Various - "Scientific American Supplement No. 275"

Chas. J. Korinek - "The Veterinarian"

Ruth McEnery Stuart - "Moriah's Mourning and Other Half Hour Sketches"

Laura Lee Hope - "The Moving Picture Girls Snowbound"

Annual Bibliography of Commonwealth Literature 2007
This paper argues that discourses of love in Ghanaian market literature for youth offer a view into complex negotiations of agency and empowerment. Drawing on Deborah Durham's notion of youth as "social `shifters'" and Francis Nyamnjoh's conception of the "interconnectedness" of agency, I take Ghanaian market literature as one specific case of how African literature for youth foregrounds questions of continuity and change as African societies enter into increasingly complex global relations. In this literature for youth, received notions of love, often constructed out of impressions from American pop and hip hop music, carry new notions of agency that compete with existing "domesticated" forms. Authors like Ike Tandoh and Evelyn Tay employ discourses of love to offer youth alternative avenues for empowerment in a context of socio-economic disenfranchizement. In a creative process of "straddling", this writing both reveals and reproduces the contradictions that obtain in youth configurations of agency.

Spacehounds of IPC

E >> Edward Elmer Smith >> Spacehounds of IPC




Then, in each group of seven, similar great streamers of energy reached
out from fortress to fortress, until each group was welded into one
mighty unit by twenty-one such bands of force. The unit formed, a ray
from each of its seven component structures seized upon a designated
sphere, and under the combined power of those seven tractors, the
luckless globe was literally snapped into the center of mass of the
Vorkulian unit There seven dully gleaming red pressor rays leaped upon
it, backed by all the power of seven gigantic fortresses, held rigidly
in formation by the unimaginable mass of the structures and by their
twenty-one prodigious tractor beams. Under that awful impact, the
screens and walls of the hexan spheres were exactly as effective as so
many structures of the most tenuous vapor. The red glare of the vortex
of those beams was lightened momentarily by a flash of brighter color,
and through the foggy atmosphere there may have flamed briefly a drop or
two of metal that was only liquefied. The red and green beams snapped
out, the peculiar radiance died from the metal walls, and the gigantic
duplex cone of the Vorkuls bored serenely northward--as little marked or
affected by the episode as is a darting swift who, having snapped up a
chance insect in full flight, darts on.

"Great Cat!" Far off in space, Brandon turned from his visiray screen
and wiped his brow. "Czuv certainly chirped it, Perce, when he called
those things flying fortresses. But who, what, why, and how? We didn't
see any apparatus that looked capable of generating or handling those
beams--and of course, when they got started, their screens cut us
off at the pockets. Wish we could have made some sense out of their
language--like to know a few of their ideas--find out whether we can't
get on terms with them some way or other. Funny-looking wampuses, but
they've got real brains--their think-tanks are very evidently full of
bubbles. If they have it in mind to take us on next, old son, it'll be
just ... too ... bad!"

"And then some," agreed Stevens. "They've got something--no fooling. It
looks like the hexans are going to get theirs, good and plenty, pretty
soon--and then what? I'd give my left lung and four front teeth for one
long look at their controls in action."

"You and me both--it's funny, the way those green ray-screens stick to
the walls, instead of being spherical, as you'd expect ... should think
they'd _have_ to radiate from a center, and so be spherical," Brandon
cogitated. "However, we've got nothing corkscrewy enough to go through
them, so we'll have to stand by. We'll stay inside whenever possible,
look on from outside when we must, but all the time picking up whatever
information we can. In the meantime, now that we've got our passengers,
old Doctor Westfall prescribes something that he says is good for what
ails us. Distance--lots of distance, straight out from the sun--and
I wouldn't wonder if we'd better take his prescription."

The two Terrestrial observers relapsed into silence, staring into
their visiray plates, searching throughout the enormous volume of one
of those great fortresses in another attempt to solve the mystery of the
generation and propagation of the incredible manifestations of energy
which they had just witnessed. Scarcely had the search begun, however,
when the visirays were again cut off sharply--the rapidly advancing main
fleet of the hexans had arrived and the scintillant Vorkulian screens
were again in place.

