BORN OF THE SUN

 

by Jack Williamson

 

 

The deep song of a wide-open motor throbbed into the huge mahogany library—the first faint note of rising menace. Foster Ross, busy over a great table in the end of the room, glanced up abstractedly at a frost-rimed window. Gaunt trees, outside, flung bare, skeletal branches against the gray gloom of an early December dusk; the moaning wind carried a few flakes of snow.

 

Listening, Foster Ross wondered briefly the reason for such suicidal haste over the icy highways, before his attention went back to the experiment that had engrossed him for two hard years.

 

He was alone in the great, rambling stone mansion his father had left him, secluded upon a lonely, wooded Pennsylvania hilltop. No visitors were expected—the house was being closed for the winter. The few servants had departed that afternoon. Foster, himself, planned to leave at midnight for sunny Palm Beach to meet June Trevor.

 

A lean, muscular giant, he was whistling absently as he bent over the immense mahogany table. It was littered with electrical apparatus. In the center of it, shimmering under brilliant light, was a little aluminum sphere, trailing two fine platinum wires.

 

Foster tightened a last connection. He stepped back a little eagerly brushing a wisp of copper-colored hair out of his eyes.

 

“Now!” he whispered. “It should go up. As the first space ship will go up toward the Moon! It should be-”

 

Nervously watching the toylike sphere, he snapped down a key. Anxiously, he waited, as coils whined angrily, and violet discharges flickered about bright contacts.

 

The tiny globe did not move. A moment he stared at it, sighing wearily. Then he shrugged, grinned at himself.

 

“Fifty thousand, that makes,” he muttered to himself. “Fifty thousand dollars, for a pipe dream! I could have sowed a lot of wild oats for that. What a fool I am, to be fussing with this infernal thing like an old crank, when I might be lounging on the beach with June!”

 

But something flashed, then, in his level blue eyes; his wide shoulders squared.

 

“It can be done!” he insisted under his breath. “I might try a conegrid. Or alloy the cathode element with titanium. The motor-tube-”

 

He heard, then, the insistent doorbell and frantic knocking at the front door. Foster hurried down the gloomy hall.

 

Still he could hear the racing car, a deep-toned, ominous roll, that grew swiftly louder. It slackened momentarily, was renewed.

 

“It has turned in the drive,” he thought. “Two unexpected guests, and both in a hurry!”

 

He flung the door open upon wintry gloom; the bitter wind whirled snow into his face.

 

A cab was standing in front of the door, yellow lights stabbing feebly into the swirling snow. It glided away as he appeared. And Foster saw the man who had rung, a small figure, muffled in an enormous gray coat, crouching against the wall.

 

He sprang toward the opening door, gasping: “Quick! Inside! The other car—”

 

Powerful lights probed through the snow; the second machine came roaring up the drive, behind the departing cab. Skidding recklessly, it swerved toward the door.

 

Terrific reports crashed in Foster’s ears; yellow flame jetted from a black automatic in the little man’s hand. He was shooting into the skidding sedan.

 

A thin sword of blinding orange light stabbed back from the machine, as it thundered past. The ray seemed to touch the little man. He whirled, as his gun exploded a last time, fell inside the door.

 

The black car paused, plunged forward again. Its headlights rested a moment on the cab, swept past it. It vanished down the drive.

 

* * * *

 

Bewildered, Foster slammed the door, locked it. He bent over the little man on the floor. A gasping breath greeted him, then a faint chuckle.

 

A low voice spoke, oddly calm: “We score one, Foster!”

 

“You aren’t hurt, sir? You fell, when the orange light-”

 

“No. I dropped in time.”

 

Foster was helping him to rise.

 

“But it’s a deadly thing. The poison flame, they call it. It’s an actinic radiation, I believe, that splits proteins. It forms poison in the blood.”

 

The little man bent for his automatic. Deliberately, he removed the empty cartridge clip, snapped another into place, slipped the heavy weapon back into the pocket of his gray coat.

 

“Won’t you come in where it’s warmer?” Foster invited. “And if you don’t mind explaining-”

 

“Of course, Foster.”

 

His strange guest followed him through the shadowy hall, into the brightly lighted library. Foster turned, when they came into the light, to survey the other.

 

“You seem to know my name,” he remarked. Recognition flashed then, in his level blue eyes. “Uncle Barron!” he exclaimed. “I hadn’t recognized you!” He offered his hand cordially.

 

Barron Kane was a small man. His chest was flat; his drooping shoulders were thin as a boy’s; his arms were lean and stringy. Yet the serene patience of the scientist lighted his weary face with a radiance of power. In his calm gray eyes was confidence, and beside it, strangely, the shadow of a devouring dread.

 

“You surprised me,” said Foster. “I thought, you know, that you must be—dead. It’s years since any one has heard from you. My father tried to locate you.”

 

“I’ve been in Asia,” said the little sun-browned man, “at an oasis in the Gobi, that you won’t find on the maps. I was completely cut off from civilization. And there’s a power, you see, that would cut me off forever.”

 

He nodded in the direction the racing car had gone.

 

“I remember when you were fitting out your last expedition,” recalled Foster. “Twelve years ago—I was in high school. You were so mysterious about where you were headed. And I was wild to go along, for the adventure of it, trying to talk dad out of the idea that I was destined to run the steel business.

 

“But sit down. Do you care for a drink?”

 

Barron Kane shook a brown, bald head—he had arrived without a hat. “But I must talk to you, Foster.”

 

“I’m keen to know all about it,” Foster assured him. “All this is—well, interesting.”

 

“We might be interrupted,” said Barron Kane. “Do you mind fastening the doors and windows and drawing the blinds?”

 

“Of course not. Do you think—they will come back?”

 

“There is a power,” said Barron Kane, his low voice still oddly calm, “that will not rest without positive proof that I am dead.”

 

Foster locked the door, went to secure the windows. He came back to find his uncle curiously examining the little silver model on the table.

 

“I read your monograph last month in the Science Review,” he said. “About the omicron-effect and your motor-tube. That’s why I’ve come to you, Foster. You’ve hit on a tremendous thing-”

 

“Not yet,” denied Foster, with a weary little smile. “I’ve spent two years of time and a good deal of money on the motor-tube. And still it won’t lift its own weight.”

 

“But you’re still trying?” The low voice was edged with a strange anxiety.

 

“I was working to-day.” Foster touched the little aluminum globe. “This is a model of the space machine. The motor-tube is inside, connected with these platinum wires. The real ship, of course, would have all this other apparatus aboard. The living accommodations and she--”

 

He stopped himself, shook his head bitterly.

 

“But it’s just a dream!” he muttered. “A crazy dream—I’m not going to waste my life on it.” His blue eyes flashed at Barron Kane defiantly. “I’m leaving for Palm Beach, to-night, to meet June Trevor.” He explained: “We’re engaged. We’ll be married New Year’s. Barron, June’s simply-wonderful!”

 

“You can’t do that!” protested Barron Kane. Gripping Foster’s arm, he spoke with a puzzling urgency. “You must stick to the space machine. You must finish it, Foster, to save the human race.”

 

“Eh!” Grunting with astonishment, Foster stepped back from him. “What do you mean?”

 

“Just that,” Barron Kane told him, in the same quiet voice that was emphatic for its very lack of emphasis. “I’ve come to tell you a dreadful thing, Foster. A thing I learned in Asia. A thing that a terrible power is bent upon keeping me from telling.”

 

Foster stared at him, demanded: “What’s that?”

 

“The planet is doomed to destruction,” said Barron Kane, still grimly calm. “And the human race with it—unless you can save a handful of humanity. You are the one man who has even the ghost of a chance, Foster, with your steel mills and your invention of the motor-tube.”

 

* * * *

 

Amazed, a little shaken, despite himself, at the chill touch of alien fear, Foster watched his uncle.

 

Had the man gone mad in the twelve years since he vanished? He always had been famous for an eccentricity of character no less than his ability as geologist and astrophysicist. No, Foster decided, his manner was sane enough. And the car from which the orange ray had flamed had been no mad delusion. It had been very real.

 

Foster took Barron Kane by the shoulder, marched him to a great leather chair and seated him in it. Standing over him, he demanded:

 

“Now tell me exactly what this is all about?”

 

Grave humor momentarily banished the haunting shadow of dread from those calm gray eyes.

 

“No, Foster,” the quiet voice said; ‘I’m afraid that I’m perfectly sane.”

 

Barron Kane laced his thin brown fingers together, stared at them meditatively.

 

“You cannot have heard of the Cult of the Great Egg,” he began. “You can’t, because even the name of it is almost completely unknown outside. But it is a fanatical religious sect, whose temple is hidden in an unknown oasis in the Gobi.

 

“Nearly ten years ago, Foster, I became a member of that sect. It was not easily done. And afterward I had to endure ordeals that were—well, trying. After seven years I was fully initiated. From the lips of the head of the order—a human demon named L’ao Ku—I heard the dreadful secret that I had gone to Asia to learn.

 

“That was three years ago. L’ao Ku must have suspected me. I was very closely watched. Two years I had to wait, even for the chance to escape. Since, I’ve been hunted across the world by the agents of L’ao Ku. It’s almost another year.

 

“I thought I’d given them the slip in Panama. I saw your article about the motor-tube and came to you, Foster. You, as I say, are the only man— But they’ve somehow picked up the trail again. I’m afraid I’ve sentenced you to death.”

 

“Sentenced me?” asked Foster. “How?”

 

“L’ao Ku wants his secret kept. Three men have died very soon after talking with me, mysteriously.”

