Onslaught from Rigel-Fletcher Pratt

Clifford D. Simak (0:23)

PREFACE Mr. Pratt is well known for his Reign of the Ray and the War of the Giants, where in both stories he showed his excellent knowledge of warfare and what a future war might be like. In this story, he combines that knowledge with a vivid and fertile scientific imagination to construct an interplanetary story that marks a new triumph for Wonder Stories quarterly. We know that many scientists believe that life may have originally come to earth in the form of spores from other solar systems and other universes. We therefore might really have had our home dim ages ago on worlds distantly removed from our earth. The ability to travel the interstellar spaces, however, might also be possessed by other creatures, creatures driven by fear, necessity, and by the will to conquer. And if they come, in mighty waves, with scientific powers far beyond us, to dominate the earth, a terrible time will face the puny human race.

And in this story they do come, and provoke some of the strangest and most exciting adventures that have yet been recorded.

End of Preface.

Yoganand (1:47)

Chapter 1 of The Onslaught from Rigel This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit librivox.org Read by Yoganand The Onslaught from Rigel by Fletcher Pratt Chapter 1 The Onslaught from Rigel Murray Lee woke abruptly with the memory of the sound that had roused him drumming at the back of his head, though his conscious mind had been beyond its ambit. His first sensation was an overpowering stiffness in every muscle, a feeling as though he had compounded all over, though his memory supplied no clue to the reason for such a sensation. Painfully he turned over in bed and felt the left elbow where the aches seemed to center. He received the most tremendous shock of his life. The motion was attended by a creaking clang and the elbow felt exceedingly like a complex wheel. He sat up to make sure he was awake, tossing the offending arm free of the covers.

The motion produced another clang and the arm revealed itself to his astonished gaze, as a system of metal bands bounded the elbow by the mechanism he had felt before, and crowned where the finger should be by steely talons terminating in rubber-like fingertips.

Yet, there seemed to be no lack of feeling in the member. For a few seconds, he stared, open mulched, then lifted the other arm. It was a right-hand counterpart of the device he had been gazing at.

He essayed to move one, then the other. The shining fingers obeyed his thought as though they were flesh and blood.

A sense of expectant fear gripped him as he lifted one of the hands to unbutton his pyjamas. He was not deceived in the half-formed expectation. Where the ribs clothed in a respectable amount of muscle should have been, a row of glistening metal plates appeared. Thoughts of body-snatching and bizarre surgery flittered through his mind to be instantly dismissed. Dreaming? Drunk? A dreadful idea that he might be insane struck him, and he leaped from the bed to confront a mirror. His feet struck the floor with a potent aspang, and each step produced a squeak and clank, and he faced the mirror, the familiar mirror before which he had shaved for years. With utter stupefaction, he saw an iron continence above which a stiff brush of wire hair projected ludicrously.

One does not go mad at such moments. The shock takes time to sink in. Not all evens I may as well get dressed, he remarked to himself practically. I don't suppose water will do this hardware any good, so I'll omit the bath. But if I'm crazy, I might as well go out and have a good time about it.

Dressing was a process prolonged by an examination of himself and the discovery that he was a most efficient metal machine. He rather admired the smoothness of the hip joints and the way the sliding parts of his arms fitted together, and was agreeably surprised to find that in the metallizing process his toes had become prehensile. Just for the fun of it, he pulled one shoe on with the opposite foot. It was not until he was nearly dressed that he realized that the water noise of New York, which reached one as a throaty undertone at the forty-eighth storey of a modern apartment building, was somehow absent.

Surely, at this hour, he glanced at the clock, it had stopped at quarter to two.

No help there. His watch was inexplicably missing.

Probably Ben had borrowed it. Ah, that was the idea. Ben Ruby, with whom he occupied the duplex apartment in the penthouse of the Arbuckle building, was a scientist of sorts, mainly engaged in the analysis of Booz samples for millionaires distrustful of their bootleggers these days. He would be able to explain everything.