Astounding Stories, July, 1931 Part 46

And then he saw me. He was less than a hundred feet away. He changed his direction and fired again, full at me. But I had had enough warning, and, as the beam struck the cage corner, I ran back along the outer wall of the cage and appeared at the other corner. Tugh came still closer, his weapon pointed downward as he ran. Fifty feet away.

Not close enough!

I think, there at the last, that Tugh was wholly confused. Larry had come much closer. He was shouting: and from the ridge behind me Tina was shouting. Tugh ran, not for where I was lurking now, but for the corner where a moment before he had seen me.

Now he was thirty feet from me.... Twenty.... Then nearer than that.

Wholly without caution he came forward.... I leaned around the edge of the cage and fired. For one breathless instant the voices of Tina and Larry abruptly hushed.

My beam struck Tugh in the chest. It caught him and clung to him, bathing him in its spreading, intense white glare. He stopped in his tracks; stood transfixed for one breathless, horrible instant! He was so close that I could see the stupid surprise on his hideous features.

His wide slit of mouth gaped with astonishment.

My beam clung to him, but he did not fall! He stood astonished; then turned and came at me! For just a moment I was stricken helpless there before him. What manner of man was this? _He did not fall!_ My ray, which had decomposed the body of Alent, the guard, and left his skeleton stripped and bleached in an instant, did not harm Tugh! He had walked into it, taken it full and he did not fall! He was still alive!

I came to my senses and saw that Larry, seeing my danger, had run into the open, dangerously close, and hurled a rock. It struck Tugh upon the shoulder and deflected his aim, so that his flash went over me. I saw Tugh whirl toward Larry, and I rushed forward, ripping loose the cylinder of the ray projector from its restraining battery cord. In the instant the cripple was turned half way from me I landed upon him, and with all my strength brought the point of the small heavy cylinder down on his skull. There was a strange splintering crack, and a wild, eery scream from his voice. He fell, with me on top of him.

Crowning horror! Tugh lay motionless, twisted half on his back, his thick arms outstretched on the rocks and his weapon still clutched in his hand. Culminating, gruesome horror! I rose from his body and stood shuddering. Amazing realization! The bulging misshapen head was splintered open. And from it, strewn over the rocks, were tiny intricate cogs and wheels, coils and broken wires!

He was not a man, but a Robot! A Super-Robot from some unknown era, running amuck! A mechanism so cleverly fashioned by the genius of man that it stood diabolically upon the threshhold of humanity!

A super-mechanical exile of Time! But its wild, irrational career of destruction through the ages now was over. It lay inert, smashed and broken at my feet....

CHAPTER XXIV

_The Return_

I think that there is little I should add. Tugh's last purpose had been to hurl himself and Mary past the lifetime of our world, wrecking the cage and flinging them into Eternity together. And Tugh was luring our cage and us to the same fate. But Mary, to save us, had watched her opportunity, seized the main control lever and demolished the vehicle by its instantaneous stopping.

We left the sh.e.l.l of Tugh lying there in the red sunlight of the empty, dying world, and returned to Tina's palace. We found that the revolt was over. The city, with help arrived, was striving to emerge from the b.l.o.o.d.y chaos. Larry and Tina decided to remain permanently in her Time. They would take us back; but the cage was too diabolical to keep in existence.

"I shall send it forward unoccupied," said Tina; "flash it into Eternity, where Tugh tried to go."

Accompanied by Larry, she carried Mary and me to 1935. With Mary's father, her only relative, dead, she yielded to my urging. We arrived in October, 1935. My New York, like Tina's a victim of the exile of Time, was rapidly being reconstructed.

It was night when we stopped and the familiar outlines of Patton Place were around us.

We stood at the cage doorway.

"Good-by," I said to Larry and Tina. "Good luck to you both!"

The girls kissed each other. Such strangely contrasting types! Over a thousand years was between them, yet how alike they were, fundamentally. Both--just girls.

Larry gripped my hand. In times of emotion one is sometimes inarticulate. "Good-by, George," he said. "We--we've said already all there is to say, haven't we?"

There were tears in both the girls' eyes. We four had been so close; we had been through so much together; and now we were parting forever.

All four of us were stricken with surprise at how it affected us. We stood gazing at one another.

