The Cosmic Juggernaut

By John Russel Fearn

No being may play God. Valno, benevolent Lord of Ixonia, tried. He tampered with Creation’s basic law to avoid the cosmic chaos of a world gone wild.... Here is a truly momentous story; the strange record of a second Genesis.

John Russell Fearn (1908–1960) was a British author and one of the first British writers to appear in American pulp science fiction magazines. Always a highly prolific author, he published not only under his own name, but also as Vargo Statten and other pseudonyms including Thornton Ayre, Polton Cross, Geoffrey Armstrong, John Cotton, Dennis Clive, Ephriam Winiki, Astron Del Martia (and others). He remains best known for his long-running Golden Amazon saga. At times these drew on the pulp traditions of Edgar Rice Burroughs. Fearn also wrote Westerns and crime fiction.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Wildside Press
• Release date: May 4, 2021
• ISBN: 9781479469536

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Table of Contents

THE COSMIC JUGGERNAUT

COPYRIGHT INFORMATION

CHAPTER 1

CHAPTER 2

THE COSMIC JUGGERNAUT

JOHN RUSSELL FEARN

COPYRIGHT INFORMATION

Copyright © 1940 by John Russell Fearn.

First published in Planet Stories, Summer, 1940.

Reprinted with the permission of the Cosmos Literary Agency.

Published by Wildside Press LLC.

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CHAPTER 1

Zios Valno emerged from the darkness of the phototelescopic room with a frown on his big, ugly face. Ugly, that is, from ordinary standards; by the rest of his race he was considered rather handsome. Massively built, his body was perched on two blocks of legs, and comprised a barrel of a chest, pillar-like neck, and the huge, intelligent head common to this entire race of Ixonians.

Well, was I right?

Valno came to a sudden halt in his meditative walking and looked up sharply. In the midst of the weird, complex machinery that formed this master laboratory, stood Jus—the chief astronomer. His deeply sunk green eyes regarded the ruler anxiously.

Quite right, Valno assented, still frowning. It is of course quite unbelievable—that a distant star should break away from an unknown spot in the cosmos and start to move toward this system of ours. . . . He shrugged. But there it is! We must take immediate steps to protect ourselves.

In those words Valno voiced the inherent fatalism of his race, their cold, calculating scientific knowledge, their almost entire lack of fear, destroyed through years of solving the unknown. Only ignorance of the unknown can produce fear: without it, there is none.

Protection against such a body as that will be none too simple, Jus observed gravely. It is a high temperatured star, measures well over a million miles in diameter. In fact, it is almost the twin of our own sun. Therein we face considerable danger. Nothing we can devise in time can prevent this invader from passing close to our sun, close enough to disrupt portions of his mass. Even create a solar system . . . he finished, pondering.

Another one! Valno’s face took on a new expression. But we—

Jus smiled a little. We know science, yes, but we do not even yet understand Nature. At any moment—even as we see now—she may decide to create another system and wipe out an old one. . . . Ours! We live in a system of five worlds, our own planet being the second nearest to the Sun. Of these five worlds only ours has life which may reasonably be called intelligent. Our Sun, at present, is only eighty million miles from us. . . . But beyond the area of our system is empty space for untold light-years, clear to the First and Second Galaxies. Do you not see that this invader, which will probably miss the orbits of our three outer worlds, will smash this one, and the one nearest the Sun, into mere rocks and asteroids?

Valno nodded slowly. "Yes; and such an event is even more likely in view of the fact that our world is the heaviest of all, has diameter of over 8,000 miles and materials of extreme density. Between