ONE AGAINST THE STAR THINGS

Slimy ice-cold creatures had taken over the world in one brutal blitzkrieg, and after fifty years of their domination the only humans left were living like animals in the deepest tropical jungles.

Among those tenacious survivors was Mark Darragh, a brash young man who dreamed of the world his fathers had lost, and who decided to make his dream come true.

Travelling by flimsy canoe, armed with hopelessly outdated weapons, Mark started out for the Cold People's stronghold. Somehow they must have an Achilles Heel —all he had to lose was his life, but if he won, he'd win a world!

Turn this book over for second complete novel

CAST OF CHARACTERS

Mark Darragh

Because he had nothing to lose and everything to gain, this young rebel was without fear.

Chief Megan

As leader of the surviving humans, Megan could think only of retaliation and never of reconquest.

Orrin Lyle

Playing petty dictator meant more to him than the welfare of his people.

Brenda Thompson

By learning to love a stranger, she saved the lives of everyone around her.

Sam Criddle

He knew the truth when he heard it, but it was seldom that he got the opportunity to listen.

THE DARK DESTROYERS

by

MANLY WADE WELLMAN

ACE BOOKS, INC. 23 West 47th Street, New York 36, N.Y.

THE DARE DESTROYERS

Copyright ©, 1959, by Manly Wade Wellman

An Ace Book, by arrangement with Thomas Bouregy & Co. Part of this novel appeared under the tide Nuisance Value and is copyright, 1938, by Street & Smith Publications, Inc.

. . he who does not recognize what is in the universe is a stranger to the universe . . . Watch how all things continually change, and accustom yourself to realize that Nature's prime delight is in changing things that are . . ."

—Marcus Aurelius Antoninus, To Himself, Book IV

BOW DOWN TO NUL

Copyright ©, 1960, by Ace Books, Inc.

:                                        \

Printed in U.S.A.

PROLOGUE

EVERYONE HAS heard countless theories as to where the Cold People came from, but nobody knows for a certainty; so sudden was their arrival on Earth, so swift and complete their victory in battle, that the men and women of Earth had no time for meditation or study or consideration of evidence-only time for flight.

The Cold People were great translucent, helmet-shaped things that moved by hitching and hunching upon rubbery pedestal-organs of locomotion, snail fashion, but with surprising speed and maneuverability. The comblike crest of such a creature stood full five feet high; and at the lowest and thickest point, the body was somewhat greater than that in diameter. At a point just forward of thé serrated comb sprouted a close-set sheaf of from six to eight tendrils, like a weaving, wriggling plume for the helmet. These tendrils were snakily agile, capable of stretching themselves to a length of six feet or more. Each terminated in a disklike sucker, like a palm, that could grasp or hold or cradle. In the midst of the cloudily-gleaming, gray bulk hung and pulsed a heavy-appearing body, the size of a football, that gave off a dim reddish brown light. It is possible that this was the vital organ, or the sensory body, or even both. At times it throbbed violently, and the intensity of its light varied weirdly.

The Cold People took their food—it was ■ synthetic food, various liquids blended of certain chemicals—by ready absorption through the surface of the body. Most studies agree that they were sexless, and that probably they achieved reproduc-

Hon by budding, like the simpler forms of Terrestrial life. Other natural functions appear to have been exercised in manners fully as primitive. Some human scientists have thought that these strangers on Earth were unicellular, amazingly evolved to intelligence, and others argue that they were an extreme development of an originally complex organism to certain specializations of the rational and manipulative faculties. Here again, there was no time or opportunity for the testing of theories and the settlement of arguments.

They arrived unsuspected and unheralded in midwinter, a rain of black ships that swooped down throughout Europe, North America, and northern Asia. At that time, there was freak weather—a widespread siege of zero weather that tormented Earth's entire north temperate zone.

The first men to see them died almost in the moment of seeing; for each ship, as it approached Earth, gave off great concentric rings and halos of sickly white light that exploded all living things they touched. Cities and harbors and defenses seemed to fluff away into murky vapor. Survivors of states and populations fled miserably from these first landings, to blunder upon other landings and perish in senseless flight.

Heads of governments, those who lived through the first hours, first blamed the sneak attacks of rival powers, then forced themselves to grasp the truth in its unspeakable strangeness. Men and nations tried to defend themselves. Armies and navies mobilized and swarms of fighter and bomber planes sped to strike at the snow-girt camps of the invaders. But bombs and bullets sprang back from force-screens of dark green radiance, while the white lights, now leveled in streams as though they gushed from hoses, felled the planes in squadrons and groups, like a generation of locusts suddenly stricken with a plague. Pilots and navigators and bombardiers melted into bladdery pulps at their controls, and their craft plunged to smash on earth, while the Cold People counterattacked all around the world.

There was no gainsaying them. Guided missiles could not pierce the screens. Artillery bombardments were as futile, with gunners dying around their pieces. The survivors were the swiftly-furtive, the cowards. And more of the black spacecraft arrived hourly.

The strangers set up posts, established communications between them, and combined their parties into deadly armies. Out darted smaller craft to scout, and in one pitched battle fought on land and sea from Alaska to Vladivostok effortlessly obliterated the last of Earth's soldiery, and their weapons, bases and cities with them.

That any human beings escaped was a marvel that came about by a second whim of the weather. Even as the survivors of the globe-spanning disaster fled despairingly, a thaw set in—again general—throughout devastated Russia, shattered England and Germany, scorched and racked southern Canada, the catastrophe-flogged United States. Even as the great freeze had seemed to bring the invasion, that great thaw seemed to perplex it. The conquerors retreated northward before it, drawing back as men might have drawn back from a great fire; they shut themselves up within their ships and shelters. The second day of the thaw—when the sky shimmered blue with an almost summer heat, and the snow ran into brooks and rivers across the continents—found no single helmet-shaped victor abroad to survey the triumphant destruction its coming had wrought upon Earth.

This phenomenon gave scurrying mankind the first clue as to the nature of the enemy. That invasion had been launched from some world far from its warm sun—a world whose denizens throve on temperatures that would freeze Terrestrials, and wilted in weather that on Earth seemed mild. If men would live, they must go south, into lands too hot for the natures of their adversaries.

South men went, where and how they could, deserting their immemorial seats of civilized culture and rule. New York, London, Moscow, Paris, Peiping, St. Louis, San Francisco, Tokyo—all stood empty where they had not been wrecked in the first fearsome attack. Some did not flee soon and fast enough. Preparing for motion and action in the heat, the Cold People ventured forth again.

Plainly, a war of extermination was intended. The new advance was organized against the possibility of hampering warmth; every helmet-shaped individual wore strange sealed armor, and many rode in insulated aircraft. Again slaughter and terror visited the rearguard of routed humanity. There was no checking or opposing the new masters of Earth, not until the flight had come to the tropics. Then, at last, the scornful pursuit slackened. The shattered, exhausted remnants of mankind bivouacked in the swamps of Florida, the jungles of Yucatan, in Indo-China and Saharan oases, and along mangrove-jungled hot coasts.

For long after that, it was a cruel game of hide and seek. No longer did humanity offer even a token resistance to the Cold People. Yet little patrols of darting aircraft—insulated and refrigerated and irresistibly armed—darted here and there above even the equatorial cities to bomb or ray to death the folk whose hands had become too weak to hold their Mother Earth. What few people remained lurking in the temperate and sub-Artie regions were ruthlessly hunted out and exterminated. The resolute survivors of many hunts and assaults plunged deep into hot Equatorial jungles, there to tend their wounds and build their nests and teach their children prodigies of hate and dread.

Those children grew up in the starkly bitter hope of recapturing the world their parents once had ruled . . . but half a century went by before the children tried it.

CHAPTER I

FIVE CHIEFS SAT around a council fire near the midreach of the Orinoco River, in a clearing among the lush lofty trees that had repossessed that land since Cold People's raiders had discouraged farming. Six had originally gathered to confer; but the sixth—a blackbearded leader of a fish-spearing clan—had proved both bull-headed and hot-headed. Early in the proceedings he had argued fiercely with the self-appointed chairman; accusations and insults had boiled up, and finally a duel with cutlasslike machetes. The others had seen fan-play with amiable appetite, and now the blackbeard was dead, lying yonder under a strewing of broad green leaves.

The victor in the affair finished wiping his blade by thrusting it repeatedly into the moist, dark earth. Then he polished it bright against his ragged cotton trousers and returned it to the leather loop that was fastened to his belt to do duty for a scabbard.

"And now," he announced, "the meeting will come back to order."

The others nodded agreement, and looked at him with the admiration of fighting men for a fighting man. He wore rings in his ears and a tattered red scarf around his head, like a pirate of the old days; but his lantern jaw and his accent were traditional Yankee. His grandparents had been among nine survivors who made their escape from Lynn, Massachusetts, in the first dreadful days of the Cold People's invasion.

"As I was saying before that rude interruption," he went on dryly, "I calculate the majority of us is agreed on the al

liance." His bright eye flicked toward the silent form under the leaves. "I ought to say the thing's unanimous by now."

"Yes," said the others. "That's right." They were savage and hairy and variously armed, with a general air of confidence in violent situations. Like their chairman, they resembled figures in a melodrama about pirates.

"Good-d," said the chairman, grinning with hard lips. "Who's got a word on his crowd? Are you sure your folks will go along with" what we've decided?"

"I can speak for my outfit and those outfits upriver," volunteered a swarthy-jowled fellow named Megan. "Three or four of the chiefs talked to me just before I came to this meeting. They're with us in this, Spence. They're waiting right now for me to come back and report on what the council decided."

"Good-d," said the chairman again. "What about you others?"

Another chief promised support from neighboring clans, and another. Spence grinned again, with happy pride.

"With our bands and those others who say they'll throw in with us, we've got a strong alliance to start with," he said. "Enough of a bunch, with good able chiefs, to bring in more. One after another, those gangs and groups back in the country will fall in line."

Megan glanced at the body away from the fire. "How about his folks? How will they feel about their chief getting—eliminated?"

"I was figuring about that," nodded Spence, and spat in the fire. "They'll be lacking a chief, so maybe they can come in with my bunch. I've got in mind they might be happy to have a sensible head of things instead of just a mouthy, fight-picking one. Any comment on having them join my band?"

"It is so moved," said Megan.

"Seconded," put in his neighbor at the fire.

"Anybody opposed?" inquired Spence. "The ayes have it, his band will be invited to join mine. I'll just appoint all of us as a committee to drop in on them and tell them what happened, and how they can do the smart thing. Won't be much of an argument, I calculate, with five chiefs talking." He spat again. "I'm beginning to think our troubles are just about over."

"Not quite," said a voice from behind him.

Spence spun around and came smoothly to his feet. His hand slid, as if by its own impulse, to the hilt of his machete.

There was a stir of motion in the thicket of broad leaves from which had been plucked the makeshift shroud of the recent arguer. Out into view moved a tall young man.

"Huh," said Spence. "Thought you'd gone."

The young man wore leather sandals and a pair of patched shorts of coarse-woven cotton. His lean body and smooth-shaven face were sunburnt almost to the color of his sandals, making the blue of his well-set, wide-open eyes the more startling. His shock of black hair and the strength of his chin, with the big straight nose and sharp-planed cheekbones, together with his gaunt height, might have suggested what young Abraham Lincoln probably looked like. No weapon rode at his belt—only a pouch of catskin tanned with the fur on.

Spence stuck out his thin jaw and glared disconcertingly. "I brought you to this meeting to make a report on that expedition of yours up north," he growledf-*"You're not a chief; you don't have any voice in this council. I thought you'd made your report and gone, anyway."

The tall youngster grinned, with no trace of abashment. "I'd started to leave, all right," he said, "but that fight boiled up."

"Just call it a little parliamentary debate," Spence bade him.

"Then that little parliamentary debate boiled up. So I waited yonder in the bushes to watch it. Then I stayed on, and I couldn't help but hear what you said afterward."

"What do you mean, what we said afterward?" challenged Spence.

"That business about your troubles being over." The young man grinned again. "Your troubles are just beginning, if I may say so."

All five chiefs scowled as one.

"You may say so, all right," said the swarthy-faced Megan witheringly, "but it won't get you anywhere."

"And it won't get you anywhere to think your troubles are over," was the good-humored rejoinder.

Spence frowned. "You're not saying what I meant. It isn't that all our troubles are over. It's just that the greatest difficulty—the forming of an alliance . . ." He gestured, somewhat vaguely. "We've made the biggest step toward fighting the Cold People. We can get ready for the next step now."

"Get ready to fight the Cold People?" prompted the young interloper. "Get ready to advance . . . which way—north or south? I've heard somebody say that their main base is somewhere on Antarctica."

"We go north," said Megan grimly. "Well meet them there!"

"And when you meet them, what?" The lean young face had lost its smile and grew dark. "Stop and do some thinking, you chiefs. Each one of you has a band, a whole community, depending on you for sensible judgment."

"And," amplified Spence, hitching up the belt that held his machete, "you think our judgment isn't sensible."

"I think that it's fifty years since the Cold People came to Earth. I think that they whipped the nations of Earth in about fifty hours. And I think you've forgotten what it is to be beaten and smashed."

"Hum," grunted Megan. "Speaking of getting beaten and smashed, young man, how would you like to ..."

"If you and I and the others have forgotten," went on the other, "wouldn't we learn about it all over again, as soon as we got within their reach?"

"Talk about your own fathers and grandfathers being whipped," snarled a bronzed man with a fine hooked nose. He was Capato, a Venezuelan Indian who governed a federation of native villages. "My people never got whipped by the Cold ones."

"That's because your people never fought them," flung back the tall youth. "You're on the point of fighting them now, and you'll get your bellyful. Maybe nobody will get back from the fight to say how bad the whipping was."

"All right, sonny," put in another. "You're full of criticisms. What do you have in the way of sensible advice?"

"Stop and think, I say again. If the Cold People beat us once, when they had barely landed and were only catching their breath—if we got knocked off our perch just when we thought we were firm on it—what will they do this time, when they're the entrenched defenders and you're the attackers?"

"You're just a damned defeatist," sniffed Spence. "I'll give him a better name than that," sneered Megan. "A coward."

The tanned face turned toward Megan, the young lips drew back to bare white, even teeth. Two big hands closed into fists. Megan moved a pace away and slid his machete out of its loop.

"He's unarmed," said Capato quickly. "You can't kill an unarmed man, Megan."

"Lend him your stabbing-iron, then," growled Megan.

Capato put his hand to his own weapon, but the young man gestured in refusal. "I'll just pass that insult," he said slowly. "Let it he for the time being. Samebody asked if I had any sensible advice. Why don't we all sit down?"

Suiting the action to the word, he squatted on his sandaled heels beside the fire. Spence stared at him a moment, then dropped into his own place. The others, too, sat and waited.

"Just now," resumed the young scout, "there are a lot of other things to do than fight duels. Duels don't solve anything. That chief who was killed is already a problem. The whole bunch of you are' going to have to go and explain to his people."

"He insulted me mortally," Spence defended himself. "What would you have done in my place?"

"You just saw what I did when I was insulted. I took it

and stuck to more important business. We can find out things more valuable than whether this chief—Megan's your name, isn't it?—can beat me in a rough-and-tumble with machetes. It's a whole lot more to the point to find out whether the human race can beat the Cold People."

"We can beat them," snapped Spence, as if sharp assurance could settle the question. "They never showed any really unthinkable superiority in warfare. Wherever they came from

n

"Wherever they came from, they were just an expedition far across space," finished the young man for him. "They were travelling light, a small payload on a long-distance space-spanning vehicle. The weapons they brought probably aren't anywhere near the best they know about." He spread his big hands. "I see them like a detail of police going out to handle a big unarmed mob in the old days. I've heard about such things. They took pistols and nightsticks and tear-gas bombs. If these didn't do the trick at once—if the mob fought back, maybe gave the police detail real trouble—up came reserves, maybe with machine guns. If it turned into a revolution, there were big guns and tanks and planes. All right; our ancestors were defeated with only the small arms of the Cold People, and we've fallen a long way from what we were then."

"We still have what counts in war," insisted Spence. "We've been putting old equipment into shape for years. We have guns and ammunition. We have chemicals, even some planes."

"All of which counted for exactly nothing fifty years ago."

That was quite true, but the five chiefs did not like to be reminded of it. They let their young tormenter know as much by their five angry scowls.

"It just occurs to me that you're doing a lot of talking when you don't even have a vote in this council," said Spence. "We don't even know what your name is."

"My name's Darragh. Mark Darragh. And I'm not trying to vote; I'm only trying to remind you of the facts. Wait now—give me just half a minute more, please. All of you feel safe here in the tropics."

"We've been safe here for half a century," said Capato.

"Because "they've forgotten about us. Suppose you and some others get together a fighting force and go up north and get licked? You've shown fight; you've called yourselves to their attention. They'll come down here and wipe out the last human being alive."

"That's nonsense," exploded Capato. "They can't venture into these temperatures. The jungle hides us, anyway."

"They can slide into the stratosphere above here," said Mark Darragh. "It's cold enough for them up there. And from that point they can put those destroyer-rays of theirs to the jungles. They could wipe us out, the way we wipe out pests—by setting the grass afire."

The picture of such a fate, briefly and flatly sketched, again brought throughtful pause to the five chiefs. Darragh seized the moment and plunged on.

"Let me ask you again, to visualize how things have changed. When the first of them came to Earth, we were entrenched and powerful and in the majority. Now they're entrenched. I've been up yonder—up into the Gulf of Mexico. I've seen their outpost communities . . ."

"We know about that," Spence tried to cut him off. "You reported on your scouting of their outposts."

"I've seen their outpost communities/,' repeated Darragh stubbornly. "Big forts, sealed and domed and walled. Aircraft crawling overhead. The only sign of human habitation is ruins. I know what I'm talking about. I doubt if any man has gone so far in among them for years and years, and come back alive."

"It was the foolish adventure of a boy," sneered one of the other chiefs.

"You're right, sir—it probably was foolish. I went up there a boy; but I spent two years on the prowl, and I feel that I came back home a grown man, with helpful knowledge about the enemy."

"You're not much help when you say to forget fighting them," charged Megan,

"I didn't say to forget fighting them. I just said, don't fight their way. Don't fight the way that got us whipped once. Develop another policy and other weapons."

"Such as what policy and what weapons?" prompted Spence.

Darragh frowned. For the first time he looked baffled. "I don't know, just yet," he admitted after a moment.

There was harsh laughter all around the fire.

"All right, Darragh, you seem to have come to the end of your little comedy," said Spence. "I'm presiding over this council, and 111 give you leave to clear out and let us finish the rest of our business."

Darragh got up. "All right, I'll leave," he said. "But let me leave as your scout, gendemen,"

"Scout?" echoed Megan.

"Let me go back up there once more. Let my spy out the land and the Cold People. Let me bring back the secret that will destroy them."

"Now, I'll go to hell if the kid isn't eloquent," chuckled Megan. "He almost convinces me. He would if he hadn't dropped that about a new policy and new weapons he doesn't know anything about."

"I'm looking for the secret," insisted Darragh.

Spence shook his canny head. "Even if you found it, you'd take too long," he objected. "We're tired of sneaking and hiding. You told us that the Cold People are getting mighty thick up there in the land we ought to be living in."

"That's right," nodded Capato. "We've got to smack them right now, or never."

"Right now?" repeated Darragh. "How soon is right now? Let's see, this is early September. You aren't figuring on a winter campaign, are you?"

"No, we aren't," said Spence. "Well gather and arm our men, then organize and drill this fall and winter. We'll move north with the hot weather. Take the Cold People at the worst time of the year for them."

"That means six months from now," summed up Darragh for him. "Then let me have six months for my expedition."

Smiling crookedly, Spence shrugged in contemptuous concession. "All right," he said. "Get back in six months and tell us the whole tale. You'll find us ready for our campaign."

"That's a deal," said Darragh. He looked down toward where Megan sat. "When I get back, maybe you'll want to take up that little quarrel you tried to force on me."

Megan laughed and shook his head, without malice. "Look, sonny, I'll make a deal with you. I'll take back that thing I said. You're no coward or you wouldn't be heading into Cold People country. No hard feelings."

"Fair enough," said Darragh.

"We've made fun of you, youngster," put in Capato, "and, one way or the other, you've deserved it with your butting in. But you've got nerve, and I wish you luck. Get back here safe in six months."

"Amen to that," said another. "You're a long, tall young man. We'll want you and lots like you in the army."

"And if I bring back the secret of the Cold People's weakness?" persisted Darragh.

