The Onslaught from Rigel
By FLETCHER PRATT
[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Wonder Stories Quarterly Winter 1932. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]
A jagged beam of flame, intenser than the hottest furnaceleaped through the air, struck the green globe and reached the earth ina thousand tiny rivulets of light.
THE ONSLAUGHT FROM RIGEL
By the author of "The Reign of the Ray," "The War of the Giants," etc.
FLETCHER PRATT
Mr. Pratt is well known for his "Reign of the Ray," and "The War of theGiants" where in both stories he showed his excellent knowledge ofwarfare, and what a future war might be like.
In this story he combines that knowledge with a vivid and fertilescientific imagination to construct an interplanetary story that marks anew triumph for Wonder Stories Quarterly.
We know that many scientists believe that life may originally have cometo earth in the form of spores, from other solar systems and otheruniverses. We therefore might really have had our home dim ages ago, onworlds distantly removed from our earth.
The ability to travel the interstellar spaces, however, might also bepossessed by other creatures—creatures driven by fear, necessity and bythe will to conquer. And if they come, in mighty waves, with scientificpowers far beyond us, to dominate the earth, a terrible time will facethe puny human race.
And in this story they do come, and provoke some of the strangest andmost exciting adventures that have yet been recorded.
THE ONSLAUGHT FROM RIGEL
Murray Lee woke abruptly, with the memory of the sound that had rousedhim drumming at the back of his head, though his conscious mind had beenbeyond its ambit. His first sensation was an overpowering stiffness inevery muscle—a feeling as though he had been pounded all over, thoughhis memory supplied no clue to the reason for such a sensation.
Painfully, he turned over in bed and felt the left elbow where the acheseemed to center. He received the most tremendous shock of his life. Themotion was attended by a creaking clang and the elbow felt exceedinglylike a complex wheel.
He sat up to make sure he was awake, tossing the offending arm free ofthe covers. The motion produced another clang and the arm revealeditself to his astonished gaze as a system of metal bands, bound at theelbow by the mechanism he had felt before, and crowned, where thefingers should be, by steely talons terminating in rubber-likefinger-tips. Yet there seemed to be no lack of feeling in the member.For a few seconds he stared, open-mouthed, then lifted the other arm. Itwas the right-hand counterpart of the device he had been gazing at. Heessayed to move one, then the other—the shining fingers obeyed histhought as though they were flesh and blood.
A sense of expectant fear gripped him as he lifted one of the hands tounbutton his pajamas. He was not deceived in the half-formedexpectation; where the ribs clothed in a respectable amount of muscleshould have been, a row of glistening metal plates appeared. Thoughts ofbody-snatching and bizarre surgery flitted through his mind to beins