THE ACCURSED GALAXY

by Edmond Hamilton

A thin, tearing sound like the ripping of thousands of sheets of paper grew with lightning speed to a vibrant roar that brought Garry Adams to his feet in a jump.

He leaped to the door of his cabin and as he flung it open, he saw a sword of white fire cleave the night vertically and heard an abrupt ear-shattering crash from the distant darkness.

Then all was dark and still again, but down in the dimly starlit valley he could see clouds of smoke slowly rising.

“Good heavens, a meteorite!” Garry exclaimed. “And it’s fallen right into my lap.”

His eyes suddenly lighted. ‘Will this make a story! Reporter Sole Witness of Meteor’s Fall-”

He grabbed a flashlight from the shelf by the door and the next minute was hurrying down the rude path that twisted from his hilltop cabin down the wooded slope to the valley.

Garry Adams was for fifty weeks of each year a reporter on one of the more sensational New York dailies. But two weeks each summer he spent in this lonely cabin in the northern Adirondacks and washed the taste of slayings, scandals and corruption out of his mind.

“Hope there’s something left of it,” he muttered as he tripped over a root in the dark. “It would rate a three-column picture.”

Stopping for a moment at a place where the rude path emerged from the trees, he scanned the darkness of the valley. He spotted the place where faint wisps of smoke were still rising and plunged unhesitatingly in that direction through the woods.

Briers tore Garry’s trousers and scratched his hands, and boughs whipped and stung his face as he struggled ahead. He dropped the flashlight once and had a hard time getting it. But before long he heard a crackle of small flames and smelled smoke. He emerged a few minutes later into a hundred-foot circle crushed flat by the impact of the meteorite.

Brush and grass, set afire by the heat of impact, were burning feebly, several places around the edge of this circle, and smoke got into Garry’s eyes. He stood blinking, then saw the meteorite.

It was not an ordinary meteorite at all. He saw that at the first glance, even though the thing was half buried in the soft earth which it had flung up around itself. It was a glowing polyhedron ten feet in diameter, its surface a multitude of small flat facets, perfectly geometrical in shape. An artificial polyhedron that had fallen from outer space.

Garry Adams stared, and as he stared the visioned news headings in his mind expanded into black headlines.

“Meteorite Proves Shot from Space! Reporter Finds Shell from Space that Contains-”

What did the thing contain? Garry took a step toward it, cautiously because of the heat the white glow of it betokened. To his surprise, he found that the polyhedron was not hot at all. The ground under his feet was hot from the impact but the faceted thing before him was not. Its glow, whatever it was, was not of heat.

Garry stared, his black brows concentrated into a frown beneath which his brain worked excitedly. It must be, he argued, a thing made by intelligent beings, somewhere out in space.

It could hardly contain living beings, for they could not have survived its fall. But there might be books, machines, models-

Garry came to a sudden decision. This story was too big for him to handle alone. He knew the man he needed here. He turned around and struggled back through the woods to the path, then followed it, not back up to the cabin but on down the valley until it joined a narrow, rude dirt road.

* * * *

An hour of walking on this brought him to a somewhat better dirt road, and an hour more on this brought him, tired but still vibrant with excitement, into a dark, sleeping little village.

Garry pounded on the door of the general store until a querulous, sleepy storekeeper came down in his nightshirt and let him in. He made straight for the telephone.

“I want to call a Dr. Peters, Dr. Ferdinand Peters of Manhattan University Observatory, in New York,” he said to the operator. “And keep ringing until you get him.”

Ten minutes later the astronomer’s sleepy, irritated voice greeted his ears. “Well, who’s this?”

“It’s Garry Adams, doctor,” Garry said rapidly. “You remember, the reporter who wrote up your solar researches last month?”

“I remember that your story contained no less than thirty errors,” Dr. Peters answered acidly. “What in the devil do you want at this time of night?”

Garry talked steadily for five minutes, and when he had finished there was so long a silence that he shouted into the transmitter, “Did you hear me? Are you there?”

