Page:Weird Tales volume 36 number 02.djvu/78

 unearthly radiance bathing the inside of the metal walls.

A screeching howl filled the interior of the tube. It lasted for perhaps five seconds. Abruptly it changed to a high, thin hum. He groped his way back to the chair, his heart beating wildly. The die was cast. From now on there could be no turning back.

ANZIG thrust something in his hand. "Here. Put these on before you look up at the rods."

Carruthers adjusted the polaroid glasses to his eyes and looked upward into the flame-lashed vault of the tube. High above him glowed two electro-carbonide rods. They were tilted at an angle and their tips were ten inches apart. Across this gap poured streamers of violet fire. Where the flame points converged, there hung a ball of white, pulsating fire. Unless there had been some error in calculations, billions upon billions of heavy neutrons were flowing in a concentrated beam into the sky straight upon the Mass that moved on the earth.

"How much power in reserve?"

"Two million volts," said Danzig.

"Step it up five-hundred thousand."

Danzig bent forward. The whine of an unseen dynamo took on a swifter thrumming. "Five hundred thousand," he announced.

Carruthers watched the pulsing rays between the ends of the electro-carbonide rods, nodded approvingly, removed the polaroid glasses and walked to a small window set in what looked like a lead coffin. Inside this container was the heart of the Annihilator. Smoothly polished mirrors of the world's newest metal deflected the neutrons from their erratic courses and pointed them in a straight line toward the target they were supposed to hit and destroy.

There was no immediate way of knowing whether the neutrons were impinging against the metal core of the Mass, or whether they were wasting themselves in sky space millions of miles from the target. Astronomical observers had given Carruthers the exact angle in relation to the mountain top where the machine had been erected. Now there was nothing more to do but to keep blasting away at the target.

Minutes passed into hours. No one spoke. There seemed nothing anyone could do or say. As the earth turned on its axis, the stream of neutrons from the Annihilator was kept on the target by the automatic adjuster.

When the Mass reached the far western horizon and was no longer visible, Carruthers shut off the power. There was nothing more to be done until the Mass appeared in the eastern sky at dawn.

He turned to Danzig. "Karl, we have no electronic phones, nor have we any means of keeping in touch with the outer world save with our ether-vision machine. While we can see with this, we can't talk or act. Our success in carrying out this experiment depends solely on the current we are receiving from the power-station at the big dam near the base of the mountain. Go there at once. And don't let anyone shut off that power."

"That's all very well," boomed Vignot. "But you can't expect me to stay cooped up here. Surely there must be something I can do..."

"There is," said Carruthers, "much as I hate to have you leave. I would like to know the full extent of the disturbance that rocked this mountain and nearly split it in two. If there has been a ground shift of even a few degrees, it might well throw off all our calculations. I don't believe, however, that the slippage of earth has been upward. More than likely it has been downward so that its movement disturbed only surface soil and not the basic rock."

"It'll take time, Aaron. I'll have to