The White Invaders, Ray Cummings [best ereader for graphic novels TXT] 📗
- Author: Ray Cummings
Book online «The White Invaders, Ray Cummings [best ereader for graphic novels TXT] 📗». Author Ray Cummings
“Jane! Jane, did you see it? My triumph! Tako, master of everything! Even of you—is it not so?”
Did some instinct impel her not to repulse him? Some intuition giving her strength to flash him a single alluring moonlit glance?
But suddenly he had enwrapped her in his arms. Kissing her, murmuring love and lust….
This was our chance. But we did not know it then. A very chaos of diverse action so suddenly was precipitated upon this balcony!
Don and I cried out and heedlessly leaped forward. The tiny beams of the guards swung up. But they did not reach us, for the guards themselves were stricken into horror. The shot from a far-distant warship screamed past. But that went almost unheeded. Tako had shouted, and the guards impulsively turned so that their beams missed Don and me.
Tolla had flung herself upon Tako and Jane. Screaming, she tore at them and all in an instant rose to her feet. Tako’s cylinder, which she had snatched, was in her hand. She flashed it on as Don and I reached her.
THE guards for that instant could not fire for we were all intermingled. Don stumbled in his rush and fell upon Tako and Jane, and in a moment rose as the giant Tako lifted him and tried to cast him off.
My rush flung me against Tolla. She was babbling, mouthing frenzied laughs of hysteria. Her beam pointed downward, but as she reeled from the impact of my rush, the beam swung up; missed me, narrowly missed the swaying bodies of Tako and Don, and struck one of the guards who was standing, undecided what to do. It clung to him for a second or two, and then swung to the other guard.
The guards in a puff of spectral light were gone. Tolla stood wavering; then swung her light toward Tako and Don. But I was upon her.
“Tolla! Good God—”
“Get back from me! Back, I tell you.”
I heard Jane’s agonized warning from the floor. “Bob!”
Tolla’s light missed my shoulder. Tako had cast Don off and stood alone as he turned toward us. Then Tolla’s light-beam swung on him. I heard her eery maddened laugh as it struck him.
A wraith of Tako was there, stricken as though numbed by surprise…. Then nothingness….
Shots from the distant warships were screaming around us. One struck the base of the building.
I clung to my scattering senses. I gripped Tolla.
“That projector—what was it you almost told Jane?”
SHE stood stupidly babbling. “Told Jane? That projector—”
She laughed wildly, and like a tigress, cast me off. “Fools of men! Tako—the fool!”
She swung into a frenzy of her own language. And then back into English. “I will show you—Tako, the fool! All those fools out there under the ground and in the sky. I will show them!”
She stooped over the projector and fumbled with the mechanism.
Don gasped, “Those apparitions—is that what you’re going to attack?”
“Yes—attack them!”
The beam flashed on. But it was a different beam now. Fainter, more tenuous; the hum from it was different.
It leaped into the ground. It was a spreading beam this time. It bathed the white apparitions who were peering up at the city.
Why, what was this? Weird, fantastic sight! There was a moment of Tolla’s frenzied madness; then she staggered away from the projector. But Don and I had caught the secret. We took her place. We carried it on.
We were hardly aware that the far-off warships had ceased firing. We hardly realized that Tolla had rushed for the parapet; climbed, screaming and laughing—and that Jane tried to stop her.
“Oh, Tolla, don’t—”
But Tolla toppled and fell…. Her body was almost not recognized when it was later found down in the ruins.
Don and I flung this new beam into the night. We rolled the projector around the platform, hurling the beam in every direction at the white apparitions….
IT had caught first that group which lurked in the ground near the base of the Empire State. Tolla had turned the beam to the reverse co-ordinates from those Tako used. It penetrated into the borderland, reached the apparitions and forcibly materialized them! A second or two it clung to that group of white men’s shapes in the ground. They grew solid; ponderable. But the space they now claimed was not empty! Solid rock was here, yielding no space to anything! Like the little materialization bombs, this was nature outraged. The ground and the solid rock heaved up, broken and torn, invisibly permeated and strewn with the infinitesimal atomic particles of what a moment before had been the bodies of living men.
We caught with the beam that marching line of apparitions beneath the ground surface—a section of Tako’s army which was advancing upon Westchester. The city streets over them surged upward. And some we caught under the rivers and within the waters of the bay, and the waters heaved and lashed into turmoil.
Then we turned the beam into the air. The apparitions lost contact with their invisible mountain peaks. And with sudden solidity, the gravity of our world pulled at them. They fell. Solid men’s bodies, falling with the moonlight on them. Dark blobs turning end over end; plunging into the rivers and the harbor with little splashes of white to mark their fall; and yet others whirling down, crashing into the wreckage of masonry, into the pall of smoke and the lurid yellow flames of the burning city.
The attack of the White Invaders was over.
A YEAR has passed. There has been no further menace; perhaps there never will be. And again, the invisible realm of which Don, Jane and I were vouchsafed so strange a glimpse, lies across a void impenetrable. Earth scientists have the projector, with its current batteries apparently almost exhausted. And they have the transition mechanism which we three were wearing. But of those, the vital element had been removed by Tako—and was gone with him. Many others were found on the bodies, and upon the body of poor Tolla. But all were wrecked by their fall.
