Astounding Stories, May, 1931 Part 8

Walter Harkness tried to rearrange his jumbled thoughts. She had come to warn them. Was this true? Or was this girl, who laughed so lightly, playing with him?

"Yes," he said dully, "we were bound for the Dark Moon. The Patrol couldn't stop us, nor the beasts that have paralyzed the flying service of the earth; but you have done it. We will turn back at once, and return you safely--"

He was again at the controls, one hand extended for the metal ball, when her slim hand closed upon his wrist.

"I know Herr Schwartzmann's plans," she said quietly. "He would ruin you; seize your s.h.i.+p; steal for himself the glory of your invention.

Would you go back and deliver yourself into his hands--because of me?"

The brown eyes, Harkness found, were upon his with an expression he could not fathom.

"Yes," he said simply.

And still the eyes looked into his. There was laughter in them, and something else whose meaning was concealed.

"I ask you not to do this," she was saying. "You will succeed; I read it in your face. Let me go with you; let me share in the adventure. I am begging this of you. It is your turn to be generous."

Harkness' hand upon the metal ball held it motionless within its enclosing cage. From astern there came to him the m.u.f.fled roar of a blast that drove them on and out into s.p.a.ce--black, velvety s.p.a.ce, thick-studded with sharp points of light.... He stared into that wondrous night, then back into the eyes that looked steadily, unfathomably, into his.... And his hand was unresisting as the strong, slender fingers about his wrist drew it back....

They were off for the Dark Moon: their journey, truly, was begun. And this girl, whom he had told himself to forget, was going with them.

There was much that he did not understand, but he knew that he was glad with a gladness that transcended all previous thrills of the perilous plan.

CHAPTER V

_The "Dark Moon"_

They were seated in the cabin of the man-made meteor that the brain of Harkness had conceived--two men and a girl. And they stared at one another unsmilingly, with eyes which reflected their comprehension of the risks that they ran and the dangers which lay ahead in the dark void. Yet the brown eyes of Mam'selle Diane, no less than the others, were afire with the thrill of adventure--the same response to the same lure that has carried men to each new exploration--or to their death.

Behind them, a rear lookout port framed a picture of awful majesty.

The earth was a great disc, faintly luminous in a curtain of dead black. From beyond it, a hidden sun made glorious flame of the disc's entire rim. And, streaming toward it, a straight, blasting line from their stern exhaust, was an arrow of blue.

It had taken form slowly, that arrow of blue fire, and Harkness answered an unspoken question from the girl.

"Hydrogen and oxygen," he explained. "It is an explosive mixture at this height, but too thin to take fire. It will pa.s.s. Beyond this is pure hydrogen. And then, nothing."

He turned to switch on their radio receiver, and he set it for the newscasting waves that went forth from the most powerful station of Earth, the Press Tower of New York. A voice came to them faintly. For a time it vied with the m.u.f.fled roar of their thundering exhaust; then it lost volume, faded, and was finally gone.

Their last contact with Earth was severed. There remained only blackness, and a great abyss through which they were plunging.

Harkness busied himself with calculations. He would have spoken, but the silence that followed the vanished voice of Earth had robbed his own voice of control.

A telescope sight was fixed rigid with the axis of their s.h.i.+p. He looked through it, moved their controls, and brought the cross-hairs of his instrument to bear upon a star.

"That's about right," he said quietly. "I got all the information that the observatories had on the orbit of the Dark Moon. It is circling the Earth from north to south. It coincided for a short time with our own moon when it first hit; that's what kicked up the big wave and jarred us up. But it swung off and seems to have settled down in its own orbit now.

"Two hundred thousand miles away is what they make it, though I think that is more or less of a guess. I wish we could measure our speed."

He looked at the earth-induction speed-indicator. Useless now, it registered zero.

"Well," he added, "we are shooting for the North Star. We will pa.s.s close to the Dark Moon's...o...b..t; it should be about over the Pole on this date. And there is one good safe bet, anyhow; there is nothing between here and there to stop us."

He was being weakly facetious, but his efforts met with an enthusiastic response. The tension of the moment, it was plain, had not affected Harkness alone. But it was many hours before the error of his statement was made manifest to all.