 

Foster was still planted in front of Barron Kane, wonder and incredulity struggling in his mind. His chin tightened with determination to find some rational order in these bewildering incidents.

 

“This secret?” he demanded. “What is it? What’s this about the end of the world?”

 

Again Barron Kane thoughtfully studied the tips of his laced fingers. “I’ll begin, I think,” he said, “by asking you a question—by asking you, Foster, the greatest riddle in the world. What is the Earth?”

 

Startled, Foster searched the weary, patient face. He studied the gray eyes, calm, yet shadowed with brooding horror. He shook his head. Barron Kane was an enigma.

 

“All right, what is the Earth?”

 

“I’ve a very astounding thing to tell you,” went on Barron Kane, “a very terrible thing. It will be hard for you to accept, for it is contrary to a lot of our unthinking dogma that is older than science.

 

“The idea is so strange, so terrible, Foster, that no western mind could have conceived it. We owe a debt, after all, to the Cult of the Great Egg. The oriental mentality, working with the secret science of the order, saw a thing that we should never have been able to see, in spite of all the evidence in front of our eyes.

 

“But I can make it easier for you to accept the thing, Foster, by recalling a few notorious gaps in scientific knowledge. And you must accept it, Foster. The very life of humanity depends upon you.”

 

Foster dropped into a chair directly before Barron Kane. Sitting bolt upright, he waited silently.

 

“We live in appalling ignorance of the planet beneath us,” the same calm voice spoke on, edged still with a terrible intensity. “Out of four thousand miles to the center of the Earth, how far have we penetrated? Not four miles!

 

“What lies beyond? What, really, is the thing whose tremors we call earthquakes? What lies beneath the thin shell of solid rock we live upon? What is it whose heat causes our volcanoes? I could cite you a thousand vague, conflicting theories, guesses, about the nature of the Earth’s interior —but hardly one proved fact. We know actually as little of the Earth, Foster, as a fly, crawling on an egg, knows of the mystery of embryonic life within.

 

“And how much less we know of the other planets! What scientist can tell you even how they came to be? Oh, there’ve been fine theories enough, since Laplace. We have the planetesimal hypothesis, the nebular hypothesis, the gaseous hypothesis, the meteoritic hypothesis—this hypothesis and that. The most remarkable thing about each one is that it successfully contradicts all the others.

 

“Think of the puzzle of the lost planet! According to Bode’s Law, you know, there should be another planet in the gap between Mars and Jupiter, where the asteroids are. The asteroids and the comets and the meteor swarms apparently are fragments of it—but, altogether, they account for no more than a tenth of the bulk it should have had. What unthinkable cataclysm shattered the lost planet, Foster? And, tell me, what became of the nine-tenths of it that is gone?

 

“Take another cosmic enigma! What is the Sun itself, upon which our very lives depend? What is the life story of a sun, any sun? How does it acquire its matter and its motion and its heat? What is the purpose in existence of a sun? When you look at the stars on a winter night, Foster, can you conceive them without any end in being?

 

“Consider the riddle of entropy! There is a force of death that pervades the universe. Stars grow cold and die; star dust is scattered; radiation is diffused and lost. Our cosmogonists say the universe is running down. But must there not also be a force of life, of growth, of creation?

 

“How can death be, Foster, without life before it?

 

“Did you never wonder, Foster, why the Sun, like other variable stars, expands and contracts in the rhythm of the sun-spot cycle, with a beat like the pulse of a living thing?”

 

Barron Kane leaned forward. His gray eyes—the shadow of haunting horror was deeper in them, now—fixed upon Foster’s face with a desperate, appealing earnestness.

 

“Foster,” he went on, “I know what the Earth is!

 

“Years ago, struggling with the failures and the contradictions of our western science, I vaguely guessed the thing. Twelve years ago, from a chance faint rumor, I inferred that oriental insight had seen the truth hidden from our dogmatic western minds.

 

“I went, as I say, into the Gobi. I found the secret sect. After seven years of effort and endurance, I reached the inner mystery. L’ao Ku confirmed my terrible inference.

 

“I learned from him things I had not dared even to guess. I learned that the Earth—the entire solar system—is destined to break up within a very short time. We shall see the end, Foster—unless the secret agents of L’ao Ku make away with us first.

 

“We must not forget him, Foster, in the greater danger. The man is inhuman, fanatic, diabolical; but he is a genius. And all his power, all the secret science that produced the poison ray, is bent upon our destruction.”

 

The calm voice paused. Quiet hung in the wide library, strained, electric. And Foster whispered, incredulous:

 

“The end of the world!”

 

“The end,” repeated Barron Kane, with the same compelling calm. “I had hoped we might have—years. But I know to-night, from an item in the evening paper, that the change has already begun.”

 

Foster Ross surged back to his feet, towered over the little brown man. “Tell me,” he implored, “just what are you getting at?”

 

Barron Kane told him, leaning forward, his low voice sunk almost to a whisper. Foster listened silently, still standing. Unbelieving wonder was first in his blue eyes. It gave way slowly to the dawn of a terrible fear.

 

* * * *

 

II.

 

An hour later, it was, when the grave little scientist finished and leaned back in the huge leather chair lacing his thin brown fingers together again.

 

Without speaking, Foster strode to a tall window. He put up the blind and stared out into the early-winter night. The bare trees were a ghostly rank of skeletons on fields of snow that shimmered faintly under the dark sky. Flakes of snow gleamed white in the flood of light from the window. The bitter wind moaned bleakly against the ancient stone walls.

 

“Please draw the blind,” requested Barron Kane, with that same calm that nothing disturbed. “The agents of L’ao Ku might be watching. The poison ray-”

 

Foster snatched down the blind. He strode back to his uncle, tense, trembling a little. “Sorry!” he muttered. “I forgot.”

 

“The idea is a peculiarly difficult one for the western mind to receive,” said Barron Kane sympathetically. “It would drive most westerners mad, I suspect, to be forced to believe it. But, if you will try to grasp it with something of the oriental fatalism-”

 

Foster seemed unconscious of him. He strode up and down the vast, dark-paneled room. He paused, once, to touch the little aluminum model of the space ship on the table. He took a photograph of dark-eyed June Trevor from the mantel, and studied her demure, classic loveliness for a moment and replaced it very carefully. He strode back to his uncle.

 

“The Earth—that!” he rasped. “I can’t believe it! It’s too—monstrous!”

 

Barron Kane rose and came to him eagerly. “You must believe me, Foster,” his low voice pleaded. “Because only you have the means to save the seed of humanity. And you must begin the work at once—to-night!”

 

“To-night?” echoed Foster, in dull surprise.

 

“You must realize, Foster, that we’ve only months. Half a year, at most. And the undertaking is—terrific. We must set up a laboratory to rush the development of your motor-tube. Your steel mills must begin fabricating parts for the—the ark of space.

 

“We’ve a thousand problems to solve in every branch of engineering. And the thing must be finished in less time than was ever taken for a similar construction. Much less time!”

 

“There has been no similar construction,” Foster said. “Even a battle ship is a simple toy compared to the space machine. It would take a lifetime to launch the thing.

 

“Besides,” he protested vaguely, still lost in wonderment, “I’m going to Palm Beach. I promised June that I—”

 

“Then you must break your promise,” cut in Barron Kane imperatively. “Both of us must give every second to the job. Even then, the time is fearfully short. And we must look out for L’ao Ku with his poison ray.”

 

“Really, you see, I can’t—can’t quite believe.” Foster’s blue eyes looked soberly at Barron Kane. “The thing’s too damnably fantastic!”

 

“You must try to grasp it with the oriental viewpoint,” urged his uncle. “The eastern fatalism—”

 

“I’m no Chinaman,” said Foster. “But I do love June Trevor—more than anything. Even if you’re right—if the next six months will be the last—I’d rather spend them with her.”

 

“Don’t you see?” whispered Barron Kane. He gripped Foster’s arm with thin fingers. “If you love June Trevor, you must build the space machine to save her. Would you want to see her die, Foster, with the rest of the human race, like—like vermin in a burning house? Wiped out-annihilated?”

 

“No!” exclaimed Foster. “No! But I can’t believe-”

 

“You must!” insisted Barron Kane. “There’s proof, I tell you. To-night, in the evening paper, is an item that heralds the disruption of the solar system.”

 

“Proof?” cried Foster incredulously. “Proof of—that?”

 

“Have you an evening paper?”

 

“It’s here somewhere. I had no time to look at it. The experiment, you know.”

 

He found the paper, unfolded it curiously. His eye sought the chief headline, saw that it concerned merely a new disclosure of political corruption.

 

Barron Kane’s thin, eager hands took the paper from him, pointed out an obscurely headed item at the bottom of the page.

 

SAVANTS PUZZLED

 

Doctor Lynn Poynter, of the Mount Wilson Observatory, reported this morning that the planet Pluto has left its orbit and is wandering away from the Sun on an erratic and inexplicable path. The planet’s color, Doctor Poynter also stated, has changed from yellowish to vivid green.

 

He is unable, Doctor Poynter says, to give any explanation of the phenomenon. He refuses to make any further comments upon it, except to say that other astronomers, in all parts of the world, are being requested to check his observations.

 

 

Foster’s face set grimly as he read the brief paragraphs. His fingers, trembling, closed unconsciously upon the newspaper, tore it slowly in two. Into his blue eyes, when he looked back at Barron Kane, had come a new, consuming horror. Huskily, he spoke:

 

“So Pluto is already—gone? Already, the solar system is breaking up!”

 

He gazed down at the torn paper in his hands.