“Of course I’m here—don’t yell so loud,” retorted the astronomer’s voice. “I was just considering.” He began to speak rapidly. “Adams, I’m coming up to that village of yours on the dot, by plane if possible. You wait there for me and we’ll go out and look at the thing together. If you’re telling me the truth, you’ve got a story that will make you famous forever. If you’re hoaxing me, I’ll flay you alive if I have to chase you around the world to do it.”

“Don’t let anyone else know about it, whatever you do,” cautioned Garry. “I don’t want any other paper to get it.”

“All right, all right,” said the scientist. “A lot of difference it makes to me whether any of your filthy rags get it.”

Four hours later Garry Adams saw a plane buzzing earthward through the dawn mists east of the village. He waited, and in another half hour the astronomer tramped into the place.

Dr. Peters saw Garry and came straight toward him. Peters’ keen, spectacled black eyes and ascetic, shaven face wore an expression in which were mixed doubt and repressed excitement.

Characteristically, he wasted no time in greetings or preliminaries. “You’re sure the thing is a geometrical polyhedron? Not just a natural meteorite with some resemblance to that shape?” he queried.

“Wait till you see it for yourself,” Garry told him. “I’ve rented a car that will take us almost there.”

“Drive out to my plane first,” the doctor ordered. “I’ve brought some equipment that may prove useful.”

The equipment consisted of bars, tools and wrenches of fine steel and a complete oxy-acetylene torch outfit, with the necessary tanks. They stowed it into the back of the car and then bumped and rattled over the uncertain mountain roads until they reached the beginning of the path.

When Dr. Peters emerged with the reporter into the clearing where lay the half-buried, glowing polyhedron, he stared at it for some moments in silence.

“Well?” asked Garry impatiently.

“It’s not a natural meteorite, that’s sure.”

“But what is it?” Garry exclaimed. “A projectile from another world? What’s in it?”

“We’ll know that when we’ve opened it,” Peters answered coolly. “The first thing is to dig away the dirt so that we can examine it.”

Despite the astronomer’s calmness, Adams saw a glitter in his eyes as they lugged the heavy equipment from the automobile to the clearing. And the driving energy with which Dr. Peters worked was further index of the intensity of his interest.

They started at once digging away the earth around the thing. Two hours of hard work did it, and the whole polyhedron stood naked before them, still glowing whitely in the morning sunlight. The scientist then made minute examination of the substance of the glowing thing. He shook his head.

“It’s not like any terrestrial substance ever heard of. Is there any sign of a door or opening?”

“Not a trace of one,” Garry answered, then added suddenly, “But here’s something on one of the facets, a sort of diagram.”

Dr. Peters hurried quickly to his side. The reporter pointed to what he had discovered, a curious and complex sign graven deep on a facet halfway up the side of the polyhedron.

The diagram represented a small, spiral-shaped swarm of densely crowded dots. A little out from this central swarm were other little swarms of graven dots, mostly spiral-shaped also. Above this curious diagram was a row of grotesque, interlinked symbols.

“By heaven, it’s writing of some sort, an inscription!” Garry cried. “I wish we had a photographer here.”

“And a pretty girl to sit with her knees crossed and give the picture sex-appeal,” Peters observed caustically. “You can think of your dirty sheet in the presence of—this.”

His eyes were brilliant with controlled excitement. “The symbols, we can’t guess what they mean, of course. Undoubtedly they tell something about this thing’s contents. But the diagram--”

“What do you think the diagram means?” Garry asked excitedly as the astronomer paused.

“Well, those swarms of dots seem intended to represent galaxies of stars,” Peters said slowly. “The central one, no doubt, symbolizes our own galaxy, which has just such a spiral shape, and the other swarms stand for the other galaxies of the cosmos.

“But they’re too close to ours, those others—too close. If they were actually that close when this thing was made, it means that the thing was made back when the universe first started to expand!”

He shook off his abstracted ponderings and turned briskly toward the pile of tools and equipment.

“Come on, Adams, we’ll try to open it up on the side opposite the inscription. If the bars won’t do it, the torch will.”