True to hexan nature, training and tradition, the fleet, hundreds
strong, rushed savagely to the attack. Above, below, and around the
far-flung cone the furious globes dashed, attacking every Vorkulian
craft viciously with every resource at their command; with every weapon
known to their diabolically destructive race. Planes of force stabbed
and slashed, concentrated beams of annihilation flared fiercely through
the reeking atmosphere, gigantic aerial bombs and torpedoes were hurled
with full radio control against the unwelcome visitor--with no effect.
Bound together in groups of seven by the mighty, pale-green bands of
force, the Vorkulian units sailed calmly northward, spiraling along with
not the slightest change in formation or velocity. The frightful planes
and beams of immeasurable power simply spent themselves harmlessly
against those sparklingly radiant green walls--seemingly as absorbent
to energy as a sponge is to water, since the eye could not detect any
change in the appearance of the screens, under even the fiercest blasts
of the hexan projectors. Bombs, torpedoes, and all material projectiles
were equally futile--they exploded harmlessly in the air far from their
objectives, or disappeared at the touch of one of those dark, dull-red
pressor rays. And swiftly, but calmly and methodically as at a Vorkulian
practice drill, the heptagons were destroying the hexan fleet. Seven
mighty green tractors would lash out, seize an attacking sphere, and
snap it into the center of mass of the unit of seven. There would be a
brief flash of dull red, a still briefer flare of incandescence, and the
impalpable magnets would leap out to seize another of the doomed globes.
It was only a matter of moments until not a hexan vessel remained; and
the Vorkulian juggernaut spiraled onward, now at full acceleration,
toward the hexan stronghold dimly visible far ahead of them--a vast
city built around Jupiter's northern pole.

At the controls of his projector, Kromodeor spun a dial with a
many-fingered, flexible hand and spoke.

"Wixill, I am being watched again--I can feel very plainly that strange
intelligence watching everything I do. Have the tracers located him?"

"No, they haven't been able to synchronize with his wave yet. Either
he is using a most minute pencil or, what is more probable, he is on a
frequency which we do not ordinarily use. However, I agree with you that
it is not a malignant intelligence. All of us have felt it, and none of
us senses enmity. Therefore, it is not a hexan--it may be one of those
strange creatures of the satellites, who are, of course, perfectly
harmless."

"Harmless, but unpleasant," returned Kromodeor. "When we get back I'm
going to find his beam myself and send a discharge along it that will
end his spying upon me. I do not...."

* * * * *

A wailing signal interrupted the conversation and every Vorkul in
the vast fleet coiled even more tightly about his bars, for the real
battle was about to begin. The city of the hexans lay before them,
all her gigantic forces mustered to repel the first real invasion of
her long and warlike history. Mile after mile it extended, an orderly
labyrinth of spherical buildings arranged in vast interlocking series
of concentric circles--a city of such size that only a small part of it
was visible, even to the infra-red vision of the Vorkulians. Apparently
the city was unprotected, having not even a wall. Outward from the low,
rounded houses of the city's edge there reached a wide and verdant
plain, which was separated from the jungle by a narrow moat of
shimmering liquid--a liquid of such dire potency that across it,
even those frightful growths could neither leap nor creep.

But as the Vorkulian phalanx approached--now shooting forward and
upward with maximum acceleration, screaming bolts of energy flaming out
for miles behind each heptagon as the full power of its generators was
unleashed--it was made clear that the homeland of the hexans was far
from unprotected. The verdant plain disappeared in a blast of radiance,
revealing a transparent surface, through which could be seen masses of
machinery filling level below level, deep into the ground as far as the
eye could reach; and from the bright liquid of the girdling moat there
shot vertically upward a coruscantly refulgent band of intense yellow
luminescence. These were the hexan defences, heretofore invulnerable and
invincible. Against them any ordinary warcraft, equipped with ordinary
weapons of offense, would have been as pitifully impotent as a naked
baby attacking a battleship. But now those defenses were being
challenged by no ordinary craft; it had taken the mightiest intellects
of Vorkulia two long lifetimes to evolve the awful engine of destruction
which was hurling itself forward and upward with an already terrific and
constantly increasing speed.

Onward and upward flashed the gigantic duplex cone, its entire whirling
mass laced and latticed together--into one mammoth unit by green tractor
beams and red pressors. These tension and compression members, of
unheard-of power, made of the whole fleet of three hundred forty-three
fortresses a single stupendous structure--a structure with all the
strength and symmetry of a cantilever truss! Straight through that wall
of yellow vibrations the vast truss drove, green walls flaming blue
defiance as the absorbers overloaded; its doubly braced tip rearing
upward, into and beyond the vertical as it shot through that searing
yellow wall. Simultaneously from each heptagon there flamed downward a
green shaft of radiance, so that the whole immense circle of the cone's
mouth was one solid tractor beam, fastening upon and holding in an
unbreakable grip mile upon mile of the hexan earthworks.

