on the pilot dais staring out into space.
“I knew then that you had always been in love with love, and that means everything to a woman.”
“I didn’t do so badly then?”
“Richard, you’ve never done badly at any time. Do you think I could love a man who was all flattery and blather?”
“I’ve always loved you, Joan.”
“I know, Richard my darling.”
“If only it didn’t have to end.”
“It will be over swiftly, dearest. They’ll take us out into the mist and into one of their nests, but we’ll be beyond pain ten seconds after the atmosphere enters our lungs. Darnel and Dawson are at peace now.”
“But we could have gone on, and—” I broke off in stunned bewilderment.
The vibrating wings of the wasps beneath me seemed to be casting less massive shadows on the walls of the pilot chamber. The wasps themselves seemed to be—
My heart gave a sudden, violent leap. For perhaps ten seconds utter incredulity enveloped me. Unmistakably the wasps had grown smaller, dimmer.
Even as I stared they continued to dwindle, shedding their awesome contours and becoming no larger than ourselves.
“Good God!” I exclaimed.
“Richard, what is it?”
“The wasps, Joan. They’re getting smaller!”
“Richard, you’re either stark, raving mad, or your vision is swimming from the strain of watching them.”
“No, Joan. I’m quite sane, and my eyes are all right. I tell you, they’re shrinking.”
“Richard, how could they shrink?”
“I—I don’t know. Perhaps—wait a minute, Joan. Eddington’s oscillations.”
“Eddington’s what?”
“Oscillations,” I exclaimed, excitedly. “A century ago Eddington pictured all matter throughout the universe as alternating between a state of contraction and expansion. Oh, Joan, don’t you see? These creatures are composed not of solid matter, but of some form of vibrating energy. They possess an oscillatory life cycle which makes them contract and expand in small-scale duplication of the larger pulse of our contracting and expanding universe. They become huge, then small, then huge again. They may expand and contract a thousand times before they die. Perhaps they—”
A scream from Joan cut my explanation short. “Richard, the web’s slackening. I’m going to fall.”
Fifteen minutes later we were rocketing upward through Jupiter’s immense cloud blanket, locked in each other’s arms.
Joan was sobbing. “It’s unbelievable, Richard. We were saved by—by a miracle.”
“No, Joan—Eddington’s oscillations. Although I’ll admit it seemed like a miracle when those tiny wasps became frightened by enormous us descending upon them, and flew straight through the quartz port into the mist.”
“What do you suppose made the web slacken?”
“Well,” I said. “That web was spun out of the bodies of those dwindling wasps. It seems to have been a sort of energy web, since it shriveled to a few charred fibers before we could pluck it from our tunics. Apparently it was sustained by energies emanating from the wasps which burned out the instant the wasps dwindled.”
“Richard, hold me close. I thought we would never see Earth again.”
“I’m not sure that we will,” I warned her. “We’ve lost our crew and we can’t even set our course by the stars. Perhaps the direction gauges will function again when the atomotors carry us beyond Jupiter’s orbit, but I wouldn’t bank on it.”
“Oh, Richard, how could you? You said you liked uncertainty, danger. You said—”
“Never mind what I said. I’m just being realistic, that’s all. Do you realize how heavily the cards are stacked against us?”
“No, and I don’t particularly care. Kiss me, Richard.”
Grumblingly I obeyed. It would have been better if we could have saved our energies for the grim ordeal ahead of us, but it was impossible to reason with Joan when she was in one of her reckless moods.
The Sky Trap
Lawton enjoyed a good fight. He stood happily trading blows with Slashaway Tommy, his lean-fleshed torso gleaming with sweat. He preferred to work the pugnacity out of himself slowly, to savor it as it ebbed.
“Better luck next time, Slashaway,” he said, and unlimbered a left hook that thudded against his opponent’s jaw with such violence that the big, hairy ape crumpled to the resin and rolled over on his back.
Lawton brushed a lock of rust-colored hair back from his brow and stared down at the limp figure lying on the descending stratoship’s slightly tilted athletic deck.
“Good work, Slashaway,” he said. “You’re primitive and beetle-browed, but you’ve got what it takes.”
Lawton flattered himself that he was the opposite of primitive. High in the sky he had predicted the weather for eight days running, with far more accuracy than he could have put into a punch.
They’d flash his report all over Earth in a couple of minutes now. From New York to London to Singapore and back. In half an hour he’d be donning street clothes and stepping out feeling darned good.
He had fulfilled his weekly obligation to society by manipulating meteorological instruments for forty-five minutes, high in the warm, upper stratosphere and worked off his pugnacity by knocking down a professional gym slugger. He would have a full, glorious week now to work off all his other drives.
The stratoship’s commander, Captain Forrester, had come up, and was staring at him reproachfully. “Dave, I don’t hold with the reforming Johnnies who want to remake human nature from the ground up. But you’ve got to admit our generation knows how to keep things humming with a minimum of stress. We don’t have world wars now because we work off our pugnacity by sailing into gym sluggers eight or ten times a week. And since our romantic emotions can be taken care of by tactile television we’re not at the mercy of every brainless bit of fluff’s calculated ankle appeal.”
Lawton turned, and regarded him quizzically. “Don’t you suppose I realize that? You’d think I just blew in from Mars.”
“All right. We have the outlets, the safety valves. They are supposed to keep us civilized. But you don’t derive any benefit from them.”
“The heck I don’t. I exchange blows with Slashaway every time I board the Perseus. And as for women—well, there’s just one woman in the world for me, and I wouldn’t
