Astounding Stories, August, 1931

Various

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• Publié par: umkoi
• Publié le: 08 décembre 2010
• Nombre de lectures: 15
• Langue: English

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The Project Gutenberg EBook of Astounding Stories, August, 1931, by Various This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org Title: Astounding Stories, Author: Various August, 1931 Release Date: June 28, 2010 [EBook #33016] Language: English Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1 *** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK ASTOUNDING STORIES, AUGUST, 1931 *** Produced by Sankar Viswanathan, Greg Weeks, and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net ASTOUNDING STORIES 20¢ On Sale the First Thursday of Each Month W. Publisher; BATES, Editor M. CLAYTON, HARRY The Clayton Standard on a Magazine Guarantees That the stories therein are clean, interesting, vivid, by leading writers of the day and purchased under conditions approved by the Authors' League of America; That such magazines are manufactured in Union shops by American workmen; That each newsdealer and agent is insured a fair profit; That an intelligent censorship guards their advertising pages. The other Clayton magazines are : ACE-HIGH MAGAZINE, RANCH ROMANCES, COWBOY STORIES, CLUES, FIVE-NOVELS MONTHLY, ALL STAR DETECTIVE STORIES, RANGELAND LOVE STORY MAGAZINE, WESTERN ADVENTURES, WESTERN LOVE STORIES and JUNGLE STORIES. More than Two Million Copies Required to Supply the Monthly Demand for Clayton Magazines. 2 VOL. VII, No. CONTENTS 1931 August, THE DANGER FROM THE DEEP RALPH MILNE FARLEY Marooned on the Sea-Floor, His Hoisting Cable Cut, Young Abbot Is Left at the Mercy of the Man-Sharks. BROOD OF THE DARK MOON CHARLES WILLARD DIFFIN Once More Chet, Walt and Diane Are United in a Wild Ride to the Dark Moon. But This Time They Go as Prisoners of Their Deadly Enemy Schwartzmann. (Beginning a Four-Part Novel.) IF THE SUN DIED R. F. STARZL Tens of Millenniums After the Death of the Sun There Comes a Young Man Who Dares to Open the Frozen Gate of Subterranea. THE MIDGET FROM THE ISLAND H. G. WINTER Garth Howard, Prey to Half the Animals of the Forest, Fights Valiantly to Regain His Lost Five Feet of Size. A Complete Novelette.) THE MOON WEED HARL VINCENT Unwittingly the Traitor of the Earth, Van Pits Himself Against the Inexorably Tightening Web of Plant-Beasts He Has Released from the Moon. THE PORT OF MISSING PLANES CAPTAIN S. P. MEEK In the Underground Caverns of the Selom, Dr. Bird Once Again Locks Wills with the Subversive Genius, Saranoff. THE READERS CORNER ALL OF US A Meeting Place for Readers of Astounding Stories Single Cents) Copies, 20 Cents (In Canada, Yearly Subscription, $2.00 149 168 198 214 236 255 273 25 Issued monthly by The Clayton Magazines, Inc., 80 Lafayette St., New York. N. Y. W. M. Clayton, President; Francis P. Pace, Secretary. Entered as secondclass matter December 7, 1929, at the Post Office at New York, N. Y., under Act of March 3, 1879. Title registered as a Trade Mark in the U. S. Patent Office. Member Newsstand Group. For advertising rates address The Newsstand Group, Inc., 80 Lafayette Street, New York; or The Wrigley Bldg., Chicago. The Danger from the Deep By Ralph Milne Farley [149] He caught a glimpse of the grinning fish-face. ithin a thick-walled sphere of steel eight feet in diameter, with crystalclear fused-quartz windows, there crouched an alert young scientist, George Abbot. The sphere rested on the primeval muck and slime at the bottom of the Pacific Ocean, one mile beneath the surface. The beam from his 200-watt searchlight, which shot out through one of his three windows into the dark blue depths beyond, seemed faint indeed, yet it served to illuminate anything which crossed it, or on which it fell. Marooned on the sea-floor, his hoisting cable cut, young Abbot is left at the mercy of the man-sharks. [150] For a considerable length of time since his descent to the ocean floor, young Abbot had clung to one of the thick windows of his bathysphere, absorbed by the marine life outside. Slender small fish with stereoscopic eyes, darted in and out of the beam of light. Swimming snails floated by, carrying their own phosphorescent lanterns. Paper-thin transparent crustaceans swam into view, followed by a few white shrimps, pale as ghosts. Then a mist of tiny fish swept across his field of vision. Abbot cupped his face in his hands, and stared out. The incongruous thought flashed across his mind that thus he had often sat by the window of his club in New York, and gazed out at the passing motor traffic. His searchlight cut a sharp swath through the blue muck. More than once he thought he saw large moving fish-like forms far away. "Speed up the generator," he called into his phone. Immediately the shaft of light brightened. He set about trying to focus upon one of those dim elusive shapes which had so intrigued