He somehow managed to close the tiny switch.
Phobar stands before the metallic
invaders of the ravished solar
system.
Raiders of the Universes
By Donald Wandrei
It was in the thirty-fourth
century that the dark star
began its famous conquest,
unparalleled in stellar annals.
Phobar the astronomer discovered
it. He was sweeping
the heavens
with one of the
newly invented
multi-powered
Sussendorf comet-hunters
when something caught
his eye—a new star of great brilliance
in the foreground of the
constellation Hercules.
For the rest of the night, he cast
aside all his plans
and concentrated
on the one star.
He witnessed an
unprecedented
event. Mercia’s
nullifier had just been invented, a curious
and intricate device, based on
four-dimensional geometry, that
made it possible to see occurrences
in the universe which had hitherto
required the hundreds of years
needed for light to cross the intervening
space before they were visible
on Earth. By a hasty calculation
with the aid of this invention,
Phobar found that the new star was
about three thousand light-years
distant, and that it was hurtling
backward into space at the rate of
twelve hundred miles per second.
The remarkable feature of his discovery
was this appearance of a
fourth-magnitude star where none
had been known to exist. Perhaps
it had come into existence this
very night.
On the succeeding night, he was
given a greater surprise. In line
with the first star, but several
hundred light-years nearer, was a
second new star of even more
brightness. And it, too, was hurtling
backward into space at approximately
twelve hundred miles
per second. Phobar was astonished.
Two new stars discovered within
twenty-four hours in the same part
of the heavens, both of the fourth
magnitude! But his surprise was as
nothing when on the succeeding
night, even while he watched, a
third new star appeared in line
with these, but much closer.
At midnight he first noticed a
pin-point of faint light; by one
o’clock the star was of eighth magnitude.
At two it was a brilliant
sun of the second magnitude blazing
away from Earth like the others
at a rate of twelve hundred miles
per second. And on the next evening,
and the next, and the next,
other new stars appeared until
there were seven in all, every one
on a line in the same constellation
Hercules, every one with the same
radiance and the same proper motion,
though of varying size!
Phobar had broadcast his discovery
to incredulous astronomers;
but as star after star appeared
nightly, all the telescopes
on Earth were turned toward one
of the most spectacular cataclysms
that history recorded. Far out in
the depths of space, with unheard-of
regularity and unheard-of precision,
new worlds were flaming up
overnight in a line that began at
Hercules and extended toward the
solar system.
Phobar’s announcement was immediately
flashed to Venus, Mars,
Jupiter, and Saturn, the other members
of the Five World Federation.
Saturn reported no evidence of the
phenomena, because of the interfering
rings and the lack of Mercia’s
nullifier. But Jupiter, with a
similar device, witnessed the phenomena
and announced furthermore
that many stars in the neighborhood
of the novæ had begun to
deviate in singular and abrupt
fashion from their normal positions.
There was not as yet much popular
interest in the phenomena.
Without Mercia’s nullifier, the stars
were not visible to ordinary eyes,
since the light-rays would take
years to reach the Earth. But every
astronomer who had access to Mercia’s
nullifier hastened to focus his
telescope on the region where extraordinary
events were taking
place out in the unfathomable gulf
of night. Some terrific force was at
work, creating worlds and disturbing
the positions of stars within a
radius already known to extend
billions and trillions of miles from
the path of the seven new stars.
But of the nature of that force,
astronomers could only guess.
Phobar took up his duties
early on the eighth night. The
last star had appeared about five
hundred light-years distant. If an
eighth new star was found, it
should be not more than a few
light-years away. But nothing happened.
All night Phobar kept his
telescope pointed at the probable
spot, but search as he might, the
heavens showed nothing new. In
the morning he sought eagerly for
news of any discovery made by
fellow-watchers, but they, too, had
found nothing unusual. Could it be
that the mystery would now fade
away, a new riddle of the skies?
The next evening, he took up his
position once more, training his
telescope on the seven bright stars,
and then on the region where an
eighth, if there were one, should
appear. For hours he searched the
abyss in vain. He could find none.
Apparently the phenomena were
ended. At midnight he took a last
glance before entering on some
tedious calculations. It was there!
In the center of the telescope a
faint, hazy object steadily grew in
brightness. All his problems were
forgotten as Phobar watched the
eighth star increase hourly. Closer
than any other, closer even than
Alpha Centauri, the new sun appeared,
scarcely three light-years
away across the void surrounding
the solar system. And all the while
he watched, he witnessed a thing
no man had ever before seen—the
birth of a world!
By one o’clock, the new star
was of fifth magnitude; by
two it was of the first. As the faint
flush of dawn began to come toward
the close of that frosty,
moonless November night, the new
star was a great white-hot object
more brilliant than any other star
in the heavens. Phobar knew that
when its light finally reached Earth
so that ordinary eyes could see, it
would be the most beautiful object
in the night sky. What was the
reason for these unparalleled births
of worlds and the terrifying mathematical
precision that characterized
them?
Whatever the cosmic force behind,
it was progressing toward the
solar system. Perhaps it would even
disturb the balance of the planets.