Perhaps it is just as well. Yet, often I ponder on that other realm. What strange customs and science and civilization I glimpsed.
Out of such thoughts one always looms upon me: a contemplation of the vastness of things to be known.
And the kindred thought: what a very small part of it we really understand!
As we later learned, the scientific mechanism by which the transition was made from the realm of the fourth dimension to our own earthly world and back again, was only effective to transport organic substances. The green light-beam was of similar limitation. An organic substance of our world upon which it struck was changed in vibration rate and space-time co-ordinates to coincide with the characteristics with which the light-current was endowed. Thus the invaders used their beams as a weapon. The light flung whatever it touched of organic material with horrible speed of transition away into the Unknown—to the fourth, fifth, or perhaps still other realms. In effect—annihilation.
The mechanism of wires and dials (and small disks which were storage batteries of the strange current) was of slower, more controllable operation. Thus it could be used for transportation—for space-time traveling, as Earth scientists later came to call it. The invaders, wearing this mechanism, materialized at will into the state of matter existing in our world—and by a reversal of the co-ordinates of the current, dematerialized into the more tenuous state of their own realm.Return to text
We were soon to learn also that they were bringing into our world weapons, food, clothing and a variety of equipment by encasing the articles in containers operated by these same mechanisms of wires carrying the transition current. The transportation was possible because all the articles they brought with them were of organic substance.Return to text
The extent of the Fourth Dimensional world was never made wholly clear to us. Its rugged surface was coincident with the surface of our earth at Bermuda, at New York City, and at many points along the Atlantic seaboard of the United States. For the rest, there is no data upon which one may even guess.Return to text
The vehicles were constructed of a material allied in character to that used for garments by the people of this realm. It was not metal, but an organic vegetable substance.Return to text
What we learned of the science of the invisible realm was perforce picked piecemeal by us from all that we saw, experienced, and what several different times Tako was willing to explain to us. And it was later studied by the scientists of our world, whose additional theories I can incorporate into my own knowledge. Yet much of it remains obscure. And it is so intricate a subject that even if I understood it fully I could do no more than summarize here its fundamental principles.
The space-transition of these vehicles, Tako had already told us, was closely allied to the transition from his world to ours. And the weapons were of the same principles. The science of space-transition, limited to travel from one portion of the realm to another, quite evidently came first. The weapons, the forcible, abrupt transition of material objects out of the realm into other dimensions—into the Unknown—this principle was developed from the traveling. And from them both Tako himself evolved the safe and controlled transition from his world to ours.
Concerning the operation of these vehicles: Motion, in our Earth-world or any other, is the progressive change of a material object in relation to its time and space. It is here now, but it was there. Both space and time undergo a simultaneous change; the object itself remains unaltered, save in its position.
In the case of the vehicles, the current I have already mentioned (used in the mechanism for the transition from Earth to the other realm) that current, circulating in the organic material of which the vehicle was composed, altered the state of matter of the carrier and everything within the aura of the current’s field. The vehicle and all its contents, with altered inherent vibratory rate of its molecules, atoms and electrons, was in effect projected into another world. A new dimension was added to it. It became an imponderable wraith, resting dimly visible in a sort of borderland upon the fringe of its own world.
Yet it had not changed position. It still remained quiescent. Then the current was further altered, and the time and space co-ordinates set into new combinations. This change of the current was a progressive change. Controlled and carefully calculated by what intricate theoretic principles and practical mechanisms no scientist of our world can yet say.
It is clear, however, that as this progressive change in space-time characteristics began, the vehicle perforce must move slightly in space and time to reconcile itself to the change.
There never has been a seemingly more abstruse subject for the human mind to grasp than the theories involving a true conception of space-time. Yet, doubtless, to those of Tako’s realm, inheriting, let me say, the consciousness of its reality, there was nothing abstruse about it.
An analogy may make it clearer. The vehicle, hovering in the borderland, might be called in a visible but gaseous state. A solid can be turned to gas merely by the alteration of the vibratory rate of its molecules.
This unmoving (gaseous) vehicle, is now further altered in space-time characteristics. Suppose we say it is very slightly thrown out of tune with its spatial surroundings at the time which is its present. Nature will allow no such disorganization. The vehicle, as a second of time passes, is impelled by the force of nature to be in a different place. This involves motion. A small change in the first second. Then the current alters it progressively faster. The change, of necessity, is progressively greater, the motion more rapid.
And this, controlled as to direction, became transportation. The determination of direction at first thought seems amazingly intricate. In effect, that was not so. With space-time factors set as a destination, i. e., the place where the vehicle must end its change at a certain time, all the intermediate changes become automatic. With every passing second it must be at a reconcilable place—the direction of its passage perforce being the shortest path between the two.
With this in mind, the transition from one world to another becomes more readily understandable. No natural change of space is involved, merely the change of the state of matter. It was the same change as that which carried the vehicles into a shadowy borderland, and then pushed further into new dimensional realms.
The green light-beam weapons were merely another application of the same principle. The characteristics of the green light current, touching organic matter, altered the vibratory rate of what
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