Pioneers of space

by George Adamski

But five hundred miles is a long way, so Bob wanted to know why it was necessary for the power to extend that far from the ship.

One of the ship's scientists answered Bob's question. "Meteors travel so fast that were they not deflected so far from the ship, they would be upon us before we knew it. Even so, there are some very large meteors which are able to penetrate this outer wall of protection. During the entire time of passing through these showers we observe our screen closely so when we see a meteor continuing towards us, we have time to throw our heavier power of protection into operation, which is the middle wall of the ship. Its influence extends only two hundred fifty miles into space but is so strong that no meteor yet has ever been able to penetrate it. When we first attempted interplanetary travelling our ships were built with only a single wall, but then we lost many of them due to the heavy meteoric bombardment. Even then the ships of other planets were constructed with three bodies and used the law of repulsion for safe travelling. Since we learned this and built our ships accordingly, we too have enjoyed safe travelling to Venus, Saturn, and Jupiter. There are rather heavy meteoric showers between the Earth and the Moon, and the Moon and Mars, but between Mars and the other planets they are much heavier, with far larger meteors."

"Speaking of meteors, in our House of Records we have an account of a meteor falling through space and getting caught in the magnetic field of an almost neutral zone where it went whirling in a circle just outside the borderline of the gravitational powers. Becoming so hot through continuous action, it became a sun and is still serving as a sun in one of our present solar systems. The records shows that this took place three hundred million years ago. During this time, around this particular meteor known today as a sun, a solar system has been built upon which human life is just beginning."

"Since this has become known, scientists on other planets are beginning to wonder if others of our suns have not come into being just that way."

"With the type of telescope your men on Earth have, they cannot see this system, but with our telescope we can see it. Its distance is one billion sextillion light years from Mars."

We are now half way to Venus and encountering so many meteors that they almost illuminate our path. These are of various colors and look much like different types of fireworks. Some appear to be cold as we see them by the light of others. On this screen which we have been watching, we can see meteors of different sizes, some would easily weigh twenty to fifty tons. These large ones must call for a tremendous repulsing power to turn them away from the ship. We wonder how strong it really is.

Sensing the question in our minds, the scientist explains that it doesn't take much power since it operates on what we would call a down force. Once a meteor hits the repulsing wall it begins to fall, so to speak, instead of continuing on its forward path. But we noticed that when the fifty ton meteor was sighted they threw in the second repulsing wall, probably just as a precaution. It really looked just like a big ball of fire.

He is telling us that, "some meteors have fallen on Mars weighing around fifteen million tons. Since all meteors are largely composed of iron as well as other minerals, we Martonians have an electro-magnet so powerful that we can pull them right out of the ground and then cut them open to study their composition. Some of these meteors have contained crystals so hard within their centers that we had nothing which could cut them. One time an exceptionally large meteor hit our planet which, because of its immense size and the force with which it hit, we did not try to remove from the ground for twenty years. Even after that length of time, when we pulled it out and cut it open, it was still tremendously hot in the center. In cutting this one we were lucky for we missed the pocket of crystals, otherwise we would never have been able to cut it in half."

We have passed through the gap between Mars and Venus which was nine million miles in width, but riding in this ship is so very smooth that we didn't know we had entered it until we were told.

"Now we are within twenty million miles of Venus and are about to enter the heavy atmosphere surrounding this planet. This is a sort of cloud bank made up mostly of particles of dust. We have to use the repulsing power on this too because travelling at the speed we are, those particles would really sandblast our ship," explains the scientist. "This cloud is produced mostly by satellites of Venus which are not like the Earth's moon. They have terrific dust storms blowing over them constantly which produce a dust belt around the planet half a million miles in width. It is not a belt in the sense you use this word, meaning a band which girds only a certain portion. We speak of it as a belt because of its thickness, but it entirely envelopes the planet, acting as a protective casing and shielding her from the intense heat of the sun's bombardment, since she is so close to the sun."