The possible chance of such an
event had already called the attention
of some astronomers, but the
whole phenomenon was too inexplicable
to permit more than speculation.
The next evening was cloudy.
Jupiter reported nothing new except
that Neptune had deviated from
its course and tended to pursue an
erratic and puzzling new orbit.
Phobar pondered long over this
last news item and turned his attention
to the outermost planet on
the succeeding night. To his surprise,
he had great difficulty in locating
it. The ephemeris was of
absolutely no use. When he did
locate Neptune after a brief search,
he discovered it more than eighty
million miles from its scheduled
place! This was at one-forty. At
two-ten he was thunderstruck by a
special announcement sent from the
Central Bureau to every observatory
and astronomer of note throughout
the world, proclaiming the discovery
of an ultra-Plutonian planet.
Phobar was incredulous. For centuries
it had been proved that no
planet beyond Pluto could possibly
exist.
With feverish haste, Phobar
ran to the huge telescope
and rapidly focused it where the
new planet should be. Five hundred
million miles beyond Neptune was
a flaming path like the beam of a
giant searchlight that extended exactly
to the eighth solar planet.
Phobar gasped. He could hardly
credit the testimony of his eyes.
He looked more closely. The great
stream of flame still crossed his
line of vision. But this time he
saw something else: at the precise
farther end of the flame-path
a round disk—dark!
Beyond a doubt, a new planet of
vast size now formed an addition
to the solar group. But that planet
was almost impervious to the illuminating
rays of the sun and was
barely discernible. Neptune itself
shone brighter than it ever had,
and was falling away from the sun
at a rate of twelve hundred miles
per second.
All night Phobar watched the
double mystery. By three o’clock,
he was convinced, as far as lightning
calculations showed, that the
invader was hurtling toward the
sun at a speed of more than ten
million miles an hour. At three-fifteen,
he thought that vanishing
Neptune seemed brighter even than
the band of fire running to the invader.
At four, his belief was certainty.
With amazement and awe,
Phobar sat through the long, cold
night, watching a spectacular and
terrible catastrophe in the sky.
As dawn began to break and the
stars grew paler, Phobar turned
away from his telescope, his brain
awhirl, his heart filled with a great
fear. He had witnessed the devastation
of a world, the ruin of a member
of his own planetary system
by an invader from outer space.
As dawn cut short his observations,
he knew at last the cause of Neptune’s
brightness, knew that it was
now a white-hot flaming sun that
sped with increased rapidity away
from the solar system. Somehow,
the terrible swathe of fire that
flowed from the dark star to Neptune
had wrenched it out of its
orbit and made of it a molten inferno.
At dawn came another bulletin
from the Central Bureau. Neptune
had a surface temperature of
3,000° C, was defying all laws of
celestial mechanics, and within three
days would have left the solar system
for ever. The results of such
a disaster were unpredictable. The
entire solar system was likely to
break up. Already Uranus and
Jupiter had deviated from their
orbits. Unless something speedily
occurred to check the onrush of the
dark star, it was prophesied that
the laws governing the planetary
system would run to a new balance,
and that in the ensuing chaos the
whole group would spread apart
and fall toward the gulfs beyond
the great surrounding void.
What was the nature of the great
path of fire? What force did it
represent? And was the dark star
controlled by intelligence, or was
it a blind wanderer from space that
had come by accident? The flame-path
alone implied that the dark
star was guided by an intelligence
that possessed the secret of inconceivable
power. Menace hung in the
sky now where all eyes could see
in a great arc of fire!
The world was on the brink of
eternity, and vast forces at whose
nature men could only guess were
sweeping planets and suns out of
its path.
The following night was again
cold and clear. High in the heavens,
where Neptune should have been,
hung a disk of enormously greater
size. Neptune itself was almost invisible,
hundreds of millions of
miles beyond its scheduled position.
As nearly as Phobar could estimate,
not one hundredth of the sun’s rays
were reflected from the surface of
the dark star, a proportion far below
those for the other planets.
Phobar had a better view of the
flame-path, and it was with growing
awe that he watched that
strange swathe in the sky during
the dead of night. It shot out from
the dark star like a colossal beam
or huge pillar of fire seeking a
food of worlds.
With a shiver of cold fear he
saw that there were now three of
the bands: one toward Neptune, one
toward Saturn, and one toward the
sun. The first was fading, a milky,
misty white; the second shone almost
as bright as the first one previously
had; and the third, toward
the sun, was a dazzling stream of
orange radiance, burning with a
steady, terrible, unbelievable intensity
across two and a half billions
of miles of space! That gigantic
flare was the most brilliant
sight in the whole night sky, an
awful and abysmally prophetic flame
that made city streets black with
staring people, a radiance whose
grandeur and terrific implication of
cosmic power brought beauty and
the fear of doom into the heavens!
Those paths could not be explained
by all the physicists
and all the astronomers in the
Five World Federation. They possessed
the properties of light, but
they were rigid bands like a tube
or a solid pillar from which only
the faintest of rays escaped; and
they completely shut off the heavens
behind them. They had, moreover,
singular properties which could not
be described, as if a new force
were embodied in them.