* * * *

Two hours later Garry and Dr. Peters, exhausted, sweating and baffled, stood back and gazed at each other in wordless futility. All of their efforts to open the mysterious polyhedron had utterly failed.

Their sharpest tools made not the slightest scratch on the glowing walls. The oxy-acetylene torch had not the least bit more effect, its flame not even seeming to heat the substance. And even a variety of acids which Dr. Peters had brought with him had no effect.

“Whatever it is,” Garry panted, “I’ll say it’s the hardest and most intractable matter I ever heard of.”

The astronomer nodded slowly. “If it is matter at all,” he said.

Garry stared. “If it is matter? Why, we can see the thing’s matter; it’s solid and real as we are.”

“It’s solid and real,” Peters agreed, “but that does not prove that it is matter. Adams, I think that it is force of some kind, crystallized in some superhuman and unknown way into a solid-seeming polyhedron. Frozen force!

“And I don’t think we’ll ever open it with ordinary tools. They would work with ordinary matter, but not with this thing.”

The reporter looked perplexedly from him to the glowing mystery. “Frozen force? Then what are we going to do?”

Peters shook his head. “The thing’s beyond me. There isn’t a way in the world that I can think of to--”

He stopped suddenly. Garry, looking up sharply at the interruption in his words, saw that an odd listening expression had fallen upon the scientist’s face.

It was at the same time an expression of surprise, as though some part of his mind were surprised at something another part told it.

Dr. Peters spoke in a moment, and with the same surprise in his voice.

“Why, what am I talking about? Of course we can open the thing. A way just occurred to me--The thing is made of crystallized force. Well, all we need to do is to de-crystallize that force, to melt it away by the application of other forces.”

“But surely it’s beyond your scientific knowledge how to do a thing like that!” the reporter said.

“Not at all; I can do it easily but I’ll need more equipment,” the scientist said.

He fished an envelope and pencil from his pocket and hastily jotted down a list of items. “We’ll go into the village and I’ll telephone New York to have these things rushed up.”

Garry waited in the village store while the astronomer read his list into the telephone. By the time this was done and they returned to the clearing in the valley woods, darkness had fallen.

The polyhedron was glowing weirdly in the night, a shimmering, faceted enigma. Garry had to tear his companion away from his fascinated inspection. He finally did so and they climbed to the cabin and cooked and ate a sketchy supper.

The two sat after supper and tried to play cards by the light of the kerosene lamp. Both men were silent except for the occasional monosyllables of the game. They made error after error, until at last Garry Adams flung the cards down.

“What’s the use of this? We’re both too wrought up over that darned thing down there to give a thought to anything else. We might as well admit that we’re dying with curiosity. Where did the thing come from and what’s in it? What do those symbols on it mean, and that diagram you said represented the galaxies? I can’t get it all out of my head.”

Peters nodded thoughtfully. “Such a thing doesn’t come to earth every day. I doubt if such a thing has ever come to earth before.”

* * * *

He sat staring into the soft flame of the lamp, his eyes abstracted and his ascetic face frowning in intense interest and disturbed perplexity.

Garry remembered something. “You said when we looked at that queer diagram on it that it might mean the polyhedron was made when the universe first started expanding. What the devil did you mean by that? Is the universe expanding?”

“Of course it is. I thought everyone was aware of the fact,” Dr. Peters said irritably.

Then he smiled suddenly. “But I keep forgetting, since I associate almost always with fellow scientists, how completely ignorant most people are of the universe in which they live.”

“Thanks for the compliment,” Garry said. “Suppose you enlighten my ignorance a little on this point.”

‘Well,” said the other, “you know what a galaxy is?”

“A swarm of stars like our sun, isn’t it—a whole lot of them?”

“Yes, our sun is only one of billions of stars gathered together in a great swarm which we call our galaxy. We know that the swarm has a roughly spiral shape and that as it floats in space the whole spiral swarm is rotating on its center.

