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Title: The ghost planet

Author: Murray Leinster

Release Date: March 8, 2023 [eBook #70230]

Language: English

Produced by: Greg Weeks, Mary Meehan and the Online Distributed
             Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net

*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE GHOST PLANET ***





                           THE GHOST PLANET

                             a short novel
                          by MURRAY LEINSTER

           [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from
                Thrilling Wonder Stories December 1948.
         Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that
         the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]




                               CHAPTER I

                           _Solar Newcomer_


Tom Drake was the first human being who is known to have come in
contact with the inhabitants of the Ghost Planet. At the time the Ghost
Planet wasn't even a name. It was undreamed of.

More, Tom had to admit that he neither saw nor heard nor felt the
creatures whose existence he reported. The instruments of the
_Weddington_ had recorded absolutely nothing out of the ordinary. So,
on his arrival at Earth, Tom was politely fired from the staff of the
Blair Memorial Expedition to Titan and found his affairs in a parlous
state.

The encounter itself almost justified that action. The _Weddington_ was
the emergency craft left on Titan with the observing members of the
expedition. After eleven months of routine observations temperaments
clashed, crotchets developed and lunacy impended. So the _Weddington_
was sent back to earth for mail, reading-matter and visi-records to
save the situation.

Because of her size, only two men were required to man her. One was
Tom Drake, who had no nerves and was the lowliest member of the
expedition's staff--the other navigating member of the crew, was the
most high-strung and nerve-racked of the whole force on Titan.

Four days out toward Earth he blew up with a loud report and had
to take a hypnotic for twelve hours of restful slumber so he could
continue to navigate the _Weddington_. The _Weddington's_ course was
close by Mars then and, while the navigator snored heavily in his bunk,
Tom Drake took post in the control room and relaxed.

It was very lonely. The sun was a small round flame. The stars were
many-colored unwinking specks of light. Tom Drake regarded the
instruments which said that the little ship went on her course without
incident. Mars was a dim red disk of pinhead size far off to the left.

The tiny ship went streaking through emptiness without any of the
ghastly sounds her drive produced in atmosphere, leaving behind
the thinnest and most tenuous of tails, which was created by the
infinitesimal exhaust of ionized gases.

Later Tom was inclined to credit the whole thing to that tail. The
_Weddington_ was still accelerating and would do so for three days
more, switching to deceleration well past Mars. Partial compensation
for acceleration allowed of a high speed-gain rate.

Everything seemed utterly normal--depressingly so, in fact. The
exploration of the other planets of the solar system had been
disappointing. None would support a colony. There were observatories on
Mars and Luna and Mercury, but the _Weddington_ was alone in emptiness.

Tom thought regretfully of ancient dreams of interplanetary commerce
and almost resentfully of the recent tendency not even to dream of
interstellar journeyings.

And then he saw something odd.

It was a tiny speck of mistiness, perhaps half the size of the disk of
Mars. It was almost in line with the red planet. And in interplanetary
space there should be nothing misty save comets. Tom regarded it
absently for a moment, then swung a telescope to bear.

It was a globular mass of unsubstantial reflecting stuff, like a puff
of smoke in emptiness. Which, of course, was impossible. Also, this
particular object was new. It hadn't been in sight in the neighborhood
of Mars a little while since.

Presently it was larger and its angular distance from Mars had
increased. Since it was on the side away from the sun and the
_Weddington_ sped sunward, that made him stare. He took a reading
of the angle between the mist and the planet. Ten minutes later the
mistiness had increased in size by several seconds of arc and the angle
between it and Mars had decreased again.

The logical inference would be that it was between the space-ship and
the planet, that it was moving nearer to the space-ship and that it
had just changed course. But that was preposterous! The thing had no
substance! In the telescope he could see fourth magnitude stars through
the very center of the mist.

       *       *       *       *       *

Half an hour after he first sighted it, it was on the sunward side of
Mars and was larger still. Had it been a solid object he would have
considered that it was accelerating at a terrific rate and speeding to
intercept him.

But it was not solid! Not only could he see remote stars through it
but, when he turned a radar-scanner on it, the instrument registered
exactly nothing. There was not even a tiny meteorite in its center.
There was nothing there except mistiness. But it continued to move and
grow.

He went back to rouse the navigator but could get no response. Hypnogen
tablets aren't habit forming, but they are powerful and the navigator
was out cold. Tom returned to the control room and regarded the
mistiness again.

As nearly as he could tell the mist was headed on a collision
course and accelerating at four or five gravities. He cut off the
_Weddington's_ drive, so the little ship would merely drift on with her
attained speed and without acceleration. That should make the misty
globe pass on ahead.

But it changed course. From terrific acceleration, too, it began
suddenly to decelerate. It would still meet the _Weddington_ in space.

It was not solid. The whole business was unthinkable, but Tom sweated
suddenly. He thought of all the wild imaginative tales that had been
written about monsters of space. He used the gyros to swing the
_Weddington_ about. He blasted recklessly at two gravities at right
angles to his former course.

The mist swerved and continued to grow in size.

An hour after his first glimpse of it the misty sphere was very near
indeed--so near that there could be no possible question that it meant
to close with the _Weddington_. Tom Drake sweated profusely. He sent
the small emergency-ship in crazy gyrations at all angles and all
accelerations up to four.

The unsubstantial sphere followed each change of direction with
precision. It matched his speed. It reached a point no more than a
hundred yards away and kept that distance for long minutes through
dozens of maneuverings.

It was a diaphanous globe of utter unsubstantiality. Stars could be
seen through it clearly. Yet it seemed to Tom that some distant stars
were dimmed a little more than others, as if the mistiness varied in
thickness with an internal structure. He had a good opportunity to make
these observations. The sphere was a good thousand feet in diameter and
for minutes it clung close, no more than three hundred feet away. Then,
suddenly, it closed in.

And nothing happened. Absolutely nothing. The _Weddington_ was
enclosed, was engulfed in the mist. But no alarm bell rang. No
instrument showed the slightest change of registration. Indeed,
staring out from within the substance of the globe, it was hard to
detect any difference in the look of things. But the _Weddington_ was
unquestionably in the very center of the sphere of mist.

Tom Drake had an eerie feeling that he was being watched intently by
sentient beings. He knew that from a little distance his ship would
appear to be the center of a sharply edged, ball-shaped nimbus like the
head of a comet. He knew that something was watching him. He sweated.
But no instrument needle swerved from its peg, nothing happened and
nothing happened and nothing happened.

Then the globe suddenly shifted. It was off to one side. It moved
swiftly away. It headed back toward Mars at an incredible acceleration.

That was all. There was no damage to the _Weddington_. There was no
registry on any instrument tape to corroborate Tom's impressions. But
the memory was very vivid. Tom had the curious, unpleasant impression
that he had been examined intently by ghosts and then left behind when
their curiosity was satisfied. It was not a nice feeling.

When his navigator woke he told him about the visitation. The navigator
was annoyed. Tom's tale was nonsense. The _Weddington_, though, was
off-course and that was a serious matter. He returned her to her proper
line and speed and fretfully reproved Tom for his absurdity.

In time he made report to the trustees of the Blair Memorial Fund.
Tom was questioned. He told his tale frankly, then indignantly, then
resentfully as he was disbelieved. When he was informed that his
contract with the expedition was canceled he was enraged. He was
practically thrown out.

He was, in fact, not only given the heave-ho but classified as
an unstable personality, which would not help in getting further
employment--and that was a serious matter, those days. Times were not
good on Earth.

The population of the planet had increased to the point where
merely living was a problem. Tom Drake nearly starved--because he'd
encountered the inhabitants of the Ghost Planet before the Ghost Planet
was known to exist. His friend Lan Hardy took him in while he hunted
for a job.

Then, three months later, the Ghost Planet appeared in the Solar System.




                              CHAPTER II

                        _Non-Material Invasion_


When the Ghost Planet appeared on the far side of Neptune, of course,
nobody on Earth thought it meant anything at all. The first news
releases said only that a new comet had been discovered. It was coming
in at a surprisingly high velocity and it had developed a head at an
extraordinary distance from the sun.

It had no tail, as yet, but one was expected to form. A comet's head
and tail, of course, are simply ionized gases of almost infinite
thinness, driven out and away from the sun by light pressure.

Tom's friend Lan Hardy saw the news releases, mentioned them to Tom and
forgot them. He was pulling wires desperately to get some sort of Guild
rating that would justify Kit McGuire in marrying him. Her father
had been World President and at the moment was in disgrace because he
hadn't been able to stave off an inevitable economic depression.

But Lan shared his apartment with Tom and confided all his amorous
dreams to him and after Tom found a job doing electronic design for a
very small manufacturer he stayed on with Lan because living quarters
were hard to come by.

Tom dug doggedly into books and found nothing that would explain his
experience between Mars and Earth and ultimately had to work out a
theory of his own. And then, without any real hope of ever putting his
ideas to use, he began to work out possible devices which would prove
or disprove his notion.

Even he, though, didn't connect the Ghost Planet with what he'd seen.
At first it was called simply a new comet which had developed a head
unusually far from the sun and so far had no tail. Besides, there was
not much time given to it on the newscasts.

Even when the astronomers mentioned that its course--they said
orbit--was a mathematically straight line headed accurately for the
Sun, there was too much other news on the vision-screens for anybody to
pay attention.

There was a scandal involving a prominent vision-screen actor. Two
of the biggest Guilds had locked horns and conflict between their
respective members was in prospect. A new fashion swept the earth and
every woman had to get an entirely new wardrobe.

Work rationing appeared likely in North America and a new orgiastic
religion turned up in Africa and spread like wildfire with a twenty
percent drop in industrial production as a consequence. Nobody paid
any attention to the Ghost Planet except the astronomers at the
government-supported observatories on Earth, Luna, Mars and Mercury.

Then Lan Hardy--trying to play politics for advancement--got into
trouble with a Guildmaster and was suspended from all connection with
Guild conducted industry. It became Tom's turn to provide the cash on
which both of them lived for a while.

Then the astronomers reported that the Ghost Planet--which they still
called a comet--had no detectable mass and was completely unaffected by
the mass of Neptune, which should have changed its line.

They added that their spectroscopes showed no sign of ionization of
the gaseous mass they then considered the Ghost Planet to be and they
expressed amazement at its almost perfectly globular shape. And then
they observed that it had a regular diurnal rotation, proved by the
Doppler-effect difference between the light of opposite limbs.

Still there was no public interest. A mutation in soil bacteria in
Western Europe threatened the fertility of ten percent of the world's
tillable soil. Chicago won the World's Pennant. The world government
administration which had taken over from Ex-President McGuire raised
taxes all around and blamed his regime for the necessity.

The Seda Mountain ore deposit was officially declared exhausted. A new
vision-screen comedian shot up to the top of the popularity polls. The
value of the prizes for naming "Mr. Sh-h-h-h" on a quiz program mounted
to $120,000.

And Lan Hardy was told that since he was suspended from his
Guild--which was worse than expulsion, because he couldn't even try to
join another--his quarters in a Guild-owned building had to be vacated.
So he and Tom had nowhere to live.

Their personal dilemma bothered nobody but themselves. Even their
friends joined the rest of the world in absorbed attention to the
prospects and games of the Interhemisphere Polo Games, with the usual
rumors of fixing, bribery and deliberate injury of players.

In the week before Lan and Tom were to be evicted, while they sought
vainly for other lodging, Australia came from far behind and classified
for the finals against the Hungarian five. Ex-President McGuire
forwarded to Earth Government a heavily worded statement which those
then in office unanimously ignored.

An atomic-energy plant in Patagonia flared blue and was automatically
dumped into the pool of cadmium its flaring had melted. There was a
prison break in Montreal. There was an airways accident on the Honolulu
run.

       *       *       *       *       *

Nobody thought about the Ghost Planet, now a flaring globe of
unsubstantiality some thirty-two thousand miles in diameter, heading in
past Mars.