Hour after hour humanity watched
the spectacular progress of the
dark star, watched those mysterious
and threatening paths of light that
flowed from the invader. When
dawn came, it brought only a great
fear and the oppression of impending
disaster.
In the early morning, Phobar
slept. When he awoke, he felt refreshed
and decided to take a short
walk in the familiar and peaceful
light of day. He never took that
walk. He opened the door on a
kind of dim and reddish twilight.
Not a cloud hung in the sky, but
the sun shone feebly with a dull
red glow, and the skies were dull
and somber, as if the sun were
dying as scientists had predicted
it eventually would.
Phobar stared at the dull heavens
in a daze, at the foreboding atmosphere
and the livid sun that
burned faintly as through a smoke
curtain. Then the truth flashed on
him—it was the terrible path of
fire from the dark star! By what
means he could not guess, by what
appalling control of immense and
inconceivable forces he could not
even imagine, the dark star was
sucking light and perhaps more
than light from the sun!
Phobar turned and shut the
door. The world had seen its
last dawn. If the purpose of the
dark star was destruction, none of
the planets could offer much opposition,
for no weapon of theirs was
effective beyond a few thousand
miles range at most—and the dark
star could span millions. If the invader
passed on, its havoc would
be only a trifle smaller, for it had
already destroyed two members of
the solar system and was now striking
at its most vital part. Without
the sun, life would die, but even
with the sun the planets must rearrange
themselves because of the
destruction of balance.
Even he could hardly grasp the
vast and abysmal catastrophe that
without warning had swept from
space. How could the dark star
have traversed three thousand light-years
of space in a week’s time?
It was unthinkable! So stupendous
a control of power, so gigantic a
manipulation of cosmic forces, so
annihilating a possession of the
greatest secrets of the universe, was
an unheard-of concentration of
energy and knowledge of stellar
mechanics. But the evidence of his
own eyes and the path of the dark
star with flaming suns to mark its
progress, told him in language
which could not be refuted that the
dark star possessed all that immeasurable,
titanic knowledge. It
was the lord of the universe. There
was nothing which the dark star
could not crush or conquer or
change. The thought of that immense,
supreme power numbed his
mind. It opened vistas of a civilization,
and a progress, and an unparalleled
mastery of all knowledge
which was almost beyond conception.
Already the news had raced
across the world. On Phobar’s
television screen flashed scenes of
nightmare; the radio spewed a
gibberish of terror. In one day
panic had swept the Earth; on the
remaining members of the Five
World Federation the same story
was repeated. Rioting mobs drowned
out the chant of religious fanatics
who hailed Judgment Day. Great
fires turned the air murky and
flame-shot. Machine guns spat regularly
in city streets; looting, murder,
and fear-crazed crimes were
universal. Civilization had completely
vanished overnight.
The tides roared higher than they
ever had before; for every thousand
people drowned on the American
seaboards, a hundred thousand
perished in China and India. Dead
volcanoes boomed into the worst
eruptions known. Half of Japan
sank during the most violent earthquake
in history. Land rocked, the
seas boiled, cyclones howled out
of the skies. A billion eyes focused
on Mecca, the mad beating of tom-toms
rolled across all Africa, women
and children were trampled to death
by the crowds that jammed into
churches.
“Has man lived in vain?” asked
the philosopher.
“The world is doomed. There is
no escape,” said the scientist.
“The day of reckoning has come!
The wrath of God is upon us!”
shouted the street preachers.
In a daze, Phobar switched off
the bedlam and, walking like a man
asleep, strode out, he did not care
where, if only to get away.
The ground and the sky were
like a dying fire. The sun seemed
a half-dead cinder. Only the great
swathe of radiance between the sun
and the dark star had any brilliance.
Sinister, menacing, now
larger even than the sun, the invader
from beyond hung in the
heavens.
As Phobar watched it, the air
around him prickled strangely. A
sixth sense gave warning. He turned
to race back into his house. His
legs failed. A fantastic orange light
bathed him, countless needles of
pain shot through his whole body,
the world darkened.
Earth had somehow been
blotted out. There was a brief
blackness, the nausea of space and
of a great fall that compressed eternity
into a moment. Then a swimming
confusion, and outlines which
gradually came to rest.
Phobar was too utterly amazed
to cry out or run. He stood inside
the most titanic edifice he could
have imagined, a single gigantic
structure vaster than all New York
City. Far overhead swept a black
roof fading into the horizon, beneath
his feet was the same metal
substance. In the midst of this
giant work soared the base of a
tower that pierced the roof thousands
of feet above.
Everywhere loomed machines,
enormous dynamos, cathode tubes
a hundred feet long, masses and
mountains of such fantastic apparatus
as he had never encountered.
The air was bluish, electric. From
the black substance came a phosphorescent
radiance. The triumphant
drone of motors and a terrific
crackle of electricity were everywhere.
Off to his right purple-blue
flames the size of Sequoia trees
flickered around a group of what
looked like condensers as huge as
Gibraltar. At the base of the central
tower half a mile distant Phobar
could see something that resembled
a great switchboard studded with
silver controls. Near it was a series
of mechanisms at whose purpose
he could not even guess.