“Now, there are other galaxies in space beside our own, other great swarms of stars. It is estimated, indeed, that their number runs into billions and each of them, of course, contains billions of stars. But—and this has seemed to astronomers a curious thing—our own galaxy is definitely larger than any of the others.

“Those other galaxies lie at enormous distances from our own. The nearest is more than a million light years away and the others are much farther. And all of them are moving through space, each star cloud sweeping through the void.

“We astronomers have been able to ascertain the speed and direction of their movements. When a star, or a swarm of stars, is moving in the line of sight of the observer, the movement has a definite effect upon its spectrum. If the swarm is moving away from the observer, the lines in its spectrum will shift toward the red end of the spectrum. The faster it is moving away, the greater will .be the shift toward the red.

“Using this method, Hubble, Humason, Slipher and other astronomers have measured the speed and direction of movement of the other galaxies. They have found an amazing thing, a thing that has created a tremendous sensation in astronomical circles. They have found that those other galaxies are all running away from our own!

“It is not just a few of them that are moving away from our own but all of them. In every side, every galaxy in the cosmos is hurtling away from our own galaxy! And they are doing so at speeds as high as fifteen thousand miles a second, which is almost a tenth the speed of light itself.

“At first astronomers could not believe their own observations. It seemed incredible that all other galaxies should be fleeing from our own, and for a time it was thought that certain of the nearer ones were not receding. But that has been seen to be an observational error and we now accept the incredible fact that all other galaxies are flying away from our own.

“What does that mean? It means that there must once have been a time when all those outward-speeding galaxies were gathered with our own into a single giant supergalaxy that contained all the stars in the universe. By calculating back from their present speeds and distances, we find that that time was about two billion years ago.

“Then something made that supergalaxy suddenly break up, and all its outer portions went flying off into space in all directions. The portions that flew off are the galaxies that are still flying away from us. Our own is without doubt the center or core of the original supergalaxy.

“What caused that break-up of the gigantic supergalaxy? That we do not know, though many theories have been advanced. Sir Arthur Eddington believes that the break-up was caused by some unknown principle of repulsion in matter which he calls the cosmical constant. Others have suggested that space itself started expanding, an even more incredible explanation. Whatever the cause, we know that that supergalaxy did break up and that all the other galaxies formed by its break-up are flying away from our own at tremendous speeds.”

Garry Adams had listened intently to Dr. Peters as the astronomer spoke in quick, nervous fashion.

His own lean, newly tanned face was serious in the glow of the lamp. “It seems strange, at that,” he commented. “A cosmos in which all the other galaxies are fleeing from us. But that diagram on the side of the polyhedron—you said that indicated the thing was made when the expansion first started?”

“Yes.” Peters nodded. “You see, that diagram was made by intelligent or superintelligent beings, for they knew our own galaxy is spiral-shaped and so depicted it.

“But they depicted the other galaxies as almost touching our own. In other words, that diagram must have been made when the giant super-galaxy first started breaking up, when the other galaxies first started running away from our own. That was some two billion years ago, as I said. Two thousand million years. So you see, if the polyhedron was actually made that long ago it--”

“I see enough to feel that I’m going crazy with speculation,” Garry Adams said, getting to his feet. “I’m going to bed, whether I’m able to sleep or not.”

Dr. Peters shrugged. “I suppose we might as well. The equipment I sent for won’t be out until morning.”

Garry Adams lay thinking in the darkness after he had retired to the upper of the two bunks in the cabin. What was this visitant from outer space and what would they find in it when they opened it?

His wonderings merged into sleep mists out of which he suddenly awoke to find the cabin bright with morning sunshine. He woke the scientist and after a hasty breakfast they hurried down to the point on the dirt road where Dr. Peters had directed the ordered equipment to be brought.

They had waited there but a half hour when the sleek high-speed truck came humming along the narrow road. Its driver halted it at sight of them, and they helped him unload the equipment it carried. Then he drove back the way he had come.

* * * *

Garry Adams surveyed the pile of equipment dubiously. It looked too simple to him, consisting only of a dozen or so sealed containers of chemicals, some large copper and glass containers, a pile of copper strips and wiring, and some slender ebonite rods.