"Oh, that?" said Spence, almost indulgently. "Bring it back, and we'll see."

"I'll bring it back," promised Darragh,*"and I most certainly hope you'll see."

CHAPTER II

WITHIN forty-eight hours, Mark Darragh was drifting down the Orinoco in a canoe, his goal the Caribbean Sea and the strongholds of the Cold People along its northern shore and beyond.

Chief Megan had been right in withdrawing that accusation of cowardice, but Chief Capato had been wrong in chuckling at Darragh for a fool. Darragh's equipment for the voyage had been assembled with both courage and wisdom.

His thirty-foot dugout of red gum had been a legacy from his father—a good hunter and a part-time teacher in the shabby village school. The wood of that dugout had a tough hardness that was almost metallic, and had been worked and shaped with skill and artistry. Darragh's father had chosen the log with experienced sense, had hollowed it by fire to a two inch shell, had scraped the inside smooth and clean and polished the outside to a silky sheen the color of stale cherry juice. At the widest, the dugout measured three feet; it was perhaps twenty-four feet long. Its pointed bow and stern were decked in against waves; it was furnished with outriggers to starboard and port, and there was a paddlelike rudder that swung on an upright pin of wrought iron. A single mast was stepped a littie forward of center, slooped-rigged with main sail and jib of closely-woven palm fiber. As loaded by Darragh, the craft rode a good eighteen inches out of the water.

Stowed under the after deck Darragh carried his provisions —flat cakes of cassava, with meal to bake more; some big yams; breadfruit; the dried and smoked meat of pig, armadillo and goat; a fiber bag of guavas, pomegranates and avocados; a small bunch of bananas; and a string of twenty green drinking coconuts. He brought water in an array of big gourd bottles, and trusted to rainstorms to provide more. His cooking apparatus was simple but efficient—a rectangle of slate clamped in the bottom of the boat, with a basket of charcoal for fuel and a spit and a saucepan for utensils.

Darragh was no experienced navigator; he had taught himself what he could of navigation theory, from grubby old books that had come down from North America in that long-ago retreat. He had a compass, a quadrant and a tattered set of United States Navy charts of the Caribbean Sea, perhaps three-quarters of a century old. His arms were an ancient but well-whetted cavalry saber; a good sheath knife of home-forged, home-tempered steel; and—since all firearms had long ago been confiscated by the chiefs who planned that uprising against the Cold People—a bow and a quiver full of arrows.

Since Darragh was to spy upon the Cold People, he had prepared and packed warm clothing. It lay there under the foredeck, a combination garment that would cover body, limbs and head—also two heavy gauntlets, and a pair of high moccasins that could lace up snugly. The lack of furry pelts in the tropics had baffled him at first, but he had made shift with two thicknesses of deer leather tanned to the utmost softness. Between these layers he had sandwiched a third layer of cotton lint, and had quilted the whole together with strong tuft stitches. There was a pair of immemorial glass goggles set in a half-mask of old leather, which he had oiled carefully to make it soft again, and a scarf knitted of heavy cotton yarn to protect his face. Completing the cargo was a handful of personal odds and ends—several hand-whittled pipes; a bag of tobacco; his father's well-ground straight razor; a bamboo tube of hand-rolled quinine pills; and a copy of "Robinson Crusoe".

At first Darragh had nothing to do except steer his dugout as the strong-flowing current of the Orinoco carried him down and down and to the open sea. There he ran up his sails to take advantage of a fair breeze from southward.

Running well before that breeze on a bright, hot afternoon, Darragh sailed to starboard of Trinidad and at sundown dropped his stone anchor close in to a swampy shore. He slept some hours, breakfasted before dawn on cassava bread and dried meat, then set sail again. The sun came up to show him the Island of Tobago on his right.

An effort to sail straight past and away from Tobago was unsuccessful; a strong current beat him back, and it occurred to him that the same current was mentioned in his Robinson Crusoe book. He tacked to go around the other way, and was successful. Pleasant days and nights followed. He slept little, with sails furled and rudder lashed, but the little he slept was enough for a healthy young body. He felt that his makeshift navigation was to be congratulated when he made a landfall at the old port of St. George's on Grenada for fresh water and exploration, on his seventh day out from the mouth of the Orinoco.

He found that the one-time capital of the island colony was in prone ruins and overgrown with jungle; plainly, it had received the attention of the invaders long ago. Trying to trace the old streets, Darragh saw that even the concrete curbs had gone to powder. He wondered, as so often in the past, at the riddlesome force of the explosive ray mechanism that had spelled disaster for his race.

Guns would be nothing against it, and Spence and those other chiefs of the alliance were unable to think or imagine beyond guns. Darragh found a clear spring and refilled his array of gourds with sweet water. He picked some custard apples to take back to the boat, and pushed off to sea again, thinking soberly and somewhat gloomily.

But, out on the blue water with his palm-woven sails bellying to the breeze, he plucked up spirits. He had seen nothing of the Cold People so far. Plainly they ignored the latitudes in which he sailed. His previous scouting adventure had taken him to westward along the coast of South America, far up the isthmus. In three years he had seen only a few domelike shelters of the enemy, and those in the Mexican highlands. This time, he told himself, he would reach the Gulf Coast of the old United States, perhaps reach the Mississippi River and voyage upward and learn the actualities of the Cold People.

It was his business to remain cautious and clear-eyed, and wide awake at all times. Yes, and it was his business to be— vicious.

For had not weak adversaries triumphed over strong ones in the earlier days of Earth's history? It was a matter of spirit, if you came down to first principles. Spence and

Megan and Capato and the others were almost sensible about the right attitude. Darragh wished he'd thought of that when he spoke to their council; that he'd pointed out the direction for them to continue thinking, the refusal to accept defeat.

After all, defeat was like a lot of other proffered things. It must be accepted. Otherwise it was—well, refused. A memory came of one of his father's old books. It had told the story of another open boat, in these very seas, not far away from where he, Darragh, now sailed; the story of the old man who fished, who fought what seemed the cosmic spite of fate and of nature itself, who would have been called a failure. The moral of the tale, as Darragh had decided, was that you had not been conquered until you yourself fell flat on your face to kiss the foot that kicked you.

Now, he was the young man and the sea, utterly determined to survive and to succeed, and to decline to recognize that prodding offer of the baleful gift of defeat.

He remembered something else he had read once, a stanza of Kipling. All alone with the sea and the hot sky and the taut sails, the sand the words to a tune of his own making:

"Mistletoe killing an oak-Rats gnawing cables in two-Moths making holes in a cloak— How they must love what they do! Yes—and we Little Folk, too, We are as busy as they, Working our works out of view. Watch, and you'll see it some dayr

That passage, as Darragh remembered, referred to the crushed Picts in old Britain, plotting the downfall of mighty Rome. He wished he could think of the rest of Kipling's powerfully spiteful verses. Since he could not, he sang the single stanza over again, exultantly.

Somewhere in there, he felt mystically sure, was the lesson for him and his own kind—the way to fight and defeat the

Cold People, the way he knew existed but could not tell the council. He'd puzzle out the lesson. It was a simple matter of concentrated rational thinking; when he had it, he'd apply it. Back in the home jungle, perhaps he would find and learn the rest of that Pict Song Kipling had written, would sing it and teach it to others as a chant of battle. There was one final line that did come back to him:

. . . And then we shall dance on your graves!

With fierce relish Darragh said those words over. They were a good omen . ..

Near Martinique, on a gently rolling stretch of sea full of black prowling sharks, he looked up and was aware of a faraway flying vehicle of the Cold People.

At once he struck his sails and sat silent in the dugout. The ship, a silvery torpedo shape with no wings or propellers or jet streams, grew larger as it descended out of the stratosphere. Over him it skimmed and circled, as though to examine the face of the deep. Sharks came to nudge his craft at either side.

Thank you, brother sharks, said Darragh in his heart as he sat motionless as a stone image, thank you for flocking around. Thank you for being big and long and shaped like my boat.

For the sharks helped him fool that observer craft up there. He would seem like one of the great school of sharks. At last the silvery torpedo hoisted its nose and dived upward and away out of sight somewhere. Darragh hoisted his sails and headed north again.

To supplement his dwindling food supply, he trailed a line overside with a hook that carried a bait of pork rind. Not a day passed that he did not catch several good fish. Splitting them, he grilled them over a handful of glowing charcoal fragments on his slate hearth, and on another bit of slate baked flapjacks of cassava meal and water.

Sliding past Dominica, he observed that Roseau, too, had been utterly obliterated by the enemy, nor had the jungle returned; apparently the entire island had been so thoroughly blasted that all life had been swept away and nothing left but the great bald mountain in the center. If no seeds had been blown or washed up there, to grow a new mat of vegetation, perhaps the explosive ray had been at work here recently. Why? Did the Cold People conduct target practice? If so, did they prepare for another clash with humanity? And, once more, what was that ray weapon of theirs? It must be hot beyond imagination to do such scathe, even to concrete buildings and pavements. But how did the Cold People, so gingerly in even mild warmth, endure the management of a hot weapon?

He could not answer those questions, but he did not put them out of his mind. The mystery added to the menace; however, Darragh decided that he did not feel too timid about it. After all—and he grinned rather tigerishly to himself as he developed the thesis he had begun—man had ruled too long on Earth to learn defeat in mere half century of time.

In his fancy he saw ranks of warriors that seemed to pass his mind's eye in review, ranging one behind the other as they came out of the dead centuries. There were the battered but triumphant Marines of Midway and Okinawa, the scarred infantry that had swept like a tidal wave up the beaches of Normandy; the victors of Cantigny and the Argonne, in weathered khaki; Lee's gray Virginians, Grant's stubborn men in blue; the Light Brigade that did not pause to reason why at Balaklava; Cortez and his rusty-armored handful that gulped down the Aztec Empire; the Crusaders, led by Richard and Saint Louis, the Saracen chivalry of Salah-ad-Din; Caesar's Tenth Legion; Assyrian phalanxes, bearded and scale-armored. And, behind these, barely visible in prehistoric antiquity, the hairy men of the Flint People, Darragh's first human ancestors who in Europe had met the Neanderthal race, another monster people who had to be taught who was ruler of Earth.

Those were the conquerors, and not one of them but had known defeat once and again, and not one of them but had risen to victory. Just now, all mankind was down; but not out, by no means out. Resting, rather, on one knee, shaking the groggy head clear, flexing the muscles, growing strong by the respite, getting ready to resume the struggle. The plight of the human race was desperate, but not too desperate.

Then Darragh saw in his mind those villages and little towns in the South American jungle where his people lived— houses of hewn timber and adobe-like stucco and tight-thatched roofs, with their governments and market places, with their fields here and there for the growing of crops and the grazing of herds. He saw the civilization mankind had rebuilt; the forge, where the blacksmith had found his frade one of dignity and prestige as in brave old days; the looms and the potteries; the village schools, such as the one in which his father had taught from old books that told the story of humanity's greatness and wisdom and courage; even the simple printing presses that produced new books and newspapers, the factories where simple machine tools were achieved, the laboratories where doctors and other scientists wrought.

As a matter of fact, conquered mankind had come back a long way from what the Cold People must have thought was complete destruction. The Cold People had better look out.

One late afternoon, midway of his third week of sailing, Darragh steered his canoe to the southeastern point of the island of Haiti. He needed water and food; he took in sail and let his boat drift close inshore, under some drooping palms. Even as he dropped his anchor stone overboard, he saw through the frondy foliage half a dozen aircraft of the Cold People, dancing like midges among high, streaky clouds overhead.

Had they seen him? Would they investigate? He stood up in the boat, one hand on a palm trunk. He watched while one of the ships dropped down like a pouncing hawk, and another and another. One by one they dipped beyond the belt of tall shaggy-leafed trees inland from his anchorage.

They were landing there, not far away. Maybe they had not sighted him, after all. He, Darragh, was there to scout and spy, and he did not hesitate long. Hurriedly he belted on his saber. That well-sharpened blade had been a legacy from his grandfather, who had inherited it from an ancestor once with a Kentucky cavalry regiment in the Civil War. Kneeling, Darragh tightened the straps of his sandals, said a quick prayer for luck, and stepped out of the canoe to the sandy beach. Stealthily he moved in the direction of those descending ships.

He made careful progress, from the first few palms at the water's edge to the shelter of a bush, beyond to another bush. Then he was among trees and comfortably dense undergrowth, the best of cover. The leaves overhead would screen him effectively from a possible flying observer, and, from long hunting habit, he crouched low among the trunks and bushes, advancing without any rustle of the stems around him.

Up ahead, gray light shone through the green of the jungle. That meant there was open country just beyond. Darragh moved more cautiously still, until he came to the edge of a clearing. Squatting low, he cautiously pulled aside two great femy fronds of leaves, and looked out.

Here in the midst of the jungle of Haiti was a spacious bald circle of earth—as large, perhaps, as an old flying field— and in its center stood a big artificial dome of a patchworky gray substance. Upon the top of this structure was just then descending the last of the ships. As Darragh watched, the ship vanished, as though through a trapdoor or valve. He was looking, as on several occasions of his earlier expedition, at an outpost shelter of the Cold People.

He wished with all his heart for one of the precious cameras his people had been able to make; but such things were jealously kept as scientific instruments, and not even Darragh's audacity had been sufficient to allow him to ask for one. Spence and the other chiefs would have refused, anyway.

The next best thing would be "a drawing, and Darragh rather fancied his skill as a draughtsman. From his belt pouch he fished a folded wad of the coarse, tan-tinted paper manufactured by an enterprising fellow in a village that neighbored Darragh's. Another dig in the pouch, and he produced a pencil, hammered out of a strip of lead. He put a sheet of the paper on his bare brown knee, squinted at the scene, and began carefully to draw.

The dome, as Darragh judged, was a good two hundred

yards in diameter, and fairly half as high. He had better jot

down those estimated figures, and did so. Its curved surface

might be of several materials, for the shades of gray were

various. Dull, darkish metal in one place, or so it seemed;

circles and quadrilaterals of glasslike semi-transparency; ir-

regularly shaped blotches that might be fine-grained stone or

possibly, some kind of mortar or cement. Here and there

showed ports through which the outer world could be

observed. Rectangular panels at regular intervals were fur-

nished with what looked like hinges, so that they might open

for doorways.                                                               ,N

Darragh wished for something else, one of the few pairs of field glasses that had also made the retreat from the destruction of America. With glasses, he felt, he could be surer about those entry panels—could be sure, too, of the condition of the ground around the dome shelter. He strained his unaided eyes, and guessed that the structure was fairly new, and that the baldness of the clearing was new, too—he could make out no sprouts of young vegetation in the fat dark earth.

Undoubtedly this open space in the jungle had been made by the use of those mysterious rays, snuffing and scalding away the trees and bushes and ferns into clouds of vapor. There were no felled trunks, no chopped-away decaying leaves. Once the clearing was there, the dome had been erected. While he drew, Darragh summed up his findings in his mind.

This might well be one of a group or system of new posts in the tropical southern regions, disturbingly close to where men had been living in comparative safety. The Cold People might have become more numerous, perhaps by emigrations and increased births of new individuals on the planet they had so ruthlessly appropriated. Now, they seemed to be closing in on the tropics. The denuding of the island of Dominica might mean that another outpost would be built there. And more encroachments would come, perhaps into the home jungles of mankind.

Had Spence and the others been right after all? Had their instinct been good, even while he had derided it, that now or never was the time to fight? If man waited to make war, it might well be that war would come and seek him out in his tropical refuge.

Darragh completed his drawing, and attempted a sketch, from memory, of that last ship seen comparatively close at hand. Then he began a careful circuit of the clearing, within the shelter of the trees. At point after point he studied the dome; it presented no arrestingly new features from any observation. A full hour went by as Darragh moved in his circle, and almost as he reached his starting point he saw a sudden shimmer of motion at the dome's summit. A torpedo shape of a flying craft came into view and roared slowly upward. Another made its appearance and fose in its turn. More came. Darragh counted five in all. They drifted off to seaward above the trees, as though on some sort of patrol mission.

The sun was sinking low. Darragh's previous expedition had convinced him that the Cold People were not particularly active in the dark, and he would feel safe in departing from Haiti. He slipped away from the clearing, and headed back toward the place where his dugout waited under those seaside palms.

Moving silently, as before, he was aware of some noisier thing, in the direction of the water's edge.

At once he dropped flat among the low-growing bushes, and lay there for long moments. A slender, bright-blotched snake wriggled by within inches of his face, and his flesh crawled at the sight of its flat head, heavily jowled with poison sacs, but he dared not move to strike or retreat. The snake departed, but the noise continued. Finally Darragh crept forward on hands and knees. It sounded as though some clumsy body, large as a hippopotamus, wallowed at the beach.

He came to where he could peer through some lemon-scented leaves into the open.

There were the palms, there was his boat, and there, close to it, moved something of a fish-bright gleaming hue, vaguely pyramidal.

One of the Cold People hunched along the water's edge, between him and his boat.

Darragh remained motionless and stared. There was little more than that for him to do. He had never seen one of the Cold People so close at hand before, and he studied the form of the uncouth monster. It seemed swaddled and blurred by a strange sheathlike cloak it wore, apparently some land of insulating armor against the tropical heat. The fabric was as transparent as isinglass and quite supple, as he could see, but it seemed to be of considerable thickness. Each of the tentaclelike organs that served as arms had a close sleevelike covering of it.

The creature's attention was plainly directed to seaward, and Darragh made bold to creep to a new observation point between two trees.

He could see the edge of the sea by the palms, and his boat riding there at its tether. Floating easily above, just clear of the palm fronds, hovered an air vehicle of silvery metal like a twenty-foot cigar. On top of this apparatus perched another Cold Creatine, also draped in transparent armor, and the one on the beach was joined by a third, shuffling into Darragh's view from behind the clump of palms. The two on the ground stood still, examining his boat.

After a moment or so, they turned their armored comb-tops toward each other. Their tentacles vibrated rhythmically, as though they communicated in some weird sign language. Then the one on the top of the aircraft dropped out of sight as though through a trap into the interior, and quickly clambered back with a tangle of lean, dark cordage. This it dropped down to its companions.

The two of them busied themselves here and there beside the boat. They twined and interlaced the cords, very deftly as it seemed to the helplessly-watching Darragh. Then the craft dropped down to the sand, and with awkward but powerful motions the two on shore scrambled upon it. They and the third climbed down inside. A breath's space later, the ship rose gendy.

Half a dozen lines drew taut from ship to water. Then Darragh's boat, with all his possessions, came up from where it lay, in a net of the dark lines. Despairingly Darragh watched, while the craft with its dangling burden floated inland above him, toward the domed shelter.

Darragh forgot caution. He rose and fairly raced back in the same direction. He gained the edge of the clearing in time to see the Cold People's littie ship, still carrying his boat slung beneath it, descend to the top of its home structure and dip out of sight.

CHAPTER III

WRETCHEDLY, softly Darragh voiced a long and black curse. His dugout, with its sail and rudder, and its load of food and equipment, was primitive and sketchy in a high degree; Darragh had known that from the first. But it was all he had had in the way of transportation, provision and base of operations.

He had raced back through the trees without taking any thought whatever. Now, standing still and miserable under the trees, he did some quick and serious thinking.

Those Cold Creatures undoubtedly had noticed his boat by mere chance; but their discovery and seizure of it-leaving him thus stranded and foodless in a strange, wild place far from home—meant that they must divine his presence in the neighborhood. Very soon, therefore, they would come out again to hunt for him and kill him out of hand, as they had once killed almost a full generation of his fellow men.

Then he must flee. With good luck, he might escape far into Haiti's howling inner jungles. But if he did . . . what then? He would be alone, for he knew the Cold People well enough to understand that they would have built their dome fortress on Haiti only after satisfying themselves that no human colony had survived on the island or on any near shore. Even alive, he would be cut off from home, cut off by a vast blue ocean that at that moment seemed as impossible to cross as starry space. With only his sword and knife, could he fell the proper sort of tree, shape and fire-hollow it, equip with rudder and outriggers, weave himself a sail, gather provisions, find his way back to the mouth of the Orinoco without chart or compass?

Darragh very much doubted that he could. The Cold People would be after him. They would quickly discover if he was working at a boat. Then they would close in to finish him. Even if he hid himself, surely they would not scruple to blast away the jungle that he used for shelter. And his effort to gather information to give his fellows, back there at their fumbling war-plans in the South American jungles, would have gone for nothing.

"I've got to get that damned boat back again," he whispered fiercely to himself;

Then night fell, with the abruptness it affects in the tropics.

