August 1931 Read online

  Some tools lay on the table, just out of his reach, among them a pair of cutting pliers. He stared at the pliers--an overgrown tool, half as long as his own body. The twist of Hagendorff's wrist driving home the first screw brought a cold chill over him. The pliers! It was a chance!

  He twisted a little, and keeping his eyes on the giant's back, he inched toward them. His hands, tied at the wrists behind him, clutched for them; found them. The jaws were open, and there were two sharp cutting edges. He could not hope to manipulate the whole implement with his bound hands, but he located one edge, painfully brought the rope to it and sawed rapidly.

  The steel sliced his flesh, and he felt the warm stickiness of blood. But he disregarded this and kept on. Hagendorff was still working, all unconscious--but the last screw was going in. And then some strands of the rope snapped, and it loosened.

  The next second, Garth had wrenched his hands free.

  Then, throwing caution to the winds, he sat up, grabbed the great tool and sliced the rope at his feet.

  At that moment, Hagendorff finished his job and turned around.

  * * * * *

  Their eyes met. For a breathless instant nothing happened, save that the smile on the titan's face changed to surprise and then fury. Garth scrambled to his feet. The movement brought a bellow of rage, and the manikin saw two enormous hands converging on him in a sweep that bade fair to crush every bone in his dwarfed body.

  Leaping backwards instinctively, he hurled the pliers at the giant's head.

  They were well aimed, and he saw them strike the temple, stopping the man in his tracks. He thundered, more from anger than pain. His heart pounding wildly, Garth ran back to a position behind a rack of test tubes. It was from there that he saw Hagendorff, cursing crazily, grab up a machinist's hammer and advance upon him.

  All sanity had apparently left the giant. His great face was flushed and distorted, and a growing welt showed where the pliers had clipped him. Garth suddenly knew that if he were captured again, death would not come in the chamber, but from those powerful hands, or the weapon they clutched.

  The hammer swung back for a crushing blow. But in the instant it hung poised, Garth lifted a half-filled test tube from the rack before him and swished its contents forward.

  The tube held sulphuric acid, and it sprayed over Hagendorff's face. The hammer pitched from his hand; he clutched at his eyes and stumbled back, shrieking in agony.

  Garth at once ran to the edge of the table, swung himself over and slid down the leg to the floor. The laboratory door was open and he dashed for it. But, whether or not Hagendorff could see his frantic retreat, he anticipated it, and with a reeling plunge he got there first. Fumbling, he found the key in the hole and turned it. The room was sealed.

  * * * * *

  Beginning then, the blind Hagendorff was a man berserk. With a sobbing roar of pain and fury, he lashed round for the foot-high figure that dodged and wheeled and zig-zagged to keep from his threshing arms and his hands. A table crashed over, and a flood of chemicals mixed and boiled on the floor; then another, as the giant blundered blindly into it. The cages of animals split open, and guinea pigs, rabbits and insects scuttled from their prisons, fleeing to the corners from the wild plunges of the raging German.

  Garth went reeling from a glancing blow, and fell against an over-turned stool under a far table where he could hardly breathe for the mixed odors of spilt chemicals. By some sixth sense, Hagendorff seemed to locate him, for his huge body turned and came directly for him.

  But Garth did not wait. Seizing the stool he whirled it so that it slid smash into the giant's legs. The man pitched over with a grunt, striking the floor so hard that the planks shivered.

  He did not rise. He lay there, in a wreckage of glass and splintered wood and stinking chemicals, moaning slightly.

  Garth wasted no time, but gripped a leg of the laboratory table, shinned to the top and with frantic speed fixed his strand of wire onto the control lever and round the supporting posts of the instrument panel. Then he jumped for the dynamo switch, caught the handle and jerked it down.

  The drone of a generator surged through the room. Then the midget was standing in the chamber, both ends of the wire in his hands; and his heart was thudding madly as he pulled one of them.