Then there came the night of the final Interhemisphere polo game. Tom
and Lan saw it on the vision-screen from the lodging they were so soon
to vacate. They were watching keenly with the feeling of absolute
presence. They saw the multiple-balconied stands about the field, the
black and cloudy sky overhead and the playing field itself in its glare
of invisible, non-glaring lights.

And in the second chukker, as there was a tumultuous rush of men and
horses after a racing ball, something thin and pallidly glowing and a
thousand feet through seemed to settle down above the lighted field. It
was barely visible on the vision-screen until the roaring of the crowd
changed to panicky shrillness.

Then the sports announcer said crisply, "Something queer in the air.
It's barely visible. I'm changing the contrast."

The seeming soft lighting became harsh and hard and the vision-camera
swung upward and the photographic quality of the lens grew hard indeed.
Grainings appeared even in the night clouds overhead. Then the vision
grew clearer.

It was a round globe of mist, almost motionless in midair over the polo
field. It was not substantial. When a search beam struck it the light
went right through but, in puncturing, it seemed to disclose structure
inside.

And the internal details, misty as they were, were not the random
swirling patterns of mist but very specific lines and masses and angles
which were convincingly artificial. It looked very familiar to Tom.

A rocket soared upward from the stands. It had been placed to announce
the victors of the polo game. It spurted through the wraithlike
phenomenon unhindered and burst through in a spray of blue lights above
it. Those lights drifted down through the wraith and reiterated the
look of artificiality about its inner changes of thickness. They went
out.

The globe did not stir, though search-beams showed the smoke trail of
the rocket blowing sidewise through it. Had it been solid or real it
might have looked like an alien space-ship, a spectral space-ship,
curiously watching the polo game below. But it was not real. A private
plane, joy-riding overhead, made an hilarious lunatic dive at the
apparition, flew through it, flew through it again and nothing happened.

Presently, in its own good time, exactly as if it had lingered until
its curiosity was satisfied, the misty globe rose and vanished in the
darkness overhead. It acted exactly as if living beings in it had
become bored or annoyed and had gone away. It was remarkably like
the way that other misty thing had acted about the _Weddington_ three
months before.

"Now, what on earth was that?" demanded Lan, blankly.

Tom Drake smoked furiously and said nothing. Within minutes, the muted
beep-beeping call of a special news bulletin broke into the restored
but disorganized viewcast of the polo game. Jan Hardy switched to the
newscast channel.

"A special broadcast of comments on the apparition at the
Interhemispheric polo game ten minutes ago," snapped an announcer's
voice crisply.

The face of a famous scientist peered out of the screen.

"I was watching the game," he observed. "Until the recorded telecast
can be examined in detail, I can say only that it appears to be a very
curious meteorological phenomenon. Akin, perhaps, to radar-ghosts,
which are well-known and still not fully explained."

His face vanished. An eminent physicist took over.

"Very quaint, I would suggest a projected image of some sort, thrown
into emptiness by practical jokers, except that it reflected light
thrown upon it. That suggests that it was material. On the other
hand no material substance known can be penetrated by other material
substances without some disturbance of the penetrated substance."

His face disappeared. The world's best-publicized vision comedian
appeared.

"My head felt that big this morning," said the comedian and hiccoughed
in his inimitable fashion. Undoubtedly, it evoked gales of laughter
from his faithful fans. "I wondered what happened to my hangover. It
went to the polo game!"

He leered in his equally famous manner, and his face faded.

       *       *       *       *       *

Other faces and other voices. The special-events vision department
dragged in all the big names that could be reached within the spot news
time limit. Some hedged. Some tried feebly to wise crack. Some uttered
profound nothings. It was the standard sopping-up process designed to
get the maximum out of any news event that went on the air-waves. Lan
Hardy scowled.

"But what was it?" he demanded again. "This is just junk we're getting!"

The screen flickered again and there was ex-World-President McGuire
looking heavy-lidded out of the screen. He spoke with deliberate energy.

"I happen to know what the apparition was. I have had private reports.
Similar phenomena have been reported on Mars, Luna and Mercury.
Moreover, the survey-ship Arcturis passed close to the reported new
comet on its way back from Jupiter. Copies of photographs taken of the
appearance were sent me by personal friends.

"The appearance over the polo field was similar in kind to the new
comet. It came from the new comet. Two photographs of the comet show
such globes as we have just seen, arriving at and departing from the
so-called comet.

"I have informed the World Government of those facts. The Government
will doubtless issue a communication on the nature of the so-called
comet and such globular artifacts as the vision-screen just showed us."

His voice ceased. The screen went blank. A smooth anonymous voice said,
"This concludes the special-events broadcast about the appearance at
the Interhemispheric polo match. Further details will be included in
special feature broadcasts at the regular hours."

Tom Drake said slowly, "Globular artifacts."

"Crazy, eh?" said Lan brightly. "He's a fairly decent sort when you
know him though. Kit likes him, even though he's her father. Fairly
decent to me, too."

"I wonder what he heard from his private reports," said Tom. "I'd like
to talk to him. I'd like to see those reports. I wonder if we could
query it?"

Lan shrugged. Tom punched the dials on the vision-screen and a newsfile
clerk looked impersonally out of the screen.

"What's the data on this new comet?" asked Tom, frowning. "The one
McGuire just mentioned?"

"I do not recognize the reference," said the newsfile clerk detachedly,
"but the new comet file will be projected for you."

There was a click and the typed record of newscasts appeared on
the screen. Tom read absorbedly. Orbit ... mass zero ... diurnal
rotation ... un-ionized gases.... As he read the pulsing blue glow of
a personal communication call appeared on the screen under the file
image. He threw the switch to take the call. The newsfile faded. Kit
McGuire looked appealingly out of the screen.

"Oh, Tom! How-do! Do you know how I can locate Lan? My father wants him
to come out here--"

"He's right in this room," said Tom.

"Thanks. Lan--can you come out to the Coast at once? Father wants some
specialists. It's that new comet business. I told him you'd come and
might find another good man or two for him."

"I'll take the next plane," said Lan, beaming. "I'm being evicted
anyhow. But about someone to bring along--"

"Me," said Tom briefly from the background, "if I'll do."

"Sure!" said Lan. "I'll bring Tom. We're practically on the way!"

Kit smiled at Lan. Fondly, almost tenderly. But her forehead was
creased a little with worry.

Tom said, "What's up?"

"Father," said Kit, "made the mistake of calling the Government's
attention to the new comet. So they're ignoring it just because he
mentioned it. And--it's stopped."

Lan feasted his eyes upon her.

Tom said sharply, "What's that?"

"It's stopped," Kit repeated. "It was headed straight in for the sun.
And it's stopped. It's standing still out in space between Earth's
orbit and Mars."

"Oh, it couldn't do that!" protested Lan. "It simply couldn't! Heavenly
bodies can't stand still!"

"This one does," insisted Kit.

"Then what's up?" asked Lan. "Are we to get it started again?"

He grinned and Kit smiled in return. But she looked directly out of the
screen at Tom Drake.

"Father says it isn't a comet," she told Tom. "He says it's a planet. A
ghost planet. And somebody has to find out what it wants."

Tom jumped. The term "ghost planet" was something to make him sit up.
It suggested--many things. Tom didn't happen to agree with Kit's father
politically, but he did respect the older man's brains. And this meant
something! His own brain went into high gear.

While Lan filled out the call from Kit with zestful, romantic
conversation, Tom Drake put together the things he knew and some things
he wouldn't have guessed without that "ghost planet" phrase. They
added up to a brand-new concept which was upsetting.

He was packing his own possessions for travel when the call ended and
Lan came in, smiling sentimentally.

"Funny, eh?" said Lan comfortably. "Kit's actually worried!"

"So am I," said Tom. "It didn't occur to me before but now I begin to
see things. I saw one of those globes three months and more ago, out
by Mars. I couldn't make myself believe what it pointed to. It was a
scout. You see?

"Looking over our solar system for whatever it wants. And it must've
gotten an idea that what it wants is here and--well--the planet
followed it. It was a ghost space-ship from a ghost planet and it
didn't come here for fun. What would ghosts living on a ghost planet
and running ghost space-ships be wanting of Earth, Lan? Whatever it is
I'd hate to have them find it!"




                              CHAPTER III

                         _Go West, Young Men_


They left New York on the midnight plane and four hours later they
stepped off at the landing field at Pasadena. Ten minutes of shuttling
and they came above-ground at the very edge of the solidly built city.
Kit waved to them from her father's groundcar. It was still midnight by
clock time.

The groundcar drew up beside them on its two wheels. They entered and
it went hissing softly out to the openness beyond the city's limits.
One had to be rich to live outside a city these days.

The Guilds had taken over the functions of insurance organizations,
lodges and unions all in one, and building was now so costly that only
a rich man could own an individual dwelling on an individual plot of
ground. The Guilds themselves owned a good half of all the dwelling
units in America. So people looked envious as the groundcar sped out on
an arrow-straight road toward darkness.

It was almost the only private car in view. There was traffic but it
was gigantic ten and twelve and twenty-wheel trucks and trailers. The
groundcar dodged among them with needed agility and Kit spoke briefly
as she drove. She was accustomed to this sort of traffic. The pressure
of existence on an overcrowded world had made private vehicles almost
as rare as private houses.

"Quite a lot has happened since I called you," she said curtly. "Father
spoke over the visioncast about the thing that appeared over the polo
field tonight."

"We saw it," said Lan. He shifted his position to be closer to her on
the upholstered seat.

"An hour later the Administration told the newscasters that Father's
report had been received. Their only comment was that he seemed to be
very ill! They were hinting that he was crazy!" She laughed angrily.

Lan Hardy said softly, "Was that why you wanted me to come, Kit?"

"I want you to help prove he isn't crazy!" snapped Kit. "Just because
he's unpopular because he tried to be a good President, they're trying
to get more popular by ridiculing him!"

Tom said meditatively, "Some people think he was not only honest but
intelligent and that he had the right ideas as President. Naturally the
politicians who replaced him don't like that!"

Kit turned to him eagerly. "You're for him, then? You think he was a
good President?"

"I disagreed with him practically all the time," admitted Tom, "but I
did think he had brains--just not the kind for that job. I'm much more
interested in--"

"I'm not interested in your interests then," said Kit icily. She turned
warmly to Lan. "Lan, the problem for you to work on is a way to prove
that the Ghost Planet and those globes are what my father says and that
they're dangerous and something has to be done about them!"

Lan put his arm along the back of the seat behind her. He talked
soothingly in her ears. Tom sat in silence as the groundcar tore
through the night. Presently he looked thoughtfully up at the stars. He
watched them, continuing to piece things together.

Suddenly he said sharply, "Pull over to the side and stop the car, Kit!"

"Eh?" asked Lan, startled. "What's the matter?"'

"Pull over and stop!" snapped Tom. "It's important!"

In silence, Kit swerved the vehicle and went onto the shoulder of the
highway. She stopped. Tom spoke in a voice which sounded a little odd
even to himself.

"Turn off the lights. I mean it!"

Almost instinctively Kit obeyed. There was a temporary blackness all
about. There was, right here, no other vehicle to pierce the darkness
with its headlights or the silence with the sound of its motor. They
saw only the stars and heard only the shrill stridulation of insects
and the croaking of frogs in a nearby marsh. Then Tom pointed.

"Look there! Quick!"

Against the sky a gossamer, circular mistiness moved swiftly. It was
lighted by the stars which shone through it. It was moving. It was
perfectly round. Perhaps--_perhaps_--it glowed slightly. It rose in
utter silence and moved swiftly against the wind. It dwindled in size
and vanished.

"That one over the polo field on the other side of the world wasn't the
only one on Earth tonight," said Tom grimly. "Did you see that, Lan?"

Lan said easily, "It was the tip of a searchbeam lighting the clouds,
wasn't it, Tom? What of it?"

"That was a ghost-globe," said Tom shortly. "Like the one that chased
the _Weddington_ and caught it. It's from the new comet. From the
ghost planet. It's a ghost space-ship. There may be hundreds of them
searching for something here on Earth."