Practically irresistible force and supposedly immovable object!
Every loose article in every heptagon had long since been stored in
its individual shockproof compartment, and now every Vorkul coiled his
entire body in fierce clasp about mighty horizontal bars: for the entire
kinetic energy of the untold millions of tons of mass comprising the
cone, at the terrific measure of its highest possible velocity, was
to be hurled upon those unbreakable linkages of force which bound
the trussed aggregation of Vorkulian fortresses to the deeply buried
intrenchments of the hexans. The gigantic composite tractor beam snapped
on and held. Inconceivably powerful as that beam was, it stretched a
trifle under the incomprehensible momentum of those prodigious masses
of metal, almost halted in their terrific flight. But the war-cone was
not quite halted; the calculations of the Vorkulian scientists had been
accurate. No possible artificial structure, and but few natural ones--in
practice maneuvers entire mountains had been lifted and hurled for miles
through the air--could have withstood the incredible violence of that
lunging, twisting, upheaving impact. Lifted bodily by that impalpable
hawser of force and cruelly wrenched and twisted by its enormous couple
of angular momentum, the hexan works came up out of the ground as a
waterpipe comes up in the teeth of a power shovel. The ground trembled
and rocked and boulders, fragments of concrete masonry, and masses of
metal flew in all directions as that city-encircling conduit of
diabolical machinery was torn from its bed.

* * * * *

A portion of that conduit fully thirty miles in length was in the air,
a twisted, flaming inferno of wrecked generators, exploding ammunition,
and broken and short-circuited high-tension leads before the hexans
could themselves cut it and thus save the remainder of their
fortifications. With resounding crashes, the structure parted at the
weakened points, the furious upheaval stopped and, the tractor beams
shut off, the shattered, smoking, erupting mass of wreckage fell in
clashing, grinding ruin upon the city.

The enormous duplex cone of the Vorkuls did not attempt to repeat the
maneuver, but divided into two single cones, one of which darted toward
each point of rupture. There, upon the broken and unprotected ends of
the hexan cordon, their points of attack lay: theirs the task to eat
along that annular fortress, no matter what the opposition might bring
to bear--to channel in its place a furrow of devastation until the two
cones, their work complete, should meet at the opposite edge of the
city. Then what was left of the cones would separate into individual
heptagons, which would so systematically blast every hexan thing into
nothingness as to make certain that never again would they resume their
insensate attacks upon the Vorkuls. Having counted the cost and being
grimly ready to pay it, the implacable attackers hurled themselves upon
their objectives.

Here were no feeble spheres of space, commanding only the limited
energies transmitted to their small receptors through the ether. Instead
there were all the offensive and defensive weapons developed by hundreds
of generations of warrior-scientists; wielding all the incalculable
power capable of being produced by the massed generators of a mighty
nation. But for the breach opened in the circle by the irresistible
surprise attack, they would have been invulnerable, and, hampered as
they were by the defenseless ends of what should have been an endless
ring, the hexans took heavy toll.

The heptagons, massive and solidly braced as they were, and anchored by
tractor rays as well, shuddered and trembled throughout their mighty
frames under the impact of fiercely driven pressor beams. Sullenly
radiant green wall-screens flared brighter and brighter as the Vorkulian
absorbers and dissipators, mighty as they were, continued more and more
to overload; for there were being directed against them beams from the
entire remaining circumference of the stronghold. Every deadly frequency
and emanation known to the fiendish hexan intellect, backed by the full
power of the city, was poured out against the invaders in sizzling
shrieking bars, bands, and planes of frenzied incandescence. Nor was
vibratory destruction alone. Armor-piercing projectiles of enormous
size and weight were hurled--diamond-hard, drill-headed projectiles
which clung and bored upon impact. High-explosive shells, canisters of
gas, and the frightful aerial bombs and radio-dirigible torpedoes of
highly scientific war--all were thrown with lavish hand, as fast as
the projectors could be served. But thrust for thrust, ray for ray,
projectile for massive projectile, the Brobdingnagian creations of
the Vorkuls gave back to the hexans.

