would not serve the purposes of the Terrestrials. Small it was, and barren: waterless,
practically airless, lifeless; a cratered, jagged, burned-out ember of what might once
have been a fertile little world.
The viewpoint then leaped past the flaming inferno of the luminary and came to rest in the
upper layers of an atmosphere.
“Aha!” Seaton exulted, after he had studied his instruments briefly. “This looks like home,
sweet home to me. Nitrogen, oxygen, some CO2, a little water vapor, and traces of the
old familiar rare gases. And see them oceans, them clouds, and them there hills? Hot
dog!”
As the projection dropped toward the new world’s surface, however, making possible a
detailed study, it became evident that there was something abnormal about it. The
mountains were cratered and torn; many of the valleys were simply desolate expanses of
weathered lava, tuff, and breocia; and, while it seemed that climatic conditions were
eminently suitable, of animal life there was none.
Everywhere there were signs of ravishment, as though that fair world had been torn and
ravaged by cataclysmic storms of violence unthinkable; ravages which for centuries
Nature had been trying to heal.
And it was not only the world itself that had been outraged. Near a large inland lake there
spread the ruins of what once had been a great city; ruins so crumbled and razed as to
be almost unrecognizable. What had been stone was dust, what had been metal was
rust; and dust and rust alike were now almost completely overgrown by vegetation. For
centuries Nature undisturbed had slowly but implacably been reducing to nought the once
ordered and purposeful works of a high intelligence.
“Hm-m-m!” Seaton mused, subdued. “There was a near collision of planet-bearing suns,
Mart; and that chlorin planet was captured. This world was ruined by the strains set up
but surely they must have been scientific enough to have seen it coming? Surely they
must have made plans so that some of them could have lived through it?”
He fell silent, driving the viewpoint hither and thither, like a hound in quest of a scent. “I
thought so!” Another ruined city lay beneath them; a city whose buildings, works, and
streets had been fused together into one vast agglomerate of glaringly glassy slag,
through which could be seen unmelted fragments of strangely designed structural
members. “Those ruins are fresh-that was done with heat beams, Mart. But who did it,
and why? I’ve got a hunch-wonder if we’re too late if they’ve killed them all of already?”
Hard-faced now and grim, Seaton combed the continent, finding at last what he sought.
“Ah, I thought so!” he exclaimed, his voice low but deadly. “I’ll bet my shirt that the
chlorins are wiping out the civilization of that planet-probably people more or less like us.
What d’you say, folks-do we declare ourselves in on this, or not?”
“I’ll tell the cockeyed world . . . I believe that we should . . . By all means . . : ‘ came
from Dorothy, Margaret, and Crane.
“I knew you’d back me up. Humanity fiber alles-homo sapiens against all the vermin of
the universe! Let’s go, Two -do your stuff!”
As Two hurtled toward the unfortunate planet with her every iota of driving power,
Seaton settled down to observe the strife and to see what he could do. That which lay
beneath the viewpoint had not been a city, in the strict sense of the word. It had been an
immense system of concentric fortifications, of which the outer circles had long since
gone down under the irresistible attack of the two huge structures of metal which hung
poised in the air above. Where those outer rings had been there was now an annular
lake of boiling, seething lava. Lava from which arose gouts and slender pillars of smoke
and fume; lava being volatilized by the terrific heat of the offensive beams and being
hurled away in flaming cascades by the almost constant detonations of high-explosive
shells; lava into which from time to time another portion of the immense fortress slagged
down-put out of action, riddled, and finally fused by the awful forces of the invaders.
Even as the four Terrestrials stared in speechless awe, an intolerable blast of flame
burst out above one of the flying forts and down it plunged into the raging pool, throwing
molten slag far and wide as it disappeared beneath the raging surface.
“Hurray!” shrieked Dorothy, who had instinctively taken sides with the defenders. “One
down, anyway!”