him. ut suddenly the searchlight went out! Intent on repairing the apparatus as rapidly as possible, Abbot snapped the button-switch, which ought to have illuminated the interior of his diving-sphere; but the lights did not go on. Then he noticed that the electric fan, on which he depended to keep his airsupply properly mixed, had stopped. He spoke into the telephone transmitter, which hung in front of his mouth: "Hi, there, up on the boat! My electric power is cut off. I'm down here with my fan stopped and my heat cut off. Hoist me up, and be quick about it!" "O.K., sir." As the young man waited for the winch to get under way on the boat a mile above him, he pulled out his electric pocket flashlight and sent its feeble ray out through his quartz-glass window into the dim royal-purple depths beyond, in one last attempt to get a look at those mysterious fish-shapes which had so intrigued him. And then he saw one of them distinctly. Evidently they had swum closer when the glow of his searchlight had stopped; and so the sudden flash of his pocket-light had taken them by surprise. For, as he snapped it on, he caught an instant's glimpse of a grinning fish-face pressed close against the outside of his thick window-pane, as though trying to peer in at him. The fish-face somewhat resembled the head of a shark, except that the mouth was a bit smaller and not quite so leeringly brutal, and the forehead was rather high and domed. But what most attracted Abbot's attention, in the brief instant before the startled fish whisked away in a swirl of phosphorescent foam, was the fact that, from beneath each of the two pectoral fins, there protruded what appeared to be a skinny human arm, terminating in three fingers and a thumb! Then the fish was gone. Abbot snapped off his little light. The diving-sphere quivered, as the hoisting-cable tautened. But suddenly the sphere settled back to the bottom of the sea with a jarring thud. "Cable's parted, sir!" spoke a frantic voice in his ear-phones. or a moment George Abbot sat stunned with horror. Then his mind began to race, like a squirrel in a cage, seeking some way of escape. Perhaps he could manage to unscrew the 400-pound trap door at the top of the sphere, and shoot to the surface, with the bubbling-out of the confined air. But his scientifically trained mind made some rapid calculations which showed him this was absurd. At the depth of a mile, the pressure is roughly 156 atmospheres, that is to say, 156 times the air-pressure at the surface of the earth; and the moment that his sphere was opened to this pressure, he would be blown back inwardly away from the man-hole, and the air inside his sphere would suddenly be compressed to only 1/156 of its former volume. [151] Not only would this pressure be sufficient to squash him into a mangled pulp, but also the sudden compression of the air inside the sphere would generate enough heat to fry that mangled pulp to a crisp cinder almost instantly. As George Abbot came to a full realization of the horror of these facts, he recoiled from the trap-door as though it were charged with death. "For Heaven's sakes, do something!" he shrieked in agony into the transmitter. "Courage, sir," came back the reply. "We are rigging up a grapple just as fast as we can. Long before your oxygen gives out, we shall slide it down to you along the telephone line, which is the only remaining connection between us. When it settles about your sphere, and you can see its hooks outside your window by the light of your pocket-flash, let us know, and we'll trip the grapple and haul you up." "Thank you," replied the young man. e was calm now, but it was an enforced and numb kind of calmness. Mechanically he throttled down his oxygen supply, so as to make it last longer. Mechanically he took out his notebook and pencil and started to write down, in the dark, his experiences; for he was determined to leave a full account for posterity, even though he himself should perish. After setting down a categorical description of the successive partings of the electric light cable and the hoist cable, and his thoughts and feelings in that connection, he described in detail the shark with hands, which he had seen through the window of his sphere. He tried to be very explicit about this, for he realized that his account would probably be laid, by everyone, to the disordered imagination of his last dying moments; being a true scientist, George Abbot wanted the world to believe him, so that another sphere would be built and sent down to the ocean depths, to find out more about these peculiar denizens of the deep. Of course, no one would believe him. This thought kept drumming in his ears. No one—except Professor Osborne. Old Osborne would believe! George Abbot's mind flashed back to a conversation he had had with the old professor, just before the oil interests had sent him on this exploring trip to discover the source of the large quantities of petroleum which had beg