The universe wreckers

by Edmond Hamilton

The Gathering of Earth's Forces

Staring ahead into space from the control-chair of our racing flier, I heard Whitely's voice from beside me. "Seventeen days," he was saying. "And in two more days we ought to reach Earth."

I nodded abstractedly, gazing ahead. "Two days at the most," I said. "We're inside Jupiter's orbit now, and once through the asteroidal belt, there'll be nothing to delay us."

For as Whitely and I gazed outward, Marlin and Randall sleeping now in two of the space-flier's bunks, we could see that we were approaching, indeed, that belt of whirling asteroids that marked the division between the four inner and the four great outer planets of the solar system. To the left, dropping behind us, gleamed the gigantic cloud-belted sphere of Jupiter with its stately train of attendant moons, as great a mystery to us as when we first had passed it. A side force-ray was holding the flier out still from the mighty planet's attraction, while ahead and to the right from us now gleamed crimson Mars. Yet it was not these that held the eyes of Whitely and myself, nor even the increasing fiery circle of the sun before us, but the bluish-white little spot of light that was expanding slowly in size and brilliance as we shot on toward it, the little spot of bluish light that was our planet, Earth.

For days we had gazed toward that little light-spot as our space-flier went on and on through the solar system's vast reaches toward it. For seventeen days, now, even as Whitely had said, we had been racing inward from Neptune at utmost speed on our desperate journey back to our own world. The space-flier's great rear force-ray, pushing back against giant Neptune, had hurled the flier in through the outer reaches of our universe with an acceleration of velocity that was so great as to prove almost our undoing. For more than once that terrific pressure of that acceleration on us, despite our shock-absorbing apparatus, had so affected our bodies as to overcome us with successive fits of nausea and unconsciousness. And once, just after we had swept in past great Saturn and its mighty rings, fearful of those great rings after our former misadventure with them, I had awakened from my sleep-period to find Randall and Marlin, in the control-chairs, quite unconscious from the flier's terrific acceleration, the flier itself speeding onward without any guiding hand on its controls.

Yet despite this we had grimly driven the flier to the utmost acceleration possible, its speed steadily mounting toward the maximum in those succeeding days that we flashed inward from Neptune. For behind us Neptune's calm, green little disk of light, though diminishing steadily in size as we receded from it, seemed like a baleful signal of doom shining there behind us. For out from Neptune, or rather out from its moon, Triton, the giant force-ray of the Neptunians was still radiating toward the sun, thus shadowing all the solar system with the cataclysmic doom to come. For, as we flashed inward, Marlin had used his astronomical instruments to determine the fact that the sun's rotatory period had now decreased to a little over eight days, and was decreasing still by the same amount of four hours each day, its spin accelerated each day by the same amount as the colossal force-ray from Triton kept upon its side its unrelenting pressure. And within half a hundred days more, as we knew, that rotatory period of the sun would have decreased until its huge mass would be spinning once in every hour, would be spinning then so fast that it must inevitably be riven asunder into a new double star by its own centrifugal force, engulfing all its planets save Neptune alone!

So it was that we spared not ourselves but drove the space-flier in through the solar system toward Earth with a speed unthinkable, almost, using an acceleration that was all but death for us. For the one hope of preventing that colossal sun-cataclysm, as Marlin had said and as we all knew, was to reach Earth soon and then at once fly back out from Earth toward Neptune again with the great space-flier fleet, which, if the World President and the World Congress had not failed us, would be waiting on Earth for us. With that fleet we must sally back across the solar system once more to its outer edge, to great Neptune, and must fall upon Triton and the giant force-ray that was shooting from Triton to the sun, with all our power. If we could vanquish the Neptunians long enough to destroy the giant sun-ray's mechanism, to halt that ray, we would have halted the acceleration of the sun's spin, would have saved the sun and its planets from the cataclysmic doom that now threatened them. But if we could not, if the Neptunians with their countless cylinders and great weapons were too strong for us, then we could but perish there in struggling with them, since in that case nothing could halt the doom that they were loosing from Triton upon the sun and the solar system.

And as Whitely and I gazed out through the flashing flier's windows, we knew that scant enough was the time left for us in which to do these things. Even if we were safe on Earth in the next two days, as we hoped, there would remain but little more than forty days before the coming of the dread cataclysm that threatened, and it would require half that time for the space-fliers of Earth to make their way back out across the solar system to Neptune. So that now there lay over my mind that deepening shadow of impending colossal disaster that had hovered over all our minds during the strange days of our racing inward through the solar system, making me gaze somberly enough toward the bluish light-spot in the darkness of space far ahead that was our goal now. To the left, though, Jupiter's great globe had dropped far behind now, and as I saw that I cut out our side-ray, and turned toward Whitely.

"We're at the edge of the asteroidal belt now," I told him, "but I'm not going to slow our speed. We'll just flash on through it and take our chance."

He nodded gravely. "I'll wake Marlin and Randall now to help me keep watch," he said.