Darragh lingered at the edge of the Cold People's clearing. A large and hungry mosquito sang near and prodded Dar-ragh's cheek with its bill. He slapped at it—too late. It buzzed away, then returned to pink him again. Brushing at the pest with his hands, he leaned close to a tree and studied the great domed shelter of his enemies.

As the gloom deepened, lights were flaring up inside that dome, behind the patchwork of glass panes. The Cold People needed light in the darkness, Darragh knew. Whatever their sensory system, they could not be properly and efficiendy aware of objects save with light. Darragh, outside in the dark, probably would be hard to observe. He would steal into the open, steal close to the dome.

Thus he reasoned, but it took pluck as well as reason to force himself out into the open. He waited for a full minute, screwing up new determination. Then, crouching double, he stole forward across the bare, black earth.

Overhead shone the host of stars, but no moon; Darragh was thankful for that. At last, after what seemed breathless hours, he came close to the dome. He shifted his direction to avoid a direct approach to any of the lower tier of windowlike spaces. At last he came up against a comfortably opaque curve of rough stony foundation, pressed closed against it, and sidled along until he could peer past the edge of a transparent panel.

He looked into a small square compartment with walls of speckless white, in which half a dozen of the Cold People were ranged at a bench of dull metal, picking daintily with their tentacles at a keyboardlike array of levers and buttons. Some sort of intricate machinery, he righdy judged, that begat power—perhaps an item of the complex refrigeration system that the shelter must demand in order that the Cold People survive. As Darragh looked, a mosquito—might it have been the same that had annoyed him at the edge of the clearing?—buzzed in and assailed the tip of his big straight nose.

Again he struck at his tormentor, and again it nimbly dodged away. Damn all mosquitoes, thought Darragh, as he stooped low and slipped past beneath the groundward edge of the transparent pane to reach another stretch of massive stone wall beyond.

Here, his hands groped along a considerable and apparently deliberate roughness. The surface was incised with lines, one above the other, into which he could slide his fingers. As high as Darragh could reach, those lines were scored into the swell of the rocky wall, like rungs of a ladder.

Ladder, he said to himself. That was what these lines were meant to be. The Cold People could mount upward over such a deeply-cut design, with the creeping vacuum-suction powers of their bases so like the locomotive organs of snails. This, then, would lead to the top. He determined to climb.

He slipped off his sandals and thrust them into his belt. He paused and listened. Then he mounted the curve of the dome, fingers and toes probing for the heavily notched lines. It was not too difficult a feat for an active climber who wanted badly to reach the top, and at that moment Darragh wanted nothing else in the world so badly. His boat had gone inside the dome, up there at the top. If he failed to find that boat of his again, to drag it out somehow and away and at last to the shore of the sea, the Cold People were fairly certain to get him anyway. He might as well be hanged—or rayed—for a sheep as for a lamb.

He wriggled sidewise around two more glasslike panels in the surface of the dome, also around several nozzlelike projections that might have been ray-throwing devices. He wanted to look down into these latter but withstood the temptation. There was the mosquito again, relishfully prodding him in the middle of his bare back.

With a furious shudder, Darragh fairly bucked the little insect away. "Get out of here!" he whispered in the night. "Go bite a Cold Creature if you're hungry!"

Then he clung trembling to the notched lines, for his saber-sheath had scraped loudly on the stone. He felt that all the Cold People in the universe must have heard it, that a whole throng of them would burst from inside to surround him. But could they hear? Were they sensitive in any way to sound waves? He had seen them gesturing to each other. Perhaps he still was lucky. He unfastened the saber from his belt and slung it behind his shoulder lest it betray him.

He had mounted a considerable distance by now, and the curve of the dome was not so steep as it had been at first. He made faster progress, and was glad that the mosquito was not plaguing him any more. For a moment he wished he could be a mosquito, unnoticeably small, able to dart here and there and spy out the enemy's secrets. Up he scrambled toward the top of the dome. Ahead of him he saw darkness, more black than the night. It was some sort of an opening. He crept cautiously to the edge of it.

Here a great slice of the dome was slid away into some sort of recess, leaving a gap like that made by the cutting away of a plug in the rind of a plump melon. Darragh moved forward, and found himself crouching at the brink of a sizable quadrangular pit, a good forty feet long by half as wide. At the bottom was a bare glimmer of pale light, oozing up through a floor that appeared to be made of a substance like heavily clouded glass. Upon this floor rested a small aircraft of the Cold People. Darragh leaned farther into the pit to peer. Yes, and his boat rested there beside the flying ship, still wound in the lashings of cord.

He drew a deep, silent breath of triumphant joy. Pausing there on the hp of the opening, he once nfere put two and two together.

This entrance hole to the fortress had not been closed against the inhospitable heat of a tropic night. Therefore, the ship down yonder on the translucent floor would shortly take to the air again. And still fastened to the ship was his dugout canoe. It was going along on the voyage. Where?

The answer to that was evident. The boat would be flown to some greater and more central community of the Cold People, for exhibition to creatures in high authority—perhaps as evidence that human beings still dared to spy upon their terrible vanquishers. If Darragh was to save his belongings, he must move prompdy.

He examined the walls of the orifice. They were sloping, and no more than twenty feet in height. He saw, too, that they were scored all the way around with the ladder slits. Quickly he flung his feet over the edge, groped with his toes for purchase, and began to climb down.

Quickly he reached the lighted level bottom, and stood still there for a moment. His bare feet felt an icy chill at their soles, apparendy filtered from the frozen interior of the dome shelter. Then he moved noiselessly across to the boat where it lay in its netting beside the aircraft.

He studied the criss-cross of lines. They were tough and pliable, and of a rubbery texture to his exploring fingers. He could not guess the substance, but when he drew his knife and tried one of the lines he found that it could be cut. He paused again, to take council with himself.

Suppose he cut the various binding ropes almost through. Then, when the aircraft rose again, it would carry the dugout only a little distance before the nearly severed strands parted and dropped their burden. Falling, the dugout might with luck strike into the jungle, be cushioned by the twigs and branches of the trees, and so slide through unharmed, to the ground beneath. It was possible that such a falling of the boat might occur in the night without the knowledge of the Cold Creatures piloting the craft. He, Darragh, would be lurking in the jungle to run and reclaim his little vessel, drag it somehow to the water, get in, raise his sail and voyage away from Haiti with the knowledge his spying had gathered. All these things would need luck to achieve; but luck had been with Darragh from the very beginning of his expedition. And, despite a most practical and logical pattern of mind, Darragh could never persuade himself to stop believing in luck.

He took another strand of the rope in his hand and set the edge of the knife to it, but paused again. He could see that the dugout had been emptied of all his stores. Even the mast had been stripped of the palm-fiber sails, the slate hearth had been pried from its fastenings and taken away. He needed those things, wherever they had been carried.

He glanced here and there. After a moment, he studied the aircraft of the Cold People as it lay next to the boat. It was a metal cigar in which a hatchway gaped. He rose from beside the dugout, tiptoed gingerly to the aircraft and stared in through the open hatch.

He saw something bundled inside, in a dim reddish light like the light from an ember of his charcoal cooking-fire. Darragh thought he recognized the string-woven fruit bag in which he carried guavas and plums harvested on various islands of the Caribbean. He moved boldly through the hatch into that murkily lighted interior and began to fumble for his belongings.

With his hand on the fruit bag, he suddenly snapped erect. Outside the craft had sounded a sliding rasp of metal. Somewhere a panel was opening.

Listening with a sudden throb of his heart, Darragh heard movement, a creaky flow of movement like the dragging of something heavy and wet.

Cold People were coming out of their shelter into the open port-chamber. They were coming to the ship.

He felt panic, and in the same moment he felt inspiration. He must hide, at once. Frantically he glanced around. In a comer he saw the palm-fiber sails, loosely bundled together. He dived for them and then into them, like a rabbit into its burrow. He wriggled deep among the folds^-4 turned around, and cautiously lifted a corner of the fabric so that he could peer out.

As he did so, a shiny-swaddled shape, indistinct in the dim red glow, came in through the hatchway. It went humping across the floor, and as it cleared the way another followed it in. This second one put out a tentacle, sleeved and gloved, to slide the hatch shut. The first went forward in the ship and touched some instruments that gave a faint vibrant clatter. The red light grew brighter and paler. Then the floor beneath Darragh vibrated. It shifted. The ship was taking off.

The strengthening of the light gave Darragh his first clear view of the compartment. It was no more than half the length of the vessel in extent, a curve-walled chamber like the inside of an egg, some ten feet long. The rest of the craft's interior must be occupied by the engines. Silent engines they were— Darragh did not hear even the faintest purring of machinery in motion. There was no furniture for the Cold People, who were not built to sit or to he, even when in that motionless condition which for them must approximate sleep. Here and there the bulkheads were pierced with glassed-in ports, and between these were studded with strange instruments that might be gauges or chronometers, and were furnished in several places with hatchlike panels that might be the doors to cupboards.

The gear that operated the craft was strange but, after Darragh had gazed at it for moments, understandable.

Upon a litde round pedestal of shimmery metal there lay, or was fastened, a horizontal cross made of two wirelike rods, with the arms about a foot long. From the intersection of the rods rose a third slender length, like the gnomon of a sundial, but perpendicular. Each of the four arms of the cross, as well as the upright fifth arm, was furnished with a beadlike object, more than an inch in diameter and dead black in color. The position of these beads determined the direction and speed of the craft.

Just now, as Darragh judged, they were rising upward. The Cold creature at the controls had its tentacle to the bead on the upright arm and held it nearly at the top of the rod. And likewise they were going straight ahead; another tentacle had advanced the bead on the forward arm of the cross, while those on the other three arms remained at the intersection of the rods. Already they must be soaring high above Haiti and the tropic heat, for upon Darragh's naked body began to rise protesting areas of gooseflesh. He tried not to shiver or to breathe heavily.

He tried, also, not to curse himself for getting into the ship so confidently. Cursing one's self was a waste of time, when one needed badly to find a way out of mortal danger.

CHAPTER rV

MARK DARRAGH WAS young, tough and healthy, but he was tropic-born and tropic-bred. Cold temperatures he had never been made to endure, and here in this high-mounting aircraft it was growing colder by the second. He groped frantically in his mind for some way of escape, and yet another inspiration came to his mental hand.

He had most sagely prepared a warm dress, an armor of his own against just such shuddering chill. He himself had fashioned it of those two thicknesses of fine deerskin, with a comforting layer of cotton down quilted between them. And he had stowed it, as he well remembered, under the foredeck of his dugout when he made ready to sail down the Orinoco.

But it had been gone from the dugout when he had scrambled down into the open lock. It must be here in this cabin, with his other gear. It must be. He widened the crack of his vision between the folds of the woven sail.

There was the bundle, sure enough—a great lumpy package of leather folded and bound with strips of rawhide. In its center were the good moccasins, the gauntiets, the goggles and the scarf. But it lay a sickeningly long four feet out of his reach as he huddled there.

He clamped his strong teeth together lest they chatter, and considered hunching the sail a bit closer. But surely that would be noticed by one of the Cold Creatures hunched so close to him, perhaps by both. While he *wondered what to do, it grew colder, degree by degree. The temperature, if he were able to read whatever the Cold Creatures employed as a thermometer, must already be close to freezing.

Well, he had to get the garments, that was certain. He had to reach them, drag them unobserved into his hiding, and there pull them over his suffering nakedness. A shiver threatened to convulse his body, to make it thrash like a jumping-jack. Desperately he fought it down. He wrapped both arms around himself in a half-instinctive gesture to shut out the cold, and his left hand touched the hilt of his saber, still slung over his shoulder.

That suddenly gave him new hope. He dragged the weapon around to his front, and began to draw the weapon, an inch at a time, down there under the sail. When at last it was free of the scabbard, he pushed the fold of fabric a little wider. His breath made a steamy cloud in the red-lighted air of the cabin.

Neither of the Cold Creatures seemed to notice. One was paying close attention to the controls; the other lounged lumpily at a port as though observing the night outside. Darragh extended his arm into the open, and touched the bundle of deerskin clothing with the point of his saber.

Painstakingly he worked the blade under a strand of the rawhide that bound the package. As he had done when leaving the dugout to explore on the shore of Haiti, Darragh repeated a prayer to himself, but this time it was a prayer of deep and devout thanks. Gendy he began to twitch the prize near to him.

At that very instant, the Cold Creature at the port turned itself around with ponderous smoothness, facing in his direction.

It was impossible that the thing could not perceive. Darragh did not move, his hand with the saber and his arm from the elbow downward in the open. Perceiving, the creature did not quite understand. Mildly mystified, it began to hunch its bulk closer.

Darragh lay huddled as though the chill of the air had indeed frozen him stiff. He dared not unclasp his stiffened fingers from the saber hilt or turn betrayingly under the palm fiber cloth; the least motion would have given him away entirely. The monster inched toward him until it towered above the wadded sail and the bundle of leather and the saber. Its strange sensory powers, whatever they were, plainly were concentrated upon this curiosity. Darragh, crouching where he was—like a mouse under a napkin—could see through its transparent armoring drapery the glow and pulsation of its central organ.

Now it was observing that naked hand that emerged from the sail's depths. No doubt but that it was aware what sort of creature owned such an extremity. A tentacle reached down to twitch away the concealing sail; another fell down toward -a pouch that hung to the armor fabric, a pouch that held some sort of weapon.

A ray-thrower, perhaps.

Darragh told himself not to die quiedy. His lips dragged themselves from his clenched teeth as he quickly rose to his knees and made a slashing cut with his saber.

The thing divined the move and tried to sidle backward, but not in time. The point of Darragh's saber snagged the protecting cloak and sliced a great smooth rent in it. And that was all the saber needed to do.

Staring, Darragh saw the creature's tentacles relax, quiver and sag, saw a slumping of the great gross pyramidal shape of gelatinous tissue that was the body. The afr that to Darragh seemed torturingly cold was rushing through that slit he had made in the armor, like a blast of murderous heat. Already the monster was helpless, unconscious. Darragh, still upon his knees, the fighting grin stamped upon his desperate brown face, watched while the inner organ grew dimmer, feebler of pulse, and dark and motionless.

The Cold Creature was dead. He knew that, and he knew why.

From what little he had heard from men who had assembled knowledge about the invaders, the Cold Creatures must have come from a planet not only bitterly cold, but of an unchanging temperature. Like snakes and snails, the Cold Creatures took their temperature from their surroundings, and did not have within themselves any heat-regulating mechanism. But they were highly organized mentalities. A very few degrees of heat beyond their margin of endurance meant unconsciousness. If it continued, that unendurable degree of heat, it meant death.

Darragh's discoverer had died, within less than a minute— the first of the Cold Creatures to die of a human hand since those pitifully unequal pitched battles of half a century ago.

No motion or menace from the operator a few feet away at the controls of the ship. The drama of menace and sudden counter-attack and death behind it had gone all unnoticed. Darragh felt a sudden surging flush of fierce, triumphant exultation. Then he dragged the clothes to him and, crouching to hide behind the silent bulk of the Cold Creature he had slain, drew his knife and cut away the lashings. In trembling silence he drew on the wide breeches, tied the belt-cord, and then lowered the quilted jacket down over his head. He dragged the moccasins upon his numb bare feet, gratefully slid his hands into the gauntiets, and pulled the hood over his ears and face. He drew a steamy breath of comparative relief, and dared to peer cautiously around the shielding bulk of his conquered enemy.

Still the ship was mounting upward, its floor gendy tilted beneath him as he crouched, and the temperature was dropping steadily. By now, as Darragh judged, it was truly below the freezing mark. He had not won his swift victory and secured his garments any whit too soon. But the quilted swaddling of leather was sufficient. He strapped the goggles over his eyes, and wound his nose and mouth in the grateful warmth of the woollen scarf. Then, very gingerly, he wriggled back under the sail and propped up its edge so that he could look out past the dead mass of his victim toward the other creature at the controls.

He found himself ready to accept his own congratulations at killing one enemy; but, since he had done so, he must kill the other if it did not kill him first. He could see the transparent pouch on the armor at its side, and in the pouch the pistol-formed apparatus for throwing rays. So far luck had been richly on the side of Mark Darragh, and he felt it would carry him further. But he would launch the attack at the next clash, before this second enemy could muster its devices against him.

Attack he would, but not now, not until he had learned something more about how to operate the ship. If he managed to kill the second creature, he must manage to keep the speeding vessel from crashing with him. He glued his goggle-covered eyes to the controls on which confidently skillful tentacle-tips slid beads backward and forward to adjust speed and direction. Higher the craft was mounting, and higher, toward the upper reaches of Earth's atmosphere. Darragh felt the chill of the altitude, even through his thick garments of quilted leather; his breath made frost in the woolen fabric he had stretched across his mouth and nose, so that it was like a rigid mask of ice-cold tin.

At last the creature at the controls began to pluck at its armor with free tentacles, unfastening studs and clamps and dragging the fabric away. Its own range of temperature-comfort was being reached up in these heights, judged Darragh, something well below zero. With three tentacles the thing deftiy folded the discarded armor into a compact parcel, and with it the pouch with the weapon. Now; Darragh told himself, the time had come for striking.

He took his saber tightiy in his gloved right hand, rose cautiously upon his moccasined feet behind the protecting carcass of the dead Cold Creature, then sprang around it and at the other.

The thing was aware of him as he came out into the open. It had been fumbling at the catch of a cupboard panel, as though to stow its folded armor away. But now it slid clear of its controls and hurriedly strove to push a tentacle into the pouch for its weapon. But Darragh got there first. A savage downward slash of his saber struck the folded bundle of fabric and knocked it to the floor. He kicked it away and out of reach.

Tentacles shot out at him, seizing and grappling him with anaconda strength. At the same time the floor tilted sicken-ingly, as though the ship was sliding out of the horizontal.

But Darragh struck again with his saber, and the blow went home. The whetted edge pierced the massive translucent body as a knife pierces cheese. He shortened the blade and stabbed, full into the glowing, throbbing central organ. As the point pierced that vital spot, Darragh twisted the weapon and drew with it. Deep within the sofdy tough substance of that squat, unlovely body, his edge sliced the organ in two. The grip of tentacles fell away from him, and he sprang clear.

Darragh was master of the ship.

CHAPTER V

THE LUCK in which Mark Darragh chose to believe was, it must be admitted, necessary to allow the slaying of the first Cold Creature. Double luck had favored Darragh in his victory over the second. But undoubtedly the high point of his phenomenal good fortune was attained when the aircraft in which he thus fought and triumphed did not crash at once to earth.

For one thing, the Cold Creature which he had so expertly sabered at the controls had flown its craft miles high, in fact had risen nearly to the stratosphere. When the pilodess vessel began to slip away sideways out of its course, throwing the two ungainly carcasses against the port bulkhead, and almost toppling Darragh from his moccasined feet, it had a long way to go before crashing disaster could arrive. In the moments that followed, Darragh himself became a successful operator of a Cold People's airship.

He dropped his saber and clutched the pedestal of the control mechanism to steady himself. A frantic shake of his right hand threw off the muffling gauntlet and he began to manipulate the beads upon the five metal arms.

The principle of the mechanism he had already grasped as he watched, and his first act was to draw all the beads close together at the juncture of the five arms. At once the ship righted itself, but continued to descend swifdy. Darragh then drew the bead upward on the perpendicular arm, and after a trembling halt in dark space, the thing began to rise. A slight lowering of the bead slackened the pace of ascent. Then Parragh gingerly adjusted the forward bead. At last he managed to get the captured craft on an even keel, moving forward. He blew on his cold-nipped fingers, retrieved his glove and thrust his hand back into its warm shelter. Then he stood up and studied other items.

Before him, as he stood in the pilot position, was set a round transparent pane in the curved bulkhead, partially obscured by frost. He leaned forward and scrubbed it clear with the cuff of his gauntlet, then gazed through it at the night. A half-moon had risen, revealing a floor of soft, smooth white clouds far below. He reckoned that h& must still be miles high, despite that sudden tumble during the fight. On one side of the port was clamped an arrangement that somewhat resembled a thermometer, furnished with an upright transparent tube bracketed against a board marked with lines. Inside the tube quivered a sparklike red pellet. This was a gauge of altitude, decided Darragh, and apparently indicated that the ship was progressing far below its maximum soaring height.

On the opposite side of the portline opening were riveted two yard-square metal plates, one above the other.

