When the Moon Turned Green

Bruce Dixon expected nothing more than fresh air after seventy-two hours locked inside his mountain laboratory. Instead he stepped into a nightmare: a glowing green moon hanging over Arizona and a world where birds, animals, and people lie frozen in a rigid sleep that looks disturbingly like death. The pulse of life still beats faintly in their bodies, but something in that unnatural moonlight has robbed them of movement and will. Within hours Dixon learns the terrible truth. Refugees from Alpha Centauri have chosen Earth as their new home—and they have begun their conquest by turning the moon itself into a weapon. The green light flooding the planet carries a strange radioactive force that leaves humanity helpless while monstrous hybrids patrol the land to enforce the invaders’ rule. Only Dixon, protected by accident and stubborn ingenuity, remains free to fight. With the help of Ruth Lawton and her wounded uncle Emil Crawford, Dixon uncovers a final desperate chance. Crawford has built a radio-guided projectile capable of crossing the gulf of space. Dixon has created an explosive powerful enough to shatter worlds. If the two inventions can be combined and launched in time, they might destroy the alien ship that is poisoning the moon. But reaching the launch point means crossing a landscape crawling with nightmarish creatures grown from insects and human remains, battling alien masters armed with weapons beyond Earth science, and struggling against the same creeping paralysis that has already claimed the rest of the planet. As the green moon sinks toward the horizon and his strength drains away, Dixon faces a final race against time—one last crawl across the rocks to send a weapon into space before the last human resistance disappears. Hal K. Wells wrote a number of fast-moving science fiction adventures from the 1920s through the 1950s, many of them appearing in the pages of Weird Tales and other pulp magazines.