But her jubilation was premature. The squat and monstrous fabrication burst upward
through that flaming surface and, white-hot lava streaming from it in incandescent
torrents, it was again in action, apparently uninjured.
“All fourth-order stuff, Mart,” Seaton, who had been frantically busy at his keyboard and
instruments, reported to Crane. “Can’t find a trace of anything on the fifth or sixth, and
that gives us a break. I don’t know what we can do yet, but we’ll do something, believe
me!”
“Fourth order? Are you sure?” Crane doubted. “A fourth order screen would be a zone of
force, opaque and impervious to gravitation, whereas those screens are transparent and
are not affecting gravity.”
“Yeah, but they’re doing something that we never tried, since we never use fourth-order
stuff in fighting. They’ve both left the gravity band open-it’s probably too narrow for them
to work through, at least with anything very heavy and that gives us the edge.”
“Why? Do you know more about it than they do?” queried Dorothy.
“Who and what are they, Dick?” asked Margaret.
“Sure I know more about it than they do. I understand the fifth and sixth orders and you
can’t get the full benefit of any order until you know all about the next one. Just like
mathematics-nobody can really handle trigonometry until after he has had calculus. And
as to who they are, the folks in that fort are of course natives of the planet, and they may
well be people more or less like us. It’s dollars to doughnuts, though, that those vessels
are manned by the inhabitants of that interloping planet-that form of life I was telling you
about-and it’s up to us to pull their corks if we can. There, I’m ready to go, I think. We’ll
visit the ship first.”
The visible projection disappeared and, their images now invisible patterns of force, they
stood inside the control room of one of the invaders. The air bore the faint, greenish
yellow tinge of chlorin; the walls were banked and tiered with controlling dials, meters,
and tubes; and sprawling, lying, standing, or hanging before those controls were
denizens of the chlorin planet. No two of them were alike in form. If one of them was
using eyes he had eyes everywhere; if hands, hands by the dozen, all differently
fingered, sprouted from one, two, or a dozen supple and snaky arms.
But the inspection was only momentary. Scarcely had the unseen visitors glanced about
the interior when the visibeam was cut off sharply. The peculiar beings had snapped on a
full-coverage screen, and their vessel, now surrounded by the opaque spherical mirror of
a zone of force, was darting upward and away-unaffected by gravity, unable to use any
of her weapons, but impervious to any form of matter or to any ether-borne wave.
“Huh! `We didn’t come over here to get peeked at,’ says they,” Seaton snorted.
“Amoebic! Must be handy, though, at that, to sprout eyes, arms, ears, and so on
whenever and wherever you want to-and when you want to rest, to pull in all such
impedimenta and subside into a senseless green blob. Well, we’ve seen the attackers,
now let’s see what the natives look like. They can’t cut us off without sending their whole
works sky-hooting off into space.”
Nor could they. The visibeam sped down into the deepest sanctum of the fortress without
hindrance, revealing a long, narrow control table at which were seated men-men not
exactly like the humanity of Earth, of Norlamin, of Osnome, or of any other planet, but
undoubtedly men, of the genus homo.
“You were right, Dick.” Crane the anthropologist now spoke. “It seems that on planets
similar to Earth in mass, atmosphere, and temperature, wherever situated, man
develops. The ultimate genes must permeate universal space itself.”
“Maybe-sounds reasonable. But did you see that red light flash on when we came in?
They’ve got detectors set on the gravity band-look at the expression on their faces.”
Each of the seated men had ceased his activity and was slumped down into his chair.
Resignation, hopeless yet bitter, sat upon lofty, domed brows and stared out of large
and kindly eyes. Fatigue, utter and profound, was graven upon lined faces and upon
emaciated bodies.
“Oh, I get it!” Seaton exclaimed. “They think the chlorins are watching them-as they
probably do most of the time and they can’t do anything about it. Should think they could
do the same-or could broadcast an interference-I could help them on that if I could talk to