The Earth In Peril Read online

  Table of Contents

  THINGS PASS BY By Murray Leinster

  Invasion Trail

  The Deal Is Made

  Treason!

  Into the Void

  “It Can’t Be!”

  Contact!

  Another Miracle

  No More Cosmoquakes

  LETTER FROM THE STARS By A. E. Van Vogt

  THE SILLY SEASON By C. M. Kornbluth

  THE PLANT REVOLT By Edmond Hamilton

  MARY ANONYMOUS By Bryce Walton

  THE STAR By H. G. Wells

  THE EARTH IN PERIL

  Edited by DONALD A. WOLLHEIM

  THINGS PASS BY BY MURRAY LEINSTER

  I

  Invasion Trail

  FAR, far away, multiple billions of miles off in empty space, Things moved toward our sun. They were arranged as a warlike space-fleet. There were scouts and advance-guards fanned out ahead. One of the scouts had already passed beyond Sol. The main body of the Things was an enormous distance behind, but there were thousands of them.

  They moved at a rate almost inconceivable to human beings. Their engines were powered by forces yet undreamed of by men. They did not decelerate as Sol drew relatively near. Our sun was a convenience in space-navigation,—no more.

  The occupants of the Things had no interest in it. That it had planets was a matter of no concern to them. That two billion human beings lived upon one of the planets affected them no more than knowledge of an ant city in its path would affect an army.

  The peoples of Earth might be obliterated, as an ant-city would be destroyed by the passage of an army, but the occupants of the Things could not know and would not have been interested. To them, it would not have seemed important.

  However, it happened that on the anthill called Earth there was a man named Dirk Braddick. Because of him, Earth is net now an uninhabited, crumpled ball, with its continents mere salt-mud marshes and its seas swept by five-mile-high tidal waves as the Things go by.

  The Things have not the faintest idea what happened. They probably do not care. But we do. This is the story of Dirk Braddick.

  THE ' FIRST of the cosmoquakes was relatively mild. The earth’s seismographs went crazy, and the sun’s photosphere burst into frenzied eruption. There were casualties here and there, and earthquakes of varying intensity followed it. Possibly a thousand people, altogether, died as a result of the first cosmoquake. But it was really very mild indeed.

  Two weeks after it happened, but not at all as a result of it, something came down out of black, swiftly-moving clouds above Dirk Braddick’s laboratory. It was night, and the clouds moved swiftly toward the north.

  The inverted, cup-shaped thing swayed crazily as it descended. The dangling object below it oscillated wildly. When it was a thousand feet high, it was two miles south of the laboratory.

  When it was five hundred feet up, it was still a mile away, and the agglomeration of buildings which enclosed a square courtyard was utterly invisible. There was not a light to be seen.

  The parachute came on down, swaying and spinning, flung through the darkness by the wind. The inert, pendulumlike object under it made no effort to guide it by tugging at the shrouds. There was nothing in sight to seek to avoid or to try for. There was only a noise underneath, which was tree-branches clashing in the wind.

  They were very near. Something whipped at the descending figure. Then there was clear space below. The oscillating object swung high and cleared the ridge-pole of the big shed—latest addition to the laboratory. The figure under the parachute missed the ridge-pole—dropped crazily just beyond—the parachute spilled air crazily in the eddies of air above the buildings,—and the figure hit the ground.

  The parachute, at the same instant, hit the projecting comer of a building and ripped noisily, flapped wildly for a moment, and then lay caught and tom against a building wall.

  The figure struggled up, staggered, and collapsed again. It lay still. The dark clouds overhead hurried on to the northward. A broadcast-powered plane above the ceiling emitted a bleating, panic-stricken call on a secret wave-group.

  Dirk Braddick slept the peaceful sleep of a man who has worked contentedly at something he wants to work at, and will resume the process in the morning.