An island, faintly luminous, lay ahead. It grew to enormous size as they dashed upon it. Harkness sprang for the controls, but, before he could reach them, they had struck the vast field of pale green light, flashed through it, and left it diminis.h.i.+ng in size behind them. Then, other lights, not brilliant, but like phosph.o.r.escent bodies, that came and went and flashed by with blinding speed.

Another luminous area rushed at them from ahead. At first it was a speck, then an island, and then a continent in size, and through it moved other brighter lights. This time a slight suggestion of an impact was felt. Here was matter of a form they could not guess. It was Chet who pointed to the gla.s.s of their control room. The heavy lights of the lookouts were smeared with sticky fluid that drew together in trickling streams.

"Nothing between us and the Dark Moon?" he asked of Harkness. "And s.p.a.ce is an empty void? We Earth-creatures are a conceited lot."

"Meaning?" the girl questioned.

"Meaning that because we live on Earth--walk on solid ground, swim in the water and fly in the air--we deny the existence of life in s.p.a.ce.

There's the answer written in the blood of some life that was snuffed out as we hit it."

Harkness shook his head doubtfully. "Matter of some sort," he admitted, "and the serpents came from somewhere; but, as for the rest, the idea that the ocean of s.p.a.ce is filled with life as our Earth-oceans are--creatures living and moving through unknown fields of force...." He did not finish the denial, but looked with wondering gaze at the myriad points that flashed softly into glowing ma.s.ses and darted aside before their onward rush.

It was hours later that he checked their flight. Slowly at first he cut off the exhaust from their stern and opened the bow valve.

Slowly, for their wild speed must slacken as it had been built up, by slow degrees. The self-adjusting floor swung forward and up. Their deceleration was like the pull of gravity, and now straight ahead seemed down.

More hours, and they were at rest, floating in an ethereal ocean, an ocean teeming with strange life. Each face was pressed close to a lookout port. No one of the three could speak; each was too absorbed in the story his eyes were reading--this story of a strange, new existence where no life should have been.

Animalculae. They came in swarms; cloud ma.s.ses of them floated past; and swirls of phosph.o.r.escent fire marked the presence of larger creatures that moved among them. Large and small, each living creature was invisible until it moved; then came the greenish light, like phosph.o.r.escence and yet unlike.

Still Harkness could not force himself to believe the irrefutable evidence. What of astronomy? he asked himself. Why was this matter not visible through telescopes? Why did it not make its presence known through interference? Through refraction of light?... And then he realized the incredible distance within the scope of his vision; he knew that this swarming life was actually more widely s.p.a.ced; and the light of a brilliant star shone toward him through the center of a living ma.s.s to prove that here was matter that offered no resistance to the pa.s.sage of light.

A void of nothingness was before his eyes. He saw its black emptiness change to pale green fire that swirled and fled before a large shape.

The newcomer swept down like light itself. Softly green like the others, its rounded body was outlined in a huge circle of orange light. Like a cyclopean pod, it was open at one end, and that open end closed and opened and closed again as the creature gulped in uncounted millions of the tiny, luminous dots--every one, as Harkness now knew, a living thing.

Strange light whirled into life and vanished, each evidencing a battle where life took life in this ocean of the invisible living. A gasp from the girl brought Harkness quickly about.

"Another one!" she said breathlessly, and pointed where the blackness was looped with writhing fire. It came swiftly near to show the outline of the dread serpent form; the suction cups showed plainly.

Danger was in this thing, Harkness knew, but it pa.s.sed them by before he could move. The further lookout showed two gleaming monsters locked together in deadly embrace. So swift was their whirling motion that details of form were lost: only a confusion of las.h.i.+ng tentacles that whipped and tore, and one glimpse of a savage maw that sheared the tentacles off. Then the serpent was upon them.

Harkness had seen one time a sight that was indelibly impressed upon his memory. A steeloid cable had broken under a terrific strain; the end of it had lashed out with a speed the eye could not follow, to wind itself around the superstructure of a submarine--and the men who were gathered there.

He thought of that now, saw again the bleeding ma.s.s that had been an instant before a group of humans, as the serpent seized its prey. The two combatants were encircled in a living coil of light. Then, as motion ceased, the ethereal sea went dark except for pulsing suction cups that drew and strained at the bodies they held.

Harkness was groping for the controls--he saw too plainly their own helplessness when they were at rest--but the voice of Dianne checked him.

"That bright star went out," she said; and Harkness let his gaze follow where she pointed.