The uppermost of these bore an engraved diagram that quite evidendy was a plan of the ship. It stressed many mechanical devices, most of them seemingly located in the chamber aft of the control cabin. Darragh studied them, but despaired of understanding them properly. At the point on the diagram where the control apparatus would be located were various flecks of glowing light—green, blue, rose and yellow—approximating the positions of the various beads on the arms. Darragh changed'the position of the forward bead, and saw a fleck move. This diagram, he guessed, was to show whether all mechanisms were in working order.

He looked here and there, but could locate no wire or lever connection between the controls and that picture, nor any battery to supply light for the moving flecks. He reflected that the Cold People were said to be masters of ray-mechanics. Undoubtedly there existed invisible bands of power here, beyond his own limited comprehension.

He lectured himself on these matters, with no impulse toward humility. However he might lack understanding of the head, his hands and arms and legs and body had seemed to know what to do of themselves, and had done it. That brace of Cold Creatures he had slain—and what human warrior could claim as many as two such vanquished enemies, what fighting man of all history—had been supposed to be wise and informed beyond all Terrestrial possibility. Now they were dead. He adjusted the beads of the control mechanism, and gave his attention to the lower engraved square on the bulkhead.

This quite plainly was a map of North America, most skilfully done, with the continent and islands rendered in greenish-brown, with blue for the oceans and lines and blotches of blue for rivers and lakes. Here, too, was a fleck of pale light that instandy caught his eye, hovering near the juncture of the peninsula of Florida and the main northern shore of the Gulf of Mexico. After a moment of puzzled study, Darragh set this down as an indication of the position of the very ship he now operated. As time went by, the gradual progression of the fleck to northward on the map confirmed his surmise. Here and there upon the outline of the continent showed other, softer glows, ruby-red and varying in size from a mere pinpoint of light to a disk a quarter of an inch in diameter. One of the smaller shining marks was visible upon the southeastern corner of the island of Haiti, from which Darragh deduced that the ruby lights marked the positions of forts or settlements of the Cold People. The largest and most numerous of these showed in northern Canada, Greenland and the islands above the Arctic Circle. Several, though, were set in what once had been the United States; and one of the biggest of these was situated at the southern end of Lake Michigan, near where once Chicago had been a crowning American city.

Darragh tried to count these evidences of Cold People's communities. He could not do so while he must give partial attention to flying the craft.

"Every one of those damned things is a city or town or village of these cold creepers," he muttered aloud into the scarf across his face, "and every one of them is full of inhabitants. They've certainly made themselves at home here where they're not wanted. I wonder just what the Cold Creature population of Earth adds up to."

He wished that that war-eager council of chieftains he had left on the banks of the Orinoco River could see that map and understand the disheartening information it gave. Then he took time to wish that those same loftly and sneering gendemen could see him, conqueror of two of the enemy and captor and operator of the craft he had taken at point of his saber. Spence would have something to wag his long chin about, Megan could glower in awed confusion instead of conceited disdain; that Indian, Capato, would have to admit that a white man as well as red men did not fear to face and fight the invader, if he, Mark Darragh, came flying gloriously home with his prize. The scientists of the Orinoco communities could study the two slaughtered corpses sagging yonder. The best mechanics could survey and appreciate the mechanism of the ship itself, perhaps understand it, perhaps even imitate it and make other craft in its pattern to serve mankind. And for Darragh would be wide-eyed, wide-mouthed admiration.

He almost ungloved to put his fingers to those beads on the control arms, coax them into position to achieve a U-tum and a course back to his home wilderness. But he paused in mid-motion.

After all, he had made certain promises to Spence and the others. He had talked with all the young assurance in the world about bringing back definite information that would lead to the overthrow of the Cold People. The dramatic return he envisioned, complete with this little scouting craft, might bring him credit and praise; but it would not be sufficient to assure victory. His mission was still to be accomplished.

He gazed at the map, at the little blob of radiance that marked his position upon it. Then he leaned forward to the port, judging by long hunting practice his direction by the stars. Then he set his course toward the big red blotch that meant a setdement of the Cold People on the margin of Lake Michigan.

The night wore on. Despite his stout lappings of leather and cotton, he felt the penetrating cold of the upper atmosphere, and carefully manipulated the control beads so as to drop his ship close to the cloud layer. Experimentally he pushed the bead on the forward arm well along to increase speed ahead, but drew it back when the ship accelerated so suddenly as to frighten him. He had no way of telling what the mechanism's utmost rate of speed might be, and he knew that he really had no desire to find out just then. He felt safer when he slowed it to something like an estimated two hundred miles an hour. Skimming along above the clouds, he watched the progress-light move northwestward on the map-across what had been Georgia, then across what had been Tennessee. He was somewhere above Kentucky when the sun came up and made the floor of clouds a blazing glory.

In the lower altitudes where he flew, the temperature rose until Darragh was fain to peel off his gauntiets, unship his goggles and unwind the soggy scarf from his face. He threw back the cowl-like hood of his jacket from his head. Awareness of hunger and thirst came upon him. He took a step away from the controls to pick up the string bag of fruit. A mango seemed soft and mushy—it had been frozen, he supposed, then thawed out. He sucked its pulp gratefully, then bent to grab for a little bundle that had cassava cakes and smoked meat. He gnawed these things with vigorous young appetite.

At mid-morning, the fleck on the map told him that he was approaching that great center of the Cold People by the northern lake. Beneath his speeding craft, the clouds still showed, but were thinning here and there. He began to wonder how best to reconnoiter that settlement. It would be wise, he told himself, to set the ship down somewhere, hide it perhaps among trees or in a valley; then he could approach on foot, taking advantage of whatever cover he found. Surely those confident seizers of Earth would not be expecting a scout in these latitudes, would not keep a watch .. .

Pondering thus, he was aware of a vibration in the metal floor under his moccasin soles, a silent taut quivering.

Mystified and startled, he glanced toward the chart that showed the warning lights on the plan of the ship. None had shifted, changed color or intensity. The quiver departed, as abruptly as it had come. Then it was back again:'

He felt a tightening of his nerves and muscles. Was the mechanism on the point of failure? But no—the ship did not waver as it slid along above the wispy layer of clouds. Was it a matter of fuel, then, whatever the fuel was? He had come a long way .. .

A second time the vibration had ceased. Even as he sighed in relief, it was back, stronger this time, and complicated with a deep audible undertone that, as Darragh listened, broke into a jerky semi-rhythmic succession of humming chirps.

It sounded like telegraphy.

Undoubtedly it was telegraphy.

Up ahead, another aircraft had come from somewhere, a larger ship of plumply ovoid lines, its nose turning in Darragh's direction.

"That damned thing's signalling me," he muttered aloud.

He had no desire for conversation, even had he known how to achieve it. Nor had he desire for close companionship. As the egg-shaped craft approached, he touched the bead on the right arm of the control assembly, pulled it outward, and made his own little vessel slip abruptly sidewise and around the other. As he did so, the vibration and the rippling signal hum grew more intense, even insistent. His ears rang with it and he shook his dark-maned head to clear it. A new pattern of signal thrust itself into the cabin, seeming to stir the air around him.

Another ship was accosting him.

He leaned above the controls to look out at the port. Two or three more vessels were dropping down from above. Two more came struggling upward through the wispy mask of cloud. They converged toward him. They were closing in.

"This is. an attack!" Darragh snorted aloud, and braced himself like a stanchion for the destroying impact of rays.

But no ray came to smite him. Instead, the other craft bunched at his sides. He could see them through the ports to starboard and port. They wove closer and closer, as hunting wasps might close in upon a succulent spider. It was too late to do anything but try to run.

But one of the pursuers maneuvered just ahead, swifter than he and with confident agility. No way out there, nor to either side. Perhaps he could drop away beneath, gain the earth and seek cover. Darragh pulled the bead down on the perpendicular arm; but they dropped with him. A whole storm of vibrations stirred the floor beneath him, the curved bulkheads, the air he breathed. And from below came spiralling another tormentor, a craft almost spherical and much larger than his. Again he raised the bead and sped straight forward, again he was overtaken and surrounded in flight.

They came close, almost nuzzling him. They were driving him along a certain course.

He cursed every Cold Creature piloting that swarm around him, as fervendy as earlier he had prayed for guidance and fortune. He went ahead because^1 he must. Once more he tried to plummet down, and actually gained the clouds; but, when he had fallen through, he could see his hunters and herders all around, flying more swifdy and skilfully than he could hope to fly. And the vibration was more intense, more maddening than ever, seeming to rattle him inside die cabin like a pea in a gourd. He clung to the uppermost arm of the controls to keep himself steady.

Below was ground, brown patches that seemed scalded and barren, with belts and clumps of woods between. Up ahead he saw a great blue-gray sheet of water, stretching far out to the northern horizon, and at the shore and upon hills to either side were tufts of timber. There rose at almost the water's brink, dead ahead of him, a great plump dome.

An artificial structure? A haven of these Cold People? But

it dwarfed the trees and the hills to nothing—it was like a

mighty mountain, at least five miles in diameter and fully

two miles high. As he swept toward it, he thought he could

make out a pocking of ports—thousands of ports or entrances.

Nearer now, in the midst of his escorting foemen, and he

could see great veinlike abysses, that might be the cracks of

great doorways ever to slighdy ajar.                    *•*

Surely, this was a capital city of Earth's conquerors, a dome so much larger and more complex than those he had seen in southern regions that they would be like buttons beside a parasol. And that flock of ships, darting and crowding around him, was forcing him toward it. Ever the vibration shook his fugitive craft, tingling his nerves and making his hair brisde, driving him half wild.

He tried to swerve aside; his controls did not respond. That meant that something had taken hold of his -vessel from outside, was guiding it. His speed checked. He felt himself drop, felt the sickening tilt of the floor as it slanted forward. Out of the port he looked at the dome, close in, as he approached it in utter helplessness.

A round black pit opened suddenly in the great structure's swelling flank, as a dark passionless eye might open in a spacious face to stare at him. The pit was black for only a moment—then, deep within it, a green glare sprang out, and seemed to hurl itself upon him.

This is going to be the finish, Darragh said hastily in his heart. This is the goodbye wave of the fortune that kept me alive and brought me all the way up here.

That green radiance must surely be the explosion-ray of which he had heard utterly terrible tales. He seemed to be getting time enough to draw himself up straight, into a position of pride and defiance worthy of Spence or Capato, to die like a man.

But he was not dying. He was not exploding.

The floor still tilted, the craft still slid downward. But Darragh was alive inside it. He did not even feel discomfort. Those vibrations were gone from him and from around him. Then he knew that the ship was standing still, as though pedestalled upon the beam of green light that involved it.

All around him, things had turned green, as if the light mushroomed there, flowing in at every port of the cabin. He himself seemed clamped in that braced erect posture he had achieved, unable to stir hand or foot, barely able to breathe. But he could see and think.

A new sense came into him, as of lightness, of rising from the slanted floor. That was it; the floor was trying to drop from beneath him. The green beam was dragging him and the ship down to earth, down into the great round door in the dome.

Seconds later, he jarred to a standstill.

At once the green fight was gone from around him. All was dark outside, and the soft lights of his cabin, the little flecks on map and diagram, had blinked out.

Some inspiration of saving himself compelled him to thrust on his goggles and scarf, to drag his gauntlets upon his hands, to pull the hood over his head again. Then he dived at the

THE   DARK   DESTROYERS sail that once before had been a shelter to him, and wriggled under it and into it.

He made that squirming crawl for a hiding place just in time. There were clanking noises at the hatchway at the side. A protesting scrape, then an abrupt ping, and the fastenings yielded as though somehow pulled open from outside. The hatchway moved open, and Darragh heard a heavy, dragging noise.

Cold Creatures were coming in.

CHAPTER VI

AT THE FIRST opening of the hatchway there had rushed in a wave of deadly cold that smote like a club. It pushed through Darragh's thick-wadded leather clothing, nipping and tingling his skin beneath. This, he knew, must be the temperature that best suited the comfort of the Cold People, a temperature in which they throve while the most vigorous man would freeze in it.

Peeping once more through a half-open fold of the sail, he saw that there was light in the cabin, either turned on at the switches or somehow fetched in from outside. Three of the Cold Creatures had entered, unarmored and confident. Each of these held in one tentacle a curious little ray-weapon, no larger than a pistol but manifesdy intricate of operation. Darragh could see the surface integuments of the things, smooth and waxy, rippling with motion, and in the midst of each bladdery body the dull cold gleam of that incomprehensible organ of lif e and sense.

They did not seem to have any thought of where Darragh himself might be; their first attention was to their two dead fellows. Around these they crowded, and there was a complex fluttering of tentacles, as though they conferred and argued in that sign language of theirs. One of them prodded experimentally at the deep saber-slash in the pilot creature, and indicated this to his fellows. All their tentacles groped at the wound, then drew away to flourish and tremble in new discussion. They seemed to be at a loss to account for that wound.

Finally both bodies were lifted—the tentacles of the Cold People moved with amazing strength and deftness, even with such heavy bulks—and passed them out through the hatchway into the grasp of others.

Then the things inside began to explore. Darragh's scattered possessions were scooped up, examined, passed from tentacle to tentacle. One of the creatures picked up Darragh's string bag and dumped out the last few pieces of tropical fruit. They fell to the floor with hard whacks, like lumps of wood; plainly they had frozen solid, even in the short time since the ship had come inside the dome. Another of the Cold Creatures lifted its ray-apparatus, and from its muzzle jutted a pen-cillean ray of sickly pale light upon a banana.

That banana exploded, as violently as a cannon cracker, leaving only a puff of vapor that vanished in an instant, without even dampness to show where it had gone. That pale ray, then, was the destroyer, something entirely different from the green light that had bound and carried Darragh into this prison.

Again the destroyer-ray pointed at a fruit and exploded it; to another and another. A moment later, the neighbor of the operator put out protesting tentacles. Plainly it urged its companion to desist. The rest of the fruits must be kept for examination, not destroyed.

Not destroyed, at least, until later.

Other tentacles gathered them up and passed them outside. Then a grasp was laid upon the sail, dragging it from Darragh, wadding it up to be given to those waiting beyond the hatchway. This, said Darragh to himself again as he lay exposed, must be his finish. He lay quiet on the stinging cold of the floor, feeling no terror or despair, only an utter exhaustion, as he waited for the ray of death. But it did not come.

Instead, he felt the touch of those palmlike tentacle-ends upon his legs and body. They took hold of him, hard and elastic and facile. He was being lifted, moved, carried. No attack as yet. Maybe he did not seem alive to them. Completely encased in leather breeches, jacket, moccasins and gloves, with the hood and goggles and scarf to hide his face and head, he might have been some sort of image or effigy, something that would excite only mystified curiosity.

He was passed from one creature to the next, and from that one to the one beyond, like a bucket in the hands of a line of amateur firemen. Out through the hatchway he was bodily shoved. Looking upward, he could see nothing but a pale ceiling that had a frosty gleam to it—crystals of ice, he supposed—and he could hear nothing at all. More tentacles received him. He did fancy that it was colder, if anything, outside the ship than inside. Then he was flung down roughly, like a bale of clothing, upon the doubled fabric of that palm-leaf sail. He dared to peer stealthily about.

The ship, he could see, had settled into'a great chamber with a flat floor, smooth curved sides and a ceiling that was made in two pieces, like jaws, that could open and shut. Over floor, sides, and ceiling was a sheath of hard, white frost crystals. Hooded lamps gave radiance, showing him that in all directions opened the mouths of tunnels, darker than the chamber itself. Nowhere could he see the source of that green ray that had captured him and drawn him down-perhaps it was emitted by some apparatus that could be moved. In the center of the floor was the ship, and at the hatchway were a dozen of the Cold People, eagerly giving their attention to what was going on inside.

More things were being passed out from the cabin. There came Darragh's saber. This drew more attention than had any single discovery up to now. All of the observers gathered around their companion who held the saber, then hunched over to where lay the two dead bodies. No doubt but that they connected that gleaming, well-sharpened blade with the fatal stab in the body of the pilot.

It was high time to get away, anywhere, while for a moment there was no observation toward his position. Darragh rose suddenly to his knees, gave a great spring, found his feet, and darted into the nearest of the passageways.

Commotion boiled up behind him, a great slapping and wriggling of swift, heavy bodies. Something shot gleamingly past him—a cold, narrow streak of the colorless explosion-ray. It missed him, but the wall it grazed seemed to fluff away in sudden steam, and a buffet like that of a sudden gust of high wind almost hurled Darragh flat.

He floundered to keep his feet under him, turned and plunged into a side opening, and made a turn around the curve beyond. That was the way to dodge their cursed murdering rays—keep angling away, even into the interior of this unthinkable frozen hive. If they should catch him in a straightaway tunnel or an open space, they could bring their rays to bear. He would be done for, like a scrambling bug under a showering spray of insecticide.

He was tired and confused, but his strong, long legs made swift leaping strides. The tunnel widened as he ran along it, then brought him out into a great courdike opening with a luminous ceiling high overhead. A row of machines whirred here, like a battery of looms, with Cold Creatures pottering here and there among the spinning wheels and hurrying dark belts. Darragh did not stop, he slowed his pace only long enough to locate the mouth of another corridor on the far side. Then he crossed the floor past the bank of machinery in desperate leaps. He reached the new tunnel and flung himself into it almost before those machinists could turn toward him.

But what, he found half of an instant to ask himself, would be the end of all this headlong dash? For all his length and

THEDARK DESTROYERS hardness of limb, for all his splendid young strength and health, he was already puffing. His head whirled, and blood beat in his ears. The cold nipped and dragged at him, like a living foe trying to throw him down. His breath clouding out through the scarf, fell around him in shimmery crystals as he ran. He wanted to stop, but he knew that stopping would be fatal. The cold would fell him and finish him.

He ran more slowly despite himself, and reached another open space, a mere lofty chamber at which tunnels crossed. In the instant that he slowed up to choose a new route, a patrol of Cold People moved into view across the way, ready for him.

Three held ray-throwers and stabbed the beams toward him, making steamy furrows in the clotted frost of the floor. He stopped still, once again recognizing the futility of escaping death longer. But the rays did not touch him. One played past him to the right, like a stream from a hose; another flicked the tunnel-way from which he had emerged, cutting off his retreat in that direction. Perforce he turned to his left, and into that passage.

One inside, he ran again, his breath beginning to sob in his laboring lungs.

But no ray blasted him, and even in his weariness he swifdy outdistanced the things that had thus menaced him. On shaking legs he ran until he reached another open space, this time as large as a public square.

Along its walls were ranged shantylike little structures, of dull metal or smooth concrete, and direcdy across his path ran a single rail of supports. As he came into the open, a flat one-wheeled car came into view along this rail, smoothly whispering. It stopped, and down from it hopped three Cold Creatures. They, too, had rays, and these rays began to glow, weaving and crossing around him.

He stood still and glared.

"Why don't you finish me, damn you?" he yelled hoarsely at them.

But the rays, two of them crossed, only crept toward him.

This was some complicated cat-and-mouse game. Darragh had heard all his life that the Cold People were merciless in their warfare, but never that they were wantonly cruel. He wished for a gun, for arrows, for his lost saber, that he might charge and perhaps kill yet again before he was exploded into atoms. Closer crept the crossed rays ... closer.

He could stand still and perish, or he could keep running. One of the alleys was still open to him, and he swung around and staggered into it. He was fagged and fainting, but he ran.

The single rail went along this passage, and after a moment he heard that one-wheeled car behind him. He snatched a backward glance. The three tormentors followed, but not swifdy, not so closely as to overtake him. Once or twice a ray came flicking, as a herdsman might crack a whip over a refractory animal. He must keep moving somehow, stay ahead of their car, their rays. Up ahead, this tunnel, too, widened.

Another crossing of ways, but here both side exits were guarded by inexorable squads of helmet-shaped devils with poised ray-weapons.

He had come more than a mile, at a speed that made him sweat inside his leather despite that ineffable cold. Again and again he had been sure that his last moment had come, but teasingly it had delayed. Now ...

Now it could delay no longer. Darragh was running toward a blank wall at the end of the last tunnel. Frost ridged the partition, hung in shaggy beards before him. Behind him came the Cold People, three of them on the car that rode the rail, the others hitching nimbly along on their pseudopods.

Darragh swung around to face them. He was utterly happy to stand still.

"All right, get it over with!" he found wind and strength to croak. "Kill me and be damned to the last one of you! I'm through making sport for . .