 

“We’ll go down to the mill in the morning, Barron,” he said, “to begin.”

 

Silently, the little brown man gripped his hand, mutely thankful.

 

“Now,” said Foster, “I must telephone June.”

 

* * * *

 

“It’s you, Foster!” came the girl’s clear voice over the wire, eager with anticipation. “You’re coming down to-morrow? I’ll drive to meet you-”

 

Foster was picturing her staid, brown-eyed charm; he saw her as she would sit at the wheel, tall, slender: a gay, childish eagerness beneath her sedate reserve. And he was faint, suddenly, with a sick regret that he could not go to her.

 

“No,” he was saying, trying to keep the pain from his voice; “I’m afraid I can’t come down.”

 

He sensed the quick anxiety in her reply: “Is something—wrong?”

 

“A thing has come up,” he stumbled, searching for words not too alarming. “A job that I must do. It’s tremendously important. I must stay--”

 

“Oh!” In her voice was a little catch of agony. “Will it keep you—past the New Year?”

 

“Yes,” he said. “We’ll have to name a new wedding day.”

 

“Oh!” It was a gasp of pain: Foster was sick with pity for her. “Can’t you tell me what it is?”

 

“No; not over the phone. But I want you to come to me, June, as soon as you can. I’ll explain.”

 

“I’ve a lot of engagements,” she protested. “And you seem so—strange!”

 

“It’s really important,” he urged. “Please come! I need you, really. Oh, June—please-”

 

A moment of silence; then she spoke decisively:

 

“All right, Foster, I’ll be there—let’s see—Monday.”

 

“Thanks, dear!” he said gratefully. “When you understand-”

 

“Atta boy!” she cried, almost gayly. “Get some sunshine in your voice! You were talking as if the world were going to end! I’ll be there Monday.”

 

Dear June, the same good sport, he was thinking, as she hung up. Gay and unselfish as ever. She always understood. And he would, he must, finish the space machine in time to carry her away from this unbelievable terror that Barron Kane promised.

 

* * * *

 

That night Barron Kane and Foster Ross did not go to bed. They stayed in the long library, beside the little aluminum model of the space machine, planning how to transform the dream of it into reality. Foster ventured to the kitchen at midnight and brought bread and cold ham and a bottle of milk and set them beside the toy ship.

 

At dawn he began packing into a brief case the model and the sheets they had covered with plans, to carry down to the mill.

 

“There’s a danger, remember,” warned Barron Kane. “The men who followed me won’t be far away. They won’t go back without proof that I am dead.”

 

“I’ll call the mill,” said Foster, “have a few men sent out.”

 

But the line, he discovered, was dead.

 

“The wires are down,” he said. “The storm--”

 

“L’ao Ku’s men have cut them,” whispered Barron Kane. “They are waiting for us.”

 

“We’d better make a dash for it, then,” Foster suggested, “while we can.”

 

Barron Kane nodded. “We’ll have to fence ourselves in if we do get to the mill,” he said. “For we’ll be fighting L’ao Ku, to the end, as well as fighting against time. It is the basis of the secret sect that all life must perish when the Earth breaks up. Any attempt to save even a single human life breaks the first tenet of their fantastic dogma.”

 

Leaving the lights burning in the library, the two slipped out through the rear of the old mansion. The grounds were ghostly white with snow. Dense clouds hid the sky, ice-gray with the first glow of dawn. Mysterious shadows were clotted against trees and buildings.

 

Foster carried his priceless model. Barron Kane had drawn his heavy automatic, snapped off the safety. At a half run, they crunched through thick snow to the garage. Foster unlocked the doors, flung them back.

 

A thin orange ray, bright as a blade of incandescent metal, flamed silently out of the gloomy doorway. It struck Barron Kane’s arm. His automatic spoke once in reply. Then, gasping with agony, he crumpled down on the snow.

 

Foster caught his breath. His lean body catapulted instantly into the black corner from which the silent ray had come.

 

His groping hand closed over a talonlike hand that held a light metal tube. His shoulder struck a lithe, powerful body, flung it heavily against the wall. Another lean hand closed on his throat. He caught a sinewy wrist, forced it back.

 

The two recoiled from the wall, thudded on the concrete floor. Foster had heard a guttural grunt of surprise. That was the only sound from his unseen opponent. The battle was finished in silence and darkness.

 

A doubled knee drove into Foster’s groin. As he writhed in agony, hard fingers twitched under his. A blinding finger of yellow light stabbed from the little tube. It wavered across the wall of the garage. Slowly it came down.

 

The poison ray! If it touched him, to make a deadly venom of his own blood--

 

Intolerable agony burst suddenly from the tortured wrist of his resisting arm. He trembled with the pain of effort. Hot sweat burst out on his face.

 

The orange ray touched the floor, trembled toward his shoulder. The talons that moved it were hard as steel.

 

Foster was giddy with the unbearable pain from his twisted arm. The world spun; a wave of blackness rose. Then, in the moment of defeat, a queer something happened to him, a blinding revelation. In a moment of crystal vision, he saw himself not as one man fighting for his own life, but the champion of humanity, battling for ultimate survival.

 

* * * *

 

A new strength came oddly with the vision; deathless purpose flowed into him like a strange tide.

 

He straightened his tortured arm. Red agony flamed in it. But the orange needle flickered away. The hard body against him knotted with exertion; the ray flashed back. Faint and dizzy, Foster drew on his new strength to the utmost.

 

He heard the dull snap of a breaking bone. The steel talons in his grasp turned to limp flesh. The orange blade described a sudden arc, that touched the head of the other man. Then the little tube crashed against the wall, the ray went out.

 

The other was already dead from his own weapon when Foster staggered to his feet.

 

Barron Kane lay still on the snow outside, a small gray huddle in the pale dawn light. Foster ran to him, heard his faint whisper:

 

“The poison ray—my wrist—a tourniquet at the elbow—bleed it.”

 

Foster pushed up the sleeve on the thin brown arm. He whipped his handkerchief around the right elbow, twisted it tight with a spanner he snatched from the wall. On the lean, stringy wrist he saw a swelling, lividly purple, swiftly increasing in size. He dug a keen penknife out of his vest pocket, slashed deep into it, put his own lips to the wound to draw out the poison.

 

“That will do,” whispered Barron Kane at last, his voice a little stronger. “Guess I’m done for, anyhow. Just hope I live to see you win, Foster. No matter. I’ve done my part. It’s up to you, now, to save the seed of mankind.”

 

“I—I’ll do my best,” Foster promised him, choking. He was still strong with the strange self-forgetful resolution that had come to him in the fight.

 

“Drive on,” whispered Barron Kane, “to the mill!”

 

Foster lifted him into the roadster. When he switched on the lights he paused a moment to look down at the dead man on the floor. His face was yellow, Mongoloid, with a hawklike thinness. It was set, now, in the fearful, derisive grin of death.

 

“Open his clothing, Foster,” commanded Barron Kane. “Look on his body, under the left arm.”

 

Foster obeyed. Under the man’s arm, on the yellow skin stretched like parchment over the ribs, was a scarlet mark, like a large O.

 

“He’s branded!” he cried. “With a red circle!”

 

“That is the emblem of the secret cult,” whispered Barron Kane. “He came from L’ao Ku.”

 

Foster leaped in beside Barron Kane. The stiff motor came to bellowing life. The roadster lunged forward, swerved past the dead man, skidded out upon the icy drive.

 

The leaden, frigid day had come when they drove into the grimy mill town. Gaunt, ugly, the little buildings of the workers huddled over hillsides gray with snow and soot. The mill stood in the level valley; gigantic blast furnaces marched, like a grim army of black steel monsters, against the gloomy clouds.

 

Foster drove straight through the gates to the emergency hospital. He carried Barron Kane to a cot inside.

 

“The doctors will soon be here,” he promised.

 

“Don’t worry about me,” the little man whispered. “You have work to do. I’m going to try to live to see you finish it.”

 

* * * *

 

III.

 

Three months later, a new fence surrounded the steel mill. It was twenty feet high, and the first ten were bullet-proof concrete and steel. The top of it was wired to powerful generators. At hundred-foot intervals it was studded with rotating turrets of steel and bullet-proof glass, in which sentries watched always, behind frowning machine guns.

 

Inside the fence, on a huge pier of reenforced concrete, the space machine was building.

 

Its hull was already completed—a feat unprecedented in engineering. A colossal sphere, nearly five hundred feet in diameter, it dwarfed to insignificance the flanking armies of blast furnaces. The top of its gray bulk was visible for many miles across the low Pennsylvania hills, that now, in March, were green with the last spring of Earth.

 

Much, however, remained to be done in perfecting the interior arrangements, by which human life was to be sustained indefinitely in the sunless void. Greatest lack of all, the motor-tube, which was to utilize Foster Ross’ omicron-effect to propel the machine, was still unperfected.

 

“The rest will be finished in a month,” Foster promised Barron Kane, one windy spring day. “But a lot of good that will be if the motor-tube won’t work. A million tons of steel and glass! We have no way to move it an inch, unless-”

 

They were in a room in the emergency hospital, from the windows of which the sick man could watch the tremendous gray-painted sphere of steel, looming against pale-green hills and wind-torn sky.

 

Barron Kane was still on his back. The venom formed by the orange ray had affected spinal nerve centers; he was unable to walk, even his hands were partially paralyzed. But his brain remained keen as ever; despite his helplessness and pain, he had helped the solution of many a problem in the building of the space machine.

 

“Unless?” he whispered. “You’re trying something else?”