  It held. Over came the lever, halfway. The brilliant stream of the ray poured down. Dimly the manikin glimpsed the chamber's walls sinking down, the wreckage-strewn room outside diminishing to normal size. Fiery pain throbbed through him, but it was lost in the exultation that filled his mind as the seconds went by. He grew to two feet, two and a half--three.

  * * * * *

  But beyond that he was not to go. The swaying shape of Hagendorff loomed outside the cube. Aroused by the drone of the generator and what it signified, the giant had floundered up from the floor and now came clutching blindly for him.

  Garth knew he would have to leave the chamber at once; so, struggling for command of his muscles through the paralysis that numbed them, he tensed his hold on the other wire and pulled it a little. The control lever swung back to neutral; the ray faded and Garth jumped out. He was only a few feet away from the huge convulsed face as the German roared:

  "By God, you'll never get back on this machine!"

  His purpose was plain; his groping hand had already found the control lever. To prevent his ripping it out, Garth plunged head first into Hagendorff's stomach, and they both went down in a flurry of arms and legs. Garth, scrambling to get loose, was conscious of the ray pouring down again in the chamber above. The lever had not been wrenched out, but jerked over, setting the process of increase on.

  The next few minutes were a chaos. Now that Howard was three feet tall he was without some of the advantages of his former smallness and compactness, and his utmost efforts failed to free him from the death clutch of the pain-maddened giant. Over and over they rolled on the floor. Garth trying only to break free, and the other relentlessly holding on and dragging him over to the chamber again.

  It was a losing fight for the diminutive one, weakened as he was by his exposure and the fierce fights he had had. Little by little, squirming and resisting with all his remaining strength, he was brought near--to see the German, at last, pull half the reducing apparatus with a crash to the floor.

  The ray in the chamber faded off. The machine was silenced forever, so that Garth could never hope to regain his full size in this one....

  * * * * *

  With the realization of this, most of his spirit went, while the savage giant, successful in smashing the machinery, now turned and devoted himself exclusively to his victim.

  "Now for you!" he roared in frightening triumph, clutching the smaller man's neck with his great hands and bearing him to the floor.

  Against those fingers gouged into his wind-pipe like a vise of steel, Garth could do nothing. Feebly he gagged, and feebly he clawed at the pitiless hands--and futilely.

  It was the end, he told himself. He had come close, but closeness did not count. His eyes bulged, and a shroud of black began to obscure his vision.

  And then, suddenly, over the giant's flexed arms, he glimpsed, coming from the chamber on the table, something that chilled the blood in his veins with horror.

  It was huge and utterly loathsome. Long, hairy legs folded out, and following them came a furry, bloated body at least five feet thick. Many-faceted eyes fixed themselves coldly on the men on the floor. In one hideous leap the monster soared from the table all the way to the room's ceiling, seeming almost to float as it came down. For a moment it teetered on the floor, not five feet from the giant who, blind and all unconscious of it, was throttling his diminutive victim beneath him.

  Garth for a second forgot the grip on his throat in the horror of the monster. He knew at once what it was--a tarantula. It had crawled inside the chamber when its cage was broken, had been there even while he had been there, and had been swollen to its present blood-curdling size while they were fighting and the ray
was on. With the smashing of the apparatus, it was free to come out.

  * * * * *

  It gathered for the final spring, its terrible legs tensing perceptibly--a creature out of a nightmare. Garth Howard tried to shriek out a warning, but Hagendorff was holding his throat too well. He could only struggle weakly and nod toward the horror beyond; but the message did not get across to the giant.

  Then the tarantula sprang again.

  For a moment it seemed to hover on Hagendorff's upturned back. When it floated down, its ragged legs cradled over him, and the egg-shaped body squatted on his back....

  Garth felt his frayed nerves and senses going. A hairy leg was touching him, chilling his flesh. Above him, the giant was thrashing impotently, and he found his neck free of the awful grip.

