The Sky Trap

The Sky Trap by Frank Belknap Long

First Officer Dave Lawton, aboard the descending stratoship Perseus, works off his aggression sparring with professional gym slugger Slashaway Tommy while performing routine meteorological duties, watched over by Captain Forrester, who chides him for hitting too hard even against a man toughened to absorb blows for the ship's civilized society. Suddenly the ship lurches violently, throwing everyone about and knocking Slashaway unconscious against a bulkhead. Lawton revives him and discovers the ship has gone eerily still: no vibrations, no motion. Forrester finds through the quartz observation port that motionless cirrus clouds lie beneath them, and the pilots report the rotaries dead and temperature rising, with no ability to work the emergency torps. Given emergency authority by Forrester, Lawton investigates and rules out an internal cause. Testing the air outside, he finds it breathable but chemically anomalous: water vapor as HO instead of H2O, hydrocarbons as CH instead of methane's CH4, plus scandium oxide and boron oxide molecules unlike anything on Earth. Lowering a plumb line, Lawton finds a solid but completely invisible surface about a hundred feet below the ship. Further tests with rocket leads confirm the Perseus is trapped inside a huge, invisible, spherical "bubble" with a plastic surface that sealed itself after the ship tore through it and hardened to steel-like resistance. The ship floats at the bubble's energy-balanced core, drifting slowly westward toward the Atlantic. Lawton descends by ladder to stand on the invisible inner surface, experiencing vertigo and finding it rubbery and faintly electric underfoot. Meanwhile Forrester, unaware Lawton was outside, attempts to restart the engines; the rotaries backfire, consuming oxygen and contaminating the ship's air with carbonic oxide, forcing the crew to vent outside air through the ventilation valves. Furious at having been risked as an "experimental rat," Lawton nonetheless helps manage the crisis. The bubble carries them out over the Atlantic, with roughly four or five days of oxygen before it's exhausted, though they seem to be moving fast enough to reach Europe first. Lawton rigs cosmic ray absorbers into expulsor disks to direct a stream of neutrons against the bubble's underside, hoping to wear through it, while the pilots stand ready to restart the rotaries and deploy helicoptic vanes for a vertical descent if a rupture occurs. Before this can succeed, petty officer Caldwell reports that the bubble's interior has "bloomed": vast, unearthly purple and yellow vegetation—serpentine tendrils, ropy fungus, a towering purplish stench weed—has grown explosively inside the bubble in the span of an hour, its odor and spores demoralizing the crew. Lawton theorizes that alien chemical compounds within the bubble have telescoped eons of mutation into minutes, producing plant life foreign to Earth. The vegetation resists all chemical countermeasures and continues spreading, choking the ship's air and driving the crew toward panic and madness: men attack each other, mutilate themselves, and one, the assistant engineer, leaps to his death, becoming impaled on a giant thorn-like growth below. Slashaway, badly shaken, confesses he can barely endure it, but Lawton insists there's no limit to what a man can stand. When the radio operator reports improving reception—evidence the bubble is thinning—Lawton has himself patched through to address the entire panicked crew, rallying them with a speech about fighting through to freedom; the men respond by breaking into a defiant sailor's chant. Soon after, the ship suddenly lurches free as the bubble ruptures; the rotaries restart and fresh air floods in. Looking down, Lawton and Forrester see the vegetation mass floating on the Atlantic's waves, trailing a tainted seepage—and crawling across it, a huge, mottled, slug-like creature, evidence that animal life had also evolved within the bubble. Forrester, shaken, is grateful they escaped before this "last straw" appeared. Lawton, exhausted and hoarse, calls for grog to be issued to the crew. The story closes with Dr. Stephen Halday, in his Appalachian mountain laboratory, worrying that a portion of his experiment has again escaped skyward as a loosely bound cloud of highly energized "wavicles," potentially forming one of several such bubbles now adrift in the stratosphere, their uncharged particles combining with atmospheric hydrogen to create new molecular compounds. He resolves to be more careful, fearing that if discovered, the "Controllers" might halt all atom-smashing experiments.

By Frank Belknap Long · First published 1932 · Genre: Science Fiction, Adventure, Thriller · 6,719 words

First lines

Lawton enjoyed a good fight. He stood happily trading blows with Slashaway Tommy, his lean-fleshed torso gleaming with sweat. He preferred to work the pugnacity out of himself slowly, to savor it as it ebbed.

"Better luck next time, Slashaway," he said, and unlimbered a left hook that thudded against his opponent's jaw with such violence that the big, hairy ape crumpled to the resin and rolled over on his back.

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The Sky Trap is listed on Textopian as a novel by Frank Belknap Long, dated 1932 CE.

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science fiction · horror · cosmic horror · alien invasion · suspense · thriller · paranoia · dystopian · psychological · mystery · survival · extraterrestrial

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