Astounding Stories of Super-Science 1

Astounding Stories of Super-Science 1

Astounding Stories of Super-Science January 1930

 

Author: Victor Rousseau

Captain S. P. Meek

Ray Cummings

M. L. Staley

C. V. Tench

Murray Leinster

Anthony Pelcher

 

CONTENTS

 

 

EDITORIAL THE EDITOR 7

_An Introduction to a New and Unique Magazine._

 

THE BEETLE HORDE VICTOR ROUSSEAU 8

_Only Two Young Explorers Stand in the Way of the Mad Bram's

Horrible Revenge--the Releasing of His Trillions of Man-sized

Beetles upon an Utterly Defenseless World._ (Part One of a Two-part

Novel.)

 

THE CAVE OF HORROR CAPTAIN S. P. MEEK 32

_Screaming, the Guardsman Was Jerked Through the Air. An Unearthly

Screech Rang Through the Cavern. The Unseen Horror of Mammoth Cave

Had Struck Again!_

 

PHANTOMS OF REALITY RAY CUMMINGS 46

_Red Sensua's Knife Came up Dripping--and the Two Adventurers Knew

that Chaos and Bloody Revolution Had Been Unleashed in that Shadowy

Kingdom of the Fourth Dimension._ (A Complete Novel.)

 

THE STOLEN MIND M. L. STALEY 75

_What Would You Do, If, Like Quest, You Were Tricked, and Your Very

Mind and Will Stolen from Your Body?_

 

COMPENSATION C. V. TENCH 92

_Professor Wroxton Had Disappeared--But in the Bottom of the

Mysterious Crystal Cage Lay the Diamond from His Ring!_

 

TANKS MURRAY LEINSTER 100

_Two Miles of American Front Had Gone Dead. And on Two Lone

Infantrymen, Lost in the Menace of the Fog-gas and the Tanks,

Depended the Outcome of the War of 1932._

 

INVISIBLE DEATH ANTHONY PELCHER 118

_On Lees' Quick and Clever Action Depended the Life of "Old Perk"

Ferguson, the Millionaire Manufacturer Threatened by the Uncanny,

Invisible Killer._

 

 

 

_Introducing_--

 

ASTOUNDING STORIES

 

 

What _are_ "astounding" stories?

 

Well, if you lived in Europe in 1490, and someone told you the earth was

round and moved around the sun--that would have been an "astounding"

story.

 

Or if you lived in 1840, and were told that some day men a thousand

miles apart would be able to talk to each other through a little

wire--or without any wire at all--that would have been another.

 

Or if, in 1900, they predicted ocean-crossing airplanes and submarines,

world-girdling Zeppelins, sixty-story buildings, radio, metal that can

be made to resist gravity and float in the air--these would have been

other "astounding" stories.

 

To-day, time has gone by, and all these things are commonplace. That is

the only real difference between the astounding and the

commonplace--Time.

 

To-morrow, more astounding things are going to happen. Your children--or

their children--are going to take a trip to the moon. They will be able

to render themselves invisible--a problem that has already been partly

solved. They will be able to disintegrate their bodies in New York and

reintegrate them in China--and in a matter of seconds.

 

Astounding? Indeed, yes.

 

Impossible? Well--television would have been impossible, almost

unthinkable, ten years ago.

 

Now you will see the kind of magazine that it is our pleasure to offer

you beginning with this, the first number of ASTOUNDING STORIES.

 

It is a magazine whose stories will anticipate the super-scientific

achievements of To-morrow--whose stories will not only be strictly

accurate in their science but will be vividly, dramatically and

thrillingly told.

 

Already we have secured stories by some of the finest writers of fantasy

in the world--men such as Ray Cummings, Murray Leinster, Captain S. P.

Meek, Harl Vincent, R. F. Starzl and Victor Rousseau.

 

So--order your next month's copy of ASTOUNDING STORIES in advance!