"Come now, Tom," said Lan kindly. "A plane dived right through the
thing over the polo field. It wasn't real. It couldn't be!"

"I didn't say it was real," said Tom briefly, "but it's actual. McGuire
is right. I wonder what they're after?"

       *       *       *       *       *

Kit started the groundcar again. It went on through the night. After
half an hour she turned in a private driveway and drove on a mile or
more to her father's house. She parked the car by a side entrance and
led the way within.

Her father was in his study. It was an engineer's study, with a great
commercial fine-grain vision-screen at one end. McGuire himself,
heavyset and prosaic as in the newscast, sat regarding an image on the
screen, shown with even greater perfection of detail than the news
screens would portray.

It was undoubtedly an image sent from some technical service on a
commercial wave band. The image was that of a field of stars, in the
center of which a sphere of pale mistiness hung stationary. Stars shown
behind it. Stars shone through it. The magnification was so great that
the slight oblateness of the wraithlike globe was visible. The image
was almost a yard across.

He swung in his chair as they entered, nodded to Lan, acknowledged the
introduction to Tom and waved his hand at the screen.

"It's stopped dead," he said heavily. "This image is from the Yerkes
telescope. Six hours ago it began to decelerate at a rate of close to
four gravities. It was going nearly two hundred miles a second--faster
than any interplanetary space-ship we've ever made has built up to. In
two hours it was down to a dead stop. And it's stayed stopped."

Lan said brightly, "Very interesting, sir."

"Smaller globes, like the one over the polo field, have been seen going
to it and coming from it," McGuire added heavily, "but I can't seem to
get any--"

"We saw another, sir," said Tom, "on the way here from town. And I saw
one nearly three months ago, out near Mars."

McGuire swung in his chair. "Yes?"

Tom told the story of the _Weddington_ and the ghost-ship. "When I was
in the middle of it," he finished, "I had the feeling that I was being
watched. But my report got me fired from the Titan Expedition as a
lunatic."

McGuire asked crisp questions. Mostly they were technical ones, about
acceleration of the ghost-ship and the like. McGuire had been an
engineer, not a politician, before his election to the World Presidency
and he was not thinking like a politician now. He was absorbed in a
problem in whose importance he believed.

But Lan interrupted the questioning to say respectfully, "You can count
on us to do any work you need done, Mr. McGuire. Have you anything in
mind for us to do right away?"

McGuire looked at his daughter's fiancé detachedly. "I'm waiting for
reports," he observed. "It was Kit's idea that you might be useful. Any
suggestions?"

"No, sir," said Lan cheerfully. "Only that we get our luggage in from
the car. I'll do that, sir."

He made a graceful exit, followed by Kit. Tom stayed uncomfortably
where he stood. "I've got a rather crazy idea, sir," he said awkwardly.
"It comes from a theory--"

A speaker unit spoke with startling clarity from the wall. "A number
of mist-globes are leaving the sunward side of the large sphere. They
appear to be arranging themselves in a geometric pattern."

McGuire pressed a button and the image on the screen changed to an
even more enlarged view of the ghost planet. Only a part of its edge
was in view, now. And there was a distinct formation of tiny, almost
transparent objects moving away from it.

There were dozens of them. They spread out in an expanding V and moved
steadily across the star-speckled background. They looked like bits of
thistledown in space. Stars shone right through them.

The speaker unit said crisply, "They are accelerating at four point two
gravities. Their course appears to be toward Earth."

McGuire watched. Tom drew in his breath sharply. He reached forward and
touched the screen.

"Look!" he said sharply. "If this Ghost Planet were solid--see? There'd
be mountains here!"

There were small but distinct serrations at the edge of the almost
transparent disk. The loudspeaker spoke again.

"This is the third such formation that has moved toward Earth in the
past four hours."

"And the Administration says I'm crazy," said McGuire wrily. "Strictly
speaking, it's none of my business. It should be left to official
departments. But I was head of the government for awhile. I know better
than to think the only duty of a private citizen is obedience!"

Then he reverted to Tom's comment. "Of course they're mountains.
But they're mist. They're impalpable. They're imponderable. They're
unreal! But if they were real--if a planet thirty-odd thousand miles
in diameter moved into our solar system and its space-ships began to
explore Earth in squadrons--then I think the Government wouldn't call
me crazy!"

       *       *       *       *       *

Tom said carefully, "There is--er--substance of this sort known?"

There was another booming voice from another room beyond McGuire's
study.

"News bulletin! News bulletin! Two misty objects or apparitions like
that seen over the interhemispheric polo match some hours ago have
appeared over Honolulu! They are hovering over the city now!"

Kit appeared in the doorway, her hair a little disheveled. "Father! Did
you hear that?"

McGuire got up and walked heavily out into the next room, where a
standard broadcast vision receiver had interrupted a period of romantic
music to bellow out the news. The technical screen in the study would
remain on the observatory beam McGuire had arranged for. This was a
news broadcast all the world would see. Lan Hardy got up hastily from a
sofa. Tom observed that he looked annoyed.

The three men--McGuire, Tom and Lan--watched the news broadcast in
silence while Kit looked from one to another of their faces. This
vision cast was not as clear as that from the polo field. The misty
globes were higher and not as well lighted, even though search-beams
sought them out and followed them.

The two globes drifted over the city, stopped together, moved onward
together, made systematic circlings as if inspecting everything below
them with great care--and went off into the darkness.

"Well?" said McGuire when it was over. He spoke to Tom. It apparently
did not occur to him to question Lan.

Tom hesitated. Then he said, "Look here, sir. We say things are real or
unreal as we say they are red or green. But there isn't any absolute
redness or greenness. Things are just more or less red or green.

"We recognize that redness and greenness are abstractions only. Maybe
reality and unreality are more or less abstract ideas too. Maybe
nothing is wholly real and nothing is absolutely unreal."

McGuire stared at Tom. Thoughtfully. "Mmmmm. Go on."

"Maybe there's no absolute reality," said Tom. "Just as there's no
absolute red. And maybe there's no absolute unreality. There are some
suns in the star catalogs that are known to have densities as low as
the vacua in X-ray tubes.

"That's not matter in the ordinary sense of the word. Those suns glow,
and they exist, but they're on the border of unreality. If this ghost
planet and these globes are like that--"

McGuire looked at him in a curious mixture of approval and doubt.

"If they are--"

"If there's a type of matter on the borderline of reality, it
might be matter on the borderline between our cosmos and another.
Matter not wholly real in our universe, but not wholly unreal
either. Possibly--well--latent matter. Like latent energy.
Like--say--trigger-energy or atomic energy.

"It would be real enough in its own universe. It would even have an
infinitesimal, perhaps immeasurable mass in this. The point is that if
this were a planet from a ghost sun, searching for something here--it
wouldn't be here for the trip.

"And it would have some way either of turning into matter which was
real here or of making our matter into its own kind. Its space-ships
are spying on us. It must have a purpose. It could be--"

Tom hesitated. "Apparently its space-ships have been making public
appearances to see if we have any weapon we can use against them. When
they find we haven't--when they're sure--they'll probably begin to
seize on whatever it is they want of us."

McGuire said practically, "And what would you guess that to be?"

Tom shrugged. "They could get any possible mineral matter from Mercury,
and most organic materials from Venus. But there's no intelligent life
except on Earth. Would they want intelligent creatures--in short, men?
I don't know."

But as it happened Tom made that guess just eight hours before the
first human being, in Cleveland, Ohio, was engulfed in a misty globe
which came down from the sky and enclosed him--and then, before the
eyes of his goggling fellow-humans, turned him into mist like the thing
which had captured him.




                              CHAPTER IV

                       _Political Implications_


It is always dawn somewhere on Earth. Tom Drake saw the sun rise where
he worked feverishly in the private laboratory attached to McGuire's
house. McGuire had been an eminent engineer before he became the most
unpopular president the World Government ever had.

He was a sound thinker even after he was retired to private life and
became the Earth's most scorned private citizen. He was equipped to
verify, with his own apparatus, any material and any calculation used
in any type of engineering design he was likely to be concerned with.

Tom worked all night long till sunrise, putting together an unlikely
small contrivance which--if it worked--would tell something about what
the ghost-globes were made of. _If_ one could be contacted.

Meanwhile there was panic in Calcutta where a religious festival
procession turned into stark terror-stricken flight when a ghost-globe
settled down in the middle of it. But the ghost-globes were merely
facts.

They rated with flying disks and other phenomena which at various
times had been credibly reported by large numbers of people and then
had ceased to be reported and been dropped into the limbo of forgotten
things. The globes had been broadcast, to be sure, but nobody--except
ex-President McGuire--had an explanation for them and nobody was
willing to take his word for anything.

He'd become World President because the public was tired of
professional politicians which were nothing else. He'd suffered the
fate of all men less thick skinned than professional politicians.
When, returned to private life, he tried to do a public service he was
ignored.

Part of that ignoring took the form of playing up all other news items
than the ghost-globes and the ghost planet. A woman in Cairo had
quintuplets. A London-Ottawa plane crashed on landing and a hundred and
twenty persons were killed.

There was a school fire in Johannesburg, an unusually gory murder in
Stockholm, a quaint "royal" wedding between members of formerly royal
families in Central Europe, with ancient pomp and ceremony. There was
a jurisdictional dispute between two Guilds which was threatening to
throw two hundred thousand men out of work because of the question of
the classification of four jobs in an atomic-power plant in Siberia and
the regular run of sensational and merely idiotic news.

But one item made the morning newscasts about the globes. One of them
settled upon the Smithsonian Museum main building in Washington. When
the sun rose in the Eastern time-zone the globe enclosed two-thirds of
an antique building dating from the early twentieth century.

It was pale and thin and wraithlike but the morning sunlight showed it
clearly. It looked rather like a balloon of sheerest gossamer except
for those disturbing hints of internal structure.

For some reason unknown fire engines were called out. They poured
huge streams of water upon and into the wraith. The streams went right
through the uncanny sphere. The buildings of the Smithsonian--not only
the one englobed, but others nearby--got very, very wet. There was no
other result that could be detected. When the globe got ready, in its
own good time, it lifted from the drenched structure and vanished in
the sky. That was all.

But that was at dawn on the Eastern coast. At that time Tom Drake
worked obliviously in McGuire's laboratory. He did not even hear the
spot news announcement. The dawn traveled westward and the cities woke
in their turn. Buffalo woke, and Cleveland, and Detroit and Chicago.

The dawn went on toward the Rockies. It crossed them. And Tom, in
Pasadena, blinked wearily at the new-risen sun in the Pacific time-zone
when the globes took their first specific overt action against a human
being.

It was in Cleveland at a quarter to nine, local time. The morning rush
to work was in full swing. Away downtown, where Euclid Avenue runs into
Lincoln Square, the sidewalks were crammed with workbound pedestrians.
It was an extraordinarily bright and sunshiny morning for the city of
Cleveland.

The air was utterly clear and the look of things was normal in every
possible way. Hurrying, crowding people--stenographers, bookkeepers,
minor executives--salesgirls, porters, typists, clerks. The sidewalks
were crowded and the pavements between were jammed with traffic.

Even the walkways around the very ugly Lincoln Monument were filled
with people using them as short cuts across the square. Everything
was exactly as it had been ten thousand mornings before and could
reasonably be expected to be for ten thousand mornings after.

But suddenly, above the noise of feet on concrete walks and the sounds
of traffic in the streets, there came a high shrill scream.

It was not a scream of pain but of terror. A man stood stock-still and
shrieked. He was an absurd, pudgy, bespectacled man with a ridiculous
mustache. He was later learned to be a certain Arthur V. Handmetter,
a foreman in a factory making artificial flowers. He stood as if
frozen on the sidewalk with his eyes wide and staring. He screamed and
screamed and screamed.

