Astounding Stories of Super-Science, August 1930

Anyway, Frank was content. So was Phaestra. Tommy swung the heavy car into the road and turned toward New York, alone and lonely--but somehow happy; happy for his friend. [Advertisement: ASTOUNDING STORIES Appears on Newsstands THE FIRST THURSDAY IN EACH MONTH] Earth, the Marauder PART TWO OF A THREE-PART NOVEL By Arthur J. Burks [Sidenote: Deep in the gnome-infested tunnels of the Moon, Sarka and Jaska are brought to Luar, the radiant goddess against whose minions the marauding Earth had struck in vain.] WHAT HAS GONE BEFORE The Earth was dying. Ever since Sarka the First, king of scientists, had given mankind the Secret of Life, which prolonged life indefinitely, the Earthlings had multiplied beyond all count, and been forced to burrow deep into the ground and high into the air in the desperate search for the mere room in which to live. There was much civil war. The plight of the children of men was desperate. Something had to be done. Then Sarka the Third called the Spokesmen of the Gens of Earth around him, and proposed to them a new scheme which had come to him in his laboratory atop the Himalayas. He would swing the Earth from its orbit!--send it careening through space toward the Moon!--there to destroy its inhabitants and supplant them with a colony of Earthlings! And then they would surge on to Mars! One by one the twelve Spokesmen, each the head and representative of the teeming trillions comprising his Gens, acceded. Even Dalis, the jealous rival of Sarka, finally gave his sulky consent.