All this his astounded eyes
took in at one confused glance.
The thing that gave him unreasoning
terror was the hundred-foot-high
metal monster before him. It
defied description. It was unlike
any color known on Earth, a blinding
color sinister with power and
evil. Its shape was equally ambiguous—it
rippled like quicksilver,
now compact, now spread out in a
thousand limbs. But what appalled
Phobar was its definite possession
of rational life. More, its very
thoughts were transmitted to him
as clearly as though written in his
own English:
“Follow me!”
Phobar’s mind did not function—but
his legs moved regularly. In
the grasp of this mental, metal
monster he was a mere automaton.
Phobar noticed idly that he had to
step down from a flat disk a dozen
yards across. By some power, some
tremendous discovery that he could
not understand, he had been transported
across millions of miles of
space—undoubtedly to the dark star
itself!
The colossal thing, indescribable,
a blinding, nameless color, rippled
down the hall and stooped before
a disk of silvery black. In the
center of the disk was a metal seat
with a control board near-by.
“Be seated!”
Phobar sat down, the titan flicked
the controls—and nothing happened.
Phobar sensed that something
was radically wrong. He felt the
surprise of his gigantic companion.
He did not know it then, but the
fate of the solar system hung on
that incident.
“Come!”
Abruptly the giant stooped,
and Phobar shrank back, but
a flowing mass of cold, insensate
metal swept around him, lifted him
fifty feet in the air. Dizzy, sick,
horrified, he was hardly conscious
of the whirlwind motion into which
the giant suddenly shot. He had a
dim impression of machines racing
by, of countless other giants,
of a sudden opening in the walls of
the immense building, and then a
rush across the surface of metal
land. Even in his vertigo he had
enough curiosity to marvel that
there was no vegetation, no water,
only the dull black metal everywhere.
Yet there was air.
And then a city loomed before
them. To Phobar it seemed a city
of gods or giants. Fully five miles
it soared toward space, its fantastic
angles and arcs and cubes and pyramids
mazing in the dimensions of
a totally alien geometry. Tier by
tier the stupendous city, hundreds
of miles wide, mounted toward a
central tower like the one in the
building he had left.
Phobar never knew how they got
there, but his numbed mind was at
last forced into clarity by a greater
will. He stared about him. His
captor had gone. He stood in a
huge chamber circling to a dome
far overhead. Before him, on a dais
a full thousand feet in diameter,
stood—sat—rested, whatever it might
be called—another monster, far
larger than any he had yet seen,
like a mountain of pliant thinking,
living metal. And Phobar knew he
stood in the presence of the ruler.
The metal Cyclops surveyed
him as Phobar might have surveyed
an ant. Cold, deadly, dispassionate
scrutiny came from
something that might have been
eyes, or a seeing intelligence locked
in a metal body.
There was no sound, but inwardly
to Phobar’s consciousness
from the peak of the titan far
above him came a command:
“What are you called?”
Phobar opened his lips—but even
before he spoke, he knew that the
thing had understood his thought:
“Phobar.”
“I am Garboreggg, ruler of Xlarbti,
the Lord of the Universes.”
“Lord of the Universes?”
“I and my world come from one
of the universes beyond the reach
of your telescopes.” Phobar somehow
felt that the thing was talking
to him as he would to a new-born
babe.
“What do you want of me?”
“Tell your Earth that I want the
entire supply of your radium ores
mined and placed above ground
according to the instructions I
give, by seven of your days hence.”
A dozen questions sprang to
Phobar’s lips. He felt again that
he was being treated like a child.
“Why do you want our radium
ores?”
“Because they are the rarest of
the elements on your scale, are absent
on ours, and supply us with
some of the tremendous energy we
need.”
“Why don’t you obtain the ores
from other worlds?”
“We do. We are taking them
from all worlds where they exist.
But we need yours also.”
Raiders of the universe! Looting
young worlds of the precious radium
ores! Piracy on a cosmic
scale!
“And if Earth refuses your demand?”
For answer, Garboreggg rippled
to a wall of the room and
pressed a button. The wall dissolved,
weirdly, mysteriously. A
series of vast silver plates was revealed,
and a battery of control
levers.
“This will happen to all of your
Earth unless the ores are given us.”
The titan closed a switch. On the
first screen flashed the picture of a
huge tower such as Phobar had seen
in the metal city.
Garboreggg adjusted a second
control that was something like a
range-finder. He pressed a third
lever—and from the tower leaped a
surge of terrific energy, like a bolt
of lightning a quarter of a mile
broad. The giant closed another
switch—and on the second plate
flashed a picture of New York City.
Then—waiting. Seconds, minutes
drifted by. The atmosphere became
tense, nerve-cracking. Phobar’s eyes
ached with the intensity of his
stare. What would happen?
Abruptly it came.
A monstrous bolt of energy
streaked from the skies, purple-blue
death in a pillar a fourth of
a mile broad crashed into the heart
of New York City, swept up and
down Manhattan, across and back,
and suddenly vanished.
