Part 1

Juggernaut of Space

Ray Cummings

Never had the mind of man conceived so horrible a doom as was reaching for Earth. Never had a greater need for Earth's valiant champions been needed. And yet the only ones who could fight the menace--were five futile humans, prisoners on another world.

[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Planet Stories Fall 1945. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]

My name is Robert Rance. You've heard of me, of course--through the recent weird affair of the Crimson Comet, if for nothing else. It seems to me rather ironic: for five years I have been reporting popular science items on the split-wave band of non-visual broadcasting. Station WANA-NYC--the main outlet of _Amalgamated Newscasters' Association_, for whom I work. I struggled for personal publicity. Then I was plunged--certainly entirely against my will--into the blood-chilling, gruesome adventure which is now popularly known as "The Death of the Crimson Comet." Out of it has come publicity beyond my wildest dreams. And now that I've got it, I don't want it. I'm not a hero, of dauntless, fearless courage. I'm not a scientific genius, who has made possible to Earth the New Era of Interplanetary Travel. But I've been called all that by broadcasting asses who are my friends.

I'm just a plain American, who, when his life is in danger gets frightened as the devil, fighting to get himself out of a jam, and with not much thought of anything else. I didn't relish that Crimson Comet business, and I don't want ever to experience anything like it again. I'm not alone in this. There were four others in it with me. They don't like all this public fuss being made over them any more than I do. They weren't heroic. They just tried their best not to get killed. So on their behalf, and my own, I'm writing this narrative of exactly what happened to us. Not the professionally glamorized version which you've heard so many times. Just the facts.

The thing must have been brewing, under cover, for many months. Like a smouldering, unnoticed fire. No one knows; we can only guess at what happened. But looking back on it now, there were incidents, seemingly unrelated at the time, which now I can see were significant. The first of them was in August, 1985--about a year ago. I had just finished a broadcast on some trivial, popular science subject, which I had tried to make sound important to my listeners. And Dr. Johns of the White Mountains Observatory telephoned me. I knew him quite well; he had often steered me into little subjects for my broadcasts, but this, I could see at once, was something different The tel-grid showed his thin face without its usual smile. His grey hair was rumpled; his eyes bloodshot. He looked as though he hadn't slept for much too long.

"I thought you might want to come up and see me, Bob," he suggested.

"Sure I will. I always appreciate your tips, Dr. Johns."

His smile was queer. "I haven't got anything--not that you can use," he said. "Certainly not yet. I guess I just figure I'll feel better, talking about it. When can you arrive?"

"I'll come right away," I told him. "Not busy tonight. I'll be there by midnight."

We disconnected. I was just about to leave when Shorty Dirk walked in on me. Shorty was--and still is--connected with the _American Newsprint Publishers_--a reporter in the Crime Division, specializing in reporting the work of the Bureau of Missing Persons. He and I were good friends, perhaps because we are so different. I'm big and rangy, slow-going and easy-tempered. In college I was a good athlete, but now this radio work was putting quite a bit of soft poundage on me which didn't belong--poundage which, I do assure you, the Crimson Comet business got rid of in a hurry. Like all of us five, I was something like an undernourished greyhound when we got back.

Shorty isn't much over five and a half feet, thin and wiry and alert--a sort of little human dynamo; a freckle-faced fellow with a shock of bristly red hair and a good-natured grin.

"Where you going?" he asked.

I told him. "I'll go with you," he said. He grinned. "I'm only here, Bob, because I haven't got anything better to do."

* * * * *

We took my small flyer from the roof stage and headed north. It was a handsome night, warm and almost cloudless with the upper air so clear that the stars were packed solid on the purple-blue vault of the heavens. Shorty and I didn't theorize, during the brief trip up to the White Mountains, on what Dr. Johns might have to say. Shorty wasn't much interested in astronomy, anyway--to him, as he often said, it was an uninteresting enigma. He mentioned that tonight.

"Good," I said. "Then, how is crime coming? Many people missing lately?"

