The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Pygmy Planet, by John Stewart Williamson
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Title: The Pygmy Planet
Author: John Stewart Williamson
Release Date: June 20, 2009 [EBook #29177]
Language: English
*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE PYGMY PLANET ***
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Transcriber's Note:
This etext was produced from Astounding Stories February 1932.
Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S.
copyright on this publication was renewed.
The Pygmy Planet
By Jack Williamson
[Sidenote: Down into the infinitely small goes Larry on his mission to
the Pygmy Planet.]
[Illustration: _It paused, seeming to regard them with malevolent
eyes._]
"Nothing ever happens to me!" Larry Manahan grumbled under his breath,
sitting behind his desk at the advertising agency which employed his
services in return for the consideration of fifty a week. "All the
adventure I know is what I see in the movies, or read about in
magazines. What wouldn't I give for a slice of real life!"
Unconsciously, he tensed the muscles of his six feet of lean, hard
body. His crisp, flame-colored hair seemed to bristle; his blue eyes
blazed. He clenched a brown hammer of a fist.
Larry felt himself an energetic, red-blooded square peg, badly
afflicted with the urge for adventure, miserably wedged in a round
hole. It is one of the misfortunes of our civilization that a young
man who, for example, might have been an excellent pirate a couple of
centuries ago, must be kept chained to a desk. And that seemed to be
Larry's fate.
"Things happen to other people," he muttered. "Why couldn't an
adventure come to me?"
He sat, staring wistfully at a picture of a majestic mountain
landscape, soon to be used in the advertising of a railway company
whose publicity was handled by his agency, when the jangle of the
telephone roused him with a start.
"Oh, Larry--" came a breathless, quivering voice.
Then, with a click, the connection was broken.
The voice had been feminine and had carried a familiar ring. Larry
tried to place it, as he listened at the receiver and attempted to get
the broken connection restored.
"Your party hung up, and won't answer," the operator informed him.
He replaced the receiver on the hook, still seeking to follow the thin
thread of memory given him by the familiar note in that eager excited
voice. If only the girl had spoken a few more words!
* * * * *
Then it came to him.
"Agnes Sterling!" he exclaimed aloud.
Agnes Sterling was a slender, elfish, dark-haired girl--lovely, he had
thought her, on the occasions of their few brief meetings. Larry knew
her as the secretary and laboratory assistant of Dr. Travis Whiting, a
retired college professor known for his work on the structure of the
atom. Larry had called at the home-laboratory of the savant, months
before, to check certain statistics to be used for advertising
purposes and had met the girl there. Only a few times since had he
seen her.
Now she had called him in a voice that fairly trembled with
excitement--and, he thought, dread! And she had been interrupted
before she had time to give him any message.
For a few seconds Larry stared at the telephone. Then he rose abruptly
to his feet, crammed his hat on his head, and started for the door.
"The way to find adventure is to go after it," he murmured. "And this
is the invitation!"
It was not many minutes later that he sprang out of a taxi at the
front of the building in which Dr. Travis Whiting made his home and
maintained a private experimental laboratory. It was a two-story
stucco house, rather out of date, set well back from the sidewalk,
with a scrap of lawn and a few straggling shrubs before it. The door
was closed, the windows curtained blankly. The place seemed deserted
and forbidding.
Larry ran up the uneven brick walk to the door and rang the bell.
Impatiently, he waited a few moments. No sound came from within. He
felt something ominous, fateful, about the silent mystery that seemed
to shroud the old house. For the first time, it occurred to him that
Agnes might be in physical danger, as a result of some incautious
experiment on the part of Dr. Whiting.
* * * * *
Instinctively, his hand sought the door knob. To his surprise, the
door was unlocked. It swung open before him. For a moment he stared,
hesitating, into the dark hall revealed beyond. Then, driven by the
thought that Agnes might be in danger, he advanced impulsively.
The several doors opening into the hall were closed. The one at the
back, he knew, gave admittance to the laboratory. Impelled by some
vague premonition, he hastened toward it down the long hall and threw
it open.
As he stepped inside the room, his foot slipped on a spot of something
red. Recovering his balance with difficulty, he peered about.
Bending down, Larry briefly examined the red spot on which he had
slipped. It was a pool of fresh blood which had not yet darkened.
Lying beside it, crimson-splashed, was a revolver. As he picked up the
weapon, he cried out in astonishment.
Something had happened to the gun. The trigger guard was torn from it,
and the cylinder crushed as if in some resistless grasp; the stock was
twisted, and the barrel bent almost into a circle. The revolver had
been crumpled by some terrific force--as a soft clay model of it might
have been broken by the pressure of a man's hand.
"Crimson shades of Caesar!" he muttered, and dropped the crushed
weapon to the floor again.
His eyes swept the silent laboratory.
It was a huge room, taking up all the rear part of the house, from the
first floor to the roof. Gray daylight streamed through a sky-light,
twenty feet overhead. The ends of the vast room were cluttered with
electrical and chemical apparatus; but Larry's eye was caught at once
by a strange and complex device, which loomed across from him, in the
center of the floor.
* * * * *
Two pillars of intense light, a ray of crimson flame and another of
deeply violet radiance, beat straight down from a complicated array of
enormous, oddly shaped electron tubes, of mirrors and lenses and
prisms, of coils and whirling disks, which reached almost to the roof.
Upright, a yard in diameter and almost a yard apart, the strange
columns of light were sharp-edged as two transparent cylinders filled
with liquid light of ruby and of amethyst. Each ray poured down upon a
circular platform of glass or polished crystal.
Hanging between those motionless cylinders of red and violet light was
a strange-looking, greenish globe. A round ball, nearly a yard in
diameter, hung between the rays, almost touching them. Its surface was
oddly splotched with darker and lighter areas. It was spinning
steadily, at a low rate of speed. Larry did not see what held it up;
it seemed hanging free, several feet above the crystal platforms.
