an Amazon who’s coldly scientific and vicious, mirroring the original Amazon as she had once been early in her career. Inevitably, they become locked in a deadly duel—to the death!
Book Ten: World Out of Step
The Cosmic Crusaders find themselves on a planet that seems mysteriously not to conform with natural law, a world out of step with the universe. It leaps ahead into time at unexpected moments, thereby suddenly adding many years of age to the flower-like inhabitants, and killing tens of thousands of individuals through death and old age. In trying to find the alien menace responsible, The Golden Amazon and her fellow Crusaders are flung backwards and forwards through time and space, threatening their own survival.…
Book Eleven: The Shadow People
The Cosmic Crusaders discover a planet whose people are subject to a baleful influence from outer space that sweeps across their world—and for a brief while embraces every man, woman and child. It stirs the emotions of the sexes against each other. Men desire only to destroy women, and women men. Only those with higher types of mind are able to build a resistance against it. The struggle is dire and dreadful, and leaves its victims physical and mental wrecks. The less fortunate are left dead after the Wave has passed.
But when the Crusaders identify and destroy the source of the problem, they precipitate an even greater menace.…
Book Twelve: Kingpin Planet
The Cosmic Crusaders are plunged into a strange new space, where all the probabilities of electronic law were strangely altered, a complete and stunning inversion of the so-called natural laws. They discover the mysterious silver planet of Tuca, and deep below its surface they find an enigmatic machine—the legacy of a vanished race. Masters of science, they had over-reached themselves by constructing a strange machine that could alter the very laws of nature and electronic probability. The machine had ultimately destroyed them, and blasted a neighboring planet into a cosmic cinder—and unless the Cosmic Crusaders can stop it, it may well destroy the entire universe!
CHAPTER ONE
THE PROBABILITY MACHINE
With the gentleness of a bird alighting on a branch, the multi-ton mass of the spaceship Ultra came to rest upon a barren world—one world in countless thousands strewn throughout the complex star system of the Milky Way Galaxy. A world so far from Earth, the distance would be beyond imagination.
The throb of the massive atomic power plant whined down into silence, and with a matter-of-fact gesture Abna of Jupiter pulled out the master-switch, and then surveyed.
To land on another world was no novelty for the four who congregated around the vast observation window. Traveling through the deeps of space, their avowed intention was to bring scientific knowledge and uplift to those people of other worlds who might need it. To this end, the Cosmic Crusaders were prepared to devote their knowledge, wealth, and superhuman strength…and what was more, they were well capable of it.
Abna, the seven-foot, godlike, one-time ruler of Jupiter, was technically the leader of the quartet, but in every branch of science, save perhaps pure metaphysics, he was equaled by his phenomenally beautiful blonde wife, the Golden Amazon of Earth, eternally youthful and stupendously strong. The lesser lights in the circle of four were Viona, daughter of Abna and the Amazon, and Mexone, her husband, originally an inhabitant of a far-off world.
So, then, these four gazed upon the rocks and clouds of the deserted world to which they had come, and presently they glanced at each other.
“Nice little bit of untenanted rock,” Abna said. “I think it will suit admirably.”
The Amazon shrugged. “Up to you. You said you wanted somewhere quiet to work, and I can’t imagine anything quieter than this. We’ve circumnavigated the planet and there isn’t a thing on it, except rock.”
Viona turned from surveying, the amber sunlight setting off the glory of her coppery hair.
“I’m still not entirely clear what we’re here for,” she said. “Did you say something about a machine, Dad? We’ve been cruising around for such a long time I’ve almost forgotten.”
Abna indicated a series of photographs lying on the control panel bench.
“I propose to reconstruct the Probability Machine which gave us such a lot of trouble on the planet Tuca. You remember that at one stage I was projected by its probability waves into another space altogether—and there I glimpsed a world whereon natural laws don’t work. In other words—putting it baldly—love becomes hate, up becomes down, and backwards becomes forward. A complete inversion of natural laws.”
“And being of an inquisitive turn of mind, you want to find out more about it?” the Amazon asked dryly. “Well, I’m quite willing, even though I can’t believe that the sort of planet you mention is scientifically possible.”
“It isn’t,” Abna said simply. “Yet there it was. Now, having made that clear, let’s get busy.”
The Probability Machine to which he referred was complicated beyond belief, and had been dismantled stage by stage on the planet Tuca from sheer necessity. The machine, a product of trained scientists, incorporated waves of spatial stress, which, in turn, influenced the probability laws governing all matter. Working on the basis that atoms and their attendant electrons exist only in probability—a law long ago laid down by the Earthly German scientist Heisenberg—the machine was capable of disturbing the spatial probabilities to an amazing extent, even to shifting matter itself to an entirely new space—as had happened in the case of Abna when he had found himself unexpectedly projected.
Such a machine was of profound interest to the Crusaders, and in the knowledge that one day they would have a chance to study its workings in peace, Abna had photographed every intricate detail—photography of the nth degree, done to scale, stereoscopic, and in color. These prints, together with memory, would he more than sufficient to build the machine again in happier circumstances than before.
Accordingly, the four set to work, each one so versed in the arts of science that they did not need to ask questions. Abna divided the four photographic prints among the four of them, and the amazing machine tools incorporated in the Ultra’s equipment did the rest. Hour by hour there began to appear in the Ultra’s enormous workshop in the rear of the ship a tall, complicated electronic apparatus.
The four did not hurry themselves: there was no urgency about the business, and they had all the time they needed. In between spells of work and intensive concentration, they relaxed for eating or sleeping, or to log details of the barren planet to which they had come. At other times they look advantage of the planet’s brief night to survey the wonder of this front-seat view of the Milky Way with its vast iridescence of stardust. Tens of thousands of worlds and suns. Unimaginable populations—and beyond the Milky Way again that other strange ultra-space, which Abna had seen. It was small wonder that the Crusaders, constantly viewing such marvels, had minds that were almost godlike.
In all, it took a fortnight to complete the Probability Machine. It was powered atomically in a self-contained unit, and therefore, unlike its prototype, it was portable, even though there was no intention as yet to move the machine from where it stood in the workshop.
“As I reason it,” Abna said thoughtfully, as he and the others surveyed the completed apparatus, “this instrument works in five stages—the fifth stage being the ultimate one, and the one which projected me into that other space. It’s plain from what we’ve learned that it did it by transposing my electronic makeup into another field of probability altogether,