 

--_The Editor._

 

 

 

 

The Beetle Horde

 

A TWO-PART NOVEL

 

_By Victor Rousseau_

 

 

[Illustration: _Dodd and Tommy realised that they were powerless against

the monstrous beetles._]

 

[Sidenote: Only two young explorers stand in the way of the mad Bram's

horrible revenge--the releasing of his trillions of man-sized beetles

upon an utterly defenseless world.]

 

 

 

 

CHAPTER I

 

_Dodd's Discovery_

 

 

Out of the south the biplane came winging back toward the camp, a black

speck against the dazzling white of the vast ice-fields that extended

unbroken to the horizon on every side.

 

It came out of the south, and yet, a hundred miles further back along

the course on which it flew, it could not have proceeded in any

direction except northward. For a hundred miles south lay the south

pole, the goal toward which the Travers Expeditions had been pressing

for the better part of that year.

 

Not that they could not have reached it sooner. As a matter of fact,

the pole had been crossed and re-crossed, according to the estimate of

Tommy Travers, aviator, and nephew of the old millionaire who stood

fairy uncle to the expedition. But one of the things that was being

sought was the exact site of the pole. Not within a couple of miles or

so, but within the fraction of an inch.

 

It had something to do with Einstein, and something to do with

terrestrial magnetism, and the variations of the south magnetic pole,

and the reason therefore, and something to do with parallaxes and the

precession of the equinoxes and other things, this search for the pole's

exact location. But all that was principally the affair of the

astronomer of the party. Tommy Travers, who was now evidently on his way

back, didn't give a whoop for Einstein, or any of the rest of the stuff.

He had been enjoying himself after his fashion during a year of

frostbites and hard rations, and he was beginning to anticipate the

delights of the return to Broadway.

 

Captain Storm, in charge of the expedition, together with the five

others of the advance camp, watched the plane maneuver up to the tents.

She came down neatly on the smooth snow, skidded on her runners like an

expert skater, and came to a stop almost immediately in front of the

marquee.

 

Tommy Travers leaped out of the enclosed cockpit, which, shut off by

glass from the cabin, was something like the front seat of a limousine.

 

"Well, Captain, we followed that break for a hundred miles, and there's

no ground cleft, as you expected," he said. "But Jim Dodd and I picked

up something, and Jim seems to have gone crazy."

 

* * * * *

 

Through the windows of the cabin, Jim Dodd, the young archaeologist of

the party, could be seen apparently wrestling with something that looked

like a suit of armor. By the time Captain Storm, Jimmy, and the other

members of the party had reached the cabin door, Dodd had got it open

and flung himself out backward, still hugging what he had found, and

maneuvering so that he managed to fall on his back and sustain its

weight.

 

"Say, what the--what--what's that?" gasped Storm.

 

Even the least scientific minded of the party gasped in amazement at

what Dodd had. It resembled nothing so much as an enormous beetle. As a

matter of fact, it was an insect, for it had the three sections that

characterize this class, but it was merely the shell of one. Between

four and five feet in height, when Dodd stood it on end, it could now be

seen to consist of the hard exterior substance of some huge, unknown

coleopter.

 

This substance, which was fully three inches thick over the thorax,

looked as hard as plate armor.

 

"What is it?" gasped Storm again.

 

* * * * *

 

Tommy Travers made answer, for James Dodd was evidently incapable of

speech, more from emotion than from the force with which he had landed

backward in the snow.

 

"We found it at the pole, Captain," he said. "At least, pretty near

where the pole ought to be. We ran into a current of warm air or

something. The snow had melted in places, and there were patches of bare

rock. This thing was lying in a hollow among them."

 

"If I didn't see it before my eyes, I'd think you crazy, Tommy," said

Storm with some asperity. "What is it, a crab?"

 

"Crab be damned!" shouted Jim Dodd, suddenly recovering his faculties.

