Astounding Stories, May, 1931

Various

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• Publié par: nifir
• Publié le: 01 décembre 2010
• Nombre de lectures: 40
• Langue: English

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The Project Gutenberg EBook of Astounding Stories, May, 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, May, 1931 Author: Various Release Date: November 23, 2009 [EBook #30532] Language: English Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1 *** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK ASTOUNDING STORIES, MAY, 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. M. CLAYTON, Publisher Editor HARRY BATES, Editor DR. DOUGLAS M. DOLD, Consulting 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, and WESTERN LOVE STORIES. More than Two Million Copies Required to Supply the Monthly Demand for Clayton Magazines. VOL. VI, No. 2 CONTENTS May, 1931 COVER DESIGN DARK MOON H. W. WESSO CHARLES W. DIFFIN 148 Painted in Water-Colors from a Scene in "Dark Moon." Mysterious, Dark, Out of the Unknown Deep Comes a New Satellite to Lure Three Courageous Earthlings on to Strange Adventure. (A Complete Novelette.) WHEN CAVERNS YAWNED CAPTAIN S. P. MEEK 198 Only Dr. Bird's Super-Scientific Sleuthing Stands in the Way of Ivan Sarnoff's Latest Attempt at Wholesale Destruction. THE EXILE OF TIME RAY CUMMINGS 216 Young Lovers of Three Eras Are Swept down the Torrent of the Sinister Cripple Tugh's Frightful Vengeance. (Part Two of a Four-Part Novel.) WHEN THE MOON TURNED GREEN HAL K. WELLS 241 Outside His Laboratory Bruce Dixon Finds a World of Living Dead Men—and Above, in the Sky, Shines a Weird Green Moon. THE DEATH-CLOUD NAT SCHACHNER AND ARTHUR L. ZAGAT 256 The Epic Exploit of One Who Worked in the Dark and Alone, Behind the Enemy Lines, in the Great Last War. THE READERS' CORNER ALL OF US 276 A Meeting Place for Readers of Astounding Stories. Single Copies, 20 Cents (In Canada, 25 Cents) $2.00 Yearly Subscription, Issued monthly by Readers' Guild, Inc., 80 Lafayette Street, New York, N. Y W. M. Clayton, President; Francis . P. Pace, Secretary. Entered as second-class 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 St., New York or The Wrigley Bldg., Chicago. [148] Behind them a red ship was falling—falling free! Dark Moon A COMPLETE NOVELETTE By Charles W. Diffin CHAPTER I There Comes a New World he one hundred and fifty-ninth floor of the great Transportation Building allowed one standing at a window to look down upon the roofs of the countless buildings that were New York. Flat-decked, all of them; busy places of hangars and machine shops and strange aircraft, large and small, that rose vertically under the lift of flashing helicopters. Mysterious, dark, out of the unknown deep comes a new satellite to lure three courageous Earthlings on to strange adventures. The air was alive and vibrant with directed streams of stubby-winged shapes that drove swiftly on their way, with only a wisp of vapor from their funnel-shaped sterns to mark the continuous explosion that propelled them. Here and there were those that entered a shaft of pale-blue light that somehow outshone the sun. It marked an ascending area, and there ships canted swiftly, swung their blunt noses upward, and vanished, to the upper levels. A mile and more away, in a great shaft of green light from which all other craft kept clear, a tremendous shape was dropping. Her hull of silver was striped with a broad red band; her multiple helicopters were dazzling flashes in the sunlight. The countless dots that were portholes and the larger observation ports must have held numberless eager faces, for the Oriental Express served a cosmopolitan passenger list. But Walter Harkness, standing at the window, stared out from troubled, frowning eyes that saw nothing of the kaleidoscopic scene. His back was turned to the group of people in the room, and he had no thought of wonders that were prosaic, nor of passengers, eager or blase; his thoughts were only of freight and of the acres of flat roofs far in the distance where alternate flashes of color marked the descending area for fast freighters of the air. And in his mind he could see what his eyes could not discern—the markings on those roofs that were enormous landing fields: Harkness Terminals, New York. [149] [150] nly twenty-four, Walt Harkness—owner now of Harkness, Incorporated. Dark hair that curled slightly as it left his forehead; eyes that were taking on the intent, straightforward look that had been his father's and that went straight to the heart of a business proposal with disconcerting directness. But the lips were not set in the hard lines that had marked Harkness Senior; they could still curve into boyish pleasure to mark the enthusiasm that was his. He was not typically the man of business in his dress. His broad shoulders seemed slender in the loose blouse of blue silk; a narrow scarf of brilliant color was loosely tied; the close, full-length cream-colored trousers were supported by a belt of woven metal, while his shoes were of the coarse-mesh fabric that the latest mode demanded. He turned now at the sound of Warrington's voice. E. B. Warrington, Counsellor at Law, was the name that glowed softly on the door of this spacious office, and Warrington's gray head was nodding as he dated and indexed a document. "June twentieth, nineteen seventy-three," he repeated; "a lucky day for you, Walter. Inside of ten years this land will be worth double the fifty million you are paying—and it is worth more than that to you." He turned and handed a document to a heavy-bodied man across from him. "Here is your copy, Herr Schwartzmann," he said. The man pocketed the paper with a smile of satisfaction thinly concealed on his dark face. arkness did not reply. He found little pleasure in the look on Schwartzmann's face, and his glance passed on to a fourth man who sat quietly at one side of the room. Young, his tanned face made bronze by contrast with his close-curling blond hair,