Reluctantly he withdrew his eyes from the mysterious sphere and looked
about the room once more. No, the laboratory was vacant of human
occupants. No one was hidden among the benches that were cluttered
with beakers and test tubes and stills, or among the dynamos and
transformers in the other end of the room.
A confusion of questions beat through Larry's brain.
What danger could be haunting this quiet laboratory? Was this the
blood of Agnes Sterling or the scientist who employed her that was now
clotting on the floor? What terrific force had crumpled up the
revolver? What had become of Agnes and Dr. Whiting? And of whatever
had attacked them? Had Agnes called him after the attack, or before?
* * * * *
Despite himself, his attention was drawn back to the little globe
spinning so regularly, floating in the air between the pillars of red
and violet flame. Floating alone, like a little world in space,
without a visible support, it might be held up by magnetic attraction,
he thought.
A tiny planet!
His mind quickened at the idea, and he half forgot the weird mystery
gathering about him. He stepped nearer the sphere. It was curiously
like a miniature world. The irregular bluish areas would be seas; the
green and the brown spaces land. In some parts, the surface appeared
mistily obscured--perhaps, by masses of cloud.
Larry saw an odd-looking lamp, set perhaps ten feet behind the slowly
spinning, floating ball, throwing upon it a bright ray of vividly blue
light. Half the strange sphere was brilliantly illuminated by it; the
rest was in comparative darkness. That blue lamp, it came to Larry,
lit the sphere as the sun lights the earth.
"Nonsense!" he muttered. "It's impossible!"
Aroused by the seeming wonder of it, he was drawn nearer the ball. It
spun rather slowly, Larry noted, and each rotation consumed several
seconds. He could distinguish green patches that might be forests, and
thin, silvery lines that looked like rivers, and broad, red-brown
areas that must be deserts, and the broad blue stretches that
suggested oceans.
"A toy world!" he cried. "A laboratory planet! What an experiment--"
Then his eyes, looking up, caught the glistening, polished lens of a
powerful magnifying glass which hung by a black ribbon from a hook on
one of the heavy steel beams which supported the huge mass of silently
whirring apparatus.
* * * * *
Eagerly, he unfastened the magnifier. Holding it before his eyes, he
bent toward the strange sphere spinning steadily in the air.
"Suffering shades of Caesar!" he ejaculated.
Beneath the lens a world was racing. He could see masses of vividly
green forest; vast expanses of bare, cracked, ocherous desert; wastes
of smooth blue ocean.
Then he was gazing at--a city?
Larry could not be sure that he had seen correctly. It had slipped
very swiftly beneath his lens. But he had a momentary impression of
tiny, fantastic buildings, clustered in an elflike city.
A pygmy planet, spinning in the laboratory like a world in the gulf of
space! What could it mean? Could it be connected with the strange call
from Agnes, with the blood on the floor, with the strange and ominous
silence that shrouded the deserted room?
"Oh, Larry!" a clear, familiar voice rang suddenly from the door. "You
came!"
Startled, Larry leaped back from the tiny, whirling globe and turned
to the door. A girl had come silently into the room. It was Agnes
Sterling. Her dark hair was tangled. Her small face was flushed, and
her brown eyes were wide with fear! In a white hand, which shook a
little, she carried a small, gold-plated automatic pistol.
She ran nervously across the wide floor to Larry, with relief dawning
in her eyes.
"I'm so glad you came!" she gasped, panting with excitement. "I
started to call you on the phone, but then I was afraid it would kill
you if you came! Please be careful! It may come back, any minute!
You'd better go away! It just took Dr. Whiting!"
"Wait a minute," Larry put in. "Just one thing at a time. Let's get
this straight. To begin with, what is it that might kill me, and that
got the doctor?"
"It's terrible!" she gasped, trembling. "A monster! You must go away
before it comes back!"
* * * * *
Larry drew a tall stool from beside one of the crowded tables and
placed it beside her.
"Don't get excited," he urged. "I'm sure everything will be all
right. Just sit down, and tell me about it. The whole story. Just what
is going on here, and what happened to Dr. Whiting."
He helped her upon the stool. She looked up at him gratefully, and
began to speak in a rapid voice.
"You see that little planet? The monster came from that and carried
the doctor back there. And I know it will soon be back for another
victim--for sacrifice!"
She had pointed across the great room, toward the strange little globe
which hung between the pillars of red and violet light.
"Please go slow!" Larry broke in. "You're too fast for me. Are you
trying to tell me that that spinning ball is really a planet?"
Agnes seemed a little more composed, though she was still flushed and
breathing rapidly. Her small hand still gripped the bright automatic.
"Yes, it is a planet. The Pygmy Planet, Dr. Whiting called it. He said
it was the great experiment of the century. You see, he was testing
evolution. We began with the planet, young and hot, and watched it
until it is now almost as old as Mars. We watched the change and
development of life upon it. And the rise and decay of a strange
civilization. Until now its people are strange things, with human
brains in mechanical bodies, worshiping a rusty machine like a god--"
"Go slow!" Larry pleaded again. "I don't see--Did the doctor
build--create--that planet himself?"
"Yes. It began with his work on atomic structure. He discovered that
certain frequencies of the X-ray--so powerful that they are almost
akin to the cosmic ray--have the power of altering electronic orbits.
Every atom, you know, is a sort of solar system, with electrons
revolving about a proton.
"And these rays would cause the electrons to fall into incredibly
smaller orbits, causing vast reduction in the size of the atoms, and
in the size of any object which the atoms formed. They would cause
anything, living or dead, to shrink to inconceivably microscopic
dimensions--or restore it to its former size, depending upon the exact
wave-length used.
"And time passes far more swiftly for the tiny objects--probably
because the electrons move faster in their smaller orbits. That is
what suggested to Dr. Whiting that he would be able to watch the
entire life of a planet, in the laboratory. And so, at first, we
experimented merely with solitary specimens or colonies of animals.
