19
I had leaped and seized the gun which was still in the hand of thedead guard. "Snap, the girls!"
"Down below. Free. They've got Meka bound and gagged, locked andsealed in a bunk-room. You bring them up! I'll hold this accursedtraitor. No need to kill him. By the gods, I've killed enough!"
He saw for the first time the vast silent drama in the firmamentoutside the dome windows. "Gregg, for the love of...."
"No time now, Snap! I'll get the girls."
"Watch out. I might have missed somebody down below."
He had. Three men appeared on the forward deck near the foot of ourturret ladder. My bolt spat down upon them; two of them fell. Theother ran aft, toward where I saw Venza and Anita appearing from thelounge doorway of the cabin superstructure. I fired again, and therunning man tumbled forward on his face. He was the last of the piratecrew.
Molo was crouching, half-bending forward over his instrument table,with Snap's gun upon him. The girls burst upon us. We armed them. Mekawas safely fastened down below. We backed Molo to the floor in thecorner, with Venza and Anita watching him.
Snap and I were in control of the ship. For temporary periods theautomatics would handle the gravity-shifters. I could operate themhere from the turret. We had a downward velocity toward the Moon. Fivehundred miles below us, no more, was the base of that diabolicalgravity-ray which was so swiftly pulling the twenty-five Grantlineships to their destruction.
I gripped Snap and told him what we must do. "The forward gun on thestarboard side is almost identical with our Earth guns, the Francineprojectors. With a short range you can handle it and I'll give you aclose mark!"
He dashed for the deck. I set the levers. Gravity-plates with full bowattraction. Stern repulsion to the Earth and the stern rocket-streamsat highest power.
The _Star-Streak_ responded smoothly; with acceleration such as onlyMolo's famous terror of the starways could attain, we dove for theMoon.
Breathless minutes! Those Wandl ships up in the firmament behind ourstern would probably do nothing; they would not understand this suddenmove of their friendly ship. The brain masters, the insect-likeWandlites down on the Moon rocks operating the mechanism of thegravity-ray, would not suspect until too late what the _Star-Streak_was doing.
Uprushing rocks, the Apennines to one side; the dark yawning maw ofArchimedes on the other. We were diving parallel with the gravity-raynow, hardly a mile from it, diving for the mechanisms of its source.Twenty thousand feet of altitude. I bent our rocket-streams up for thestart of our turning. Bow-hull gravity-plates next. Ten thousand feet.Five thousand.
How close we went I never knew. It was seconds now, not minutes. Ishifted all the controls. Our bow lifted as we straightened. The wholespreading lunar surface tilted and dipped. Snap fired. I saw the boltflash at the tilting landscape and a puff of light down there on therocks. And an instant later there were vacant rocks where the littlecluster of men and mechanisms had been. And the upflung gravity-beamwas gone!
The giant towering cliffs of the mountain of Archimedes seemed to rushat our upturning bow. The great dark crater-mouth slid under our hull.But we cleared it; the maw of blackness slid down and away; the wholelunar world tilted down and dwindled as we mounted again into thestarlight.
Minutes passed while we mounted. Above our upstanding bow was a newdrama. The suddenly-released Grantline ships, almost level with theten Wandl vessels when the ray vanished, turned sidewise. The poisedWandl craft, devoid of velocity, could not pick up the ray toescape now. Grantline, for those minutes, ignored the franticallyflung discs; it was a desperate encounter, all at close quarters. Wesaw the spitting, puffing lights and the silent turmoil, hiddenpresently by the spreading clouds of luminous fog.
Then out of it came drifting the wreckage. We plunged through an endof the glowing fog, encountered nothing but two triumphant Venusvessels. With them we mounted into the upper starlight.
This was the end of the battle. The victorious Grantline ships one byone came lunging up: only twelve of them now. No Wandl vessels wereleft.
The great spreading cloud drifted down like a shroud to hide thewreckage, drifted and settled to the lunar surface, a great, radiantarea of fog, gleaming in the Earthlight.
20
There is very little more, pertinent to this narrative, that I needadd of the events on Earth, Venus, and Mars during this momentoussummer. The main facts are history now: the wild storms, the damagedone by outraged nature and the panic among the people--all of it hasbeen detailed as public news. The strange light-beams planted by Wandlin Greater New York, Grebhar, and Ferrok-Shahn have not yet burnedthemselves away. But they are lessening and scientists say that theywill soon be gone.