"No!" I burst out. "I haven't said all there is to say. Don't you destroy that cage! You come back! Guard it as carefully as you can, and come back. Land here, next year in October; say, night of the 15th. Will you? We'll be here waiting."

"Yes," Tina abruptly agreed.

We stood watching them as they slid the door closed. The cage for a moment stood quiescent. Then it began faintly humming. It glowed; faded to a spectre; and was gone.

Mary and I turned away into the New York City of 1935, to begin our life together.

(_The End_)

TO THE MOON

The prediction that man will fly to the moon within the next 100 years was made by John Q. Stewart, a.s.sociate professor of astronomical physics at Princeton University, in a recent address at the Brooklyn Inst.i.tute of Arts and Sciences.

The first obstacle to be overcome is that of developing a speed of 25,000 miles an hour, the professor said, which means production of fuels more powerful than coal, gasoline, dynamite or any other source of energy now available. Such remarkable progress has been made in the speed of pa.s.senger carrying vehicles in the last century that scientists believe that a speed of 1,000 miles per hour will be reached in 1950 and 50,000 an hour will be surpa.s.sed before the year 2030, a century from now.

The one theoretically feasible method of making the journey to the moon, Stewart believes, is a vehicle propelled on the principle of the rocket. He visions a ship built in the form of a large metal sphere--110 feet in diameter, weighing 70,000 metric tons and carrying a crew of sixty and a dozen scientists. A dozen or more cannon would protrude slightly from the surface, shooting material the rate of 200 miles a second.

A half hour or so before noon and about three days before a new moon, Stewart would head his ship toward the sun, expecting it to rise twelve miles in the first six minutes and to soar out of the earth's atmosphere at 200 miles per hour.

Two hours and 29 minutes after the take-off the firing from the lower cannon would be stopped with the ship going upward, the professor estimates, at 190 miles per minute and having reached a height of 13,200 miles. Seventy hours later, crossing the moon's...o...b..t, Stewart would fire the forward cannon and the ship would coast around the moon, becoming the temporary satellite of a satellite.

"The rest would be easy," said Stewart, "owing to the lesser gravity of the moon. The cannon would be fired to cushion the fall to the moon as the ship was gradually sucked toward the satellite.

"The moon is airless, waterless and lifeless, days and nights are two weeks long, temperatures range from that of boiling water at noon down perhaps to that of liquid air at midnight. The men of the ship would walk on the moon clad in diving suits. Gravity being only one-sixth that of the earth, a man would carry several hundred pounds of apparatus for providing air and for regulating the temperature.

"To leave the moon the ship would fire her rear cannon and coast back to earth. By firing its forward cannon it would cushion its landing on the earth, which would have to be made on a desert, because of the tremendous charges the cannon would fire."

_A Meeting Place for Readers of_ Astounding Stories

[Ill.u.s.tration: The Readers' Corner]

_The Author Explains_

Dear Editor:

Am very much puzzled by the several apparent mistakes in two of the stories in the April issue of Astounding Stories. In "The World Behind the Moon," Mr. Ernst makes an error so obvious that it almost makes me believe that it isn't an error. Like doing a math problem and finding it so easy that you're sure that you have it wrong. Anyway, here is my problem; this is taken verbatim from the story: "At two thousand miles from the Earth there had still been enough hydrogen traces in the ether to give purchase to the explosions of their water-motor." Does the author mean to say that the explosions of the tubes have to have something to push against to have any action? (a) Has it not been proven actually and mathematically that the explosions of rockets and expanding gases are even more powerful in s.p.a.ce?

The s.p.a.ce ship in this story was equipped with both bow and stern tubes; why not fire them to slow the ship down instead of waiting to run into some resistance?

(b) Also, when they landed they took some air-guns which shot bullets containing a liquid which exploded when heated by the pa.s.sage of the sh.e.l.l through the barrel; then the author goes ahead and tells us that the planet was about as hot as the tropics. Such heat should explode the bullets, but it didn't. Why?

Mr. Ernst has his heroes do a lot of running around on that little planet.

(c) Since the planet is smaller than the moon, it hasn't much gravity and therefore can't retain a very heavy atmosphere, or one very thick. Anyone doing all that violent exercise would probably die of exhaustion before many minutes of it.