The Black Star Passes - John W. Campbell (reading cloud ebooks txt) 📗

put a small loop in one end of a cord, thrust his left wrist through this, and grasped the rope firmly with his hand. Then he drew his ray pistol, and adjusted it carefully for direction of action. The trigger gave him control over power. Finally he turned the ray on the block of metal at the other end of the rope. At once the metal pulled vigorously, drawing the rope taut, and as Arcot increased the power, he was dragged slowly across the floor.

“Ah⁠—it works.” He grinned broadly over his shoulder. “Come on, boys, hitch your wagon to a star, and we’ll go on with the investigation. This is a new, double action parachute. It lets you down easy, and pulls you up easier! I think we can go where we want now.” After a pause he added, “I don’t have to tell you that too much power will be very bad!”

With Arcot’s simple brake, they lowered themselves into the corridor below, descending one at a time, to avoid any contact with the ray, since the touch of the beam was fatal.

The scene that lay before them was one of colossal destruction. They had evidently stumbled upon the engine room. They could not hope to illuminate its vast expanse with their little hand lights, but they could gain some idea of its magnitude, and of its original layout. The floor, now tilted at a steep angle, was torn up in many places, showing great, massive beams, buckled and twisted like so many wires, while the heavy floor plates were crumpled like so much foil. Everywhere the room seemed covered with a film of white silvery metal; it was silver, they decided after a brief examination, spattered broadcast over the walls of the room.

Suddenly Morey pointed ceilingward with his light. “That’s where the silver came from!” he exclaimed. A network of heavy bars ran across the roof, great bars of solid silver fully three feet thick. In one section gaped a ragged hole, suggesting the work of a disintegration ray, a hole that went into the metal roof above, one which had plainly been fused, as had the great silver bars.

Arcot looked in wonder at the heavy metal bars. “Lord⁠—bus bars three feet thick! What engines they must have! Look at the way those were blown out! They were short circuited by the crash, just before the generator went out, and they were volatilized! Some juice!”

With the aid of their improvised elevators, the three men attempted to explore the tremendous chamber. They had scarcely begun, when Wade exclaimed:

“Bodies!”

They crowded around his gruesome find and caught their first glimpse of the invaders from space. Anatomical details could not be distinguished since the bodies had been caught under a rain of crushing beams, but they saw that they were not too different from both Terrestrians and Venerians⁠—though their blood seemed strangely pallid, and their skin was of a ghastly whiteness. Evidently they had been assembled before an unfamiliar sort of instrument panel when catastrophe struck; Morey indicated the dials and keys.

“Nice to know what you’re fighting,” Arcot observed. “I’ve a hunch that we’ll see some of these critters alive⁠—but not in this ship!”

They turned away and resumed their examination of the shattered mechanisms.

A careful examination was impossible; they were wrecks, but Arcot did see that they seemed mainly to be giant electrical machines of standard types, though on a gargantuan scale. There were titanic masses of wrecked metal, iron and silver, for with these men silver seemed to replace copper, though nothing could replace iron and its magnetic uses.

“They are just electrical machines, I guess,” said Arcot at last. “But what size! Have you seen anything really revolutionary, Wade?”

Wade frowned and answered. “There are just two things that bother me. Come here.” As Arcot jumped over, nearly suspended by his ray pistol, Wade directed his light on a small machine that had fallen in between the cracks in the giant mass of broken generators. It was a little thing, apparently housed in a glass case. There was only one objection to that assumption. The base of a large generator lay on it, metal fully two feet thick, and that metal was cracked where it rested on the case, and the case, made of material an inch and a half thick, was not dented!

“Whewww⁠—that’s a nice kind of glass to have!” Morey commented. “I’d like to have a specimen for examination. Oh⁠—I wonder⁠—yes, it must be! There’s a window in the side up there toward what was the bow that seemed to me to be the same stuff. It’s buried about three feet in solid earth, so I imagine it must be.”

The three made their way at once to where they had seen the window. The frame appeared to be steel, or some such alloy, and it was twisted and bent under the blow, for this was evidently the outer wall, and the impact of landing had flattened the rounded side. But that “glass” window was quite undisturbed! There was, as a further proof, a large granite boulder lying against it on the outside⁠—or what had been a boulder, though it had been shattered by the impact.

“Say⁠—that’s some building material!” Arcot indicated the transparent sheet. “Just look at that granite rock⁠—smashed into sand! Yet the window isn’t even scratched! Look how the frame that held it is torn⁠—just torn, not broken. I wonder if we can tear it loose altogether?” He stepped forward, raising his pistol. There was a thud as his metal bar crashed down when the ray was shut off. Then, as the others got out of the way, he stepped toward the window and directed his beam toward it. Gradually he increased the power, till suddenly there was a rending crash, and they saw only a leaping column of earth and sand and broken granite flying up through the hole in the steel shell. There was a sudden violent crash, then a moment later a second equally violent crash as