 

“We began this morning to work out a new design. We started from a new beginning, suggested by the equations of the omicron-effect. We don’t know that it will be any better. Even if it works, the installation will take six weeks.”

 

“Six weeks?” breathed Barron Kane, in weary alarm. “We may not have that long before the Earth breaks up!”

 

His gray eyes stared at Foster from the pillow, calm, yet dark with dread.

 

“The moon of Neptune, you know,” he whispered, “left its orbit last week. It turned greenish and followed Pluto off into space. And there’s another thing-”

 

His shrunken, half-useless hands fumbled for the newspaper on the blanket beside him.

 

“What is it?” asked Foster.

 

“In the morning paper. Still no one sees what’s coming. They have the story hidden on an inside page—nobody saw what it meant. But it’s about the most important thing they ever printed. Here it is!”

 

Foster read the item:

 

QUAKES SHOW RHYTHM

 

A new series of tremors is shaking the earth, announced Doctor Madison Kline, noted English seismologist, speaking to-day before an international convention of geologists.

 

These recently observed earth tremors occur at regular intervals of about thirty-one minutes, said Doctor Kline. He believes they reflect some rhythmic disturbance deep within the planet.

 

Doctor Kline and his associates, he stated, have had the phenomenon under observation for several weeks, during which time it has steadily and markedly increased.

 

No conclusively definite explanation can yet be offered, Doctor Kline said, though he believes that the period of the vibration corresponds to the natural fundamental frequency of the planet.

 

 

Foster’s hands closed until the knuckles went white. “That means,” he muttered huskily, “that we’re near—the finish.”

 

“You see,” whispered Barron Kane, “you must rush the installation of the new motor-tube.”

 

“We will!” Foster promised. “Though the thing may not work, when it’s done. We’re trying, you see, to compress a generation of scientific progress into four months.”

 

“There are other things,” Barron Kane reminded him. “We must be ready to cut all connection with civilization.”

 

“Our supplies are mostly on board, already,” Foster informed him. “And our people are moving into the machine as fast as the quarters are ready. Six hundred picked men, representing every race and every craft and every creed, with their wives and children. Two thousand, all told— and the very cream of humanity.”

 

“The laboratories?” queried Barron Kane.

 

“Oh, they’ll be finished in time,” Foster assured him. “In a month, Barron, we’ll have our own artificial air and our own synthetic food, made on board from the refined elements of the waste.

 

“Once out in space,” he went on, a ring of enthusiasm in his voice, “we’ll be independent. Our generators will tap the limitless energy of the cosmic ray. They will supply warmth and light and power, the means for the manufacture of oxygen and food, and current for the motor-tube.

 

“The machine can sail on forever, Barron. It’s a little world, itself, independent of the Sun—”

 

Foster stopped himself, bit his lips. “Here I am,” he muttered sheepishly, “ranting about the thing! When I couldn’t move it an inch, to save my soul! So long, Barron. I must get back to the shops.”

 

“Wait!” whispered the sick man. “There’s another thing. Where is your fiancée?”

 

“Why,” Foster told him, “June has gone back to Florida for a short visit with some friends. I want her to forget, as much as she can, what’s coming. It’s so terrible, for a girl like her—”

 

“Have her come back,” advised Barron Kane. “Have her move on board with us.”

 

“There’s danger?” demanded Foster. “Already?”

 

“The first quiver of the Earth’s crust will be enough to shatter the thing we call civilization,” whispered the little man. “She must be here before that happens. And there’s another danger.”

 

“What’s that?”

 

“L’ao Ku hasn’t shown his power, Foster. But don’t forget that he has a power. He’s just waiting, getting ready. Don’t be deceived; don’t let down your guard.”

 

“Oh!” breathed Foster, relieved. “I thought you meant some danger to June.”

 

“I do,” whispered Barron Kane.

 

Foster leaned over him, tense with alarm.

 

“In that temple in the Gobi is an altar erected to the Great Egg. Above it is an image, cut from black stone. The image is a globe, with the outlines of the continents engraved on it, so you can see that it represents the Earth. It is split, and a thing is emerging. A thing obscenely monstrous!

 

“Regular ceremonies are held in the temple, Foster. On that altar, under the image of that unthinkable obscenity breaking from the earth, L’ao Ku offers sacrifices. The victims are always women. When possible, they are heretics or members of their families.

 

“It is possible, Foster, that June Trevor might—suffer, just because you plan to save her.”

 

Foster’s face was gray, drawn. Hoarsely, he rasped: “I’ll send for her to come on board. Right away!”

 

* * * *

 

The scientific world was stunned from the first. The aberration of Pluto shattered the whole painfully built structure of western science. The pulselike tremors of the earth, which soon became violent enough to be felt as one walked in the street, received no adequate explanation.

 

Scientists, for a time, took refuge in pitiful charges of inaccurate observation. But they could not long deny that the solar system was breaking up. The planet Neptune shifted unaccountably from its calculated position. One by one, the greater moons of Saturn and Uranus assumed a greenish color and departed from their orbits. The change, spreading inward through the solar system, overtook the four large moons of Jupiter.

 

The very universe of science collapsed.

 

The common man, however, at first was only slightly concerned. Business went on as usual; the public attention centered in turn upon unemployment, the stabilized dollar, the sensational murder of a Hollywood actress. There was no real panic, even when the “Earth-beat,” as the newspapers termed the oddly rhythmic tremors of the planet, became a chief topic of conversation.

 

Real panic began only with loss of life. Late in March a series of terrific earthquakes and accompanying tidal waves overwhelmed, one by one, Tokyo, Bombay, Rio de Janeiro, and Los Angeles. The cataclysms were progressively more violent. Hardly a paper, so long as papers were printed, lacked its story of a new holocaust.

 

Even then, the old order did not immediately fall. “Business as usual” was a catchword, though prices rocketed, governments and corporations crashed, and crime ran wild.

 

New leaders, radical movements, fantastic fads, won tremendous support. New religions, in particular, were widely and feverishly embraced. Ten thousand new prophets rose and were acclaimed; but the greatest following was won by the disciples of that strange oriental sect, the Cult of the Great Egg.

 

They, alone, professed to understand the change. They, alone, could offer bewildered humanity a rational, if fantastic, key to the astounding riddle of the crumbling solar system. Even though he promised only grim death—death as a sacred duty—L’ao Ku became the master of fanatic millions.

 

The mad tide of his increasing power, Barron Kane and Foster Ross recognized from the beginning, was sure to be turned against them. They had made a fortress of the steel mill. They hastened the construction of the space machine to the utmost. They could do no more.

 

* * * *

 

IV.

 

The crisis came on the night of April 23rd. The Moon was full. The skies, often of late strangely clouded, were clear over most of North America. Horror-stricken millions, that night, watched the change overtake the Moon. Few, having seen it, were ever completely sane again.

 

It was the madness born of that incredible vision of mind-breaking horror, guided by the fanatic genius of L’ao Ku, that led to the mass attacks on the space machine.

 

The Planet—so June Trevor had named the space machine, since it was to be the sole future home of humanity—lay still upon the concrete pier, inside the fence. And still it could not be moved; the motor-tube was yet incomplete.

 

Atop the gray, colossal sphere of steel was a little domed space roofed with crystal panels. It was reached by a short stair from a door below. Gleaming mechanisms crowded it, the intricate instruments designed for the control and navigation of the space machine.

 

On that fatal night, Foster Ross and June Trevor came into the little control room, Foster carrying Barron Kane in his arms. They made the wrecked body of the little scientist as comfortable as possible in an invalid chair amid the shining instruments.

 

“Last night,” Foster said, “observers saw cracks spreading across the Moon. Its crust is splitting. Beneath is something--It is greenish, incandescent. To-night, we shall see the end of the Moon!

 

“Watching the Moon, we can see the thing that, in a day or so, is going to happen to the Earth!”

 

June Trevor moved, quickly, anxiously, to his side. June was a tall girl, dark-eyed, with a grave, classic beauty. She smiled at Foster—it was a wan, anxious little smile. Apprehensive, she slipped her hand into his.

 

“Foster,” she whispered, “will it be very—terrible?”

 

“The terror of it,” he told her, “will not be in what we see. It will be in what it means. In the fate of the Moon, we see the fate of the Earth, of human civilization. But try, dear, not to be afraid.”

 

“I’m not—not exactly afraid,” she whispered, shivering a little. “But it’s dreadful to think of so many—perishing--”

 

Foster’s hand tightened on her own. “June,” he said huskily, “you must try not to think of that. We’ve each other, remember. Without you, I—I’d go mad!”

 

“And there’s a bigger thing,” she breathed. “We’ve a duty. To save the race!”

 

Foster turned out the lights, then, in the tiny room. They looked upward through the panels of heavy fused quartz. Flooded with moonlight, the sky was silver-gray; in the south were white, luminous feathers of cloud. The Moon was high in the east, a supernal disk of mottled gold.

 

They stared at it. June Trevor quivered; she pressed close against Foster’s lean body.

 

“There are cracks!” she murmured, breathless. “I see them! Like a net of wire.”

 

“They’re spreading,” muttered Foster. “And—I see a green something, breaking through.”

 

From his pillow came the queer, voiceless whisper of the paralyzed scientist: “The being is emerging.”

 

Breathless, speechless with fearful awe, the three watched the Moon —as maddened millions were watching it over all the continent.

 

They saw the familiar seas and ring craters of the lunar topography dissolve in a network of cracks, black and shining green. They saw the face of the Moon, for the first time in human memory, misty with clouds of its own.