  In the comer of one of the laboratory buildings, an electronic watchman hummed softly to itself. Its circuits circled the laboratory, shifting current-values in unpredictable patterns so that no neutralizer could possibly analyze the fields and allow an intruder to approach the buildings unnoticed. But it had not scanned the sky overhead. It made no report.

  A long time later the sky cleared. Later still, the sun rose and morning came. Dew dried, the bird-songs became commonplace. The sun floated high over the horizon. The still figure on the earth among the laboratory buildings stirred again. It got weakly to its feet.

  It was a girl, who stared about her with a haunted, hunted look in her eyes.

  Then Dirk Braddick came out of a door and saw her and stopped short. The girl seemed to shrink at sight of him. She turned as if to flee, but only walls and closed doors surrounded her.

  She turned and faced him defiantly, white to the very lips.

  “Hello!” said Braddick evenly. “So Atomic Power is using girl spies now, eh? And dropping them by parachute! I’ll have to put some detector-fields overhead."

  He saw by the girl’s clothing that she had hit hard. When she moved, he saw her wince a little.

  “Hurt yourself?” he asked. “I’ll get a doctor if you like, and have him take you in to town. I’m not especially harsh to spies. In fact, one might be useful right now.”.

  The girl’s pallor increased, if anything. She gasped:

  "Please—no doctor—don’t tell anyone where I ami Not anyone—Who are you?”

  Braddick raised his eyebrows.

  “You don’t know? All right. I’ll playl I’m Dirk Braddick. This is my laboratory. And you’re a lady spy for Atomic Power, I think. Aren’t you?”

  “No! Nol I—I’m—” Then she caught her breath and wrung her hands. “I don’t knowl I—don’t—know—who—I—am! Oh— help me, please!”

  Her distress and terror, at any rate, were real. But Braddick looked even more suspicious, for an instant.

  “You’d better sit down and have a cup of coffee or something. Do you hurt any place particularly?”

  “All over,” she said unsteadily. "But I don’t think there are any bones broken. I—know your name. I can’t remember anything about myself, but realize that I know your name. You’re an inventor. You invented the broadcast-power tube, and the D.C. transformer and—something to do with metal casting, I think.”

  She looked at him with a hunted hopefulness. He nodded. “I don’t like the term inventor,” he said drily. “Those things were by-products of definite scientific research. But there’s nothing very wrong with your brain."

  He led the way into the house. Robot servants produced coffee, and then a complete breakfast. The girl sat down, trying hard to keep calm and cool. But her hands trembled. She drank the coffee while Braddick took an extra cup. The hunted look in her eyes increased as she contemplated her own thoughts.

  “Look here,” said Braddick presently. “Even if you’re telling the truth, you’ve had a bad scare. After you’ve had something to eat, you go and lie down. Sleep a bit. You’ll wake up feeling like yourself. Then you can set about spying or whatever you came for. If you don’t feel all right then, I’ll call a doctor.”

  “No! Please!” She went instantly into something like a panic. "Please don’t call a doctorl I’ve got to hidel”

  “Why?” asked Braddick casually.

  “Because I—because—” the helpless terror in her expression wa
s pathetic. “I don’t know! I don’t know who I am or anything! But I know I’ve got to hide."

  “The police?”

  “I’m not any more afraid of them than anybody else,” said the girl helplessly, after an instant. She made a hopeless gesture. “I feel queer. I don’t know who I am, but that doesn’t frighten me so much, now. I have a feeling that if—if I can only stay hidden for a time, it will all come out right.”

  “It sounds,” said Braddick drily, “like a very bad excuse for a spy to hang around my laboratory. I’m really a sort of psychologist, you know. My specialty is the mechanics of research. But I test my theories about how to make discoveries by using them to make discoveries.

  “As you mentioned, I’ve made a few. Atomic Power wants to know what I’m up to now. I’ve been trying to get some; thing from them, and they think I’ve something up my sleeve. If you’re a spy, a good report from you might help me to make a deal. Hence my cordiality.”