The material lining of the ghastly moat was the only substance capable
of resisting the action of its contents, and now, that lining destroyed
by the uprooting of the fortress, that corrosive, brilliantly mobile
liquid cascaded down in to the trough and added its hellish contribution
to the furious scene. For whatever that devouring fluid touched flared
into yellow flame, gave off clouds of lurid, strangling vapor, and
disappeared. But through yellow haze, through blasting frequencies,
through clouds of poisonous gas, through rain of metal and through
storm of explosive the two cones ground implacably onward, their every
offensive weapon centered upon the fast-receding exposed ends of the
hexan fortress. Their bombs and torpedoes ripped and tore into the
structure beneath the invulnerable shield and exploded, demolishing
and hurling aside like straws, the walls, projectors, hexads and vast
mountains of earth. Their terrible rays bored in, softening, fusing,
volatilizing metal, short-circuiting connections, destroying life
far ahead of the point of attack; and, drawn along by the relentlessly
creeping composite tractor beam, there progressed around the circumference
of the hexan city two veritable Saturnalia of destruction--uninterrupted,
cataclysmic detonations of sound and sizzling, shrieking, multi-colored
displays of pyrotechnic incandescence combining to form a spectacle
of violence incredible.

But the heptagons could not absorb nor radiate indefinitely those
torrents of energy, and soon one greenishly incandescent screen went
down. Giant shells pierced the green metal walls, giant beams of force
fused and consumed them. Faster and faster the huge heptagon became a
shapeless, flowing mass, its metal dripping away in flaming gouts of
brilliance; then it disappeared utterly in one terrific blast as some
probing enemy ray reached a vital part. The cone did not pause nor
waver. Many of its component units would go down, but it would go
on--and on and on until every hexan trace had disappeared or until
the last Vorkulian heptagon had been annihilated.

In one of the lowermost heptagons, one bearing the full brunt of the
hexan armament, Kromodeor reared upright as his projector controls
went dead beneath his hands. Finding his communicator screens likewise
lifeless, he slipped to the floor and wriggled to the room of the Chief
Power Officer, where he found Wixill idly fingering his controls.

"Are we out?" asked Kromodeor, tersely.

"All done," the Chief Power Officer calmly replied. "We have power left,
but we cannot use it, as they have crushed our screens and are fusing
our outer walls. Two out of seven chances, and we drew one of them. We
are still working on the infra band, over across on the Second's board,
but we won't last long...."

* * * * *

As he spoke, the mighty fabric lurched under them, and only their quick
and powerful tails, darting in lightning loops about the bars, saved
them from being battered to death against the walls as the heptagon was
hurled end over end by a stupendous force. With a splintering crash it
came to rest upon the ground.

"I wonder how that happened? They should have rayed us out or exploded
us," Kromodeor pondered. The Vorkuls, with their inhumanly powerful,
sinuous bodies, were scarcely affected by the shock of that frightful
fall.

"They must have had a whole battery of pressors on us when our greens
went out--they threw us half-way across the city, almost into the gate
we made first," Wixill replied, studying the situation of the vessel in
the one small screen still in action. "We aren't hurt very badly--only a
few holes that they are starting to weld already. When the absorber and
dissipator crews get them cooled down enough so that we can use power
again, we'll go back."

But they were not to resume their place in the attack. Through the
holes in the still-glowing walls, hexan soldiery were leaping in
steady streams, fighting with the utmost savagery of their bloodthirsty
natures, urged on by the desperation born of the knowledge of imminent
defeat and total destruction. Hand-weapons roared, flashed, and
sparkled; heavy bars crashed and thudded against crunching bones;
mighty bodies and tails whipped crushingly about six-limbed forms which
wrenched and tore with monstrously powerful hands and claws. Fiercely
and valiantly the Vorkuls fought, but they were outnumbered by hundreds
and only one outcome was possible.

Kromodeor was one of the last to go down. Weapons long since exhausted,
he unwrapped his deadly coils from about a dead hexan and darted toward
a storeroom, only to be cut off by a horde of enemies. Throwing himself
down a vertical shaft, he flew toward a tiny projector-locker, in the
lowermost part of one of the great star's points, the hexans in hot
pursuit. He wrenched the door open, and even while searing planes of
force were riddling his body, he trained the frightful weapon he had
sought. He pressed the contact, and bursts of intolerable flame swept
the entire passage clear of life. Weakly he struggled to go out into the
aisle, but his muscles refused to do the bidding of his will and he lay
there, twitching feebly.

In the power room of the heptagon a hexan officer turned fiercely to
another, who was offering advice.

"Vorkuls? Bah!" he snarled, viciously. "Our race is finished. Die we
must, but we shall take with us the one enemy, who above all others
needs destruction!" and he hurled the captured Vorkulian fortress into
the air.

As the heptagon lurched upward, the massive door of a lower projector
locker clanged shut and Kromodeor collapsed in a corner, his
consciousness blotted out.

* * * * *

"Well, that certainly tears it! That's a ... I...." Stevens' ready
vocabulary failed him and he turned to Brandon, who was still staring
narrow-eyed into the plate, watching the destruction of the hexan city.

