With an air suggestive of condescension, they placed the men in the car, and vaulted in themselves. In a moment the great flying machine arose from Tycho’s floor and darted toward the ramparts that made up its edge. They paused on a broken segment of the crater’s rim.
The second machine, smaller than the first, was brought from the workroom then, and placed on the rugged ridge. Kennard, Craig and Norcott watched them from the door of the vehicle.
When they had the device arranged satisfactorily, they sprang hastily into the flying machine and sent it high above the moon, some distance to the left of the crater. And there they hovered, watching Tycho intently.
Suddenly there was a vague suggestion of crimson light on the red-metal machine on the rampart. This grew rapidly to a cloud of brilliant fire that completely covered the device that had created it. Then there was a flash on the summit of the central cone, spreading like wild-fire, in a few moments covering the entire floor of Tycho. And then, a split second later, it leaped out into space, a fifty-four mile wide pillar of crimson light that sprang unerringly across space to the earth—the crater a reflector to cast the light through the void!
“SOMETHING must be done immediately,” Kennard exclaimed in a determined voice. “We can’t let that terrible destruction continue!”
Craig and Norcott nodded, a worried frown on the pale, earnest face of each. They had just come from the observatory in the vehicle’s top—the Red-men were still there—where they had been watching the earth through the powerful telescope of the giants. They had seen the terrible destruction that had followed the advent of the red beam on the Terrestrial sphere. And they realized now with overwhelming force that they alone stood between the inhuman Red-men and the possible destruction of earth.
“If we could only get at the machine on the rampart,” Craig said thoughtfully. “That’s the key to it all. If we could destroy that, we’d cut off the ray.”
“Yes,” agreed Norcott, “but we can’t get at it. With the walls restored to their normal, opaque selves, and the door—if we can call it that—closed by some unexplainable method, we’re helpless. We’re parked only a short distance from the machine, but we might just as well be miles away.”
“Well, let’s get rid of the bean-poles upstairs, first,” Craig suggested. “Then we can work unmolested. We can rush them, and overcome them by force of numbers.”
“Oh, yes, that’ll be easy,” snorted Kennard. “They’re only about three times taller than we are. Fat chance we’d have!”
There was a period of silence then, while the three wracked their brains for an idea. Norcott seemed to be struggling with himself. Finally his jaw set at a tenacious angle, and he began speaking in his low, measured voice.
“I have a plan that I’m sure will succeed,” he said, “if we can get past the first difficulty. It will be necessary for us to get the Red-men outside this machine. With that done, the rest will be comparatively easy.
“Here’s the plan: After all of us are outside, I’ll remain close to the Red-men, and make myself as conspicuous as possible. In some way we’ll have to keep their attention away from the car. You two, at the first opportunity, will start toward it, get inside, and pull down that big lever. You’ve watched the Red-men often enough to know something about the running of the machine.
“When you start moving away, slowly so that they can follow, I’ll smash the apparatus on the rampart to bits. And finally,” he concluded vehemently, “if you’re able to do so, you can double back and smash these redskinned brutes with their own vehicle.”
“Absolutely no!” exploded Kennard. “It’s a good idea, but we can’t use it, you’d be taking all the risk!”
“Well, why shouldn’t I? You and Craig are more necessary to the running of the Rocket than I am, anyway. You, yourself, actually run it; Craig is needed to make necessary repairs—whereas, I’m only an astronomer. If there’s any risk to take, I’ll take it!”
After a rather heated discussion, they finally agreed to Norcott’s plan, neither Kennard nor Craig being able to suggest a better one. But none of the three could think of a way to get the Red-men out of the vehicle.
A few hours after the discussion, the beings solved the problem for them. Attired in their crimson armor, they descended from the observatory, and immediately opened the strange door. Hastily Kennard, Craig and Norcott put into place their spherical helmets; they hadn’t removed their space-suits.