"But on the Pygmy Planet, we have watched the life of a world--the
whole panorama of evolution--"
* * * * *
"It seems too wonderful!" Larry muttered. "Could Dr. Whiting actually
decrease his size and become a dwarf?"
"No trick at all," Agnes assured him. "All you have to do is stand in
the violet beam, to shrink. And move over in the red one, when you
want to grow. I have been several times with Dr. Whiting to the Pygmy
Planet."
"Been--" Larry stopped, breathless with astonishment.
"See the little airplane," Agnes said, pointing under the table.
Larry gasped.
Beneath the table stood a toy airplane. The spread of its glistening,
perfect wings was hardly three feet. A wonderful, delicate toy,
accurate in every detail of propeller, motor and landing gear, of
brace and rudder and aileron. Then he realized that it was no toy at
all, but a faithful miniature of a commercial plane. A complete, tiny
copy of one of the latest single-motor, cabin monoplane models.
"It looks like it would fly," he said "a friend of mine his a big
one, just like it! Taught me to fly it, last summer vacation. This is
the very image of it!"
"It will fly!" Agnes assured him, now composed enough to smile at his
amazement. "I have been with the doctor to the Pygmy Planet in it.
"You stand in the violet ray until you're about three inches high,"
she explained, "and then get into the plane. Then you fly up and into
the violet ray at the point where it touches the planet, and remain
there while you grow smaller. When you are the right size, all you
have to do is drop to the surface, and land. To come away, you rise
into the red ray and stay in it till you grow to proper size, when you
come down and land."
"You--you've actually done that?" he gasped. "It sounds like a fairy
story!"
* * * * *
"Yes, I've done it," she assured him. Then she shuddered
apprehensively. "And the things--the machine-monsters, Dr. Whiting
called them--have learned to do it, too. One of them came down the red
ray, and attacked him. The doctor had a gun--but what could he do
against one of those?" She shivered.
"It carried him back up the violet beam. Just a few minutes ago, I
started to phone you. Then I was afraid you would be hurt--"
"Me, hurt?" Larry burst out. "What about you, here alone?"
"It was my business. Dr. Whiting told me there might be danger, when
he hired me."
"And now, what can we do?" Larry demanded.
"I don't know," she said slowly. "I'm afraid one of the monsters will
be back after a new victim. We could smash the apparatus, but it is
too wonderful to be destroyed. And besides, Dr. Whiting may have
escaped. He may be alive there, in the deserts!"
"We might fly up, in the little plane," Larry proposed, doubtfully. "I
think I could pilot it. If you want--"
The girl's body stiffened. Her brown eyes widened with sudden dread,
and her small face went pale. She slipped quickly from the stool,
drawing in her breath with a sort of gasp. The hand that gripped the
automatic trembled a little.
"What's the matter?" Larry cried.
"I thought--" she gasped, "I think I see something in the ray! The
machine-monster is coming back!"
Her lips tightened. She lifted the little automatic and began to shoot
into the pillar of crimson fire beside the tiny, spinning globe.
Larry, watching tensely, saw a curious, bird-like something fluttering
about in the red ray, _swiftly growing larger_!
Deliberately, and pausing to aim carefully for each shot, the girl
emptied the little gun at the figure. Her body was rigid, her small
face was firmly set, though she was breathing very fast.
* * * * *
A curious numbness had come over Larry. His only physical sensations
were the quick hammering of his heart, and a parching dryness in his
throat. Terror stiffened him. Though he would not have admitted it, he
was paralyzed with fear.
The glittering thing that fluttered about in the crimson ray was not
an easy target. When the gun was empty, it seemed still unharmed. And
its wings had increased to a span of a foot.
"Too late!" Agnes gasped. "Why didn't we do _something_?"
Trembling, horror-stricken, she shrank toward Larry.
He was staring at the thing in the pillar of scarlet light.
It had dropped to the crystal disk upon which the red ray fell from
the huge, glowing tube above. It stood there, motionless except for
the swift increase of its size.
Larry gazed at it, lost in fear and wonder. It was like nothing he had
ever seen. What was it that Agnes had said, of machine-monsters, of
human brains in mechanical bodies? His brain reeled. He strained his
eyes to distinguish the monstrosity more clearly. It was veiled in
crimson flame; he could not see it distinctly.
But suddenly, when it was as tall as himself, it sprang out into the
room, toward Larry and the shuddering girl. Just off the crystal disk,
beyond the scarlet pillar of fire, it paused for long seconds, seeming
to regard them with malevolent eyes.
For the first time, Larry could see it plainly.
Its body, or its central part, was a tube of transparent crystal; an
upright cylinder, rounded at upper and lower ends. It was nearly a
foot in diameter, and four feet long. It seemed filled with a
luminous, purple liquid.
About the cylinder were three bands of greenish, glistening metal.
Attached to the lower band were four jointed legs of the same bright
green metal, upon which the strange thing stood.
Set in the middle band were two glittering, polished lenses, which
seemed to serve as eyes, and Larry felt that they were gazing at him
with malevolent menace. Behind the eyes, two wings sprang from the
green band. Ingenious, folding wings, of thin plates and bars of green
metal.
And from the upper band sprang four slender, glistening, whip-like
tentacles, metallic and brilliantly green, two yards in length. They
writhed with strange life!
* * * * *
It seemed a long time to Larry that the thing stood, motionless,
seeming to stare evilly at them with eye-like lenses. Then, lurching
forward a little, it moved toward them upon legs of green metal. And
now Larry saw another amazing thing about it.
Floating in the brilliant violet liquid that filled the crystal tube
was a gray mass, wrinkled and corrugated. This was divided by deep
clefts into right and left hemispheres, which, in turn were separated
into larger upper and smaller lower segments. White filaments ran
through the violet liquid from its base toward the three rings or
bands of green metal that encircled the cylinder.
In an instant, Larry realized that the gray mass was a human brain.