Things were dull, he assured me. Nothing but the usual run of stuff that you couldn't write up or broadcast because nobody but a few relatives were interested. As it happened, the Crimson Comet affair caused five mysterious disappearances, Shorty, myself and three others. I think I can understand now why it happened that I knew them all. I must have been marked, through my widely broadcast popular science. That involved Shorty, because he was so much with me. And as for the other three--looking back on it now I realize that each of them vanished soon after having been with me. I was being trailed and was seized last.

We landed on the private stage of the big Observatory about midnight and presently were with Dr. Johns in his study. What he had to tell us didn't seem very startling at the time. But in the light of what was to happen, looking back on it now I can see its deadly significance. Like a great pattern of evil, to involve disaster and death to all the world! Grim, stealthy events creeping upon us--little things here on Earth just involving me and those few others; and with them, giant events mysteriously taking place out in the great vault of the stars.

"Here at the Observatory," Dr. Johns was saying, "we thought that somehow we must be making miscalculations. A fraction of a second in the axial and orbital movements of the Earth, which involved the visual movement of all the starfield. But we checked and rechecked. And then other observatories reported it."

The Earth's axial rotation, and its movement around the Sun apparently were changing infinitesimally.

"Too bad," Shorty commented. "I'm sure sorry."

But Dr. Johns didn't smile. "There seem to be many unrelated things," he said. "You can shrug any of them off. But then, if it once occurs to you that they might be connected--"

"What other things?" I asked.

Meteorologists were admitting that the weather was peculiar. Nothing which had not occurred before, of course--unusual, freakish storms in many parts of the Earth.

"And for a month now," Dr. Johns went on, "there has been noticeable a peculiar purple radiance in the air at night."

"Purple radiance?" Shorty echoed. "Hadn't noticed it."

"Because it isn't visible to the naked eye," Dr. Johns retorted. "But it has disturbed the exposure time of our photographic work. Slowed it down. And our spectrograms show it, or at least they show its effects so that we know if we could see it--it would be a purplish glow."

And there was a new comet which several of the observatories recently had located. I had heard that much--had mentioned it in one of my broadcasts.

"We call it a comet," Dr. Johns explained, "because there's a crimson radiance streaming back from it as it comes in toward the Sun. But its nucleus seems sizable--five hundred miles in diameter possibly. A planetoid, with a radiance. You might just possibly call it that."

"And it's just about now crossing the orbit of Mars," I said. "That was the last report made public, wasn't it?"

Dr. Johns nodded. "Our calculations of its orbit--made a month ago--showed it would pass within about twenty million miles of Earth. But that's all changed now. It's erratic."

I was beginning to see why he was startled. This new Crimson Comet wasn't obeying the normal laws of Celestial Mechanics. It was swimming erratically in Space. Could it be a solid body as big as five hundred miles in diameter? Solid enough to be the cause, by its proximity, of the Earth's axial and orbital disturbances?

"And this purple radiance," Dr. Johns said soberly, "we've just been wondering if that could be coming from the comet."

* * * * *

I need not specify all the weird theories that Dr. Johns and I talked of that evening. With me, a broadcaster of popular science as lurid always as I could make it, weird, gruesome theories came natural. But with him, a man of cold logic and careful science--well, it must have been a premonition. Was this Crimson Comet hurling a lethal radiance at us, attacking the Earth? A tiny, inhabited world of diabolic science enabling it to direct its own course through Space, peopled with weird enemies coming at us now, bent on destroying us?

You couldn't make such speculations public. People would laugh. But some wouldn't. Some would believe you, and go into a wild panic. And Dr. Johns had sent for me--a sort of kindred spirit in the concocting of wild tales.

"You two, say nothing of this," he warned us. "And if it goes on, you can announce it, Bob." He shrugged again, and tried to laugh lugubriously. "I feel like an idiot, talking about the end of the world with a couple of news-hounds. And yet, somehow, I also feel that maybe everyone of us on Earth is in more deadly danger than he ever was before!"

And we certainly were!

That was the general gist of our talk that night with Dr. Johns. I never found out more from him--I had no time. The thing struck at me four days later. During those four days, it happened that quite by chance I met the three other people who were destined to be plunged with Shorty and myself into adventure. The first was Peter Mack. I was walking at night in Washington Square, in New York City--small remaining tradition of little old New York. To me it's like a Monks' Garden, flowered, tree-lined rectangle enclosed by the massive building walls with the canyon of Fifth Avenue running into it.

The night was hot and clear. The little tent of blue over the Square was star-filled. I chanced to sit down for a moment on a bench.

"Got a light?" There was a young fellow on the bench with me. He shifted toward me. He was a thin, lanky fellow about my own age, hatless, with the starlight on his sparse, rumpled sandy hair. A slack-jawed fellow, with shabby clothes. He had a grimy cigarette butt between his fingers.

"I can do better than that," I smiled. I gave him a cigarette and lighted it for him.

"Thanks." He would have turned away, but I stopped him. I don't know why, but there seemed something about him that was likable. He needed a shave badly; his clothes were torn. I had a look at his eyes, red-rimmed, bloodshot. Just a down-and-outer on a park bench. But you don't see many of them these days.

"Maybe you haven't got a job," I said. "I can tell you a dozen places--easy work too--in case you're a stranger in town."

"I'm not," he said. "Thanks for the cigarette. I'm just minding my own business."

I shrugged; and as he gave me a resentful look and shifted back to his own end of the bench, I let him alone.

I know now a lot of things that were the matter with Peter Mack, but he has asked me not to go into details. It isn't important anyway; resentfulness at a girl; the escape mechanism of too much drink; trouble with the authorities in a lot of minor ways. And then a sort of sullen resentment at everything and everybody. A derelict who could salvage himself but he didn't want to.

* * * * *

Anyway, that was Peter Mack. And then there was Vivian La Marr. I met her back stage at the _Gayety_ with Shorty who was there to see the stage manager who was to be a witness in some trivial crime-affair that Shorty was reporting. This Vivian La Marr was the main reason why the _Gayety_ was having trouble with the Anti-Vice League and was about to lose its license. She came up to me back stage--a lush, artificial blonde, heavy with makeup; with an amazing expanse of flesh smooth as satin, and a negligible tinseled costume that the Anti-Vice League did not like at all but which pleased the _Gayety's_ customers very much.

"You're Robert Rance," she said. "I saw your picture an' wasn't you televized a few times."

I agreed that was so.

"I also heard one of your astronomy lectures," she added with a wry grimace. "I was wonderin' how a guy like that could live with himself." She looked me up and down. "Now I see you ain't so bad," she said. She was grinning.

"Much obliged," I said. "Maybe I can teach you astronomy some time!"

"From you I would be glad to learn anything," she retorted, mockingly. We were standing by the stage door where it was cooler, and a moment later she was called back on the stage.

That was Vivian La Marr. The other person who was destined to be involved with us was J. Walter Blaine, the International Financier. I interviewed him at his Fifth Avenue Club. He tells me now that I may say what I like concerning my impression of him that first time I met him. So I will be absolutely frank.

A man of multi-millions and international importance makes many friends, and inevitably many enemies. Seldom can he know what people really think of him. His enemies exaggerate the worst, and his friends mostly fawn. Blaine's personal reputation, by hearsay, had reached me, of course. I had no expectation of liking him, and, very frankly, I didn't. I found him a big man, as tall as myself, heavy, portly from easy living. But I must say his appearance was impressive--a big mane of shaggy hair, a rather handsome, large-featured face, keen dark eyes under heavy brows, a jutting chin.

He was playing chess with a fellow club member and I sat down to watch. I know something about chess and I think his playing very well displayed his character. He won, with skill of aggressive attack. But there was about it something you didn't like. His incisive moving of his men, as though there could be no doubt that it was the correct move; and his whole attitude made you hope it wasn't. It was a quite informal game. Once Blaine made an obvious, rather silly mistake, exposing a piece. His opponent offered to have him take it back. He didn't; he pretended it was what he wanted to do, taking the loss rather than admit his error.

