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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of Raiders of the Universes, by Donald Wandrei
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: Raiders of the Universes
+
+Author: Donald Wandrei
+
+Release Date: July 12, 2009 [EBook #29389]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK RAIDERS OF THE UNIVERSES ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Greg Weeks, Stephen Blundell and the Online
+Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+[Illustration: _He somehow managed to close the tiny switch._]
+
+
+Raiders of the Universes
+
+By Donald Wandrei
+
+
+  Childlike, the great astronomer
+ Phobar stands before the metallic
+  invaders of the ravished solar
+              system.
+
+
+It was in the thirty-fourth century that the dark star began its famous
+conquest, unparalleled in stellar annals. Phobar the astronomer
+discovered it. He was sweeping the heavens with one of the newly
+invented multi-powered Sussendorf comet-hunters when something caught
+his eye--a new star of great brilliance in the foreground of the
+constellation Hercules.
+
+For the rest of the night, he cast aside all his plans and concentrated
+on the one star. He witnessed an unprecedented event. Mercia's
+nullifier had just been invented, a curious and intricate device, based
+on four-dimensional geometry, that made it possible to see occurrences
+in the universe which had hitherto required the hundreds of years needed
+for light to cross the intervening space before they were visible on
+Earth. By a hasty calculation with the aid of this invention, Phobar
+found that the new star was about three thousand light-years distant,
+and that it was hurtling backward into space at the rate of twelve
+hundred miles per second. The remarkable feature of his discovery was
+this appearance of a fourth-magnitude star where none had been known to
+exist. Perhaps it had come into existence this very night.
+
+On the succeeding night, he was given a greater surprise. In line with
+the first star, but several hundred light-years nearer, was a second new
+star of even more brightness. And it, too, was hurtling backward into
+space at approximately twelve hundred miles per second. Phobar was
+astonished. Two new stars discovered within twenty-four hours in the
+same part of the heavens, both of the fourth magnitude! But his surprise
+was as nothing when on the succeeding night, even while he watched, a
+third new star appeared in line with these, but much closer.
+
+At midnight he first noticed a pin-point of faint light; by one o'clock
+the star was of eighth magnitude. At two it was a brilliant sun of the
+second magnitude blazing away from Earth like the others at a rate of
+twelve hundred miles per second. And on the next evening, and the next,
+and the next, other new stars appeared until there were seven in all,
+every one on a line in the same constellation Hercules, every one with
+the same radiance and the same proper motion, though of varying size!
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Phobar had broadcast his discovery to incredulous astronomers; but as
+star after star appeared nightly, all the telescopes on Earth were
+turned toward one of the most spectacular cataclysms that history
+recorded. Far out in the depths of space, with unheard-of regularity and
+unheard-of precision, new worlds were flaming up overnight in a line
+that began at Hercules and extended toward the solar system.
+
+Phobar's announcement was immediately flashed to Venus, Mars, Jupiter,
+and Saturn, the other members of the Five World Federation. Saturn
+reported no evidence of the phenomena, because of the interfering rings
+and the lack of Mercia's nullifier. But Jupiter, with a similar device,
+witnessed the phenomena and announced furthermore that many stars in the
+neighborhood of the novae had begun to deviate in singular and abrupt
+fashion from their normal positions.
+
+There was not as yet much popular interest in the phenomena. Without
+Mercia's nullifier, the stars were not visible to ordinary eyes, since
+the light-rays would take years to reach the Earth. But every astronomer
+who had access to Mercia's nullifier hastened to focus his telescope on
+the region where extraordinary events were taking place out in the
+unfathomable gulf of night. Some terrific force was at work, creating
+worlds and disturbing the positions of stars within a radius already
+known to extend billions and trillions of miles from the path of the
+seven new stars. But of the nature of that force, astronomers could only
+guess.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Phobar took up his duties early on the eighth night. The last star had
+appeared about five hundred light-years distant. If an eighth new star
+was found, it should be not more than a few light-years away. But
+nothing happened. All night Phobar kept his telescope pointed at the
+probable spot, but search as he might, the heavens showed nothing new.
+In the morning he sought eagerly for news of any discovery made by
+fellow-watchers, but they, too, had found nothing unusual. Could it be
+that the mystery would now fade away, a new riddle of the skies?
+
+The next evening, he took up his position once more, training his
+telescope on the seven bright stars, and then on the region where an
+eighth, if there were one, should appear. For hours he searched the
+abyss in vain. He could find none. Apparently the phenomena were ended.
+At midnight he took a last glance before entering on some tedious
+calculations. It was there! In the center of the telescope a faint, hazy
+object steadily grew in brightness. All his problems were forgotten as
+Phobar watched the eighth star increase hourly. Closer than any other,
+closer even than Alpha Centauri, the new sun appeared, scarcely three
+light-years away across the void surrounding the solar system. And all
+the while he watched, he witnessed a thing no man had ever before
+seen--the birth of a world!
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+By one o'clock, the new star was of fifth magnitude; by two it was of
+the first. As the faint flush of dawn began to come toward the close of
+that frosty, moonless November night, the new star was a great white-hot
+object more brilliant than any other star in the heavens. Phobar knew
+that when its light finally reached Earth so that ordinary eyes could
+see, it would be the most beautiful object in the night sky. What was
+the reason for these unparalleled births of worlds and the terrifying
+mathematical precision that characterized them?