  The girl licked her lips. She seemed tense. She saw his eyes upon her.

  “Atomic Power—that means something to me,” she said shakily. “It frightens me—I mean, the name of the company. I—do you really think I’m a spy for them?”

  Braddick shrugged.

  “Maybe. Maybe not. But they certainly want to get into my laboratory. I’ve had to fire the few men who did work for me, because every one had been gotten to with threats or money.”

  "You’re working on something secret?”

  Braddick shrugged again.

  “I wouldn’t say secret. Just impossible. There was a rather queer phenomenon a couple of weeks ago. They called it a cosmoquake. Remember?”

  The girl’s expression changed. Braddick’s lips quirked wrily. She remembered that. But it would be hard to imagine any shock obliterating the sensations of a cosmoquake. It was called that because there had never been such a thing before, and “earthquake” certainly did not describe it. The earth seemed to have been shaken, not in one place but all over, as a terrier shakes a rat.

  Speaking roughly, for one and a half seconds at 14:06 Greenwich mean time of May 1, 1992, everybody on nearly all the northern hemisphere felt the ground seem to drop away underfoot in a slanting direction. That was the first phase.

  Then, without a pause, the sensation reversed and the ground seemed to rise horribly for another second and a half. In the southern hemisphere, the effects were exactly reversed—the feeling of rising came first, and that of falling afterward. But it was not exactly the same at any two spots on the globe.

  Slanting across the equator over a wide belt of territory, it seemed that the earth was being jerked from underfoot so that people and things were tumbled generally to the northward, and later that it was being jerked in the opposite direction so that they tumbled generally to the southward again.

  The force of the cosmoquake was nowhere overwhelming. Water in small shallow ponds tended to overflow. Mostly, however, the two impulses were so nearly equal in duration, and so nearly opposite in sign that there was no great damage.

  Some chimneys fell. There were a great many traffic accidents. But the damage done by the cosmoquake itself was much less than that caused by violent local earthquakes which followed wherever geologic faults existed.

  The thing was inexplicable. It really appeared that not only the Earth but the whole cosmos had experienced some hitherto-unknown phenomenon. There was a monstrous increase in solar disturbances to lend color to the theory.

  But Braddick had used a new discovery in his own specialty—which was the study of research methods—and within three days had submitted a paper to the Philosophical Journal on the cosmoquake.

  In it, he pointed out that the observed effects on the Earth and sun could have been produced by a body of twelve sols mass passing through the solar system at a speed approaching that of light, along a line from Polaris toward the Southern Cross and at a distance of some six hundred million miles from Earth.

  The paper was rejected, but its contents leaked out. Someone who had read it quoted it at length as an example of how wrong a man like Braddick might be. His explanation, of course, was as impossible as the event had been.

  It reached the daily papers and was a source of much hilarious pubb'city as divers eminent scientists condescended to point out how completely ridiculous it was.

  But Braddick had continued to work on the problem.

  In his dining room, now, he spoke detachedly:

  “I have a very queer and much-laughed-at idea of what may have caused that cosmoquake. There is a possibility that the same thing may happen again and be much worse. So I want to get ready for it. To get ready I need mass-time fields.

  “I’ve been trying to get them from Atomic Power. They won’t listen, because they suspect I have something up my sleeve to break their monopoly over power.

  “I haven’t, but meanwhile they’ve been annoying me with spies, trying to break into my laboratory, steal my stuff and —I suspect—if necessary, kill me in defense of the corporation’s business.”

  The girl had gone very pale again.

  “Yes. They would kill. They’re terribly ambitious. They’re ruthless. ...”

  “Your memory’s improving,” said Braddick politely.

  The girl flushed. A tide of crimson swept upward from her throat. It covered all her face. Then it receded, and she was very pale again.

  “You think I’m lying?” she asked unsteadily. “About not remembering?”

  Braddick made a noncommittal gesture with his hands.

