Astounding Stories of Super-Science, August 1930 — John Shaqi
Astounding Stories of Super-Science, August 1930Various
Science
Astounding Stories of Super-Science, August 1930
Various
Science fiction -- Periodicals; Science fiction, American -- Periodicals
He led Norman, excited throngs of the green men about them, into the
great building from which he had emerged. There were big rooms inside,
workshops and laboratories that Norman but vaguely glimpsed in
passing. The room to which the other led him was one with a long metal
couch. Norman stretched protestingly upon it at the other's bidding,
drifted off almost at once into sleep.
He woke to find the sunlight that had filled the room gone and
replaced by the silvery Earth-light. From the window he saw that the
silver-lit city outside now held tremendous activity, immense hordes
of green men surging through it with masses of weapons and equipment,
flying-boats pouring down out of the night from all directions. He
turned as the door of the room clicked open behind him. It was his old
friend Fellows.
"I thought you'd be awake by now, Norman. Feeling fit?"
"As though I'd slept a week," Norman said, and the other laughed his
old care-free laugh.
"You almost have, at that. Two days and nights you've slept, but it
all adds up to hardly more than a dozen hours."
"This world!" Norman's voice held all his incredulity. "To think that
we should be on it--a second satellite of Earth's--it seems almost
beyond belief."
* * * * *
"Sometimes it seems so to me, too," Fellows said thoughtfully. "But
it's not a bad world--not the human part of it, at least. When this
satellite's atmosphere caught me and pitchforked me down among these
green men, smashing the plane and almost myself, they took care of me.
You say three others vanished as I did? I never heard of them here;
they must have crashed into the sea or jungles. Of course, I'd have
got back to Earth on one of these flying-boats if I'd been able, but
their molecular power won't take them far from this world's surface,
so I couldn't.
"As it was, the green men cared for me, and when I found how those
frog-men have dominated this world for ages, how that city of the
Ralas has spread endless terror among the humans here, I resolved to
smash those monsters whatever I did. I taught some of the green men
like Sarja my own speech, later learning theirs, and in the weeks I've
been here I've been working out a way to smash the Ralas.
"You know that amphibian city is almost impregnable because humans can
hardly live long enough under the water to get into it, let alone
fight under water as the frog-men can. To meet them on even terms the
green men needed diving-helmets with an oxygen supply. They'd never
heard of such an idea, too afraid of the sea ever to experiment in it,
but I convinced them and they've made enough helmets for all their
forces. In them they can meet the Ralas under water on equal terms.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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