R. Briggs Johns paced up and down the laboratory floor, talking to Asher, who had just arisen from his bed, two weeks after he had collapsed at their feet in the derrick. Still bandaged, he was a different Blaine Asher. His face was lined, and the hair next to his scalp nearly snow white.

"I'll be able to do some walking around outside in a few days," Asher declared as he cleaned a test tube and placed it in a rack. "I can locate several wells over that underground storage cavern, and you can recover that oil. But you can't mine this field.

"Twenty years, perhaps, and you can. But it will take that long for those Petrolia to die out. We've got to get the oil out from below to a point where they can no longer sp.a.w.n. We will apply mining in other fields--but not here!"

"Not here," Johns repeated, shuddering.

"It's up to you to see no one else tries it." Asher lit a cigarette and nodded at Johns. "Get control of the field--anything. Tell the oil men something. But don't tell then the truth. They wouldn't believe you. They would call you raving mad.

"The world does not know. It would not believe. Can we do other than remain silent?"

R. Briggs Johns, sick of thinking of the cavern world and horrible things below them, knew they could not.

Brigands of the Moon

(The Book of Gregg Haljan)

CONCLUSION OF A FOUR PART NOVEL.

_By Ray c.u.mmings_

CHAPTER x.x.xIV

_The First Encounters_

[Ill.u.s.tration: Like feathers we were blown with it.]

[Sidenote: The besieged Earth-men wage grim, ultra-scientific war with Martian bandits in a last great struggle for their radium-ore--and their lives.]

It seemed, with that first shot from the enemy, that a great relief came to me--an apprehension fallen away. We had antic.i.p.ated this moment for so long, dreaded it. I think all our men felt it. A shout went up:

"Harmless!"

It was not that. But our building withstood it better than I had feared. It was a flash from a large electronic projector mounted on the deck of the brigand ship. It stabbed up from the shadows across the valley at the foot of the opposite crater-wall, a beam of vaguely fluorescent light. Simultaneously the search-light vanished.

The stream of electrons caught the front face of our main building in a six-foot circle. It held a few seconds, vanished; then stabbed again, and still again. Three bolts. A total, I suppose, of nine or ten seconds.

I was standing with Grantline at a front window. We had rigged an oblong of insulated fabric like a curtain: we stood peering, holding the curtain cautiously aside. The ray struck some twenty feet away from us.

"Harmless!"

The men in the room shouted it with derision. But Grantline swung on them.

"Don't think that!"

An interior signal-panel was beside Grantline. He called the duty-men in the instrument room.

"It's over. What are your readings?"

The bombarding electrons had pa.s.sed through the outer sh.e.l.l of the building's double-wall, and been absorbed in the rarefied, magnetized air-current of the Erentz circulation. Like poison in a man's veins, reaching his heart, the free alien electrons had disturbed the motors.

They accelerated, then r.e.t.a.r.ded. Pulsed unevenly, and drew added power from the reserve tanks. But they had normalized at once when the shot was past. The duty-man's voice sounded from the grid in answer to Grantline's question:

"Five degrees colder in your building. Can't you feel it?"

The disturbed, weakened Erentz circulation had allowed the outer cold to radiate through a trifle. The walls had had a trifle extra explosive pressure from the room-air. A strain--but that was all.

"It's probably their most powerful single weapon, Gregg." Grantline said.

I nodded. "Yes. I think so."

I had smashed the real giant, with its ten-mile range. The ship was only two miles from us, but it seemed as though this projector were exerted to its distance limit. I had noticed on the deck only one of this type. The others, paralyzing-rays and heat rays, were less deadly.

Grantline commented: "We can withstand a lot of that bombardment. If we stay inside--"

That ray, striking a man outside, would penetrate his Erentz suit within a few seconds, we could not doubt. We had, however, no intention of going out unless for dire necessity.

"Even so," said Grantline. "A hand-shield would hold it off for a certain length of time."

We had an opportunity a moment later to test our insulated shields.

The bolt came again. It darted along the front face of the building, caught our window and clung. The double window-sh.e.l.ls were our weakest points. The sheet of flashing Erentz current was transparent: we could see through it as though it were gla.s.s. It moved faster, but was thinner at the windows than in the walls. We feared the bombarding electrons might cross it, penetrate the inner sh.e.l.l and, like a lightning bolt, enter the room.

We dropped the curtain corner. The radiance of the bolt was dimly visible. A few seconds, then it vanished again, and behind the shield we had not felt a tingle.

"Harmless!"

But our power had been drained nearly an aeron, to neutralize the shock to the Erentz current. Grantline said:

"If they kept that up, it would be a question of whose power supply would last longest. And it would not be ours.... You saw our lights fade down while the bolt was striking?"

But the brigands did not know we were short of power. And to fire the projector with a continuous bolt would, in thirty minutes, perhaps, have exhausted their own power-reserve.

This strange warfare! It was new to all of us, for there had been no wars on any of the three inhabited worlds for many years. Silent, electronic conflict! Not a question of men in battle. A man at a switch on the brigand ship was the sole actor so far in this a.s.sault.

And the results were visible only in the movement of the needle-dials on our instrument panels. A struggle, so far, not of man's bravery, or skill, or strategy, but merely of electronic power supply.

Yet warfare, however modern, can never transcend the human element.

Before this insult was ended I was to have many demonstrations of that!

"I won't answer them," Grantline declared. "Our game is to sit defensive. Conserve everything. Let them make the leading moves."