Crashing Suns
BY EDMOND HAMILTON
[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from
Weird Tales August and September 1928.
Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that
the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]
As the control-levers flashed down under my hands our ship dived downthrough space with the swiftness of thought. The next instant therecame a jarring shock, and our craft spun over like a whirling top.Everything in the conning-tower, windows and dials and controls, seemedto be revolving about me with lightning speed, while I clung dizzily tothe levers in my hands. In a moment I managed to swing them back intoposition, and at once the ship righted herself and sped smoothly onthrough the ether. I drew a deep breath.
The trap-door in the little room's floor slid open, then, and thestartled face of big Hal Kur appeared, his eyes wide.
"By the Power, Jan Tor!" he exclaimed; "that last meteor just grazedus! An inch nearer and it would have been the end of the ship!"
I turned to him for a moment, laughing. "A miss is as good as a mile,"I quoted.
He grinned back at me. "Well, remember that we're not out on the Uranuspatrol now," he reminded me. "What's our course?"
"Seventy-two degrees sunward, plane No. 8," I told him, glancing at thedials. "We're less than four hundred thousand miles from Earth, now," Iadded, nodding toward the broad window before me.
Climbing up into the little conning-tower, Hal Kur stepped over besideme, and together we gazed out ahead.
The sun was at the ship's left, for the moment, and the sky aheadwas one of deep black, in which the stars, the flaming stars ofinterplanetary space, shone like brilliant jewels. Directly ahead ofus there glowed a soft little orb of misty light, which was growingsteadily larger as we raced on toward it. It was our destination, thecloud-veiled little world of Earth, mother-planet of all our race. Tomyself, who had passed much of my life on the four outer giants, onJupiter and Saturn and Uranus and Neptune, the little planet aheadseemed insignificant, almost, with its single tiny moon. And yetfrom it, I knew, had come that unceasing stream of human life, thatdauntless flood of pioneers, which had spread over all the solarsystem in the last hundred thousand years. They had gone out to planetafter planet, had conquered the strange atmospheres and bacteria andgravitations, until now the races of man held sway over all the sun'seight wheeling worlds. And it was from this Earth, a thousand centuriesbefore, that there had ventured out the first discoverers' crude littlespace-boats, whose faulty gravity-screens and uncertain controlscontrasted strangely with the mighty leviathans that flashed betweenthe planets now.
Abruptly I was aroused from my musings by the sharp ringing of abell at my elbow. "The telestereo," I said to Hal Kur. "Take thecontrols." As he did so I stepped over to the telestereo's glass disk,inset in the room's floor, and touched a switch beside it. Instantlythere appeared standing upon the disk, the image of a man in the blueand white robe of the Supreme Council, a life-size and moving andstereoscopically perfect image, flashed across the void of space to myapparatus by means of etheric vibrations. Through the medium of thatprojected image the man himself could see and hear me as well as Icould see and hear him, and at once he spoke directly to me.
"Jan Tor, Captain of Interplanetary Patrol Cruiser 79388," he said, inthe official form of address. "The command of