The larger, upper part the cerebrum, the smaller mass at the back the
cerebellum. And the white filaments were nerves, by means of which
this brain controlled its astounding, mechanical body!
A brain in a machine!
The violet liquid, it came to Larry in his trance of wonder, must take
the place of blood, feeding the brain-cells, absorbing waste.
An eternal mind, within a machine! Free from the ills and weaknesses
of the body. And devoid, too, of any pity, of any tender feelings. A
cold and selfish mind, without emotion--unless it might worship itself
or its mechanical body.
It was this monster that had spilt the pool of blood drying on the
floor, near the door. And it was these glistening, green, snake-like
tentacles that had crumpled the revolver into a broken mass of steel!
Abruptly the machine-monster darted forward, running swiftly upon its
four legs of green metal. Slender tentacles reached out toward the
shuddering girl at Larry's shoulder.
"Run!" Agnes gasped to him, quickly. "It will kill you!"
The girl tried to push him back.
As she touched him, Larry recovered from his daze of wondering fear.
Agnes was in frightful danger, and facing it with quiet courage. He
must find a weapon!
* * * * *
Wildly, he looked about him. His eyes fell upon the tall, heavy wooden
stool, upon which Agnes had been sitting.
"Get back!" he shouted to her.
He snatched up the stool, and, swinging it over his head, sprang
toward the machine of violet-filled crystal and glittering green
metal.
"Stop!" Agnes screamed, in a terrified voice. "You can't--"
She had run before him. He seized her arm and swung her back behind
him. Then he advanced warily toward the machine-monster, which had
paused and seemed to be regarding him with sinister intentness,
through its glistening crystal eye-lenses.
With all his strength, Larry struck at the crystal cylinder, swinging
the stool like an ax. A slender, metallic green tentacle whipped out,
tore the stool from his hands, and sent it crashing across the room,
to splinter into fragments on the opposite wall.
Larry, sent off his balance, staggered toward the glittering machine.
As he stumbled against the transparent tube that contained the brain,
he clenched his fist to strike futilely at it.
A snake-like metal tentacle wrapped itself about him; he was hurled to
the floor, to sprawl grotesquely among broken apparatus.
His head came against the leg of a bench. For a few moments he was
dazed. But it seemed only a few seconds to him before he had staggered
to his feet, rubbing his bruised head. Anxiously, he peered about the
room.
The machine-monster and Agnes were gone!
He stumbled back to the mass of apparatus in the center of the huge
laboratory. Intently, he gazed into the upright pillar of crimson
flame. Nothing was visible there.
"No, the other!" he gasped. "The violet is the way they went."
* * * * *
He turned to the companion ray of violet radiance that beat straight
down on the opposite side of the tiny, whirling planet. And in that
motionless torrent of chill violet flame he saw them.
Tiny, already, and swiftly dwindling!
With green wings outspread, the machine-monster was beating swiftly
upward through the pillar of purple-blue flame. And close against the
crystal tube that contained its brain, was Agnes, held fast by the
whip-like tentacles of glistening green metal.
Larry moved to spring after them, into the torrent of violet light.
But sudden caution restrained him.
"I'd shrink, too!" he muttered. "And then where would I be? I'd be
standing on the glass platform, I guess. And the thing flying off over
my head!"
He gazed at the rapidly dwindling forms of Agnes Sterling and her
amazing abductor. As it grew smaller, the machine-monster flew higher
in the violet beam, until it was opposite the tiny, spinning planet.
The distance between the red and the violet rays was just slightly
more than the diameter of the pygmy world. The sphere hung between
them, one side of it a fraction of an inch from the red, the other as
near the violet.
Opposite the elfin planet, the monster ceased to climb. It hung there
in the violet ray, an inch from the surface of the little world.
And still it swiftly dwindled. It was no larger than a fly, and Larry
could barely distinguish the form of the girl, helpless in the green
tentacles.
Soon she and the monster became a mere greenish speck.... Suddenly
they were gone.
* * * * *
For a little time he stood watching the point where they had vanished,
watching the red and the violet rays that poured straight down upon
the crystal disks, watching the tiny, green-blue planet spinning so
steadily between the bright rays.
Abruptly, he recovered from his fascination of wonder.
"What did she say?" he muttered. "Something about the monsters
carrying off people to sacrifice to a rusty machine that they worship
as a god! It took her--for that!"
He clenched his fists; his lips became a straight line of
determination.
"Then I guess we try a voyage in the little plane. A slim chance,
maybe. But decidedly better than none!"
He returned to the table, dropped on his knees, inspected the tiny
airplane. A perfect miniature, delicately beautiful; its slim, small
wings were bright as silver foil. Carefully, he opened the door and
peered into the diminutive cabin. Two minute rifles, several
Lilliputian pistols, and boxes of ammunition to match, lay on the rear
seat of the plane.
"So we are prepared for war," he remarked, grinning in satisfaction.
"And the next trick, I suppose, is to get shrunk to fit the plane.
About three inches, she said. Lord, it's a queer thing to think
about!"
He got to his feet, walked back to the machine in the center of the
room, with its twin pillars of red and violet flame, and the tiny
world floating between them. He started to step into the violet ray,
then hesitated, shivering involuntarily, like a swimmer about to dive
into icy cold water.
Turning back to one of the benches, he picked up a wooden funnel-rack,
and tossed it to the crystal disk beneath the violet ray. Slowly it
decreased in size, until it had vanished from sight.
"Safe, I suppose," he muttered. "But how do I know when I'm small
enough?"
* * * * *
After a moment he picked up a glass bottle which measured about three
inches in height, set it on the floor, beside the crystal disk.
"I dive out when I get to be the size of the bottle," he murmured.
With that, he leaped into the violet beam.
He felt no unusual sensation, except one of pleasant, tingling warmth,
as if the direct rays of the sun were bearing down upon him. For a
moment he feared that his size was not being affected. Then he
noticed, not that he appeared to become smaller, but that the
laboratory seemed to be growing immensely larger.