+
+Whatever the cosmic force behind, it was progressing toward the solar
+system. Perhaps it would even disturb the balance of the planets. The
+possible chance of such an event had already called the attention of
+some astronomers, but the whole phenomenon was too inexplicable to
+permit more than speculation.
+
+The next evening was cloudy. Jupiter reported nothing new except that
+Neptune had deviated from its course and tended to pursue an erratic and
+puzzling new orbit.
+
+Phobar pondered long over this last news item and turned his attention
+to the outermost planet on the succeeding night. To his surprise, he had
+great difficulty in locating it. The ephemeris was of absolutely no use.
+When he did locate Neptune after a brief search, he discovered it more
+than eighty million miles from its scheduled place! This was at
+one-forty. At two-ten he was thunderstruck by a special announcement
+sent from the Central Bureau to every observatory and astronomer of note
+throughout the world, proclaiming the discovery of an ultra-Plutonian
+planet. Phobar was incredulous. For centuries it had been proved that no
+planet beyond Pluto could possibly exist.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+With feverish haste, Phobar ran to the huge telescope and rapidly
+focused it where the new planet should be. Five hundred million miles
+beyond Neptune was a flaming path like the beam of a giant searchlight
+that extended exactly to the eighth solar planet. Phobar gasped. He
+could hardly credit the testimony of his eyes. He looked more closely.
+The great stream of flame still crossed his line of vision. But this
+time he saw something else: at the precise farther end of the flame-path
+a round disk--dark!
+
+Beyond a doubt, a new planet of vast size now formed an addition to the
+solar group. But that planet was almost impervious to the illuminating
+rays of the sun and was barely discernible. Neptune itself shone
+brighter than it ever had, and was falling away from the sun at a rate
+of twelve hundred miles per second.
+
+All night Phobar watched the double mystery. By three o'clock, he was
+convinced, as far as lightning calculations showed, that the invader was
+hurtling toward the sun at a speed of more than ten million miles an
+hour. At three-fifteen, he thought that vanishing Neptune seemed
+brighter even than the band of fire running to the invader. At four, his
+belief was certainty. With amazement and awe, Phobar sat through the
+long, cold night, watching a spectacular and terrible catastrophe in the
+sky.
+
+As dawn began to break and the stars grew paler, Phobar turned away from
+his telescope, his brain awhirl, his heart filled with a great fear. He
+had witnessed the devastation of a world, the ruin of a member of his
+own planetary system by an invader from outer space. As dawn cut short
+his observations, he knew at last the cause of Neptune's brightness,
+knew that it was now a white-hot flaming sun that sped with increased
+rapidity away from the solar system. Somehow, the terrible swathe of
+fire that flowed from the dark star to Neptune had wrenched it out of
+its orbit and made of it a molten inferno.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+At dawn came another bulletin from the Central Bureau. Neptune had a
+surface temperature of 3,000 deg. C, was defying all laws of celestial
+mechanics, and within three days would have left the solar system for
+ever. The results of such a disaster were unpredictable. The entire
+solar system was likely to break up. Already Uranus and Jupiter had
+deviated from their orbits. Unless something speedily occurred to check
+the onrush of the dark star, it was prophesied that the laws governing
+the planetary system would run to a new balance, and that in the ensuing
+chaos the whole group would spread apart and fall toward the gulfs
+beyond the great surrounding void.
+
+What was the nature of the great path of fire? What force did it
+represent? And was the dark star controlled by intelligence, or was it a
+blind wanderer from space that had come by accident? The flame-path
+alone implied that the dark star was guided by an intelligence that
+possessed the secret of inconceivable power. Menace hung in the sky now
+where all eyes could see in a great arc of fire!
+
+The world was on the brink of eternity, and vast forces at whose nature
+men could only guess were sweeping planets and suns out of its path.
+
+The following night was again cold and clear. High in the heavens, where
+Neptune should have been, hung a disk of enormously greater size.
+Neptune itself was almost invisible, hundreds of millions of miles
+beyond its scheduled position. As nearly as Phobar could estimate, not
+one hundredth of the sun's rays were reflected from the surface of the
+dark star, a proportion far below those for the other planets. Phobar
+had a better view of the flame-path, and it was with growing awe that he
+watched that strange swathe in the sky during the dead of night. It shot
+out from the dark star like a colossal beam or huge pillar of fire
+seeking a food of worlds.
+
+With a shiver of cold fear he saw that there were now three of the
+bands: one toward Neptune, one toward Saturn, and one toward the sun.
+The first was fading, a milky, misty white; the second shone almost as
+bright as the first one previously had; and the third, toward the sun,
+was a dazzling stream of orange radiance, burning with a steady,
+terrible, unbelievable intensity across two and a half billions of miles
+of space! That gigantic flare was the most brilliant sight in the whole
+night sky, an awful and abysmally prophetic flame that made city streets
+black with staring people, a radiance whose grandeur and terrific
+implication of cosmic power brought beauty and the fear of doom into the
+heavens!
