"But what are the light-beams for?"
I listened, breathless, as he told them. The electronic beams could not be destroyed; a disintegration of the rock atoms had been set up. With each rotation of the Earth it was sweeping the sky. From a great control station, Wandl was flinging attraction gravity upon that beam, using it as a monstrous lever upon the rotation of Earth. With every daily passage now the force was being exerted. The rotation was slowing. In a few days it would stop, with the end of the beam drawn to Wandl and held there.
And the beams from Grebhar and Ferrok-Shahn were the same. Three giant chains! Then Wandl, traveling of its own gravitational volition, would withdraw from our solar system. The gravitational chains would pull the Earth, Venus and Mars after it!
Titanic tow-ropes! The destruction, not of our worlds, but of all life upon them, for the cold of interstellar space would leave no living organism. Three dead worlds; Wandl would draw them to her own Sun and then free them, send them, with new orbits, around the distant blazing star. Three new worlds brought home triumphantly by Wandl to join the little family of inhabited planets revolving around this other Sun. Three fair and lovely worlds, warmed back by the other sunlight to be green mansions untenanted, ready to receive the new beings who would come and possess them.
9
"You, Snap!"
"Gregg! But how...?"
"Hush! They might hear us."
"They can do more than that. They can almost hear you think."