The walls seemed to race away from him. The green-blue sphere of the
tiny planet which he proposed to visit expanded and drew away above
his head.
Abruptly fearful, alarmed at the hugeness of the room, he turned to
look at the bottle he had placed to serve as a standard of size. It
had grown with everything else, until it seemed to be about three feet
high.
And it was swiftly expanding. It reached to the level of his shoulder.
And higher!
He ran to the edge of the crystal disk, which now seemed a floor many
yards across, and leaped from its edge. It was a dozen steps to where
he had left the bottle. And it was as tall as himself!
He started across the floor of the laboratory toward the table under
which the toy plane stood. The incredible immensity of his
surroundings awed him strangely. The walls of the room seemed distant,
Cyclopean cliffs; the roof was like a sky. Table legs towered up like
enormous columns.
It seemed a hundred yards across the strangely rough floor to the
plane. As he drew near it, it gave him huge satisfaction to see that
it was of normal size, correctly proportioned to his own dimensions.
"Great luck," he muttered, "that I can fly!"
* * * * *
He paused, as he reached the cabin's open door, to wonder at the
astounding fact that a little while ago he had opened that door with a
hand larger than his entire body now was.
"I guess this is my day of wonders!" he muttered. "Allah knows I had
to wait long enough for it!"
First he examined the weapons in the cabin. There were two heavy
sporting rifles and two .45 automatics. There were also two smaller
automatics, which, he supposed, had been intended for Agnes' use. And
there was abundant ammunition.
Then he inspected the plane. It looked to be in excellent condition in
every way. The gasoline and oil tanks were full.
He set about starting the motor, using the plane's inertia starter,
which was driven by an electric motor. Soon the engine coughed,
sputtered, and gave rise to a roaring, rhythmic note that Larry found
musical.
When the motor was warm, he opened the throttle and taxied out from
beneath the colossal table, and across the laboratory floor toward the
Titanic mechanism in the center of the room. The disk of crystal was
set almost flush with the floor, its edge beveled. The plane rolled
easily upon it, and out into the Cyclopean pillar of violet flame.
Once more, Larry felt the sensation that everything about him except
the plane itself, was expanding inconceivably in size. Soon the
laboratory's walls and roof were lost in hazy blue distance. He could
distinguish only the broad, bright field formed by the surface of the
crystal disk, with the floor stretching away beyond it like a vast
plain. And above, the green-blue sphere of the tiny planet, bright on
one side and dark on the other, so that it looked like a half-moon,
immensely far-off.
* * * * *
As he waited, he noticed a curious little dial, in a lower corner of
the instrument board, which he had not seen at first. One end of its
graduated scale was marked, "Earth Normal," the other, "Pygmy Planet
Normal." A tiny black needle was creeping slowly across the scale,
toward "Pygmy Planet Normal."
"That's how we tell what size we are without having to look at a
bottle," he muttered.
When the area of the crystal platform appeared to be about half a
square mile, he decided that he would now have sufficient space to
spiral up the violet ray toward the planet. If he waited too long to
start, the distance would become impossibly great.
He gave the little plane the gun. The motor thundered a throbbing
song; the ship rolled smoothly forward over the polished surface,
gained flying speed and took the air without a shock.
"Feels good to hold the stick again!" Larry murmured.
Making small circles to keep within the upright pillar of violet
radiance, he climbed steadily and as rapidly as possible, keeping his
eyes upon the brilliant half-moon of the Pygmy Planet.
The strangest flight in the annals of aviation! He was flying toward
a goal that, a few minutes before, he could have touched. Toward a
goal that, at the beginning of his flight, was only a few lengths of
his plane away. And his size dwindled so rapidly as he flew that the
planet seemed to swell and draw away from him.
As Larry and the plane grew smaller, the relative size of the violet
ray increased, so there was no longer much danger of flying out of it.
It seemed that he flew through a world of violet flame.
He met a curious problem in time. It is evident that time passes
faster for a small animal than for a large one, because nerve currents
require a shorter time in transit, and all thought and action is
consequently speeded up. It took a hundred-foot dinosaur nearly a
second to know that his tail had been pinched. A fly can get under way
in time to escape a descending swatter. The Pygmy Planet rotated in a
few seconds of earth time; one of its inhabitants might have lived,
aged, and died in the duration of a single day in our larger world.
* * * * *
So Larry found that time seemed to pass more rapidly, or rather that
the time of the world he had left appeared to move more slowly, as he
adventured into smallness. He had been flying, it seemed to him,
nearly an hour when he reached the level of the planet's equator.
Now it seemed a vast world, filling half the visible universe. He flew
toward it steadily, until he knew, by the fading before him of the
violet flame which now seemed to fill all space, that he was near the
edge of the ray. And as he flew, he watched the little scale, upon
which the black needle was now nearing the line marked, "Pygmy Planet
Normal."
Circling slowly, keeping always on the level of the planet's equator,
and near the edge of the violet ray, so as to be as close as possible
to his landing place when he reached the proper size, he watched the
creeping black needle.
Too, he scanned with eager eyes the planet floating before him. Bare,
red deserts; narrow strips of green vegetation; shrunken, blue oceans;
silvery lines of rivers, passed in fascinating panorama beneath his
eyes. The rate of the planet's spinning seemed continually to lessen,
with the changing of his own sense of time.
Agnes! Larry thought of her with a curious, eager pain in his heart.
She was somewhere on that strange, ancient world, a prisoner of weird
machine-monsters! Intended victim of a grotesque sacrificial ceremony!
Could he find her, in the vastness of an unfamiliar world? And having
found her, would there be a chance to rescue her from her hideous
captors? The project seemed insane. But Larry felt a queer, unfamiliar
urge, which, he knew, would drive him on until he had discovered and
saved her--or until he was dead.
* * * * *
At last, when it seemed to Larry nearly three hours since he had begun
this amazing flight, the crawling ebon needle reached the mark, "Pygmy
Planet Normal."
