The Onslaught From Rigel

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 originally have 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.

* * * * *

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 been pounded 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 ache
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, bound at the
elbow by the mechanism he had felt before, and crowned, where the
fingers should be, by steely talons terminating in rubber-like
finger-tips. Yet there seemed to be no lack of feeling in the member.
For a few seconds he stared, open-mouthed, then lifted the other arm. It
was the 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.