September 24, 2025 • 15 mins
Dive into the thrilling adventures of Astounding Stories 19, featuring an array of captivating tales that will ignite your imagination! In The Doom from Planet 4 by Jack Williamson, a mysterious ray of fire guides Dan on his ship to an island fraught with otherworldly danger. H.G. Winters The Hands of Aten takes you on a journey as Craig unearths three long-frozen Egyptians from solid ice, leading him into an astonishing escapade. Experience the gripping fate of young Stoddard in H. Thompson Richs The Diamond Thunderbolt, where being locked in a rocket propels him into the vastness of space. A.R. Holmess The Slave Ship from Space explores the chilling reality of three kidnapped Earthlings who reveal to Xantra of the Tillas just how docile Earth slaves can be. In The Revolt of the Machines, Nat Schachner and Arthur L. Zagat delve into the sinister motivations of a master machine as it rebels against its human creators. Finally, in Ray Cummingss The Exile of Time, follow Tugh, the cripple who evades fate until the world teeters on the brink of destruction. Plus, dont miss The Readers Corner, a gathering space for fans of Astounding Stories!
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
Section twenty two of Astounding Stories nineteen July nineteen thirty one.
This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in
the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please
visit LibriVox dot org. Reading by Mark Thornton Miranda, New Zealand,
(00:20):
Astounding Stories, nineteen July nineteen thirty one.
Speaker 2 (00:25):
Chapter twenty two, The Chase to the End of the World.
The giant mechanism, fashioned in the guise of a man,
lay dying, yet not that, for it never had had life.
It laid deranged, out of order. Its intricate cycle was
still operating, but faintly, laboriously, jangling out of tune. Every
(00:52):
moment his internal energy was lessening. They seemed to want
to talk. The beams of its eyes rolled wildly. It said,
you did this to me. I came back here frightened
because I knew that you was still controlling me. You
(01:13):
hear me. There was a muffled, rumbling blur, then his
voice clicked on again. When Chu came, I opened the
door to him, even though the girl tried to stop me,
and I was humbled before you. But he was angry
because I had released you. He deranged me. I tried
(01:35):
to fight him, and he ripped open my side port.
I thought the mechanism had gone inert from within. It
was complete silence. Larry murmured, good lord, this is gruesome.
Then the faint, rasping voice started again. He arranged me,
(01:58):
and about you? He a blur, then again que he
is ju p is. It went into a dull repetition
of the three words, ending in a rumble, which died
into complete silence. The red radiance from the ice hockets
faded and vanished. The thing we had called Migul seemed gone.
(02:23):
There was only this metal shell cast to represent a
giant human figure lying here with its operating mechanisms out
of order, smashed. I stood up. That's the end of it.
Mary Outward's gone with Chew in the time cage. Larry exclaimed, Tina,
can't we follow them? Tina interrupted, come on, no, you
(02:48):
two wait here. I will go upstairs and verify if
the time cage is gone. She came back in a moment.
The laboratory overhead was fortunately deserted robots. Larry and I
had not ordered that the cage is gone, Tina exclaimed.
Migole told us the truth. We hastened back through the time,
(03:08):
passed the guard up into the palace and into the garden.
I harp pounded in my throat for fear that tyness
Time Cage would have vanished. But it stood dimly glowing
under the foliage where she had left it. A young
man rushed up to us and said, Princess Tina, look there.
A great row of colored lights sailed slowly past overhead.
(03:32):
The micrad was here, circling over the city. The storm
had abated, it had reigned only for a brief time.
Crazy winds were subsiding. The micrad was using its deranging ray.
We could hear the thumb of it. It sent out
vibrations which threw the internal mechanisms of the robots out
of adjustment, and they were dropping in their tracks all
(03:54):
over the city. It was afterward found that many of
the robots heedless of the rain as they ran about
the city, intent upon them widrous work that exploded by
getting too wet. They chanced as momentarily we stood there
at the entrance to the time Cage, while the great
airliners swept by. That the top of the nearby laboratory
(04:15):
was visible through the trees. We saw a white search
beam from the micrad come down and disclosed a group
of robots on the laboratory roof. Then the spreading beam
of the deranging ray struck them, and they stood an
instant transfixed, stricken the wildly flailing arms. Then one toppled
them fell, then another. Two rushed together, locked in each
(04:38):
other's grip, desperately fighting because of some crazy, deranged thought impulse.
They swayed and tore at each other until both wilted
and sank inert. Another tottered with jerky steps to the
edge of the roof and plunged headlong, crashing with a
great metal clatter to the stone paving of the ground.
(04:59):
The young Ann who had joined us, dashed into the palace.