  He wormed free. He was hardly conscious of reaching up and unlocking the door, and closing it tightly again as he stumbled forth. Later, it seemed that it was in a dream that he ran wildly into the splendid sunlight outside and down the winding trail. It was only by a tremendous effort that he kept his senses long enough to shove the rowboat out from the beach and hop in.

  He never started the motor. All that he had seen and suffered on the island of horror overcame him too soon, and he pitched down in a limp, unconscious heap....

  * * * * *

  And so it was, that, the next morning, the two harbor policemen found a rowboat with mysterious cargo floating silently down the Detroit River. So it was that some time later a launch with three local officers churned up to the solitary island, and that gunshots echoed in the gloom of a hushed laboratory room, and a man's white-faced body was carried from the cabin where he had made his one great treacherous effort to steal another's fame.

  "JAZZING UP THE UNIVERSE"

  Centuries of celestial history wheeled across the plaster sky of the new Adler planetarium at Chicago, recently, at the dedication of the astronomical institution, the first of its kind in the Western Hemisphere.

  A modern Joshua, working the levers and switches of a complicated instrument, commanded a miniature sun to stand still in the heavens--and it did. He bettered the feat of the Biblical prophet by stopping the sun at any given point on its orbit across the skies, and then ran it backward, its attendant planets, planetoids and stars scampering contrary to all rules of the universe.

  The Joshua in the person of Professor Philip Fox, director of the planetarium on a "made" island in Lake Michigan described the instrument with which he made the heavenly bodies cut capers, as a projector, made in Germany at a cost of almost $100,000. As nearly as it can be described by a layman it looks like three immense diving helmets capping the ends of a tube about six feet long. Each "helmet" is studded with lenses and inside are complicated and strange lights and projectors which throw the images of the celestial bodies on the white plaster dome above that represents the skies. The wheeling motion of the universe toward the west is obtained by revolving the "helmets" in eccentric circles on an axis. The whole effect makes a spectator feel as if the solar system was revolving around him at a greatly accentuated speed.

  As a beginning lesson for the layman who attended the opening, Professor Fox set the machine to represent the latitude of Chicago on May 10, 1930. Every one turned his eyes to the east, where a silhouette of Lake Michigan, with its lighthouses and ore ships, is painted on the plaster horizon. The dome was lighted to represent a clear night, and, incidentally, all nights are clear in a planetarium. The machine was started and up from the center of the Lake jumped Mars, red against the darkness.

  Professor Fox, with a flashlight that throws the image of an arrow, pointed out the stars as they appeared over the dome. The coming of Mars forecast the dawn of May 10 and in a few moments the sun emerged from the proper latitudinal position out of the lake and blazed its way across the heavens and set behind the silhouette of the Standard Oil Building on the west wall of the dome in less than a minute, denoting that the day had passed in review. At 3:43 P. M. central standard time, the midget moon arose and sailed its course and then set behind the darkened picture of the Straus Tower.

  Then Professor Fox ran off Sunday, Monday and Tuesday for good measure, each time with Mars heralding the dawn and the sun changing position as it does in reality. Fifty centuries of astronomical history can be run off in an hour by the machine. The planets are visible during the day in the planetarium as well as night.

  The Moon Weed

  By Harl Vincent

  [Sidenote: Unwittingly the traitor of the Earth, Van pits himself against the inexorably tightening web of plant-beasts he has released from the moon.]

  Hobart Madison pursed his lips in a whistle of incredulous surprise as he regarded the object that lay in the palm of his hand. An ordinary pebble, it seemed to be, but a pebble in which a strange fire smouldered and showed itself here and there through the dull surface.

  "Would you mind repeating what you just said, Van?" he asked.

  "You heard me the first time. I say that that's a diamond and that it came from the moon." Carl Vanderventer glared at his friend in resentment of his doubting tone.

  "Mean to tell me you've been there? To the moon?"

  "Certainly not. I'm not a Jules Verne adventurer. But I'm telling you that stone is a diamond of the first water and that it came from the moon. Weighs over a hundred carats, too. You can have it appraised yourself if you think I'm kidding you."