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Those paths could not be explained by all the physicists and all the
+astronomers in the Five World Federation. They possessed the properties
+of light, but they were rigid bands like a tube or a solid pillar from
+which only the faintest of rays escaped; and they completely shut off
+the heavens behind them. They had, moreover, singular properties which
+could not be described, as if a new force were embodied in them.
+
+Hour after hour humanity watched the spectacular progress of the dark
+star, watched those mysterious and threatening paths of light that
+flowed from the invader. When dawn came, it brought only a great fear
+and the oppression of impending disaster.
+
+In the early morning, Phobar slept. When he awoke, he felt refreshed and
+decided to take a short walk in the familiar and peaceful light of day.
+He never took that walk. He opened the door on a kind of dim and reddish
+twilight. Not a cloud hung in the sky, but the sun shone feebly with a
+dull red glow, and the skies were dull and somber, as if the sun were
+dying as scientists had predicted it eventually would.
+
+Phobar stared at the dull heavens in a daze, at the foreboding
+atmosphere and the livid sun that burned faintly as through a smoke
+curtain. Then the truth flashed on him--it was the terrible path of fire
+from the dark star! By what means he could not guess, by what appalling
+control of immense and inconceivable forces he could not even imagine,
+the dark star was sucking light and perhaps more than light from the
+sun!
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Phobar turned and shut the door. The world had seen its last dawn. If
+the purpose of the dark star was destruction, none of the planets could
+offer much opposition, for no weapon of theirs was effective beyond a
+few thousand miles range at most--and the dark star could span millions.
+If the invader passed on, its havoc would be only a trifle smaller, for
+it had already destroyed two members of the solar system and was now
+striking at its most vital part. Without the sun, life would die, but
+even with the sun the planets must rearrange themselves because of the
+destruction of balance.
+
+Even he could hardly grasp the vast and abysmal catastrophe that without
+warning had swept from space. How could the dark star have traversed
+three thousand light-years of space in a week's time? It was
+unthinkable! So stupendous a control of power, so gigantic a
+manipulation of cosmic forces, so annihilating a possession of the
+greatest secrets of the universe, was an unheard-of concentration of
+energy and knowledge of stellar mechanics. But the evidence of his own
+eyes and the path of the dark star with flaming suns to mark its
+progress, told him in language which could not be refuted that the dark
+star possessed all that immeasurable, titanic knowledge. It was the lord
+of the universe. There was nothing which the dark star could not crush
+or conquer or change. The thought of that immense, supreme power numbed
+his mind. It opened vistas of a civilization, and a progress, and an
+unparalleled mastery of all knowledge which was almost beyond
+conception.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Already the news had raced across the world. On Phobar's television
+screen flashed scenes of nightmare; the radio spewed a gibberish of
+terror. In one day panic had swept the Earth; on the remaining members
+of the Five World Federation the same story was repeated. Rioting mobs
+drowned out the chant of religious fanatics who hailed Judgment Day.
+Great fires turned the air murky and flame-shot. Machine guns spat
+regularly in city streets; looting, murder, and fear-crazed crimes were
+universal. Civilization had completely vanished overnight.
+
+The tides roared higher than they ever had before; for every thousand
+people drowned on the American seaboards, a hundred thousand perished in
+China and India. Dead volcanoes boomed into the worst eruptions known.
+Half of Japan sank during the most violent earthquake in history. Land
+rocked, the seas boiled, cyclones howled out of the skies. A billion
+eyes focused on Mecca, the mad beating of tom-toms rolled across all
+Africa, women and children were trampled to death by the crowds that
+jammed into churches.
+
+"Has man lived in vain?" asked the philosopher.
+
+"The world is doomed. There is no escape," said the scientist.
+
+"The day of reckoning has come! The wrath of God is upon us!" shouted
+the street preachers.
+
+In a daze, Phobar switched off the bedlam and, walking like a man
+asleep, strode out, he did not care where, if only to get away.
+
+The ground and the sky were like a dying fire. The sun seemed a
+half-dead cinder. Only the great swathe of radiance between the sun and
+the dark star had any brilliance. Sinister, menacing, now larger even
+than the sun, the invader from beyond hung in the heavens.
+
+As Phobar watched it, the air around him prickled strangely. A sixth
+sense gave warning. He turned to race back into his house. His legs
+failed. A fantastic orange light bathed him, countless needles of pain
+shot through his whole body, the world darkened.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Earth had somehow been blotted out. There was a brief blackness, the
+nausea of space and of a great fall that compressed eternity into a
+moment. Then a swimming confusion, and outlines which gradually came to
+rest.
+
+Phobar was too utterly amazed to cry out or run. He stood inside the
+most titanic edifice he could have imagined, a single gigantic structure
+vaster than all New York City. Far overhead swept a black roof fading
+into the horizon, beneath his feet was the same metal substance. In the
+midst of this giant work soared the base of a tower that pierced the
+roof thousands of feet above.
