Raiders of the Universes, Page 2

solar system forever. The results of such a disaster were unpredictable. The entiresolar system was likely to break up. Already Uranus and Jupiter haddeviated from their orbits. Unless something speedily occurred to checkthe onrush of the dark star, it was prophesied that the laws governingthe planetary system would run to a new balance, and that in the ensuingchaos the whole group would spread apart and fall toward the gulfsbeyond the great surrounding void.

  What was the nature of the great path of fire? What force did itrepresent? And was the dark star controlled by intelligence, or was it ablind wanderer from space that had come by accident? The flame-pathalone implied that the dark star was guided by an intelligence thatpossessed the secret of inconceivable power. Menace hung in the sky nowwhere all eyes could see in a great arc of fire!

  The world was on the brink of eternity, and vast forces at whose naturemen could only guess were sweeping planets and suns out of its path.

  The following night was again cold and clear. High in the heavens, whereNeptune should have been, hung a disk of enormously greater size.Neptune itself was almost invisible, hundreds of millions of milesbeyond its scheduled position. As nearly as Phobar could estimate, notone hundredth of the sun's rays were reflected from the surface of thedark star, a proportion far below those for the other planets. Phobarhad a better view of the flame-path, and it was with growing awe that hewatched that strange swathe in the sky during the dead of night. It shotout from the dark star like a colossal beam or huge pillar of fireseeking a food of worlds.

  With a shiver of cold fear he saw that there were now three of thebands: one toward Neptune, one toward Saturn, and one toward the sun.The first was fading, a milky, misty white; the second shone almost asbright 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 milesof space! That gigantic flare was the most brilliant sight in the wholenight sky, an awful and abysmally prophetic flame that made city streetsblack with staring people, a radiance whose grandeur and terrificimplication of cosmic power brought beauty and the fear of doom into theheavens!

  * * * * *

  Those paths could not be explained by all the physicists and all theastronomers in the Five World Federation. They possessed the propertiesof light, but they were rigid bands like a tube or a solid pillar fromwhich only the faintest of rays escaped; and they completely shut offthe heavens behind them. They had, moreover, singular properties whichcould not be described, as if a new force were embodied in them.

  Hour after hour humanity watched the spectacular progress of the darkstar, watched those mysterious and threatening paths of light thatflowed from the invader. When dawn came, it brought only a great fearand the oppression of impending disaster.

  In the early morning, Phobar slept. When he awoke, he felt refreshed anddecided 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 reddishtwilight. Not a cloud hung in the sky, but the sun shone feebly with adull red glow, and the skies were dull and somber, as if the sun weredying as scientists had predicted it eventually would.

  Phobar stared at the dull heavens in a daze, at the forebodingatmosphere and the livid sun that burned faintly as through a smokecurtain. Then the truth flashed on him--it was the terrible path of firefrom the dark star! By what means he could not guess, by what appallingcontrol of immense and inconceivable forces he could not even imagine,the dark star was sucking light and perhaps more than light from thesun!

  * * * * *

  Phobar turned and shut the door. The world had seen its last dawn. Ifthe purpose of the dark star was destruction, none of the planets couldoffer much opposition, for no weapon of theirs was effective beyond afew 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, forit had already destroyed two members of the solar system and was nowstriking at its most vital part. Without the sun, life would die, buteven with the sun the planets must rearrange themselves because of thedestruction of balance.

  Even he could hardly grasp the vast and abysmal catastrophe that withoutwarning had swept from space. How could the dark star have traversedthree thousand light-years of space in a week's time? It wasunthinkable! So stupendous a control of power, so gigantic amanipulation of cosmic forces, so annihilating a possession of thegreatest secrets of the universe, was an unheard-of concentration ofenergy and knowledge of stellar mechanics. But the evidence of his owneyes and the path of the dark star with flaming suns to mark itsprogress, told him in language which could not be refuted that the darkstar possessed all that immeasurable, titanic knowledge. It was the lordof the universe. There was nothing which the dark star could not crushor conquer or change. The thought of that immense, supreme power numbedhis mind. It opened vistas of a civilization, and a progress, and anunparalleled mastery of all knowledge which was almost beyondconception.

  * * * * *

  Already the news had raced across the world. On Phobar's televisionscreen flashed scenes of nightmare; the radio spewed a gibberish ofterror. In one day panic had swept the Earth; on the remaining membersof the Five World Federation the same story was repeated. Rioting mobsdrowned out the chant of religious fanatics who hailed Judgment Day.Great fires turned the air murky and flame-shot. Machine guns spatregularly in city streets; looting, murder, and fear-crazed crimes wereuniversal. Civilization had completely vanished overnight.

  The tides roared higher than they ever had before; for every thousandpeople drowned on the American seaboards, a hundred thousand perished inChina and India. Dead volcanoes boomed into the worst eruptions known.Half of Japan sank during the most violent earthquake in history. Landrocked, the seas boiled, cyclones howled out of the skies. A billioneyes focused on Mecca, the mad beating of tom-toms rolled across allAfrica, women and children were trampled to death by the crowds thatjammed 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!" shoutedthe street preachers.

  In a daze, Phobar switched off the bedlam and, walking like a manasleep, 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 ahalf-dead cinder. Only the great swathe of radiance between the sun andthe dark star had any brilliance. Sinister, menacing, now larger eventhan the sun, the invader from beyond hung in the heavens.

  As Phobar watched it, the air around him prickled strangely. A sixthsense gave warning. He turned to race back into his house. His legsfailed. A fantastic orange light bathed him, countless needles of painshot through his whole body, the world darkened.

  * * * * *

  Earth had somehow been blotted out. There was a brief blackness, thenausea of space and of a great fall that compressed eternity into amoment. Then a swimming confusion, and outlines which gradually came torest.

  Phobar was too utterly amazed to cry out or run. He stood inside themost titanic edifice he could have imagined, a single gigantic structurevaster than all New York City. Far overhead swept a black roof fadinginto the horizon, beneath his feet was the same metal substance. In themidst of this giant work soared the base of a tower that pierced theroof thousands of feet above.

  Everywhere loomed machines, enormous dynamos, cathode tubes a hundredfeet long, masses and mountains of such fantastic apparatus as he hadnever encountered. The air was bluish, electric. From the blacksubstance came a phosphorescent radiance. The triumphant drone of motorsand a terrific crackle of electricity were everywhere. Off to his rightpurple-blue flames the size of Sequoia trees flickered around a group ofwhat looked like condensers as huge as Gibraltar. At the base of thecentral tower half a mile distant
Phobar could see something thatresembled a great switchboard studded with silver controls. Near it wasa series of mechanisms at whose purpose he could not even guess.

  * * * * *

  All this his astounded eyes took in at one confused glance. The thingthat gave him unreasoning terror was the hundred-foot-high metal monsterbefore him. It defied description. It was unlike any color known onEarth, a blinding color sinister with power and evil. Its shape wasequally ambiguous--it rippled like quicksilver, now compact, now spreadout in a thousand limbs. But what appalled Phobar was its definitepossession of rational life. More, its very thoughts were transmitted tohim as clearly as though written in his own English:

  "Follow me!"

  Phobar's mind did not function--but his legs moved regularly. In thegrasp of this mental, metal monster he was a mere automaton. Phobarnoticed idly that he had to step down from a flat disk a dozen yardsacross. By some power, some tremendous discovery that he could notunderstand,