We heard his shouts, The revolt is over, The revolt
is over. This had been a massacre similar to Tu's
vengeance upon the New York City of nineteen thirty five,
just as senseless. Both from the beginning were equally hopeless
of ultimate success. Tu could not conquer this time world,
(05:22):
so now he had left it, taking Mary Atwood with him.
We hastened into the time cage. Larry and I braced
ourselves to the shop as Tina slid the door closed
and hurried to the controls. Within a moment they were
flashing off into the great stream of time.
Speaker 3 (05:42):
You think he has gone forward into the future, Larry asked,
won't the instrument show anything? Tina, no, no trace of
him yet, who were passing three thousand a d.
Speaker 2 (05:52):
Traveling into the future. Tina reasoned that tw according to
Harles's confession, had originally come from the future time. It
seemed most probable that now he would return there. The
time teleus spectroscope so far had shown us no evidence
of the other cage. Tinket the telescope barrel trained constantly
(06:14):
on that other space, five hundred feet from us, which
held Chu's vehicle. The flowing gray landscape off there gave
no sign of our quarry. Yet we knew we could
not pass it without at least a brief flash of
it in the telespectroscope and upon the image mirror. Nervously, breathlessly,
we waited for a sign of the other time cage,
(06:37):
but nothing showed. We were not traveling fast. With Larry
and Tina at the instrument table, I was left to
stand at the window. Always I gazed eastward that other
little point of space, only five hundred feet to the
east held Mary. She was there, but not now. She
was with remote inaccessible. The thought of ho with chew
(07:01):
so inaccessible set me shadowing. I was barely aware of
the changing gray outlines of the city. I stared praying
for the fleeting glimpse of a spectral cage. I think
that up to three thousand a D. New York remained
much the same, and then quite suddenly, in some while
storm or catechism, it was gone. I saw but a
(07:23):
blurred chaos. This was near four thousand a D. And
it was rebuilt, smaller, with more trees growing about, until
presently there seemed only a forest. People that they still
were here, were building such transitory structures that I could
not see them. Five thousand a D. Manchion, no doubt,
(07:43):
had reached its peak of civilization, paused at the summer,
and now was in decadence, reverting to savagery. Perhaps in
Europe the civilized peak lasted longer. This was a backward
space during the ascent. Perhaps now it was reverting to
the primitive. But I think that by fifteen thousand a D.
(08:05):
Mankind over all the earth had become primitive. There is
no standing still. We must go forward or back. A
man with his own machines softening him, enabling him to
do nothing, eventually unfitted himself to cope with nature. The
storm at four thousand a D. In New York, for instance,
even in my own time, would have been merely an
(08:26):
incentive to reconstruct upon a greater scale. But a man
of four thousand a D could not do that. Though
the year ten thousand a D. With as singing the
primeval forest around us, Tina, Larry and I held an
anxious consultation. We had anticipated that jew would stop in
his own time world that might have been around three
(08:49):
thousand or four thousand, but we hardly thought as we
viewed the scene in passing it had come originally from
beyond four thousand. He was too similar. She had not stopped.
He had to be still ahead of us. So our
course was to follow. Wherever he stopped, we would see him.
If he turned back and flashed past us, that too
(09:12):
would be evident. But if on two thousand, nine hundred
and thirty he had gone into the past, and then
suddenly we glimpsed the other cage, it was ahead of
us traveling more slowly and retarding as though about to stop.
A gray, unbroken forest was here. The time was about
twelve thousand A d. Tina saw it first through the
(09:34):
little telescopic barrel. Then it showed on the mirror grid,
a faint, ghostly barred shape, thin as gossamer. We even
saw it presently through the window. It held its steady
posibition level with us, hanging solid amid the melting change
in gray outlines of the forest trees. They blurred it
(09:55):
as they rose and fell. This chase through time, the
two cages sped forward, with the gray paranorama whirling around them.
Of all the scene, only that other cage to us
is real. Yet it was the cages which were apparitions.
We gathered at our eastward window to gaze across the void.
(10:16):
At that five hundred feet the interior of cheuescage was
not visible to us. A little window, a thinner patch,
and the lattices of the cage side fronted us, and
nothing showed in it. We were so helpless. Only five
hundred feet away. The due cage was there now, yet
we could do nothing, so hold our time, changing rate
(10:39):
to conform with it. Of course, you saw us. He
was making no effort to elude us, for neither cage
was running at its maximum. For hours, I stood gazing,
praying that Mary might be safe, striving with futile fancy
to guess what might be transpiring within that cage, speeding
side by side with us in the blurred shadows of
(11:01):
the corridors of time. And again, as so many times before,
I was balked guessing Tune's motives for his actions. He
knew we could not assail him unless he stopped. But
to what destination was he going? There was a chase
to our consciousness of the passing of time, which lasted
(11:23):
several hours. Due altered his time, and I can spend
more swiftly. My heart sank for this shed. He was
not preparing to stop. We lost our sight of the
other cage several times as it drew ahead of us,
but it was always visible and the image of mirror.