"My God, Captain Storm, don't you know the difference between an insect

and a crustacean? This is a fossil beetle. Don't you see the

distinguishing mark of the coleoptera, those two elytra, or wing-covers,

which meet in the median dorsal line? A beetle, but with the shell of a

crustacean instead of mere chitin. That's what led you astray, I expect.

God, what a tale we'll have to tell when we get back to New York! We'll

drop everything else, and spend years, if need be, looking for other

specimens."

 

"Like fun you will!" shouted Higby, the astronomer of the party. "Lemme

tell you right here, Dodd, nobody outside the Museum of Natural History

is going to care a damn about your old fossils. What we're going to do

is to march straight to the true pole, and spend a year taking

observations and parallaxes. If Einstein's brochure, in which he links

up gravitation with magnetism, is correct--"

 

"Fossil beetles!" Jim Dodd burst out, ignoring the astronomer. "That

means that in the Tertiary Era, probably, there existed forms of life in

the antarctic continent that have never been found elsewhere. Imagine a

world in which the insect reached a size proportionate to the great

saurians, Captain Storm! I'll wager poor Bram discovered this. That's

why he stayed behind when the Greystoke Expedition came within a hundred

miles of the pole. I'll wager he's left a cairn somewhere with full

details inside it. We've got to find it. We--"

 

* * * * *

 

But Jim Dodd, suddenly realizing that the rest of the party could hardly

be said to share his enthusiasm in any marked degree, broke off and

looked sulky.

 

"You say you found this thing pretty nearly upon the site of the true

pole?" Captain Storm asked Tommy.

 

"Within five miles, I'd say, Captain. The fog was so bad that we

couldn't get our directions very well."

 

"Well, then, there's going to be no difficulty," answered Storm. "If

this fair weather lasts, we'll be at the pole in another week, and we'll

start making our permanent camp. Plenty of opportunity for all you

gentlemen. As for me, I'm merely a sailor, and I'm trying to be

impartial.

 

"And please remember, gentlemen, that we're well into March now, and

likely to have the first storms of autumn on us any day. So let's drop

the argument and remember that we've got to pull together!"

 

* * * * *

 

Tommy Travers was the only skilled aviator of the expedition, which had

brought two planes with it. It was a queer friendship that had sprung up

between him and Jim Dodd. Tommy, the blasé ex-Harvard man, who was known

along Broadway, and had never been able to settle down, seemed as

different as possible from the spectacled, scholarly Dodd, ten years his

senior, red-haired, irascible, and living, as Tommy put it, in the Age

of Old Red Sandstone, instead of in the year 1930 A. D.

 

It was generally known--though the story had been officially

denied--that there had been trouble in the Greystoke Expedition of three

years before. Captain Greystoke had taken the brilliant, erratic Bram,

of the Carnegie Archaeological Institute, with him, and Bram's history

was a long record of trouble.

 

It was Bram who had exploded the faked neolithic finds at Mannheim,

thereby earning the undying enmity of certain European savants, but

brilliantly demolishing them when he smashed the so-called Mannheim

stone pitcher (valued at a hundred thousand dollars) with a pocket-axe,

and caustically inquired whether neolithic man used babbit metal rivets

to fasten on his jug handles.

 

* * * * *

 

Bram's brilliant work in the investigation of the origin of the negrito

Asiatic races had been awarded one of the Nobel prizes, and Bram had

declined it in an insulting letter because he disapproved of the year's

prize award for literature.

 

He had been a storm center for years, embittered by long opposition,

when he joined the Greystoke Expedition for the purpose of investigating

the marine fauna of the antarctic continent.

 

And it was known that his presence had nearly brought the Greystoke

Expedition to the point of civil war. Rumor said he had been

deliberately abandoned. His enemies hoped he had. The facts seemed to

be, however, that in an outburst of temper he had walked out of camp in

a furious snowstorm and perished. For days his body had been sought in

vain.