       *       *       *       *       *

Other figures shrank away from him, clearing a space and staring at
him. There was absolutely nothing that they could see at first to
account for the pudgy man's panic. He screamed again and again and a
policeman shouldered through the crowd toward him.

Then the crowd noticed that his screams grew thinner. Standing there
before them in a ten-foot cleared space, the little man's shrieking
grew muted as if far away. His mouth was open and his body was rigid in
a paralyzed horror. But his voice grew thinner.

Perhaps, at this time, some of those about him began to notice that the
clarity of the morning air had faded a little. The sky was not quite so
blue and the sunlight was dimmer. But they noticed first that his body
began to grow translucent. His screams had only the volume of whispers
then, but they were high pitched and penetrating.

The policemen tried to seize him. Then there was panic unutterable. The
policeman's hand went through the arm of Mr. Arthur V. Handmetter as if
it were smoke. The people about him fled in stark unreasoning terror,
turning wide and horrified eyes behind them as they fled.

They saw Mr. Handmetter become more and more translucent and then
become transparent--still making the faintest of shrill screams--and
finally he faded into nothingness in the deep shadow which had fallen
imperceptibly upon the square as he vanished.

When he had gone--then quite all of the square and blocks of Euclid
Avenue itself and other blocks of other streets opening into the square
became like madhouses. Those who had known only of something strange
occurring in the square and had been craning their necks saw more than
they had bargained for.

They saw a great, thousand-foot globe acquire the seeming of substance,
bit by bit. At the beginning it was so thin and so tenuous that none
really saw it. But as the substance of Mr. Handmetter diminished the
substance of the wraith increased.

It became misty even in the sunlight. It grew smoky. Partitions and
floors appeared within it. Shapes moved, dimly seen through its
spherical walls. It grew more and more opaque--and it was an alien
Thing, not wholly real but certainly not imagined.

Then the wave of panic broke in the Square. Men fled from the shadow of
the thing of smoke. And, like a flood of pure terror, others turned and
fled until all downtown Cleveland became a bedlam of screaming, fleeing
humanity.

It was a catastrophe of major proportions in dead and injured in
the crush. But actually, nothing whatever had happened save that a
mist-globe had settled down in Lincoln Square, and one single human
being--Mr. Handmetter--had turned slowly to mist as he screamed his
horror and the mist-globe increased in thickness as he vanished.

It was a thousand feet in diameter and it had, at the end, just as much
of substantiality as a globe of smoke containing a hundred and fifty
pounds of substance might have had.

But then it rose sedately from the square--the ugly Lincoln Monument
withdrawing from its substance as the globe arose--and ascended
swiftly and diminished to the size of a tennis ball, then to the size
of a marble, then to a spot and a speck and a mote--and then vanished
utterly.

Mr. Handmetter, of course, vanished with it.

Out near Pasadena Lan Hardy smiled brightly at Kit across the breakfast
table. It was one hour later by actual time, and one hour earlier by
local clocks. Tom came in from the lab, McGuire following him. They sat
down at the table. Tom looked discouraged. McGuire drank his coffee
without a word.

"Father," said Kit. "What do you think of that Cleveland affair?"

McGuire nodded at Tom.

"It knocked my ideas all out," said Tom. "I should've known it in
advance, though. But now I know that what I was trying to make wouldn't
work even in theory."

Lan said cheerily, "Why didn't you ask me to help, Tom?"

"I was doing it by ear," said Tom morosely. "Trying to work out a
theory that would work by finding out what didn't."

McGuire said abruptly, "You had some good ideas, though."

"What were you trying to do?" asked Kit.

"Trying to make a ghost," said Tom, sourly. "That Cleveland business
shows it can't be done without ghost material to swap. But it's
perfectly obvious once you see it! I made a fool of myself!"

       *       *       *       *       *

Lan Hardy attacked his breakfast with a hearty appetite. He smiled
sentimentally at Kit from time to time.

"This young man," said McGuire, almost grimly, "has an idea that fits
the pieces together better than anything else that's been suggested to
my knowledge. There are stars which shine and are quite actual but with
no greater densities than the vacuums in vision-screen tubes.

"They are matter as compared to the emptiness of interstellar space,
but a star shouldn't exist with no greater density than that. There've
always been mathematical difficulties in computing their constants.
So Tom suggests that they're actually ghost stars--stars of which the
planets will be ghosts like the one between Earth and Mars."

"That's the idea you sprang last night," said Lan, smiling. "A
beautiful way to dodge a lot of problems."

McGuire looked detachedly at Lan. He said, "His suggestion is that
there may be two parallel universes with one or more dimensions in
common. It's been postulated before. Some oddities in electronic
behavior call for more than three dimensions in the greater cosmos of
which our cosmos is a part.

"Tom suggests that a sun in that other cosmos may, because of the
dimensions common to both, be on the borderline of existence in this.
Conversely, a solid sun in this universe may be a ghostly apparition in
that.

"Like a cork floating on water. To a fish it is perceptible but hardly
significant because it only touches the water and is not in it. The
ghost planet and the ghost-globes are detectable in this cosmos,
because they touch it. They aren't real in it because they aren't in
it. They're ghosts to us. And"--McGuire said abruptly--"that would mean
that we are ghosts to them."

Lan said, "_Boo!_" laughing. He looked at Kit for admiration. She said
impatiently, "But if they aren't real--that man in Cleveland--"

"The cork," said Tom, tiredly, "could become real to a fish if it tried
to pull something out of the water. As it pulled something into the air
some of it would be pulled into the water. They pulled a man into their
cosmos. So some of their globe was pulled into ours."

"But--but--" Kit said uneasily. "Why'd they do it?"

"Tom's idea, and mine," said McGuire, "is to ask them, since the
Government says I'm crazy. Tom encountered one of their globes three
months ago near Mars. Maybe the ghost planet was on the way and that
was an advance scout.

"Or maybe it was an exploring vessel and the ghost planet came when it
reported a civilization here. Maybe it came to be a base for a really
thorough examination of our solar system and our civilization for
whatever it is that they want."

"But what is it?" demanded Kit.

Her father shrugged. "They haven't found it, certainly. Today they took
that poor devil from Cleveland. Maybe they mean to ask him where it is."

"Took him--"

"Tom spent all night," said McGuire, "trying to work out a gadget to
put some matter from this cosmos into that or into the borderline state
at any rate. If we could do that we could communicate with them or, if
necessary, even fight them."

Tom said gloomily, "But it can't be done--obviously. I see now. The
amount of energy and matter in any cosmos is fixed by definition. It
can't be varied. So to put something from this cosmos into another,
whether it's energy or matter, an exactly equivalent amount of matter
must pass from that cosmos into this. It has to be--"

He stopped short, his mouth open as if in amazement.

"That's it!" He swung to McGuire. "Of course! Can you get hold of a
space-ship? Any size! Anything! We can do it."

But Lan leaned forward gracefully. "Look, Tom. You're suggesting that
by pulling a part of another cosmos into this, you can pull a part
of this cosmos into that. You spoke of an analogy to pulling a cork
down into water by making it pull a fish out of water. But don't you
see that on an atomic or molecular scale such an arrangement would be
unstable? They'd tend to pop back into their own space."

       *       *       *       *       *

Tom shrugged. He was about to say that the ghost-ship had managed it in
Cleveland.

But Lan went on gently, "Really, Tom, before you demand that Mr.
McGuire get hold of space-ships and such things--don't you think you
should--well--consider the facts? After all, Mr. McGuire has so much
more experience than you have and is so much better qualified in every
way, that--well--your theories are interesting enough--"

McGuire said sharply, "Your friend has some theories, at any rate. Have
you any to offer?"

"Kit asked me to come here, sir," said Lan brightly, "to do technical
work. Lab work. I've been ready to get to work at any instant, sir. But
I wouldn't presume to make suggestions."

McGuire stared at him. Then he said shortly, "Let Kit brief you,
then, and see if you can come up with some contributions to equal
your friend's. This isn't a ceremony. It's an emergency, with a pack
of politicians too busy thinking of politics to see what they're up
against!"

Kit said eagerly, "You see, Lan, Father feels--"

"I know how I feel!" said McGuire angrily. "You're loyal, Kit, but
I'm not thinking of the Ghost Planet as a matter with political
implications! When there were different nations on earth there was
a loyalty called patriotism. Now that there's a world government,
there's still room for a similar feeling!

"I think the Ghost Planet represents a possible danger. What happened
in Cleveland just now is evidence for that view. But I'm sure that the
Ghost Planet has the secret of the answer to the most desperate need of
humanity.

"So as a private citizen I think it's up to me to try to find that out!
I think it's up to Lan and Tom and everybody else! And if Lan will pay
less attention to the possibilities of being flatteringly respectful to
me and try to suggest something useful I'll like it better!"

He strode angrily from the room. Lan flushed hotly and looked at Kit.
"I'm not very popular with your father," he said resentfully.

"Don't be silly!" said Kit. "Because you're engaged to me you feel
awkward with him. He won't bite you, Lan! Talk things over with Tom and
work out something! That'll please him!"

"But it's ridiculous!" protested Lan. "There's bound to be organized
research done! What can one or two or three people, working alone, do
with problems that call for full scale planned investigation?"

Tom said nothing. He was at once very weary and very much absorbed in
the new idea that had occurred to him.

"And he talks in riddles!" said Lan indignantly. "If it's a ghost
planet with ghost space-ships why--he seems to agree with Tom that
they can't do anything! And as for having a secret solving the most
desperate need of humanity--"

Tom said abstractedly, "Interstellar travel, Lan. We've been to all
our own planets and not one will support a colony. Earth's getting
overcrowded. And our interplanetary drive wouldn't begin to reach even
Proxima Centauri, even if we could live long enough to get there.

"The Ghost Planet came from beyond our system. They've a drive that
will take a planet from one star to another. If we had it we could hunt
out planets to colonize. There are plenty if we could reach them. And
Earth would be a better place."

Kit said urgently, "There! That's it, Lan! Work out a drive that would
serve for interstellar travel--after this affair is done with!"

Tom got up. "I've got to get back to work on a new angle. With a
space-ship, even a little one, I think we could handle things."

The vision receiver was barking a news announcement as he left the
room. The announcement was that a sphere was headed back toward the
shimmering Ghost Planet--but "comet" was the word still used--and that
it was much denser than any other that had been observed.

It was assumed to be the globe which had snatched a citizen from
Lincoln Square in Cleveland and increased markedly in density while
doing so. Moreover, several other extra-dense globes had risen from
earth and were assumed to be heading back in the same direction.

At the very end of the news broadcast, an official announcement
from the government public information service was read. It stated
that Government scientists were actively investigating the comet
and that the public should not be alarmed. There was absolutely no
evidence--said the release--to support any idea that either the comet
or the mist-globes were hitherto unknown forms of life or that the
globes were likely to prey on humanity.

The release was very comfortingly phrased, but it was a mistake. Few
people, if any, had heard any rumor suggesting that the ghost-globes
were creatures which might eat men. The information release spread the
suggestion on world-wide newscasts. It sent a wave of hysteria around
an overcrowded, overemotional earth.




                               CHAPTER V

                               _Uproar_


A hundred years of peace and preventive medicine had sent Earth's
population soaring. From two billion people in the early twentieth
century it was now eight and a quarter billion. In a world-wide culture
of high development there could be neither plagues nor wars to ease the
pressure. But the pressure was enormous.

The Guilds arose to meet it--grim associations of individuals, at once
unions and fraternal organizations, which watched jealously over the
rights of their members and helped them by cooperative housing and
merchandising activities to meet the increasingly desperate pressure of
overcrowding.

But no organization could meet the actual situation, which was that of
ancient China, static for two thousand years from the same insensate
pressure of population. All Earth faced the prospect of a frantically
struggling stasis with no hope because there could be no escape.

Men like McGuire saw the situation as desperate, and were howled down
because they wanted to throw all the resources of the world behind
an all-out attack on the means of emigration to the stars. It would
be infinitely costly and taxes were already too high--demands for
ever-greater government services were unending.

