Page:Weird Tales Volume 3 Number 2 (1923-02).djvu/4

 'The Weird Adventures of a Young Man Who Was Shot Into Space in a Giant Rocket'



''HE last of the Cluni reigned over a tribe of man brutes. Queen Saga trusted in the gods. from the sky, in flame and thunder, was to come the great teacher, the mate for Saga, the salvation of the people.''

''Bright eyed, star, planet and atom watched the move of universal Destiny. Years fled like days. Progress forged on with one people, degeneration with another. The sun burned on to light the way for the races of man. Stars broke loose from their positions in space and went hissing into eternity: comets shot across the boundless chart of the heavens; the juxtaposition of space bodies shifted—the time came.''

''A sensation brightened the weary spirits of the carth-born. Faithless civilization again laughed at an impossible venture. James Weston alone felt confident that his premeditated journey's end was to be the planet Mars.''

n the outskirts of the city, where a golf course had once been, James Weston's instrument of marvelous speed awaited its inventor's hand to plunge into heights and distances unbelievable.

A large workshop nearby showed the serious toil and pains that had gone to create the sensation of the century. A high fence surrounded the whole of the grounds, through which curiosity seekers peered.

The rocket-like tube rested upon a trestle-like stand nearly a hundred feet high. A spidery ladder led up to the body of the rocket from the ground. Huge gliding wings lay along the sides of the cylinder, while from either end extended several smaller cylinders, one upon the other, resembling a telescope.

Appearing like ants in comparison with the rocket, Weston, the inventor and builder, viewed it from the ground in company with Stanley Monning, an old and skeptical scientist, professing to know much about planets, constellations, gravity and the stratas of the air a few million miles above. 3