"Five hundred feet, sir," said Hendricks.

"Very well," I nodded, and pressed the attention signal of the non-commissioned officer in charge of the big forward ray projector.

"Ott? Commander Hanson speaking. I have special orders for you."

"Yes, sir!"

"Direct your ray, narrowed to normal beam and at full intensity, on the spot directly below. Keep the ray motionless, and carry on until further orders. Is that clear?"

"Perfectly, sir." The disintegrator ray generators deepened their purr as I turned away.

"I trust, sir, that I did the right thing in following you with the _Ertak_?" asked Hendricks. "I was absolutely without precedent, and the circ.u.mstances were so mysterious--"

"You handled the situation very well indeed," I told him. "Had you not been waiting when we fought our way into the open, the nearly invisible things on the outside might have--but you don't know about them yet."

Picking up the microphone again, I ordered a pair of searchlights to follow the disintegrator ray, and made my way forward, where I could observe activities through a port.

The ray was boring straight down into a shoulder of a rocky hill, and the bright beams of the searchlights glowed redly with the dust of disintegration. Here and there I could see the shadowy, transparent forms of the creatures that the self-const.i.tuted rulers of this world had doomed to a demi-existence, and I smiled grimly to myself. The tables would soon be turned.

For perhaps an hour the ray melted its way into the solid rock, while I stood beside Ott and his crew, watching. Then, down below us, things began to happen.

Little fragments of rock flew up from the shaft the ray had drilled.

Jets of black mud leaped into the air. There was a sudden blast from below that rocked the _Ertak_, and the shaft became a miniature volcano, throwing rocky fragments and mud high into the air.

"Very good, Ott," I said triumphantly. "Cease action." As I spoke, the first light of the dawn, unnoticed until now, spread itself over the scene, and we witnessed then one of the strangest scenes that the Universe has ever beheld.

Up to the very edge of that life-giving blast of mineral-laden gas the tenuous creatures came crowding. There were hundreds of them, thousands of them. And they were still coming, crowding closer and closer and closer, a ma.s.s of crawling, yellowish shadows against the sombre earth.

Slowly, they began to fill out and darken, as they drew in the fumes that were more than bread and meat and water to us. Where there had been formless shadows, rotund creatures such as we had met in the cavern stood and lashed their tentacles about in a sort of frenzied gladness, and fell back to make room for their brothers.

"It's a sight to make a man doubt his own eyes, sir," said Correy, who had come to stand beside me. "Look at them! Thousands of them pouring from every direction. How did it happen?"

"It didn't happen. I used our disintegrator ray as a drill; we simply sunk a huge shaft down into the bowels of the earth until we struck the source of the vapor which the self-appointed 'ruling cla.s.s' has bottled up. We have emanc.i.p.ated a whole people, Mr. Correy."

"I hate to think of what will happen to those in the cavern," replied Correy, smiling grimly. "Or rather, since you've told me of the pleasant little death they had arranged for us. I'm mighty glad of it.

They'll receive rough treatment, I'm afraid!"

"They deserve it. It has been a great sight to watch, but I believe we've seen enough. It has been a good night's work, but it's daylight, now, and it will take hours to repair the damage to the _Ertak's_ hull. Take over in the navigating room, if you will, and pick a likely spot where we will not be disturbed. We should be on our course by to-night, Mr. Correy."

"Right, sir," said Correy, with a last wondering look at the strange miracle we had brought to pa.s.s on the earth below us. "It will seem good to be off in s.p.a.ce again, away from the troubles of these little worlds."

"There are troubles in s.p.a.ce, too," I said dryly, thinking of the swarm of meteorites that had come so close to wiping the _Ertak_ off the records of the Service. "You can't escape trouble even in s.p.a.ce."

"No, sir," said Correy from the doorway. "But you can get your sleep regularly!"

And sleep is, when one comes to think of it, a very precious thing.

Particularly for an old man, whose eyelids are heavy with years.

Readers' Corner

[Ill.u.s.tration: Readers' Corner]

_Now In Book Form_

Readers of Astounding Stories will be interested to hear that two of the continued novels which appeared in our pages during last year are coming out in book form.

The first of these is "Murder Madness," by Murray Leinster.

It is due sometime in February, so by the time this issue is on the newsstands it will no doubt be already out. The publishers are Brewer and Warren, and the price is $2.00.

Here's your chance, collectors, and those who missed an instalment or two.

The other book is "Brigands of the Moon," by--everyone knows--Ray c.u.mmings. It should be coming along in a month or so. Watch out for it!

_Mr. c.u.mmings Sits In_

Dear Editor:

Thank you for the opportunity to address our Readers on certain side-lights of my tale, "The Exile of Time." I particularly welcome it, for the theme of Time-traveling is, I think, the most interesting of any upon which I have written.

Some of you will no doubt recall my stories "The Man Who Mastered Time" and "The Shadow Girl." In "The Exile of Time," I present the third of the trilogy. It has no fictional connection with the others; it is in no sense a sequel, but rather a companion story.

To write about Time-traveling is for me a difficult but fascinating task. The opportunities are endless; and I hope you may think I have taken advantage of them with a measure of success.

I wrote those conceptions of Time and s.p.a.ce and the Great Cosmos, which you will find in the text of the story, because I feel them very deeply. Each occasion upon which circ.u.mstances allow me to present my theories, I eagerly welcome. How much of the conception is original with me, I cannot say. It is the product of my groping interpretation of the theories of many brilliant scientific minds of today--humbly combined with perhaps some originality of my own. The mind flings far afield when it starts to grope with the Unknown. Try it! Read what I have written and then let your mind roam a little further. Probe a little deeper.

Perhaps we may contribute something. It is only by that process--each mind following some other's cleared path and pushing forward a little on his own--that the Unknown can be pierced.

When once you admit the basic idea of Time-traveling to be plausible, what fascinating vistas are opened to the imagination!

s.p.a.ce is so crowded! The room in which you are now sitting as you read these words--just think what that s.p.a.ce around you has held in the Past, and will hold in the Future! You occupy it now, playing out your little part; but think what has happened where you are now sitting so calmly reading!

What tumultuous, crowding events! Your room is quiet now, but its s.p.a.ce has rung with war-cries; the ground under you has been drenched with blood; and further back it was lush with primeval jungle; and in another age it was frozen beneath a great ice-cap; and before that it blazed, molten with fire. Back to the Beginning.

And your little s.p.a.ce in the Future? It will be in the heart of a great mechanical city, perhaps. A mechanical servant may murder his human master in the s.p.a.ce which you now call your room. The great revolt of the mechanisms may start in your room....

I think that your room will some day again be shrouded under a forest growth. The mechanical city will be neglected, tumbled into ruins, buried beneath the silt of the pa.s.sing centuries. The sun will slowly rise--a giant dull red ball, burning out, cooling. And the Earth will cool. Humans, perhaps, will have pa.s.sed decadence and reverted to savagery. Perhaps the polar ice-caps will again come down, and ice slowly cover the dying world. All nature will be struggling and dying, with the sun a red ball turning dark like a cooling ember.

Millions of centuries, with whatever events--who am I to say?--but it will go on to the End. That's a long way from the Beginning, isn't it? And yet ours is only a tiny planet living briefly in the great cosmos of Time and s.p.a.ce!

A segment of Everything that ever was and ever will be marches through the s.p.a.ce of your room. What an enormously thronged little s.p.a.ce! There is only Time, to keep consecutive and orderly the myriad events which in your room are pushing and jostling one another! I say, then, "Time is what keeps everything from happening at once." It seems a good definition.