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- Herausgeber: Wildside Press
- Kategorie: Fantasy und Science-Fiction
- Sprache: Englisch
- Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2021
Professor Thorp wanted to create Martian life, but he got Martian death instead!
A pulp science fiction tale by John Russelll Fearn, one of the most popular British science fiction authors of his day. Originally published in Amazing Stories magazine in 1942.
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Table of Contents
COPYRIGHT INFORMATION
MARTIAN MINIATURE
COPYRIGHT INFORMATION
Copyright © 1942 byJohn Russell Fearn.
First published Amazing Stories, May 1942.
Published by Wildside Press LLC.
wildsidepress.com | bcmystery.com
Reprinted by permission of the Cosmos Literary Agency.
MARTIAN MINIATURE
By JOHN RUSSELL FEARN
Calm, misty summer darkness enveloped the little motor boat chugging its way from the Manhattan shore toward Thorp Island.
“I don’t like it,” Grant Felby said for the twentieth time. “In fact I dislike it so much I can’t be too thankful I came with you. A scientist who accepts your application to be his assistant on a synthetic island isn’t safe—probably not even decent! The whole set up is wrong, if you ask me.…”
“Grant, please!” Joan Carlson’s voice was weary. “Do stop complaining! I’m sure it’s all right. Professor Thorp is one of the greatest living scientists of the age: the fact that he made Thorp Island proves that in itself.”
“Humph!” Grant growled; then he gave up talking and concentrated on his job. Through the lowering night something dark was looming. Presently they could both dimly distinguish the hard rocks of the island which engineering had created—for a purpose so far unknown.
Grant began to look around for the sole inlet to the place, fully detailed in the letter and map Thorp had sent along when accepting the girl’s application.
Grant still recalled the advertisement—An assistant, either sex, well versed in astronomy, needed. Urgent. Write in first instance to Professor Allan Thorp, care of his New York headquarters. Joan Carlson had done so, and first grader in astronomy that she was, had got the job. And now—
“Damnable!” Grant muttered under his breath; then he revved the motor up a bit and chugged round the rocky shore. He found the inlet at last under the girl’s directions, nosed to the only strip of shingly beach and made the boat secure. He helped the girl to alight and they looked curiously about them. Here, some fifty miles from the Manhattan mainland they felt rather like a couple of castaways.
The center of the island itself was more or less surrounded by a ring of dense trees standing motionless in the night air. But there was a queer sound quivering from their direction, something quite apart from the ceaseless murmur of the sea. It was rather like the humming of a beehive on a summer afternoon.
“Sounds like a powerhouse,” Grant muttered; then glancing at the girl, “Well what do we do now? Where’s his hide-out?”
“His laboratory’s in the island center according to the map, so we go through this wood-fringe. Come on.”
* * * *
Grant lifted her solitary traveling case from the boat, then with torch in hand led the way. They went through the dense wood for perhaps half a mile and came suddenly on the unexpected as the trees thinned away . . . They were ankle deep in loose red sand—And the sand was humming!
“What the—?” Grant stared around him, pop-eyed. “Whoever heard of musical sand before? And this color!”
He gazed at it, incredulous. It seemed impossible, but he could swear the stuff was actually moving—a great slow inward shifting that made the entire mass look as though it were forced along by a subterranean wind. That though was impossible since there wasn’t the merest puff of a breeze.