As they followed the giant figures toward Tycho’s walls, the three men felt nervous and apprehensive; nor was it any wonder, for the fate of the world would possibly be decided by the result of their venture, not to consider the danger to themselves. Norcott was well up in the lead, a foot or two ahead of the Red-men. Craig and Kennard lagged behind. As the three leaders drew closer to the crater, they fell farther and farther back.
And then when the crimson beings leaned over the device that controlled the beam, the men turned, and with two gigantic, sixty foot leaps, reached the vehicle. It was a forty foot leap upward to the door of the car, but they cleared it, catching with their hands, and drawing themselves inside.
As they turned toward the controls, Kennard caught a glimpse of a towering, red-clad figure hurling himself over the ground at express-plane speed. With a wild leap the scientist caught a lever and bore down with all his weight. All too slowly it descended toward the floor.
The whirling machine responded instantly—but with amazing results. The vehicle lurched wildly; there was a sickening thud; then he and Craig were thrown to the floor. They regained their feet almost instantly, and turned as one man toward the portion of the wall that had held the great, circular opening. It was not there! Where it had been was now an unbroken expanse of transparent, crimson metal.
That single lever had closed the door, rendered the walls invisible, and started the machine whirling somewhere at a break-neck speed! Far away in the rear, the beam from Tycho was already vanishing, being lost to sight because of the curvature of the moon’s surface.
“Quick, Craig!” Kennard cried, “give me a hand!”
Together they grasped a second lever and strove to undo what they had done. But it was to no avail—their combined weight had no effect upon it. Meanwhile, they continued on and on, flashing over the moon like a shot.
“Damn it, Nev!” Kennard almost sobbed, “I made a mess of it all . . . Poor Dave, left with those brutes! . . . But I had to do something, for the Red-men were almost upon us . . . Poor Dave!”
“Don’t take it to heart, John,” Craig counselled. “It wasn’t your fault.” He rested his hand on his friend’s shoulder.
Since starting so precipitously, the huge vehicle had been hurtling through darkness; suddenly they entered a vast expanse of brilliant, crimson light. Below them lay a landscape that was strangely familiar.
“What on earth!” exclaimed Craig. “Why, John, we’ve returned to the original pillar of light!” Kennard nodded morosely, still frowning in self-condemnation.
On through the crimson glow they sped, watching the landscape flash by beneath them. Then suddenly the towering mountains, the close-clustered craters, and dead sea-bottoms vanished, and they felt that they were rising rapidly. With undiminished speed they were moving up that pillar of light, in a vehicle they could not control, flashing into—infinity!
CHAPTER IV
Into Infinity
FASTER grew the pace of the vehicle—up—up they hurtled—scores of miles—hundreds——A crushing weight bore down upon Kennard and Craig, chaining them motionless to the floor. In a moment, however, the intolerable burden lifted, and all sense of motion vanished.
Then they became aware of a faint tingling, an almost imperceptible throbbing of the vehicle—and a hum as of a faint echo of a distant tempest. It was not the vibration that had preceded their journey across the moon; the floor of the vehicle was motionless, solid. Not vibration!, but a tingling that seemed to pervade every atom of the red-metal craft.
&nb
sp; Suddenly the men realized that there was a faint tingling within themselves! A tiny, barely noticeable whirring—yet it brought a sense of nausea. Kennard reeled dizzily; swayed; Craig drew him down to a sitting posture on the floor.
Slowly the nausea passed; cobwebs of bewilderment swept from their brains. Together they arose, aware now of a strange lightness, a sense of ethereal freedom—as though age-old fetters had been torn from them. In a moment this too passed, and they were back to normalcy.
They removed their spherical helmets in order that they might converse.
“Whew!” ejaculated Craig. “Some jag! If we could bottle that stuff, we’d make a fortune in twenty minutes in any city in the U.S.A.” He laughed rather wildly.
