Astounding Stories, August, 1931 Part 28

It was a losing fight for the diminutive one, weakened as he was by his exposure and the fierce fights he had had. Little by little, squirming and resisting with all his remaining strength, he was brought near--to see the German, at last, pull half the reducing apparatus with a crash to the floor.

The ray in the chamber faded off. The machine was silenced forever, so that Garth could never hope to regain his full size in this one....

With the realization of this, most of his spirit went, while the savage giant, successful in smas.h.i.+ng the machinery, now turned and devoted himself exclusively to his victim.

"Now for you!" he roared in frightening triumph, clutching the smaller man's neck with his great hands and bearing him to the floor.

Against those fingers gouged into his wind-pipe like a vise of steel, Garth could do nothing. Feebly he gagged, and feebly he clawed at the pitiless hands--and futilely.

It was the end, he told himself. He had come close, but closeness did not count. His eyes bulged, and a shroud of black began to obscure his vision.

And then, suddenly, over the giant's flexed arms, he glimpsed, coming from the chamber on the table, something that chilled the blood in his veins with horror.

It was huge and utterly loathsome. Long, hairy legs folded out, and following them came a furry, bloated body at least five feet thick.

Many-faceted eyes fixed themselves coldly on the men on the floor. In one hideous leap the monster soared from the table all the way to the room's ceiling, seeming almost to float as it came down. For a moment it teetered on the floor, not five feet from the giant who, blind and all unconscious of it, was throttling his diminutive victim beneath him.

Garth for a second forgot the grip on his throat in the horror of the monster. He knew at once what it was--a tarantula. It had crawled inside the chamber when its cage was broken, had been there even while he had been there, and had been swollen to its present blood-curdling size while they were fighting and the ray was on. With the smas.h.i.+ng of the apparatus, it was free to come out.

It gathered for the final spring, its terrible legs tensing perceptibly--a creature out of a nightmare. Garth Howard tried to shriek out a warning, but Hagendorff was holding his throat too well.

He could only struggle weakly and nod toward the horror beyond; but the message did not get across to the giant.

Then the tarantula sprang again.

For a moment it seemed to hover on Hagendorff's upturned back. When it floated down, its ragged legs cradled over him, and the egg-shaped body squatted on his back....

Garth felt his frayed nerves and senses going. A hairy leg was touching him, chilling his flesh. Above him, the giant was thras.h.i.+ng impotently, and he found his neck free of the awful grip.

He wormed free. He was hardly conscious of reaching up and unlocking the door, and closing it tightly again as he stumbled forth. Later, it seemed that it was in a dream that he ran wildly into the splendid sunlight outside and down the winding trail. It was only by a tremendous effort that he kept his senses long enough to shove the rowboat out from the beach and hop in.

He never started the motor. All that he had seen and suffered on the island of horror overcame him too soon, and he pitched down in a limp, unconscious heap....

And so it was, that, the next morning, the two harbor policemen found a rowboat with mysterious cargo floating silently down the Detroit River. So it was that some time later a launch with three local officers churned up to the solitary island, and that gunshots echoed in the gloom of a hushed laboratory room, and a man's white-faced body was carried from the cabin where he had made his one great treacherous effort to steal another's fame.

"JAZZING UP THE UNIVERSE"

Centuries of celestial history wheeled across the plaster sky of the new Adler planetarium at Chicago, recently, at the dedication of the astronomical inst.i.tution, the first of its kind in the Western Hemisphere.

A modern Joshua, working the levers and switches of a complicated instrument, commanded a miniature sun to stand still in the heavens--and it did. He bettered the feat of the Biblical prophet by stopping the sun at any given point on its...o...b..t across the skies, and then ran it backward, its attendant planets, planetoids and stars scampering contrary to all rules of the universe.