In fifteen seconds, only a molten
hell of fused structures and incinerated
millions of human beings
remained of the world’s first city.
Phobar was crushed, appalled,
then utter loathing for this soulless
thing poured through him. If only—
“It is useless. You can do nothing,”
answered the ruler as though
it had grasped his thought.
“But why, if you could pick me
off the Earth, do you not draw the
radium ores in the same way?”
Phobar demanded.
“The orange-ray picks up only
loose, portable objects. We can and
will transport the radium ores here
by means of the ray after they have
been mined and placed on platforms
or disks.”
“Why did you select me from all
the millions of people on Earth?”
“Solely because you were the first
apparent scientist whom our cosmotel
chanced upon. It will be up
to you to notify your Earth governments
of our demand.”
“But afterwards!” Phobar burst
out aloud. “What then?”
“We will depart.”
“It will mean death to us! The
solar system will be wrecked with
Neptune gone and Saturn following
it!”
Garboreggg made no answer.
To that impassive, cold, inhuman
thing, it did not matter if a
nation or a whole world perished.
Phobar had already seen with what
deliberate calm it destroyed a city,
merely to show him what power
the lords of Xlarbti controlled. Besides,
what guarantee was there
that the invaders would not loot
the Earth of everything they
wanted and then annihilate all life
upon it before they departed? Yet
Phobar knew he was helpless, knew
that the men of Earth would be
forced to do whatever was asked of
them, and trust that the raiders
would fulfill their promise.
“Two hours remain for your stay
here,” came the ruler’s dictum to
interrupt his line of thought. “For
the first half of that period you
will tell me of your world and
answer whatever questions I may
ask. During the rest of the interval,
I will explain some of the things
you wish to learn about us.”
Again Phobar felt Garboreggg’s
disdain, knew that the metal giant
regarded him as a kind of childish
plaything for an hour or two’s
amusement. But he had no choice,
and so he told Garboreggg of the
life on Earth, how it arose and
along what lines it had developed;
he narrated in brief the extent of
man’s knowledge, his scientific
achievements, his mastery of weapons
and forces and machines, his
social organization.
When he had finished, he felt as
a Stone Age man might feel in the
presence of a brilliant scientist of
the thirty-fourth century. If any
sign of interest had shown on the
peak of the metallic lord, Phobar
failed to see it. But he sensed an
intolerant sneer of ridicule in Garboreggg,
as though the ruler considered
these statements to be only
the most elementary of facts.
Then, for three quarters of an
hour, in the manner of one lecturing
an ignorant pupil, the giant
crowded its thought-pictures into
Phobar’s mind so that finally he
understood a little of the raiders
and of the sudden terror that had
flamed from the abysses into the
solar system.
“The universe of matter that
you know is only one of the
countless universes which comprise
the cosmos,” began Garboreggg. “In
your universe, you have a scale of
ninety-two elements, you have your
color-spectrum, your rays and waves
of many kinds. You are subject to
definite laws controlling matter and
energy as you know them.
“But we are of a different universe,
on a different scale from
yours, a trillion light-years away in
space, eons distant in time. The
natural laws which govern us differ
from those controlling you. In our
universe, you would be hopelessly
lost, completely helpless, unless you
possessed the knowledge that your
people will not attain even in millions
of years. But we, who are so
much older and greater than you,
have for so long studied the nature
of the other universes that we can
enter and leave them at will, taking
what we wish, doing as we wish,
creating or destroying worlds whenever
the need arises, coming and
hurtling away when we choose.
“There is no vegetable life in
our universe. There is only the
scale of elements ranging from 842
to 966 on the extension of your
own scale. At this high range,
metals of complex kinds exist.
There is none of what you call
water, no vegetable world, no animal
kingdom. Instead, there are
energies, forces, rays, and waves,
which are food to us and which
nourish our life-stream just as pigs,
potatoes, and bread are food to you.
“Trillions of years ago in
your time-calculation, but
only a few dozen centuries ago
in ours, life arose on the giant
world Kygpton in our universe. It
was life, our life, the life of my
people and myself, intelligence
animating bodies of pliant metal,
existing almost endlessly on an
almost inexhaustible source of
energy.
“But all matter wears down. On
Kygpton there was a variety of
useful metals, others that were
valueless. There was comparatively
little of the first, much of the second.
Kygpton itself was a world
as large as your entire solar system,
with a diameter roughly of
four billion miles. Our ancestors
knew that Kygpton was dying, that
the store of our most precious element
Sthalreh was dwindling. But
already our ancestors had mastered
the forces of our universe, had
made inventions that are beyond
your understanding, had explored
the limits of our universe in space-cars
that were propelled by the
free energies in space and by the
attracting-repelling influences of
stars.
“The metal inhabitants of Kygpton
employed every invention they
knew to accomplish an engineering
miracle that makes your bridges
and mines seem but the puny efforts
of a gnat. They blasted all
the remaining ores of Sthalreh from
the surface and interior of Kygpton
and refined them. Then they created
a gigantic vacuum, a dead-field in
space a hundred million miles away
from their world. The dead-field
was controlled from Kygpton by
atomic-projectors, energy-absorbers,
gravitation-nullifiers and cosmotels,
range-regulators, and a host of
other inventions.