Even now the government regulated details of life that before had been
strictly personal decisions. A vast straining electorate demanded the
impossible and denied the only means for ultimate relief because they
required immediate sacrifices.

An enormous emotionalism had developed, which was channeled by skilful
political propaganda. But the tensions of merely securing a livelihood
made Earth a place in which almost anything in the way of mass hysteria
could happen at almost any instant, simply because ninety-nine percent
of all human beings had been forced not to think beyond the stress of
today and now.

So Tom Drake went back into McGuire's laboratory and worked and worked
and worked. He had begun to think about the ghost spheres because he'd
encountered one and it had caused him personal disaster.

When the Ghost Planet appeared, and Kit had called for the two of
them--Lan and himself--to come out to the Coast for work on the problem
it presented, he'd first thought of it as a matter of scientific
interest.

But now that Lan's peevish indignation had made him realize what
McGuire saw in the coming of the Ghost Planet, he worked with an
enthusiasm which ignored the possibility of fatigue.

If the Ghost Planet had the secret of interstellar travel--and it
must--then the problem was not that of meeting a danger, but of the
whole future of humanity. As such, it was worth much more than all he
could do. It was worth all that everybody in the world could do.

McGuire listened to his new plans. He nodded and vanished from the
house. Tom racked his brains for remembered data and dug into McGuire's
technical library for further information and then sweated over the
construction of a pilot model of a small device. He could go no further
until McGuire turned up with something for which a larger device could
be designed.

It was dusk and he was numb with mental and physical fatigue when the
air throbbed heavily about the building. Then there was a deep moaning
noise and the ground trembled--and then the whole disturbance stopped
with a startling suddenness.

McGuire came into the laboratory. "I got--of all things--the
_Weddington_," he reported. "The Titan Expedition sent it back again
and asked to be relieved. They were seeing ghosts and the whole outfit
solemnly decided it needed psychiatric treatment."

He grinned ironically. "They've sent off relief ships, which will _not_
investigate the Ghost Planet, to bring back the whole crowd. And they
started to liquidate the equipment. I got the _Weddington_."

"The ghosts were thousand-foot spheres?" asked Tom, tiredly.

McGuire nodded.

"I can handle it in a pinch," Tom told him. "The _Weddington_, that is.
Take a look at what I've got here. It works as far as I can tell. It'll
do to make a bigger one from. It's such old stuff I wasn't sure I could
make a generator. But I did."

He showed McGuire the device. It was a trigger-energy field generator,
a development from the electrets of ancient days which stored a bound
charge of electricity in a mixture of waxes so that it could not be
short circuited and could only be released by the melting of the
electret wax.

The trigger-energy field stored latent energy in the molecules of any
substance at all. Stored, it remained only latent until released by
special conditions, when it usually appeared as heat. There was a time
when there were great hopes of using it for metal-casting.

Sufficient latent energy for the melting of a billet of metal could be
stored in the metal, and the metal remained cold and could be handled
in any way as long as the latent--trigger--energy remained bound.

       *       *       *       *       *

But when it was released the metal melted from its own stored
trigger-energy. Inability to control the temperature the melted metal
would reach had made it impractical for casting and it had never had an
actual industrial application.

"The point is," Tom told McGuire, "that borderline matter or stuff
on the thin edge of being real can penetrate our matter without being
disturbed. A plane flew through that globe over the polo field and
nothing happened.

"But if the plane had been charged up with trigger-energy as its
charged molecules encountered the uncharged molecules of ghost-matter
they'd have to discharge. The latent energy would go to the ghost
matter molecules.

"But since energy can't leave this cosmos the ghost-matter molecules
would come into our space and become real--and since matter can only
enter our cosmos if other matter leaves it the discharged molecules
would go into the other cosmos.

"In other words I think a plane charged with trigger-energy flying
into a globe would turn to ghost-matter and an exactly equal amount of
ghost-matter would turn real, atom for atom and molecule for molecule.
Here's the math."

McGuire checked carefully, and then began to pace up and down the
laboratory. "It looks right," he said. He said uneasily, "If the
Government got hold of this, there'd be atomic bombs charged with
trigger-energy. Dropped on the Ghost Planet they'd become that other
kind of matter and explode there."

"Undoubtedly," said Tom, "They could do the same to us. We're ghosts to
them as they're ghosts to us."

"I've got to think," said McGuire abruptly.

"I," admitted Tom, "could do with some sleep."

He went out, stumbling a little, and had to ask a servant where he was
supposed to sleep. On the way he saw Lan and Kit. They were walking
together in the garden and Lan was in the middle of some enthusiastic
explanation.

He was immaculate and the sunlight glinted on his hair. He made a
graceful gesture and put his hand on Kit's shoulder. She looked up at
him and smiled and then saw Tom.

"How's it going, Tom?" She called eagerly.

"Got some stuff designed," said Tom and yawned. "Your father's working
on it now."

He went on wearily to the quarters assigned to him and to Lan together.
He saw himself in a mirror. His clothes were wilted and rumpled, his
hair hopelessly uncombed. His eyes were red from strain and altogether
he was not a pretty sight. Compared to Lan--He surveyed himself for a
moment.

"Oh, the heck with it!" he growled. He lay down and was instantly
asleep.

The newscasters had a busy evening, while he slept. There were
interviews with eyewitnesses of the Cleveland seizure of Arthur V.
Handmetter and a broadcast of astronomical motion-pictures of the Ghost
Planet. There were reenactments of a seizure or kidnapping in Chungking.

There were announcements by the heads of the official Government
astronomical research project, who managed to put into their
discussions of the "comet"--they carefully said nothing
significant--plugs for more money for their staffs and equipment.
Essentially, these officials said that the "comet" was simply gas in so
attenuated a form that if it were condensed to the thickness of air at
sea level on Earth it would all go into a two-quart bottle.

But there was a tight-beam vision cast from the Moon observatory which
confirmed the fact that a steady stream of thousand-foot globes of mist
moved from the "comet"----the Ghost Planet--to Earth and back again.

And it confirmed, too, the fact that seven returning globes were
enormously more dense than any globes leaving the "comet" for Earth, as
if they had somehow absorbed or eaten some substance on Earth.

Since at least two humans were known to have been carried away from
large cities, it was reasonable to assume that five other isolated
individuals might have been taken away without any eyewitnesses.

Then an eminent psychiatrist appeared on the screen and beamed at
his audience, and jovially assured them that mass illusions were
commonplace. He listed examples going all the way back to the sworn
statements of crowds that they had seen witches riding on broomsticks.

He instanced a craze of flying disks, whose appearance was sworn to
by wholly credible witnesses and he referred humorously to the craze
of a few years before. Then a meteor shower had been interpreted as
the arrival of a flight of space-ships from somewhere and for months
afterward honest men and women reported seeing stilt-legged green men
in various unlikely places. But all were illusions.

"Illusion is a form of catharsis," said the psychiatrist reassuringly.
"We objectify our fears. We picture them outside of ourselves and
so consider that we get rid of them. I do not doubt that people in
Chungking and Cleveland believe they saw everything they report. I
merely say that mass suggestibility makes it possible for a large
number of people to share a common illusion."

Human beings being what they are and psychiatry being a very obscure
science, this vision cast tended to reassure everybody who did not
stop to reflect that vision cast screens portrayed the globes and the
Ghost Planet and that illusions which affect electronic devices are not
illusions.

But the newscast went on to show one of the world's most glamorous
actresses at a famous resort where she was honeymooning with her
seventh husband. There was an appealing sequence of a small white dog
lying on his master's grave with the explanation that he refused to
leave it.

There was a picture of an important political figure leaving the World
White House. A festival of flowers in Rio. The coming of the puffins to
Greenland. A minor eruption of a volcano in the Galapagos.

       *       *       *       *       *

In short the matter of the Ghost Planet was honestly presented as
the big news feature of the day and then was deftly played down.
Ex-President McGuire's broadcast of the night before, assuring the
public that there was real information available about the Ghost
Planet, was not referred to at all.

Kit was angered by that. She told Lan indignantly that her father's
political enemies were refusing him a hearing for fear that the
disclosure of his rightness and their wrongness would cause a political
repercussion.

"Oh, of course," said Lan sagely. "My Guild was opposed to him, you
know. I was suspended, really, because I'm engaged to you. That's why I
can't get a job."

Kit regarded him with warm admiration for his martyrdom. "You'll show
them!" she said vengefully. "When you show them what you can do."

Then Lan told her tenderly that she filled all his mind and it was
hard to think of anything but her. But he did have the beginning of an
idea for an interstellar drive. It would probably take some months of
research to develop it and he could not put his whole mind on it while
fearing that something might happen to break their engagement.

But then he began to picture the idyllic situation which would arise
if they were married even if it were an elopement--and he carried on
his research with her to inspire him to brilliance. He did not mention
the fact that, as he had no job, their support as well as the financing
of his research would have to be at her father's charge.

That was left for Kit to resolve upon for herself. Lan grew lyrical
about the genius which would come to him immediately they were married.
It appeared that, in sheer dutifulness to her father, she should elope
with Lan immediately.

When Tom awoke next morning, McGuire was grimly at work in his
laboratory. The model trigger-energy field generator had been a
necessary preliminary to later work, because trigger-energy had no
regular practical use and few physicists had ever seen a generator of
the field.

McGuire had studied it and spent the night in grim and somewhat clumsy
labor upon a much larger one. When Tom examined it he realized that
sound engineering had made up for lack of dexterity. This generator
might be the largest that had ever been built and undoubtedly it would
work.

"I asked your friend Lan to help me install this," said McGuire
savagely, "and he explained very plausibly that Kit had asked him to go
in to Pasadena with her and said regretfully that he would ask her to
excuse him. He didn't have the least idea what this was!"

Tom said, "It's pretty old-fashioned, sir. I remembered it because I'm
always digging in outdated textbooks. There's fascinating stuff in
them. I suspect there are a lot of useful leads in forgotten facts that
simply weren't followed up when they were first discovered."

McGuire grunted. "Nevertheless, your friend is simply planning a career
as my son-in-law. That's all! Shall we install this on the ship?"

Tom postponed breakfast to get at it. Presently the two of them
staggered out of the laboratory to the _Weddington_ with their load.
The little emergency-ship was small enough and clumsy enough and ugly
enough to have no attraction for a wealthy amateur who wanted to do
space flying for a thrill. That was why McGuire had been able to get
hold of it. The job of the moment wasn't glamorous either.

There were some people--probably Lan among them--who would have been
startled to see a former chief executive of the World Government
helping to carry out a weighty clumsy device and working with grunts
and heavings to get it into place against an ungainly small ship's
nose, then sweating as he worked a welder--sometimes he merely held the
braces in place while Tom welded them--to fasten it on.

McGuire, sweat-streaked and dirty, was making the last electric
connections when the groundcar came whizzing up the drive and stopped
with a squealing of brakes. Kit was very pale. Lan looked at once
uneasy and excited--but more uneasy.

"Something's happening in Pasadena," he said, and gulped. "There are
four globes there. One of them's squatted over the General Hospital.
There are three others linked to it. All four are getting denser by the
minute. As if"--he gulped--"as if they were eating the people inside."

Kit got out of the car. Her knees wobbled.

"I--made Lan come back," she whispered. "They're--eating the people.
Lan says so."

McGuire painstakingly climbed down the ladder. He threw it aside. Tom
was in the act of wrenching open the entrance port of the _Weddington_.
He climbed inside. McGuire followed. A deep droning noise sounded, so
deep and so heavy that it seemed to shake the very ground. Then there
sounded a throbbing noise and the _Weddington_ moved straight up. But
as it rose it headed toward Pasadena.




                              CHAPTER VI

                          _Panic in Pasadena_


There was ungodly panic in Pasadena. It was ten A.M., a time when
shopping would hardly have begun and the industries of the cities
should have emptied the streets of men. But as the _Weddington_ came
clumsily toward the city its ways were black with fleeing humanity.