I think Tina said finally that we should stay behind it.
(11:45):
When he retires to stop, we'll have a better opportunity
of landing simultaneously with him. We passed one hundred thousand
a d. The forest went down, and it seemed that
only rocks were here. A baron vista was visible off
to the river and the distant sea. The familiar conformations
of the sea and the land were changed. There was
(12:07):
a different shawline. It was nearer at hand now, and
it was creeping closer. I stared at the blurred gray's
surface of water, at the wide, undulating stretch of rock.
We came to one million lady, a million years into
my future. Ice came briefly and vanished again. But there
(12:29):
were no trees springing into life on this barren landscape.
I could not fancy that even the transitory habitations of
humans were here. From this cold desolation, were we headed
for the end? I could envisage a dying world, this
internal fires cooling ten million years, then one hundred million.
(12:53):
The gray sea, blended of dark nights and sunshine days,
began changing its monochroy There were fleeting, alternating intervals now
when it was darker and then lighter, with a tinge
of red. The Earth's rotation was slowing down. Through thousands
of centuries, the change had been proceeding, but only now
(13:15):
could I see the lengthening days and nights. Perhaps now
the day was a month long, and the night the
same a billion years one billion a d By now
the day and the year were of equal length, and
it chanced that this western hemisphere faced the sun. I
could see the sun, now motionless above the horizon. The
(13:36):
scene was dull or red. The sun painted the rocks
and the sullen sea of blood. A shout from Larry
whirled me round. George, good God. He was bending over
the image mirror. Tina, ghastly pale, with utter horror stamped
upon her face, sprang for the controls on the mirror.
(13:56):
I caught a fleeting glimpse of jewscage, wrapped and broken,
and instantly gone. It stopped. Mary shouted, good God, it
stopped all at once. It was wreck smashed. We reeled. Albert,
lost consciousness with the shock of our own abrupt retarding
our cage, stopped and turned back. Tina located the wreckage
(14:19):
and stopped again. We slid the door open. The outer
air was deadly cold. The sun was a huge, dull
red ball hanging in the haze of a gray sky.
The rocks were gray black, the blood light of the
sun upon them. Five hundred feet from us, by the
shore of an oily sullen sea, the wreckage of Chew's
(14:42):
cage was piled in a heap. Near it, the crumpled
white figure of Mary lay on the rocks, and beside her,
still with his black cloak around him, crouched Tew end
of Chapter twenty two
Section twenty two of Astounding Stories nineteen July nineteen thirty one.
This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in
the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please
visit LibriVox dot org. Reading by Mark Thornton Miranda, New Zealand,
(00:20):
Astounding Stories, nineteen July nineteen thirty one.
Speaker 2 (00:25):
Chapter twenty two, The Chase to the End of the World.
The giant mechanism, fashioned in the guise of a man,
lay dying, yet not that, for it never had had life.
It laid deranged, out of order. Its intricate cycle was
still operating, but faintly, laboriously, jangling out of tune. Every
(00:52):
moment his internal energy was lessening. They seemed to want
to talk. The beams of its eyes rolled wildly. It said,
you did this to me. I came back here frightened
because I knew that you was still controlling me. You
(01:13):
hear me. There was a muffled, rumbling blur, then his
voice clicked on again. When Chu came, I opened the
door to him, even though the girl tried to stop me,
and I was humbled before you. But he was angry
because I had released you. He deranged me. I tried
(01:35):
to fight him, and he ripped open my side port.
I thought the mechanism had gone inert from within. It
was complete silence. Larry murmured, good lord, this is gruesome.
Then the faint, rasping voice started again. He arranged me,
(01:58):
and about you? He a blur, then again que he
is ju p is. It went into a dull repetition
of the three words, ending in a rumble, which died
into complete silence. The red radiance from the ice hockets
faded and vanished. The thing we had called Migul seemed gone.
(02:23):
There was only this metal shell cast to represent a
giant human figure lying here with its operating mechanisms out
of order, smashed. I stood up. That's the end of it.
Mary Outward's gone with Chew in the time cage. Larry exclaimed, Tina,
can't we follow them? Tina interrupted, come on, no, you
(02:48):
two wait here. I will go upstairs and verify if
the time cage is gone. She came back in a moment.