There was no answering light of mirth in Kennard’s eyes. His thoughts were of a lone astronomer left to face the revenge of two grotesque, inhuman creatures; of a world in the grip of a crushing beam of radiance that, at that very moment, was stamping out the lives of men, women, and children. Under his troubled gaze, Craig’s jocularity vanished.
“Nev,” Kennard cried in sudden desperation, “we’ve got to get back! We can’t leave Norcott like this! And the beam from Tycho—unless it’s taken away in a very short time, it’ll crush out the life of humanity! We must—must get back!”
Craig opened his mouth to reply, but closed it without speaking. In silence he joined Kennard in his efforts to check their flight. The latter had attacked the huge machine of the Red-men in a frenzy of effort, striving by brute force to make the machinery yield to his will. But it resisted their efforts stubbornly, the great levers seemingly locked in immobile rigidity.
He was about to desist, despairing of ever controlling the huge vehicle, when it occurred to him to try to manipulate the great, notched discs that played so prominent a part in the machine’s structure. Choosing one at random, he grasped it, and strove to move it with all his strength.
Suddenly it yielded—and Kennard and Craig were thrown back violently by a whirling, crimson vortex of force that leaped from a huge, crimson sphere in the heart of the machine! Hurled back by a force that, paradoxically, seemed to attract them as it repelled.
For a moment they were aware of a rapid dwindling of the machine before them; the ceiling of the great chamber rushing down to meet them; the walls moving inward—then conscious thought left them.
A roaring chaos within their minds—their sense reeling, staggering—and they crashed to the floor, unconscious.
It seemed only a moment to Kennard that he was senseless. He lay on the floor, blinking up at a conical beam of light that converged in a point a few feet above his head. For a moment he stared at it dazedly; then in a flash he remembered what had happened. The turning of the notched disc, the stabbing cone of crimson light, his strange sensations—and the lapse into unconsciousness.
Slowly, carefully avoiding contact with the ray, he crawled to the machine, now strangely smaller than it had been, reached up toward the offending disc, and turned it back to its former position. The crimson beam vanished.
As Kennard rose to his feet, he gasped in mystification. The machine was larger, or—he suddenly realized the truth—he, himself was larger! Craig, lying a short distance away, was fully twenty-two feet tall, far more of a giant than the Red-men, for he was proportionately broad. And he, Kennard, was even taller. Somehow that ray had caused their bodies to increase in size to a tremendous degree. Fortunately, in falling they had dropped out of its range; if they hadn’t—Kennard shuddered—they would probably have expanded until they filled the vehicle, pushing against the sides; bursting it——
At that moment Craig sat up and blinked. An expression of incredulous astonishment overspread his face. In answer to his amazed questioning, Kennard told what had evidently occurred.
When they had adjusted themselves to some extent to their unusual state, an adjustment that required a complete alteration of their viewpoint, Craig offered a suggestion.
“Say, John,” he said thoughtfully, “perhaps we’ll have better success in attempting to control the machinery, now that it has shrunken to a sensible size—or rather, since we’ve expanded. We can try, at any rate.”
Kennard nodded. “Yes,” he said slowly, “it probably would make a difference, but I don’t think we’ll try it anyway. For one thing, we don’t know what forces may be locked up in that maze of metal; besides, we’re headed for the world of the Red-men. I’ve been thinking that, even though we had been successful in snuffing out the beam in Tycho, the menace wouldn’t be removed anyway. This pillar of light that we’re in is evidently a sort of tunnel that the Red-men use to travel through; as long as it’s in existence, the earth will be in danger. Now that we’re as large, in fact larger, than the Red-men, and are headed toward their world, we may be able to do something that will make the earth safe from future invasions.
“I don’t really believe we could stop the vehicle anyway; I’ve an idea that the lever I pulled down back there on the moon was an emergency device that automatically sent the vehicle back to the crimson pillar, prepared it for its trip back to the world it came from, and started it on its return journey. I may be wrong, but I believe that the device automatically locked itself against interference.”