For once the moving sidewalks were so crowded that passengers were
edged off, reeling, into the throngs which fought to get on. Ground
vehicles--trucks and commercial vehicles almost exclusively--blared and
roared their sirens among crowds afoot which had overflowed into the
vehicular ways. All of Pasadena struggled furiously to get from where
it was to somewhere else. Mostly, to be sure, men battled to reach
their families and mothers ran desperately to the schools to relieve
their children.

From aloft, it seemed that the streets simply boiled with black
figures, eddying purposelessly, and that only relatively small streams
of fugitives trickled from the streets at the edges of the city and
fled for the open country.

The buildings of the city were unchanged. The tall block-shaped
structures which alone were economical enough to build for rental to
any but the rich stood serene. Untroubled small wisps of steam drifted
from their tops in the morning sunlight.

But there was one oddity which accounted for everything that was
strange among the people. Above a group of buildings set in green
lawns an alien and frightening appearance hung. At first, from the
_Weddington_, Tom Drake saw only the top three monstrous globes. They
were smoky. They looked thick. But they did not yet look solid.

Touching each other as the upper part of a colossal inverted pyramid,
they also touched a fourth globe which touched the ground. Buildings
vanished into its dark murkiness. It enclosed the major part of the
town's principal hospital.

The _Weddington_ flew clumsily, like a wingless beetle, making a
monstrous throbbing in the air. It wabbled in its flight. It fishtailed
and seemed sometimes to progress crabwise. It was not designed for
flight in atmosphere and the new excresence on its bow ruined what
streamlining it may have had. It was hopelessly unhandy in the air. But
it flew toward Pasadena and wallowed to a lower level and went droning
heavily toward the fifteen-hundred-foot pile of smoky spheres.

It blundered into the first of them. All four were growing momentarily
thicker and less transparent but still the _Weddington_--by the
precedent of planes which had flown through other spheres--should have
penetrated it without difficulty.

It did penetrate. But there was a mark where it struck. An instant
later it bounced out crazily at an angle to its original course,
spinning like a top and making lunatic darts in every direction
successively. It had encountered resistance.

It was two thousand feet up and still gyrating unpredictably when Tom
crawled back to the control seat. He had been thrown furiously to one
side when the ship hit a spongy obstacle. There was a cut on his temple
which bled messily down his cheek. McGuire held fast to stanchions
beside a vision port and stared out.

[Illustration: Tom crawled back to the control seat while the ship
gyrated unpredictably.]

"Lucky!" panted Tom. "I just put a trace of power in the trigger-field.
If I'd given it full power we'd have been wrecked. Why can't I have
sense? We were trying to make it solid ahead of us! _Ahead!_"

He straightened out the _Weddington_ with the gyros. He swung in midair
and dived again.

"This time," he panted, "we'll hurt them! I don't know how badly, but
we'll hurt! The thing's working! We charge up air with trigger-energy.
When it hits ghost-matter, it substitutes--air for metal, most likely.

"Since it's a matter of mass, that makes a vacuum which draws more
trigger-charged air to substitute for more ghost metal. Hitting it head
on was like trying to push a boat through water its bow turns to ice.
This time, though--"

He leveled the _Weddington_ out. He shot at the chosen globe. The
clumsy space-craft throbbed and roared. A hundred yards from it, Tom's
fingers moved like lightning. The throbbing ceased instantly. The
_Weddington_ began to arch downward. And then it spun upon its own
axis in midair, turned end for end and vanished into the murky globe
backward.

"We'll leave solid stuff behind us now!" gasped Tom. "Hold fast!"

For seconds the little craft plunged through darkness. The globes
were dark as black smoke. There was nothing at all to be seen. Then
there was light, and Tom's fingers flashed again, and the _Weddington_
climbed frantically for the sky, precariously close to the tops of
buildings rearing up beyond the hospital.

McGuire said in deep satisfaction, "Nicked him! Not bad at all!"

The spots where the _Weddington_ had dived into and left the globe were
plainly visible. The trigger-energy field had trailed behind the ship,
this time, as it shot through the ghost-globe. And this time Tom had
put full power into the field. Borderline matter materialized as matter
of this cosmos and air--only air--replaced it in the universe of the
ghost-ships.

       *       *       *       *       *

Irregularly shaped slabs of solid stuff, exchanged for thin air,
became quite real in this universe and fell crashing through the
unsubstantiality of which it had been a part. A complete tunnel of
clear air led through the globe where the _Weddington_ had pierced it.
Because what had been ghost stuff had become real, and no ghost metal
but only ghost air had replaced it.

"That'll be a wallop!" said Tom as the little ship climbed. "A few more
punctures and they'll know they're hurt!"

He reached the top of the necessary climb and dived again. But as the
_Weddington_ went roaring downward for further battle, the sphere at
which he aimed shot skyward. It was very dense now. Certainly human
beings, and possibly other matter of this earth had gone nearer to the
borderline of ghostliness.

Patients had become partly unreal. As a necessary consequence the
four globes had become very slightly real. And they were vulnerable
to the _Weddington_. The clumsy little ship was a deadly weapon to
them--though only where there was atmosphere or other substance to
trade for the matter of the ghost-ships' hulls.

One fled. A second detached itself from the others and shot up for the
heavens. Tom swerved the _Weddington_--dived more steeply--and the
third of the upper globes fled before it.

Then, from openings in the hull of the remaining murky mass, small
murky objects shot out. They soared away, and were suddenly snatched by
invisible forces and drawn with enormous acceleration after the three
fleeing ships.

       *       *       *       *       *

Later Tom and McGuire agreed that these smaller objects were crew
members of the crippled ghost vessel. It was still a ghost. It was
still not more dense than dense black smoke and it still enclosed a
major part of the hospital.

Possibly, in their dive through it, the two men had damaged some
essential control or drive mechanism. And Tom guessed that the crew
which dived out of the crippled vessel had been snatched by tractor
beams in the escaping ships.

But at the moment that did not matter. One ghost-ship, dark and well
on the way to reality yet still penetrable by normal matter, remained
huddled over the hospital building. The raid--if it was a raid--had
been at least partly frustrated. But the _Weddington_ had been wrongly
equipped when the trigger-energy generator was mounted on its bow.

There were other things to be done. Tom headed it back toward its
starting place while he and McGuire canvassed the situation as of the
moment. McGuire was very hopeful. It was Tom who was the gloomy one.

"I don't think much can be learned from the ship that was left behind,"
he said cynically. "If I know the sort of people who'll be in charge in
Pasadena you'd have to spend hours getting permission to try to examine
it.

"And if I were abandoning a ship in the middle of an alien civilization
I think I'd see to it that nothing very informative was left behind.
Besides, we'd crippled it anyhow. And"--he paused--"The politicos won't
like your being a hero. Not after you lost the last election."

McGuire swore a little. "That's right. I mustn't be allowed to do
anything creditable," he said wrathfully. "But what we know has to be
passed on and fast!"

Tom said nothing. He aimed for the rambling, gracious house in its
roomy grounds, a mile below and five miles away.

"Shells charged with trigger-energy and fired at the spheres,"
he observed, "will damage the globes. The shells will change to
ghost-matter as they hit and make ghostly explosions, which are the
only kind that will do any good. There's a defense of sorts against the
globes.

"But it's not likely it would bring down a globe in any sort of shape
that we could examine. We can't copy machinery made of smoke--and very
thin smoke at that! And of course, if they want to, the Ghost-Planet
people can turn the same trick against us. It's bad."

The throbbing, moaning noise the _Weddington's_ space-drive made in
atmosphere changed a little. The ship went wallowing down for a landing.

"We've got to turn over the fact that shells can be made effective,"
said Tom, frowning, "and there's the fact that the patients in that
hospital will be in a queer state. They're partly real and partly not.

"We can make them wholly real with trigger-energy charges, but they've
got to be careful not to get that energy released until the charged
molecules are gotten rid of by natural metabolism."

McGuire had lost his elation. He said gloomily, "I know what will
happen. The Government will start building space-ships. They'll drag
them out of museums, and start equipping them with guns. They'll think
only in terms of war."

"Naturally," agreed Tom. "And those people have a space-drive we need.
That we've got to have!"

"Anything we can do to them they can do back to us, with probably
thousands of ships to start with! They didn't expect trouble back
yonder. They could wreck Earth in a week!"

Tom grunted. He was landing the _Weddington_. It was a ticklish job.
The space-boat had just about the maneuverability of a washtub in
atmosphere. There was a heavy thud and he cut off the drive. When they
climbed down, dispiritedly, they did not look like two men who had
struck the first blow to prove that Earth was not helpless against
immaterial invaders.

Kit searched her father's face. She seemed to grow paler at his
expression of discouragement.

"Father! What happened?"

"We drove them off," said McGuire bitterly, "and we disabled one of
their ships and I suspect we started a war. It's a mess! And now I've
got to send word to Pasadena how to get those hospital patients back to
something like normal. Tom, will that little generator you made first
fix up those patients?"

"Yes, sir."

McGuire went into the house. Tom gloomily examined the field generator
on the Weddington's bow. It had to be shifted to the stern. It could be
cut loose and rewelded but he was filled with forebodings--particularly
because he already foresaw the only possible thing to do.

"I wish," he said, "one could be as smart as the heroes of the history
books! They always know just how everything has to be done from the
beginning and never have to do anything over."

Kit repeated, "But what did you do?"

Tom told her. Lan Hardy listened unhappily.

"And your father," said Tom, "is going to pass on what he knows. The
Administration will waste time trying to figure out how to keep him
from getting any credit for it but at least there's a defense now that
they've started kidnapping citizens."

Lan said suddenly, "You mean, charging ghost-matter with trigger-energy
makes it real? Just use a generator on the patients and they'll
get back to normal? And just do the same to the ship and it can be
examined?"

"Kit's father is getting out the small generator now," said Tom. "We'll
have to send it over to town, with instructions. But I've got to get
this big generator shifted."

Lan went briskly into the house. Kit said, with shining eyes, "Then
we don't have to worry about the spheres any more and my father'll be
credited with being right."

"We _do_ have to worry," growled Tom, "and he'll be given credit only
over a pack of dead politicians. We have to worry about the spheres
because it's pretty clear that they know that what they want is here.
It could be simply--well--human beings.

"I can't guess why they'd want them but that's all they've taken that
we know of. And now they know they'll have to fight to get them and
they should have all the edge in a war. If we hadn't seemed so helpless
they should have been able to smash the _Weddington_ like a fly. They
just didn't expect an attack."

Lan came out of the house again. He looked at once enormously elated
and oddly furtive. He carried the small trigger-energy generator and
smiled significantly at Kit.

"Come along, Kit. We're going back to Pasadena. I'm taking this to fix
up the hospital patients and start examining the ship. We'll have to
hurry."

Kit hesitated, looking at Lan with a peculiar intentness.

"Come along," repeated Lan. "We--" he spoke with the tone of one
speaking of a matter understood only by a special person, in this case
Kit--"we didn't attend to what we went for anyhow. We'll fix that up
and start up the business of defending Earth against whatever the
globes are."

Tom said abstractedly, "Get the patients out of the globe. It'll be
rather odd if our friends don't come back and retrieve the ship they
left behind. They'll come loaded for bear too."

"T thought of that," said Lan rather jerkily. "I'll attend to it. Come
on, Kit!"

Kit hesitated. Lan put his hand on her shoulder, urgently. Tom looked
at him. Kit flushed a little.

"I'll stay here," she said, inexplicably seeming to be ashamed.
"There's more than just--"

"Look!" said Lan persuasively. "The globes eat people. They're
animals! We want to get a defense started against them, besides--that
other matter. You're holding things up."

"They're not animals," said Tom curtly. "Why the devil do you insist on
believing what the most respectable authorities say, without trying to
help us prove the facts?"

Lan ignored him. He caught Kit's arm and sought to lead her to the
groundcar. He bent to whisper in her ear. She broke free.

"I'm staying!" she said unsteadily. "This is important, Lan. This is
more important than anything else!"