The changed calendars call this the New Era. The axis of each of thethree worlds was not appreciably altered; the climates are at lastrestoring to normal. But the axial rotations of all three planets wereslowed by that attacking Wandl beam before we wrecked the gravitystation. The Earth day has been lengthened, resulting in the newcalendar, the New Era. Our year, formerly of approximately 365-1/4days, now contains, but 358.7 days.
Molo and Meka have been returned to Ferrok-Shahn. They were triedthere for piracy and treason and are imprisoned.
And Wandl? With her gravity-controls wrecked, Wandl became subject tothe balancing celestial forces. During those succeeding months of thesummer and autumn no other spaceships appeared from her: nor did ourworld investigate. Her presence here, even a little world one-sixththe size of the Moon, was causing disturbance enough!
Wandl moved with slow velocity, like a dallying, strangely sluggishcomet about to round our Sun. What would her final orbit be? Byfortunate chance she headed in, far from the Earth and Venus; missedMercury by a wide margin; went close around the Sun: came out again.
But the pull of the Sun, and Mercury dragged her back. Her velocitywas not great enough.
I recall that late autumn afternoon when, with Anita, Snap, and Venza,I sat in the observatory near Washington, gazing at Wandl through thedark glass of the solar-scope. Doomed invader! She showed now as atiny dark dot over the Sun's giant, blazing surface. This was herfinal plunge. The dot was presently swallowed and gone. It seemed,amid those giant, licking streamers of blazing gas, that there was anextra puff of light.
And some claim now that for a brief time our sunlight was a triflewarmer, a little pyre to mark the end of Wandl, the Invader.
* * * * *
A CLASSIC NOVEL OF INTERPLANETARY WARFARE
There were nine major planets in the Solar System and it was withintheir boundaries that man first set up interplanetary commerce andbegan trading with the ancient Martian civilization. And then theydiscovered a tenth planet--a maverick!
This tenth world, if it had an orbit, had a strange one, for it washeading inwards from interstellar space, heading close to theEarth-Mars spaceways, upsetting astronautic calculations and raisingturmoil on the two inhabited worlds.
But even so none suspected then just how much trouble this new worldwould make. For it was WANDL THE INVADER and it was no barrenplanetoid. It was a manned world, manned by minds and monsters andtraveling into our system with a purpose beyond that of astronomicalaccident!
It's a terrific novel from the classic days of great science-fictionadventure--now first published in book form. When RAY CUMMINGS tookleave of this planet early in 1957, the world of modernscience-fiction lost one of its genuine founding fathers. For theimagination of this talented writer supplied a great many of the mostbasic themes upon which the present superstructure of science-fictionis based. Following the lead of Jules Verne and H. G. Wells, Cummingssuccessfully bridged the gap between the early dawning ofscience-fiction in the last decades of the Nineteenth Century and thefull flowering of the field in these middle decades of the Twentieth.
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Born in 1887, Cummings acquired insight into the vast possibilities offuture science by a personal assoc
iation with Thomas Alva Edison.During the 1920's and 1930's, he thrilled millions of readers with hisvivid tales of space and time. The infinite and the infinitesimal wereall parts of his canvas, and past, present, and future, theinterplanetary and the extra-dimensional, all made their initialimpact on the reading public through his many stories and novels.
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D-449 THE GENETIC GENERAL by Gordon R. Dickson and TIME TO TELEPORT by Gordon R. Dickson
D-453 THE GAMES OF NEITH by Margaret St. Clair and THE EARTH GODS ARE COMING by Kenneth Bulmer
D-455 THE BEST FROM FANTASY AND SCIENCE-FICTION Fourth Series, edited by Anthony Boucher.
D-457 VULCAN'S HAMMER by Philip K. Dick and THE SKYNAPPERS by John Brunner
D-461 THE TIME TRADERS by Andre Norton
D-465 THE MARTIAN MISSILE by David Grinnell and THE ATLANTIC ABOMINATION by John Brunner
D-468 SENTINELS OF SPACE by Eric Frank Russell
D-471 SANCTUARY IN THE SKY by John Brunner and THE SECRET MARTIANS by Jack Sharkey
D-473 THE GREATEST ADVENTURE by John Taine
D-479 TO THE TOMBAUGH STATION by Wilson Tucker and EARTHMAN GO HOME by Poul Anderson
D-482 THE WEAPON SHOPS OF ISHER by A. E. Van Vogt
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