 

They saw a thing come out of the riven planet—an unthinkable head appeared--

 

It broke through, in the region of the great crater Tycho. It was monstrously weird. Colossal, triangular, a beak came first, green and shining. Behind it were two ovoid, enormous patches, like eyes, glowing with lambent purple. Between and above them was an enigmatic organ, arched, crested; it was an unearthly spray of crimson flame.

 

Incredible wings—reaching out—stretching-

 

They pushed through the shattered, crumbling shell, which already had lost all likeness to the Moon of old. Wings, alone, could human beings term them. Yet, Foster thought, they were more than anything else like the eldritch, gorgeous streamers of the Sun’s corona, which is seen only at the moment of total eclipse, spreading from the black disk like two wings of supernal light. They were sheets of green flame. They shimmered with slow waves of light, that faded indistinctly at the edges, like the uncanny fans of the aurora. They were finely veined with bright silver.

 

A body, both horrible and beautiful--

 

It came into view, when the slowly expanding, supernal wings pushed back the cosmic debris that had been the Moon’s crust. It uncoiled into a sinuous loveliness, long and slender, delicately tapering. It was green as emerald, bright as flame, and strangely marked with silver and black.

 

The color of all the sky changed appallingly from silver-gray to green, with the fearful radiation of the thing. The shadows it cast, inky-black, green-fringed, were uncanny—dreadful.

 

It hung for a time in the sky where the Moon had been, nearly motionless. Monstrous appendages like serpents of blue flame reached out of its head, beneath the purple ovoids. They writhed over its slender, terrible body and its diaphanous wings.

 

It preened itself.

 

Amazingly, then, it wheeled across the sky. Its fantastic shadows crept like living things. With luminous waves, like some strange force, pulsing outward through the wondrous sheets of flame that were like wings, it flew away. The dread green illumination faded from the sky, and the terrible shadows died, and the thing became a minute fleck of emerald light, dwindling beside white Vega.

 

“The Moon is gone!” breathed Foster, dazed with wonder.

 

“As the Earth will go,” came the voiceless whisper of Barron Kane, “in a few days, now.”

 

“Beautiful!” gasped June Trevor, in a queer, shaken little voice. “It was lovely—and horrible-”

 

She shuddered, and Foster was surprised to find her firm, warm, straight body in his arms. Unconsciously she nestled against him, instinctively seeking comfort; and his arm tightened, before he released her.

 

“Our world must go—that way, dear--” he breathed; and her shivery, tiny whisper finished: “But we have—each other-”

 

* * * *

 

Barron Kane was still looking out through the crystal dome. Since the going of the Moon, the sky was a dome of splendid stars. The low, rolling Pennsylvania hills loomed dark under it, picked out with tiny, winking lights of house and motor. The lights of the mill town, under the towering bulk of the Planet, were little bright rectangles in the blackness.

 

“There are too many lights on the roads,” said Barron Kane, and his whisper was edged with alarm. “Cars and torches and swinging lanterns. They are all coming toward the Planet!”

 

Foster and June looked down from the lofty windows. Over the dark hills they saw the rivers of dancing, flickering light, flowing toward them.

 

Foster rasped a single bitter word: “Mobs!”

 

“Mobs?” echoed June wonderingly. “Why?”

 

“People aren’t human beings any longer,” Foster told her grimly. “They are animals—frightened animals. They are mad with fear, since they’ve seen the break-up of the Moon. They’re driven to fight, like any fear-crazed thing. We can’t blame them—but we must defend the Planet.”

 

Tenderly, he put the girl from him.

 

“I must go down to warn the guard,” he said, “and to help the men in the power rooms. They’re installing the motor-tube.”

 

“When,” rustled the anxious whisper of Barron Kane, “when will you be able to move the Planet?”

 

“The castings came this morning from the foundry,” Foster informed him. “It will take a day to put them in. Then—if the mob hasn’t wiped us out!—we can see whether the Planet will move. Whether the human race is to live—or to die with the Earth.”

 

“A day?” breathed Barron Kane despairingly. “Our fence won’t hold them back so long.”

 

“It will take that long,” Foster told him, tight-lipped. “Twenty hours, at the very least. We’ll save every second, of course. And the entrance valve is ready to close. We’ll make an inner fort of the Planet, itself. But I must go!” He squeezed June’s hand and ran out of the little room.

 

The girl and Barron Kane waited there, amid the gleaming instruments that were to navigate the space machine—if it ever moved. The sick man was whispering orders into a telephone mouthpiece, to help organize the defense.

 

Impatiently, June waited; at last she demanded fearfully:

 

“Is there much—danger? The people are mad with fear; I understand that. But why should they attack us?”

 

“The priests of a fanatic religion have stirred them up against us,” grimly whispered Barron Kane. “In Asia, the priests of a secret sect foresaw the doom. They based their faith on it, and on the duty of man to die. In their eyes, we are heretics. They seek to destroy us.

 

“To destroy us,” the dread-chilled whisper went on, “and perhaps to sacrifice some of us, for atonement, at the ceremonial altar of the Great Egg, in the temple in the Gobi.”

 

June shuddered, as if with a premonition of horror.

 

“I’m going after Foster,” she cried, fighting to keep a thin edge of hysteria out of her voice. “I want to be with him.”

 

“You had better wait here,” Barron Kane advised her. “Or rest in your room, just below. Foster is very busy.” And he added grimly: “You will be safer here—you are in the greatest danger.”

 

“I’m not afraid!” she burst out, wild-voiced. Then calmness came back; she went on quietly: “Not for myself, I mean. It’s the terror of it, the thought that so many must die. And the awful, awful thing we saw, that came out of the Moon! I want to be with Foster. But I’ll stay, if you think best.”

 

And she sank on a seat, face buried in her hands, and fought to control her sobs.

 

* * * *

 

All the terrible night, June remained in the little room. The mob still increased; ten thousand small fires flickered upon the hillsides; swinging lights crept here and there. The voice of the mob was a ceaseless, menacing murmur; again and again she heard a rattle of shots.

 

Barron Kane slept, in his invalid chair, at dawn. June covered him and watched a while. Then the loneliness, the strain, became so terrible that she went down to her own room and tried to sleep. But she could not, and before noon she came back into the bridge. The sick man was awake again.

 

He gazed at her.

 

“How is—everything?” her anxious question greeted him.

 

“They attacked three times in the night,” the little man whispered. “The wall held them back; many were killed, by the charge on the wall, and by the guns. But a thousand more poor wretches have come, for every one that died.”

 

His quiet gray eyes looked out through the thick quartz panels, down upon hillsides that were brown and swarming with the horde.

 

“There must be a million,” his voiceless whisper went on. “They came every way you could imagine. On foot, on bicycles and trucks and freight cars, in cars and airplanes.

 

“You can’t help pitying them, so frightened, so soon to die. A great many of them seem to be ragged and cold; they can’t have brought food enough. Most of them didn’t bring any weapons.

 

“But the disciples of L’ao Ku have taken them over. You can see rings of them gathered around the priests, who are fanning their hate against us. You can see them marching, drilling. And some of them are unloading explosive and weapons that came this morning on the railroad. L’ao Ku is making an army out of the mob.”

 

Wearily nervous, June was peering with sleepless eyes through the heavy panels.

 

“I see a plane!” she cried suddenly. “Flying low over the hills. It’s going to land!” She watched it, adding: “It’s a huge ship, black, and it has scarlet circles on the wings and the fuselage.”

 

Grimly Barron Kane whispered: “That is L’ao Ku’s own ship. He has come to direct the attack in person. And, perhaps, to take one of us back-”

 

Silently, biting her lips until they bled, clenching her small hands, June Trevor watched—until the mob rolled toward the Planet, a resistless wave of fanatic, terror-mad hate.

 

Flashing like golden blades, the narrow blinding jets of the poison ray silenced the machine guns in the armored turrets. Bombs of high explosive, hurled from cunningly improvised catapults, demolished the electrified wall. A million men, commanded by a pitiless fanaticism and armed by a secret science, stormed the great steel valve of the Planet.

 

Racked with an agony of suspense, June waited in the bridge room, until her straining ears caught the dull crash of a heavy explosion, and then the sharp rattle of gunfire—inside the Planet!

 

“They’ve taken the valve!” she whispered, then, forcing the words through a black haze of despair: “They’re coming on board. I must go to find Foster.”

 

Barron Kane began some protest; she stopped him with a fierce gesture.

 

“I’m not—not afraid,” she gasped. “But the—finish has come. I want to be with Foster.”

 

She ran out of the room and hastened down toward the sound of desperate battle.

 

* * * *

 

In the exact center of the great steel globe of the Planet was a sixty-foot, spherical chamber. In that chamber, mounted in hugely massive gimbals, was an immense tube of fused quartz and steel, fifty feet long.

 

Foster Ross, with a score of other grimy, haggard, red-eyed men, was laboring to complete the assembly of that tube. A manhole was open in the top of the tube. With hoisting tackle, they were lifting a four-ton casting of a new alloy, to lower it through the manhole.

 

The confused, terrible roar of fighting burst suddenly into the chamber. “They’ve stormed the valve!” came a terror-laden shout; and consternation shook the men.

 

“Wait, men!” implored Foster desperately. “We can’t quit the job. A few more minutes, and we’ll have it done. We can take off into space. Come on-”

 

But some one, in his fright, had left his post. The tackle slipped. The great casting swung; it toppled out of the creaking sling and crashed to the floor. A man’s legs were pinned under it. He made a low cry, thin, dreadful, and then began to whimper like a child.

