Astounding Stories, July, 1931 Part 13

Then he scrambled up the other bank and ran towards the hillock behind which a sleek black monoplane with an eight hundred horse-power motor awaited him....

The thing that followed next was never forgotten by the people who wors.h.i.+pped Aten, the Sun G.o.d. It went down in legends; it was repeated and repeated, and it grew in the telling. It was awful; it was magical; it was G.o.dlike.

A great thunder sounded from behind the hillock of ice, a thunder that pulsed louder and louder, until the people fell down in awe, hardly daring to look. When they did, they saw a gleaming black form that stood on queer shafts of wood come gliding with the speed of the wind from behind the hillock. It straightened out on a stretch of snow, bellowing with a loudness that hammered their eardrums into numbness, and sped lightly along till the queer shafts of wood left the surface and the sleek black object soared up into the air.

Into the air! With frightened eyes they watched it wheel around, and then come roaring towards them. They fell flat again, and did not dare to look. The thunderous blast pa.s.sed close over them, then dwindled and dwindled, until they ventured timidly to look up again.

They saw the shape ringed with sunset fire hurtling through the air, soaring up and up and up ... till it died to a speck ... till it disappeared into the face of the sun they wors.h.i.+pped as Aten....

A warrior spoke. His tones were low and awed but they all heard him.

"Truly," he whispered, "he was a G.o.d!..."

A ONE-BILLIONTH-OF-A-SECOND CAMERA

Through use of a spectroscopic camera with a shutter which operates in about one-billionth of a second, physicists at the University of California have been able to take pictures of the action of light at various periods during the course of an electrical spark which lasts only one one-hundred-thousandth of a second.

They have been able to show by photographic evidence that the magnetic field developed by the pa.s.sage of an electric current across the spark gap gives the first light emitted a different appearance from that emitted a few millionths of a second later.

At the moment that the spark jumps, electricity is released in enormous quant.i.ties much as water is released by the breaking of a dam. It is this sudden release of the dammed-up current across the spark gap that causes the temporary magnetic field and the difference in the appearance of the light from the spark.

In answer to those who scoff at the possibility of a camera shutter operating in a billionth of a second, it was explained that the shutter is not a mechanical device, but operates automatically through the application of a physical law of light. In a general way, it might be said that the spark takes its own picture.

The spectroscope camera is set up at one end of a long corridor. When the electrical current jumps across the spark gap it sets up a momentary current in a set of wires running the length of the corridor and connected with the camera. This current travels toward the camera at the rate of about 186,000 miles a second.

At about the same instant that the current jumps, or an infinitesimal fraction of a second later, the light of the resulting spark starts toward the camera at a trifle more than 186,000 miles a second. It is a race between the spark current and the spark light as to which arrives first. The current jumps just before the spark appears; so it is possible for the current to reach the camera and close the shutter even before the light which is to be pictured arrives.

By lengthening the wires between the spark gap and the camera the light is allowed to arrive first. By suitable adjustment of the wiring, the shutter can be made to close during any one-billionth of a second interval during the first four ten-millionths of a second of the spark's short life.

The camera shutter consists of two Nicol prisms of Iceland spar and balsam, arranged in such a way that under ordinary conditions the light coming from the spark is stopped by polarization and prevented from reaching the camera. Between these two prisms, however, is a solution of chemicals which will depolarize the light and allow it to continue.

The wires leading from the spark gap connect with this solution. When the current jumps across the gap it races down the corridor and electrifies the solution for about one-billionth of a second. This electrification removes the depolarizing effects of the solution and light pa.s.sage stops; in other words, the shutter is closed.

The Diamond Thunderbolt

_By H. Thompson Rich_

[Ill.u.s.tration: "_Good Lord! What's this?_"]

[Sidenote: Locked in a rocket and fired into s.p.a.ce!--such was the fate which awaited young Stoddard at the end of the diamond trail!]

Prof. Norman Prescott, leader of the American Kinchinjunga expedition, crept from his dog-tent perched eerily at the 26,000-foot level of this unscaled Himalayan peak, the third highest in the world. With anxious eyes he searched the appalling slopes that lifted another 2,000 feet to its majestic summit, now glistening in the radiance of sunset.

Where was young Jack Stoddard, official geologist and crack mountaineer of the party?

That morning Professor Prescott and Stoddard had set off together, from Camp No. 4, at the 22,000-foot level. Mounting laboriously but swiftly, they had reached the present eyrie by noon. There Stoddard had left the leader of the expedition and pushed on alone, to reconnoiter a razor-back ridge that looked as though it might prove the key to the summit.

But the afternoon had pa.s.sed; the daring young geologist had promised to return in an hour; and now it was sunset, with still no sign of him.

Professor Prescott sighed, and a bitter expression crossed his bronzed, lined face. Just one more evidence of the cursed luck that had marked the expedition from the start!

Well he knew that he must head down at once for Camp No. 4 or risk death on this barren, wind-swept slope, and equally well he knew that to go would be to leave his brave companion to his fate, providing he had not already met it on those desolate ridges above.

Yes, and another thing he knew. The report of this latest disaster would mean the doom of the expedition. The terrified, superst.i.tious natives would bolt, claiming the "snow people" had struck again.

"G.o.ds of the Mountain" they called them, those mysterious beings they alone seemed to see--evil spirits who kept guard over this towering realm, determined none should gain its ultimate heights.

Tensely Professor Prescott stood there on that narrow shelf of glacial ice, peering off into the sunset.

A hundred miles to the west, bathed in the refulgence of a thousand rainbows, rose the incredible peak of Everest, mightiest of all mountains, yet less than 1,000 feet higher than Kinchinjunga. And down, straight down those almost vertical slopes up which the expedition had toiled all summer, lay gorges choked with tropical growth. Off to the south, a scant fifty miles away, the British health station of Darjeeling flashed its white villas in the coppery glow.

An awesome spectacle!--one that human eyes had seldom if ever seen.

Yet from the summit, so invitingly near!...

Perhaps, even now, Stoddard was witnessing this incomparable sight. To push on, to join him, meant triumph. To head down, defeat. While to stay, to wait....

Grimly, Professor Prescott left his insecure perch and headed up over that razor-back ridge whence the young geologist had vanished.

As he proceeded cautiously along, drawing sharp, quick breaths in the rarefied upper atmosphere, he told himself it was ambition that was leading him on, but in his heart he knew it was not so. In his heart, he knew he was going to the rescue of his gallant companion, though the way meant death.

A hundred yards had been gained, perhaps two--each desperate foothold fraught with peril of a plunge into the yawning abysms to left and right--when suddenly he spied a figure on a twilit spur ahead.

Panting, he paused. It must be Stoddard! Yet it seemed too small, too ghostly.

Professor Prescott waved, but even as he looked for an answering signal, the figure vanished.

"My eyes!" he muttered to himself. "I'm getting snow-blind."

Then he called aloud:

"Jack! Oh, Jack! h.e.l.lo!"

Only an echo greeted the call, and he did not repeat it but pushed on silently, conserving his energy.

Was there truth after all in those persistent rumors of the natives about the snow people who inhabited the upper slopes of the Himalayas?

His tired brain toyed with the idea, to be cut off sharply by the cheery call: