Bird speculates that the coldness was created artificially in a deliberate attempt to bring down the plane.

What could have created this cold belt? Given that the plane’s valuable cargo had been taken from the wreckage, Dr. Carnes it was cold of the type that infests interstellar space cold beyond any conception you have of cold, cold near the range of the absolute zero of temperature, nearly four hundred and fifty degrees below zero on the Fahrenheit scale.” But he acknowledges that this would take an extremely low temperature: “It was no ordinary cold. Bird investigates the crash, and attributes the disaster to the plane running into a belt of cold that froze it and its occupants solid. There was no sign of blood on the ground.”ĭr. Arms and legs were detached from the torsos and lying at a distance. Flying to the scene of the disaster, Carnes and his pilot Hughes felt an inexplicable coldness above the crashed plane then, looking at the wreckage through binoculars, they noticed the weird state of the victims: “the bodies of the crew had broken into pieces, as though they had been made of glass. While flying, Carnes witnessed the crash of a plane carrying valuable cargo – the plane breaking to pieces on the ground but strangely failing to burst into flame. Bird over to investigate another mystery. Meek provides another tale about scientific investigator Dr. In what was by now a regular feature in the magazine, Captain S. Together, the contributors explored new worlds just as surely as the crew of the spacecraft on the cover… “Cold Light” by Captain S. But other than them, the issue was a round-up of new talent for the magazine. Meek and Ray Cummings, each of whom had previously written stories for Astounding. The March 1930 issue of Astounding Stories was on the newsstands, marking the third instalment of this pulp fiction pioneer.Įstablished readers of the series would have recognised the names of two contributors, Captain S. The inhabitants of the ship are doubtless gazing out upon the scattered planets, just as we are as we look upon the illustration. Not all of it is visible, but we can see enough to discern that it resembles a submarine in design, complete with a line of port holes along the side. A who’s-who of celestial bodies can be seen against the dark-blue firmament: the crater-scarred surface of Earth’s moon the glow of the sun, tucked away in the bottom corner the ringed planet Saturn a ruddy-hued orb that may be Mars or Venus.

Stolen Brains by S.P. Meek