He turned to Dr. Peters, who was also gazing at the pile.

“This sure looks like a lot of junk to me,” the reporter said. “How are you going to use this stuff to de-crystallize the frozen force of the polyhedron?”

Dr. Peters turned to him a blank, bewildered stare. “I don’t know,” he answered slowly.

“You don’t know?” Garry echoed. “Why, what do you mean? Yesterday there at the polyhedron you said it was quite clear to you how to do it. You must have known, to order all this stuff.”

The astronomer seemed even more bewildered. “Garry, I remember that I did know how then, when I jotted down the list of these things. But I don’t now. I haven’t the slightest idea of how they could be used on the polyhedron.”

Garry dropped his arms, stared unbelievingly at his companion.

He started to say something, but as he saw the other’s evident mental distress he checked himself.

“Well, we’ll take the stuff over to the polyhedron now,” he said calmly. “Maybe by that time you’ll remember the plan you’ve forgotten.”

“But I’ve never before forgotten anything in this way,” Peters said dazedly as he helped pick up the mass of things. “It’s simply beyond my understanding.”

They emerged into the crushed clearing where the enigmatic polyhedron still glowed and shimmered. As they set down their burdens beside the thing, Peters burst suddenly into a laugh.

“Why, of course I know how to use this stuff on the polyhedron. It’s simple enough.”

Garry stared at him again. “You’ve remembered?”

“Of course,” the scientist answered confidently. “Hand me that biggest box marked barium oxide, and two of those containers. We’ll soon have the polyhedron open.”

The reporter, his jaw hanging in surprise, watched Peters start confidently to work with the supplies. Chemicals foamed together in the containers as rapidly as he mixed them.

He worked swiftly, smoothly, without asking any aid of the reporter. He had an utter efficiency and utter confidence, so dissimilar to his attitude of a few minutes before, that an incredible idea was born and grew in Garry Adams’ mind.

He said suddenly to Peters, “Doctor, you know completely what you’re doing now?”

Peters looked up impatiently. “Of course I do,” he replied sharply. “Doesn’t it look like it?”

“Will you do something for me?” asked Garry. “Will you come back with me to the road where we unloaded the supplies?”

“Why in the world do that?” demanded the scientist. “I want to get this finished.”

“Never mind; I’m not asking for fun but because it’s important,” Garry said. “Come on, will you?”

“Oh, damn such foolishness, but I’ll go,” the scientist said, dropping his work. “It’ll lose us half an hour.”

Fuming over this, he tramped back with Garry to the dirt road, a half mile from the polyhedron.

“Now what do you want to show me?” he snapped, looking around.

“I only want to ask you something,” Garry said. “Do you still know how to open the polyhedron?”

Dr. Peters’ expression showed pure anger. “Why, you time-wasting young fool! Of course I--”

He stopped suddenly, and abruptly panic fell on his face, blind terror of the unknown.

“But I don’t!” he cried. “I did there a few minutes ago but now I don’t even know just what I was doing there!”

“I thought so,” said Garry Adams, and though his voice was level there was a sudden chill along his spine. “When you’re at the polyhedron, you know well enough how to go about a process that is completely beyond present-day human science.

“But as soon as you go some distance away from the polyhedron, you know no more about it than any other scientist would. Do you see what it means?”

Peters’ face showed astounded comprehension. “You think that something—something about that polyhedron, is putting into my mind the way to get it open?”

His eyes widened. “It seems incredible, yet at that it may be true. Neither I nor any other scientist of earth would know how to melt frozen force. Yet when I’m there at the polyhedron I do know how to do it!”

Their eyes met. “If something wants that open,” Garry said slowly, “it’s something inside the polyhedron. Something that can’t open it from the inside, but is getting you to do so from the outside.”

For a space of seconds they stood in the warm morning sunlight looking at each other. The woods around them gave off a smell of warm leaves, a sleepy hum of insects. When the reporter spoke again, his voice was unconsciously lower than it had been.