“As fast as it was mined and extracted,
the Sthalreh metal was
vaporized, shot into the dead-field
by interstellar rays, and solidified
there along an invisible framework
which we projected. In a decade of
our time, we had pillaged Kygpton
of every particle of Sthalreh. And
then in our skies hung an artificial
world, a manufactured sphere, a
giant new planet, the world you
yourself are now on—Xlarbti!
“We did not create a solid
globe. We left chambers,
tunnels, passageways, storerooms
throughout it or piercing it from
surface to surface. Thus, even as
Xlarbti was being created, we provided
for everything that we needed
or could need—experimental laboratories,
sub-surface vaults, chambers
for the innumerable huge ray dynamos,
energy storage batteries, and
other apparatus which we required.
“And when all was ready, we
transferred by space-cars and by
atomic individuation all our necessities
from Kygpton to the artificial
world Xlarbti. And when everything
was prepared, we destroyed the
dead-field by duplicate control from
Xlarbti, turned our repulsion-power
on full against the now useless
and dying giant world Kygpton,
and swung upon our path.
“But our whole universe is incredibly
old. It was mature before
ever your young suns flamed out
of the gaseous nebulæ, it was decaying
when your molten planets
were flung from the central sun, it
was dying before the boiling seas
had given birth to land upon your
sphere. And while we had enough
of our own particular electrical
food to last us for a million of
your years, and enough power to
guide Xlarbti to other universes,
we had exhausted all the remaining
energy of our entire universe. And
when we finally left it to dwindle
behind us in the black abysses of
space, we left it, a dead cinder,
devoid of life, vitiated of activity,
and utterly lacking in cosmic forces,
a universe finally run down.
“The universes, as you may know,
are set off from each other by
totally black and empty abysms, expanses
so vast that light-rays have
not yet crossed many of them.
How did we accomplish the feat of
traversing such a gulf? By the
simplest of means: acceleration.
Why? Because to remain in our
universe meant inevitable death.
We gambled on the greatest adventure
in all the cosmos.
“To begin with, we circled our
universe to the remotest point
opposite where we wanted to leave
it. We then turned our attraction
powers on part way so that the
millions of stars before us drew us
ahead, then we gradually stepped
up the power to its full strength,
thus ever increasing our speed. At
the same time, as stars passed to
our rear in our flight, we turned our
repulsion-rays against them, stepping
that power up also.
“Our initial speed was twenty-four
miles per second. Midway in
our universe we had reached the
speed of your light—186,000 miles
per second. By the time we left
our universe, we were hurtling at
a speed which we estimated to be
1,600,000,000 miles per second. Yet
even at that tremendous speed, it
took us years to cross from our
universe to yours. If we had encountered
even a planetoid at that
enormous rate, we would probably
have been annihilated in white-hot
death. But we had planned well, and
there are no superiors to our stellar
mechanics, our astronomers, our
scientists.
“When we finally hurtled from
the black void into your universe,
we found what we had only dared
hope for: a young universe, with
many planets and cooling worlds
rich in radium ores, the only element
in your scale that can help to
replenish our vanishing energy.
Half your universe we have already
deprived of its ores. Your Earth
has more that we want. Then we
shall continue on our way, to loot
the rest of the worlds, before
passing on to another universe. We
are a planet without a universe.
We will wander and pillage until
we find a universe like the one we
come from, or until Xlarbti itself
disintegrates and we perish.
“We could easily wipe out all
the dwellers on Earth and
mine the ores ourselves. But that
would be a needless waste of our
powers, for since you can not defy
us, and since the desire for life
burns as high in you as in us and
as it does in all sensate things in
all universes, your people will save
themselves from death and save us
from wasting energy by mining the
ores for us. What happens afterwards,
we do not care.
“The seven new suns that you
saw were dead worlds that we used
as buffers to slow down Xlarbti.
The full strength of our repulsion-force
directed against any single
world necessarily turns it into a
liquid or gaseous state depending
on various factors. Your planet
Neptune was pulled out of the solar
system by the attraction of Xlarbti’s
mass. The flame-paths, as you call
them, are directed streams of energy
for different purposes: the one to
the sun supplies us, for instance,
with heat, light, and electricity,
which in turn are stored up for
eventual use.
“The orange-ray that you felt is
one of our achievements. It is
similar to the double-action pumps
used in some of your sulphur mines,
whereby a pipe is inclosed in a
larger pipe, and hot water forced
down through the larger tubing returns
sulphur-laden through the
central pipe. The orange-ray instantaneously
dissolves any portable
object up to a certain size,
propels it back to Xlarbti through
its center which is the reverse ray,
and here reforms the object, just
as you were recreated on the disk
that you stood on when you regained
consciousness.
“But I have not enough time to
explain everything on Xlarbti to
you; nor would you comprehend it
all if I did. Your stay is almost up.
“In that one control-panel lies all
the power that we have mastered,”
boasted Garboreggg with supreme
egotism. “It connects with the individual
controls throughout
Xlarbti.”