He flew out of the wall of violet flame toward the planet's surface.
Before, the distance between the planet and the ray's edge had seemed
only the fraction of an inch. Now it appeared to be many miles.
Abruptly the Pygmy Planet, which had seemed to be _beside_ him,
appeared to swing about, so that it was _beneath_ him. He knew that it
was a change merely in his sensations. He was feeling the gravitation
of the new world. It was pulling him toward it!
He cut the throttle, and settled the plane into a long glide, a glide
that was to end upon the surface of a new planet!
In what seemed half an hour more, Larry had made a safe landing upon
the Pygmy Planet. He had come down upon a stretch of fairly smooth,
red, sandy desert, which seemed to stretch illimitably toward the
rising sun, which direction Larry instinctively termed "east."
To the "west" was a line of dull green--evidently the vegetation along
a stream. The ocher desert was scattered with sparse clumps of
reddish, spiky scrub. Larry taxied the plane into one of those
thickets. Finding canvas and rope in the cabin, he staked down the
machine, and muffled the motor.
Then, selecting a rifle and a heavy automatic from the weapons in the
cabin, and filling his pockets with extra ammunition, he left the
plane and set out with brisk steps toward the green line of
vegetation.
"I'll follow along the river," he reasoned. "It may lead me somewhere
and it will show the way back to the plane. I may come across
something in the way of a clue. Can't go exploring by air, or I'll
burn up all the gas and be stranded here!"
* * * * *
To his surprise, the water course proved to be an ancient canal,
walled with crumbling masonry. Its channel was choked with mud and
thorny, thick-leaved desert shrubs of unfamiliar variety; but a feeble
current still flowed along it.
After some reflection, Larry set out along the banks of the canal.
He followed it for two days.
Curious straight bars of light were visible across the sky--a band of
violet in the morning; one of crimson at evening. Their apparent
motion was in the same direction as that of the sun. The bars of
light puzzled him considerably before it occurred to him that they
must be the red and violet rays.
"So you wait till evening, and then fly up into the red ray, to go
home," he muttered. "But I may not need that information," he added
grimly. "Seems to be a pretty big job to search a planet on foot, for
one person. And I'm not going back without Agnes!"
In the afternoon of the second day, he came within view of a city. He
could discern vast, imposing walls and towers of dark stone. It stood
in the barren red desert, far back from the green line of the old
canal. Larry left the canal and started wearily across toward it. He
had covered several miles of the distance before he saw that the lofty
towers were falling, the magnificent walls crumbling. The city was
ruined, dead, deserted!
The realization brought him a great flood of despair. He had hoped to
find people--friends, from whom he might get food, and information
about this unfamiliar planet. But the city was dead.
Larry was standing there, in the midst of the vast red plain between
ruined city and ruined canal. Tired, hungry, lonely and hopeless. He
was looking up at the white "sun," trying to comfort himself with the
thought that the brilliant luminary was merely a queer blue lamp, that
he was upon a tiny experimental world in a laboratory. But the thought
brought him no relief; only confusion and a sense of incredulity.
* * * * *
Then he saw the machine-monster.
A glittering, winged thing of crystal and green metal, identical with
the one he had encountered in the laboratory. It must already have
seen him, for it was dropping swiftly toward him.
Larry started to run, took a few staggering steps. Then he recalled
the heavy rifle slung over his shoulder. Moving with desperate haste,
he got it into his hands and raised it just as the monster dropped to
the red sand a dozen yards away from him.
Steadily he covered the crystal cylinder within which the thing's
brain floated in luminous violet liquid. His finger tightened on the
trigger, ready to send a heavy bullet crashing into it. Then he
paused, swore softly, lowered the gun.
"If I kill it," he murmured, "I may never find Agnes. And if I let it
carry me off, it may take me where she is."
He walked toward the monster, across the red sand.
It stood uncertainly upon green metal legs, seeming to stare at him
strangely with eye-like lenses. Its wings of thin green metal plates,
were folded; its four green tentacles were twitching oddly.
Abruptly, it sprang upon him.
A green tentacle seized the rifle and snatched it from his hands. He
felt the automatic pistol and the ammunition being removed from his
pockets.
Then, firmly held in the flexible arms of green metal, he was lifted
against the cylinder of violet liquid. The monster spread its broad
emerald wings, and Larry was swiftly borne into the air.
In a few moments the wide ruins of the ancient city were spread below,
with the green line of the choked canal cutting the infinite red waste
of the desert beyond it.
The monster flew westward.
* * * * *
For a considerable time, nothing save barren, ocherous desert was in
view. Then Larry's weird captor flew near a strange city. A city of
green metal. The buildings were most fantastic--pyramids of green,
crowned with enormous, glistening spheres of emerald metal. An
impassable wall surrounding the city.
Larry had expected the monster to drop into the city. But it carried
him on, and finally settled to the ground several miles beyond. The
green tentacles released him, as the thing landed, and he sprawled
beside it, dizzy after his strange flight.
As Larry staggered uncertainly to his feet, he saw that the monster
had released him in an open pen. It was a square area, nearly fifty
yards on each side, and fenced with thin posts or rods of green metal,
perhaps twenty feet high. Set very close together, and sharply pointed
at the top, they formed a barrier apparently insurmountable.
In the center of the pen was a huge and strange machine, built of
green metal. It looked very worn and ancient; it was covered with
patches of bluish rust or corrosion. At first it looked quite strange
to Larry; then he was struck by a vaguely familiar quality about it.
Looking closer, he realized that it was a colossal steam hammer!
Its design, of course, was unfamiliar. But in the vast, corroded frame
he quickly picked out a steam chest, cylinder, and the great hammer,
weighing many tons.
He gasped when his eyes went to the anvil.
A man was chained across it.