His drooping shoulders touched the wall, and the wall slipped beneath it. One of the Cold Creatures was at a stand of levers at the side of the tunnel, was pressing one down to open some sort of a panel. Blackness came through behind Darragh, a blackness almost palpable, and a wave of cold that surpassed anything he yet had felt. He reeled and caught his breath.

He heard the lapping of liquid behind him. Turning, he gazed down into a ditch. Along it flowed swift, steaming water—no, not water. Water could not flow here, at many degrees below zero.

He faced toward the Cold People again. They ranged themselves across the tunnel down which he had run those last stumbling moments. The car was stopped, and upon it was a squat mortarlike device with around lens.

One of them touched buttons with its tentacles. Out sprang green light, dark green, such as had filled his aircraft at the moment of its recapture.

Darragh felt as though he had been struck in the center of his leather-clad chest by the end of a flying log. He flew from his feet and whirled backward through the air, soared across the floor. Under him burbled that torrent of liquid in the ditch. Then he hung spread-eagled against a perpendicular partition on the far side, held there by the ray as by a crushing hand. A moment later, the partition, too, gave way, sinking back and down.

Darragh fell through, clumsily and heavily, and the valve snapped shut, as though forced by a great spring. He struck on a solid level space and lay there crumpled.

For long moments he could only gasp for breath. Brightness stabbed at his eyes, and he closed them beneath the goggles. He never wanted to move again.

Then something touched him. He had not the strength to pull his exhausted body away. There was a fumbling at his hood. The scarf, frozen across his nose and mouth, began slowly, painfully, to peel away.

"Stop," he moaned miserably. "Ill freeze."

But he was not freezing. He felt warmth on his exposed face. An arm slid behind his shoulders, lifting him from where he lay.

"Take it easy," said a hushed voice. "You're among friends."

CHAPTER VII

MAKE DARRAGH LAY quiedy, as though he could never summon energy or inclination to move again. Take it easy, the soft voice had advised, and the advice seemed good after all the fighting, flying, running. You're among friends, the voice had added, and it had sounded friendly. Darragh opened his eyes.

He sprawled with his head out of the hood and supported on an arm. Close above him bent the face of a woman—a girl really—a pleasant blue-eyed face just now full of concern. Corn-yellow hair made bright masses around the face. Beyond and above were the faces of other people, stooping to look.

"He isn't one of us," said a man's voice. "Who are you, anyway?"

Darragh had some of his wind back. "I was going to ask that question of you," he replied.

"He can talk," said another. "He speaks English."

Darragh sat up, then, and gazed at the people around him. They were clad neatiy, in what he had seen in pictures of the days of his unconquered grandfathers—the men in jackets and trousers, the women in dresses of print or stout weave. There were a dozen of them and, beginning to press around this inner group, twice as many more. The blonde girl who had knelt beside him gazed with relief as he moved and half rose, and he smiled at her. She looked capable and intelligent and pretty. She wore dark slacks, a white blouse with short sleeves, and slippers that seemed to be made of coarse cloth, like canvas. Her bare arms and face were tanned, the darker because of that bright hair.

"You mean, who are we?" prompted the nearest man, a fellow perhaps thirty, with canny eyes set rather close together. "Why—we've been here ever since this settlement has been here."

Darragh only half-heard those words. He was getting up and looking beyond the gathering of people.

A town was there. At least it looked like the towns that Darragh had seen in old salvaged pictures of the civilization from which his own forebears had fled. There were ten houses or so—cottages, he remembered such houses were called—or white-painted planks with roofs of snug red tile. They had green lawns and beds of bright flowers, and they were ranged around a wide central court. Behind and around those cottages rose a great lead-colored wall, that extended in a sweeping curve to enclose the houses and the central common, holding them as,at the bottom of a tube. Looking up, Darragh was aware that this wall rose to a tremendous height. It was as though he and these men and women and their houses were at the bottom of an immense chimney.' Far above them, the shaft was filled with radiance, dazzling and warm, that came down and touched everything with brightness.

The blonde girl, too, had risen. She stood straight beside him, as tall almost for a girl as Darragh was for a man. All the excitement and mystery could not keep him from seeing that her body was both strong and graceful, that she was somebody he would like to know better.

"Where did you come from?" she asked.

"Why, from outside there." Darragh gestured to the wall at one side.

"From the Owners?"

"Owners?" repeated Darragh. "Who are the Owners?"

"They just threw you in here with that ray," said the man with the close-set eyes.

"Oh," said Darragh. "You mean the Cold People. No, I didn't come from them. Do I look like one of them?"

Everybody-was staring. "I say that I came from outside, "he repeated." Far away from here. Down on the Orinoco, if you know where that is."

"South America," said the blonde girl. "You mean you come from South America?"

"I was scouting the Cold People," Darragh elaborated. "I got hold of one of their aircraft and came here to look at this dome where they live. They got my ship down, but I got away and ran off through about eighty-eight miles of tunnels, and for some reason or other they pushed me in here among you." He laughed. "I don't blame you for staring at me, I know it sounds fantastic. Or should I say it sounds foolish?"

Nobody answered that. Everyone kept staring for a moment. Then the man who had first spoken crinkled the brow above his close-set eyes. "You'll have to forgive us. It's hard to grasp the notion that there are still free human beings."

"Why, aren't you free?" demanded Darragh.

Another man spoke. He was broadly built, with short grizzled hair. "How can we be free? Don't you see this pen we five in?"

Darragh gazed around the lead-colored walls again. "Is this a prison, you mean? The Cold People keep you prisoners?"

"Cold People," repeated the younger man. "That's a good name for them."

"And you call them ..." began Darragh.

"We call them Owners." A harsh, bitter flash of teeth. "They own us, you see. What's your name, may I ask?"

"Mark Darragh."

"I'm Orrin Lyle." He held out a hand, long but slimmer than Darragh's. "And this is Brenda Thompson."

"He means me," said the girl beside Darragh. "But aren't you still shaky on your legs?"

Darragh realized that he was, and nodded.

"Let's take him to my place, Orrin," she said.

"Wait a second," spoke up Darragh suddenly. "Excuse me if things take a while to sink in, but they get there. You're prisoners, and you were brought here alive. Why don't you fight your way out again?"

There was silence at that, and more stares; somewhat abashed stares, as though Darragh had said something embarrassing.

"You're not in shape to fight your way out just now," said the man called Orrin Lyle. "Come with us to Brenda's."

The others made way for Darragh. Orrin Lyle took Dar-ragh's leather-clad arm and twitched him toward one of the cottages. Brenda Thompson came along at Darragh's other side. As they walked, Darragh could feel eyes watching them go-

"In here," said Brenda Thompson, opening a door, and Darragh walked through.

Inside the cottage things were tasteful and comfortable. A hand-braided rag rug covered the concrete floor. There were chairs, old but well kept, a sofa, a shelf of books. On the walls hung pictures. To Darragh these pictures looked strange and vivid, masses and arrangements of color.

"I did those," said Brenda Thompson, seeing his interest.

Do you like them?"                                                     *•

"I don't really know about art," confessed Darragh.

"But you know what you like, eh?" Orrin Lyle completed the old cliche. "Sit down, Mr.—eh—Darragh."

He spoke as though doing the honors in his own home. Darragh, who had been well brought up, stood where he was with his eyes on the girl. She smiled.

"Go ahead, sit down," she seconded Lyle's invitation. "I'm going to get us some tea."

She was gone into another room, sure and confident of movement. Lyle dropped into an armchair, the most comfortable-seeming of all the seats in the room. Darragh sat down opposite him.

Now he noticed that in the center of the room rose a joist or support, a pole perhaps four inches square. It seemed to support the ceiling. On the wall beyond, the rear wall of the room, was a rectangular stretch of glass, perhaps a mirror.

Orrin Lyle spoke again: "If I may be frank, Mr. Darragh, let me caution you about talking escape to the people here."

"Why not?" demanded Darragh. "Don't they want to escape?"

"Ill put it like this: We have our own plans for escape. Our time's coming." Lyle leaned forward, an elbow on the arm of the chair. "You see, I'm pretty much in command here. I'm like the mayor of this community, or you might call me the captain of this band. I'm in charge of escape plans, among other things."

"Maybe I can help you," said Darragh. "I've been in traps twice—traps of the Cold People—and escaped both times . . . No, the second time I blundered in here with you."

"Suppose," said Lyle, "that you tell me more about how you came all the way up here from the Orinoco."

"Shouldn't we wait for Miss Thompson?"

"I'm here," she called, entering with a dark wooden tray. It bore a teapot and cups, figured in green and red. She set the tray on a table near the upright support, and poured steaming liquid into the cups. One of these she handed to Darragh. As he took it, he saw Orrin Lyle gazing at the girl, in a strange mood of mingled suspicion and relish.

The second cup she gave to Lyle, and seated herself with the third cup in her hand. "All right," she smiled to Darragh. "Begin."

He told them, as briefly as possible, about how his people lived in the tropics; how a group of chieftains planned a counter-assault on the Cold Creatures; and how he had gone out as a spy and a scout, to what adventures so far. Both Brenda Thompson and Orrin Lyle asked frequent questions. To illustrate his tale, Darragh fumbled inside his leather suit to drag his drawings from his belt-pouch and offer them.

"This is the kind of shelter the Owners make?" asked Brenda Thompson. "I've never seen one."

"Never seen one?" echoed Darragh. "How did you get in here?"

"I was bom here," she told him, and handed the sketches to Lyle. "He draws very well, doesn't he, Orrin?"

"Very well indeed," granted Lyle. "Now, Mr. Darragh, I find a couple of odd points in your story."

"Odd points?" echoed Darragh sharply.

"Oh," and Lyle grinned, showing big, even teeth, "I didn't mean I thought you were telling lies."

"Let's hope not," said Darragh.

"I meant your attitude toward the Owners—what you call the Cold People. You say you argued against those chiefs of yours. You urged a policy of waiting for the right time."

"And that's what I did," Darragh assured him.

"Yet," went on Lyle, sipping his tea, "just now you started talking about escape from here, when the rest of us are content to wait for the right time.

"And how long have you waited for the right time?" inquired Darragh.

"Some years now. We don't want to go off half-cocked."

"Apparendy you don't. When do you think the right time will come?"

Lyle's eyes grew narrow in thought. "Perhaps not for years," he replied. "Perhaps not for generations. We have an escape committee, made up of our best minds, gathering knowledge, studying . . ."

"Hold on," interrupted Darragh unceremoniously. "It just happens that I can't wait for years or generations. I have to get back home and make my report to the council of chiefs."

"Indeed?" Lyle's grin was harsh again above his teacup. "And just how do you propose to escape?"

"I'm not quite sure yet," Darragh was forced to admit, and felt his ire grow warmer as Lyle's grin broadened. "Yet," and he forced himself to speak calmly and coolly, "it ought to be possible. There are about thirty people here, and . . ."

"These people obey me, Darragh," Lyle reminded him, frostily and blundy. "They're my people. I'm related to many of them, and I'm a friend of all of them."

"I want to be their friend, too," Darragh tried to temporize. He glanced toward the front window. "They're out there now, and they seem mighty interested in what's going on in here."

"They understand cooperation and discipline," elaborated Lyle. "They put their trust in the committee."

"Please," spoke up Brenda Thompson. "Mr. Darragh's our guest, Orrin."

"Thank you, ma'am," said Darragh.

"An uninvited guest, you might say," rejoined Lyle. "I don't want to be impolite or stubborn, Darragh, but you must realize that we are scientists here."

"Scientists?" repeated Darragh:

"How's the state of science down there in your jungle?" "Why," said Darragh, "we do what we can ..." "And what can you do? Do you have electricity or steam power?"

"We have electricity," Darragh told him. "We use steam for things like mills and presses. We have radio—not television, though probably we could have that if we really wanted it."

"How about airplanes?"

"We have some of those. Not jet planes—propeller craft." "You seem to have done a lot," contributed Brenda Thompson.

"In this litde community, we are scientists," said Lyle again. "Our fathers were captured at the moment of the original invasion; they've kept books and plans, have set out their knowledge and passed it on."

Darragh stared. "You've been here from the time the Cold People landed? Fifty years?"

"We have picked up considerable knowledge from the Owners—the Cold People," went on Lyle. "We understand some of their science, things like the rays."

Darragh leaned forward eagerly, almost spilling his tea. "You can make the ray-throwers?"

Lyle shook his head. "I said we understand those things. Well manufacture them some day. We're learning; it has been a slow process but it's been a steady one."

"Try to understand, Mr. Darragh," Brenda Thompson's soft voice pleaded.

"Yes," said Lyle, "try to understand. We work in a way that doesn't arouse suspicion. After all, we've been penned up here for two generations or so. But well find out how to build and operate one of their ships, and in that ship . . ." He spread his free hand. "In that ship, well fly out of this prison shaft and away to freedom."

"I've flown one of their ships," reminded Darragh.

"Yes, yes, so you've told us," nodded Lyle impatiendy; "but can you make one?"

"No. I can see how that would take years, all right." He set down his teacup. "Sorry I can't hang around here and watch it work out."

"What do you think you'll do?"

"Look, Lyle, I've been forming a plan while we've been talking here," said Darragh. "Why don't you let me offer it to your crowd here—let them take it or leave it?"

"I'd rather you didn't," said Lyle, his eyes bright and un-

friendly. "In fact, I'm going to have to ask you not .to make

any orations at all."                                                ».

"Why," said Darragh, "I hadn't any notion of making orations."

"Thanks for your promise." Lyle got up. "Will you wait here? I'm going to bring someone else back to talk to you." "More tea first, Orrin?" asked the girl.

"No thanks," Lyle almost snapped. "Ill be back in a little while."

He was gone. Darragh, too, rose. "This leatherwork's getting hot," he said to Brenda Thompson. "Mind if I shed it?"

"Please do," she granted, and he kicked off his moccasins, then pulled the jacket over his head. Her blue eyes grew round as she watched, and he realized that he stood stripped to the waist.

"Oh," and he tried to laugh, "excuse me. I didn't stop to think—down in the tropics we wear just as few clothes as we can get by with."

"I just was thinking that you have such big shoulders." She turned. "Let me bring you some things my father used to wear. A robe."

She was gone. Darragh wriggled out of his heavy trousers. He put the garments on the chair, then turned suddenly.

He had felt an intent study of his back. But behind him was only that mirror-like rectangle of glass in the rear wall. He walked toward it.

On the other side a Cold Creature pressed close, as though watching him in rapt interest.

CHAPTER VIII

DARRAGH FAIRLY sprang at that window, his hand going to the knife at his belt. Close to the pane he came, craning his neck to look into what would be a face if Cold Creatures had faces. He felt his skin tighten and twitch, his hair bristle. At his sudden rush, the thing outside seemed to shrink back in the dimly lighted corridor. It paused, and its tentacles made fluttering motions, as though trying to signal him.

"I'd like to give you this, you damned jelly-blob!" snarled Darragh aloud, whirling the knife up above his head.

A gasp behind him, and he swung around on his bare heel.

Brenda Thompson had come back. Over her arm was slung a folded robe, black with dark red belt, collar and cuffs.

"Heavens!" she said, and smiled with lips that seemed to quiver.

He gestured furiously at the pane. "That thing out there-it was gaping in at me."

"They often watch us," she said, as though to reassure him. "They never do harm."

"I don't want to be watched," Darragh growled, and walked toward her. For a moment he thought she might retreat before him, as the Cold Creature out there had retreated. But she smiled again, and offered him the robe. He took it.

"Thanks," he said, and put it on. He pulled the sandals out of his belt and stooped to pull one, then the other, upon his bare feet. Her eyes were still on the knife he held, and he laid it on the table beside the tea-tray.

"You looked as though you'd actually kill that Owner," she half-whispered.

"I've killed two already," he reminded her. "I told you about that. Didn't you believe me?"

She pursed her lips, and a tiny crease marked her brow. "Now that you ask me," she said slowly, "I don't really think I did believe you. Not until this moment. But I believe you now."

She sat down, and so did he.

"Haven't any of your people tried to kill one?" he asked.

A shake of her bright head. "Nobody ever really thought of trying. But you—yes, I can believe you would. I can believe you could." She smiled suddenly, and radiantiy, with mouth and eyes and a bunching of-her round cheeks. "You're not like these men here. You're—I don't know exactiy how to put it.. ."

"You think I'm a wild man?" he suggested, smiling back at her.

"Well, you're certainly not a tame man," she suddenly laughed, and there was happy admiration in that laugh. "You've been living out of reach of the Owners—what you call the Cold People. You've been living in spite of them; you've dared spy on them and oppose them and strike them down."

"That's all new to you, Miss Thompson."

"You're new to me, Mr. Darragh. You're a stranger. Do you realize that you're the first stranger I ever met? I've grown up without seeing any stranger before."

He smiled at her again, and shook his head slowly. "Let's not go on being strangers. Let's start by using our first names. I'm Mark."

"And I'm Brenda. More tea?"

She filled his cup, and hers. Yet another smile they shared as they sipped.

"I have a feeling that I'm not such a big success with Orrin Lyle as I seem to be with you," he ventured.

"Orrin doesn't like to have anybody oppose him, he's not used to it."

"I'm used to it, but I don't like it either. I hope he and I can get along together." "So do I, Mark."

He glanced at the pane in the wall. He could not tell whether a Cold Creature lounged there or not. "I don't like being watched," he said. "Can we go to some other room, Brenda?"

She shook her head. "There's only one other room, and .they can look into that, too. Into every room of every one of these houses, and into the grounds."

"It's like being in a zoo!" he exploded.

"That's what it is," she said soberly. "A zoo. We're kept here alive, allowed food and other things for our support. And they study us, I suppose."

"But to pry into this cottage. Isn't it yours?"

"I'm afraid not," she told him. "It's theirs. It's a showpiece. It's like the imitation rock den in a bear pit in the zoos we human beings used to have." She made a gesture. "These walls are just mockups. They're flimsy, because we don't have wind down in this shaft. The roof has to be strong, because snow and rain do come down from above in winter time."

"So," he said, "that's the reason for this center post."

She looked at it. "Yes, that's to prop up the rafters and riles of the roof. They're substantial, and the stuff of the walls isn't."

He set down his cup. "I've told you about how my people live. Tell me about yours. Begin at the beginning."

"All right," she agreed. "At least, I'll begin with what I've been told about the beginning. The Owners . . ."

"The Cold People," Darragh corrected her. "Don't call them Owners. They don't own me, or you either; they just happen to have us in a box at the moment."

"All right, when the Cold People came on Earth, like a thief in the night, I suppose your ancestors got away from them."

"And yours?" he prompted. "How did they stay here and live?"

"We were situated in a tiny town—a suburb, it was called—on the shores of a lake."

"I've seen the lake," he remembered.

"We were professors then. Teachers, at the State University."

"And probably too deep in study to appreciate the danger."

She shrugged ruefully. "Something like that, I suppose. It's a failing of scientists and teachers. First thing they knew, it was too late. The—Cold People, I won't say Owners again —they were wiping out armies and cities orf- every side, hemmed in that little suburb." She paused, gloomily reconstructing what it must have been like. "Of course, I'm talking about my grandfather and his family and neighbors. There's nobody alive today who remembers it. Anyway, there was nothing to do but surrender."

Darragh sat up so suddenly that Brenda Thompson jumped. "Surrender?" he echoed. "How did they manage that? A white flag or something?"

"No; probably that wouldn't have been understood. Dr. Lyle—that Was Orrin's grandfather—took charge. He told everybody to stand quite still, with hands up. There were half a dozen professors and their wives and children. The

Cold People came crawling around, wearing their armor, pointing their ray-guns."

"I'm interested in those ray-guns," interposed Darragh.

"Ill tell you what I know about them, later," Brenda promised. "We've had some communication and understanding with the Cold People, and we've found out some things. But let me get back to the history; That litde knot of human beings was herded into a sort of a pen. There was a conference of Cold People, talking with their tentacle-talk, and then this prison . . ."

"This zoo," contributed Darragh.

"It had its beginning."

"And after that?"

"We've lived here ever since, a human peep-show for two generations," said Brenda, and she sounded grim and, weary. "They built this refrigerated city of theirs around us, all around our litde central patch of open ground here."

"And they allowed you to build your cottages," Darragh elaborated.

They built the cottages for us. They let us plant gardens. From up above we get rain, and there's sunlight. It seems to be reflected down to us with lenses and mirrors around the rim of the upper opening. And other wants are supplied, by thrusting big bundles through the valve-panels from outside."

"I got thrust through, the same way,", remembered Darragh. "So the Cold People make your food and clothing and so on."

