Читать книгу Tama of the Light Country - Raymond King Cummings - Страница 5
ОглавлениеFROM ANOTHER PLANET
That was the last of the incidents at the White Camp. But such an affair could not be kept secret. The world rang with it.
For a time, however, it seemed destined to be shrouded in mystery. Professor White died without recovering consciousness; the body of the man we had shot, and the strange winged girl with him, remained as the only tangible evidence. The giant figure which had made off into the forest was not caught. Nor were any of the missing girls who had been kidnapped, recovered.
There was a weapon found in the road the night when we gathered over the two bodies. It was evidently the projector of the blue-green bolts, a small, globular affair, with a mesh of wires across its face, a firing mechanism, and what seemed an odd form of storage battery in its handle. What current it may have used could not be discovered. The thing was empty of charge when found; apparently its last available shot had been the blue-green stab which sizzled past me.
The two bodies were examined by many learned men before they were interred. Obviously the winged girl was nothing of Earth. Nor could the man be identified with any race on this planet. Yet the two were clearly not of the same race.
One extremely curious circumstance was brought out by this investigation. The man's body was short and abnormally thickset—ape-like, but with a flabby, pallid, hairless skin. A man of such build would normally weigh about one hundred and seventy pounds. I was present at the investigation. Gazing at the body, I was convinced it would weight at least that much. Yet on the scales it weighed a hundred and twenty-two. I felt the body.... small-boned...a light skeleton. And the flesh was putty-like, with what seemed to be microscopic air-cells in it.
The girl was an extraordinarily beautiful little creature, with great blue-feathered wings arching out from the shoulder blades. But her face, composed now in death, was humanly beautiful, with a delicate, ethereal beauty.
She seemed certainly no more than sixteen years old. Her clear white skin in life might have been flushed rose-pink. She had long, pale golden hair, blue eyes, and a strangely frail-looking body, yet rounded almost to matured girlhood.
She was four feet seven inches tall. Such a girl of our world, might have weighed a hundred pounds. This one, with allowance for the weight of the wings, weighed only sixty-five pounds.
Queer, inexplicable facts! And I could not forget that this dying winged girl had tried to speak to us in English. This, to me, seemed most inexplicable of all.
By the end of August the world was beginning to talk less of the affair. Then, on August thirtieth, Dr. Grenfell made public his theory, and explanation—and warning. It was more startling than anything that had gone before.
I give here, not the original paper which was couched in the technical and detailed phraseology of science, but the transcription made for the general public which Dr. Grenfell gave me to put on the air:
"The affair at White Camp occurred on the night of of August tenth. On the previous night, upon one of the star-filled photo-diagram plates made in routine work of the Lowell Observatory at Flagstaff, Arizona, a curious dot appeared which had no logical reason to be there. With a subsequent, longer exposure made a few minutes later, that dot became a tiny hairline streak of light, proving that it was in motion.
"Observations made at the Lowell Observatory that night established that the dot was something extremely small and quite close to the Earth—only a few thousand miles beyond the upper reaches of our atmosphere.
"The Mount Wyndam Observatory, near Summit, New Jersey, made similar observations during the early evening of August tenth. But the dot was moving fast, and soon disappeared to the northward. And the sky became overcast as the evening advanced, preventing further observation.
"The inescapable conclusion of both observatories is that this was some form of interplanetary vehicle hovering above our Earth. Spectrographs showed it to be shining with reflected sunlight. How far away it was, how great its velocity, or its size, could not be determined.
"Other strange facts came to light during that memorable week of August tenth, a shooting star of abnormal aspect was reported by many eyewitnesses in Maine. It fell very slowly from a point near the zenith toward the northern horizon. The "star" was pale white.
"A meteor, which generally is a mere fragment of stardust burning with the heat of friction as it hits our atmosphere, blazes with a streak of fire for an instant; and then, consuming itself, burns out and vanishes. But this was different. It seemed to float down, glowing with a silvery light. A few moments, and then it disappeared from view.
