Adventure stories; Science fiction; Space warfare -- Fiction
Startled, we swung about, and then the blood drove from my heart at the
strangeness and awfulness of what we saw; for, engrossed in our talk,
we had not noticed that all in the pilot room about us, walls and floor
and mechanism and controls, was beginning to shine out with a strange,
flickering luminosity, a misty, fluorescent light that with each moment
was waxing in intensity, a quivering, unfamiliar light that seemed to
glow from all in our ship, as it raced swaying on, though outside was
nothing but the same blackness of space as before! Even as we stared
about us, astounded, our own bodies, and especially the metal body of
Korus Kan, had begun to radiate the same lambent light, and then, with
a sudden great leap of my heart, I saw that the edges and corners of
the walls about us were smoothing and rounding a little, crumbling
and disappearing a little as though slowly disintegrating. At the
same moment a strange tingling shook through every atom of my body, a
quivering force that flooded through me with increasing intensity.
Horror-stricken we stood, until from one of the levers beside me an
inch of the handle fell off, a little piece of metal that rattled to
the floor and that was crumbling slowly, disintegrating, even as did
the lever from which it had crumbled off. Then Korus Kan was leaping
toward me, across the glowing pilot room.
"Swerve the ship's course!" he cried, wildly. "_We've run into another
great region of vibrations--radio-active vibrations that will crumble
the ship and all in it to pieces in a few more moments!_"
I grasped the shining levers, swung them sharply sidewise, sent our
craft flashing off at a broad angle to its previous course, but
still about us the glowing light waxed and deepened, and I felt an
infinite nausea overcoming me as through my body surged the floods
of radio-active vibrations from the ether about us that had caused
all matter in our ship to radiate that misty light. With each moment
the shining walls about us seemed crumbling faster, and I knew that
moments more would see the ship's end unless soon we escaped from the
great trap of disintegrating death into which we had ventured. I felt,
too, that not for long could we ourselves stand the impact of these
disintegrating vibrations, felt the tingling that shook my own glowing
flesh increasing in intensity, while all about us, now, tiny bits of
metal were falling from crumbling walls and ceiling and machinery.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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