The Fire People (Sci-Fi Classic). Ray Cummings

      CHAPTER II.

       THE UNKNOWN ENEMY.

       Table of Contents

      When, in February, 1941, Professor James Newland issued this remarkable statement, my paper sent me at once to interview him. He was at this time at the head of the Harvard observatory staff. He lived with his son and daughter in Cambridge. His wife was dead. I had been acquainted with the professor and his family for some time. I first met his son, Alan, during our university days at Harvard. We liked each other at once, and became firm friends—possibly because we were such opposite physical types, as sometimes happens.

      Alan was tall, lean and muscular—an inch or so over six feet—with the perfect build of an athlete. I am dark; Alan was blond, with short, curly hair, and blue eyes. His features were strong and regular. He was, in fact, one of the handsomest men I have ever seen. And yet he acted as though he didn't know it—or if he did, as though he considered it a handicap. I think what saved him was his ingenious, ready smile, and his retiring, unassuming—almost diffident—manner.

      At the time of the events I am describing Alan was twenty‑two—about two years younger than I. It was his first year out of college. He had taken a scientific course and intended to join his father's staff.

      Beth and Alan were twins. I was tremendously interested in Beth even then. She seemed one of the most worth‑while girls I had ever met. She was a little wisp of femininity, slender and delicate, hardly more than five feet one or two. She had beautiful golden hair and an animated, pretty face, with a pert little snub nose. She was a graduate of Vassar, and planned to take up chemistry as a profession, for she had the same scientific bent as her father and brother.

      I called upon Professor Newland the evening of the day his statement was published, and found all three discussing it.

      "You want me to talk for publication, don't you, Bob Trevor?" the professor asked suddenly, after we had exchanged a few pleasantries.

      He was a wiry little man, about sixty, smooth‑shaven, with sparse gray hair, a rugged face of strong character, and a restless air of energy about him. He was an indefatigable worker; indeed, I am confident that, for any single continuous period of work without sleep, he could have run Alan and me into the ground and still have been comparatively fresh.

      "You want an exclusive follow‑up story from me to‑night, don't you?" he repeated.

      I admitted that I did.

      "What you'll get won't be just what you expect. Look at this."

      He pulled one of the evening papers toward him vigorously. "They think it is humorous. There—read that."

      The item to which he pointed was a sprightly account of the weird beings that might shortly arrive from Mercury.

      "They think it's a joke—some of them. There's another—read that."

      The attitude of the press was distinctly an inclination to treat the affair from the humorous side. I had seen indications of that during the day at the office.

      "Look here, Bob"—the professor swept all the papers aside with his hand. "You put it to them this way. Make them see this is not a prediction of the end of the world. We've had those before—nobody pays any attention to them, and rightly so. But this Mercutian Light is more than a theory—it's a fact. We fought it last November, and we'll have to fight it again next month. That's what I want to make them realize."

      "They'll think it is worth being serious about," Alan put in, "if one of those lights drop into Boston or New York—especially if it happens to play in a horizontal direction instead of vertical."

      We went into the whole subject thoroughly, and the professor gave me a second signed statement in which he called upon the nations of the world to prepare for the coming peril.

      The actual characteristics of the Mercutian Light we had discussed before several times. A good deal had been printed about it during the previous December—without, as I have said, attracting much public attention. The two meteors had been examined. They were found to be of a mineral that could have originated on Mercury. They were burned and pitted like other meteorites by their passage through the earth's atmosphere.

      Of the light itself Professor Newland had already given his opinion. It was, he said, some unknown form of etheric vibration. It radiated heat very slightly, but it had the peculiarity of generating intense heat in anything it touched directly.

      "You'd better explain that, father," said Beth, when we reached this point in our summary that evening.

      "Heat is the vibration of molecules of matter," the professor began.

      I nodded.

      "Make it clear when you write it up, Bob," Alan put in. "It's like this. All molecules are in motion—the faster the motion, the hotter the substance, and vice versa."

      "And this Mercutian Light," Beth added, "has the power of enormously increasing the molecular vibration of anything it comes in contact with—"

      "But it doesn't radiate much heat itself," Alan finished.

      Professor Newland smiled. "The old man doesn't have much of a show, does he?"

      Alan sat down somewhat abashed, but Beth remained standing beside her father, listening intently to everything he said.

      "This light I conceive to be the chief weapon of warfare of the Mercutians," the professor went on. "There has been some talk of those two meteors being signals. That's all nonsense. They were not signals—they were missiles. It was an act of aggression."

      I tried to get him to give some idea of what the inhabitants of Mercury might be like, for that was what my editor chiefly desired.

      At first he would say nothing along those lines.

      "That is pure speculation," he explained. "And very easy speculation, too. Any one can allow his imagination to run wild and picture strange beings of another world. I don't predict they will actually land on the earth—and I have no idea what they will look like if they do land. As a matter of fact, they will probably look very much like ourselves. I see no reason to doubt it."

      "Like us?" I ejaculated.

      "Why not?" said Alan. "Conditions on Mercury are not fundamentally different from here. We don't have to conceive any very extraordinary sort of being to fill them."

      "Here's what you can tell your paper," said the professor abruptly. "Take it down."

      I took out my notebook, and he dictated briskly.

      "Regarding the possible characteristics of inhabitants of Mercury, it is my conception that intelligent life—let us say, human life—wherever it exists in our universe does not greatly differ in character from that of our own planet. Mars, Venus, Mercury, even Neptune, are relatively close. I believe the Creator has constructed all human life on the same general plan.