"The observatory at Flagstaff saw nothing of this. But at Mount Wyndam they saw it. The thing seemed a silvery metallic ball. It glowed with friction-heat and with sunlight. But when it descended into the night-shadow of Earth, it was seen no more. The time was 8:55 p.m.
"This, we believe, was a smaller vehicle descending from the larger one hovering out there in Space. As a tender comes from a liner lying outside the shoals, this silver ball came down with its occupants and landed somewhere in the forests or upon one of the lakes in Maine.
"And there were other facts: This small vehicle—though there may have been several of them—was observed subsequent to August tenth, upon at least two occasions by pilots of our patrol flyers. The sky, day and night, in Maine and vicinity, was during that week almost constantly obscured by heavy clouds. At a hundred thousand feet such vehicles would be safe from discovery.
"One of our climbing planes, with Navy pilot Rankin, present holder of the altitude record, on the night of August twelfth, and again during the day, ascended over Quogg, Maine to a height of sixty-two thousand feet—but discovered nothing. As a matter of fact, an interplanetary vehicle—this silver ball, for instance—could easily attain a velocity enabling it to follow the night-shadow around the world.
"We are therefore forced to the conclusion that the attacks upon the White Camp and elsewhere in Maine were made by beings of human form and intelligence from another planet. But which one? To our knowledge, whether or not any of the other planets of the solar system are inhabited has been problematical. Yet—here is proof!
"We believe that these beings came from the planet Mercury, and have now returned there. Many astronomical and astro-physical phenomena recently observed lead to that conclusion. And so do the biological facts concerning the two bodies. Much of this is of too technical a nature to include here. I need only explain that Mercury revolves about the Sun once in eighty-eight of our days. That is the length of its year. On August tenth it and the Earth were near inferior conjunction—in other words, at their closest points to each other.
"The marauders came then, and now they have gone back, for Mercury, moving faster in its orbit than does the Earth, is rapidly drawing away from us.
"But why did they come? Certainly it was not with friendly intentions. Nor yet with the boldness of an invasion—an attempted conquest. They were prowlers in the night, using every effort to maintain secrecy, abducting our women—our young girls. Again, that is an inescapable fact: they made no move, did nothing save for the purpose of abduction.
"A dozen young girls have vanished. The prowlers have gone back into interplanetary space to Mercury or wherever they are native. The menace is over ... but is it?
"We killed one of these men, and his companion, a fantastic young girl with wings. She was a beautiful girl, no more than a child—in racial appearance no more like him than he was like an Earthman. And, dying, the few words she spoke were English! That is indeed beyond all possible understanding of our logical science. Even the wildest conjecture cannot explain it.
"But we may imagine that the girl was not friendly to her companion and his fellows. She was captive, perhaps. With her dying breath she gasped something about warning us. Of what? Presumably the abduction of our women. And our imagination asks: Can there be so few women on Mercury that its men must come to Earth to steal ours?
"Is the menace over? When the winged girl and the man were shot by our guards the night of August seventeenth at the White Camp, a gigantic figure escaped into the forest. It seems impossible—with our aerial patrol and our multiplicity of watchers in the neighborhood—that one of the vehicles could have taken him away. We believe he is still on Earth. Every effort is being made to find him, but so far without success.
"Will the marauders come back to rescue him, or to pursue their mysterious purpose? Can we believe that if the men of Mercury desire our women, the abductions are not to be planned upon a larger scale? Was this not a mere tentative foray to learn of conditions here?
"We believe just that! And when will the real attack be made? Mercury is speeding away from us now. Thousands, millions of miles are being added to the distance between it and the Earth. In eighty-eight days from last August 10th, Mercury will have completed one revolution about the Sun. But during that time the Earth will have moved along a distance requiring twenty-eight days more for Mercury to overtake us.
"Therefore, during the first week of next December, Mercury and the Earth will again be approaching inferior conjunction; again they will be at their closest point to each other. At that time we may expect another attack. Undoubtedly it will be of far greater proportions, menacing the safety of our women everywhere in the world!"