A man in torn, grimy clothing, fastened with fetters of green metal
upon wrists and ankles, so that his body was stretched beneath the
massive hammer. He seemed to be unconscious; upon his head, which was
turned toward Larry, was a red and swollen bruise.
The monster which had dropped Larry within the pen rose again into the
air. And Larry started forward, trying to remember just what Agnes had
told him of a machine to which the monsters sacrificed.
This must be the machine--this ancient steam hammer!
As he moved forward, Agnes came into view.
* * * * *
She walked around the massive base of the great machine, carrying a
bowl filled with a fragrant brown liquid. She stopped at sight of
Larry, and uttered a little cry. The bowl fell from her hands, and the
fragrant liquid splashed out on the ground. Her brown eyes went wide
with delighted surprise; then a look of pain came into them.
"Larry, Larry!" she cried. "Why did you come?"
"To get you," he answered, trying to speak as lightly as he could.
"And the best way I knew to find you was to let one of the monsters
bring me. Cheer up!" But even to himself, his voice had a tone of
discouragement.
She smiled wanly. "I don't see anything to be cheerful about." Her
small face was set and a little white. "Dr. Whiting is going to be
smashed under the hammer of this dreadful machine, whenever the steam
is up. Then it is my turn. And yours. That's nothing to laugh about."
"But we aren't smashed yet!" Larry insisted.
"By the way, what was that in the bowl?" he went on, glancing down. "I
forgot to bring lunch." He grinned.
She looked down, startled.
"Oh. Dr. Whiting's soup. Poor fellow, I'm afraid he'll never awake to
eat it. There's plenty more. Come around here."
She picked up the bowl and led him around the base of the machine;
then she filled the bowl again with the fragrant, red-brown liquid,
from a tall urn of green metal. Larry took the dish eagerly and gulped
down the rather insipid and tasteless food.
"And the monsters worship this old steam hammer?" he inquired, when
his hunger was appeased.
"Yes. I think the thing is worked by steam generated by volcanic heat.
Anyhow, there isn't any boiler, and the steam pipe comes up out of the
ground. You can see that. So it runs on, without any attention--though
I guess the heat is dying down, since it is several days between blows
of the hammer.
"And I guess the monsters have forgotten how they used to rule
machines. They seem to have depended upon machines, even giving up
their own bodies for mechanical ones, until the machine rules them.
"And when this old hammer kept pounding on through the ages, using
volcanic steam, I guess they got to considering it alive. They began
to regard it as a sort of god. And when they got the idea of giving it
sacrifices, it was natural enough to place the victims under the
hammer."
* * * * *
They went back to Dr. Whiting who was chained across the anvil. He was
still breathing, but unconscious. He had been injured in a struggle
with the monsters, and his body was much emaciated. Agnes explained
that he had been a prisoner in the pen for many months of the time of
this world, waiting his turn to die; she said that the monsters had
just completed the extermination of another race upon the Pygmy
Planet, and were just turning to the greater world for victims.
Larry noticed that the great hammer was slowly rising in its guides,
as the pressure of the steam from the planet's interior increased. In
a few hours--just at sunset--it reached the top of its stroke.
The air above the pen was suddenly filled with glittering swarms of
the green-winged monsters, sweeping slowly about, in measured flight,
with strange order in their masses. They had come to witness the
sacrifice!
With an explosive rush of steam, the hammer came down!
The ground trembled beneath the terrific blow; the roaring of escaping
steam and the crash of the impact were almost deafening. A heavy white
cloud shrouded the corroded green machine.
When the hammer slowly lifted, only a red smear was left....
Agnes had shrunk, trembling, against Larry's shoulder. He had put his
arms about her and was holding her almost fiercely.
"My turn next," she whispered. "And don't try to fight them. It will
only make them hurt you!"
"I can't let them take you, Agnes!" Larry cried, in an agonized tone.
And the words seemed to leap out, of themselves, "Because I love you!"
"You do?" Agnes cried, in a thin, choking voice, pressing herself
against him. "Ever since the first time you came to the laboratory--"
A score of the monster forms of violet-filled crystal and gleaming
green metal had dropped into the pen. They tore Agnes from Larry's
arms, hurling him roughly to the ground, at the bottom of the green
metal fence. For some time he was unconscious.
* * * * *
When he had staggered painfully to his feet, it was night. The
monsters were gone; the starless sky was black and empty. Calling out
weakly, and stumbling about the pen, he found Agnes. She was chained
where Dr. Whiting had been.
She was conscious, unharmed. For a time they talked a little,
exchanging broken, incoherent phrases. Then they went to sleep, lying
on the anvil, beneath that mighty hammer that was slowly lifting to
strike another fearful blow.
When the "sun" had risen again, Larry brought Agnes some of the brown
soup from the metal urn, which had been filled again. Then, when he
had satisfied himself, he started clambering up the massive frame of
the hammer.
If he could put it out of commission!
It was a difficult task. He slipped back many times, and finally had
to choose another place to make the ascent. Twice he slipped and
almost fell from a considerable height. But finally he reached the
massive wheel of the valve which seemed to control the admission of
steam into the cylinder above the hammer.
If he could but close that, the steam would be confined in the chest
below. And when the pressure reached a certain point, something should
happen!
The valve was not easy to turn; it seemed fixed with the corrosion of
ages. For hours Larry wrestled with it. Then he left it, realizing
that he must find something to use for a hammer. A vigorous search of
the pen's hard earth floor failed to reveal any stone that would do.
He turned his attention to the machine, and presently saw a slender
projecting lever, high up on the side of the vast frame, which looked
as if it had been weakened by corrosion. After a perilous climb, he
reached the bar of green metal and swung his weight upon it. It broke,
and he plunged to the ground with the bar in his hands.
* * * * *
Clambering up once more to the great valve, he hammered it until the
rust that stiffened it was loosened. Then he struggled with the valve
until it was closed.
"We'll see what happens!" he muttered.
Returning to the ground, he set to work to break the green metal
fetters upon Agnes' wrists and ankles, using the broken lever as
hammer and file.