 

Some of the men started a rush to leave the chamber.

 

Faint, himself, with the shock of unexpected disaster, Foster struggled grimly to keep his self-command.

 

“Here, boys!” he shouted, forcing a show of unfelt confidence. “Let’s try again! Yet, we may have time to get-”

 

The panic-stricken men hesitated. Foster seized a bar, and struggled to lift the casting off the legs of the trapped man. The others came back to help. The man was freed, and the tackle quickly adjusted to the casting again.

 

The four-ton mass of metal was lifted, and lowered, this time safely through the manhole. It was being bolted into place, when the mob, howling with maniacal fanaticism and led by yellow-visaged demons armed with the weapons of a secret science, stormed the room.

 

Foster’s recollection, after that, was a red haze of horror.

 

He led the resistance of the doomed defenders. He made a fortress of every angle of the corridors, of every door and bulkhead, of every stair and elevator shaft. To the last, he guarded the way to the bridge, because he thought June Trevor was still there with Barron Kane.

 

His six hundred men fought with the courage that became the flower of the race. Their six hundred women stood beside them. Even the children gave the aid they could. And the Planet had been well-armed; each new position was a fresh arsenal. Yet the conclusion was inevitable.

 

Foster made the last stand on the little stair beneath the bridge. He staggered back to it, with four others—three men and a woman, all of them wounded. They had a machine gun. With that, until the last ammunition drum was empty, they kept the howling, triumphant mob at bay.

 

Then they contested the way with bayonets, with clubbed rifles, with pistols, even with bare hands. One of the men, dying, leaped forward and cleared the stair as he went down. The woman fell. Another man was dragged down by the mob, eviscerated, dismembered. Foster’s last comrade shrieked and collapsed before the stabbing orange blade of a poison ray.

 

Foster dragged himself, then, to the top of the stair, to make the last defense. He looked about the tiny room for June and saw that she was gone. Sickness of utter despair rolled in a black flood over him at the discovery. Strength left him; he felt, for the first time, his many wounds and fell senseless.

 

Only Barron Kane was left, lying helpless in his invalid chair. Clumsily, his half-useless hands raised his big automatic and shot down the first grim-faced Asiatic who leaped into the room over Foster’s still body.

 

That was the end of the defense.

 

L’ao Ku’s black plane with the scarlet circles rose, an hour later, and fled into the flaming sunset, toward the temple of the Great Egg, in the Gobi.

 

* * * *

 

V.

 

Foster Ross came to himself, lying on the bloodstained floor of the wrecked bridge room. His body was a stiff mass of cuts and bruises; dull agony throbbed from a swollen wound in his temple; a lock of his hair was stiffly cemented to his forehead with dried blood.

 

He stood up, reeling with a sudden sickness, biting his salty, blood-crusted lip to keep back a cry of pain. The smashed room, littered with broken instruments, swam before his darkened sight. For a moment he had no memory.

 

“Foster!” Barron Kane’s faint, heartsick whisper brought him a shock of dim surprise. “L’ao Ku told me he was leaving you alive. I thought he lied, to torture me.”

 

“L’ao Ku!” It was a dry, harsh gasp, from Foster’s burning throat. “He was here?”

 

“He came,” whispered Barron Kane, “when we all were helpless. He left us alive, he told me, because our sin is too great to be punished by the hand of man. He wanted us to live, he said, to know that we had failed, and then to die from the opening of the Great Egg.”

 

“June?” rasped Foster’s dusty voice. “Where is she?”

 

“I don’t know,” the weary, hopeless whisper answered. “She went to look for you, when they stormed the valve. I don’t know-”

 

“Did L’ao Ku take her?” Agony leaped in Foster’s heart.

 

“It may be,” admitted Barron Kane. “L’ao Ku went back, in the black plane. He may have taken her. That, or else she will be—among the bodies--”

 

Foster reeled dizzily toward the stairway. “I’m going to look,” he rasped. “If I don’t find her, I’ll finish the motor-tube and fly the Planet to the Gobi and take her back from L’ao Ku!” A glare of terrible madness flickered in his blue eyes.

 

“You couldn’t do that,” whispered Barron Kane. “It’s just two days, L’ao Ku told me, until the Earth will break up. And we may not live even that long.”

 

“Eh?” said Foster, with a staring blankness on his blood-caked face.

 

“A tidal wave is coming from the Atlantic,” Barron Kane informed him. “It has overwhelmed the coastal cities. New York is gone and Boston and Washington. It will reach us to-night—a terrible rushing wall of sea water, a hundred feet high.”

 

Foster did not seem to be listening. He reeled, and stumbled against the standard of a broken telescope; he gripped it with both his bruised hands, as if making a terrible effort to keep upright; his dry lips murmured: “I’ll finish the motor-tube and look for June.”

 

“Lie down again, Foster,” advised Barron Kane. “You’ll faint.”

 

Foster paid him no heed, and the dull whisper ran on:

 

“Even if you finished the motor-tube, the Planet couldn’t fly. L’ao Ku told me that. They blew the entrance valve open with explosive. It was wrecked, so it can’t be sealed any more. If we got off into space, the air would leak out, and we should die.”

 

“I’m going to find June,” Foster muttered faintly.

 

His gripping hands slipped off the standard. Beneath its stain of grime and blood, his lean face whitened. He fell heavily, at full length, on the floor.

 

* * * *

 

It was twenty hours later, when Foster went down to close the valve.

 

Some strength had come back, as he lay unconscious on the floor; the throbbing agony in his temple had become more endurable. He had washed his wounds, when he woke and bandaged the worst of them; he had found a little food for himself and Barron Kane.

 

His first trip had been to search for June.

 

“I’ve looked at all the dead,” he informed Barron Kane grimly, when he came back to the bridge. “I didn’t find—her.”

 

“Then,” the sick man whispered, “the black plane must have taken her to L’ao Ku’s altar.”

 

“I’m going after her,” Foster told him, with the quietness of a terrible fatigue and of a determination that was invincible. And he said in a tired voice that held no triumph:

 

“The motor-tube is finished. We had the elements in place before the mob came. I stopped to make the connections, and seal the manhole, and start the pumps to evacuate it. In ten hours, it will be ready.”

 

“Still,” protested the hopeless whisper of Barron Kane, “we cannot seal the valve. We can’t live, in outer space-”

 

“I’m going down, now,” Foster told him, “to close the valve. Then, we’ll look for June.”

 

“It was two days,” the sick man reminded him, “until the end. And one has gone. It is killing me, Foster, to give up. But we can only die.”

 

“The water is rising,” Foster told him. “I must hurry.”

 

And he went down to close the valve.

 

The tidal wave had come, as he lay unconscious—the same racing wall of the advancing ocean, gray, dreadful, that had drowned the coastal cities. It had routed the triumphant mob, at the very moment of victory, before they had plundered the ship; it had overcome them as they fled.

 

A tremendous blow, it had struck the gray, steel side of the Planet; a stormy sea still crashed against the concrete pier beneath the space machine. The green surrounding hills of yesterday now were barren, rocky islets, drenched with spray.

 

The huge steel entrance valve had been torn open with a charge of high explosive. The hinges were twisted, the lock demolished.

 

Grimly, Foster surveyed the damage. The massive steel disk of the door itself, he decided, was not much injured. If he could straighten the hinges, to allow it to fit, and then find some way to fasten it--

 

He dragged himself to the machine shops and staggered back with hammers and wrenches and lifting tackle; he went again for a portable welding torch. Grimly deliberate, he set about heating the massive hinges and straightening them, so that the valve could close.

 

The massive concrete pier trembled constantly beneath him, as the whole Earth trembled. At thirty-minute intervals, it rocked and swayed dizzily beneath him—as the whole planet yielded to the ever-stronger pulse of the awakening thing within.

 

The mad waves of the conquering sea thundered endlessly against the great pier. Spray kept Foster drenched; sometimes it put out his torches. The wild waters came up, as he worked—he was sick with fear that the valve would be covered before he could close it.

 

Paroxysms of a tortured, outraged nature threatened his life, moment by moment. A weary, naked pygmy, wounded, scalded, blistered. Foster worked doggedly on, pitting his puny efforts against the convulsions of a dying giant.

 

A pall of dreadful gloom had covered the sky, that did not change when day should have come. It was crimson with dull volcanic light. Gray cinders showered out of it intermittently; and huge drops of boiling volcanic mud. Hot winds parched his skin, suffocated him with the reek of sulphur.

 

Thunder boomed endlessly above the chaos of a world in the agony of death; blue lightning stabbed in an endless blinding torrent against the top of the sphere, as if the heavens themselves had conspired against mankind.

 

Sometimes Foster left his tools a moment, to look down into the black, crashing waves, that were always higher. Under the red, uncanny gloom that did not change between night and day, in the violet, sudden glare of lightning, he saw the debris of a lost world. Remains of men were flung past him, shattered, twisted. Sometimes he shuddered to the horror of a drowned face, gray and bloated and pulped.

 

Despair, then, would overcome him. He would drop wearily upon the brine-drenched pier and gaze hopelessly into the red, mad gloom of the disintegrating world.

 

But then a picture would always come to him—a picture of June Trevor, tall and grave-eyed and beautiful, about to die on an altar before an image of the Earth and an obscene monstrosity emerging. That picture always banished his sense of helpless futility and brought back that strange, impersonal, self-forgetful resolution that had come to him first in the fight in the garage, so long ago.

 

Moved by a purpose that was racial, above anything of himself, he would pick up his tools again.