  Far away in space, one of the scout-patrols of the Things drew nearer to the solar system. It had been a thousand million miles away. It hurtled onward at a speed which was literally inconceivable.

  While Braddick first questioned the girl from the parachute out of doors, the thousand million miles had halved. While the girl sipped her coffee and seemed to search desperately for memory, the distance of the hurtling object lessened still more.

  When she spoke brokenly, denying that she lied or that she was consciously a spy, monstrous gaseous prominences burst from the sun at greater speeds than had ever before been observed. Because as the Thing flung onward through empty space. . . .

  In the laboratory, an alarm bell rang sharply. Braddick’s face grew dark. He put his hand to the table to push back his chair. And the earth groaned. Literally. There are millions of people who will always swear that they experienced the shocking vibration of the cry of a tortured earth. And then horrible things happened. . . .

  It is not possible to describe them all. There were areas where human beings found themselves completely weightless, and were made mad by the feeling that they fell upward into an empty, cloudflecked sky.

  There were other areas in which people felt themselves pressed to the earth as if by an intolerable weight. Those sensations reversed themselves within the term of three seconds to which cosmoquakes seemed to be limited by the nature of things. But the areas in which such uncomplicated phenomena showed were the lucky ones.

  There were not many casualties in Australia nor in the northeastern United States. But elsewhere. . . .

  In Rio de Janeiro, the streets were crowded. It was a normal, brisk autumn morning. Then, suddenly, for just one and a half seconds, everything in the city strained savagely toward the northeast. The crowds surged that way, screaming suddenly.

  They piled up in lacking masses against brick walls, or through plate-glass windows, or they ran in irresistibly racing, shrieking panic where there was no solid obstacle to check them. And they were pursued.

  Buildings leaned to the northeast, and collapsed, and bounding masses of masonry rolled and leaped after the fleeing humans. Everything, animate and inanimate, acted as if the city had been turned on edge. Everything fell toward the abyss which was the horizon.

  In the forests outside the city, the jungle trees leaned and crashed. The waters of the great estuary which is the River of January began a mighty surge. For one and a half seconds.

>   Then the impulse ceased and reversed. Those who still remained upright, found themselves hurtling in almost the opposite direction. It was not quite opposite. The impulse this time was almost due south. They ran or were flung into the rubble and the still-tumbling walls of buildings.

  Those who had fallen or were crushed still lay beneath walls which had not yielded to the northeastward impulse. And most of those walls now yielded to the second, reverse impulse, and crashed upon and buried the dazed injured who had been intent upon commonplace things only a scant few seconds before.

  The giant Mundo building, the pride of Rio, resisted the first phase of the cosmoquake. It bent dangerously northeastward, and dropped down most of its wall-panels of brick and glass, but the steel frame stayed intact during the first phase.

  When the second came, however, it swung in a giant arc and crashed in ruins to southward, its thousand-foot bulk covering three blocks of what had been the heart of the city. The casualties in Rio alone from this cosmoquake were comparable only to those from a saturation bombing of an undefended place.

  And Rio was only a sample. Quito and Guayaquil ceased to exist. All around the globe, destruction reigned. Naples was a rubbish heap, with Cairo. Calcutta no longer was. Teheran was a dust-pile.

  And—somehow more pathetically—in that wide band of death all around the earth, it was not only the large cities that were struck. Isolated villages and hamlets, and even individual houses, crashed in ruins, all too often upon their occupants.

  In three successive seconds the peoples of Earth suffered destruction and death to a degree they had not been able to inflict upon themselves in two world wars. Then it ended. The earth was still again.

  In Dirk Braddick’s laboratory he went white—desperately white. His eyes burned.

  "That,” he said in a forced calm, “was a second cosmoquake. It was worse than the first. There will be others still, and they will be worse yeti I don’t think I’m exaggerating when I say that I think the end of the world is at hand if something isn’t done about it. Now—are you a spy for Atomic Power?”