"Right. They must have examined all the stuff they didn't destroy. They supply us the way keepers used to supply captive monkeys or rabbits."

"What about food?" asked Darragh.

"It's frozen, of course, but that way it keeps longer. There's some kind of meatiike stuff, and bread, and tea, and all of it is synthetic. They're masters at making chemical foods and fabrics. We grow green things enough in our gardens to give us vitamins."

"And you live in a zoo," summed up Darragh.

"In a zoo," she agreed. "About thirty of us, the children and grandchildren of those professors who surrendered. The adults of the free days have all died; nobody remembers much about freedom. And we're a zoo or an aquarium, for Cold People to stare at."

"They can stare, all right, whatever they use for eyes," said Darragh. "Now, how about government? Even ants in a hill have that."

"We've a committee," she told him. "Orrin Lyle sort of inherited the chairmanship, through his father and grandfather. That's all the command there is among us."

"And what can the committee do?" asked Darragh.

"Well, communicate with the Cold People. Orrin knows how. He can make signs with his hands, to the creatures outside the windows; they understand, and make signs that he understands. That way he gets us what we need, even medicine. Besides that, the committee figures on escape plans for some future time."

Darragh glanced at the front window. "Here comes Chairman Lyle now."

Lyle entered without knocking. Behind him came the stocky grizzled man who had been one of the first to speak to Darragh.

"Are you feeling better, Mr. Darragh?" asked Lyle.

"I'm feeling worse," said Darragh. "Nothing is going to make me feel better except getting out of this rat hole."

Lyle jerked a thumb at his companion. "This is Sam Criddle," he said. "Vice-chairman of the town committee. He's wanted to hear you talk, and maybe he can help calm you down. You don't seem to realize that you're lucky to be alive."

He sat down on the sofa. Criddle found a seat near the door.

"That's a point that mystifies me," said Darragh. "How does it happen I didn't get killed outside? The Cold Creatures in the ship tried hard enough."

"I've been trying to figure that one out," offered Criddle.

"They must have thought you were one of us, one of this town, that had somehow escaped. They herded you back here, and pushed you in through the valve—the logical thing to do."

"The more fools they," Darragh said, in a voice that sounded rough in his own ears. "I came here to find a way to overthrow them."

"You're in an awkward place to start that," said Lyle.

"Am I?" Darragh flung back. "What better place to start than here? And I can bring you all with me."

"How?" Criddle almost squealed in sudden eagerness.

"If we could get them to come down the shaft with one of their ships ..." began Darragh.

"You want to be violent," Lyle said accusingly.

"If violence in indicated, yes," said Darragh, and was aware of Brenda Thompson's eyes, shining more brighdy than before.

Lyle chuckled sofdy, and his olose-set eyes turned toward Criddle. "I'm afraid, Sam, that this man is dangerous. Give him half a chance and hell sabotage all our plans of escape."

"I'm not trying to do anything of the kind," insisted Darragh; "I'm simply offering a suggestion."

"Keep your suggestions until they're asked for," Lyle said.

"Hold on now, Orrin," pleaded Criddle. "We did come to ask him what he proposed to do."

Darragh was fighting to remain cool. Again he glanced out the window, and there he saw the others of the town, closely grouped and murmuring together.

"I wonder," he said, "if my suggestions aren't being asked for outside as well as in here."

Lyle got up. "You're here among us, and you'll act like one of us," he said coldly. "You'll listen to orders .. ."

Darragh, too, rose, swifdy and smoothly. He towered over Lyle. "I don't take orders when I don't recognize authority. I'm here from another community—another government, you might say. You act as if you're afraid I'm trying to shoulder you out."

Lyle Orrin shook his head. "I believe your story, Darragh. I believe your friends are like you—brave, ingenious, intelligent, and straightforward. Those are all virtues—but they aren't always enough. You've scouted around a bit, but we've been studying the Owners while they were studying us. We know a lot more about them than you do. Enough to know that courage alone won't do." He shrugged. "The Light Brigade was courageous and they attacked head on. They were wiped out—without ever having a chance of achieving their objective."

Darragh looked at him for a moment. "Maybe you believe that, but that's only half the story. I've known others like you, Orrin: I know how you tick.

"However you may try to rationalize it, you've jumped to the conclusion that I'm trying to steal your thunder," went on Darragh. "You think I'm some sort of a rival. I don't want to be anything of the sort. I don't want to push you around; but don't get the idea you can push me around, either."

"For heaven's sakel" cried Brenda. "Can't we keep this conversation on a quiet, friendly basis?"

"Take it easy, Orrin," added Criddle. "I don't think Mr. Darragh wants to be offensive."

"Doesn't he?" Lyle half-crooned. "Well, he is." He swung around and looked at Criddle. "You aren't very cooperative, Sam."

"I just suggested..."

"I don't have to listen to your suggestions, at least," interrupted Lyle. "Why don't you just go away Sam?"

"Why . . ." began the older man.

"That's an order, Sam. From the chairman.''

Criddle got up, frowned, twisted his lips, and walked out.

"This is my house, Orrin," said Brenda, also on her feet. I don't see why you have to be unpleasant in it."

"Unpleasant," he said after her, and let his eyes creep around to Darragh. "This man from nowhere is more pleasant I take it." He made an airy gesture. "Maybe I ought to go, too, and leave the pair of you to whatever you find so pleasant about each other."

He stepped to the table and picked up Darragh's knife.

"That's mine," said Darragh.

"It was yours," Lyle told him, in a tone of mocking correction. "I'm confiscating it. All weapons stay in a central depository."

He started for the door, but Darragh made two long strides and barred his way. "I said, that's my knife, Lyle."

"You insist on that point?" Lyle shifted the knife in his hand, holding it daggerwise. "I've confiscated it, I told you."

Darragh's long arm shot out and seized the chair in

which Criddle had been sitting. He swung it above his head

like a club.                                                        .

"That's my knife," he said for the third time. "Put it back."

Lyle's eyes seemed to spring out of his head, and his face turned livid white with fury. Then he relaxed, grinned nastily, and tossed the knife back on the table. "We'll discuss the point later," he said. "May I go now?"

"You certainly may go," Brenda said, before Darragh could speak.

Lyle walked jauntily past Darragh and opened the door. He paused on the threshold. "I'll have to confer with another colleague of mine," he said. "Then I'll come back, Darragh. I may have another rebuttal to your argument."

He was gone.

Darragh set down the chair and looked apologetically at Brenda.- "I'm sorry," he said honesdy. "I don't know what I said or did to make him act like that. I haven't even gone into any notion of how we might get out of here."

"Orrin just likes to have his own way," she said. "He's always like that. Now I've offended him, too."

"You and he are friends?"

"He wants to marry me," she told him.

Darragh stared at her, then suddenly burst out laughing.

"Marry you?" he cried. "That ruffled-up little parrot wants to marry you?"

She looked at him wide-eyed.

"You seem to think the idea of marrying me is ridiculous," she said angrily.

He stopped laughing, and slowly shook his head. "No—the idea of marrying you is by no means ridiculous."

He made another of his long strides, put both his arms around Brenda Thompson, and kissed her thoroughly on her red mouth.

CHAPTER IX

BRENDA THOMPSON WAS shocked, he knew as he held her close. His arms clamped a body as rigid and motionless as a statue. Then she strove with frantic strength to free herself.

"What's going on here?" she gasped against his cheek.

"You know what's going on here," he replied, and kissed her again.

"Now, stop." She had worked her hands up against his robe-wrapped chest, and she shoved strainingly against him, throwing her head far back to keep it free.

"After all. . ." she stammered. "I... nobody ever . .

"Nobody ever grabbed you and kissed you before?" he finished for her. "Well, it's high time."

"Let go!"

"Not a chance, Brenda. If Orrin Lyle wants to marry you, that's just one more way I'm going to frustrate him."

He pulled her against him, and suddenly he did not have to hold her there. She was close to him, her whole body and face, and her arms were up around his neck.

He kissed her, and this time she kissed him back, as strongly as he, for a long heart-scrambling moment.

"Oh, this is crazy," she found time to mumble.

"It's sane," he protested, and let go of her at last.

She still stood against him, and she was smiling up at him, her face so close to his that it looked out of focus.

"After all," she said again.

"You . . ."

He was reaching for her, but suddenly moved away, his eyes toward that panel in the rear wall.

"Mark!" Her quick hand caught the sleeve of his robe. "Is anything wrong?"

"Something's very wrong, Brenda. Look yonder. One of those snooping Cold Creatures. I wish I could get close enough to make it hot for him."

She, too, looked and saw. She laughed.

"They don't count, Mark; they don't understand what we're doing." She made as though to put her arms around him, then paused. After a moment she, too, drew back.

"You know what I mean about hating to be watched," he guessed. "I know," she agreed. Her eyes shone with quick fierceness as she gazed at the gross lounger beyond the pane. "What shall we dor

"Sit down."

They did so, side by side on the sofa.

"Mark," she said pleadingly, "are you really going to get us out of here? Me—and the others?"

"Yes, I am. I'll even get Orrin Lyle out, if he's in a mood to let me. Since we're being gawked at by the visitor at the zoo, let's just talk. You mentioned those ray-weapons, said you knew something about them. All right, tell me what you know."

She clasped her hands in her lap. "Ill do my best, Mark. There are two rays." "Yes. White and green."

"The white one's explosive, and the green one's a power

THE   DARK   DESTROYERS ray. They're both some sort of electrical achievement. You know about electricity, you said."

"Electricity? But I didn't tingle or feel shocked when they rayed me with the green one," remembered Darragh.

"No, because it didn't vibrate you. It..."

"It shoved me."

"That's right," she nodded. "You see, that green ray controls any material body it involves. Anything from dust particles in the air up to—well, up to the heavy roof of this shelter dome."

Darragh glanced upward. "A ray holds up this heavy roof!"

"It's true. Do you think that even the Cold Creatures could find or make a material in quantity and strength to build a solid structure as high as this city or theirs? It's impossible, even for their science."

He smiled at her, and rumpled his black hair. She laughed. "You look like a boy having trouble with his lessons."

"That's what I am, in a way. New ideas are always hard to take aboard. With me, anyway."

"With everybody," said Brenda. "Now, here's what we've rationalized about this structure, and probably those others you say are everywhere. The lower curves and tiers of the dome are supported by concrete and metal braces. But that's good for only a certain height, or the total weight would crush everything. Where we are now—in the center, with the tube rising up, up there maybe two miles above us—the upper weights are held in place by a special formation or pattern of green rays."

"Pointing upward," supplied Darragh.

"They act as girders, shining up frtim a ring of generators set around this shaft where our cottages and we are penned

UP-

"I've been out there," said Darragh. "I saw something else. There was a sort of moat of water, that didn't freeze. Some sort of -liquid, at least, colorless and transparent like water, flowing along although the temperature must have been away down below zero."

"Ill tell you about that liquid later. I'll finish now about the green ray. You understand the basic principle, Mark?"

"Only that you say it controls any physical substance that it involves or encounters."

"All right. The operator of the ray can manipulate its various powers. It can push a body away, great or small, or hold it locked in space, or drag it down to the very source of the green light."

"And I've had experience of all three aspects of the power," said Darragh.

She smiled up at him, and put her hand on his. He closed his own big hand around her fingers, and squeezed.

"Now, be careful," she whispered, "or 111 forget what I was going to say."

"I was just remembering to say that I loved you."

"After something like forty or fifty minutes of acquaintance," she mocked him.

"Wonders can be done in that time. You said I was the first stranger you'd ever met, but I'm not a stranger any more. Ami?"

She shook her head happily. "Mark. Tell me something-am I the prettiest girl you ever knew?"

He looked at her closely, and slowly shook his head. "I doubt it. Down yonder on the Orinoco, there are girls so pretty that they just loaf around, knowing what a favor they do the men by letting themselves be looked at. You—hell, you're pretty, but you're not that kind of pretty."

"Beautiful, maybe?"

"Let's call you delicious. You taste good, look good, sound good. .."

"What were we talking about?" she broke in. "The green ray. I think it can even go around a comer. Some sort of mirror arrangement can reflect it at an angle."

"That's understandable," said Darragh. "But can't the ray be blocked off some way? A screen or curtain pushed

THE   DARK   DESTROYERS across it to darken it? If we could do that, we could bring down the roof of this dome like a shower of cocoanuts on what the Cold People have for heads."

"Oh, you savage from down in the tropics!" she almost cried out. "You want to wreck their happy home."

"That's just what I want to do. Why not?"

"For one thing, I don't see how it can be done. I know of no way to cut across the ray's path, once the power is on. It would be like trying to cut through a steel rod with a dull knife."

"That green ray must have been what I've heard about, in the stories of the first invasion," suggested Darragh. "They made curtains of it, and bounced back bullets and bombs and shells. Well, all right; but something could throw the source or the reflector out of order. A grenade or bomb, for instance."

"Yes," she said, falling in with the humor. "A bomb of a considerable explosive force, set off in the middle of our court, might smash the walls of the shaft and jam all the fixtures."

"Now," Darragh told her, "you're talking like us savages from the tropics."

"You've infected me," she teased. "However, there aren't any such bombs to be had. We don't have chemicals to make explosives."

"We savages do." He squeezed her hand again. "Tell me more things about the green rays."

"They're used in all sorts of mechanisms. The Cold People use them to fly their ships, I understand, and to run motors and work levers and apply pressures and props. They operate their food-synthesizers with the rays."

"How do they make their food?"

"Oh, from the ordinary elements, to judge from the items we get. Carbon, nitrogen, hydrogen, oxygen."

"Which means they come from a planet like ours," amplified Darragh. "What planet, Brenda? Mars? Jupiter? One of Jupiter's moons?"

"Our committee doubts that. Mars would be too warm, and Jupiter and Jupiter's moons would be too cold. But about making the food—the active principle of synthesizing seems to be distilled from a vegetable substance they've brought from their own home world."

"They ship it in?"

"No, apparently they grow it here. In bitter cold, of course. Big crops of it, in the polar regions."

"Just how do you people find out these things?"

"From Orrin Lyle," she said. "He can understand the Cold People, and make them understand him, by signs made back and forth at one of those view panels."

"And he gives himself airs because he can do that?" Dar-ragh's smile was wry this time. "Well, I won't belittle him. I wish I knew what the Cold People were saying. You don't suppose they can understand us?"

"I don't think so, because Orrin always interprets for us when there's anything to ask. Now, about the explosive ray."

"Yes," said Darragh eagerly, "how do they manage that thing? It must be unthinkably hot, beyond anything they can stand. What is the temperature range for them? I mean, what temperature they can endure."

"Orrin's father and grandfather made studies and estimates on that," Brenda told him. "They came to the conclusion that comfort point for the Cold Creatures is about sixty degrees below zero, Fahrenheit. That would be like seventy degrees above for us."

"A difference of a hundred and thirty degrees, say," quickly computed Darragh.

"Zero would be like the most endurable summer heat to them," Brenda elaborated, "and a hundred below would be only a bracing tingle of frost. You see how this sort of temperature-comfort for them would rule out Mars as too warm, Jupiter as too cold."

"The explosion-ray would be too hot, though," Darragh said again.

She shook her head emphatically, and he relished the dance of golden sparkle in her hair. "No, Mark. The explosion-ray isn't hot at all. It doesn't effect explosion by heat. In fact, it's quite cold."

"That doesn't make sense!" he argued.

"It will if you'll let me finish. It simply changes the type of the water in whatever substance it encounters!. It changes ordinary water into H_20."

He stared at her until she laughed aloud. "You look as if you'd suddenly swallowed a pebble."

"I won't swallow that one, Brenda. Listen, I know we're primitive and untaught and all those things Orrin Lyle charges us with down yonder in South America, but we have schools and a few books and so on. My own father was a teacher. And what's all this about changing water into H_2OP Water is H,0, I've always heard."

"You've never heard the whole story," she insisted, still smiling. "Let me give you a little lesson in molecular science."

She got up and crossed to the bookshelf. From it she selected a volume with faded brown covers, and turned around again. "Now what are you goggling about?"

"I just watched you when you walked," he told her.

"Brenda, I was wrong in hesitating when you asked me if

you were the prettiest girl I'd ever seen. You are; it's just

soaking through to me."                                                '.<

"Oh," she laughed, "you're- looking at me through love-colored glasses. Let's stick to chemistry for a moment." Coming back, she sat down and opened the book. "This is the old Handbook of Chemistry and Physics, compiled in the earlier part of the twentieth century by Hodgman and Lange for use as a reference book by students in laboratory courses."

"And what does it say?" prompted Darragh.

"It says, ampng other basic facts in science, that normal water, the kind we see around us in rain and pools and so on —the kind we drink and wash in—is H_20 merely in proportion."

"Isn't that what I was just arguing?" Darragh asked, mystified.

"Not at all. You know what molecules are, don't you?" "Certainly I know what molecules are," he replied, somewhat huffily.

"All right. A normal water molecule, made up of atoms of hydrogen and oxygen, gathers them in a special way. Not just two atoms of hydrogen and one of oxygen—naturally it forms from sixteen hydrogen atoms and eight oxygens."

"Is that what the book says?" he demanded "Then . .."

"Then the ordinary molecule of water isn't just three atoms; it doesn't look like a shamrock. It looks more like a raspberry. Quit sticking your big pale eyes out at me, Mark, and try to understand. The book knows what it's talking about."

"Of course it does, and so do you. Let me make a few notes."

He fumbled for his belt pouch under the robe, and got out scraps of paper and his hammered lead pencil. He poised the paper on his knee. "Now," he said, "you say that this ray somehow rearranges the atom—breaks up the complex molecules of water into smaller, simpler ones. But the proportions are the same—two atoms of hydrogen to one of oxygen. What's the big difference?"

"In the boiling points," replied Brenda. "It's far lower for the true H_20. Human science never really made sure, but Cold-Creature science did. We can work it out pretty well by consideration of other known facts."

She turned pages in the brown book for a moment.

"Set down these figures," she directed him. "At the top of the column, put normal water—H_20, with the boiling point at one hundred degrees Centigrade."

"Boiling point one hundred," Darragh said after her writing.

"Now let's take another hydrogen-containing liquid compound, hydrogen telluride. Boiling point is zero degrees Centigrade."

"I'm not acquainted with hydrogen telluride," confessed Darragh, writing.

"Neither am I particularly. I'm just quoting from what it says here in Hodgman and Lange. Got it down on your list?" "Right. H_2Te, boiling point zero."

"Next in the column, hydrogen selenide—minus forty-two degrees Centigrade."

He looked over her shoulder for the chemical symbol, and jotted it down. "H_2Se boils at minus 24. Ready for another here."

"And hydrogen sulphide," continued Brenda, her slim forefinger traveling down the page. "Boiling point, minus sixty. Now then, what have you got there?"

Darragh showed her his succession of figures:

H_16Og.................................  boils at 100 degrees

" 0 "-42 "-60

"All right so far," pronounced Brenda. "Now we can progress on to hypothetical H_20. It's not in the book but we can work it out roughly by comparing the weights of atoms in relation to each other."

"Maybe you can," he smiled ruefully, "but I can't."

"Then let me." She took the paper, leafed,- through the book to a table of atomic weights, and quickly scribbled several of them below Darragh's figures:

Tellurium weighs 127.5

Selenium " 79.2

Sulphur             "        32.06

'And one more," she said. "Here it is.!

Oxygen weighs

16.00

Leaning close to her, Darragh felt her smooth cheek brush his rough one.

"In other words," he tried to sum up, "the boiling point varies inversely with the atomic weight."

"Well, yes, in a general sort of way, I can remember my father and Orrin's father going over these same figures. Of course it's not quite as simple as that."

Darragh had taken the pencil from her. Quickly he did a couple of problems in division.

"Well, Selenium's weight goes one^1' and six-tenths times into Tellurium's weight," he computed. "In other words, that diminishment procures a drop in boiling point of forty-two degrees. But sulphur is less than half of Selenium, as regards atomic weight, and that gives us a reduction in boiling point of only eighteen degrees."

"Which is why we have to be loose in our estimates. In any case, we can only guess, in the long run of the boiling point of true H_20—simple water. We generally figure it to be minus 100."

"Whew!" whistled Darragh. "That would be minus 212 degrees Fahrenheit—colder than liquid air."

But Brenda smiled dissent and shook her blonde head. "Not quite that frigid. You forget that Zero degrees Centigrade equals plus thirty-two Fahrenheit. So the boiling point of simple water is about 148 degrees below zero, in Fahrenheit figures."