+
+Everywhere loomed machines, enormous dynamos, cathode tubes a hundred
+feet long, masses and mountains of such fantastic apparatus as he had
+never encountered. The air was bluish, electric. From the black
+substance came a phosphorescent radiance. The triumphant drone of motors
+and a terrific crackle of electricity were everywhere. Off to his right
+purple-blue flames the size of Sequoia trees flickered around a group of
+what looked like condensers as huge as Gibraltar. At the base of the
+central tower half a mile distant Phobar could see something that
+resembled a great switchboard studded with silver controls. Near it was
+a series of mechanisms at whose purpose he could not even guess.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+All this his astounded eyes took in at one confused glance. The thing
+that gave him unreasoning terror was the hundred-foot-high metal monster
+before him. It defied description. It was unlike any color known on
+Earth, a blinding color sinister with power and evil. Its shape was
+equally ambiguous--it rippled like quicksilver, now compact, now spread
+out in a thousand limbs. But what appalled Phobar was its definite
+possession of rational life. More, its very thoughts were transmitted to
+him as clearly as though written in his own English:
+
+"Follow me!"
+
+Phobar's mind did not function--but his legs moved regularly. In the
+grasp of this mental, metal monster he was a mere automaton. Phobar
+noticed idly that he had to step down from a flat disk a dozen yards
+across. By some power, some tremendous discovery that he could not
+understand, he had been transported across millions of miles of
+space--undoubtedly to the dark star itself!
+
+The colossal thing, indescribable, a blinding, nameless color, rippled
+down the hall and stooped before a disk of silvery black. In the center
+of the disk was a metal seat with a control board near-by.
+
+"Be seated!"
+
+Phobar sat down, the titan flicked the controls--and nothing happened.
+
+Phobar sensed that something was radically wrong. He felt the surprise
+of his gigantic companion. He did not know it then, but the fate of the
+solar system hung on that incident.
+
+"Come!"
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Abruptly the giant stooped, and Phobar shrank back, but a flowing mass
+of cold, insensate metal swept around him, lifted him fifty feet in the
+air. Dizzy, sick, horrified, he was hardly conscious of the whirlwind
+motion into which the giant suddenly shot. He had a dim impression of
+machines racing by, of countless other giants, of a sudden opening in
+the walls of the immense building, and then a rush across the surface of
+metal land. Even in his vertigo he had enough curiosity to marvel that
+there was no vegetation, no water, only the dull black metal everywhere.
+Yet there was air.
+
+And then a city loomed before them. To Phobar it seemed a city of gods
+or giants. Fully five miles it soared toward space, its fantastic angles
+and arcs and cubes and pyramids mazing in the dimensions of a totally
+alien geometry. Tier by tier the stupendous city, hundreds of miles
+wide, mounted toward a central tower like the one in the building he had
+left.
+
+Phobar never knew how they got there, but his numbed mind was at
+last forced into clarity by a greater will. He stared about him. His
+captor had gone. He stood in a huge chamber circling to a dome far
+overhead. Before him, on a dais a full thousand feet in diameter,
+stood--sat--rested, whatever it might be called--another monster, far
+larger than any he had yet seen, like a mountain of pliant thinking,
+living metal. And Phobar knew he stood in the presence of the ruler.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The metal Cyclops surveyed him as Phobar might have surveyed an ant.
+Cold, deadly, dispassionate scrutiny came from something that might have
+been eyes, or a seeing intelligence locked in a metal body.
+
+There was no sound, but inwardly to Phobar's consciousness from the
+peak of the titan far above him came a command:
+
+"What are you called?"
+
+Phobar opened his lips--but even before he spoke, he knew that the thing
+had understood his thought: "Phobar."
+
+"I am Garboreggg, ruler of Xlarbti, the Lord of the Universes."
+
+"Lord of the _Universes_?"
+
+"I and my world come from one of the universes beyond the reach of your
+telescopes." Phobar somehow felt that the thing was talking to him as he
+would to a new-born babe.
+
+"What do you want of me?"
+
+"Tell your Earth that I want the entire supply of your radium ores mined
+and placed above ground according to the instructions I give, by seven
+of your days hence."
+
+A dozen questions sprang to Phobar's lips. He felt again that he was
+being treated like a child.
+
+"Why do you want our radium ores?"
+
+"Because they are the rarest of the elements on your scale, are absent
+on ours, and supply us with some of the tremendous energy we need."
+
+"Why don't you obtain the ores from other worlds?"
+
+"We do. We are taking them from all worlds where they exist. But we need
+yours also."
+
+Raiders of the universe! Looting young worlds of the precious radium
+ores! Piracy on a cosmic scale!
+
+"And if Earth refuses your demand?"
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+For answer, Garboreggg rippled to a wall of the room and pressed a
+button. The wall dissolved, weirdly, mysteriously. A series of vast
+silver plates was revealed, and a battery of control levers.
+
+"This will happen to all of your Earth unless the ores are given us."
+
+The titan closed a switch. On the first screen flashed the picture of a
+huge tower such as Phobar had seen in the metal city.
+
+Garboreggg adjusted a second control that was something like a
+range-finder. He pressed a third lever--and from the tower leaped a
+surge of terrific energy, like a bolt of lightning a quarter of a mile
+broad. The giant closed another switch--and on the second plate flashed
+a picture of New York City.
+
+Then--waiting. Seconds, minutes drifted by. The atmosphere became tense,
+nerve-cracking. Phobar's eyes ached with the intensity of his stare.
+What would happen?
+
+Abruptly it came.
+
+A monstrous bolt of energy streaked from the skies, purple-blue death in
+a pillar a fourth of a mile broad crashed into the heart of New York
+City, swept up and down Manhattan, across and back, and suddenly
+vanished.