“What is the purpose of some of
the levers?” asked Phobar, with a
desperate hope in his thoughts.
A filament of metal whipped
to the panel from the lord
of Xlarbti. “This first section duplicates
the control-panel that you
saw in the laboratory where you
opened your eyes. Do not think
that you can make use of this information—in
ten minutes you will
be back on your Earth to deliver
our command. Between now and
that moment you will be so closely
watched that you can do nothing
and will have no opportunity to
try.
“This first lever controls the
attraction rays, the second the repulsion
force. The third dial regulates
the orange-ray by which you
will be returned to Earth. The
fourth switch directs the electrical
bolt that destroyed New York City.
Next it is a device that we have
never had occasion to use. It releases
the Krangor-wave throughout
Xlarbti. Its effect is to make
each atom of Xlarbti, the Sthalreh
metal and everything on it, become
compact, to do away with the empty
spaces that exist in every atom.
Theoretically, it would reduce
Xlarbti to a fraction of its present
size, diminish its mass while its
weight and gravity remained as before.
“The next lever controls matter
to be transported between here and
the first laboratory. Somewhat like
the orange-ray, it disintegrates the
object and reassembles it here.”
So that was what Phobar’s captor
had been trying to do with
him back there in the laboratory!
“Why was I not brought here by
that means?” burst out Phobar.
“Because you belong to a different
universe,” answered Garboreggg.
“Without experimentation, we cannot
tell what natural laws of ours
you would not be subject to, but
this is one of them.” A gesture of
irritation seemed to come from him.
“Some laws hold good in all the
universes we have thus far investigated.
The orange-ray, for instance,
picked you up as it would
have plucked one of us from the
surface of Kygpton. But on Xlarbti,
which is composed entirely of
Sthalreh, your atomic nature and
physical constitution are so different
from ours that they were unaffected
by the energy that ordinarily
transports objects here.”
Thus the metal nightmare went
rapidly over the control-panel. At
length Phobar’s captor, or another
thing like him, reentered when
Garboreggg flicked a strange-looking
protuberance on the panel.
“You will now be returned to
your world,” came the thought of
Garboreggg. “We shall watch you
through our cosmotel to see that
you deliver our instructions. Unless
the nations of Earth obey us, they
will be obliterated at the end of
seven days.”
A wild impulse to smash that
impassive, metallic monster passed
from Phobar as quickly as it came.
He was helpless. Sick and despairing,
he felt the cold, baffling-colored
metal close around him
again; once more he was borne
aloft for the journey to the laboratory,
from there to be propelled
back to Earth.
Seven days of grace! But
Phobar knew that less than
ten minutes remained to him. Only
here could he possibly accomplish
anything. Once off the surface of
Xlarbti, there was not the remotest
chance that all the nations of Earth
could reach the invaders or even
attempt to defy them. Yet what
could he alone do in a week, to
say nothing of ten minutes?
He sensed the amused, supercilious
contempt of his captor. That
was really the greatest obstacle,
this ability of theirs to read
thought-pictures. And already he
had given them enough word-pictures
of English so that they could
understand….
In the back of Phobar’s mind the
ghost of a desperate thought suddenly
came. What was it he had
learned years ago in college?
Homer—”The Odyssey”—Plutarch….
From rusty, disused corners
of memory crept forth the half-forgotten
words. He bent all his
efforts to the task, not daring to
think ahead or plan ahead or visualize
anything but the Greek words.
He felt the bewilderment of his
captor. To throw it off the track,
Phobar suddenly let an ancient
English nursery rime slip into his
thoughts. The disgust that emanated
from his captor was laughable;
Phobar could have shouted
aloud. But the Greek words….
Already the pair had left the
mountain-high titan city far
behind; they rippled across the
smooth, black surface of Xlarbti,
and bore like rifle bullets down on
the swiftly looming laboratory. In
a few minutes it would be too late
forever. Now the lost Greek words
burst into Phobar’s mind, and, hoping
against hope, he thought in
Greek word-pictures which his captor
could not understand. He
weighed chances, long shots. Into
his brain flashed an idea…. But
they were upon the laboratory; a
stupendous door dissolved weirdly
into shimmering haze; they sped
through.
Phobar’s hand clutched a bulge
in his pocket. Would it work?
How could it?
They were beyond the door now
and racing across the great expanse
of the floor, past the central tower,
past the control-panel which he had
first seen….
And as if by magic there leaped
into Phobar’s mind a clear-cut,
vivid picture of violet oceans of
energy crackling and streaking
from the heavens to crash through
the laboratory roof and barely miss
striking his captor behind. Even
as Phobar created the image of that
terrific death, his captor whirled
around in a lightning movement, a
long arm of metal flicking outward
at the same instant to drop Phobar
to the ground.
Like a flash Phobar was on his
feet; his hand whipped from his
pocket, and with all his strength
he flung a gleaming object straight
toward the fifth lever on the control-panel
a dozen yards away. As
a clumsy arrow would, his oversize
bunch of keys twisted to their
mark, clanked, and spread against
the fifth control, which was the
size regulator.