“We’ll go back,” he said. “We’ll go back, and if you know how again when we’re at the thing, we’ll know that we’re right.”

They walked silently, hesitatingly, back toward the polyhedron. Though he said nothing, the hair rose on Garry Adams’ neck as they entered the clearing and approached the glowing thing.

They went closer until they stood again beside the thing. Then Peters suddenly turned a white face toward the reporter.

“You were right, Garry!” he said. “Now that I’m back here beside the thing, I suddenly know how to open it!

“Something inside must be telling me, as you said. Something that ages ago was locked up in this and that wants—freedom.”

A sudden alien terror fell upon them both, chilling them like a gelid breath from the unknown. With a common impulse of panic they turned hastily.

“Let’s get away from it!” Garry cried. “For Heaven’s sake, let’s get out of here!”

Four steps only they ran when a thought sounded in Garry’s brain, clear and loud.

“Wait!”

The word, the pleading request, was as strong in his mind as though his ears had heard it.

Peters looked at him with wide eyes as they unconsciously stopped.

“I heard it, too,” he whispered.

“Wait, do not go!” came the rapid thought message into their minds. “Hear me at least, let me at least explain to you, before you flee!”

“Let’s go while we can!” Garry cried to the scientist. “Peters, whatever’s in that thing, whatever is talking to our minds, isn’t human, isn’t of earth. It came from outside space, from ages ago. Let’s get away from it!”

But Dr. Peters was looking fascinatedly back at the polyhedron. His face was twisted by conflicting emotions.

“Garry, I’m going to stay and listen to it,” he said suddenly. “I’ve got to find out what I can about it—if you were a scientist you’d understand! You go on and get away; there’s no reason for your staying. But I’m going back.”

Garry stared at him, then grinned crookedly though he was still a little white beneath his tan. He said, “Just as a scientist is ridden by his passion, doctor, so is a reporter by his. I’m going back with you. But for Heaven’s sake don’t touch that equipment; don’t try to open the polyhedron, until we at least have some idea as to what kind of thing is inside!”

Dr. Peters nodded wordlessly and then slowly they moved back to the glowing polyhedron, feeling as though the ordinary sunlit noonday world had suddenly become unreal. When they neared the polyhedron, the thoughts from within it beat more strongly into their minds.

“I sense that you have stayed. Come closer to the polyhedron—it is only by immense mental effort that I can force my thoughts through this insulating shell of force at all.”

Numbly they stepped closer until they were at the very side of the faceted, glowing thing.

“Remember,” Garry whispered hoarsely to the scientist, “no matter what it tells us, what it promises, don’t open it yet!”

The scientist nodded unsteadily. “I’m as afraid of opening it as you are.”

* * * *

The thought messages came clearer into their brains now from the polyhedron.

“I am a prisoner in this shell of frozen force, as you have guessed. For a time almost longer than you can comprehend, I have been prisoned in it. My prison has at last been cast on your world, wherever that may be. I want your help now and I sense that you are too afraid to help me. If I disclose to you who I am and how I came to be here, you will not then be so afraid. That is why I wish now to tell you these things.”

Garry Adams felt as though he stood in a strange dream as the thoughts from the polyhedron beat into his brain.

“Not in mere thought messages will I tell you what I wish to tell, but visually by thought pictures that you can understand better. I do not know the capacity of your mental systems for reception of such pictures, but I will try to make them clear.

“Do not try to think about what you see but merely allow your brains to remain in receptive condition. You will see what I wish you to see and will understand at least partially because my thoughts will accompany the visual impressions.”

Garry felt sudden panic as the world seemed suddenly to vanish from around him. Dr. Peters, the polyhedron, the whole noonday sunlit scene, disappeared in an instant. Instead of standing in the sunlight, Garry seemed now to himself to be hanging suspended in the black vault of the cosmos—a lightless, airless void.

Everywhere about him was only that empty blackness, save below him. Below him, far, far below, there floated a colossal cloud of stars shaped like a flattened globe. Its stars could be counted only by the millions of millions.