 

Jimmy Dodd had run foul of Bram some years before, when Bram had

published a criticism of one of Dodd's addresses dealing with fossil

monotremes, or egg-laying mammals. In his inimitable way, Bram had

suggested that the problem which came first, the egg or the chicken, was

now seen to be linked up with the Darwinian theory, and solved in the

person of Dodd.

 

Nevertheless, Jimmy Dodd entertained a devoted admiration for the memory

of the dead scientist. He believed that Bram must have left records of

inestimable importance in a cairn before he died. He wanted to find that

cairn.

 

And he knew, what a number of Bram's enemies knew, that the dead

scientist had been a morphine addict. He believed that he had wandered

out into the snow under the influence of the drug.

 

* * * * *

 

Dodd, who shared a tent with Tommy, had raved the greater part of the

night about the find.

 

"Well, but see here, Jimmy, suppose these beetles did inhabit the

antarctic continent a few million years ago, why get excited?" Tommy had

asked.

 

"Excited?" bellowed Dodd. "It opens one of the biggest problems that

science has to face. Why haven't they survived into historic times? Why

didn't they cross into Australia, like the opossum, by the land bridge

then existent between that continent and South America? Beetles five

feet in length, and practically invulnerable! What killed them off? Why

didn't they win the supremacy over man?"

 

Jimmy Dodd had muttered till he went to sleep, and he had muttered

worse in his dreams. Tommy was glad that Captain Storm had given them

permission to return to the same spot next morning and look for further

fossils, though his own interest in them was of the slightest.

 

The dogs were being harnessed next morning when the two men hopped into

the plane. The thermometer was unusually high for the season, for in the

south polar regions the short summer is usually at an end by March.

Tommy was sweating in his furs in a temperature well above the freezing

point. The snow was crusted hard, the sky overcast with clouds, and a

wind was blowing hard out of the south, and increasing in velocity

hourly.

 

"A bad day for starting," said Captain Storm. "Looks like one of the

autumn storms was blowing up. If I were you, I'd watch the weather,

Tommy."

 

* * * * *

 

Tommy glanced at Dodd, who was huddled in the rear cockpit, fuming at

the delay, and grinned whimsically. "I guess I can handle her, Captain,"

he answered. "It's only an hour's flight to where he found that fossil."

 

"Just as you please," said Storm curtly. He knew that Tommy's judgment

as a pilot could always be relied upon. "You'll find us here when you

return," he added. "I've counter-manded the order to march. I don't like

the look of the weather at all."

 

Tommy grinned again and pressed the starter. The engine caught and

warmed up. One of the men kicked away the blocks of ice that had been

placed under the skids to serve as chocks. The plane taxied over the

crusted snow, and took off into the south.

 

* * * * *

 

The camp was situated in a hollow among the ice-mountains that rose to a

height of two or three thousand feet all around. Tommy had not dreamed

how strongly the gale was blowing until he was over the top of them.

Then he realized that he was facing a tougher proposition than he had

calculated on. The storm struck the biplane with full force.

 

A snowstorm was driving up rapidly, blackening the sky. The sun, which

only appeared for a brief interval every day, was practically touching

the horizon as it rose to make its minute arc in the sky. A star was

visible through a rift in the clouds overhead, and the pale daylight in

which they had started had already become twilight.

 

Tommy was tempted to turn back, but it was only a hundred miles, and

Jimmy Dodd would give him no peace if he did so. So he put the plane's

nose resolutely into the wind, watching his speed indicator drop from a

hundred miles per hour to eighty, sixty, forty--less.

 

The storm was beating up furiously. Of a sudden the clouds broke into a

deluge of whirling snow.

 

In a moment the windshield was a frozen, opaque mass. Tommy opened it,

and peered out into the biting air. He could see nothing.... The plane,

caught in the fearful cross-currents that swirl about the southern roof

of the world, was fluttering like a leaf in the wind. The altimeter was dropping dangerously.