For a brief instant one of them was bathed in the alarm-light and our image of the turmoil showed it clearly. The shrouding garment was open in front as it faced us. The scurrying little thing was headless! It seemed to have square wide shoulders, straight across from tip to tip—no neck—no head! The glimpse was ended in another second as the thing darted away and was gone in the turmoil.
In our living room, Dora and I stood stricken. And suddenly our room tubelight was extinguished and we were plunged into darkness! There was just the moonlight glow from one of the living room's open windows—a pallid rectangle where now I saw a weird box-like thing lurching as it climbed over the sill!
A little automatic bullet-projector for home emergency use was hanging on a rack beside me. I snatched it. The disintegrating air-charge hurled the bullet with an almost soundless whizz. My aim doubtless was true enough; but from the oncoming little creature a faint violet radiance was streaming out, like an enveloping aura around it, visible now in the darkness. The bullet melted with a soundless little puff of light.
I was aware that Dora was clutching at me, screaming. Then something hit us with a numbing electric shock. I was conscious of nothing save that I was falling; galvanized so that I went down rigid, with a crash. Then there was only Dora's scream of terror, swiftly fading as my senses were flung away.
I came to myself with the sense that a considerable time had passed. I knew that I was thinking. For a while it seemed that there was nothing of me alive, except my mind. I was conscious now that my body was numb; lifeless.
Like catalepsy. It was a consciousness most horrible—dead, yet alive. I struggled to move, but there was nothing that would react. Then very slowly I could feel the sensation of tingling. It seemed to define my body; make me conscious of my legs and arms that were prickling as though with a thousand needles stabbing them. I could feel now that I was lying on something soft. My eyelids fluttered up so that I had the swimming vision of narrow metal walls and a low grid ceiling. The room was faintly luminous with a weird dull radiance.
Then my clearing sight focused on a lens-shaped window. Stars were out there—glittering points of blue-white light in a firmament solid black. The stars were in a slow circular procession of movement so that I knew the room was revolving.
Interplanetary Space. I was in a space-vehicle. I could hear the faint, throbbing humming mechanisms now, and see the endless procession of celestial glory outside my window. Numbly, for how long I do not know, I lay blankly watching it. The space-vehicle obviously had a slow horizontal axial rotation. The glittering distant worlds swung past. And then I saw the Earth! The blazing, flame-enveloped ball of Sun was off to one side, so that it was a great crescent Earth. Much time indeed had passed. Hours; days—a blank to me. The Earth was dull red-yellow. The sunlight gleamed on the mountains at the limb of its crescent; and I could see the mottling of clouds and the configurations of oceans and continents beneath them.
"Maybe you can move now. Your name is Tom Ralston, isn't it? Any chance you can speak—you're coming out all right, damned if you're not. I'd about given you up."