It was some minutes after Kennard had ceased speaking that Craig called to his attention a faint, luminous, white patch beyond the wall of the vehicle. Together they peered through the transparent metal. The blackness of space seemed but a few feet away; conditions had evidently changed at some time since their start up the crimson beam. Either the pillar of light had contracted, or else the vehicle had expanded to an enormous size. Kennard, thinking of their own phenomenal growth, was inclined to favor the latter idea.
The patch of light spread out rapidly, and as it spread it resolved itself into a galaxy of stars! Giant suns, white, blue, yellow, red—gigantic, fiery orbs whirling through the void. They flashed past on every side, close-clustered spheres of flame. Perilously close to the vehicle, some seemed to be—perilously close—Kennard and Craig fell back as an angry red star flashed toward them.
There was an insignificant explosion, intensely bright, on the outer surface of the crimson pillar—and they were past that point, speeding on through the illimitable void. A flash—and a great sun snuffed out! A monstrous world of incandescent gas—a collision a few feet from the vehicle—and a gigantic star destroyed! Incredulous, bewildered, amazed, Kennard and Craig stared wide-eyed into space.
“What on earth!” gasped Craig hoarsely. Kennard motioned for silence.
Another patch of light lay ahead. In a moment they plunged past. A universe of stars—great suns blazing alone, giant binaries turning about a common center of gravity, nebulae swirling like silver mist—yet they were small, were but little, glowing balls in the blackness of space a few feet away! A moment, and they were lost in the distance.
Another cloudy haze of light, smaller still, whirled past. Its suns were infinitely minute—pin-points of fire—enduring, whirling sparks! And beyond lay a vast expanse of unbroken blackness.
Craig turned to his companion, visibly shaken by the tremendous, celestial panorama of dwindling stars that they had passed. “John, what—what can it mean?” He gestured toward the void. “Stars like baseballs, marbles, pin-points—what’s happening?”
Kennard was less perturbed than Craig, and far more thoughtful. He replied in a slow, musing voice.
“An explanation presents itself, that, in spite of its apparent difficulty of comprehension, seems to be the logical solution. I’ve read of a theory of the construction of the whole material universe that seems to hold the answer. It involves what might be called a”—he groped for the word—“a succession of realms of existence. A theory of infra- and supra-worlds, unending.
“Our own realm with its myriad suns, galaxies, island universes—one phase of existence. The atoms that make up everything in our realm, with their protons and planetary electrons—another plane. The inconceivable m
inute bodies that form the electrons, still another realm. And so on endlessly, down into the infinitesimal.
“Then, according to the theory, there are realms of unfathomable largeness. Our universe as a whole, forming the protons and electrons, and atoms, of a super universe. And that, in turn, a component part of a proportionately greater realm—on and on into infinity in size.
“A mind-staggering conception—unending space both larger and smaller than the space we know. Yet is it so very preposterous, or even unbelievable? We know very little beyond our own small phase of existence; who can tell what future knowledge will reveal?
“I’m inclined to believe that that theory is correct, and that we’re rushing through space, constantly increasing in size, headed for a supra-world—the home of the Red-men!”
For a moment or two Kennard was silent then, lost in thought. Craig, too, said nothing; his mind was trying to grasp the immensity of the amazing theory that Kennard had advanced. A moment or two, then the latter spoke again.
“There’s only one thing that puzzles me, and that is the factor of time. According to the theory that I mentioned, space and time in the microcosm are reduced in the same proportion. For example, as one scientist has computed it, a thousand million years on an electron would be equivalent to a millionth of one terrestral second. Obviously, then, in the supra-realm the time condition would be the reverse; Earth could be destroyed countless times in a fleeting, supra-world second.
“If the theory I suggested is true, there is but one possible explanation. In some inexplicable way, the Red-men have conquered the secret of time as well as size. This must be so, because if it isn’t, how can we account for the pillar of light pointing fixedly toward the moon? Still—but what does it matter, anyway? The theory is so involved and complex, that I think we had better drop it entirely.”
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