 

* * * *

 

Numb with exhaustion, dull-brained for want of sleep, Foster came at last into the little bridge room again.

 

“The valve is sealed,” he announced in a voice heavy and faint with unutterable weariness. “Now I can start the generators, and see if the motor-tube will work—”

 

He stopped, for his haggard, bloodshot eyes had seen that Barron Kane was sleeping. He tried a little to wake him, and make him eat—he had paused, on the way up, to snatch a little food from the storerooms, oranges, a can of broth, and crackers. But the frail little man did not stir. He had fever, Foster decided, and his pulse was fluttering irregularly.

 

“He wanted so to live to see us win,” Foster breathed to himself. “But I think he won’t wake up. Anyhow, he still—hoped—”

 

Then, moving in his great weariness like a slow mechanism, he turned to the half-wrecked instruments. His first glance at a chronometer shocked him with horror and despair.

 

Twenty-two hours had passed, while he labored with the valve. The second day had almost gone. In hours, now, would come—ultimate cataclysm--

 

He reeled drunkenly, as if from a blow, and stumbled back to the wall.

 

For a time he leaned there, lifeless with the shock of it. His red-rimmed eyes, dull and stupid, gazed fixedly out through the heavy quartz panels. The sky was a sullen mask of crimson gloom. Lightning ripped out of it in a fearful cascade of violet fire. Brown, boiling liquid mud fell against the steel hull of the Planet with a continual booming roar that drowned the thunder. The tempestuous black sea had risen over the hills; now it covered the pier, and its gigantic breakers hammered against the Planet itself. Littered with tiny, pitiful fragments of human wreckage, its wild dark surface reached to horizons of red, chaotic gloom.

 

Even as his blank eyes were staring aimlessly out, a fresh quake shook the space machine, so violent that it sent him staggering across the room. And a second tidal wave, a gray-crested, tremendous black wall, thundering with incredible velocity out of the advancing Atlantic, struck the Planet resistlessly.

 

Like a chip, it tossed the million tons of the space machine away from her cradle; she was carried away upon the mad sea.

 

The impact stirred Foster from his daze. He remembered June Trevor. And that lofty purpose, that was a thing not of himself but of the race, came back.

 

With a weary patience, he set to work to repair the controls and then to start the generators and transformers and otherwise prepare the Planet for flight. Her machinery was automatic, so that one man could drive her from the bridge. But the mob had broken half the instruments.

 

The space machine, as he worked, was tossed and battered by the maddened elements. Terrific waves thundered against her steel sides; floating wreckage hammered her; she floated at last against a new reef and was driven against it, crushingly, again and again, until Foster was despairingly certain that her hull must yield.

 

He toiled on.

 

And at last the thing was done, and still she floated. Foster turned the current into the motor-tube, his aching hands trembling with anxiety. He stepped it quickly up. Then he stumbled back—waiting—waiting-

 

The Planet lay on the black, terrible sea, beside the gray fury of the menacing reef. Out of the crimson gloom of the sky poured livid lightning and clattering fragments of volcanic rock. Furious winds drove at her with a force that rivaled that of the insurgent sea.

 

She was swinging back toward the hidden fangs of the reef; and Foster knew her hull could not endure another blow. Would the motor-tube lift her? Would it—

 

He ceased to breathe. His teeth ground together. He reeled heavily against a chair, and his bruised hands fixed themselves upon it with a grip like that of a dying man. His glaring, dark-rimmed eyes alternately watched the instruments and looked out into the fearful red gloom of the dying world.

 

The Planet lifted! She rose off the dark, furious sea, into the scarlet darkness of the sky. She rose, through mighty winds, through rain of volcanic mud and cinders, through blazing sheets of purple lightning. At a great altitude, the rain gave way to thundering hail.

 

And the space machine, at last, came through the clouds; and Foster saw the stars.

 

He was full of a great serenity. A kind of lofty elation had come with the rising of the space machine. It was a sense of triumphant power that lifted him far above any human concern.

 

His great weariness had slipped from him. He felt, no longer, his mind-deadening want of sleep, or even the dull throbbing of the wound in his temple. For a moment he attained the supreme tranquillity of a god.

 

It was sublime, awful Nirvana. He had forgotten even June.

 

* * * *

 

It was night, and the stars flamed at Foster. As the Planet came above the turbulent atmosphere, they burst into a greater splendor than any man had ever seen. In an emptiness that was utterly black, they burned motionless and ghostly, more brilliant than jewels. They were infinitely tiny, infinitely bright. Mysterious and eternal, they flamed in the black void.

 

Foster stared at them, transfixed with the strange wonder that came from the knowledge that each of them was a sentient thing.

 

And still the Planet rose, on a high, swift arc, toward the living stars. Foster felt himself one with them; he was no more a puny man, but a serene and deathless entity, of supernal power and supernal vision.

 

Then Barron Kane’s frail body moved, uneasily, in its feverish sleep. And Foster was abruptly a man again and filled with pity. He tried again to wake his uncle—once more in vain. He smoothed the pillow under his head and drew the blanket close about him.

 

He went back, then, to the controls. He remembered June again and her frightful danger. His purpose had come back, even stronger for its lapse as he first soared toward the stars. He was moved as if by some vast power without, as if he were simply a puppet in the hands of a racial will, itself as sublime and eternal as the undying stars he had looked upon.

 

Still, he grimly realized the multiplied odds against him. In the universal, cataclysmic storm that raged about the whole Earth, he might be unable to find the lost oasis in the Gobi—in time. If he did, he would be only one man, battling hundreds. He might, the fear pierced him like a cold blade, find the sacrifice already consummated. Or he might—to judge from what he had seen, it was even probable—find that the temple and all in it had already been overwhelmed by storm or earthquake or volcano or the terror of the rising sea.

 

Yes, bitter realization came, the chances against him were hopelessly great. It was useless to go. But that blind, sublime purpose, that was like an external force, moved him to drop the Planet back into the dark, furiously agitated clouds that totally obscured the face of the disintegrating globe.

 

Down sank the space machine, through terrible crimson gloom, through the furious chaos of a tortured, disrupting world. Hurricanes tore at the steel ball; it was bombarded with volcanic debris, struck with flaming lightning, sluiced with boiling mud.

 

Foster, watching through mudstained crystal panels, at last saw the surface of the earth where the Gobi had been—and it was a black and fearful sea.

 

The temple of the fanatic cult was gone, and June Trevor—And with the girl, all the meaning was gone out of his life and out of his superhuman struggle to live. The sublime purpose that had so long sustained him flowed out of him utterly; it left him a lonely, weary, haggard wreck. He had been more than human; now he was less—sick and old and useless.

 

June was gone. The thought beat through his tired, dull brain, a refrain of despair. June, gone! Only he and Barron Kane were left, two useless, aimless men, with nothing to live for; and nothing to hope for but death.

 

And Barron Kane was obviously dying. Soon he, Foster, would be alone —more alone than a human being had ever been. He would be alone in the void of space. He would know that the Earth was gone, that there was no other man or woman anywhere.

 

He would be alone, with the living, mocking stars!

 

A frantic terror grasped Foster’s throat, at the thought, with icy fingers that choked him; he was faint with the most dreadful fear he had ever known.

 

Sick with it, trembling convulsively, he tried desperately to wake Barron Kane. He shook the little mans shrunken shoulder and dashed water into his face. He wanted terribly to speak to a human being again, to listen again to a human voice not his own—even the voiceless whisper of the dying man.

 

Barron Kane gasped in his sleep, he breathed strangely, a sudden spasmodic trembling disturbed his thin limbs. But he would not wake. Aching with a pity deeper than he had ever known, Foster covered the slight, drawn body again.

 

He looked out again at the scarlet, lightning-split darkness of the sky, at the black, wildly heaving plain of the sea that had swept away the secret temple and all the essence of his life.

 

* * * *

 

VI.

 

The sea was riven, as Foster looked. It was cleft, as if by a Titan’s blade. The two dark halves of it were thrust miles apart. Stupendous, unthinkable, an abysmal gulf yawned between them, with black water plunging into it from either side, like a million Niagaras.

 

The world had parted.

 

Hanging in that dark storm sky of lurid and dreadful red, Foster stared with horror-glazed eyes down into the new gulf. Mile upon mile, incredibly, fell the jagged walls of the broken Earth crust, crumbling, splashed with dark sheets of the oceanic cataracts.

 

Below—scores of miles below—was a smooth, shimmering surface of green, bright as flame, marked strangely with silver and black. It was moving with weird paroxysms. It was the body of the Earth entity, struggling in the agony of birth.

 

Foster watched it, dazed with astounded horror.

 

The two halves of the split sea were thrust back, with a fearful quickness, until they were lost under the dark sky, which now was changing from dull red to a terrible, ominous, reflected green. The space machine hung between the menacing pall of the sky and the bright surface of that dreadful body that was struggling to life within the Earth.

 

Foster’s mind perceived the new danger. But in the lifeless, purposeless, hopeless apathy that had settled upon him he felt no alarm; he didn’t care, nothing mattered, now, since June was gone.

 

The wind struck. The atmosphere, disturbed by the movements of the waking thing, drove against the Planet with the solid, battering impact of an avalanche. With a force no hurricane had ever equaled, it hurled the steel globe down toward the green body, helpless as a toy balloon.

 

Foster’s blue eyes, sick with an agony unutterable, looked dully, without panic and without hope, at the eldritch doom ahead. All aim and direction had left him. His life had become a bitter joke, fantastic as the fate of humanity.

