Invaders from the Infinite | Page 8

machines, which would amplify and broadcast our thoughts. So we
broadcast our thought-waves, and implanted in the mind of their leader
that it would be wise to land, and learn the extent of the civilization,
and the weapons to be met. Also, as the ship drew nearer, we made him
decide on a certain spot we had prepared for him.
"He never guessed that the thoughts were not his own. Only the ideas
came to him, seeming to spring from his own mind.
"He landed--and we used our one weapon. It was a thing left to one
group of rulers when the Ancient Masters left us to care for ourselves.
What it was, we never knew; we had never used it in the fifteen
thousand years since the Great Masters had passed--never had to. But
now it was brought out, and concealed behind great piles of rock in a
deep canyon where the ship of the enemy would land. When it landed,
we turned the beam of the machine on it, and the apparatus rotated it
swiftly, and a cone of the beam's ray was formed as the beam was
swung through a small circle in the vertical plane. The machine leaped
backward, and though it was so massive that a tremendous amount of
labor had been required to bring it there, the push of the pencil of force
we sent out hurled it back against a rocky cliff behind it as though it
were some child's toy. It continued to operate for perhaps a second,
perhaps two. In that time two great holes had been cut in the enemy
ship, holes fifteen feet across, that ran completely through the hull as
though a die had cut through the metal of the ship, cutting out a disc of
metal.
"There was a terrific concussion, and a roar as the air blasted out of the
ship. It did not take us long to discover that the enemy were dead. Their
terrible, bloated corpses lay everywhere in the ship. Most of the men
we were able to recognize, having seen them in the mentovisor. But the
colors were distorted, and their forms were peculiar. Indeed, the whole
ship seemed strange. The only time that things ever did seem normal

about that strange thing, when the angles of it seemed what they were,
when the machines did not seem out of proportion, out of shape,
twisted, was when on a trial trip we ventured very close to our sun."
Arcot whistled softly and looked at Morey. Morey nodded. "Probably
right. Don't interrupt."
"That you thought something, I understood, but the thoughts
themselves were hopelessly unintelligible to me. You know the
explanation?" asked Zezdon Afthen eagerly.
"We think so. The ship was evidently made on a world of huge size.
Those men, their stocky, block legs and arms, their entire build and
their desire for the largest of your planets, would indicate that. Their
own world was probably even larger--they were forced to wear
pressure suits even on that large world, and could jump all over, you
said. On so huge a sphere as their native world seems to be, the gravity
would be so intense as to distort space. Geometry, such as yours seems
to be, and such as ours was, could never be developed, for you assume
the existence of a straight line, and of an absolute plane surface. These
things cannot exist in space, but on small worlds, far from the central
sun's mass, the conditions approach that without sufficient discrepency
to make the error obvious. On so huge a globe as their world the space
is so curved that it is at once obvious that no straight line exists, and
that no plane exists. Their geometry would never be like ours. When
you went close to your sun, the attraction was sufficient to curve space
into a semblance of the natural conditions on their home planet, then
your senses and the ship met a compromise condition which made it
seem more or less normal, not so obviously strange to you.
"But continue." Arcot looked at Afthen interestedly.
"There were none left in their ship now, and we had been careful in
locating the first hole, that it should not damage the propulsive
machinery. The second hole was accidental, due to the shift of the
machine. The machine itself was wrecked now, crushed by its own
reaction. We forgot that any pencil of force powerful enough to do
what we wanted, would tear the machine from its moorings unless

fastened with great steel bolts into the solid rock.
"The second hole had been far to the rear, and had, by ill-luck, cut out a
portion of the driving apparatus. We could not repair that, though we
did succeed at last in lifting the