Page:Weird Tales v13n04.djvu/81

shoulder as she sat beside us bravely attempting to choke down a few morsels of food, although she must have felt that every bite would strangle her.

"And how do you know that?" I demanded.

"From the diary again. In it the inventor often mentioned his son and assistant. I have been puzzled to account for his whereabouts, but the 'shadow-men,' as you call them, of course forced him to help in the construction of another cube and then made him come along to aid them in landing."

"And what else does your precious diary tell you?" I asked. "Does it tell you the purpose of all that?" And I waved my hand at the swift and never-ending activity on the plain before us.

"It does, indeed," he replied, "although I believe I would have guessed it even though it had not. But come, let us see how they are progressing and I will tell you about it."

Night had descended upon the plateau even as we ate. Night but not darkness. From a score of vantage-points, powerful lights similar to those we had observed in the interior of the cube were focused upon the structure in the plain. A soft but penetrating glow bathed the whole area in the center of the ring of cubes.

"Do I need to enlighten you, Dana?" inquired the old man as we watched the work. "Doesn't the very shape and structure of the machinery suggest something to you?"

"It might be a big gun emplacement," I hazarded, "except that there is nothing to shoot at. It might be a telescope or a huge searchlight or almost anything."

"But the direction in which it is pointing! Man, can't you see that it is aimed at the sky?"

Intuition suggested to me a purpose. "You mean it is——"

"Precisely! Imagine, Dana, that you are back in the days of the World War. You are intending to seize enemy territory. What would you do first?"

"I would send out a scouting party, of course."

"Of course you would. You see before you a scouting party dispatched from a dying world. Now suppose that this party entered the enemy's territory and found conditions suitable for a grand attack; in this case suppose they discovered that the earth was habitable and free from fierce inhabitants. What is the next thing to do?"

"Obviously to send a messenger back to tell the forces to come on and consolidate the territory."

"But suppose a messenger isn't practicable. Let us say that the scouting party has traveled 100,000,000 miles at a speed greater than that of a falling body. What then?"

"Then I would use some other means of communication. Say wireless or a rocket or a flare."

"Precisely. My boy, your intelligence is rapidly becoming more and more acute. That is just what our friends, the enemy, are doing. You see before you a giant searchlight or flare which at the proper moment will be touched off, signaling to skilled observers with a battery of telescopes on another terrestrial body that our planet is ripe and ready for the picking. Can you imagine what will result?"

The probability was appalling. I visioned scores and hundreds of such cubes descending at random upon an unsuspecting world. I saw cities leveled as by a stroke of lightning. I saw armies wiped out over night by strange and unknown weapons. I dreamed of a world writhing in agony as it attempted vainly to fight off an overwhelming and implacable foe.

"Are you beginning to comprehend what we are up against?" asked the doctor. "Can you imagine the terror