"Which is colder than would suit me," said Darragh, and shivered involuntarily. "So that's what the water is that flows just outside the valve entrance to this prison, or zoo, or whatever you call it." He turned and looked into her eyes. "Brenda, I'm going to get you out of here."

"Yes," she said, rapt and confident in the same breath. "We'll have to travel light. . ."

"Mighty fight indeed," he nodded. "Just these books of yours, to help us line up. more knowledge against the Cold People. Wait till they look at you and listen to you, down on the Orinoco."

"Wait till we get there, Mark. We were talking about the simple water flowing outside. It's boiling, you notice—so it flows somewhere above that 148 degrees below Zero. They keep supplying it by ray action on ice and frost in their tunnels and so on. There won't be any escape out that way."

"No. Listen, I wish we could take the explosive ray along." Darragh's eyes snapped with eagerness. "The way you tell me about it, the ray works by breaking normal water down into this stuff that boils at such a low temperature."

"Right," she said. "And that low-boiling simple water turns into steam at once—and explodes. A living body, a tree or animal, or any other object with lots of water in it. . ."

"Would just fly into a cloud of particles," finished Darragh for her. "That's what happened to most of the human race fifty years ago."

He rose to his feet. Folding the notes, he pushed them under his robe and into the pouch at his girdle.

"Thanks for the lecture, Brenda," he smiled. "This information is going to interest my chiefs and iit'11 help them." He chuckled as he remembered something. "I remember spying on that outpost colony, down on the shore of Haiti. I was trying to think of solutions, but a damned mosquito kept plugging its bill into me. I wished it would go bite a Cold Creature instead."

"It wouldn't get any blood from a Cold Creature," she said, quite soberly. "It ought to take a special breed of mosquito to work on one."

"Special breed of mosquito," he repeated after her. "Brenda, you know something? There's an idea there, somewhere . . ."

"I have another idea, Mark," she broke in suddenly,

"Yes?"

"That loafer out yonder on the other side of the porthole, watching us ..."

She rose and stood close to him, smiling. "What about it?"

"Nothing, except it isn't there watching any more."

He laughed happily, and his arms fairly flew out to seize her. And her own arms closed strongly around his neck, and the kiss they gave each other was strong and thorough and tender and loving.

THE   DARK  DESTROYERS "Very pretty."

Orrin Lyle stood in the open door. Darragh spun toward him so swiftly that Brenda almost staggered free.

"You don't seem to be much of a man for knocking at doors," said Darragh in slow, cold fury.

The chief of the captive community thrust his hands into his pockets. He looked from Brenda to Darragh in cold triumph, then back again to Brenda.

"I hope you'll learn to thrive without that sort of pastime, Brenda," he said. "We're not going to have the benefit of Mr. Darragh's company here much longer."

"What have you done?" she asked quickly.

"Oh," said Lyle, quite casually, "I did just about the only practical thing to be done with a dangerous and violent invader on the place. I turned him in."

"Turned me into what?" demanded Darragh. "Tell me that."

"You're a disturbing and dangerous element here," Lyle said to him, loftily calm. "These ideas of yours about a quick, desperate break—they'd ruin forever our long-range plan of getting away."

"I agree that it's a long-range plan," snapped Darragh. "You've not moved anywhere in fifty years."

Lyle's hand came out of a pocket to gesture at the interruption.

"You refused to be advised by ime," he went on. "You said you'd go out and harangue the people, that you'd try to influence the community to follow your notions."

"That's what I said," agreed Darragh, "and it so happens that I meant it"

"Oh, I was sure you did," said Lyle. "And so, while you were having tea here—having a pretty good time here, in fact—I went back to my own quarters. There's a window to the Owners there, too, you know."

"And one of them watching you there, I suppose?" suggested Brenda.

"It so happens that there was, my dear," Lyle told her.

"And I got him to bring several of his companions. I passed on some information to them."

"Orrinl" cried out Brenda. "You betrayed ..."

Smiling, he nodded his head. "I told them about Darragh, by sign language. They know that he's a spy and an enemy. They've gone to bring a ship down the shaft from above, and they're going to take Darragh away in it. What happens to him then I can't say. None of us will ever be able to say."

CHAPTER X

DARRAGH TOOK a long, swift step forward. He felt his muscles bunch to fling a blow. Orrin Lyle did not retreat, did not even draw himself up as though for defence.

"Now you think you'll try violence," he mocked. "All right, Darragh, come on and hit me; you're bigger than I am. But I happen to be the chief here. My people are waiting outside. Lay your hand on me, and they'll tear you to pieces. The Owners will have a disassembled carcass to fly away with."

Darragh did not strike. At Lyle's threat, he relaxed and gazed. His face did not show fear, but a sudden dawning of inspiration.

"Orrin," Brenda was saying, in a voice that trembled, "this is cruel and cowardly."

"No, Brenda. Suppose we just call it practical." "Orrin, I love Mark."

"You'll get over that," he assured her, quite without heat. "Out of sight, out of mind, you know. And hell be out of sight from now on."

"He came to us from outside, Orrin ..."

"You mean, lie blundered in on us from outside. He's a savage who, by better luck than his audacity deserves, survived so far. A saner and more cautious individual might have died many times."

"That's what I mean," said Darragh.

"And I won't argue the point," continued Lyle. "Brenda, this man announces right off the reel that he want to overthrow a plan that has, in its formation, consumed years of our lives and the lives of our fathers. He's dangerous. He must be eliminated."

"But stop and think," pleaded the girl. "Aren't you losing sight of the chance that there might be another way than yours, Orrin? That there might even be a better way?"

"Since Mr. Darragh hasn't acquainted us with his alternative plan, I'm unable to answer that one."

"You didn't give him a chance to talk. But he and I have been talking . . ."

"Oh, yes indeed," Lyle agreed, smiling. "You've been talking most cozily and—shall I say cordially?"

"I love him," said Brenda again.

Lyle looked at her in silence for a long moment. Finally: "I honesdy believe you do love him, Brenda. Well, now." He drew a long breath, cast his eyes upward as though in search of inspiration. "Suppose" he went on, "I said that I approved of that? That perhaps I had been wrong to argue with him, about the escape plan or about which of us was to have you? Suppose I were to give the two of you my blessing?"

"Oh!" cried Brenda, her face suddenly glowing. "If ..."

"Yes, if," he broke in to repeat. "If I took that attitude, Brenda, it would still be too late. Because, you see, I've already turned him in to the Owners. They're coming for him, and I couldn't stop them in any way whatever."

"Never mind, Brenda," spoke up Darragh suddenly. "Lyle, I'm going to disagree with you again."

"I've already found you disagreeable," said Lyle silkily.

"You said that your people would tear me to pieces at your word. That's a lie, and you know it."

Orrin Lyle's close-set eyes grew wide for just a trifle of time. That was his only change of expression. He did not move otherwise.

"And on what line of reasoning do you come to that interesting conclusion?"

"If you trusted the people of this community," went on Darragh, "why didn't you set them on me to tear me to pieces instead of running to the Cold People—to what you call Owners? It's plain to see that they own you, anyway." He moved a step nearer, his big fists set on his lean hips. "By God, that's the answer. You don't really want to escape from here. It might upset your snug, smug little career of subordinate, safe ruling."

"That's what you say," jibed Lyle.

"You're damned right that's what I say, and I'm going to say it out there where everybody can hear me. Get out of my way."

He strode toward the door, ready to sweep Lyle aside with a push of his arm, but Lyle had drawn out of reach. Darragh stepped out upon the porch, the skirts of the robe slapping about his long legs.

In the central open court stood the men anA-women of the captive settlement. They looked at him questioningly, some of them expectandy.

"Ladies and gendemenl" cried out Darragh, loudly enough to seize every attention within earshot. "Fellow human beings, fellow prisoners of the Cold People, come close here and let me tell you a few things!"

They began to mutter together, but they did as he had commanded. They crowded upon the lawn-space in front of Brenda Thompson's cottage.

"Ladies and gendemenl" he yelled again, to quiet all other voices. "You know by now that I came here from outside. There are thousands of free men out there, planning to overthrow these frozen monsters that I hate to hear you call the

Owners. They took our world away from us, but we aren't going to let them own it any more. We're going to take it back!"

Someone actually cheered.

"Any of you want to join us?" called out Darragh.

Another excited stir and muttering, and a woman's voice stammered: "How can we?"

"That's what I'm going to manage if you'll go along with me," Darragh replied, with a confidence that he really felt. "I got in here, and I'm going to get out again. I'm going to take anybody along who thinks he or she would enjoy the journey. And I'm going to get out right now—not in fifty years!"

"I'm going with him!" came Brenda's breathless voice, and she ran out of the cottage. Her hair and dress were rumpled—apparently Orrin Lyle had tried to hold her back. Her arms were full of books.

"We're traveling light!" she said, as Darragh had said a few moments before. "Just taking the books!"

"All right, Brenda Thompson isn't going to stay in prison," said Darragh. "Who's next?" His eye caught the gray-stubbled head of the man called Criddle. "I see you there, Criddle, and earlier today you seemed to think I had a few talking points. Want to take a chance with me?"

Criddle swallowed and bugged out his eyes. "I'm with you, young fellow!" he shouted. "I'm tired of being a peep show."

He moved forward out of the crowd. After him came a middle-aged woman, and he put his arm around her. "My wife's coming, too!" he cried happily.

This time a number of voices cheered. As Criddle came to the edge of the porch with his wife, fully a dozen more moved as though to follow.

Just then Orrin Lyle came out. He pushed himself between Brenda and Darragh. "Wait," he said, and his voice, without seeming to lift, yet made itself heard. Those who had started forward paused where they were.

THEDARK. DESTROYERS "I must ask you all, my friends and neighbors and followers, to be sensible," he said. "Don't let this man stampede you. He's a stranger and an alien—just half an hour old in our midst—and he's trying to sweep all of you into a suicidal attempt at escape which cannot succeed."

"What sort of attempt?" demanded Criddle, his eyes on Darragh.

"He's a spy and an emeny," accused Lyle.

"Orrin Lyle is right!" rose Brenda's voice.

Then everyone turned toward her. Darragh felt dry-mouthed with utter amazement.

"He's right!" Brenda said again. "Mark Darragh certainly is a spy—but he's a spy on the Cold People, that's what he came here to be! He's an enemy but he's an enemy to our enemies!"

"Let me inform you ..." began Orrin Lyle.

"Keep your mouth shut, Orrin," Brenda broke him off fiercely. "You've already done your informing. Did you know about that, you others? Orrin did some of his sign-language talk to the Cold People, and gave Mark Darragh up to them! Told them to come here and take him away!"

Everybody gasped at that, and for the first time Lyle seemed worried and nervous.

"Is that the truth, Orrin?" demanded Criddle, boldly and quickly, from where he stood next to the porch.

"If it is the truth, it's a mighty dirty truth," said a younger man in the crowd.

"You're right," agreed the man standing next to him.

But Orrin Lyle had ruled for years. He did not recoil from the hint of menace. He had completely recovered his studied cold calm.

"Every one of you knows," he said, "that our dearest hope is some day to win free of this cage in which we five." "Right," agreed Criddle.

"You all know that we are looking for a chance, when the time is ripe," elaborated Lyle. "You all know that we must succeed then—or never. And you also know that I, building upon the lifelong labors of my father and his colleagues, have found a way to communicate with the Owners, so that I could gather information."

"What information?" Darragh flung at them. "Suppose you fill them in on that."

"That, Mr. Darragh, is precisely what 111 do if you give me a chance to speak. My friends, I've been gathering information toward the building of an aircraft."

"That's the first I've heard of it, Orrin," spoke up Criddle.

"It wasn't time to tell you . .."

"Because your associates wouldn't believe a liel" cut in Darragh. "Lyle, you're a sort of genius; you'd rather climb a tree than stand on the ground to tell the truth." He towered above Lyle, laughing down into his face. "Even if you knew how to build an aircraft, you wouldn't have the materials and you couldn't fly it if you did build it."

"That makes sense," said Criddle's wife.

"My friends," said Orrin Lyle, "you owe me a chance to reply to these charges." He paused, and saw that he had regained the attention of his people. "Thank you. Now: I have denounced this stranger Mark Darragh for a two-fold advantage to all of us. First, his ill-planned escape attempt . .

"How do you know it's ill-planned?" Darragh challenged. "You never let me explain it."

Lyle looked up at him. "Ill amend my language. Ill say, your bluff about an escape attempt, because you don't really have one."

"Why . . ."

"Hold it, Mr. Darraghl" Sam Criddle was breaking in on his own part. "Let Orrin finish what he's saying, or we'll get nowhere."

Darragh fell silent. Again Lyle faced the gathering.

"First, he would fail in whatever scheme he tried," he went on, "and that would cause the Owners to be doubly strict at guarding us and fencing us in, doubly sure in making us doubly far off from liberty. Second, by giving this information against him as I have, I succeed in convincing the Owners that the rest of us are mild and content to be here in this community. They will come in and remove him. Then they will trust us as never before." He spread his hands in an eloquent gesture of appeal to reason. "I want to ask you, and each of you, to decide whether this isn't sufficient explanation, whether this isn't good logic and good method. That's all."

He stepped back, as though to put an end to the discussion. The group of people seemed almost on the point of breaking up and dispersing. But Darragh flung up his two long arms.

"Hold on, every single one of you," he shouted. "Orrin Lyle seems to have finished, and I let him finish. Now let me say my last word!"

Quick as thought, he shot out his big hand and closed it on the shoulder of Orrin Lyle. The smaller man started and tried to pull himself away, but Darragh's fingers dug into his flesh and drew him close. Darragh gave Lyle a vigorous shake, that jolted the struggle out of him for the moment. The onlookers had drawn back together, wide-eyed with amazement.

Darragh knew that he would have brief seconds of that attention he had so violently and melodramatically claimed. Again he shook Orrin, for emphasis.

"Let me tell you the facts about this sneak who calls himself the boss of your community!" he trumpeted. "He communicates with those jailers of yours; he admits that he's a snitch."

"I told why I did it," Lyle sputtered.

"He snitched on me," Darragh went on, "and hell snitch on any one of you who does something that may not suit his royal high mightiness!"

"I—I was acting for the best," Lyle tried to say as he struggled. His calm semity and disdain had left him. "Listenl" he cried out. "Unless we can gain time and knowledge to build ourselves a ship, leam to fly it, well never escape!"

"A ship to escape in!" Darragh took up the words. "I'm coming to that, my friends. We don't need to build one and learn about it. Our ship's going to be here before we know itl"

"M-Mark," Brenda stammered, "the only ship that's coming will take you away . . ."

"It will take us all away," cried Darragh. "I know it's coming for me—but we're going to capture it as it lands!"

"How .. ." began Criddle.

"How will we fly it?" Darragh finished the question for him. "I can fly their ships. I told you that, Criddle. I'm going to get you all out of here, every one of you, this very hour!"

And his audacious bid for attention and approval was succeeding. Criddle and one or two shouted enthusiastically. Darragh thanked heaven for making him stronger than Lyle, enough stronger to subdue his accuser physically. Others were crying out in favor of Darragh, who decided to clinch matters by thrusting Orrin down from the porch.

"Take charge of this traitor, some of you," he directed, and two of the biggest men obeyed, almost automatically. They caught Lyle by the arms and held him tight.

"Now, then," sent on Darragh, "we've got to move fast. We have a trap to set."

Brenda had come to his elbow, still lugging her books.

"Mark," she whispered, "you're wonderful. You've simply overpowered everybody."

"You turned the trick when you came out and spoke for me," he told her. "It was just the right thing at the right time."

"But how are you going to do this thing?"

"How am I going to do it?" he echoed, his voice loud again for all to hear. "Listen, those Cold Creatures aren't going to expect any trouble, only what I may cause. They spotted me in your cottage, Brenda; they'll come there for me." He addressed his new allies. "Do you people have any ropes? Bring me the longest, strongest ropes you can find."

Several of them hurried away to do his bidding. Darragh spared only the briefest of glances, to make sure that Lyle's captors were leading him away. He saw them conducting their captive to one of the cottages—Criddle's cottage, evidently, because Criddle was going along. Then he rushed into the room where he and Brenda had sat, talked of love and rebellion, and come to decisions.

He looked at the view-panel first. No Cold Creatures idled there. He snatched up his leather clothing from the floor.

"What's the plan, Mark?" asked Brenda, following him

in.

"Bring me something to stuff these clothes with," he said. "Put the books down on the table. Bring anything. Bedclothes will do."

"Why?" she asked, but did not wait to hear. She fairly flew into another room, and came back carrying a pillow and some sheets. He took them from her, and quickly padded the empty suit into the semblance of a human body.

"I don't understand," Brenda was saying.

"I hope the Cold People won't, either," he returned, and drew his dummy upright against the central pole that supported the roof. "Now, you told me that your roofing is mighty heavy—would collapse without this support."

"Yes, but. . ."

"Well fill the buts in later."

With a napkin he tied the dummy to the pole, then drew its arms aloft and put the gloves on them. He caught up his knife from the table where it had lain, and spiked the arms in place. Finally he arranged the hood as though^a head was inside, and stepped back to make a survey. He smiled and nodded in triumph. Thus posed, the stuffed garment was amazingly lifelike,

"There I am, Brenda," he announced, pointing. "Standing there, in a pose of surrender—the Cold People understood what hands up meant when your folks surrendered to them fifty years ago." He moved back. "Yes. It's a good likeness of me, don't you think? Now, what about those ropes I asked for?"

He strode back out on the porch. Half a dozen men were making haste toward him, holding out coils of line. Quickly he chose the two strongest pieces, and doubled them for extra strength. Back into the cottage he went.

"Do you have a window at the side of the cottage?" he asked Brenda. She pointed.

"There is? Good." He went to it. "Here, you men out there, take one end of this doubled line."

They did so. He took the other end to the supporting pole and knotted it securely at the bottom.

"Where's that other cord, Brenda?"

She gave it to him, and he stood on tiptoe to loop it around the top of the timber and fasten it tightly with' a square knot. He carried the free end to the front window and threw it out into the open. Then he and Brenda walked onto the porch.

Men and women waited there, eagerly ready for any of Darragh's orders. He walked in among them, choosing one after another of the strongest men until he had eight. Criddle came out of his own cottage and toward Darragh.

"We've got Lyle cooped up, close against the back wall where he'll be hard to spot from a view-window," he reported. "What's your scheme now?"

"Let me divide this tug-of-war team I've picked," replied Darragh. "You four, stand by the side window and take hold of the rope that comes out. The other four take charge of the rope through the front window."

"I get you, boss," said one of the men briskly. "What next?"

"I want everybody else to stand around and be nonchalant, make a screen so that the two rope gangs won't be spotted. Act as if you're just having a gabfest. That's it—some of you at the side and some at the front, but leave the way to the door open. Don't obstruct any Cold Creatures when they go waddling in."

"But what's your scheme?" asked Criddle again.

"Ill explain. Come here beside me, Brenda. I see you've got those books. Now, everybody, attentionl"

Faces turned to him on all sides.

"That ship that Orrin Lyle sent for will come in and land, and a posse of Cold Creatures will get out and head into Brenda's parlor after me. That's why I made a dummy in there for them to head for. Once they're inside, I'll yell for you to pull. Both teams drag on those ropes, quick and hard. One rope will drag the top of the timber one way, the other rope will drag the bottom of it the other way. And down will come the roof on them. Understand?"

"Sure," said Criddle. "But they'll leave guards outside here, with their ship."

"We'll tackle those," said Darragh, "and kill them. Don't stick your eyes out at me—Cold Creatures can be knocked over. I've been doing it myself."

CHAPTER XI

THEY TBIED to raise another cheer for Darragh then, but he flourished his arms for silence. "Friends, I appreciate it, but let's be nonchalant. When we've grabbed their ship and sail out of here, I'll lead the cheers myself. But just now . . ." "Here it comes!" squalled a woman.

A great shadow had fallen across the court, a shadow that grew and darkened. Darragh glanced up. An oval ship was lowering itself from above, and it looked like a big one. He glanced around. The villagers, bom and bred in captivity and subjugation, cowered like chickens when a hawk swoops down. Only Brenda stood up straight. Her eyes were on Darragh, happy and trusting.

"Chins up, all of you!" Darragh rasped out. "Take your places and hang onto the ropes. Brenda, come with me. We'll watch from that cottage just opposite to yours."

There was an obedient scramble of the rope-handlers into position. Darragh caught Brenda's hand and hustled her across the court and into another cottage. They peered cautiously out as the ship settled down upon the central turf.

