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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 tothe Pygmy Planet.]
_It paused, seeming to regard them with malevolenteyes._]
"Nothing ever happens to me!" Larry Manahan grumbled under his breath,sitting behind his desk at the advertising agency which employed hisservices in return for the consideration of fifty a week. "All theadventure I know is what I see in the movies, or read about inmagazines. What wouldn't I give for a slice of real life!"
Unconsciously, he tensed the muscles of his six feet of lean, hardbody. His crisp, flame-colored hair seemed to bristle; his blue eyesblazed. He clenched a brown hammer of a fist.
Larry felt himself an energetic, red-blooded square peg, badlyafflicted with the urge for adventure, miserably wedged in a roundhole. It is one of the misfortunes of our civilization that a youngman who, for example, might have been an excellent pirate a couple ofcenturies ago, must be kept chained to a desk. And that seemed to beLarry's fate.
"Things happen to other people," he muttered. "Why couldn't anadventure come to me?"
He sat, staring wistfully at a picture of a majestic mountainlandscape, soon to be used in the advertising of a railway companywhose publicity was handled by his agency, when the jangle of thetelephone 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. Larrytried to place it, as he listened at the receiver and attempted to getthe 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 thinthread of memory given him by the familiar note in that eager excitedvoice. 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 hadthought her, on the occasions of their few brief meetings. Larry knewher as the secretary and laboratory assistant of Dr. Travis Whiting, aretired college professor known for his work on the structure of theatom. Larry had called at the home-laboratory of the savant, monthsbefore, to check certain statistics to be used for advertisingpurposes and had met the girl there. Only a few times since had heseen her.
Now she had called him in a voice that fairly trembled withexcitement--and, he thought, dread! And she had been interruptedbefore she had time to give him any message.
For a few seconds Larry stared at the telephone. Then he rose abruptlyto 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 thisis the invitation!"
It was not many minutes later that he sprang out of a taxi at thefront of the building in which Dr. Travis Whiting made his home andmaintained a private experimental laboratory. It was a two-storystucco house, rather out of date, set well back from the sidewalk,with a scrap of lawn and a few straggling shrubs before it. The doorwas closed, the windows curtained blankly. The place seemed desertedand 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. Hefelt something ominous, fateful, about the silent mystery that seemedto shroud the old house. For the first time, it occurred to him thatAgnes might be in physical danger, as a result of some incautiousexperiment on the part of Dr. Whiting.
* * * * *
Instinctively, his hand sought the door knob. To his surprise, thedoor was unlocked. It swung open before him. For a moment he stared,hesitating, into the dark hall revealed beyond. Then, driven by thethought that Agnes might be in danger, he advanced impulsively.
The several doors opening into the hall were closed. The one at theback, he knew, gave admittance to the laboratory. Impelled by somevague premonition, he hastened toward it down the long hall and threwit open.
As he stepped inside the room, his foot slipped on a spot of somethingred. Recovering his balance with difficulty, he peered about.
Bending down, Larry briefly examined the red spot on which he hadslipped. It was a pool of fresh blood which had not yet darkened.Lying beside it, crimson-splashed, was a revolver. As he picked up theweapon, 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 wastwisted, and the barrel bent almost into a circle. The revolver hadbeen crumpled by some terrific force--as a soft clay model of it mighthave been broken by the pressure of a man's hand.
"Crimson shades of Caesar!" he muttered, and dropped the crushedweapon 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 thefirst floor to the roof. Gray daylight streamed through a sky-light,twenty feet overhead. The ends of the vast room were cluttered withelectrical and chemical apparatus; but Larry's eye was caught at onceby a strange and complex device, which loomed across from him, in thecenter of the floor.
* * * * *
Two pillars of intense light, a ray of crimson flame and another ofdeeply violet radiance, beat straight down from a complicated array ofenormous, oddly shaped electron tubes, of mirrors and lenses andprisms, of coils and whirling disks, which reached almost to the roof.Upright, a yard in diameter and almost a yard apart, the strangecolumns of light were sharp-edged as two transparent cylinders filledwith liquid light of ruby and of amethyst. Each ray poured down upon acircular platform of glass or polished crystal.
Hanging between those motionless cylinders of red and violet light wasa strange-looking, greenish globe. A round ball, nearly a yard indiameter, hung between the rays, almost touching them. Its surface wasoddly splotched with darker and lighter areas. It was spinningsteadily, 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 lookedabout the room once more. No, the laboratory was vacant of humanoccupants. No one was hidden among the benches that were clutteredwith beakers and test tubes and stills, or among the dynamos andtransformers 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 theblood of Agnes Sterling or the scientist who employed her that was nowclotting on the floor? What terrific force had crumpled up therevolver? What had become of Agnes and Dr. Whiting? And of whateverhad attacked them? Had Agnes called him after the attack, or before?
* * * * *
Despite himself, his attention was drawn back to the little globespinning so regularly, floating in the air between the pillars of redand 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 mysterygathering about him. He stepped nearer the sphere. It was curiouslylike a miniature world. T
he irregular bluish areas would be seas; thegreen and the brown spaces land. In some parts, the surface appearedmistily obscured--perhaps, by masses of cloud.
Larry saw an odd-looking lamp, set perhaps ten feet behind the slowlyspinning, floating ball, throwing upon it a bright ray of vividly bluelight. Half the strange sphere was brilliantly illuminated by it; therest 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. Itspun rather slowly, Larry noted, and each rotation consumed severalseconds. He could distinguish green patches that might be forests, andthin, silvery lines that looked like rivers, and broad, red-brownareas that must be deserts, and the broad blue stretches thatsuggested oceans.
"A toy world!" he cried. "A laboratory planet! What an experiment--"
Then his eyes, looking up, caught the glistening, polished lens of apowerful magnifying glass which hung by