As rapidly as Phobar’s captor
had spun around, it reversed again,
having guessed the trick. A tentacle
of pliant metal snaked toward
Phobar like a streak of flame.
But in those few seconds a terrific
holocaust had taken place. As
Phobar’s keys spattered against the
fifth lever, there came an immediate,
growing, strange, high whine,
and a sickening collapse of the very
surface beneath them. Everywhere
outlines of objects wavered, changed
melted, shrank with a steady and
nauseatingly swift motion. The roof
of the laboratory high overhead
plunged downward; the far-distant
walls swept inward, contracted.
And the metal monsters themselves
dwindled as though they were vast
rubber figures from which the air
was hissing.
Phobar sprang back as the
tentacle whipped after him.
Only that jump and the suddenly
dwarfing dimensions of the giant
saved him. And even in that instant
of wild action, Phobar
shouted aloud—for this whole
world was collapsing, together with
everything on it, except he himself
who came of a different universe
and remained unaffected! It was
the long shot he had gambled on,
the one chance he had to strike
a blow.
All over the shrinking laboratory
the monsters were rushing toward
him. His dwindling captor flung
another tentacle toward the control-panel
to replace the size-regulating
lever. But Phobar had anticipated
that possibility and had already
leaped to the switchboard, sweeping
a heavy bar from its place and
crashing it down on the lever so
that it could not be replaced without
being repaired. Almost in the
same move he had bounded away
again, the former hundred-foot
giant now scarcely more than his
own height. But throughout the
laboratory, the other metal things
had halted in their tasks and were
racing onward.
Phobar always remembered that
battle in the laboratory as a scene
from some horrible nightmare. The
catastrophe came so rapidly that he
could hardly follow the whirlwind
events. The half dozen great leaps
he made from the lashing tentacles
of his pursuer sufficed to give him
a few seconds’ respite, and then
the weird, howling sound of the
tortured world swelled to a piercing
wail. His lungs were laboring
from the violence of his exertions;
again and again he barely escaped
from the curling whips of metal
tentacles. And now the monster was
hardly a foot high; the huge condensers
and tubes and colossal
machinery were like those of a
pygmy laboratory. And overhead
the roof plunged ever downward.
But Phobar was cornered at last.
He stood in the center of a circle
of the foot-high things. His captor
suddenly shot forth a dozen rope-like
arms toward him as the others
closed in. He had not even a
weapon, for he had dropped the
bar in his first mad bound away
from the control-panel. He saw
himself trapped in his own trick,
for in minutes at most the laboratory
would be crushing him with
fearful force.
Blindly Phobar reverted to a
primitive defense in this moment
of infinite danger and kicked
with all his strength at the squat
monster before him. The thing tried
to whirl aside, but Phobar’s shoe
squashed thickly through, and in a
disorder of quivering pieces the
metal creature fell, and subsided.
Knowing at last that the invaders
were vulnerable and how they could
be killed, Phobar went leaping and
stamping on those nearest him.
Under foot, they disintegrated into
little pulpy lumps of inert metal.
In a trice he broke beyond the
circle and darted to the control-panel.
One quick glance showed
him that the roof was now scarcely
a half dozen yards above. With
fingers that fumbled in haste at
tiny levers and dials, he spun several
of them—the repulsion-ray
full—the attraction-ray full. And
when they were set, he picked up
the bar he had dropped and smashed
the controls so that they were helplessly
jammed. He could almost
feel the planet catapult through
the heavens.
The laboratory roof was only a
foot over his head. He whirled
around, squashed a dozen tiny
creeping things, leaped to a disk
that was now not more than a few
inches broad. Stooping low, balancing
himself precariously, he
somehow managed to close the tiny
switch. A haze of orange light
enveloped him, there came a great
vertigo and dizziness and pain, he
felt himself falling through bottomless
spaces….
So exhausted that he could
scarcely move, Phobar blinked
his eyes open to brilliant daylight
in the chill of a November Indian
summer noon. The sun shone radiant
in the heavens; off in the distance
he heard a pandemonium of
bells and whistles. Wearily he noticed
that there were no flame-paths
in the sky.
Staggering weakly, he made his
way to the observatory, mounted
the steps with tired limbs, and
wobbled to the eyepiece of his
telescope which he had left focused
on the dark star two hours before.
Almost trembling, he peered
through it.
The dark star was gone. Somewhere
far out in the abysses of the
universe, a runaway world plunged
headlong at ever-mounting speed
to uncharted regions under its
double acceleration of attraction
and repulsion.
A sigh of contentment came from
his lips as he sank into a heavy and
profound sleep. Later he would
learn of the readjustments in the
solar system, and of the colder
climate that came to Earth, and of
the vast changes permanently made
by the invading planet, and of a
blazing new star discovered in
Orion that might signify the birth
of a sun or the death of a metallic
dark world.
But these were events to be, and
he demanded his immediate reward
of a day’s dreamless slumber.
Transcriber’s Note:
This etext was produced from Astounding Stories September 1932.
Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S.
copyright on this publication was renewed. Minor spelling and
typographical errors have been corrected without note.