th, the world was electrified by the report of the landing of invaders in the United States. The news came by wireless from Billings, Montana. An interplanetary vehicle of huge size had landed on the desert in the Shoshone River district of northern Wyoming, west of the Big Horn Mountains.

  This strange visitor--it was described as a gleaming, silvery object perhaps a hundred feet in diameter--had landed near the little Mormon settlement of Byron. The hope that its mission might be friendly was dispelled even in the first report from Billings. The characteristic red and green light-fire had swept the country near by--a horizontal beam this time--and the town of Byron was reported destroyed, and in all likelihood with the loss of its entire population.

  The Boston Observer sent me to Billings almost immediately by quadruplane. I arrived there about eight o'clock on the evening of the 10th. The city was in a turmoil. Ranchers from the neighboring cattle country thronged its streets. A perfect exodus of people--Mormons and oil men from Shoshone country, almost the entire populations of Cody, Powell, Garland, and other towns near the threatened section, the Indians from the Crow Reservation at Frannie--all were streaming through Billings.

  The Wyoming State Airplane Patrol, gathered in a squadron by orders from Cheyenne, occasionally passed overhead, flashing huge white searchlights. I went immediately to the office of the Billings Dispatch. It was so crowded I could not get in. From what I could pick up among the excited, frightened people of Billings, and the various bulletins that the Dispatch had sent out during the day, the developments of the first twenty-four hours of Mercutian invasion were these:

  Only a single "vehicle"--we called it that for want of a better name--had landed. Airplane observation placed its exact position on the west bank of the Shoshone River, about four miles southwest of Byron and the same distance southeast of Garland. The country here is typically that of the Wyoming desert--sand and sagebrush--slightly rolling in some places, with occasional hills and buttes.

  The Chicago, Burlington and Quincy Railroad runs down its spur from the Northern Pacific near Billings, passes through the towns of Frannie--near the border of Montana and Wyoming--and Garland, and terminates at Cody. This line, running special trains throughout the day, had brought up a large number of people. During the afternoon a bomb of some kind--it was vaguely described as a variation of the red and green light-rays--had destroyed one of the trains near Garland. The road was now open only down to Frannie.

  The town of Byron, I learned, was completely annihilated. It had been swept by the Mercutian Light and destroyed by fire. Garland was as yet unharmed. There was broken country between it and the Mercutian invaders, and the rays of the single light which they were using could not reach it directly.

  Such, briefly, was the situation as I found it that evening of the 10th. In Billings we were sixty-five miles north of the Mercutian landing place. What power for attack and destruction the enemy had, we had no means of determining. How many of them there were; how they could travel over the country; what the effective radius of their light-fire was; the nature of the "bomb" that had destroyed the train on the C., B. and Q. near the town of Garland--all those were questions that no one could answer.

  Billings was, during those next few days, principally a gathering place and point of departure for refugees. Yet, so curiously is the human mind constituted, underneath all this turmoil the affairs of Billings went on as before. The stores did not close; the Billings Dispatch sent out its reports; the Northern Pacific trains from east and west daily brought their quota of reporters, picture men and curiosity seekers, and took away all who had sense enough to go. The C., B. and Q.
continued running trains to Frannie--which was about fifteen miles from the Mercutian landing place--and many of the newspaper men, most of those, in fact, who did not have airplanes, went there.

  That first evening in Billings, Rolland Mercer--a chap about my own age, who had brought me from the East in one of the Boston Observer's planes--and I, decided on a short flight about the neighboring country to look the situation over. We started about midnight, a crisp, cloudless night with no moon. We had been warned against venturing into the danger zone; several of the Wyoming patrol and numbers of private planes had been seen to fall in flames when the light struck them.

  We had no idea what the danger zone was--how close we dared go--but decided to chance it. To fly sufficiently high for safety directly over the Mercutians appeared difficult, since the light-fire already had proven effective at a distance of several miles at least. We decided not to attempt that, but merely to follow the course of the C., B. and Q. southwest to Cody, then to circle around to the east, and thence back north to Billings, passing well to the east of the Mercutians.

  We started, as I have said, about midnight, rising from the rolling prairie back of Billings. We climbed five hundred feet and, with our searchlight playing upon the ground beneath, started directly for Frannie. We passed over Frannie at about eight hundred feet, and continued on the C., B. and Q. line toward Garland. We had decided to pass to a considerable extent to the west of Garland, to be farther away from the danger, and then to strike down to Cody.

  We were flying now at a speed close to a hundred and forty miles an hour. Off to the left I could see the red and green beam of the single light of the Mercutians; it was pointing vertically up into the air, motionless. Something--I do not know what--made me decide to turn off our searchlight.

  I looked behind us. Some miles away, and considerably nearer the Mercutians than we were, I saw the light of another plane. I was watching it when suddenly the red and green beam swung toward it, and a moment later picked it up. I caught a fleeting glimpse of what I took to be a little biplane. It remained for an instant illuminated by the weird red and green flare; then the Mercutian Light swung back to its vertical position. A second later the biplane burst into flames and fell.