Astounding Stories, August, 1931 Part 29

Vanderventer's laboratory was a small domed structure set in a clearing atop the mountain and well hidden from the winding road which was the only means of approach. Though Bart Madison, who had inherited his father's prosperous brokerage business, had financed his friend's research work ever since the two left college, this was his first visit to the secluded workshop, and its wealth of equipment was revealed to him as a complete surprise. He had always thought of Van's experiments as something beyond his ken; something uncanny and mysterious. Now he was convinced.

The most prominent single piece of apparatus in the laboratory was a twelve-inch reflecting telescope which reared its latticed framework to a slit in the dome overhead. Paralleling its axis and secured to the same equatorial mounting was a shining tube of copper which bristled with handwheels and levers and was connected by heavy insulated cables to an amazing array of electrical machinery that occupied an entire side of the single room.

"Regular young observatory you've got here, Van," Bart commented when he had taken all this in in one sweeping glance of appraisal.

"Yeah, and then some. Not another like it in the world." Van was busying himself with the controls of his electrical equipment, and a powerful motor-generator started up with a click and a whirr as he closed a starting switch.

Madison watched in silence as the swift-fingered scientist fussed with the complicated adjustments of the apparatus and then turned to the ma.s.sive concrete pedestal on which his telescope was mounted. At his touch of a b.u.t.ton the instrument swung over on its polar axis to a new position. The slit in the dome was opened to the afternoon sky, revealing the lunar disc in its daytime faintness.

"You can see it just as well in daylight?" Bart asked as his friend peered through the eyepiece of the telescope and continued his adjustments.

"Sure, the surface is just as bright as at night. Doesn't seem so to your eye, but it's different through the telescope. Here, take a look."

Bart squinted through the eyepiece and saw a huge crater with a shadowed spire in its center. Like a sh.e.l.l hole in soft earth it appeared--a great splash that had congealed immediately it was made.

The cross-hairs of the eyepiece were centered on a small circular shadow near its inner rim.

"That," Van was saying, "is a prominent crater near the Mare Nubium.

The spot under the cross-hairs is that from which I have obtained the diamonds--and other things. Watch this now, Bart."

The young broker straightened up and saw that his friend was removing the cover from a crystal bowl that was attached to the lower end of the copper tube that pointed to the heavens at the same ascension and declination as the telescope. The air of the room vibrated to a strange energy when he closed a switch that lighted a dozen vacuum tubes in the apparatus that lined the wall.

"You say you bring the stuff here with a light ray?" he asked.

"No, I said with the speed of light. This tube projects a ray of vibrations--like directional radio, you know--and this ray has a component that disintegrates the object it strikes and brings it back to us as dissociated protons and electrons which are rea.s.sembled in the original form and structure in this crystal bowl. Watch."

A misty brilliance filled the bowl's interior. Intangible shadowy forms seemed to be taking shape within a swirling maze of ethereal light that hummed and crackled with astounding vigor. Then, abruptly, the apparatus was silent and the light gone, revealing an odd object that had taken form in the bowl.

"A starfish!" Bart gasped.

"Yeah, and fossilized." Van handed it to him and he took it in his fingers gingerly as if expecting it to burn them.

The thing was undoubtedly a starfish, and of light, spongy stone. Its color was a pale blue and the ambulacral suckers were clearly discernible on all five rays.

"Lord! You're sure this is from the moon?" Bart turned the starfish over in his hand and gazed stupidly at his friend.

"Certainly, you nut. Think I had it up my sleeve? But here, watch again, there's something else."

The crackling, misty light again filled the bowl.

"Suppose," Bart ventured, "you bring in something large--big as a house, let's say. What would it do to your machine?"

"Can't. The ray'll only pick up stuff that'll enter the bowl.

Look--here's the next arrival."

The mysterious light died down and the scientist picked up the second object with trembling fingers. It was a knife of beautiful workmanship, fashioned from obsidian and obviously the work of human hands.

"There! Didn't I tell you?" Van gloated. "Guess that shows there were living beings on the moon."

He made minute changes in the adjustment of his marvelous instrument and Bart watched in dazed astonishment as object after object materialized before their eyes. There were fragments of strange minerals; more fossils, marine life, mostly; a roughly beaten silver plate; three diamonds, none of which was as large as what Van had taken to New York, but all of considerable value.

"This'll be something for the papers, Van!" Bart Madison was visioning the fame that was to come to his friend.

"Yeah, all but the diamonds."

"All but the diamonds is right!"

These words were spoken by a sarcastic voice, chill as an icicle, that came from the open door. They wheeled to look into the muzzles of two automatic pistols that were trained on them by a stocky individual who faced them with a twisted, knowing grin.

"Danny Kelly!" Bart gasped, raising his hands slowly to the level of his shoulders. He knew the ex-army captain was a dead shot with the service pistol, and a desperate man since his disgrace and forced resignation. "What's the big idea?" he demanded.

"You don't need to ask. Refused me a loan this morning, didn't you?

Now I'm getting it this way." Kelly turned savagely on Van, prodding his ribs with a pistol. "Get 'em up, you!" he snapped.

Van had been slow in raising his hands, gaping in stupefied amazement at the intruder. Now he reached for the ceiling without delay.

"You'll serve time for this, Danny!" Bart shouted.

"Shut up! I know what I'm doing. And back up, too--where--no, the other door." Kelly was forcing him toward the door of the cellar at the point of one pistol as he kept Van covered with the other.

Bart clenched his fist and brought it down in a sudden sweeping blow that raked Kelly's cheek and ear with stunning force. But the gunman recovered in a flash, dropped the muzzle of his pistol and pulled the trigger. Drilled through the thigh, Bart staggered through the open door and fell the length of the stairs into the darkness of the cellar. Kelly laughed evilly as he slammed the door and turned the key.

"Hold it, you!" he snarled as he swung on Van who had dropped his hands and crouched for a spring. "If I drill you, it won't be through the leg. I'll take those diamonds now."

He pocketed one of his pistols, and, keeping the other pressed to the pit of Van's stomach, went through his pockets. Then he added those on the tray by the crystal bowl to the collection, and transferred the entire lot to his own pocket.

"Now, you clever engineer," he grinned, "we'll just operate this trick machine of yours for a while and collect some more. Hop to it!" He watched narrowly as Van stretched his fingers to the controls. "No monkey business, either," he grated; "you'll not change a single adjustment. I've been listening to you and I know the clock of the telescope is keeping the ray trained on the same spot. You just operate the ray and nothing else. Get me?"

Van did not think it expedient to tell him of the drift caused by inaccuracies in the clock and perturbations of the moon's motion. He was playing for time, trying to plan a course of action.

"There may not be any more diamonds," he offered as he tripped the release of the ray.

"Oh, there'll be more. Don't try to kid me."

An irregular block of quartz materialized in the bowl and Kelly tossed it to the floor in savage disgust. Then a small diamond, very small; but he pocketed it nevertheless. The next object was a strange one--a dried seed pod about six inches in length and of brilliant red color.

The ray had shifted to a new position on the lunar surface. Another and another of the strange legumes followed, one of them bursting open and scattering its contents, bright red like the enclosing pod to rattle over the floor like tiny gla.s.s beads. Kelly snorted his disgust.

"Still some sort of vegetation out there," Van muttered. The eternal scientist in the man could not be downed by a mere hold-up.

"Can the chatter!" Kelly snarled as the crystal bowl gave up another of the useless pods and still another. He gathered up the evidence of lunar vegetation, a half dozen of the pods, and threw them through the open doorway with a savage gesture. "You trying to put one over on me?" he bellowed.