+
+In fifteen seconds, only a molten hell of fused structures and
+incinerated millions of human beings remained of the world's first city.
+
+Phobar was crushed, appalled, then utter loathing for this soulless
+thing poured through him. If only--
+
+"It is useless. You can do nothing," answered the ruler as though it had
+grasped his thought.
+
+"But why, if you could pick me off the Earth, do you not draw the radium
+ores in the same way?" Phobar demanded.
+
+"The orange-ray picks up only loose, portable objects. We can and will
+transport the radium ores here by means of the ray after they have been
+mined and placed on platforms or disks."
+
+"Why did you select me from all the millions of people on Earth?"
+
+"Solely because you were the first apparent scientist whom our cosmotel
+chanced upon. It will be up to you to notify your Earth governments of
+our demand."
+
+"But afterwards!" Phobar burst out aloud. "What then?"
+
+"We will depart."
+
+"It will mean death to us! The solar system will be wrecked with Neptune
+gone and Saturn following it!"
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Garboreggg made no answer. To that impassive, cold, inhuman thing, it
+did not matter if a nation or a whole world perished. Phobar had already
+seen with what deliberate calm it destroyed a city, merely to show him
+what power the lords of Xlarbti controlled. Besides, what guarantee was
+there that the invaders would not loot the Earth of everything they
+wanted and then annihilate all life upon it before they departed? Yet
+Phobar knew he was helpless, knew that the men of Earth would be forced
+to do whatever was asked of them, and trust that the raiders would
+fulfill their promise.
+
+"Two hours remain for your stay here," came the ruler's dictum to
+interrupt his line of thought. "For the first half of that period you
+will tell me of your world and answer whatever questions I may ask.
+During the rest of the interval, I will explain some of the things you
+wish to learn about us."
+
+Again Phobar felt Garboreggg's disdain, knew that the metal giant
+regarded him as a kind of childish plaything for an hour or two's
+amusement. But he had no choice, and so he told Garboreggg of the life
+on Earth, how it arose and along what lines it had developed; he
+narrated in brief the extent of man's knowledge, his scientific
+achievements, his mastery of weapons and forces and machines, his social
+organization.
+
+When he had finished, he felt as a Stone Age man might feel in the
+presence of a brilliant scientist of the thirty-fourth century. If any
+sign of interest had shown on the peak of the metallic lord, Phobar
+failed to see it. But he sensed an intolerant sneer of ridicule in
+Garboreggg, as though the ruler considered these statements to be only
+the most elementary of facts.
+
+Then, for three quarters of an hour, in the manner of one lecturing an
+ignorant pupil, the giant crowded its thought-pictures into Phobar's
+mind so that finally he understood a little of the raiders and of the
+sudden terror that had flamed from the abysses into the solar system.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+"The universe of matter that you know is only one of the countless
+universes which comprise the cosmos," began Garboreggg. "In your
+universe, you have a scale of ninety-two elements, you have your
+color-spectrum, your rays and waves of many kinds. You are subject to
+definite laws controlling matter and energy as you know them.
+
+"But we are of a different universe, on a different scale from yours, a
+trillion light-years away in space, eons distant in time. The natural
+laws which govern us differ from those controlling you. In our universe,
+you would be hopelessly lost, completely helpless, unless you possessed
+the knowledge that your people will not attain even in millions of
+years. But we, who are so much older and greater than you, have for so
+long studied the nature of the other universes that we can enter and
+leave them at will, taking what we wish, doing as we wish, creating or
+destroying worlds whenever the need arises, coming and hurtling away
+when we choose.
+
+"There is no vegetable life in our universe. There is only the scale of
+elements ranging from 842 to 966 on the extension of your own scale. At
+this high range, metals of complex kinds exist. There is none of what
+you call water, no vegetable world, no animal kingdom. Instead, there
+are energies, forces, rays, and waves, which are food to us and which
+nourish our life-stream just as pigs, potatoes, and bread are food to
+you.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+"Trillions of years ago in your time-calculation, but only a few dozen
+centuries ago in ours, life arose on the giant world Kygpton in our
+universe. It was life, our life, the life of my people and myself,
+intelligence animating bodies of pliant metal, existing almost endlessly
+on an almost inexhaustible source of energy.
+
+"But all matter wears down. On Kygpton there was a variety of useful
+metals, others that were valueless. There was comparatively little of
+the first, much of the second. Kygpton itself was a world as large as
+your entire solar system, with a diameter roughly of four billion miles.
+Our ancestors knew that Kygpton was dying, that the store of our most
+precious element Sthalreh was dwindling. But already our ancestors had
+mastered the forces of our universe, had made inventions that are beyond
+your understanding, had explored the limits of our universe in
+space-cars that were propelled by the free energies in space and by the
+attracting-repelling influences of stars.
+
+"The metal inhabitants of Kygpton employed every invention they knew to
+accomplish an engineering miracle that makes your bridges and mines seem
+but the puny efforts of a gnat. They blasted all the remaining ores of
+Sthalreh from the surface and interior of Kygpton and refined them. Then
+they created a gigantic vacuum, a dead-field in space a hundred million
+miles away from their world. The dead-field was controlled from Kygpton
+by atomic-projectors, energy-absorbers, gravitation-nullifiers and
+cosmotels, range-regulators, and a host of other inventions.
