Page:Weird Tales v15n01 1930-01.djvu/79

dozen feet of it, a half-dozen—was almost within reach of it—and then another great glistening arm had looped lightning-like from the masses behind and had caught and held him in its cold grip, while upon him and upon Mallett swept the gleaming floods from which those arms had shot out!

Ralton felt that cold, terrific grip about him, pulling him backward, the shining masses behind gliding swiftly upon him, and as they did so he put his last strength into one supreme effort, straining with a final mad burst of strength toward the control-knob just before him. Beneath that superhuman effort the relentless grip that held him relaxed a little for an instant, and in that instant Ralston's forward-straining fingers had just touched the control-knob, had flicked it sharply upward from the white letters at which it stood to those just above, from the cosmic ray vibrations to those of the radio-active vibrations.

The next instant it seemed to him that over all the world there lay a sudden, tremendous stillness, a complete and utter cessation of all movement and sound, as the grip that held him, the gray masses that had been rushing forward upon him and upon Mallett paused, halted, hesitated. Then, as he swayed there, he felt the grip relax and disappear, saw dazedly that the translucent arm about him had changed oddly, had shriveled suddenly, crumbled into a smear of gray powder that fell to the ground! And the mighty masses behind him, the great tides of protoplasm on the cone's summit and sides, and those he could see out over the island's level sands far below, all had crumbled, too, disintegrated in that same moment, and where they had been was but a thick coating of fine gray powder! Gray powder in the coating of which behind them lay the dark, twisted bodies of Munson and the others! Gray powder that lay, he knew, over all earth where the protoplasm masses had been but a moment before, that lay in city and on land, the sole remaining evidence of the gigantic masses which the great condenser with its concentrated cosmic rays had built up over all earth and which with its concentrated radio-active rays it had in the same way destroyed! Gray powder, that alone remained of the greatest and most terrible menace ever to challenge the existence of man and the world of man!

Ralton staggered to Mallett's side, half led and half dragged his friend, still dazed, toward his plane that stood still untouched at the clearing's other side. Into its front cockpit he helped him, turned a switch and whirled the propeller. Another moment, and with motor roaring the little plane was speeding across the clearing, lifting sharply upward into the growing light of dawn, speeding away from the giant cone and island, over the gray waters toward the south.

South—south—Ralton, with hands on the controls and with head thrown weakly back, let the plane find its own track through the upper air as it roared on. Swaying drunkenly, it flashed southward high above the clean gray sea, with the clean salt air rushing cold against his face and that of Mallett before him. And still toward the south he raced, with the gray light of dawn to his left changing to gold as the rising sun lifted above the horizon. South—south———

The world ahead of him, which had been saved from doom at the last, not by Mallett and him but by fate, was not in Ralton's thoughts as he thundered on. Nor were the explanations of that doom and that escape which only they could give to rejoicing humanity. He wanted only, in that moment, to race farther and farther from the island of hell that was dwindling in the waters far behind them; wanted only to speed farther and farther from