The Joshua in the person of Professor Philip Fox, director of the planetarium on a "made" island in Lake Michigan described the instrument with which he made the heavenly bodies cut capers, as a projector, made in Germany at a cost of almost $100,000. As nearly as it can be described by a layman it looks like three immense diving helmets capping the ends of a tube about six feet long. Each "helmet"

is studded with lenses and inside are complicated and strange lights and projectors which throw the images of the celestial bodies on the white plaster dome above that represents the skies. The wheeling motion of the universe toward the west is obtained by revolving the "helmets" in eccentric circles on an axis. The whole effect makes a spectator feel as if the solar system was revolving around him at a greatly accentuated speed.

As a beginning lesson for the layman who attended the opening, Professor Fox set the machine to represent the lat.i.tude of Chicago on May 10, 1930. Every one turned his eyes to the east, where a silhouette of Lake Michigan, with its lighthouses and ore s.h.i.+ps, is painted on the plaster horizon. The dome was lighted to represent a clear night, and, incidentally, all nights are clear in a planetarium.

The machine was started and up from the center of the Lake jumped Mars, red against the darkness.

Professor Fox, with a flashlight that throws the image of an arrow, pointed out the stars as they appeared over the dome. The coming of Mars forecast the dawn of May 10 and in a few moments the sun emerged from the proper lat.i.tudinal position out of the lake and blazed its way across the heavens and set behind the silhouette of the Standard Oil Building on the west wall of the dome in less than a minute, denoting that the day had pa.s.sed in review. At 3:43 P. M. central standard time, the midget moon arose and sailed its course and then set behind the darkened picture of the Straus Tower.

Then Professor Fox ran off Sunday, Monday and Tuesday for good measure, each time with Mars heralding the dawn and the sun changing position as it does in reality. Fifty centuries of astronomical history can be run off in an hour by the machine. The planets are visible during the day in the planetarium as well as night.

The Moon Weed

_By Harl Vincent_

[Ill.u.s.tration: _Bart hacked and hacked at the rubbery growth._]

[Sidenote: Unwittingly the traitor of the Earth, Van pits himself against the inexorably tightening web of plant-beasts he has released from the moon.]

Hobart Madison pursed his lips in a whistle of incredulous surprise as he regarded the object that lay in the palm of his hand. An ordinary pebble, it seemed to be, but a pebble in which a strange fire smouldered and showed itself here and there through the dull surface.

"Would you mind repeating what you just said, Van?" he asked.

"You heard me the first time. I say that that's a diamond and that it came from the moon." Carl Vanderventer glared at his friend in resentment of his doubting tone.

"Mean to tell me you've been there? To the moon?"

"Certainly not. I'm not a Jules Verne adventurer. But I'm telling you that stone is a diamond of the first water and that it came from the moon. Weighs over a hundred carats, too. You can have it appraised yourself if you think I'm kidding you."

Bart Madison laughed. "Don't get sore, Van," he said. "I'm not doubting your word. But Lord, man--the thing's so incredible! It takes a little time to soak in. And you say there are more?"

"Sure. This one's the largest of five I've found so far. And there's other stuff, too. Wait till you see. Fossils, beetles and things. I tell you, Bart, the moon was inhabited at one time. I've the evidence and I want you to be the first to see it." The eyes of the young scientist shone with excitement as he saw that his friend was roused to intense interest.

"So that's what all your experimenting has been aimed at. No wonder it cost so much."

"Yes, and you've been a brick for financing me. Never asked a question, either. But Bart, it'll all come back to you now. Know how much that stone's worth?"

"Plenty, I guess. But, forget about the financing and all that.

Where's this laboratory of yours?" Madison had pushed his chair back from his desk and was reaching for his hat.

"Over in the Ramapo Mountains, not far from Tuxedo. I'll have you there in two hours. Sure you can spare the time to go out there now?"

Vanderventer was enthusiastically eager.

"Spare the time? You just try and keep me from going!"

Neither of them noticed the sinister figure that lurked outside the door which led into the adjoining office. They chattered excitedly as they pa.s.sed into the outer hall and made for the elevator.