+
+"As fast as it was mined and extracted, the Sthalreh metal was
+vaporized, shot into the dead-field by interstellar rays, and solidified
+there along an invisible framework which we projected. In a decade of
+our time, we had pillaged Kygpton of every particle of Sthalreh. And
+then in our skies hung an artificial world, a manufactured sphere, a
+giant new planet, the world you yourself are now on--Xlarbti!
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+"We did not create a solid globe. We left chambers, tunnels,
+passageways, storerooms throughout it or piercing it from surface to
+surface. Thus, even as Xlarbti was being created, we provided for
+everything that we needed or could need--experimental laboratories,
+sub-surface vaults, chambers for the innumerable huge ray dynamos,
+energy storage batteries, and other apparatus which we required.
+
+"And when all was ready, we transferred by space-cars and by atomic
+individuation all our necessities from Kygpton to the artificial world
+Xlarbti. And when everything was prepared, we destroyed the dead-field
+by duplicate control from Xlarbti, turned our repulsion-power on full
+against the now useless and dying giant world Kygpton, and swung upon
+our path.
+
+"But our whole universe is incredibly old. It was mature before ever
+your young suns flamed out of the gaseous nebulae, it was decaying when
+your molten planets were flung from the central sun, it was dying before
+the boiling seas had given birth to land upon your sphere. And while we
+had enough of our own particular electrical food to last us for a
+million of your years, and enough power to guide Xlarbti to other
+universes, we had exhausted all the remaining energy of our entire
+universe. And when we finally left it to dwindle behind us in the black
+abysses of space, we left it, a dead cinder, devoid of life, vitiated of
+activity, and utterly lacking in cosmic forces, a universe finally run
+down.
+
+"The universes, as you may know, are set off from each other by totally
+black and empty abysms, expanses so vast that light-rays have not yet
+crossed many of them. How did we accomplish the feat of traversing such
+a gulf? By the simplest of means: acceleration. Why? Because to remain
+in our universe meant inevitable death. We gambled on the greatest
+adventure in all the cosmos.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+"To begin with, we circled our universe to the remotest point opposite
+where we wanted to leave it. We then turned our attraction powers on
+part way so that the millions of stars before us drew us ahead, then we
+gradually stepped up the power to its full strength, thus ever
+increasing our speed. At the same time, as stars passed to our rear in
+our flight, we turned our repulsion-rays against them, stepping that
+power up also.
+
+"Our initial speed was twenty-four miles per second. Midway in our
+universe we had reached the speed of your light--186,000 miles per
+second. By the time we left our universe, we were hurtling at a speed
+which we estimated to be 1,600,000,000 miles per second. Yet even at
+that tremendous speed, it took us years to cross from our universe to
+yours. If we had encountered even a planetoid at that enormous rate, we
+would probably have been annihilated in white-hot death. But we had
+planned well, and there are no superiors to our stellar mechanics, our
+astronomers, our scientists.
+
+"When we finally hurtled from the black void into your universe, we
+found what we had only dared hope for: a young universe, with many
+planets and cooling worlds rich in radium ores, the only element in your
+scale that can help to replenish our vanishing energy. Half your
+universe we have already deprived of its ores. Your Earth has more that
+we want. Then we shall continue on our way, to loot the rest of the
+worlds, before passing on to another universe. We are a planet without a
+universe. We will wander and pillage until we find a universe like the
+one we come from, or until Xlarbti itself disintegrates and we perish.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+"We could easily wipe out all the dwellers on Earth and mine the ores
+ourselves. But that would be a needless waste of our powers, for since
+you can not defy us, and since the desire for life burns as high in you
+as in us and as it does in all sensate things in all universes, your
+people will save themselves from death and save us from wasting energy
+by mining the ores for us. What happens afterwards, we do not care.
+
+"The seven new suns that you saw were dead worlds that we used as
+buffers to slow down Xlarbti. The full strength of our repulsion-force
+directed against any single world necessarily turns it into a liquid or
+gaseous state depending on various factors. Your planet Neptune was
+pulled out of the solar system by the attraction of Xlarbti's mass. The
+flame-paths, as you call them, are directed streams of energy for
+different purposes: the one to the sun supplies us, for instance, with
+heat, light, and electricity, which in turn are stored up for eventual
+use.
+
+"The orange-ray that you felt is one of our achievements. It is similar
+to the double-action pumps used in some of your sulphur mines, whereby a
+pipe is inclosed in a larger pipe, and hot water forced down through
+the larger tubing returns sulphur-laden through the central pipe. The
+orange-ray instantaneously dissolves any portable object up to a certain
+size, propels it back to Xlarbti through its center which is the reverse
+ray, and here reforms the object, just as you were recreated on the disk
+that you stood on when you regained consciousness.
+
+"But I have not enough time to explain everything on Xlarbti to you; nor
+would you comprehend it all if I did. Your stay is almost up.
+
+"In that one control-panel lies all the power that we have mastered,"
+boasted Garboreggg with supreme egotism. "It connects with the
+individual controls throughout Xlarbti."