 

It was only the blind instinct to live that kept him wearily at the controls. His mind sat back, a weary, disinterested spectator, as his bruised, aching fingers moved automatically, and the Planet battled to survive.

 

The steel ball was drawn down, resistlessly, toward the fantastic markings on the side of that unbelievable body. Foster watched with lackluster eyes that held no fear, while his automatic fingers flung on the full power of the motor-tube to fight that freakish, fiendish wind.

 

He felt no triumph when the machine broke free; he had no elation as it drove upward through mad, torn cloud masses that were fearfully illuminated with green. He stared out, through the heavy crystal panels, still beyond panic and beyond hope.

 

Above the green clouds, he came; above the air and into the freedom of space. The sky was a hollow globe of darkness, pierced with a million, many-hued points of light—each of them, he knew, a thing alive.

 

The earth hung below—a huge, swollen globe, dark and fantastically patched with green.

 

A wing broke through the clouds—a stupendous sheet of supernal fire; a shield of green flame, wondrous as the aurora of the solar corona, and veined with bright silver. With its first, uncertain unfolding, it brushed close to the Planet—a blade of amazing death.

 

Foster’s instinctive fingers flung the space machine away, and the glorious, dreadful wing passed beneath, harmlessly. And the Planet drove on away into space, on her voyage that had no destination.

 

The Earth fell away behind.

 

And a thing emerged from the shattered crust of it that was like the creature that had come from the Moon. The beaked head was crested with a spray of crimson flame; it was marked with two ovoid patches, glowing lividly purple, that were like dread eyes. Flame-green, its body was slender and tapering and marked weirdly with black and silver. Slow, shining waves shimmered through its wings, that were like green fans of the aurora and veined with burning white.

 

It moved uncertainly in the void, as if to test its members. It preened itself with thin blue appendages that were thrust from the head. Then, with a beat of strange luminous force in its wings, it wheeled away from the Sun, and drove outward into the void of space.

 

Mercury and Venus, the two inner planets, Foster saw, had also changed; they had become winged, greenish motes, drifting away from the Sun. And the light of the Sun itself, he fancied, was already dimming, fading slowly toward crimson, toward ultimate darkness.

 

“The Sun is dying,” his dry lips muttered the thought from his disinterested, dully observant brain. “It’s the end! The mad finish of man’s universe-”

 

“You see?” Foster was startled to hear the faint whisper of Barron Kane, awake again on his invalid chair. “We are seeing the solution of the last riddle, Foster—the riddle of the suns! We are watching one die. We have seen many born.”

 

Foster hurried to him and lifted his head higher on the pillow so that he could see the room and look out through the crystal panels. And he spoke to the sick man of food, but Barron Kane did not seem to notice him. The small whisper ran on:

 

“The planets were the seed of the Sun. Strange life developed in them, through the ages, under solar radiation. The Sun will die, now; its work is done. And the new creatures have gone forth, to feed themselves upon the star dust, to absorb diffuse radiation and the cosmic rays, to consume, perhaps, fragments of old suns, until they themselves are suns, spawning planets, and the cycle of their life is complete.

 

“And there you have the answer, Foster, to many a problem that has baffled science. We’ve won, Foster!” There was a vague triumph in the muted whisper. “Even if we die to-day—we’re on our own!”

 

“What’s the good of it?” muttered Foster, too weary, too hopeless to be bitter. “We’re—alone,” he went on dully. “Soon we’ll be—dead. The Planet will drift on, perhaps forever. A little world, with all that life needs, but dead-

 

“Listen!”

 

* * * *

 

Foster stopped speaking, suddenly, and a fearful silence hung in the room, grimly deep, haunted only with the sounds of their breath.

 

“Listen!” A wild, strange ring of madness had come into his voice. “There’s no sound—no other voice! We’re alone, Barron; we’re the last men. There can’t be another voice anywhere! Think what it means—not ever to hear any one speak again! When we are dead--”

 

His voice dropped again abruptly, for his straining ears had caught the pad of human footsteps.

 

He rushed, trembling with incredulous hope and a fear born with it, down the steps to the door of the bridge room. He flung it open and stood swaying in it, gazing wildly, unbelievingly, at June Trevor.

 

She was grimy, bedraggled; her clothing was black with something thick and viscid and dripping; her hair was plastered against her head with it; her face was scratched, and a blue bruise was on her forehead. Yet he saw still a beauty in her tall, straight form; in her clear brown eyes was a dawning, luminous joy.

 

They stood a moment face to face.

 

Foster wet his lips. “June?” he whispered. “June--”

 

She reeled a little, and he started forward to catch her.

 

“Don’t touch me,” she gasped weakly and swayed back from him. “I’m all soaked with oil—I was in a tank. You’ll get covered with it.”

 

“You poor kid!” he breathed, and something made him laugh a little.

 

He slipped his arm around her grimy shoulders, held her up. And she clung to him suddenly, ignoring the oil. In turn, she laughed—a shaky, happy little laugh of relief.

 

“Oh, Foster!” she cried. “I’m so—so glad—that you’re here. I thought I was the only person alive. And I was so miserably soaked with oil.”

 

“How did you get here?” Foster asked as he helped her into the bridge room and made her sit down beside him. “When you were gone, we thought that L’ao Ku must have taken you—to his temple.”

 

“L’ao Ku?” she breathed, in weary surprise. “No; I didn’t see him. You see, I went to look for you, Foster, when the mob was coming. I asked the men where to find you. They sent me from one place to another, until I was down in the generator rooms. I couldn’t find you anywhere.”

 

She had relaxed, happily, against his great shoulder; unconsciously her hand had caught his arm, as if she feared that something might take him from her.

 

“What then?” Foster asked. “How’d you get away from the mob?”

 

“I was down in the generator room,” her tired voice went on. “I couldn’t find you. All of a sudden, there were shots and screams. The mob was killing the enginemen.

 

“One of the enginemen ran to me. ‘The damn’ chinks have come, miss,’ he said. ‘But I’ll put you where they won’t find you.’ And he made me come to a tank, and opened a lid, and made me climb down a ladder in it. It was full of oil—it came up to my chin. And he let the lid back down on me.

 

“I waited. It was dark in the tank. And the fumes of the oil made me sick. I nearly fell off the ladder. For a while I could hear shots and roaring voices. Then—silence.

 

“Nobody came to lift the lid, and I tried to get out. I was faint. And the lid was so heavy I couldn’t lift it. I worked until I couldn’t move. Then I rested, and tried again. At last I found a way, standing on the top of the ladder, and using my back.”

 

“You poor, game kid!” whispered Foster, and patted her shoulder.

 

She shuddered; her brown eyes seemed not to see him—they were dull with remembered horror.

 

“I came out,” she went on grimly. “And every one was—was dead. The floors were all covered with blood and—bodies. And the quiet—it was terrible. You know how still it was, Foster. I couldn’t hear a voice. Not a sound! I thought I was the only one alive.”

 

“Why didn’t you come back here?” asked Foster. “Barron was here.”

 

“I did,” she whispered. “I looked in and saw him lying there—so still. I spoke, and he didn’t move. I thought he was dead, like all the rest. I thought I was the only one still living-”

 

“You must forget all that,” Foster urged her. “But where have you been?”

 

“I was—looking,”—she paused, shuddering—”looking—among—the bodies for—for you, Foster.”

 

He held her trembling body close; for a moment she did not speak.

 

“I thought I was the—the last,” she went on jerkily, with an effort. “I thought I was—alone—alone with all the dead. I was looking for you, Foster, so that we could be together. And then-”

 

The sick horror ebbed slowly from her brown eyes; she smiled a little, wearily.

 

“Then I felt the machine moving, Foster. I had been asleep—I was so weary from searching and so grimy with oil. I woke and felt that we were moving. I knew, then, there was some one-”

 

Her brown eyes shone bravely into Foster’s blue ones, alight with hope and joy and new confidence. Then they closed; her body relaxed in his arms; she had gone to sleep. Her lips parted, and she smiled a weary little smile, in her sleep.

 

“She’s worn out, the nervy little kid,” Foster told Barron Kane. “I’m going to take her down to her room, where she can rest. I’ll come back in a minute, to help you down-”

 

“No, Foster,” the little man whispered. “I want to look out—at the stars.”

 

Foster lifted him a little, propped up his head with the pillow. “Men can carry on, now, Barron,” he said. “We can make a new beginning.”

 

Foster took up the girl’s quietly breathing body and started toward the door.

 

“Yes, Foster,” the sick man whispered after him, “we’ve really won.”

 

* * * *

 

The scientist’s gray calm eyes watched Foster until he had vanished down the little stairs. Then he looked back at the motionless, splendid stars. They were tiny and unmoving and many-colored, swung eternal in black space.

 

“We’ve won,” he whispered again to himself. “I had hoped to live— for this. Men will now be small parasites no longer, to be crushed like vermin by any chance tremor of the beast that bears them. In the Planet, men are free, on their own.”

 

He seemed to like the phrase, for he whispered it again: “On their own.”

 

He lay still for a time, musing.

 

“We’re off in the Planet, to a new beginning. And it’s just a beginning.”

 

His serene quiet eyes stared at the mocking points of the stars, and he whispered to them:

 

“You’re alive, all of you. We owe our lives to you—we’ve been parasites on your kind. But we aren’t any longer. We’re beginning all over again, on our own.”

 

His dying breath whispered a last prophecy:

 

“There will be many Planets, and greater ones. The new, free race will be greater than the old. The children of Foster and June will conquer space, to the farthermost one of you!”

 

A joy seemed to linger in his tranquil eyes, that still looked out at the stars.