"How can you say that?" he demanded dramatically. "Kit--"

McGuire came out of the house. "Not gone yet?" he asked. "I called the
Mayor's office. He's not as big a fool as most. He's waiting for you,
Lan. I'll tell him you're on the way and to have a police escort to get
you to him in a hurry."

He frowned. Lan dropped Kit's arm and moved hastily to the groundcar.
But he paused once more.

"Aren't you coming, Kit?"

She shook her head, surprisingly pale. He started the car and turned
it around. He hesitated, as if for her to change her mind, and she did
not. He went away toward the highway.

"I cleared that first," rumbled McGuire, "and told Lan a few facts.
I wish he had more brains! Right now I'm getting a linkage to a few
competent physicists. I'm going to pass on just what we did and why,
Tom, and what results we got. Get the facts spread as widely as
possible as soon as possible. You know what we've got to do if there
isn't to be a war?"

"I suspect I do," said Tom, wrily. "Nothing else can possibly turn the
trick. Maybe we'll need more fuel though."

McGuire nodded approvingly. "That, and maybe a few other tricks. You're
going to cut that gadget free and mount it on the tail?"




                              CHAPTER VII

                          _The Double Cross_


He did not wait for an answer. He disappeared. Tom began painstakingly
to reassemble the scaffolding he and McGuire had made to set the field
generator on the bow of the _Weddington_. Kit watched him.

Presently she said in a subdued voice, "Tom--"

He bolted a plank in place. "Yeah?"

"Lan and I--we--we went to Pasadena to get married," said Kit. "We
almost did."

Tom did not indicate any surprise whatever. He continued to assemble
planks for the scaffolding which would hold the generator while he
cut it free and again while he rewelded it on the other end of the
_Weddington_.

"Why don't you say something?" asked Kit nervously.

"It's none of my business," said Tom briefly.

"Do you--think we should?" she asked uncertainly.

"Why?" he asked reasonably. "You're engaged. Your father is resigned if
not enthusiastic. Why sneak off?"

"Lan said my father doesn't like him."

"Lan's been a good friend to me," said Tom shortly. "He has his good
points and his faults. If your father doesn't like him he certainly
won't like him better for ducking out on an important job."

Kit was silent for a long time. Then she said hesitantly, "Do you think
he's clever, Tom?"

"If you're expecting me to play John Alden on his behalf," said Tom
shortly, "I won't! If you expect me to malign him so you can get up
nerve by growing indignant with me I won't do that either. It's your
business, not mine!"

There was a long silence, while the scaffold grew. Then Kit said
unhappily, "I thought he was wonderful until I, until I saw him turn
pale when he realized we were close to those globes at the hospital.
We started to drive right past them on the way to the marriage license
bureau. But he was scared. He trembled! And you and Father went to
fight them!"

Tom said curtly, "I'm going to cut this loose, now. Will you hand me up
that torch?"

She obeyed meekly. He began to cut away the so-recently-welded
struts which had held the generator to the nose of the lumpy little
space-ship. Kit watched, fidgeting.

"What are you and Dad going to do now?"

"Open negotiations with the spooks, I suspect," said Tom, drily. "They
didn't bother asking us questions. They just looked us over. Maybe
the people they snatched away were taken away somewhere for a bit of
questioning.

"But we didn't ask questions when we smashed one of their ships. It
looks like time for a little conversation before we start trying to
kill them or they--more likely--wipe us all out."

"But do you think--"

"If I were boss on the Ghost Planet," said Tom, "I'd have every spare
ship over Pasadena as fast as I could get it there and I'd retrieve
that wreck before it was examined too closely. And if I'd tracked the
_Weddington_ home by telescopes from beyond the atmosphere I'd have a
flock of fighting ships over this particular spot as soon as I could
manage it.

"That's why your father's passing on what he knows as fast as he can.
And that's why I neither approve nor disapprove of your going to
Pasadena with Lan. One place is just as safe or just as dangerous as
the other."

The last strut came free. Tom climbed down, climbed in the ship, backed
away from the scaffold, swung the ship about on the ground by means of
its gyros and delicately backed it into place again.

He got out.

"Not bad," he observed. "I can patch it fast enough."

He climbed up again on the scaffold. Kit saw his eyes measuring and
looked among the scraps left over from the original job. She passed one
up to him.

"Thanks," he said. "Just about right."

"Tom!" she said after a long silence. "Will you advise me about Lan?
Please do it!"

He shook his head to clear sweat from his forehead. The welding torch
gave off a lot of heat.

"As long as you're engaged to Lan," he told her, "I tell you nothing.
It's your funeral or your wedding."

He worked. From time to time she handed up a bit of metal which was
either a near fit or could be cut down. He finished the job and began
to resplice the cables while she watched.

He was just about finished when McGuire appeared at the side of the
house and called grimly:

"Kit! Tom! Come in here, please! I want you to hear a broadcast. Lan's
made his report and he's a hero."

       *       *       *       *       *

Tom brushed off his hands and went inside.

McGuire said sourly, "I heard the bells of an extra-emergency 'cast.
Lan made his report and evidently demonstrated on the disabled sphere.
He's coming on the screen in a minute."

Kit went a trifle pale. Somehow, she did not look like a girl about to
hear the man she was to marry in a public and heroic part. An unctuous
voice said blandly, "... with the unprecedented speed with which the
present administration knows how to act in emergencies, Lan Hardy's
report and demonstration was transmitted to the highest levels on the
heels of the report of the events at Pasadena.

"Acting under emergency powers the World President has ordered every
available factory to produce trigger-energy generators at the highest
possible speed. Meteorological service guided rockets are being
prepared to become bombs against the mist-spheres as soon as the
necessary generators can charge them for conversion as they will act
against these extraordinary animals."

"Animals!" said Tom blankly. "But if he worked the thing on that ship
he _saw_ it turn into metal! They're ships!"

"Within hours," the announcer's voice assured them, blandly, "all Earth
will be equipped with defenses against these strange forms of life from
outer space. Moreover, every space-ship able to take to space will be
crammed with atomic explosives.

"Within days guided missiles will be detonated within the misty
comet--evidently the parent organism--creating such a terrific
explosion within its heart that it will be blown to atoms. Atomic
explosives in thousands of tons will shatter the comet in a blast so
intense that the human mind cannot conceive of it."

Tom and McGuire stared at each other.

"I," said McGuire, "told the government that it was a planet and the
spheres were ships. But if I am right somebody may not get reelected.
So it has to be an animal and it has to be destroyed--and the chance of
our getting a space-drive is gone forever!"

His voice held the quintessence of bitterness.

"Here is Lan Hardy," said the announcer proudly. "He will tell you of
his discovery and its fruits."

Lan's face appeared on the vision-screen. He was brightly, happily at
ease.

"I was very fortunate," he said modestly. "The strange type of matter
the invading life forms comprise seemed to be unaffected by any force
or matter at our disposal. But it occurred to me that trigger-energy
might have an effect and I tried it in a hastily improvised form.

"I am very happy that I have been able to offer to my fellow citizens a
defense against creatures beyond our experience and plainly dangerous
to Earth. I am more relieved than anybody else and more grateful for
the idea, because I saw the Earth as a hunting ground for unspeakable
intangible monsters, who could devour human beings while we were
helpless to take any action against them."

       *       *       *       *       *

He smiled, very appealingly. He made a graceful wave of his hand. He
faded from the screen.

"Lan Hardy," boomed the announcer, "by special Presidential order, is
in full charge of the defense against the creatures which have begun to
attack the people of Earth."

Kit struck off the switch which kept the vision plate alight.

She faced the others, stammering and dazed.

"But he--he didn't!" she stammered. "You two--you and Father did it!"

Her father said drily, ignoring her, "An emergency exists, Tom. You
didn't hear that part at the beginning. The World President proclaims
an emergency, takes over emergency powers--and he can do anything
necessary to control all action against anybody and anything."

"The first thing he'll do is put us in protective custody to keep us
from denying that the ships are animals. I can't be allowed to do
anything! I'm a political has-been. I can't be allowed to come back.
Now tell me--how much more has to be done to the _Weddington_?"

"All finished, sir," said Tom. "I'd like more fuel but we can take off."

"Then we take off," said McGuire. He turned to Kit. "We'll be hunted, I
suspect. No danger, of course. This is merely criminal stupidity, not
political murder they'll have in mind. But do you want to stay here?"

"N-no!" said Kit. "I--I--" Then she sobbed. "Tom! What should I do?"

Tom said, "I told you I'd give you no advice as long as you're engaged
to Lan. It's your business."

"But--but--" Then she stamped her foot. "I wouldn't marry him! I'm not
engaged to him! I'll never speak to him again!"

"Then," said Tom, "what are you waiting for?"

There was a thin buzzing noise overhead. It seemed to grow louder.
McGuire, swearing, raced for the door with the others after him. Tom
caught Kit's hand to help her run faster. McGuire was climbing into the
_Weddington_ as the others emerged into the open air. There were specks
in the sky--solid specks with helicopter screws above them--and they
were coming swiftly nearer.

[Illustration: Tom grabbed Kit's hand and they raced for the ship.]

Tom heaved Kit to the doorway and inside. He climbed after her. The
entrance port slammed. Instantly McGuire threw on the drive and, with a
monstrous roaring and moaning sound, the _Weddington_ shot upward.

Surprisingly McGuire seemed to be amused. "Lan made a very quick deal!"
he observed. "He gets a fancy administration post, stupidity has the
upper hand and all space-ships of all classes are commandeered by the
government. They won't dare shoot us down, though. After all I've had
no formal order to turn over this ship. But they certainly came for it
in a hurry!"

The _Weddington_ shot skyward. A helicopter, with whirring screws,
dropped past the control room windows. Another went careening crazily
past.

"Almost rammed him," said McGuire. "Damn politics! Let 'em keep clear
of us!"

The _Weddington_ penetrated a thick white cloud. It sped on and on
and on, upward. Presently the sky turned purplish and stars appeared
faintly. Then the sky was black, with a myriad unwinking specks of
light everywhere and a glaring yellow ball of a sun.

The earth was a vast, indistinct space below them.

"And now," said McGuire comfortably, "what are we going to do? If I'd
had time to get some supplies I'd head for the Ghost Planet direct. I
want the space-drive they've got. They want something we've got. How
are we going to see if we can't swap what we want instead of fighting
for it?"

Kit said suddenly, very confidently, "Tom will think of something!"




                             CHAPTER VIII

                              _Contact!_


Tom did. Not by any sudden inspiration, but forced to it by a dodged
hanging-on and the sheer necessity put upon him by the ships of the
ghost planet. The _Weddington_ continued to climb, no longer rapidly
but as the alternative to descent. There was no such storage of fuel in
her tanks as would make a journey to the Ghost Planet feasible unless
she spent long weeks coasting with no expenditure of power.

And that was not practical. Long before an economy-voyage could be
achieved guided missiles from Earth would have made any possible
negotiations impossible. The guided missiles would be converted
survey-ships and reserve supply craft used to keep the observations on
Luna and Mars and Mercury provisioned.

They would be such monstrous bombs as might, indeed, shatter any
civilization--any ghostly civilization--the Ghost Planet could support.
But surely, before then, hostilities against the misty fleet would have
begun with such vigor that warfare would be openly admitted, and the
space-drive that had brought it across uncounted trillions of miles of
emptiness would be ready to carry the Ghost Planet beyond the reach of
Earth's relatively short-range weapons.

The sunlit Earth was a hazy solidity filling half the void outside
the _Weddington_. The curve of its edge was plain against the glimmer
of the Milky Way. But against that glimmer, too, there appeared those
seeming bits of thistledown which were actually the space vessels of
the mysterious Ghost Planet.

From the west a squadron of no less than forty drove above atmosphere
toward the very spot where the _Weddington_ climbed slowly toward an as
yet unannounced destination. Kit saw them and pointed them out uneasily.