For the greater part of six days he toiled at that task, while the
great hammer rose slowly. But the green metal seemed very hard. One
arm was free at the end of the second day, the other on the fourth. He
had one ankle loose on the morning of the sixth day. But as evening
came on, and the great hammer reached the top of its stroke, the
fourth chain still defied him.
Before sunset, a swarm of the monsters appeared, wheeling on green
wings. He was forced to leave the work, hiding his improvised file.
Agnes still lay across the anvil, to conceal from the monsters the
fact that the chains were broken. Larry sat close beside her, nursing
hands that were blistered and sore from his days of filing at the
chains.
A sudden clatter came from the huge mechanism above them, and a sharp
hiss of steam, which became louder.
"It works!" Larry whispered to Agnes. "The old valve held, and the
steam can't get into the cylinder to smash us! But Allah knows what
will happen when the pressure rises in that old steam chest!"
Darkness came. Dusk swallowed the wheeling machine-monsters. All night
Larry and Agnes waited silently, together on the great anvil,
listening to the hissing of steam from above, which was slowly
becoming a shrill monotonous scream; monotonous, always higher,
shriller.
The "sun" rose again. Still the green-winged monsters wheeled about.
They came in glittering swarms, thousands of them. They came nearer
the machine now, and flew about more swiftly, is if excited.
* * * * *
Then it happened.
There was a roar like thunder, and a colossal, bellowing explosion.
The air was filled suddenly with scalding steam, and with screaming
fragments of the bursting steam chest. In the midst of it all, Larry
felt a crushing blow upon the head. And a blanket of darkness fell
upon him....
"The monsters are all gone, darling," Agnes' voice reached him. "As
though they were very much frightened. And a piece of the old hammer
hit the fence and knocked a hole in it. You must go. Leave me--"
"Leave you?" Larry groaned, struggling to sit up. "Not a bit of it!"
He touched his head gingerly, felt a swollen bruise.
Collecting a few fragments of the wrecked machine, to serve as tools,
he fell to work again upon Agnes' remaining chain. Already he had cut
a deep groove in it. Two hours later, it was broken.
Carrying the metal urn of brownish liquid, they crept out through the
hole in the fence, which had been torn by the flying fragment of a
broken casting of green metal. They left the wreck of the machine
which a strange race had worshiped as a bloody god and hurried
furtively into the desert of red sand.
Making a wide circuit about the fantastic city of green metal, which
Larry had seen from the air, they struck out eastward across the
desolate ocherous waste. The food in the urn, eaten sparingly, lasted
until the end of the eighth day.
On the morning of the ninth, they came in view of the green line of
the ancient canal. It was hours later that they staggered weakly over
its wall of crumbling masonry, clambered down into the muddy,
weed-grown channel, and drank thirstily of green, tepid water.
Larry found his old trail, beyond the canal. They followed it back. In
the middle of the afternoon they stumbled up to the thicket of spiky
desert growth, in which Larry had hidden the plane.
The machine was undamaged.
* * * * *
Before sunset, Larry had removed the stake ropes, slipped the canvas
cover from the motor, turned the plane around, inspected it, and
examined the strip of smooth, hard red sand upon which he had landed.
Agnes pointed out the dim band of crimson across the sky, from north
to south, slowly rising toward the zenith.
"That's the red ray," she said. "We fly into it."
"And a happy moment when we do," Larry rejoined.
He roused the motor to life.
As the bar of crimson light neared the zenith, the plane rolled
forward across the sand and took off. Climbing steeply, Larry
anxiously watched the approach of the red band. The gravitation of the
Pygmy Planet seemed to diminish as he gained altitude, until presently
he could fly vertically from it, without circling at all. He set the
bow toward the scarlet bar across the sky before him.
And suddenly he was flying through ruby flame.
His eyes went to the little scale at the corner of the instrument
board. He saw the little ebon needle waver, leave the mark designated
"Pygmy Planet Normal" and start toward "Earth Normal."
For what seemed a long time, he was wheeling down the crimson ray. A
few times he looked back at Agnes, in the rear seat. She had gone to
sleep.
Then a vast, circular field was below--the crystal platform.
Larry landed the plane upon it, taxied to the center and stopped
there, with the motor idling. The laboratory, taking shape in the blue
abyss about him, seemed to contract swiftly.
* * * * *
Presently the plane covered most of the crystal disk. He taxied
quickly off, stopped on the floor nearby, and cut the ignition. Agnes
woke. Together they clambered from the plane's cabin and walked back
into the crimson ray.
Once more the vast spaces of the room seemed to shrink, until it
looked familiar once more. The Pygmy Planet, and the huge machine
looming ever them, dwindled to natural size.
Agnes, watching a scale on the frame of the mechanism, which Larry had
not noticed, leaped suddenly from the red ray, drawing him with her.
"We don't want to be giants!" she laughed.
Larry drew a deep breath, and looked about him. Once more he was in
his own world, and surveying it in his normal size. He became aware of
Agnes standing close against him. He suddenly took her in his arms and
kissed her.
"Wait a minute," she objected, slipping quickly from his arms. "What
are we going to do about the Pygmy Planet? Those monsters might come
again, even if you did wreck their god. And Dr. Whiting, poor
fellow--But we mustn't let those monsters come back!"
Larry doubled up a brown fist and drove it with all his strength
against the little globe that spun so steadily between the twin,
upright cylinders of crimson and of violet flame. His hand went deep
into it. And it swung from its position, hung unsteadily a moment, and
then crashed to the laboratory floor. It was crushed like a ball of
soft brown mud. It spattered.
"Now I guess they won't come back," Agnes said. "A pity to spoil all
Dr. Whiting's work, though."
Larry was standing motionless, holding up his fist and looking at it
oddly. "I smashed a planet! Think of it. I smashed a planet! Just the
other--why it was just this evening, at the office, I was wishing for
something to happen!"
* * * * *
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