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Juggernaut of Space

Ray Cummings

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Where you going?" he asked.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"What other things?" I asked.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And we certainly were!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I agreed that was so.

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

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

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

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

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

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