Then he was finished and turned to me. I was there to interview him for the Editor of a booklet being issued by the Royal Astronomical Society of London. It seems that the Society was issuing a booklet with little character sketches of the people from whom they had obtained donations--sort of a tribute of thanks. I was commissioned to write the one on Blaine.

"Did they tell you how much I gave them?" he demanded of me now.

I shook my head.

"No," I said.

His smile was ironic. "I gave them a hundred pounds. What they wanted, and expected, was ten thousand. So now you'll write something very nice about me which they hope will flatter me so I'll give them more. Don't bother, young man."

Blaine was a bachelor. My first impression of him was that he was doing some woman a favor by keeping himself in that category.

So much for J. Walter Blaine.

It was the next night that the weird thing struck at me. I was walking along the edge of the park, alone on my way to the mid-town office of Amalgamated Newscasters. The street was fairly brightly lighted. I recall that there chanced to be no pedestrians near me, just an empty length of grey-white stone pavement in front of me, with the park on one side. And quite suddenly it was as though I had stepped through a black door into nothingness! I could have been stricken blind, yet it was not that, for in another split-second I could see a dim, red radiance and hear voices. Then I could see the shapes of people--three men and a woman--stumbling like myself on a strange earthy ground here in the red darkness.

"Look! Here comes another one of us!" It was a terrified man's voice, vaguely familiar.

"My Gawd, it's the handsome astronomer! _I_ know him!" The voice of Vivian La Marr.

And then there was Shorty's voice! "Bob! Bob Rance!" I could feel him gripping me and there was the vague outline of his frightened white face at my shoulder. "Bob! Tell us--what's happened to all of us?"

And Vivian cried: "Hang onto him! There he goes!" I was trying to speak but my tongue was thick, my throat dry and congested.

Things were dim and hazy in my mind; and I could feel the cool blankness stealing through my muscles. The touch of hands on my arms faded, until at last there was no more sensation. I made one last great effort to bring myself out of the fog.

Then I felt myself falling into a soundless blackness.

II

I think I did not quite lose consciousness. I was aware that I had fallen to the earthy ground, with Shorty and Vivian bending over me. My head was roaring; I was bathed in cold sweat. Then I began to feel better, trying to sit up, with Shorty's arm holding me.

"You're all right now, Bob? Can't you speak?"

"Yes. I--guess so."

Whatever had happened which had brought me here when an instant ago, it seemed, I was walking alone by the park, none of us could imagine. The identical experience had happened to Shorty, to Vivian La Marr; and to Peter Mack, and J. Walter Blaine.

"But--where are we?" I demanded, when in another moment I was strong enough to struggle upright in the crimson glowing darkness.

"Damned if we know," Shorty said. It seemed a sort of underground grotto. I could begin to make out its rocky walls and ceiling now, with that glow like a crimson phosphorescence streaming from them. One by one my companions had found themselves here. Blaine was the first. Then at intervals it seemed as though the wall across the grotto had opened and Shorty, Vivian and Mack came stumbling in, standing an instant, dazed, and then falling, as I had fallen, almost in a normal faint.

"No way of getting out of this damned place," Shorty was saying. "The rock-wall over there moves like a door, but we haven't been able to open it."

How much time had passed since we were stricken with this weird thing, none of us could guess. Suddenly I was startled. My clothes were too big for me. My body felt thin; I had lost twenty or thirty pounds. And in the dim crimson glow now I could see Mack, Vivian and Blaine fairly well. All of them thinner than I remembered them, with faces drawn and haggard and big glowing smouldering eyes. And we men had a growth of beard.

Weeks could have passed! Vivian laughed lugubriously as she met my startled stare. "De-glamorized," she said. "I feel like a lost alley cat." She was clad in a thin, summer street dress. Her lush lissome curves were gone so that it hung drably on her. The vivid artificial blonde hair was darkish at the roots; it fell in a tangled mass to her shoulders. Her makeup was gone; her lips pallid. "We're all about starved to death, if you ask me," she added.

