Argosy All-Story Weekly, August 9, 1924 — page 143: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

THE MAN WHO MASTERED TIME. northward to Toroh’s encampment. These whirling knives were what had destroyed them! The newly arrived barge was now send- ing up in every direction a slow but steady stream of the whirling knives. They seemed so easy to avoid that the aerial army at first paid them little heed. Loto’s warning from Fahn rang out; but it came almost too late. The knives sought out the figures in the air. They began falling—cut, mangled by the whirling blades. There was confusion. The army mounted; but other knives had been sent straight upward and were floating down. Uncannily, they seemed to single out their victims. Fahn understood now. This was the weapon Toroh had procured from that time- world of the past. These whirling knives were strangely powerfully magnetized; they followed the human bodies passing near them, seeking contact. The Scientist leader had ordered his fighters to the sea level; the knives as they came lower seemed to have spent themselves. They could be avoided. But nearly forty of the Anglese had met death before the lesson was learned. The three larger barges were again ad- vancing toward the Anglese coast. With- out warning, without orders from Fahn, the little remnant of girls led by Azeela and Dee, darted at them. It was a movement, not fool-hardy, but well and swiftly planned. The girls, holding close to the surface, got themselves between two of the barges. The Noths could not fire, for they would have struck each other. A puff of inky darkness spread; out of it at close range jets of fire sprang at the Noths; then the girls came back. One of the Noth vessels was a mass of flames; the other two wavered—began retreating. For a moment there was silence and darkness, lighted only by the moon and the flickering light from the blazing barge. The whirling blades were no longer being launched; the Anglese were again poised in the air. Fahn had ordered that the small barge be attacked when, abruptly, from it a low hum sounded. Georgie and Loto were hov- ering together at the moment; the barge 293 was some five hundred feet below them and slightly off to one side. There seemed no dogs on it; only a few men under its wire cage, and a single large piece of appara- tus. The hum grew louder, more intense, as though some gigantic dynamo had been set into motion. ‘““ What’s that?” Georgie demanded. But Loto did not know. Mogruud, with the remains of his division, was in the air half a mile away. He was on the other side of the small barge; his men, moving in scattered groups began passing over it. The hum was rising in pitch, up the scale until it became a shrill electrical scream. Mogruud’s men wavered—struggled as though to avoid being pulled downward. Then Loto knew what it must be—the rest of the apparatus Toroh had secured out of the past—a giant electromagnet of some unknown variety. It was pulling at every figure in the air—drawing them ir- resistibly toward it. Loto and Georgie could feel the pull— invisible fingers snatching at them. The girls near at hand were fighting against it. Mogruud was coming forward with an effort, like a swimmer struggling with the clutch of an undertow. Several of his men, closer to the barge, had been drawn to it—flattened helplessly against its wire caging. Fire was leaping from their burning bodies. They were electrocuted. In the cavern Fahn sat tense, impotent. He could hear, as plainly as though ott there over the sea, the scream of that un- canny thing that was reaching out its in- visible electrical fingers to gather in its victims. At his side, for an hour past, Rogers had been operating the larger mirrors—flashing into them scenes from the various towers along the coast. Now Fahn heard him give a sharp, horrified exclamation. Rogers was staring at a mirrored scene from a coast tower near Orleen. Moon- light; purple, starry sky; the deep purple of the channel; to one side, the dim out- lines of the Orleen houses. And from the channel off Orleen, lights were flashing; a bomb burst; its glare showed crowded COMmICLOO @) S GO) nn