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- Herausgeber: Al-Mashreq eBookstore
- Kategorie: Fantasy und Science-Fiction
- Sprache: Englisch
The Green Ray by Arthur Leo Zagat is a riveting tale of science fiction that explores the deadly consequences of human ambition and scientific discovery. When a brilliant but reckless scientist uncovers the secret to harnessing an otherworldly green ray, he unknowingly unleashes a power far beyond his control. As the mysterious energy begins to wreak havoc on the world, threatening to tear apart the very fabric of reality, a group of unlikely heroes must race against time to stop the catastrophe. But with the power of the green ray growing stronger by the minute, will they be able to prevent total annihilation, or will the world be consumed by this unstoppable force? This pulse-pounding story is a must-read for fans of high-stakes science fiction and thrilling adventures.
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Seitenzahl: 37
Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2024
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Table of Contents
The Green Ray
I. — THE WEAPON
II. — THE STOLEN CIPHER
III. — VANCE'S CORPSE
IV. — HA-LUNG UNMASKED
Landmarks
Table of Contents
Cover
The Green Ray
I. — THE WEAPON
"YOU'VE been working too hard, Greg," Dean Thorkel, chief editor of New York Newscast Central said. "This Paris trip will set you on your feet."
Professor Gregory Vance stared at his friend out of glowing eyes.
"I'm not going to Paris, Dean," he said quietly. "Maybe by tomorrow I won't be able to go anywhere."
The atmosphere of the white-tiled laboratory was suddenly heatless with the chill of some brooding dread.
"Not going!" The newsman gasped. "Passing up the Einstein Award Convocation! Hell, man! When it was announced in nineteen ninety-six you told Cliff Hoskins and me you would devote your life to winning it. That's why you've been slaving here at National U. for seven years while I've been keeping an eye on seven seas and five continents, and Cliff's been risking his life in the Military Intelligence. You?"
"Risking his life." The words trickled from between the scientist's white lips. "Risking—" A sharp burr cut him off, the attention call of the wireless teleautograph in a corner of the lab. He twisted—and then his voice was a thin thread, wire-edged with terror. "There it is again!"
Thorkel leaped to the machine whose silver pencil danced eerily across white, unrolling paper. "Vance!" The salutation was abrupt. "Final warning. You speak before you reach Paris, willingly or—unwillingly."
The newsman, his massively sculptured countenance chalky, whirled to the disc of a verbal communications transmitter, but Vance's hand closed on his shoulder.
"No use, Dean," the physicist whispered. "I've tried to trace those messages before. He taps in from some unauthorized station of his own, and it can't be located."
"But—but—who?"
"Ho-Lung."
"Good Lord!" Thorkel breathed the exclamation. "He?"
Vance's thin lips quirked in a humorless smile.
"You've heard of him?"
"Who hasn't. He's the lone-wolf ace of the Asiatic Secret Service. He's got ears and eyes everywhere. He's killed more enemies of the Yellow Coalition than their armies. But no one knows who or what he is. Sometimes I think he's a myth. But you're no soldier or diplomat. What can he want of you?"
"Want of me?" Gregory Vance's slim white hands curled into curiously ineffectual looking fists. "I'll show you."
He moved to the lab table, lifted a cylindrical graduate from the stone slab of the laboratory table. From shelves on which hundreds of bottles were ranged, each labeled with a number only, he selected a half dozen vials. He carefully measured their contents into the etched glass until he had a liquid compound that was purplish and fuming. Somehow it seemed alive in the cold light of the beta-argon bulb in the ceiling.
The physicist picked up a lens-shaped but hollow crystal, dripped the solution he had concocted through a tiny opening until it filled the cavity. Then he fitted the lens he had made over the miniature bulb of an ordinary flash-light.
"Get down one of those cages with a white mouse in it, and place it on the table." Thorkel obeyed.
"Watch!" Vance aimed the flashlight at the cage, pressed the button. A green beam flashed out, uncannily bright even in the mock daylight of the windowless room. It struck the mouse. An exclamation of horror escaped from the newsman.
An instant before the tiny animal had been there, instinct with life. Now—a glittering, viscid pool of iridescent oil glittered at the bottom of the cage!
THE virescent light clicked out. Vance extracted the lens that had converted an ordinary flashlight into an instrument of annihilation, smashed the glass in the sink, watched the purple liquid disappear, fuming, down the drain.
"Imagine searchlight beams fanning that green ray through the skies and over the seas, trapping the oncoming hosts of an enemy and melting them, melting human beings into oily nothingness as that mouse was melted.
"Imagine their rocket-ships dropping uncontrolled from the heavens, their surface craft colliding, sinking into a boiling sea. What price invasion then?