Garry knew that he looked on the universe as it was two billion years ago. He knew that this below him was the giant supergalaxy in which were all the stars in the cosmos. Now he seemed to rocket down toward the mighty swarm with the swiftness of thought, and now he saw that the worlds of its swarming suns were inhabited.

Their inhabitants were volitient beings of force, each one like a tall, disk-crowned pillar of blue-brilliant light. They were immortal; they needed no nourishment; they passed through space and matter at will. They were the only volitient beings in the whole supergalaxy and its inert matter was almost entirely at their command.

Now Garry’s viewpoint shifted to a world near the center of the supergalaxy. There he saw a single force creature who was engaged in a new experiment upon matter. He was seeking to build new forms of it, combining and re-combining atoms in infinite permutations.

Suddenly he came upon a combination of atoms that gave strange results. The matter so formed moved of its own accord. It was able to receive a stimulus and to remember it and act upon it. It was able also to assimilate other matter into itself; and so to grow.

The force creature experimenter was fascinated by this strange disease of matter. He tried it on a larger scale and the diseased matter spread out and assimilated more and more ordinary matter. He named this disease of matter by a name that reproduced itself in Garry’s mind as “life.”

This strange disease of life escaped from the experimenter’s laboratory and began to spread over all that planet. Everywhere it spread, it infected other matter. The experimenter tried to extirpate it but the infection was too widely spread. At last he and his fellows abandoned that diseased world.

But the disease got loose from that world to other worlds. Spores of it, driven by the push of light beams to other suns and planets, spread out in every direction. The life disease was adaptable, took different forms on different worlds, but always it grew and propagated, infected more and more matter.

The force creatures assembled their forces to wipe out this loathsome infection but could not. While they stamped it out on one world, it spread on two others. Always, too, some hidden spore escaped them. Soon nearly all the worlds of the central portion of the supergalaxy were leprous with the life plague.

Garry saw the force creatures make a last great attempt to stamp out this pathology infecting their universe. The attempt failed; the plague continued its resistless spread. The force creatures then saw that it would spread until it had infected all the worlds in the supergalaxy.

They determined to prevent this at all costs. They resolved to break up the supergalaxy, to detach the uninfected outer parts of it from the diseased central portion. It would be a stupendous task but the force creatures were not daunted by it.

Their plan entailed giving to the supergalaxy a rotatory movement of great speed. This they accomplished by generating tremendous waves of continuous force through the ether, waves so directed that gradually they started the supergalaxy rotating on its center.

Faster and faster the giant star swarm turned as time went on. The life disease was still spreading at its center but now the force creatures had hope. They continued their work until the supergalaxy was turning so fast that it could no longer hold together against its own centrifugal force. It broke up like a bursting flywheel.

* * * *

Garry saw that break-up, as though from high above. He saw the colossal, spinning star cloud disintegrating, swarm after swarm of stars breaking from it and flying away through space. Countless numbers of these smaller new galaxies broke from the parent supergalaxy until at last only the inmost core of the supergalaxy was left.

It was still rotating, and still had the spiral form caused by its rotation. On it now the life plague had spread to nearly every world. The last swarm of clean, uninfected stars had broken away from it and was flying away like the others.

But as this last swarm departed, there took place a ceremony and a punishment. The force creatures had passed judgment upon that one of their number whose experiments had loosed the life plague upon them and had made necessary this great break-up.

They decreed that he should remain forever in this diseased galaxy that all the others were leaving. They imprisoned him in a shell of frozen force so constructed that never could he open it from within. They set that polyhedronal shell floating in the diseased galaxy they left behind.

Garry Adams saw that glowing polyhedron floating in aimless orbits in the galaxy, as the years passed in millions. The other galaxies sped farther and farther away from this infected one in which the life disease now covered every possible world. Only this one force creature remained here, prisoned eternally in the polyhedron.

Garry dimly saw the polyhedron, in its endless orbit through the suns, chance to strike upon a world. He saw—

He saw only mists, gray mists. The vision was passing and suddenly Garry was aware that he stood in hot sunlight. He stood by the glowing polyhedron, dazed, rapt.