+
+"What is the purpose of some of the levers?" asked Phobar, with a
+desperate hope in his thoughts.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+A filament of metal whipped to the panel from the lord of Xlarbti. "This
+first section duplicates the control-panel that you saw in the
+laboratory where you opened your eyes. Do not think that you can make
+use of this information--in ten minutes you will be back on your Earth
+to deliver our command. Between now and that moment you will be so
+closely watched that you can do nothing and will have no opportunity to
+try.
+
+"This first lever controls the attraction rays, the second the repulsion
+force. The third dial regulates the orange-ray by which you will be
+returned to Earth. The fourth switch directs the electrical bolt that
+destroyed New York City. Next it is a device that we have never had
+occasion to use. It releases the Krangor-wave throughout Xlarbti. Its
+effect is to make each atom of Xlarbti, the Sthalreh metal and
+everything on it, become compact, to do away with the empty spaces that
+exist in every atom. Theoretically, it would reduce Xlarbti to a
+fraction of its present size, diminish its mass while its weight and
+gravity remained as before.
+
+"The next lever controls matter to be transported between here and the
+first laboratory. Somewhat like the orange-ray, it disintegrates the
+object and reassembles it here."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+So that was what Phobar's captor had been trying to do with him back
+there in the laboratory! "Why was I not brought here by that means?"
+burst out Phobar.
+
+"Because you belong to a different universe," answered Garboreggg.
+"Without experimentation, we cannot tell what natural laws of ours you
+would not be subject to, but this is one of them." A gesture of
+irritation seemed to come from him. "Some laws hold good in all the
+universes we have thus far investigated. The orange-ray, for instance,
+picked you up as it would have plucked one of us from the surface of
+Kygpton. But on Xlarbti, which is composed entirely of Sthalreh, your
+atomic nature and physical constitution are so different from ours that
+they were unaffected by the energy that ordinarily transports objects
+here."
+
+Thus the metal nightmare went rapidly over the control-panel. At length
+Phobar's captor, or another thing like him, reentered when Garboreggg
+flicked a strange-looking protuberance on the panel.
+
+"You will now be returned to your world," came the thought of
+Garboreggg. "We shall watch you through our cosmotel to see that you
+deliver our instructions. Unless the nations of Earth obey us, they will
+be obliterated at the end of seven days."
+
+A wild impulse to smash that impassive, metallic monster passed from
+Phobar as quickly as it came. He was helpless. Sick and despairing, he
+felt the cold, baffling-colored metal close around him again; once more
+he was borne aloft for the journey to the laboratory, from there to be
+propelled back to Earth.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Seven days of grace! But Phobar knew that less than ten minutes remained
+to him. Only here could he possibly accomplish anything. Once off the
+surface of Xlarbti, there was not the remotest chance that all the
+nations of Earth could reach the invaders or even attempt to defy them.
+Yet what could he alone do in a week, to say nothing of ten minutes?
+
+He sensed the amused, supercilious contempt of his captor. That was
+really the greatest obstacle, this ability of theirs to read
+thought-pictures. And already he had given them enough word-pictures of
+English so that they could understand....
+
+In the back of Phobar's mind the ghost of a desperate thought suddenly
+came. What was it he had learned years ago in college? Homer--"The
+Odyssey"--Plutarch.... From rusty, disused corners of memory crept forth
+the half-forgotten words. He bent all his efforts to the task, not
+daring to think ahead or plan ahead or visualize anything but the Greek
+words.
+
+He felt the bewilderment of his captor. To throw it off the track,
+Phobar suddenly let an ancient English nursery rime slip into his
+thoughts. The disgust that emanated from his captor was laughable;
+Phobar could have shouted aloud. But the Greek words....
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Already the pair had left the mountain-high titan city far behind; they
+rippled across the smooth, black surface of Xlarbti, and bore like rifle
+bullets down on the swiftly looming laboratory. In a few minutes it
+would be too late forever. Now the lost Greek words burst into Phobar's
+mind, and, hoping against hope, he thought in Greek word-pictures which
+his captor could not understand. He weighed chances, long shots. Into
+his brain flashed an idea.... But they were upon the laboratory; a
+stupendous door dissolved weirdly into shimmering haze; they sped
+through.
+
+Phobar's hand clutched a bulge in his pocket. Would it work? How could
+it?
+
+They were beyond the door now and racing across the great expanse of the
+floor, past the central tower, past the control-panel which he had first
+seen....
+
+And as if by magic there leaped into Phobar's mind a clear-cut, vivid
+picture of violet oceans of energy crackling and streaking from the
+heavens to crash through the laboratory roof and barely miss striking
+his captor behind. Even as Phobar created the image of that terrific
+death, his captor whirled around in a lightning movement, a long arm of
+metal flicking outward at the same instant to drop Phobar to the ground.
+
+Like a flash Phobar was on his feet; his hand whipped from his pocket,
+and with all his strength he flung a gleaming object straight toward the
+fifth lever on the control-panel a dozen yards away. As a clumsy arrow
+would, his oversize bunch of keys twisted to their mark, clanked, and
+spread against the fifth control, which was the size regulator.
+
+As rapidly as Phobar's captor had spun around, it reversed again, having
+guessed the trick. A tentacle of pliant metal snaked toward Phobar like
+a streak of flame.