"He brought us food a while ago," Blaine put in.

"Try to eat it," Mack said. "There's some of it over by the wall. If that's what we've been living on, no wonder we're starved."

"He? Food?" I stammered.

Since Blaine had found himself here, what seemed like perhaps twelve hours had passed. Our captor had come twice. They had only seen him dimly.

"But he's human--semi-human, anyway," Shorty said. "And he seems to talk English a little."

"Look!" Vivian suddenly murmured. "Here he comes again."

The red glow across the cave for an instant brightened. It seemed as though a rock had slid aside and closed again. A dim upright shape moved toward us; stopped and stood regarding us with eyes that gleamed green, smouldering in the dimness.

"The Great Mind--ready--see you soon," the figure's weird, guttural voice said.

I moved forward, unsteadily on my feet. "I want to talk to you," I said. I could see him now, quite plainly. A man? I suppose you could call him that. He was about five feet tall, squat and square, with high square shoulders, a rectangular torso and two legs which seemed encased in a flexible metal grey fabric. His head was round, set upon a triangular neck with its apex under his chin--a bullet head, hairless, with a weird, box-like face, square-chinned and broad square nose. His two arms, long and powerful-looking, dangled at his sides.

* * * * *

This, we were soon to learn, was a Radak. I recall my first clear impression that there was about him a queer sense of power. And something else, mysterious, yet even more apparent. An automaton-like quality. It was as though here were an individual who was only acting his role as a tiny part of some great, organized thing. A cog in a machine. The German Nazis of my father's boyhood, must have been like that. And here with these Radaks of the Crimson Comet it seemed intensified to be almost gruesome. You could not tell why, but you could sense it. Human individuals who lived only to do what they were told. A great mental force dominating them from birth to death, so that they thought what they were told to think; only did what they were told to do.

This Radak answered our questions now; he seemed willing enough to talk, though in many ways his knowledge of our language, newly absorbed by his weird brain, was inadequate. I think it best to summarize briefly here, the total of what we learned and saw of the strange little world and its people. In actuality we were destined to see very little. Doomed little world! And since its death now, as you all know, most of its secrets will forever remain a mystery.

It was some five hundred Earth-miles in diameter, doubtless of immense density because we were not aware of much change of gravitational force. Of its past history, no one knows much. Somewhere out in Interplanetary Space it must once have had a normal orbit. I shall explain more of that later.

Two human races were here now. The Radaks--there were perhaps something like a thousand or two of them--were the rulers. The others were the Lei--a primitive, gentle people, no more than slaves to the dominating Radaks. Nature always had been cruel, uncompromising, here on Zelos. (Which was the word their native language seemed to call their world.) Both Radaks and Lei lived always in great underground caverns with which this section of the surface was honeycombed. Above them, on the outer surface, weird storms and erratic extremes of heat and cold were prevalent. And out there strange monsters roamed--the Deathless Things, as they were called, since it was impossible to kill them. Creatures of indescribable horrible quality who seemed unwilling to come into the confines of the underground corridors and grottos, so that all the humans were of necessity driven here, eking out a drab and grim existence.

How the strange science of the Radaks developed will forever remain a mystery. Perhaps it was brought here from some other planet. Despite the science, life here was primitive--a struggle for the bare necessities. Queerly enough, the Radak science seemed not concerned with better living. They had a few small space-fliers--the secret of interplanetary travel was known to them. Perhaps only recently--that seems rather certain. Beyond that, there was nothing save the weird, mysterious mechanisms by which at last they had been able to control the space-movements of their tiny world. It was all here, in what they called the "Great Cavern of Machines." Shorty and I were there for a brief time--an unforgettable time of horror.

"The Great Mind will see us soon?" I was saying now to this Radak who stood stiff and stolid beside me. "Who--what is that?"