The laboratory overhead was fortunately deserted robots. Larry and I
had not ordered that the cage is gone, Tina exclaimed.
Migole told us the truth. We hastened back through the time,
(03:08):
passed the guard up into the palace and into the garden.
I harp pounded in my throat for fear that tyness
Time Cage would have vanished. But it stood dimly glowing
under the foliage where she had left it. A young
man rushed up to us and said, Princess Tina, look there.
A great row of colored lights sailed slowly past overhead.
(03:32):
The micrad was here, circling over the city. The storm
had abated, it had reigned only for a brief time.
Crazy winds were subsiding. The micrad was using its deranging ray.
We could hear the thumb of it. It sent out
vibrations which threw the internal mechanisms of the robots out
of adjustment, and they were dropping in their tracks all
(03:54):
over the city. It was afterward found that many of
the robots heedless of the rain as they ran about
the city, intent upon them widrous work that exploded by
getting too wet. They chanced as momentarily we stood there
at the entrance to the time Cage, while the great
airliners swept by. That the top of the nearby laboratory
(04:15):
was visible through the trees. We saw a white search
beam from the micrad come down and disclosed a group
of robots on the laboratory roof. Then the spreading beam
of the deranging ray struck them, and they stood an
instant transfixed, stricken the wildly flailing arms. Then one toppled
them fell, then another. Two rushed together, locked in each
(04:38):
other's grip, desperately fighting because of some crazy, deranged thought impulse.
They swayed and tore at each other until both wilted
and sank inert. Another tottered with jerky steps to the
edge of the roof and plunged headlong, crashing with a
great metal clatter to the stone paving of the ground.
(04:59):
The young Ann who had joined us, dashed into the palace.
We heard his shouts, The revolt is over, The revolt
is over. This had been a massacre similar to Tu's
vengeance upon the New York City of nineteen thirty five,
just as senseless. Both from the beginning were equally hopeless
of ultimate success. Tu could not conquer this time world,
(05:22):
so now he had left it, taking Mary Atwood with him.
We hastened into the time cage. Larry and I braced
ourselves to the shop as Tina slid the door closed
and hurried to the controls. Within a moment they were
flashing off into the great stream of time.
Speaker 3 (05:42):
You think he has gone forward into the future, Larry asked,
won't the instrument show anything? Tina, no, no trace of
him yet, who were passing three thousand a d.
Speaker 2 (05:52):
Traveling into the future. Tina reasoned that tw according to
Harles's confession, had originally come from the future time. It
seemed most probable that now he would return there. The
time teleus spectroscope so far had shown us no evidence
of the other cage. Tinket the telescope barrel trained constantly
(06:14):
on that other space, five hundred feet from us, which
held Chu's vehicle. The flowing gray landscape off there gave
no sign of our quarry. Yet we knew we could
not pass it without at least a brief flash of
it in the telespectroscope and upon the image mirror. Nervously, breathlessly,
we waited for a sign of the other time cage,
(06:37):
but nothing showed. We were not traveling fast. With Larry
and Tina at the instrument table, I was left to
stand at the window. Always I gazed eastward that other
little point of space, only five hundred feet to the
east held Mary. She was there, but not now. She
was with remote inaccessible. The thought of ho with chew
(07:01):
so inaccessible set me shadowing. I was barely aware of
the changing gray outlines of the city. I stared praying
for the fleeting glimpse of a spectral cage. I think
that up to three thousand a D. New York remained
much the same, and then quite suddenly, in some while
storm or catechism, it was gone. I saw but a
(07:23):
blurred chaos. This was near four thousand a D. And
it was rebuilt, smaller, with more trees growing about, until
presently there seemed only a forest. People that they still
were here, were building such transitory structures that I could
not see them. Five thousand a D. Manchion, no doubt,
(07:43):
had reached its peak of civilization, paused at the summer,
and now was in decadence, reverting to savagery. Perhaps in
Europe the civilized peak lasted longer. This was a backward
space during the ascent. Perhaps now it was reverting to
the primitive. But I think that by fifteen thousand a D.
(08:05):
Mankind over all the earth had become primitive. There is
no standing still. We must go forward or back. A
man with his own machines softening him, enabling him to
do nothing, eventually unfitted himself to cope with nature. The
storm at four thousand a D. In New York, for instance,
even in my own time, would have been merely an
(08:26):
incentive to reconstruct upon a greater scale. But a man
of four thousand a D could not do that. Though
the year ten thousand a D. With as singing the
primeval forest around us, Tina, Larry and I held an
anxious consultation. We had anticipated that jew would stop in
his own time world that might have been around three
(08:49):
thousand or four thousand, but we hardly thought as we
viewed the scene in passing it had come originally from
beyond four thousand. He was too similar. She had not stopped.
