Avon Fantasy Reader No. 13 — page 38: what you’re looking at

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

strained, anxious look upon his face. My four guards watched him breath- -lessly, fearfully. The cap came loose at last, disclosing the end of the tube, sealed with a grayish substance that looked like wax. Very quickly Ja Ben rolled the little cylinder under the glass hemisphere, and picked up a beaker that had been bubbling gently on an electric plate close by. Swiftly he poured the thick contents of the beaker around the base of the glass bell. The stuff hardened almost instantly, forming an air-tight seal between the glass hemisphere and the flat plate of glass upon which it rested. Then, with an evil, triumph- _ ant smile, Ja Ben looked up. “Flora,” he repeated. “Fauna. And death. Watch! The little metal cylinder is plugged still, but in a moment that plug will disappear—simply a volatile solid, you understand. It is going rapidly .. . rapidly .. . it is almost gone now! Watch... . In an instant now... ah!” : I saw the gray substance that stopped the entrance of the little metal via disappear. The rodents ran around and over it, trying to find a crevice by which they might escape. The flowers, bright and beautiful, lay untidily on the bottom of the glass prison. Then, just asthe last vestige of the gray plug vanished, an amazing, a ter- | rible thing happened. At the mouth of the tiny metal vial a greenish cloud appeared. I call it a cloud, but it was not that. It was solid, and it spread in every direction, sending out little needles that lashed about and ran to- gether into a solid mass while millions of little needles reached out swiftly. One of these little needles touched a scurrying animal. Instantly the tiny brute stiffened, and from his entire body the greenish needles spread swiftly. One of the flowers turned suddenly thick and pulpy with the soft green mass, then another, another of the rodents . . . God! In the space of two heart beats, the entire hemisphere was filled with the green mass, that still moved and writhed and seemed to press against the glass sides as though the urge to expand was insistent, imperative. . . . “What is it?” I whispered, still staring at the thing. “Death!” grunted Ja Ben, thrusting his hateful face close to mine, his tiny round eyes, with their lashless lids glinting. “Death, my friend. Go and tell your great Council of this death that we have created for every planet that will not obey us. | “We have gone back into the history of dealing death and have come back with a death such as the Universe has never known before! _ “Here is a rapacious, deadly fungus we have been two centuries in de- veloping. The spores contained in that tiny metal tube would be invisible to the naked eye—and yet given but a little time to grow with air and vegeta- ‘tion and flesh to feed upon, and even that small capsule would wipe out a world. And in the cabinet,”—he pointed grinning triumphantly—“we have, ready for instant use, enough of the spores of this deadly fungus to wipe out | all the worlds of your great Alliance. “To wipe them out utterly!” he repeated, his voice shaking with a sort — of frenzy now. “Every living thing upon their faces, wrapped in that thin, hungry green stuff you sce there under that glass. All life wiped out; made 7 36 ' 3 i ; At im Comichook