Page:Wonder Stories Quarterly Volume 2 Number 2 (Winter 1931).djvu/118

 ICHARD Holt looked up from the photographic plates as Virginia Stewart skipped across the tile floor.

"What on earth, Dick?" she cried with anxiety gathering in her face.

He regarded her soberly a long moment and then decided she should know the truth.

"Virginia," he began with a calmness in his tone he was far from feeling, "The earth is facing a cataclysm. Look!" He placed a long white finger near a tiny white dot on one of the plates. She leaned forward, watching his face more than the plate.

"A strange star is approaching," he continued earnestly: "A little fellow, dark, but tremendously dense and heavy. For some reason I can't explain, our astronomers never detected it, or never told us about it. I don't know how near it will come to us, but it seems probable there will be some kind of a major catastrophe."

She gave him a frightened look. He smiled but there was no mirth in his eyes.

"That plate was taken a year ago," he went on; "Now look at this." He showed her another and another. "See how it grows. It will soon appear as large as a baseball."

She looked, her slim figure rigid, her hands clenched.

"Have you told anyone?" she asked, facing him. "Yes, I phoned the papers. They laughed and ignored me. But I think the scientific authorities will have to admit what they know today. There will probably be headlines tonight."

"What are you going to do?" she demanded.

"I thought of a sealed ship, one that could be supplied with oxygen, water and food, which might afford protection should we be drawn away from the earth. But survival would depend on a number of things including a habitable condition of the other planets."

"An ark?" she asked dubiously.

"A modern one," he bit his lips self consciously, "It does sound ridiculous, but there is no other help I can imagine. We haven't time to build one either, my hope is to find something I can remodel to meet the unusual requirements." He laid the plates aside.

 

"Take me home, Dick," she begged after a little while.

"Sure," he acquiesced and followed bareheaded to her car.

Later that afternoon he went down to the docks to look at a space ship which had been made for an inventor who hoped to make a flight beyond the earth's gravitational pull. The long gray vessel looked good at first sight. It seemed to be a cross between an airplane, a dirigible, and a submarine. It had wings of corrugated steel, a cigar-shaped body, and a periscope.

The inventor explained that it was fitted with sun engines, water, oxygen and provisions for a long voyage. It was watertight, airtight, well insulat-and was propelled by tri-motors, the power derived from gasoline for the take-off only, further power to be supplied by the action of the sun on solarite. It would be possible, the inventor explained, to carry aboard enough gasoline to propel the ship through our atmosphere or the atmosphere of any planet on which landing was made. The sun engines would be able to work continually after the ship was out of the earth's atmosphere and in the sun's glare and no other power would be needed.

In the hold of the vessel were two great gates through which water could be admitted to sink the vessel and there were giant pumps to empty it in record time. This, the owner explained, was to provide every possible protection on other planets against hostile attacks of other forms of life. Granting of course there were oceans on that planet.

Dick wondered a bit at some of the equipment and ideas the inventor had worked into his ship, but none of them were very objectionable, and many would serve to good advantage under unusual circumstances.