Invaders from the Infinite | Page 2

ship, was indeed a welcome change.
"Uh-huh. I got hungry. Any objections?" grinned the Irishman.
"None!" replied Evans fervently, pitching in with a will.
Seated at the controls once more, he snapped the little switch that
caused the screen to glow with flashing, swirling colors as the
telectroscope apparatus came to life. A thousand tiny points of flame
appeared scattered on a black field with a suddenness that made them
seem to snap suddenly into being. Points, tiny dimensionless points of
light, save one, a tiny disc of blue-white flame, old Sol from a distance
of close to one billion miles, and under slight reverse magnification.
The skillful hands at the controls were turning adjustments now, and
that disc of flame seemed to leap toward him with a hundred
light-speeds, growing to a disc as large as a dime in an instant, while
the myriad points of the stars seemed to scatter like frightened chickens,
fleeing from the growing sun, out of the screen. Other points,
heretofore invisible, appeared, grew, and rushed away.
The sun shifted from the center of the screen, and a smaller

reddish-green disc came into view--a planet, its atmosphere coloring
the light that left it toward the red. It rushed nearer, grew larger. Earth
spread as it took the center of the screen. A world, a portion of a world,
a continent, a fragment of a continent as the magnification increased,
boundlessly it seemed.
Finally, New York spread across the screen; New York seen from the
air, with a strange lack of perspective. The buildings did not seem all to
slant toward some point, but to stand vertical, for, from a distance of a
billion miles, the vision lines were practically parallel. Titanic shafts of
glowing color in the early summer sun appeared; the hot rays from the
sun, now only 82,500,000 miles away, shimmering on the colored
metal walls.
The new Airlines Building, a mile and a half high, supported at various
points by actual spaceship driving units, was a riot of shifting, rainbow
hues. A new trick in construction had been used here, and Evans smiled
at it. Arcot, inventor of the ship that carried him, had suggested it to
Fuller, designer of that ship, and of that building. The colored berylium
metal of the wall had been ruled with 20,000 lines to the inch, mere
scratches, but nevertheless a diffraction grating. The result was
amazingly beautiful. The sunlight, split up to its rainbow colors, was
reflected in millions of shifting tints.
In the air, supported by tiny packs strapped to their backs, thousands of
people were moving, floating where they wished, in any direction, at
any elevation. There were none of the helicopters of even five years
ago, now. A molecular power suit was far more convenient, cost
nothing to operate, and but $50 to buy. Perfectly safe, requiring no skill,
everyone owned them. To the watcher in space, they were mere moving,
snaky lines of barely distinguishable dots that shivered and seemed to
writhe in the refractions of the air. Passing over them, seeming to pass
almost through them in this strange perspectiveless view, were the
shadowy forms of giant space liners, titanic streamlined hulls. They
were streamlined for no good reason, save that they looked faster and
more graceful than the more efficient spherical freighters, just as
passenger liners of two centuries earlier, with their steam engines, had

carried four funnels and used two. A space liner spent so minute a
portion of its journey in the atmosphere that it was really inefficient to
streamline them.
"Won't be long!" muttered Russ, grinning cheerily at the familiar, sunlit
city. His eyes darted to the chronometer beside him. The view seemed
to be taken from a ship that was suddenly scudding across the heavens
like a frightened thing, as it ran across from Manhattan Island, followed
the Hudson for a short way, then cut across into New Jersey, swinging
over the great woodland area of Kittatiny Park, resting finally on the
New Jersey suburb of New York nestled in the Kittatinies, Blairtown.
Low apartment buildings, ten or twelve stories high, nestled in the
waving green of trees in the old roadways. When ground traffic ceased,
the streets had been torn up, and parkways substituted.
Quickly the view singled out a single apartment, and the great smooth
roof was enlarged on the screen to the absolute maximum clarity, till
further magnification simply resulted in worse stratospheric distortion.
On the broad roof were white strips of some material, making a huge V
followed by two I's. Russ watched, his hand on the control steadying
the view under the Earth's complicated orbital motion, and rotation,
further corrections for the ship's orbital motion making the job one
requiring great skill. The view held the center with amazing clarity.
Something