And Dr. Peters, dazed and rapt, too, was working mechanically on something beside him, a triangular thing of copper and ebonite pointed at the polyhedron.

Garry understood instantly and cried out in horror as he leaped toward the astronomer. “Peters, don’t!”

Peters, only partly awakened, looked dazedly down at the thing which his hands were busy finishing.

“Smash it!” Garry yelled. “The thing inside the polyhedron kept us occupied with that vision so it could keep you working unconsciously to set it free. Don’t—oh, Lord!”

For as Garry yelled, the dazed scientist’s hands had clicked together the last parts of the copper and ebonite triangle, and from its apex leaped a yellow beam that smote the glowing polyhedron.

The yellow flash spread instantly over the faceted, glowing bulk, and as Garry and the waking Peters stared petrifiedly, they saw the polyhedron dissolving in that saffron flare.

The faceted sides of frozen force melted and vanished in a moment. Up out of the dissolved prison cage burst and towered the Thing that had been in it.

A forty-foot pillar of blazing, blue light, crowned by a disk of light, it loomed supernally splendid in sudden darkness, for with its bursting forth the noonday sunlight had snapped out like turned-off electricity. It swirled and spun in awful, alien glory as Peters and Garry cried out and threw their hands before their blinded eyes.

From the brilliant pillar there beat into their minds a colossal wave of exultation, triumph beyond triumph, joy vaster than any human joy. It was the mighty paean of the Thing, that went out from it not in sound but in thought.

It had been prisoned, cut away from the wide universe, for age after slow-crawling age, and now at last it was free and rejoicing in its freedom. In unbearable madness of cosmic rapture it loomed in the noonday darkness.

Then it flashed up into the heavens like a giant lightning bolt of blue. And as it did so, Garry’s darkening brain failed and he staggered into unconsciousness.

* * * *

He opened his eyes to bright noonday sunlight, which was streaming through the window beside him. He was lying in the cabin and the day was again brilliant outside, and somewhere near by a metallic voice was speaking.

He recognized that the voice was coming from his own little battery radio. Garry lay unmoving, unremembering for the moment, as the excited voice hurried on.

“—far out as we can make out, the area affected extended from Montreal as far south as Scranton, and from Buffalo in the West to some miles in the Atlantic beyond Boston, in the East.

“It lasted less than two minutes, and in the whole area was a complete blotting out of the sun’s light and heat in that time. Also, practically all electrical machinery ceased to function and the telegraph and telephone lines went completely dead.

“People living in certain Adirondack and Northwest Vermont sections have reported also some physical effects. They consisted of a sudden sensation of extreme joy, coincident with the darkness, and followed by brief unconsciousness.

“No one yet knows the cause of this amazing phenomenon though it may be due to a freak of solar forces. Scientists are now being consulted on the matter, and as soon as they--”

Garry Adams by this time was struggling weakly up to a sitting position in the bunk, clutching at its post.

“Peters!” he called over the metallic voice of the radio. “Peters-”

“I’m here,” said the astronomer, coming across the cabin.

The scientist’s face was pale and his movements a little unsteady, but he, too, was unhurt.

“I came back to consciousness a little sooner than you did and carried you up here,” he said.

“That—that Thing caused all the darkness and other things I’ve just been hearing of?” Garry cried.

Dr. Peters nodded. “It was a creature of force, force so terrific that its bursting forth here damped the heat and light radiations of the sun, the electrical currents of machines, even the electro-nervous impulses of our brains.”

“And it’s gone; it’s really gone?” the reporter cried.

“It’s gone after its fellows, out into the void of intergalactic space after the galaxies that are receding from our own,” said Dr. Peters solemnly. “We know now why all the galaxies in the cosmos are fleeing from our own, know that ours is held an accursed galaxy, leprous with the disease of life. But I don’t think we’ll ever tell the world.”

Garry Adams shook his head weakly. “We won’t tell; no. And I think we’ll try to forget it ourselves. I think we’ll try.”