  Bart Madison laughed. "Don't get sore, Van," he said. "I'm not doubting your word. But Lord, man--the thing's so incredible! It takes a little time to soak in. And you say there are more?"

  "Sure. This one's the largest of five I've found so far. And there's other stuff, too. Wait till you see. Fossils, beetles and things. I tell you, Bart, the moon was inhabited at one time. I've the evidence and I want you to be the first to see it." The eyes of the young scientist shone with excitement as he saw that his friend was roused to intense interest.

  "So that's what all your experimenting has been aimed at. No wonder it cost so much."

  "Yes, and you've been a brick for financing me. Never asked a question, either. But Bart, it'll all come back to you now. Know how much that stone's worth?"

  "Plenty, I guess. But, forget about the financing and all that. Where's this laboratory of yours?" Madison had pushed his chair back from his desk and was reaching for his hat.

  "Over in the Ramapo Mountains, not far from Tuxedo. I'll have you there in two hours. Sure you can spare the time to go out there now?" Vanderventer was enthusiastically eager.

  "Spare the time? You just try and keep me from going!"

  Neither of them noticed the sinister figure that lurked outside the door which led into the adjoining office. They chattered excitedly as they passed into the outer hall and made for the elevator.

  * * * * *

  Vanderventer's laboratory was a small domed structure set in a clearing atop the mountain and well hidden from the winding road which was the only means of approach. Though Bart Madison, who had inherited his father's prosperous brokerage business, had financed his friend's research work ever since the two left college, this was his first visit to the secluded workshop, and its wealth of equipment was revealed to him as a complete surprise. He had always thought of Van's experiments as something beyond his ken; something uncanny and mysterious. Now he was convinced.

  The most prominent single piece of apparatus in the laboratory was a twelve-inch reflecting telescope which reared its latticed framework to a slit in the dome overhead. Paralleling its axis and secured to the same equatorial mounting was a shining tube of copper which bristled with handwheels and levers and was connected by heavy insulated cables to an amazing array of electrical machinery that occupied an entire side of the single room.

  "Regular young observatory you've got here, Van," Bart commented when he had taken all this in in one sweeping glance of appraisal.

  "Yeah, and then some. Not another like it in the world." Van was busying himself with the controls of his electrical eq
uipment, and a powerful motor-generator started up with a click and a whirr as he closed a starting switch.

  Madison watched in silence as the swift-fingered scientist fussed with the complicated adjustments of the apparatus and then turned to the massive concrete pedestal on which his telescope was mounted. At his touch of a button the instrument swung over on its polar axis to a new position. The slit in the dome was opened to the afternoon sky, revealing the lunar disc in its daytime faintness.

  "You can see it just as well in daylight?" Bart asked as his friend peered through the eyepiece of the telescope and continued his adjustments.

  "Sure, the surface is just as bright as at night. Doesn't seem so to your eye, but it's different through the telescope. Here, take a look."

  * * * * *

  Bart squinted through the eyepiece and saw a huge crater with a shadowed spire in its center. Like a shell hole in soft earth it appeared--a great splash that had congealed immediately it was made. The cross-hairs of the eyepiece were centered on a small circular shadow near its inner rim.

  "That," Van was saying, "is a prominent crater near the Mare Nubium. The spot under the cross-hairs is that from which I have obtained the diamonds--and other things. Watch this now, Bart."

  The young broker straightened up and saw that his friend was removing the cover from a crystal bowl that was attached to the lower end of the copper tube that pointed to the heavens at the same ascension and declination as the telescope. The air of the room vibrated to a strange energy when he closed a switch that lighted a dozen vacuum tubes in the apparatus that lined the wall.

  "You say you bring the stuff here with a light ray?" he asked.

  "No, I said with the speed of light. This tube projects a ray of vibrations--like directional radio, you know--and this ray has a component that disintegrates the object it strikes and brings it back to us as dissociated protons and electrons which are reassembled in the original form and structure in this crystal bowl. Watch."