"They've got something, all right--you've got to hand it to them,"
Brandon replied. "And we thought we knew something about forces and
physical phenomena in general. Those birds have forgotten more than we
ever will know. Just one of those things could take the whole I-P fleet,
armed as we are now, any morning before breakfast, just for setting-up
exercises. We've got to do something about it--but what?"

"It's okay--whatever you say. There may be an out somewhere, but I don't
see it," and Stevens' gloomy tone matched his words.

Highly trained scientists both, they had been watching that which
transcended all the science of the inner planets and knew themselves
outclassed immeasurably.

"Only one thing to do, as I see it," Brandon cogitated. "That's to keep
on going straight out, the way we're headed now. We'd better call a
council of war, to dope out a line of action."




CHAPTER XII

The Citadel in Space


For the first time in many days Brandon and Westfall sat at dinner in
the main dining room of the _Sirius_. They were enjoying greatly the
unaccustomed pleasure of a leisurely, formal meal; but still their
talk concerned the projection of pure forces instead of subjects more
appropriate to the table; still their eyes paid more attention to
diagrams drawn upon scraps of paper than to the diners about them.

"But I tell you, Quince, you're full of little red ants, clear to the
neck!" Brandon snorted, as Westfall waved one of his arguments aside.
"You must have had help to get that far off--no one man could possibly
be as wrong as you are. Why, those fields absolutely will...."

"Hi, Quincy! Hi, Norman!" a merry voice interrupted. "Still fighting as
usual, I see! What kind of knights are you, anyway, to rescue us poor
damsels in distress, and then never even know that we're alive?" A tall,
willowy brunette had seen the two physicists as she entered the saloon,
and came over to their table, a hand outstretched to each in cordial
greeting.

"Ho, Verna!" both men exclaimed, and came to their feet as they welcomed
the smiling, graceful newcomer.

"Sit down here, Verna--we have hardly started," Westfall invited, and
Brandon looked at the girl in assumed surprise as she seated herself in
the proffered chair.

"Well, Verna, it's like this...." he began.

"That's enough!" she broke in. "That phrase always was your introduction
to one of the world's greatest brainstorms. But I know that this is the
first time you have had time even to eat like civilized beings, so I'll
forgive you this once. Why all the registering of amazement, Norman?"

"I'm astonished that you aren't being monopolized by some husband or
other. Surely the officers of the _Arcturus_ weren't so dumb that they'd
stand for your still being Verna _Pickering_, were they?"

"Not dumb, Norman, no. Far from it. But I'm still working for my
M. R. S. degree, and I haven't succeeded in snaring it yet. You'd be
surprised at how cagy those officers got after a few of them had been
captured. But they are just like any other hunted game, I suppose--the
antelopes that survive get pretty wild, you know," she concluded,
plaintively.

"Well, that certainly is one tough break for a poor little girl,"
Brandon sympathized. "Quince, our little Nell, here, hasn't been done
right by. I'm bashful and you're a woman-hater, but between us, some
way, we've simply got to take steps."

"You might take longer steps than you think," Verna laughed, her
regular, white teeth and vivid coloring emphasized by her olive skin
and her startling hair, black as Brandon's own. "Perhaps I would like
a scientist better than an I-P officer, anyway. The more I think of it,
the surer I am that Nadia Newton had the right idea. I believe that
I'll catch me a physicist, too--either of you would do quite nicely,
I think," and she studied the two men carefully.

Westfall, the methodical and precise, had never been able to defend
himself against Verna Pickering's badinage, but Brandon's ready tongue
took up the challenge.

"Verna, if you really decided to get any living man he wouldn't stand a
chance in the world," he declared. "If you've already made up your mind
that I'm your meat, I'll come down like Davy Crockett's coon. But if
either of us will do, that'll give us each a fifty-fifty chance to
escape your toils. What say we play a game of freeze-out to decide it?"

"Fine, Norman! When shall we play?"

"Oh, between Wednesday and Thursday, any week you say," and the two
fenced on, banteringly but skilfully, with Westfall an appreciative and
unembarrassed listener.

Dinner over, Brandon and Westfall went back to the control room, where
they found Stevens already seated at one of the master screens.

"All x, Perce?"

"All x. The observers report no registrations during the last two
watches," and the three fell into discussion. Long they talked, studying
every angle of the situation confronting them; until suddenly a speaker
rattled furiously and an enormous, staring eye filled both master
plates. Brandon's hand flashed to a switch, but the image disappeared
even before he could establish the full-coverage ray screen.

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