It was fifty feet long, Darragh judged, and perhaps thirty at its largest width. He nodded at Brenda, and patted her shoulder.

"That's big enough to hold everybody," he whispered.

"You sound as if we'd already captured it," she said.

"Do I? Well, maybe I'm counting my chickens before I've got a rooster, but I think we're going to win."

A hatchway swung open. A Cold Creature shuffled out. Then another and another. There were six of them in all. He saw that they wore their gleaming transparent armor-film, and all of them bore ray-weapons ready in their tentacles.

They paused together, gesturing snakily as though in consultation. Then one moved to the nose of the ship and stopped there, like a guard. The other five, formed into a close, cautious patrol, humped their way confidentiy toward Brenda's cottage.

They seemed to take forever to move those few yards. As they approached, the men and women nearest them seemed to shrink away. That was habit, reflected Darragh, but just now it was a good move. It made the community look submissive, awed. Again a pause, while the creatures seemed to study the interior of the cottage through the open door. Quite evidently they were aware of the leather decoy Darragh had set up inside, its arms aloft in token of surrender.

Again the party moved to the doorstep. There, one Cold Creature moved aside, standing like a sentry. The other four heayed themselves up on the porch, and moved one by one into the parlor.

Even as the last of them moved over the threshold and inside, there was a cry and a flurry at Criddle's cottage. Out sprang Orrin Lyle, and behind him his two guards. Somehow he had broken away. He raced toward the guard at Brenda's door, his hands moving in swift signals as though he tried to warn his allies.

"Pull!" roared Darragh at the top of his lungs, and himself rushed forth and at the guard left by the ship.

A dozen great hopping strides brought him across the intervening space before the thing could be aware of him. From behind he struck, and swiftly. Before the guard was aware of his presence and attack, Darragh had clutched its ray-thrower with both his hands and struggled to possess himself of it.

At the same instant, his ears rang with a crash like thunder. The two quartets of big men, heaving on their ropes, had torn that supporting pole free inside, and the roof had fallen with a mighty boom and clatter of tiles. Darragh, wrestling for the ray-weapon, laughed aloud—those four Cold Creatures inside must have been squashed like chipmunks in a deadfall.

He spared a single glance, to see Lyle run up to the one that had remained outside. That being levelled its own ray-gun. Out gushed cold white fire at Lyle, and he burst into a cloud of foul vapor that thinned away everywhere. Then the rest of the men and women had rushed in from both sides and over the creature like a vengeful wave over a rock.

After that, Darragh was too busy to watch or listen. The Cold Creature he had grappled was too heavy, had- too many tentacles. He could not wrench its weapon away or bowl it over. Desperately it hunched along toward the open hatch of the ship, dragging him with it. It wanted to get away, signal or bring others.

"You aren't going anywhere," Darragh vowed through clenched teeth, and suddenly let go the ray-thrower. With both hands he clutched at the thing's armor, gathered two great fistfuls of the fabric. Up he brought a foot, braced it against the rubbery hulk, and flung his weight backward, tugging with every ounce of strength he could summon.

The tough, flexible substance held for a black half-moment of despair, and he wondered if he could rend it. Then, abruptly, he was falling back full-length upon the grass, his hands still clamped full of the armor fabric.

He had rent its insulated protection open. His adversary, exposed to the instantiy deadly summer temperature, quivered and swelled—and slackly subsided.

Darragh struggled to his feet. His head spun with the straining effort he had made, his limbs trembled with the accumulated weariness of all his endeavors, but he was smiling. Brenda, half cheering and half weeping, had come to his side. Still she hugged her precious books against her bosom.

"Mark, we've won!" she exulted.

And they had won.

Through and over the ruins of Brenda's cottage the victorious captive humans swarmed like warrior ants, stamping and clubbing the bulks that feebly twitched there under the weight of tiles and planks. Criddle looked toward the ship, wagged his gray head, and hurried toward Darragh and and Brenda. His hands were laden with ray-weapons taken from the conquered Cold Creatures.

"Look what we took away from them!" he roared in a fury of proud happiness.

"Good," said Darragh. "We're going to use those things. I want samples of their insulated armor, too. Did anyone get killed beside LyleP"

"Three did. Two women and a man."

"Oh!" said Brenda miserably. "That's terrible."

"Terrible," agreed Darragh, "but the rest of us lived through it, and we'd better get out of here."

"When?" demanded Criddle.

"Right now, this moment." Darragh raised his voice. "Give me your attention! We're going to leave inside of one hundred and twenty seconds. Run to your homes and pick up tools, books, a littie food—enough for a day's rations. Understand? On the jump, now!"

They dashed away obediently in every direction, storming into their houses and out again. They gathered at the ship, variously laden. At Darragh's orders they made a double file. Into the ship they marched, like children at a fire drill.

"Don't touch anything," Darragh warned as he followed them in. The cabin was not too crowded, he thought. Brenda waited for him just inside.

"Mark, has anybody ever explained to you how wonderful you are?" she gasped at him. "I could kiss you a thousand times."

"You'll kiss me a hundred thousand times when we get a litde bit of leisure," he told her, and slammed the hatch shut. Its automatic fastenings clamped resoundingly.

Then he found himself suddenly nervous, daunted. He, who had spoken so confidentiy of flying the aircraft of the Cold People, who had extended his blazing confidence to all these others so that they had risen and overthrown a party of the monsters that had jailed them, found he had a breath's space in which to remember that he had guided but that one small ship. Yes, and he had done that without landing or faking off. But now, all eyes were upon him, expectant, trustful. And the eyes of Brenda Thompson glowed with love and rapt assurance. Darragh stepped to the control assembly, took hold of the bead on the upright arm, and drew it high.

There was a sharp hum, a swish.                               '■•

And they were far, far up into the blue sky.

Rising perpendicularly as though snatched up by a cosmic fishing line, the craft had negotiated that chimneylike tube without mishap. Luck, butt luck, Darragh told himself, it must be that there's Something somewhere rooting for me. And they were soaring upward as though falling into space. He carefully lowered the up-bead, flattened out the course, and advanced the forward bead. A glance out of the viewport gave him his bearings, high above a smudgy-seeming landscape on which the dome shelter made a litde half-egg of substance beside a lake like a sheet of greeny-silver plastic. Fiddling with the beads, he managed a great turning sweep to southward.

"They're coming out after us," Criddle yelled, looking from another port.

"But we've got a head start," grunted Darragh, and again moved the forward bead. He felt the whole fabric of the ship buzz as it gathered' speed, and pushed the bead out until they seemed to snap through the upper air.

Already the dome from which they had fled was out of sight. The craft that had risen from hatchways to pursue were specks afar on their backward trail.

"They won't catch us," said Darragh—to himself as much as to anybody. "Sit down, folks. Relax. We're going home down south. Isn't there a song about that, or wasn't there one in the old free days?"

"How about the new free days?" Criddle asked him. "Listen here, Captain—Commander, whatever we're to call you

"Try my name," invited Darragh. "It's Mark." He looked at Brenda beside him, grimaced and winked. She winked back.

"I'm just beginning to feel free," Criddle was saying. "I don't know how to describe freedom, but it's—well, there's a sort of loose, easy feeling about it."

The others all began to jabber at once. Brenda leaned close to make herself heard.

"They won't catch us, that's true," she said. "Where away now?"

"Down south, fust as I told Criddle. Down to the headquarters of the army of reconquest, that sent me up here."

"Are there any more men like you down there, Mark?"

He winked at her again. "Why? Looking for someone to trade me in on? Sure there are more like me. Thousands. I'm run of the mill down on the Orinoco."

"You're not run of the mill here," said Criddle behind them. "You're boss of the bunch here."

"That's right," nodded Brenda. "Boss of the bunch."

He took one hand from the controls and put his arm around her. "How about you? Am I boss of you?"

"I'm at your orders, King Mark," she assured him.

"Then give me the first of those hundred thousand kisses."

She gave it to "him. The others laughed and applauded.

"And now," he said, "pay attention here. I want to teach you how to fly this ship."

She moved closer to the controls and put her hands on them.

"Remember, Brenda," he said suddenly, "we were talking about mosquitoes back yonder. How we wished there were mosquitoes to devil the Cold People."

"Yes. We said something like that."

"I know about those mosquitoes now."

"What mosquitoes, Mark?"

"You're one," he told her, "and I'm another. Every human being is going to be a mosquito. Now pay attention to what makes us buzz."

CHAPTER XII

MEGAN, that swarthy-jowled leader of a jungle tribe, years before had made his followers build a village to serve as a market center for farmers, gardeners, cattle herders and gatherers of wild rubber. It was a focus of trade, gossip and importance, which importance reflected on Megan. He enjoyed the importance, and tried his best to deserve it. One of his practices was to maintain a lookout patrol on hills north of his settlement, with orders to watch for smoke signals from other villages and otherwise keep their fellows informed.

That lookout patrol was horrified, on a bright September noon, to see a sizable airship of the Cold People shoving above the northward horizon and swooping toward them.

They were more horrified still to see the craft settle down toward a wooded valley close to their observation point. All of them fled like rabbits toward the village, save a single shaky volunteer who waited until the last moment to watch the progress of the menace.

Megan heard the breathless report, and instantly told his drummers to pound their instruments for assembly. He shouted for his people to gather their cows and goats—the pigs might not retreat fast enough—pack up their most valuable portable possessions and follow him to deep-grown cover. As men and women scurried to obey this order, the last lingerer on the observation hill came running in.

"It's all right," he managed to wheeze out. "I guess it is."

"What are you guessing about?" roared Megan.

"Well, that thing landed in the trees down in the valley, and I got up my nerve to sneak close." The lookout saw a water-gourd, and drank thirstily from it. "Out came people."

"Cold People?"

"No, Chief, human people. Folks like us—well, not exactly. They're dressed different, anyway. And they started in busting down trees and bushes and tearing off branches, to throw over their ship and hide it in that litde hollow."

"Hide it?" repeated Megan. "Sounds as if they want to surprise us. Well surprise them."

He walked in among the thickest of his people. "All right, the retreat's delayed," he rapped out. "Pass that word along. Stay here, ready to leave if we have to. Now, where's that lookout who saw them? How many would you say there were?"

The man shook his head. "Don't know exactly. Maybe two dozen or so. Men and women both."

"Men and women," another villager said after him. "That doesn't sound like trouble-making."

"We don't know," Megan decided harshly. "Anyway, I want thirty fighting men. You come. You, you." Swifdy he chose his force. "Bows, machetes, and maybe a dozen guns. But nobody fires a gun unless I give the order. I don't want to waste any cartridges, hard as it is to make powder and mold bullets."

In businesslike fashion, Megan marshaled the armed party in a double column, and sent ahead as a scout the member of the lookout patrol who had brought news of the ship. Taking advantage of trails known to them all, they quiedy approached the hollow where the craft had set itself down.

"Open order," said Megan sofdy to his subordinates. "Take the word along. We'll advance through the trees, but watch me for a signal to halt."

Smoothly the men executed the movement. They were all practised hunters and trailers, and barely rustled the thick green leafage through which they moved. Finally Megan snapped his fingers for a halt, and his lieutenants stopped the line under cover just above the hollow. Megan waited until his advance scout returned.

"Someone in that gang I know from somewhere," the scout said. "You know him, too, but I can't think of his name. Big, black-haired, rangy—I'd heard he took a lone prowl up north . . ."

"Darragh," said Megan. "Hmmm. If it really is Darragh

. . . Wait here until I've gone forward while you count sixty.

Then move the rest of the boys after me, ready for trouble if

trouble begins."                                                          ,(

Alone the chief went forward. He found himself moving down slope into the hollow. People moved there among trees. They seemed to be stacking foliage high. Megan, too, recognized Darragh, stripped to the waist and gesturing in command.

"Well, 111 be damned," grunted Megan to himself; then, at the top of his voice. "Darragh! Is that you?"

Darragh turned toward him, and Megan came into the open. At once Darragh ran toward him like a sprinter in a race. Only a few weeks ago, Megan remembered, he and Darragh had talked about fighting a duel. His hand moved to loosen his machete in its scabbard.

But Darragh's face was shining with happy relief. "Just the man I hoped to meet first," he said when he came close. "I've got lots to tell you."

"I imagine you have," said Megan drily. "I hear you came in a Cold-People air machine."

"Yes. Captured one. Captured two, as a matter of fact, but this is the one I brought back."

"How did you fly it?"

"I learned how. But I've got some new friends to introduce."

"Wait a second," growled Megan. "If you stole that rig, there'll be more of them coming after you. You'll bring a whole fleet of them down to blast us out of these jungles."

But Darragh shook his head. He looked confident.

"They tried to chase us, and they were catching up. Then, somewhere—it must have been about where middle Tennessee used to be—we put the blast on one of their dome cities."

"Blast?" repeated Megan. "What kind of a blast?"

Megan's men had approached, and held their line to watch and listen.

"We used that explosion ray of theirs. Look, here's one of the small weapons." Darragh held it out. "We captured some of them, and the ship has a larger one. We figured out the discharge mechanism, and tore that dome to pieces. The ships that were chasing us circled down to help or observe where their friends were in trouble, and I took that occasion to veer off to westward and not cut back south until I was out of their sight. I think that gave them a false notion of which way we were headed. Anyway, we're hiding the ship we brought and—but here comes Miss Brenda Thompson. Brenda, I want you to meet Chief Megan."

Within the hour, signals were going forth from Megan's village. Operators employed the rickety radio sending set, trying to contact all communities within reach. To supplement this somewhat untrustworthy means of communication, smoke signals rose on the observation hill, and the swiftest runners sought nearer villages, from which went out fresh runners with messages.

THEDARK DESTROYERS The formal council opened its session on the first Tuesday in October, and was tended by an even dozen leaders. Spence, first preacher of counterattack, was prominent in the forefront of the gathering. The chiefs present represented perhaps four thousand persons, and could speak for thousands more.

The Orinoco leaders had been immediately impressed by the scientific knowledge the freed captives had inherited from their professor-forebears and learned from their former jailers, and Spence and the others could not but admire the good looks and manifest intelligence of Brenda Thompson. She stood with Darragh while Megan, as host chieftain, welcomed his allies and then turned the meeting over to Darragh.

That tall adventurer spoke with confidence and effect. He told of his journey and adventures and observations. With promptings from Brenda, he explained the principle of the explosive ray and what could be surmised about the green power-radiation. He exhibited a small ray-thrower, and showed its bleak destructive potency by blasting a tree into vapor before their eyes. He promised a tour of the captured ship and a lecture on how it operated. Other baleful mysteries of the Cold People, their fortresses and their ways of life he described.

The listening chiefs were interested and -sespectful. But Spence, long the most active and influential of them, seemed both critical and apprehensive. Finally he asked the question that all the others hoped to hear answered.

"Darragh, I remember when you and I last talked together. You promised that you'd ieam something to help us conquer these Cold People. You make them sound stronger and more numerous than we ever imagined. All right—if you have a plan of attack, what is it?"

"My plan of attack is not to attack," replied Darragh.

"Wagh!" grunted the bronzed Capato, sitting with three other Indian chieftains. "What kind of talk is that?"

"At least, we won't attack the way you mean," Darragh elaborated. "I'll try to sum up as simply as I can."

"Make it one word," Capato half-joked.

"All right, one word," said Darragh: "Nuisance!"

There was a silence, and the chiefs gaped. Then Spence snikered. "Nuisance? You've been a big nuisance in the past, young fellow, but what are you getting at?"

"It began when I was poked all over by mosquitoes on Haiti," said Darragh. "I wished then that the mosquitoes would get interested in the Cold People instead. Later, I talked about it to Brenda here. And we got to a sort of rationalization."

"We're waiting for the rationalization," Spence prodded him.

"Ill give it to you, in the form of a parable. How about letting me talk without interruption?" "Go on, boy," Megan bade him.

"It's a matter of history," went on Darragh, "about how the Swedes moved into old New Jersey and tried to settle it. They were a hard-bitten, stubborn lot, those Swedes. The Indians made a fight for their home country, and got licked."

"I'm not that kind of Indian," spoke up Capato defiantly.

"The Dutch came afterward, and attacked the Swedes. They got driven back. Then the English came into New Jersey the strongest power so far. They gave the Swedes a hard time but couldn't root them out."

"And then?" inquired Spence.

"And then the Swedes moved on."

"You said they hadn't been licked," Capato reminded.

"Not by the Indians or the Dutch or the English. But there were the New Jersey mosquitoes. That was an army of nuisances that wouldn't stand up and fight and be swatted. The mosquitoes just buzzed and bit and flew out of reach,-and came back and heckled and prodded and made life miserable. Finally the Swedes did the only thing they could do—they packed up and moved away."

He waited for comment. Again Spence was the one who spoke. "You sound as if you want us to be mosquitoes."

"That's exacdy what I want us to be." Darragh paused again, making sure that he had the attention of all the chiefs. "Look at it like this, gendemen: We have some of their secrets, enough of those secrets to make trouble."

"Trouble!" whooped Spence in high disdain. "Those litde handtype throwers. It's as if you'd stolen a few pistols, and left the enemy with the heavy artillery."

"We have scientists here, and I've brought more with me," Darragh replied. "We have both rays in captured mechanisms —the white and the green. Our scientists can study them and make bigger, more powerful projectors. And we have a captured ship and know how to fly it. We can make more in our shops, we can build and equip shops to turn them out. These things will give us the wings and the sharp bill to do our mosquito raiding."

"I still don't see what you're driving at," drawled Spence. "Talk up, Darragh. "We're used to straight-forward reports at these councils."

"We lie low until they forget about us somewhat," Darragh explained. "Their guard will relax. Meanwhile we'll be preparing. Well send envoys out to all free peoples—maybe clear around on the other side of the world, there must be communities there. We'll prepare down to the last minute. "We'll organize for what we must do. Then, fully equipped and disciplined and ready, we'll sally out..."     **

"And start by blasting those forts you say they're building in the West Indies!" cried Capato with warrior relish.

But Darragh shook his head. "On the contrary," he said, "we'll not bother their southern posts any more than we have to. The way I see it, those advance defenses are subordinate. They depend on the larger strongholds—like the one these folks got away from—for food and garrisons and orders. Well get into their main concentrations and hit those, the ones in the extreme frigid north and south."

Spence had been thinking, lean chin on lean hand. Now he looked up and nodded. "Darragh, that's not a bad idea," he granted. "Maybe we could even set fire to the woods around their settlements, get a heat up that would sweat them the way they don't like."

"Brenda, make a note of what Chief Spence said about those fires," said Darragh. "Now, gendemen, we can plan and implement a hundred ways to harass them. Maddening and damaging ways—the sort of things that will cause them labor and weariness and confusion."

"Yet they're mighty powerful," reminded a chief.

"Powerful, yes," agreed Darragh. "but, powerful as they are, they're in a fairly bad fix here, on a world that's mosdy impossible as regards its climate. Except at the north and south poles, they have to live in sealed domes and refrigerate them. Whenever they venture into the open, they must put on insulated armor. I've got samples of that, too. So, even with peace on Earth, life is almost too hot for the Cold People. If we could lift the temperature for only a degree or so everywhere a Cold Creature is, we'd have them in an unendurable situation." He looked around and wagged his head. "Well, gentlemen, what do you say? Shall we make old Mother Earth too hot to hold them—literally and figuratively?"

Megan whooped approval, and others took it up. Megan sprang up from where he had been sitting. "Gendemen of the Council," he said, "I want to make a motion. I hereby move that we here and now form a policy of nuisance warfare and aggression along the lines that have been suggested by Mark Darragh, and that we name Darragh to this council of chiefs."

"I second that motion," Capato howled back.

"Wait!"

That was the voice of Spence, also rising to his feet. His eyes snapped, his teeth flashed. "I want to amend the motion," he announced. "I've operated as the hit-or-miss head of this alliance long enough, and I offer my resignation."

"But, Spence!" protested Megan. "We didn't mean to make you mad or go over your head or anything."

"Who's mad?" demanded Spence. "I'm not. What I say is, I offer an amendment. Let the motion be stated that we here and now appoint Mark Darragh as head of this council of

chiefs, with full power as military commander of all the forces we can muster."

"Why . . ." began Darragh.

"You stay out of this; you aren't a member of the council yet," Megan laughed him down. "All right, Spence I accept your amendment. What about the second?"

"I seconded the first motion, and I second the second. Let's vote!"

"All in favor say aye, and to hell with the noes!" Megan cried.

Spence grasped Mark Darragh's hand, but Brenda was hugging Darragh before the eyes of all of them.