He had to be still ahead of us. So our
course was to follow. Wherever he stopped, we would see him.
If he turned back and flashed past us, that too
(09:12):
would be evident. But if on two thousand, nine hundred
and thirty he had gone into the past, and then
suddenly we glimpsed the other cage, it was ahead of
us traveling more slowly and retarding as though about to stop.
A gray, unbroken forest was here. The time was about
twelve thousand A d. Tina saw it first through the
(09:34):
little telescopic barrel. Then it showed on the mirror grid,
a faint, ghostly barred shape, thin as gossamer. We even
saw it presently through the window. It held its steady
posibition level with us, hanging solid amid the melting change
in gray outlines of the forest trees. They blurred it
(09:55):
as they rose and fell. This chase through time, the
two cages sped forward, with the gray paranorama whirling around them.
Of all the scene, only that other cage to us
is real. Yet it was the cages which were apparitions.
We gathered at our eastward window to gaze across the void.
(10:16):
At that five hundred feet the interior of cheuescage was
not visible to us. A little window, a thinner patch,
and the lattices of the cage side fronted us, and
nothing showed in it. We were so helpless. Only five
hundred feet away. The due cage was there now, yet
we could do nothing, so hold our time, changing rate
(10:39):
to conform with it. Of course, you saw us. He
was making no effort to elude us, for neither cage
was running at its maximum. For hours, I stood gazing,
praying that Mary might be safe, striving with futile fancy
to guess what might be transpiring within that cage, speeding
side by side with us in the blurred shadows of
(11:01):
the corridors of time. And again, as so many times before,
I was balked guessing Tune's motives for his actions. He
knew we could not assail him unless he stopped. But
to what destination was he going? There was a chase
to our consciousness of the passing of time, which lasted
(11:23):
several hours. Due altered his time, and I can spend
more swiftly. My heart sank for this shed. He was
not preparing to stop. We lost our sight of the
other cage several times as it drew ahead of us,
but it was always visible and the image of mirror.
I think Tina said finally that we should stay behind it.
(11:45):
When he retires to stop, we'll have a better opportunity
of landing simultaneously with him. We passed one hundred thousand
a d. The forest went down, and it seemed that
only rocks were here. A baron vista was visible off
to the river and the distant sea. The familiar conformations
of the sea and the land were changed. There was
(12:07):
a different shawline. It was nearer at hand now, and
it was creeping closer. I stared at the blurred gray's
surface of water, at the wide, undulating stretch of rock.
We came to one million lady, a million years into
my future. Ice came briefly and vanished again. But there
(12:29):
were no trees springing into life on this barren landscape.
I could not fancy that even the transitory habitations of
humans were here. From this cold desolation, were we headed
for the end? I could envisage a dying world, this
internal fires cooling ten million years, then one hundred million.
(12:53):
The gray sea, blended of dark nights and sunshine days,
began changing its monochroy There were fleeting, alternating intervals now
when it was darker and then lighter, with a tinge
of red. The Earth's rotation was slowing down. Through thousands
of centuries, the change had been proceeding, but only now
(13:15):
could I see the lengthening days and nights. Perhaps now
the day was a month long, and the night the
same a billion years one billion a d By now
the day and the year were of equal length, and
it chanced that this western hemisphere faced the sun. I
could see the sun, now motionless above the horizon. The
(13:36):
scene was dull or red. The sun painted the rocks
and the sullen sea of blood. A shout from Larry
whirled me round. George, good God. He was bending over
the image mirror. Tina, ghastly pale, with utter horror stamped
upon her face, sprang for the controls on the mirror.
(13:56):
I caught a fleeting glimpse of jewscage, wrapped and broken,
and instantly gone. It stopped. Mary shouted, good God, it
stopped all at once. It was wreck smashed. We reeled. Albert,
lost consciousness with the shock of our own abrupt retarding
our cage, stopped and turned back. Tina located the wreckage
(14:19):
and stopped again. We slid the door open. The outer
air was deadly cold. The sun was a huge, dull
red ball hanging in the haze of a gray sky.
The rocks were gray black, the blood light of the
sun upon them. Five hundred feet from us, by the
shore of an oily sullen sea, the wreckage of Chew's
(14:42):
cage was piled in a heap. Near it, the crumpled
white figure of Mary lay on the rocks, and beside her,
still with his black cloak around him, crouched Tew end
of Chapter twenty two
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