+
+But in those few seconds a terrific holocaust had taken place. As
+Phobar's keys spattered against the fifth lever, there came an
+immediate, growing, strange, high whine, and a sickening collapse of
+the very surface beneath them. Everywhere outlines of objects wavered,
+changed melted, shrank with a steady and nauseatingly swift motion. The
+roof of the laboratory high overhead plunged downward; the far-distant
+walls swept inward, contracted. And the metal monsters themselves
+dwindled as though they were vast rubber figures from which the air was
+hissing.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Phobar sprang back as the tentacle whipped after him. Only that jump and
+the suddenly dwarfing dimensions of the giant saved him. And even in
+that instant of wild action, Phobar shouted aloud--for this whole world
+was collapsing, together with everything on it, except he himself who
+came of a different universe and remained unaffected! It was the long
+shot he had gambled on, the one chance he had to strike a blow.
+
+All over the shrinking laboratory the monsters were rushing toward him.
+His dwindling captor flung another tentacle toward the control-panel to
+replace the size-regulating lever. But Phobar had anticipated that
+possibility and had already leaped to the switchboard, sweeping a heavy
+bar from its place and crashing it down on the lever so that it could
+not be replaced without being repaired. Almost in the same move he had
+bounded away again, the former hundred-foot giant now scarcely more than
+his own height. But throughout the laboratory, the other metal things
+had halted in their tasks and were racing onward.
+
+Phobar always remembered that battle in the laboratory as a scene from
+some horrible nightmare. The catastrophe came so rapidly that he could
+hardly follow the whirlwind events. The half dozen great leaps he made
+from the lashing tentacles of his pursuer sufficed to give him a few
+seconds' respite, and then the weird, howling sound of the tortured
+world swelled to a piercing wail. His lungs were laboring from the
+violence of his exertions; again and again he barely escaped from the
+curling whips of metal tentacles. And now the monster was hardly a foot
+high; the huge condensers and tubes and colossal machinery were like
+those of a pygmy laboratory. And overhead the roof plunged ever
+downward.
+
+But Phobar was cornered at last. He stood in the center of a circle of
+the foot-high things. His captor suddenly shot forth a dozen rope-like
+arms toward him as the others closed in. He had not even a weapon, for
+he had dropped the bar in his first mad bound away from the
+control-panel. He saw himself trapped in his own trick, for in minutes
+at most the laboratory would be crushing him with fearful force.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Blindly Phobar reverted to a primitive defense in this moment of
+infinite danger and kicked with all his strength at the squat monster
+before him. The thing tried to whirl aside, but Phobar's shoe squashed
+thickly through, and in a disorder of quivering pieces the metal
+creature fell, and subsided. Knowing at last that the invaders were
+vulnerable and how they could be killed, Phobar went leaping and
+stamping on those nearest him. Under foot, they disintegrated into
+little pulpy lumps of inert metal.
+
+In a trice he broke beyond the circle and darted to the control-panel.
+One quick glance showed him that the roof was now scarcely a half dozen
+yards above. With fingers that fumbled in haste at tiny levers and
+dials, he spun several of them--the repulsion-ray full--the
+attraction-ray full. And when they were set, he picked up the bar he
+had dropped and smashed the controls so that they were helplessly
+jammed. He could almost feel the planet catapult through the heavens.
+
+The laboratory roof was only a foot over his head. He whirled around,
+squashed a dozen tiny creeping things, leaped to a disk that was now not
+more than a few inches broad. Stooping low, balancing himself
+precariously, he somehow managed to close the tiny switch. A haze of
+orange light enveloped him, there came a great vertigo and dizziness and
+pain, he felt himself falling through bottomless spaces....
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+So exhausted that he could scarcely move, Phobar blinked his eyes open
+to brilliant daylight in the chill of a November Indian summer noon. The
+sun shone radiant in the heavens; off in the distance he heard a
+pandemonium of bells and whistles. Wearily he noticed that there were no
+flame-paths in the sky.
+
+Staggering weakly, he made his way to the observatory, mounted the steps
+with tired limbs, and wobbled to the eyepiece of his telescope which he
+had left focused on the dark star two hours before. Almost trembling, he
+peered through it.
+
+The dark star was gone. Somewhere far out in the abysses of the
+universe, a runaway world plunged headlong at ever-mounting speed to
+uncharted regions under its double acceleration of attraction and
+repulsion.
+
+A sigh of contentment came from his lips as he sank into a heavy and
+profound sleep. Later he would learn of the readjustments in the solar
+system, and of the colder climate that came to Earth, and of the vast
+changes permanently made by the invading planet, and of a blazing new
+star discovered in Orion that might signify the birth of a sun or the
+death of a metallic dark world.
+
+But these were events to be, and he demanded his immediate reward of a
+day's dreamless slumber.
+
+
+
+
+Transcriber's Note:
+
+    This etext was produced from _Astounding Stories_ September 1932.
+    Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S.
+    copyright on this publication was renewed. Minor spelling and
+    typographical errors have been corrected without note.
+
+
+
+
+
+End of Project Gutenberg's Raiders of the Universes, by Donald Wandrei
+
+*** END OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK RAIDERS OF THE UNIVERSES ***
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