Adventure stories; Asteroids -- Fiction; Science fiction; Space pirates -- Fiction; Space ships -- Fiction
He shrugged. "Probably. Only three thousand miles away--probably did."
His mouth was set into a grim hard line. In his eyes I saw that gleam
of fanatic irrationality. "Unfortunate, for them. This little vessel of
mine has never been sighted before, you know." His lips twitched with a
grin. "You see how we are dressed here? Why, we've even been down into
Earth's atmosphere--we've landed and made away without discovery. We'll
do that on Deimos. And now this Patrolship--no one on it will ever live
to tell that even for a moment they sighted the Phantom raider!"
He turned to an intricate bank of levers, dials and tiny vacuum
globes that were ranged on a table here at the side of the control
room. Separate from the space-flying mechanisms. The controls of the
mechanical electronic invisibility.
"You'll see us go into action now, Fanning. It should be interesting."
He swung the dials. I felt my senses reel with a weird shock. Brenda
gave a little gasp. There was a momentary quiver of all the ship; a
momentary current-hum. And then silence.
My head cleared; the shock was passed. I gripped the arms of my chair
and stared.
* * * * *
A glow like an aura of green radiance suffused the control room. A
green glow of unreality throughout all the little ship. I could see it
out on the forepeak triangle--the black-garbed figures like wraiths
out there in a luminous green gloom. The glassite bull's-eye portes
seemed now to have a green film on them. The stars outside were shut
away. The transparent glassite dome was spread with the same dull-green
opaqueness now. And then I saw, here in the turret walls, in the dome
and in the center of each of the bull's-eyes, little holes through
which a tiny segment of the starfield still was apparent--windows like
dull little eyes puncturing our barrage of invisibility so that we
could see outward through them.
Here in the control room the dull radience shone upon Jerome's
grinning, triumphant face; it was tinted ghastly, putty-colored by the
strange light. And the light glistened on his eyeballs, glowing like
phosphorescence--like the eyes of an animal in a hunter's torchlight at
night.
Everyone here, the same. And I saw old Professor Carson's face--the
face of a dead man. His expression was stamped with his mixed emotions.
This, his science of which he had been so proud, perverted now into
murderous, ghastly warfare by the villainous Jerome.
Then Jerome moved to his space-flight controls; through the tiny
windows in the barrage I could see that our ship was swinging, heading
for the oncoming patrolship. Only three thousand miles apart. They
would be upon each other in a few minutes.
Jerome's footsteps as he moved across the room faintly sounded on
the metal floor-grid. Toneless footsteps in this eerie radiance.
Unreal--they might have been tinkling bells, or harsh thuds. All
timbre had gone from them so that they had lost their identity
completely.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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