"Hm," said Tom coldly. "Their normal traveling acceleration is four
point two gravities. We can't beat that. What do we do? Dive down into
atmosphere where we're able to fight?"

But he was already changing the controls. The _Weddington_ ceased to
climb. It began to sweep in a great circle some five miles across.

Tom said explanatorily, "They can see us. If we run away or dive for
Earth, we'll look scared. Just pretending to patrol above Pasadena, we
can bluff for time--I think."

He searched with his eyes around the edge of the great sweep the
_Weddington_, now made over Pasadena. He nodded.

"They're coming all right! There's another fleet. And there's still
another: We've hit back. As a military operation it's necessary to find
out immediately what we've got--if they mean war. And apparently they
do."

McGuire said shrewdly, "We have only to dodge down into atmosphere
and we can fight them. Actually, with the trigger-energy field turned
on, we'd energize air so it would be ruinous to them. Chasing us, our
wake could cut them in two, just as we punched holes in the ship down
yonder."

"Sure," said Tom grimly. "But we're in a bad spot. Not for ourselves,
of course. I _think_ we can make a break. But if we've been sighted
and then run away--" He spoke wrathfully. "I'm thinking of leaving the
Government in a good position. We can't reveal its weakness though it
wants to put us in jail!"

There was silence. That was true. If the _Weddington_ had been sighted,
to the mist-ships it would represent the people on Earth. If it fled,
it would convict them of cowardice and lead to immediate attack. But if
it did not flee and was defeated, it would even more definitely prove
the present defenselessness of Earth.

As loyal human beings, it was up to Tom and McGuire to prove the
courage and deadliness of Earth people with very inadequate means.
Against mist-globes not expecting attack the _Weddington_ had been
effective. Against a fleet gathering for action against her the little
Earth ship was rather pathetic.

The V-shaped formation of mist-globes swept nearer and nearer and
nearer. When within a very few miles its rate of nearing lessened. The
whole formation came to a stop, perhaps a hundred and fifty to two
hundred miles above Earth's surface. It hung in mid-space.

The _Weddington_ continued its grim circling. Other mist-globe
formations appeared.

"They see our ionization-trail," said Tom sourly. "They're debating
what to do. They can't be bluffed off permanently."

       *       *       *       *       *

Round and round and round the circle the _Weddington_ went. A second
formation arrived. It checked and stopped like the first. A third
and fourth and fifth formation--they seemed to drift into a ringlike
arrangement, lining the course of the circuit the _Weddington_ repeated
over and over and over, looking like fat round spooks regarding a
curious phenomenon.

"They know we can hurt them," said McGuire suddenly. "At least, they
know we did. And it's crazy for us to defy them with no weapon better
than we've got. Maybe they think we've got something we're quite sure
will handle them and are waiting for them to start something!"

The spectacle was peculiar in the extreme. The _Weddington_ was squat
and clumsy and unhandy. Here, where any trace of air remaining was as
thin as the substance of the ghost-ships themselves, the little ship
went in what seemed an abstracted, yet somehow defiant circling within
the ring of gossamer-thin unsubstantial spheres which watched it.

"If they think we're daring them--" said Tom suddenly, "they think we
could attack them but are holding back. For the love of St. Peter!
Don't you see what we're doing? We're assuming they're like men! That
they'll get into wars they don't want because they're led by fools!"

He suddenly pounded on the control-board. The circular course of the
_Weddington_ continued unchanged but her progress was in jerks.

"What--what're you doing?" demanded Kit, grabbing hold of a stanchion.

"Taking a chance," growled Tom. "They can see our ionization-trail. I'm
guessing that they think we've been daring them to attack us and yet
not attacking ourselves. So, now that we've defied them long enough,
I'm signaling with our wake.

"I'm turning the drive off and on. I'm making puffs of stuff from
our exhaust, running through numerals first. I've gotten up to six.
Now I'll start doing squares, and then I'll do cubes in series. The
information won't be new but it will show that we are assuming they're
rational creatures and that we are prepared to communicate with them."

The _Weddington_ continued to circle tediously. Suddenly one of the
globes flared. A spot of distinct luminosity appeared below it. And the
luminosity flared and dimmed, first in a series of flashes which meant
numerals, then two twos and then four flashes, then four flashes and
four and sixteen after it.

"They want to talk," said Tom with a sigh of deepest relief. "It's
queer we know that a war means both sides lose and neither wins but
we never act on that assumption. We didn't even begin to suspect that
another civilized race might have found out the same thing and that
they might act on it!"

He checked the speed of the little Earth-ship and came to a stop in
mid-space opposite the ghost-globe that had flashed the light. He
plainly, specifically, singled it out. Then he began to descend toward
Earth. After a bare second the ghost-globe followed it.

McGuire grinned. "For another twelve hours," he told Tom, "we're a
monopoly on weapons against the ghosts. It'll take that long to turn
out more trigger-field generators. So for that long we can act as
ambassadors and the Administration will have to backwater.

"It can put pressure on the news services, but it can't suppress this!
I'm going to put out a G. C. emergency aircraft call the instant we're
under the Heaviside layer. By law all other radio traffic has to stop.

"And when I announce that I'm bringing a ghost-globe to Earth under a
flag of truce to open negotiations with the Government--let them try
to suppress the news! A democracy can make some horrible blunders but
praise Allah there are limits!"

And the ghost-globe and the _Weddington_ settled down out of emptiness
where the sky was dark and many stars burned, to a place where the
sky was merely deep purple, and then to a level where there was blue
overhead and clouds not too far below and then down below those clouds.

The _Weddington_, in fact, settled with a bump beside McGuire's own
house and the police who had raided it less than two hours since were
very respectful. McGuire had made his G. C. call while the two ships
were still ten miles up and the people of Earth were definitely alarmed
enough to demand accommodation instead of war. The air-police had
received instant sweeping orders. McGuire was grimly triumphant.

The ghost sphere settled close by and it was quaint to see how cagily
the air-police stayed away from it. But Tom and McGuire climbed down
from the _Weddington_ and walked toward it.

"This is unprecedented," McGuire told Lan sardonically. "That a
private citizen should be able to overrule the stupidity of his elected
rulers and force the practise of common sense. Now, if our friends the
spooks are just as sensible--"

For an instant, under the thin and tenuous unsubstantiality of the
ghost-globe, it all seemed very improbable. But the globe abruptly
began to thicken. Instinctively Tom's pulse raced.

McGuire said calmly, "They're taking some dirt from the lawn into the
other cosmos to make themselves more visible to us. It's a good sign."

The globe reached the density of black smoke. A darker space appeared
in its underside. Something square and misty came out and floated to
the earth. It checked there and solidified.

"Trigger-energy," said McGuire, in satisfaction. "We thought of
charging shells with trigger-energy to make them real to the ghosts.
They've charged a gadget of some sort with the same energy to make it
real to us."

       *       *       *       *       *

He picked up the gadget--which still, however, was curiously light in
weight.

"Vision-screen," he observed. "Evidently, they figure they can
communicate between the two universes. Hm--they wouldn't have to
transmit energy between. If they could control energy in this cosmos
from that--to be sure! No energy transmission. Just control. Let's
look."

Then he uttered an exclamation. A face looked out at him from a disk
on the face of the square object. It was not a human face at all but
it had eyes which were obviously intelligent. The cube from the mist
sphere made humming sounds.

"My word!" said McGuire. "It's not language but I understand it!"

So did Tom.

       *       *       *       *       *

There was a flare of trumpets from the vision set, and the non-human
but non-repulsive countenance of the creatures from the Ghost Planet
faded out. The screen lighted again, and the dogged, heavy-lidded
features of McGuire looked out.

[Illustration: The non-human countenance faded from the vision-screen.]

"That," he said practically, "was the face of the official commanding
the exploration fleet of the Ghost Planet. Let me make it clear! There
are two universes at least--nobody knows how many more there may
be--which touch each other along some one or two of the dimensions by
which each is measured.

"We have known of the existence of ghost suns for centuries--suns so
thin that they are practically vacua, yet which glow. We know now that
such suns are actually normal suns in another universe, with planets
and gravitations of their own.

"The Ghost Planet revolved about such a sun. Its people--one of whom
you have just seen--developed a civilization in some ways greater than
that of Earth. But just as some of our arts lag behind others, some
arts lagged behind there. Some mentalities are not suited for some
types of investigation.

"The people of the Ghost Planet did not progress in biology as we have
done. Their civilization reached a limiting point, beyond which it
could not go without further progress in a science which was stalled."

McGuire blinked from the screen.

"They sent out exploring ships in quest of the knowledge they had
failed to acquire. They found other civilizations in their own
universe, none equal to theirs. Yet they could not hope to go on
without knowledge their own science had not discovered.

"They were in the position of humanity. We have needed an interstellar
drive for a very long time. We must emigrate or suffocate. But
emigration has been impossible. The people of the Ghost Planet were
limited by a spontaneous mutation of their body cells which once
existed on Earth but was conquered seventy years ago.

"They came to Earth. To them our sun is a ghost sun and our planet a
spectre. But their exploring ships found a civilization here--and no
sign of the disease which had balked all their science. So one of the
planets they had colonized came across the void, to serve as a base for
their examination of our science, to learn how we had escaped their own
disaster."

Then McGuire said, without melodrama, "We have exchanged information
with them. They have given us the secret of an interstellar drive, by
which all the planets of our universe are made available to us for
colonization. The farthest rim of our Galaxy will be no more than four
weeks' journey when we have built ships with the new drive.

"In return we gave them information which is now included in the
schooling of human children at the age of ten. We gave them the
history of the human conquest of cancer. The Ghost Planet returns to
its own place. The two races will never again encounter each other
unless they so wish it.

"We have galaxies to occupy and to develop. They--are our friends.
Already they have returned the humans they drew into their own cosmos
in the hope of getting the information they sought.

"The individuals they chose were, unfortunately, so frightened or so
limited in education that they had forgotten the facts they learned
in grammar school. It was necessary for a great deal of confusion to
occur, and a great many misunderstandings to happen, before actual
two-way communication was opened and the bargain for the exchange of
information struck. It is struck. Both races are immeasurably enriched."

Then McGuire said prosaically, "I think that is all."

His face faded from the screen. An announcer's unctuous voice began,
"You have heard the broadcast of the bargain made--"

Kit threw off the switch. Her father came in the door from the next
room.

"How did I do?"

"Wonderful!" said Kit, "But you didn't say a word about Tom!"

Tom grinned. Kit's father chuckled.

"Tom wanted it that way. We're forming a space-ship company to use
the new drive. He doesn't want to be commandeered for lectures on
borderline matter and the biology of ghosts. He could be under the
controlled research laws."

"I'd like," said Tom meditatively, "to find a planet not too much
unlike Earth but not so crowded and start a little colony there and do
research without worrying about anything in particular."

"Wonderful!" said Kit, her eyes shining.

Her father said abruptly, "Lan called up. He explained that he said
what he did to get a defense program started. He claimed all credit to
bypass the Administration anxiety not to give me any. Now he's in an
awful mess. But I straightened the young man out."

Tom said, "How?"

McGuire chuckled again. "I said at the time he'd made a quick deal with
some politicians I know. It backfired and he made a fool of himself.
So I suggested that since I've become a hero in spite of myself and
all my enemies, the gentlemen he made the deal with won't want that
deal made public. And I suggested that he could blackmail them out of a
comfortable government position. I think he was quite grateful for the
suggestion."

Kit said, "Father--"

"What?"

"I'm engaged to Tom."

Her father displayed no surprise at the announcement.

"And," said Kit, "we're talking about when to get married."

Her father said judicially, "Talk it over with him. His ideas, so far,
have been pretty good. But--hm--I'm going to push this interstellar
drive business fast! I'll have a ship ready to take off in three months
or less, I suspect."

"Well?"

"Either it should be a honeymoon trip," her father observed, "or the
honeymoon should be over before you start. Preferably the latter, I'd
say. I'll want Tom available for consultation as the trip progresses.
Use your own judgment."

Tom did.

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